All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(112)

Emmett just nodded, but he straightened a little in his seat, and he had this annoyingly self-satisfied expression that he was trying, albeit poorly, to hide.

“And when it happened with my dad,” I said, “he was talking about Austin. He kept saying these awful things, and then he grabbed my hair and . . . and it was when he touched me, all of the sudden it was easy.”

“So you’re figuring out parts of it,” Emmett said. “Part of it is opening that third eye. Part of it is connecting. It’s easier with touch. I don’t know if that’s true for everyone, but it’s true for you.” His fingers curled across the back of my neck, and the touch was surprisingly hot. “Well?”

I focused. Inside myself that inner—

—eye—

—door felt just as distant, as though I could scrape the frame with my fingertips but couldn’t quite reach. I stretched, trembling with the exertion, and felt it open a crack. Instantly, I could feel the connection between Emmett and me. It was a bridge, but not some dinky, one-car strip of planks. This was steel, this was sixteen-lanes, this was the Golden Gate Bridge like a tiger lily against the darkness.

“Fuck,” Emmett said, his face going slack as the car drifted towards the shoulder. The rumble strip thumped under the Caddy’s tires, but Emmett didn’t seem to notice. “I can feel you in there.”

I’d never done this before. Part of me was there, inside that dark space at the center of Emmett’s mind or soul or whatever you wanted to call it. And the other part of me was here, sitting on the split vinyl, with tufts of polyester batting scratching my palms. This was all new ground, and I figured testing out psychic abilities at fifty miles per hour probably wasn’t the best idea, but we were already knee-deep. It was time for an experiment.

Yeah? Want to get back in your lane?

“I heard that,” Emmett said, whipping a glance at me. “You didn’t even open your mouth, but I heard that.”

Tire.

Emmett cursed, lifting his hand from my neck and using both hands to jerk the car back across the rumble strip. As he soon as he peeled his fingers away, the bridge vanished, and I tumbled back into myself completely. My— —third eye—

—inner door snapped shut, and exhaustion hit me. Tiny, uncontrolled tremors ran through my legs, as though I’d been running the last hundred miles, and I barely had the energy to keep myself upright. Using this ability, using it consciously, instead of just flailing around in the darkness, was harder than I’d thought. A hell of a lot harder.

The abandoned tire on the side of the road darted past us a moment later, and Emmett let out a shaky breath. “Glad one of us was watching the road.” One of his hands rubbed absently at his chest.

“Everything ok?”

“What?” He seemed to notice his hand, and he laughed. “Oh, yeah. Fine. God, you look like you’re about to pass out.” He rummaged through a plastic sack and tossed a Hostess cupcake in my lap, and then another, and then a third. “Bought those at the last gas station. You look like you could use some sugar.”

It took almost more energy than I could spare, but I ripped open the crinkly wrapper and took a bite. I finished the chocolate cupcake in two more quick bites, and then I started on the next one. By the time I’d swallowed the last one, I was starting to feel better. The world crisped up again, and the worst of the shaking had stopped.

“What’d it feel like?” I asked.

“What?”

“You said you could feel me. What was it like?”

His fingers smoothed a circular patch of shirt above his chest. “Remember that burning arrow?”

“Oh.” I scrubbed my wrist across my mouth, and chocolate frosting came away on my arm. “Not much of a psychic, if everybody knows when I’m rooting around inside their heads.”

“I might be the exception.”

“Maybe.”

“Or you might need a softer touch.”

“It’s not going to matter when I go up against River,” I said. “The most I’ll be able to do is slow him down; a guilty conscious doesn’t last forever, and he can rip my throat out. That’s permanent.”

“Why do you think it didn’t work? On that guy at the trainyard, I mean.”

“It was like running my fingers through water. I couldn’t grab anything.”

“So you need a different tactic. Hmm. I didn’t think of that. You can read, you can send, and you can . . . what do you call it?”

“Stir the pot?”

“Maybe it’s just a side-effect of reading,” Emmett said. “Here’s a shot in the dark: maybe you couldn’t read anything off that guy because there wasn’t anything to read.”

“Everybody has something, Emmett.”

“Everybody?”

There was one exception: Mr. Spencer, my English teacher. I’d only touched him twice, and neither time had I experienced a vision. Both times, though, I’d had the same sensation, like all my life I’d been freezing and, for the first time, I felt sunlight on my face. I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew how it made me feel, and that was dangerous.

“Pretty much,” was how I answered Emmett’s question.

“So here’s your first: the guy at the trainyard. Think about it, Vie. Not everyone feels guilty. Not everyone carries their shit around. Call them sociopaths, psychopaths, monsters, whatever you want. They don’t have to worry about that stuff. They don’t even feel it.”