Binding the Shadows (Arcadia Bell #3)(35)

He ran a jerky hand over his buzzed hair.

“What’s in the bag?” I asked. The backpack lay on the ground a few feet away from Telly.

“Seems you already know,” he answered.

“Who’d you steal it from?” Lon asked.

Nervous eyes darted in Lon’s direction, but Telly didn’t answer. Stupid piece of shit didn’t know Lon could read his mind at this point. He spoke to me instead. “I’ll give you your money back.”

“Yes, you will. But what are you going to do about the damages to my bar? The lost income? And you broke my partner’s bones.”

“I didn’t do anything. Not my fault she was clumsy.”

Fury and adrenalin rushed through my chest. “You’re going to pay for that, you little shit.”

Reaching out for electricity, I marched toward him, closing the distance between us. He was a twitchy trapped rabbit, muscles tense, wanting to bolt. But he couldn’t leave the backpack. It lay between us, and I saw the desperate longing in his face when he glanced at it. I tapped into current somewhere above the bridge and pulled. Prickly heat blossomed inside my cells.

I heard Lon bark my name behind me, but I was so close. Telly and I lunged for the backpack at the same time. We both got our hands on it. Only, my hands were a little more dangerous than his. I pushed kindled Heka through them, sending a lash of it through the metal zipper I was white-knuckling.

Like many other gifted magicians, my body was resistant to electrical voltage. At least, coming in. Going back out was another story. I needed graphite to even out the release, because once it bonded with Heka, it went a little haywire.

I had no graphite.

The shock sent Telly flying. With a yelp of pain, he slammed into the ground and skidded. Exactly the result I wanted. Only, the kickback from the release hit me, too. I knew the moment it happened. Knew I was in for pain and some hair singeing.

My fingers froze around the zipper. Hot pain buzzed through my cells as my body made a closed circuit with the metal. For a moment, the pain was so excruciating, so jarring, that all I could see was white light. My mind emptied. The world dropped away. Everything just . . . rebooted.

I’d done this before. Just had to let it happen and survive it. Wait for the nightmare to end. Would only take a few seconds, though they seemed an eternity. And as the shock lessened, I felt a weird, silent rumble. Like I was standing in the middle of an earthquake. We were in California. It was possible. And I knew the rumbling wasn’t coming from me.

The muscles in my hand were nearly at the point of unclenching. I felt the change when it happened. When the pain shifted. Electric Heka still coursed through me. It was a horrible feeling, but not bright and debilitating like the actual shock. My bones turned to jelly. And as I felt my legs begin to buckle, I smelled Lon. How funny was that? I smelled him. Not his shampoo or his cinnamon gum or his leather jacket. Just him. The scent I could identify underneath all the other stuff. The one I smelled when I woke up in bed and his arm was curled around my waist.

And that’s where his arm was now. He yanked me against him as the world roared back.

Not more than a yard away, an enormous black shape fell from the underbelly of the bridge. When it hit the ground, it sounded like a bomb exploding. My bones rattled. Teeth clacked together. An enormous cloud of dust and dirt shot into the air. A tidal wave. Lon shoved my face into his chest and covered me with his body.

We coughed up dust. It stung my eyes, coated my lips. And after a few moments, when it began to settle and clear, I was able to see what caused it all: a thick plate of steel, maybe twenty feet long, five feet high, lay across the creek bed, crushing one of the tents and two lawn chairs, whose bent pipe legs jutted out from beneath it like the legs of a dead roach under a boot.

I shielded my eyes with my hand and looked up. A huge section of the outer girder lining the railroad bridge was missing. That telekinetic * had used his magically enhanced knack to somehow pull the side of the bridge loose.

I surveyed the area. No sign of Telly. He’d pulled a tidy smash-and-run. If I wasn’t hacking up dirt, I might’ve cried in frustration. But then I smelled something burnt and glanced down at my hand. Scorched from my Heka unload and streaked with a line of red paint, his bionic-juice-filled backpack dangled from a strap looped around my wrist.

In the distance, a couple of people were gravitating toward the bridge, looking for the source of the horrific crash that had echoed around the dying neighborhood. We took the backpack and hustled back to where we parked. For a moment, I freaked out when a dark sedan sped past us. The windows were too dark to make out anything inside; it could’ve been anyone. I was being paranoid. No one was following me. I couldn’t start suspecting every dark car I saw or I’d go insane.

Once we got back to the SUV, we slammed the doors shut and stared at each other.

“I’ll tell you what,” Lon said, “the boy who wasn’t able to get a safe through the Diablo Market counter a few days ago has sure acquired some strength.”

“No joke.”

“You okay?” He’d already asked me that twice. “You’re shaking.”

“Electrocution by Heka can’t be good for my heart. Almost worse than being struck by lightning.”

He swiped his thumb over my eyebrow, brushing dirt away. I patted dirt out of his hair. And after we’d cleaned each other like monkeys, I rifled through the backpack. Inside, I found: a single bottle of red liquid, a box of sugar cubes, a glass dropper, a high school chemistry book, and a zip top bag filled with quarters. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were quarters from Tambuku’s register. But of course there was no identification. Nothing of interest but the medicinal.