All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(40)

“Hennessy?” He smiled, took the bottle, and sloshed the liquid back and forth. “You are a fine young man. I knew it the moment I laid eyes on you.”

A deputy’s cruiser rolled into the parking lot, and Frankie got to his feet, tucking the bottle into one flapping pocket. He was surprisingly small: a short bundle of twigs wrapped in that big gray trench coat. His silvery hair glowed in the October light, and that same light glinted off the bottle of Hennessy as he tipped it towards me in salute. “Time for me to go, Mr. Eliot. My bus doesn’t leave until morning, and I don’t fancy another encounter with Vehpese’s finest. I don’t know that we’ll see each other again, so allow me to wish you the best, my very warmest best.”

“You too, Frankie.” I hesitated, not wanting to, but knowing I should. Then I reached out and grabbed his hand. The moment I touched him, the world flattened into a thin line, like an old TV cutting off, and I felt that same jerky back-and-forth, like I was a ping-pong ball and somebody was playing a hell of a game. Then I was somewhere else. A memory—one of Frankie’s memories—started to form around me. It was going to be the worst moment of his life; I already knew that much. That’s how my ability always worked.

But things had been different lately. Things had been different with DeHaven Knight, and with Sal, and things had been different with Becca, and at the end, before things had gone wrong between us, things had been different with Emmett. Emmett had been convinced—and had almost convinced me—that I could do more with my ability. That I could control it, instead of always letting it control me. Now was the time to try.

As Frankie’s worst memory formed around me—for an instant, I was reclining on worn upholstery as a bus bounced over a rutted road, and unspooling behind me on an invisible thread was heartache and loss and—and I swatted the memory aside. For a moment, it resisted, and that memory of the bus grew more vivid, and the pilled upholstery grew more solid under my fingers, but then the world went black again. I’d done it. How I couldn’t say, but I’d done it.

Now I needed to find what I was looking for. A very specific memory. I wanted to see that night in Denver. I wanted to see River Lang. I wanted to be sure that it was the same boy who had come into Bighorn Burger. But how in the world was I supposed to find a memory when I was faced with total darkness?

I tried to call up the image that Frankie had described: the old stone and the green awning and the carnival bulbs spelling out Union Station. But nothing changed; I drifted in that darkness. Had the awning been gray? Frankie hadn’t seemed sure, so I tried again, this time picturing a gray awning instead of the green. But still nothing. What did that mean? How was I supposed to find anything, how was I supposed to do anything, when I couldn’t even see a memory that Frankie had already shared with me?

I thought about my ability. Until recently—until Emmett, my brain said, but I buried the thought—it had always been the same. I had touched someone, or looked in their eyes, and then it had happened: sometimes, a feeling or an impression, but mostly, a memory. A vivid, immersive memory, the worst memory that person had. With Austin, it had been the shame and guilt and self-loathing of catching himself check out Kaden in his underwear. With Emmett, it hadn’t been that specific, just a roiling storm of self-hatred. The strength of those feelings was real, and as they seeped back into me, the darkness began to change. The bus paneling reappeared, and the pilled upholstery knitted together under me, and I was back on the bus, bouncing, feeling my heart unravel like a sweater with a loose thread.

Again, I batted the memory away. I didn’t want that one. But it had come back: so clear, so close, so quickly. Why? I had been thinking about this psychic nonsense, I had remembered what I felt when I punched Austin in the face, when I slammed Emmett against the tree: the oil-and-water slosh in my stomach, the tightness in my throat, the knowledge that there had never been anyone worse than me.

Once more, the memory of the bus started to gather around me, and once more I batted it away. That part, at least, was becoming easier. I thought back to Emmett and how he had tried to help me. He had been so certain that I could do more, that I didn’t have to lose control. I was starting to think he was right; ever since then, my ability had been different, evolving. And if I were honest with myself, if I looked the truth straight in the eye, I thought I knew why. I had been in love with Emmett Bradley, and that had opened something in me that I hadn’t felt before. He had turned out to be an asshole, true, but at the time, I had fallen for him: he was wounded and vulnerable and kind underneath everything else. This ability of mine, I was starting to realize, had something to do with emotion.

So I summoned up all the feelings Frankie had mentioned when he told me about River: his grumpiness, the cold, the need for a drink, and his growing irritation with the young man and young woman who were giggling like they didn’t have a care in the world. Slowly, jerkily, the image came together: the blaze of the bulbs, and the iron awning, and at the end of the awning, sparkling and bright like he was more alive, twice as alive, as anyone else, stood River. He tossed something in the air, and the light from the carnival bulbs sparked red against the metal, and it clinked as it came down into his hand. Leaning against the old stones of Union Station, he was talking to a beautiful young blond woman.

Almost immediately, I felt exhausted, and the memory began to fade. I tried to pull it back, but I was too tired, and it was like gathering sand while a breaker washes over you. In the final moments before the memory vanished completely, I saw something that made my blood go cold. Frankie had said that everybody decent had gone home, and that was likely true. Only a few people remained, most of them huddled in the building’s shadow. One face, though, I recognized. He stood well away from River and the girl, far enough that no one would have paid him any attention, except that a stray gleam from the carnival bulbs illuminated the dark hair, chopped rough at the jaw, and the lined, too-tight face. From the shadows, DeHaven Knight watched River with an expression that I wanted to call longing, and that word made my stomach flip.