Binding the Shadows (Arcadia Bell #3)(19)

What the hell kind of trap was this? It was as if I was radiating some sort of noxious silver gas. Then I noticed the point of origin: above my head. My hand flew to my hair. I jerked my head back and looked upward at my silver halo. Impossible! It was growing and spreading—like the silver fog from the night I slowed time at Merrimoth’s house.

An intense nausea made the ground below my feet seem to buckle. I stumbled, panicking, as the boy began crying for help, pleading for me to stop. Lon’s voice bellowed in the distance, entwining with the boy’s pleas. But it was the third voice, a lighter-than-air feminine voice that stabbed me like a dagger to the chest.

“Ma petite lune.”

I jumped back in surprise, lost my footing, and fell on my ass. The silver fog funneled back into me, rushing toward my face like a vortex was centered above my head, sucking it all back in. It happened so fast it made me dizzy. Every muscle contracted at once. I cringed, biting down on my tongue until it bled. I felt sick. Exhausted. And scared out of my mind.

An engine rumbled. Tires spun and squealed, kicking up a small cloud of dust that went up my nose as the blond boy drove away. I coughed, tasting blood. When the dust cleared, I spotted a dark figure huddled between two cars across the aisle. A man. Something about the way he was standing made me thing he was hiding. And the way he retreated deeper into shadow as I tried to focus on him made me think he was trying to slip away unseen.

As he moved out of sight, I thought of the dark sedan I’d seen outside the corner shop, though God only knew if there really was a connection. My head was so rattled at the moment, I was probably half-crazy. I tried to push myself up, but I was too weak.

“Cady!” Lon’s deep voice vibrated through me. “What happened? Talk to me.”

But I couldn’t talk. Intense, jumbled emotions flooded my senses. And when he gathered me up, pulling me against his chest, all I could do was wilt inside his arms as he mumbled, “I’ve got you. It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t. As much as I didn’t want to admit it to myself, it was all kinds of not okay. Something was wrong with my powers and it was getting worse.

Ma petite lune. My little moon. Only two people ever called me that, and both of them were supposed to be dead.

Jupe stuck his head between the front seats of the SUV on the ride back to their house, touching me with little pokes and prods, trying to get my attention. Trying to make me smile. I finally gave in—there was really no other option with him, as he’d mastered the art of pestering—and turned sideways in my seat, letting him hold my hand. His skin was soft and he smelled nice, like the coconut in his shampoo.

“At least we got the name of that punk,” Jupe said.

Noel Saint-Hill. Lon had tracked down the Plymouth guy, Freddie, before we left the racetrack. He didn’t know where the Saint-Hills lived, but we could probably do some Internet sleuthing and figure it out. Something positive came out of all of it, but I couldn’t shake the sound of my mother’s voice, repeating in my head like a bad song.

“I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong,” Jupe said as we sped along the dark highway that connected Morella with La Sirena. “Maybe I can help.”

“I wish you could,” I said. My tongue was fat in my mouth, swollen from me biting it.

“If I were you, I’d be bragging to everybody. You need a comic book hero name, like Silver Fog, or something. That was insane!” he said enthusiastically.

“Yeah, it was pretty crazy.” It was the other crazy thing I was more concerned about at the moment.

“And you didn’t know you could do that?”

“Can’t say I did.”

Lon grunted. His eyes were on the road in front of us, lost in his own thoughts. Probably wondering the same thing that was floating through my mind: how was my mother still alive in the Æthyr, and what the hell was I going to do about it?

“Well, you shouldn’t be upset,” Jupe was saying. “Because that fog spell was one hundred percent badass. When you jumped up on that van, I was all, holy shit! I thought—”

“Shut it, Jupe,” Lon warned.

“I’m just sayin’, maybe she should be happy about it. Who knows what she could do if she tried.” He poked me on my elbow. “Besides, you told me magick is unpredictable.”

“I told you that the results are unpredictable. And that talent is varied.”

“Oh, please. Don’t quote semantics to me.”

“You mean ‘argue’ and ‘with me.’ ”

He chuckled sheepishly. “I don’t really know what it means.”

“Well, you used it right, by some miracle.”

He made a pleased clucking sound with his tongue. “Because I’m smarter than I have any right to be. That’s what Mr. Ross says every time I prove him wrong in class.”

Lon made an exasperated noise and knocked the back of his head against the headrest.

“You aren’t supposed to prove your teachers wrong,” I said. “You’re supposed to listen and do what they tell you.”

Lon’s phone rang. He looked at the screen and answered in his usual terse manner, grunting and mmm-hmming his way through the call.

“What-ev,” Jupe whispered, eyeing his father as he conspired with me. “Mr. Ross is wrong, like, twenty times a week. He said yesterday that if I was so sure about myself, maybe I should be teaching the class. And I said, ‘Hand me the chalk!’ And I think he was this close to sending me to—” He glanced at Lon, then silently mouthed detention to me.