Outlaw Read online

  The ground sloped up from there, toward a hillside covered in bushes.

  Keisha whistled softly. “That’s a lot of old iron.”

  “What is this place?”

  “It’s a mine.” Keisha’s eyes lit up. “A mine means metal.” She rubbed her hands together.

  Crazy. A mine? I wished I’d had the time to learn more about Mossville, but something about being on the run, and trying not to be found cramped my style.

  Bushes rustled behind us and we whirled around to see what it was.

  A dozen people in outdoor clothes emerged from the bushes.

  They looked like they’d slept in their clothes. The men all had a few days of beard growth, the women had their hair tied back. All wore knitted caps.

  A half-dozen dudes carried tire irons. The biggest guy held a pump shotgun. One of the women had a knife. Two other women pointed machine pistols at us. No smiles on any of their faces. They were deadly serious.

  “Why are you here?” The big guy demanded. He had a tangled beard.

  “We’re looking for someone,” I said, trying to sound relaxed, which was damn hard since my heart pounded, thanks to the backwoods militia. Automatically, I tried reaching out with my power to the tangle of plants behind them.

  Still nothing. My heart thumped faster. I had wanted to do something to distract them. Make the shrubs rustle, or even grow.

  “My sister,” I said. I swallowed. My mouth was dry, like it always got when I became worried. What the hell had happened to my power?

  One of the women had red hair, and her pale face was sunburned. She stepped closer, her machine pistol pointed at my chest. “What’s her name?”

  “Ella. Ella Brandt.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t know her.”

  I’d been around a lot of liars. You could tell with the amateur liars. They blinked a lot, wouldn’t meet you in the eye, tried to rush the subject. Pretty obvious they lied.

  The redhead was a pro. “What does she look like?” She asked, matter-of-fact.

  “She’s about six foot, with hair the same color as mine, used to be short.”

  “Used to be?” She gave a little head shake. “You don’t know?”

  “I haven’t seen her for a while.” I’d seen her projection, but God only knew how much that was Ella these days.

  Worse, thanks to being in prison I’d missed so much of Ella and Ava’s teenaged years. I tasted ash.

  “Maybe she’s going by a different name?” I asked.

  I watched her reaction. With pros, since it’s hard to tell when they’re lying, you have to look for tells. They hesitate for a second, or maybe they are just a bit too confident.

  The redhead took just a bit too long to answer. “Haven’t seen anyone who looks like that around here, sorry.”

  The others kept their mouths shut and their faces blank, too blank.

  They knew her.

  But they had the guns, and the knives, and there were more of them.

  Keisha scowled. She tensed, arms at her sides, finger beginning to twiddle.

  I put a hand on her arm.

  She gave me a look. She thought we could take them.

  I shook my head. She did a little “are you sure?” with her face.

  I shrugged.

  “You done playing pantomime?” The guy with the shotgun asked.

  “Who are you people?” Keisha asked him.

  “People who want you out of here.”

  Her face hardened. She stared at him for a long moment.

  My breath froze. Keisha had a temper almost as bad as mine; it was why we’d nearly killed each other when we first met. I watched her hands out of the corner of my eye. She stopped twiddling her finger. Exhaled.

  “Okay, let’s go,” she said to me. Just like that. Keisha never got reasonable that fast. She should have started a fight. Why hadn’t she?

  “Good to see you got some sense, despite looking like idiots,” he said.

  “No reason to get nasty,” she said.

  “You really don’t know Ella Brandt?” I asked. “Really?” The big guy had small brown eyes, they looked at me without blinking. A hard stare. Just long enough without blinking I knew he was lying.

  Fuck it. They’d won this round.

  “All right, thanks,” I said. I jerked my head in the direction of the highway, maybe a mile off. “We’re leaving.”

  So we left.

  The highway and our van were nearly a mile away. But I wasn’t angry that those bozos had run us out of Craptown. Mainly because we weren’t going far.

  We left. Keisha didn’t argue. I still couldn’t believe it. She’d gone all calm. The people watched us leave, keeping their guns pointed at us until we’d rounded the corner of an old store.

  I tried reaching out with my power. There was a very faint humming in my mind. The first thing I’d heard from the plants around us since I’d woken up.

  We walked past the jail, then onto the gravel path. Our feet crunched rocks.

  “They’re still watching us.” I said I could just see them out of the corner of my eyes.

  We reached the rutted, half-overgrown dirt road that wound through the woods. Mossville had disappeared behind the ash trees.

  “Where do you think Ella is?” Keisha asked. “If she isn’t here.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then we’ve lost her,” Keisha’s voice was quiet, sad. “I’m sorry, Mat.”

  Keisha looked so sorry. This wasn’t like her.

  “What gives?” I asked.

  She blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “Why aren’t you pissed?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess because it didn’t seem worth fighting when your sister wasn’t there.”

  My sister. My sister’s projection was more like it. Frustrating as hell. She could find me whenever she wanted to, but I couldn’t find her. Her power, I’d never heard of anything like it.

  “They know where she is,” I said.

  “They said they didn’t.”

  I laughed softly. “Keisha, come on. That redhead was lying through her teeth. And the brown-eyed idiot with the shotgun was lying even worse than she was.”

  “They didn’t seem like it.”

  Just when I thought I knew her, Keisha surprised me. “How could you tell?” she asked.

  “I’ve been around a ton of liars,” I said. I rubbed the back of my neck. Closed my eyes and tried to gently push my power into the pine tree. I heard the tree rumbling quietly. I put my hand on its bark, there was a spark that rushed from the tree into me, and suddenly the tree’s awareness filled my mind. The pine was content. It had gotten water from the rain, and it rumbled with happiness.

  My exhale was loud in my ears. My power, it was back. It crackled through me like lightning. My muscles trembled.

  “I still don’t get you,” I said to Keisha. “Why did you just leave like that?”

  “Didn’t seem worth getting in a fight.”

  I cocked my head. Something was wrong here. “They were bullshitting us. They know where Ella is. They’re part of her crazy church. You’ve got to see that.”

  She shrugged again. “I don’t.”

  “Bullshit.” I turned back toward where Mossville was, hidden behind fir trees.

  “I’m going back. You coming with me?”

  “There’s no reason to go back,” she said.

  “Bullshit,” I repeated. I clenched my fingers. “I can’t believe you are such a weak-ass on this.”

  That got her. A muscle in her face twitched. She stomped toward me, fist balled.

  That was more like it.

  “You want some of me,” I said. “Come on.”

  She swung at me, hard, and fast. I ducked but she still clocked the side of my head. Crap. Stars swam around me. I swung back, slugged her in the side. I heard the air leave her and she staggered back. We rushed each other, and slammed onto the ground, rolling. I punched her and she punched bac
k, furiously.

  We rolled around for a minute, hitting each other, but it was hard to hit with much force, grappling like that, so mostly we just got dirty.

  Keisha stopped hitting me and I did likewise. “This is fucked,” she said. “What the hell are we doing?” She pushed off me, rolled to her feet. She shook her head. “This place,” she said. “You said you didn’t feel your power, right?”

  “Yeah. But I do now.” Which was weird. What had happened to it? Why had we fought? The whole thing was nuts.

  “But you didn’t then, back there.” She jerked her head at Mossville.

  “What about you?” Maybe that was it. Something had happened with her power?

  “I was all set to use it, and then, I don’t know, suddenly I wasn’t pissed off, and I didn’t feel that, you know, trembling you get when you want to unleash your power. There was metal in the ground, and in the air, but it faded away, and suddenly this just didn’t make sense. Why the hell fight when Ella wasn’t there?”

  Fear stabbed me, running down my spine. “It was like there was a dampener there?”

  “Those are myths,” she said.

  Dampeners were said to be Empowered that could shut down your power, like nullifier weapons. I’d never seen one, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist.

  “Besides, did you feel any tingling?” she asked.

  We always tingled when another Empowered was nearby but there was none back there. None at all. Even if dampeners existed, it couldn’t have been one.

  “I’m going back in,” I said. “You coming with me?”

  She swung her arms, unkinked her shoulders. “Yeah.” I could hear her exhale. Her lips were tight. “We got to find out what they know.”

  I closed my eyes, reached out to the world around me, felt the trembling of the trees and the shimmy of the ferns in the breeze, and the promise of the fertile soil. Yeah, I could summon blackberry vines here, in a heartbeat.

  The smell of the green was stronger than I remembered it ever being before. It wasn’t just a faint smell, it was all around me, like water brushing against my skin, rolling down my body, filling up my senses. It had always been noise in my mind, but now it was scent. The more I smelled, the richer it became. All kinds of woodiness, green earth, sharp tang of weeds. I shook myself. It was like being drunk, only worse.

  I reached into a nearby Douglas fir, heard the creaking welcome in my head, smelled the rich wood and bark, felt the roots deep down in the earth, seeking water, thirsty, always thirsty. I pulled out, took another gulping breath of moist air.

  I looked over at Keisha, expecting she’d be glaring at me to get my shit together, since I’d ridden her about going back.

  But instead she stood there, hands twiddling as a steaming mess of steel rotated in the air in front of her. Nails mostly, some rusting, others new, like the blades and forks and razors all spinning around a smoking tire iron. The ground steamed, too, with little mounds of dirt where her power had pulled the old nails out. The rest of the steel came from her power.

  “Don’t waste your energy now,” I said. The air crackled between us and I stumbled back.

  She looked at me. Her eyes were bright and hard. “This is just the warm up.” She waved her hands and the metal flew together with a soft clang. The air flashed and a steel bar hovered there, gleaming bluely. She twiddled her fingers and the bar floated into her hand.

  I swallowed. Her voice was hard as the steel she now held.

  Anger practically rose off her in waves.

  “Down girl,” I said. Even as I said that, my own power surged inside me, and the “Chorus of the Forest” erupted in my head, with all the singing, moaning, whistling, humming cacophony of the trees, bushes, grass, moss, ferns, you name it, going to town.

  “This is going down,” she said, and grinned. It was the “I’m-going-to-fuck-them up” sort of grin. No laughter in that grin. None at all.

  That town had dampened us somehow, but now it seemed to be super-charging our power.

  We strode back to Mossville like we owned the place. Heads held high. I was in the lead, looking around as we passed the old general store, my special senses out as far as I could reach, brushing over all the green, the stink of Queen Anne’s Lace mixing with the sharp tang of pine needles.

  My power didn’t go away this time.

  Keisha had destroyed all the steel she’d created by melting it and sending it back into the ground and the air. I glanced back, her eyes flashed behind me as she walked but she kept her gaze on the path ahead of us, walking like a soldier, half crouched, now, her hands at her side.

  We reached the little clearing by an old bleached wood church, moss hissing along the sides of the steeple. The door on the church looked new. Someone had painted it, weathered it somehow, but it didn’t quite match the walls. The handle looked modern.

  “Figures,” I said. The Fellowship of Insight claimed to be this underground church and they’d been holed up for a while in that abandoned Methodist church. So, of course they’d be holed up in the church here.

  The door wasn’t locked. I started to open it, Keisha beside me. The handle was cool to my touch.

  “We asked you to leave,” a voice said behind us. We turned around.

  A blonde woman in jeans and flannel, stood there, hands on her hips. I couldn’t tell how old she was. Her hair was back in a pony-tail. She hadn’t been in the group that had blocked us before.

  “I’m looking for my sister, Ella Brandt.”

  “She doesn’t want to see you.”

  Hope surged in me and I felt light all of a sudden.

  “Well, I want to see her.” The ground around her was rich with seeds and life. I extended my sense deeper into it, fishing around for blackberry seeds. If I didn’t find them, I could make them, but it would be easier if there were seeds already there.

  There were blackberry seeds there. Sprouting. Even better.

  “Please let me see her.” I tried to keep my voice level. I didn’t have to fake the big sister concern. It filled me. “Please.”

  “She doesn’t want to see you. Please leave.”

  Keisha nudged me with her shoulder. “She’s not going to let us see Ella.” Keisha’s lips twisted into a nasty smile. “We’ll have to make her.”

  “It’s not going to come to that,” the woman said. “You’ll leave.”

  I held out my hands. “Look, I just want to find my sister.”

  The woman’s stare was hard. “Your sister has her path, you have yours. Now go.”

  Keisha twiddled her fingers. There was a flash of steam and half-dozen throwing stars spun into existence just beyond her hands. “I don’t want to cut you. But I will if you won’t talk.”

  “No, we can do things different,” I said to Keisha.

  “Differently,” the woman said.

  Her tone annoyed me.

  “Whatever,” I shot back, and closed my eyes, pushed my power into the ground.

  “You’d better do what she says,” a deep male voice rumbled. Figured the woman would have reinforcements. Fine.

  I raised my hands as I urged the roots below to grow, the seeds to burst forth and push monster blackberry vines up from the soil, like snakes, rearing up.

  I could feel them move in my mind. It was like my arms had become vines.

  Something hit me and I flew back into the church wall, banging into the wood. I heard a second loud bang nearby. My eyes flew open.

  On the other side of the church door Keisha staggered against the church, and fell.

  Two dudes flanked the blonde woman. All of them had their hands raised like claws.

  “Leave,” they all said in unison, and my skin crawled at the sound.

  Somehow they shared a superpower, but I hadn’t felt any of that damn tingling you got when you were around an Empowered. How the hell could that be?

  I wiped my mouth and pushed more vines from the soil, moved them toward the three people, until they were surrounded. The
thorns were three inches long.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” I said.

  Another trio of people, the redhead with the braid and the two big lugs we had first encountered sprinted from between two buildings. They didn’t have any guns this time. Instead, the three of them also raised their arms, and sparks shot from their fingertips, like tiny lightning bolts, showering on Keisha and me. I jerked as my muscles writhed, and I lost control of the vines. The vines stopped growing.

  I went to one knee. Keisha was on the ground, swearing.

  These people had powers, but they didn’t feel like Empowereds. There was no tingling, no sense of their power. I gritted my teeth and pulled myself up.

  “You aren’t stopping me from finding my sister,” I said. The second trio gestured at the blackberry vines, twisting with their hands. It was creepy, they were all doing that in unison. That was also different. Empowereds always did used their power solo.

  But these people were working in groups of three. What the hell was that about?

  The air rippled with force. An invisible giant’s hand smashed the vines and flattened the shreds to the ground. The vines screamed in my head, and I squeezed my eyes shut. My bones ached from the plants’ sudden agony.

  Damn them! Why couldn’t they just let me and Keisha see Ella, then we wouldn’t have to fight.

  But they wouldn’t.

  I ran to the pine trees. Keisha twirled her hands and metal balls spun into existence in front of her.

  She bared her teeth. She didn’t yell, didn’t threaten. She just flung the balls as the first three people shot sparks at her. She jerked and fell again, but the balls streaked into the trio. The blonde cried out as a ball smacked into her shoulder. She stumbled back, moaning. More balls thumped the two dudes in the chest and neck. They gave out strangled yelps, and threw up their arms.

  My heart hammering, I flattened my hand against the pine’s bark, felt the sap, willed it to bubble up, and out of the branches, spraying sap that now boiled and steamed. The force blasters or whatever they were screamed and clutched at their hair. I brought more hot sap up from other trees and willed the tree to spray it on the sparking threesome. They screamed again.