All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(111)

Well, if that didn’t put everything in perspective, nothing would. Emmett was still flirting with me, but that’s all it was. He wasn’t ever going to be interested in something serious. There was something wrong with me, something that made it impossible for him to ever love me back. That was ok, I told myself. At least he was trying to be nice. At least, some way, somehow, we could be friends.

“Back at the train,” Emmett said, breaking the silence. “After the bullet knocked me flat.”

“Yeah?”

“When I got up, I looked back for you, and you were staring at that guy. Just for a second, and then you started running again, but you were staring at him.”

“Were you jealous?”

“Were you trying to . . . you know?”

“I didn’t know what to do. I thought maybe I could do what I did to my dad.”

“But it didn’t work.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“I remember back when we—before we got in that fight, when we were at the lake. You were trying to see something more, something that wasn’t just a person’s worst memory.”

“Yeah. Actually, you pushed me in a good direction. I’ve been, well, I guess you could say I’ve been practicing. I can find memories. Only sometimes, but it’s better than nothing. I have a little more control.”

“So I was right.”

“You had a good idea.”

“Go ahead. Tell me I was right.”

“You didn’t even know what you were talking about—”

“Ok,” Emmett interrupted smoothly. “So we agree: I was right. But if you can do that, why didn’t it work on that guy at the train station?”

“I don’t know. The door was open, the bridge was there—”

“Slow down. What door? What bridge?”

I frowned. “I haven’t tried to explain it before. It’s like there’s this part of me that opens, and I tend to think of it as a door. I’ve tried so hard for so long to keep it shut, that I’m still learning how to open it.”

“And the bridge?”

“It’s new. I mean, it’s something I hadn’t realized before.” My mind went back to the trainyard, when I had fallen and hit my head. For a moment, everything had been so clear—the bridge, the door, everything—but now it was like trying to grab smoke. “I think it’s always been there, but I didn’t know what I was doing. The door is the part of me that opens, right? Well the bridge is . . . it’s like a connection.”

“A psychic link?”

“Yeah. It’s easier to think of it as a bridge.”

“Well, you sound like a three-year-old. I did some reading when we, um, weren’t talking.”

“When you weren’t talking to me, you mean.”

“Anyway, I did some reading about this stuff. The door, what you’re talking about, I think it’s a third eye. That’s what it’s called, anyway. And what you’ve been doing, all this picking up people’s worst thoughts, it’s called an unstructured psychic reading. It’s basically wild telepathy. And what you did back in the motel, that’s called sending, and it’s part of telepathy too. So that makes you a sender and a reader.”

“You . . . read about this?”

“Yeah.” His shoulders inched up.

“Why?”

“I thought maybe I was crazy.”

“Oh. And?”

“And I definitely am, because here I am, right?”

“A third eye,” I ticked the terms off on my finger, “unstructured psychic reading, telepathy, and sending. Is that all?”

“It sounds a hell of a lot better than the door and the bridge, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so. So my . . . third eye. God, that sounds creepy.”

“It is creepy. You are creepy.”

I punched him.

“All right,” he said, shying away and laughing. “Yes, your third eye. When you open it, that’s when you can read other people. Or send, for that matter.”

“So what do you call the bridge?”

“You want my two cents?”

“You’re going to give it anyway. Go ahead.”

Emmett threw me a sideways look. “You’re . . .”

“What?”

“You’re kind of closed off. Look, I’m not trying to be a jerk. I’m just saying, you keep people at a distance. That makes sense, considering everything you’ve been through, but it also means your ability is going to be different. Like you said, you’ve been trying so hard for so long for this ability not to work. I think now you’re going to have to try, and I mean really try, to make that connection.”

“It wasn’t hard with you.”

“That’s not surprising, considering, um, how you feel.”

My face turned hot. “That’s not why. It wasn’t hard with that guy at the trainyard, and I certainly didn’t feel that way about him.”

“It wasn’t hard?”

“No. I was so angry. More than angry. I was furious. I thought he’d shot—” I cut off. “Oh. I thought he’d shot you.”