Mindsurge (Mindspeak Book 3) (2 page)

“Well, I hadn’t. You’ve barely spoken to me the past two weeks, and you still refuse to discuss what’s at the heart of our feud.” He touched a cool finger to my chin and lifted. “Are you not even going to mention your moth—”

I held up a hand to stop him. “Don’t. Can we just go to this party and not discuss my mother?” She was becoming the least of my concerns.

“I thought that was what this run was about.” He raised his hands to the side in frustration before he dropped them, and his face softened. His eyes narrowed in on mine. The warmth behind them about did me in. “I’m on your side. I’m always on your side. You know this.”

I averted my eyes and watched some squirrels playing in the fallen leaves behind Jack. How could I look at him, knowing that I was now the one not being honest? That I could very well be the one who would hurt
him
? This run was supposed to have been about forgiving him.

I squeezed my eyes tight, pushing back the pain of tears that I knew wouldn’t come. Sandra would pay for what she’d done to us—for constantly screwing up our lives, for Dani’s death, for my dad’s death. Even if her gift proved she wasn’t directly responsible, I couldn’t accept that she wasn’t involved at all. One way or another, I would repay her.

And I couldn’t forget that I’d watched her kill Dani with my own eyes. All the evidence in the world wouldn’t change that.

“I know. I’m trying.”

“We’ll keep trying together.”

I nodded—though I didn’t believe we’d get that chance—then turned my arm to see the thick and now dried blood on my elbow. “I guess I better get myself cleaned up.”

Jack stepped in close to me. He lifted my wrist and studied my arm. “I can fix this. And your knee.”

“I know you can, but I’m still not convinced we should be using these powers that came from such evil.” It felt wrong to let him heal me when I could feel myself throwing up barricades to distance us. “Besides, I’m pretty sure I can suffer through a couple of scrapes.”

“It’s me, Lexi. You don’t have to be tough with me.” Jack’s thumb rubbed against my forearm. His touch was warm and addictive. “Just because our abilities rose out of Sandra’s evil intentions, we can still find ways to use them for good. And I think keeping you from bleeding all over your dress or from limping in high heels on our date tonight qualifies as a good deed for the day.”

“I don’t want you to be sick for the party,” I said. “Briana would never let me hear the end of it if I was the reason any one of us didn’t show up. And on time.”

Jack shook his head. “I don’t think these small injuries will make me sick. Nothing’s broken or dislocated. Besides, I’m getting better at controlling the nausea.”

It was true. I was making a lot of headway with the nosebleeds, too. Many of us had been working hard to improve how we used our minds while minimizing the side effects. Jonas had been working with me daily. I mindspoke to a teacher earlier in the week—when I’d failed to turn in some homework—and my upper lip had remained one-hundred-percent dry. Sandra had fooled us into thinking we needed
her
to cure our side effects. But we were starting to discover that our own minds held the keys to controlling the repercussions of using our abilities.

“Are you sure?” I glanced down at my swollen knee.

“Just a strained ligament.” He had already examined my injuries.

Jack brushed loose hair off of my face. “Let me do this for you. I want tonight to be good for us, and I can’t have my girlfriend limping around with an open wound on her arm.”

Girlfriend
. I still wanted that title.

Finally, I nodded.

Holding my masquerade mask to my face with one hand, while clenching the other into a fist, I backed up against the far wall. As I scanned the room for Jack, I saw her again—a girl with a certain familiarity, dressed in black from head to toe. Her hair was pulled away from her face, and strands of brunette with streaks of cherry hung over her shoulders and down to her chest. Her skin was pale, her lips were blood red, and an intricate lace formed a mask that covered her eyes and nose.

The ballroom had been transformed. Layers of dark fabric had been draped across the ceiling to a point in the center where a chandelier hung, dimmed to romantic perfection. Twinkle lights were strung around the outer perimeters, providing enough light to make out most faces, but dark enough for me—dressed in black and deep green—to fade into the background.

Briana had been instrumental in planning the Halloween gala, including the decorations and the music. She even took it upon herself to pick out the gown and mask I wore. She wasn’t convinced I’d show up if she didn’t plan my ensemble. I wasn’t either.

I was dressed chest to ankles in black silk. Emerald-green rhinestones and black lace accented the strapless bodice, showing a little more skin than I would have liked. Feathers and the same emerald stones and lace decorated my hand-held mask and the wristlet that hung on my gloved arm.

Students danced. Some hung out by the punch. By the looks on some of the lowerclassmen’s faces, the punch was spiked. Not surprising, since many of the adults had been so preoccupied as of late.

I continued to scan the crowd as I skirted the outer edge of the party, holding my mask to my face. I spotted Briana over by the band. Though the room was rather dark, it was easy to make out Briana, dressed in cardinal red. Feathers adorned the bodice of both her dress and her mask, which was also red—a bold statement for someone with hair the color of shimmering copper.

To her right and by the windows were Georgia, Fred, Lin, and Dia. Seth had talked each of them into attending Wellington’s Halloween masquerade in the hope that they would reconsider enrolling at the school. But at the moment, they didn’t appear happy to be there.

Georgia stood with her arms crossed like a protective shield. Instead of wearing a mask, paint decorated her cheeks and swirled around her eyes in shades of white and canary yellow, a stark contrast to her dark skin. Her eyes were accented with gold metallic shadow so thick that I could see it from across the ballroom.

Dia had straightened her red hair—setting her apart from her twin clone, Briana—and was dressed in a tightly fitted, silver dress. Both Fred and Lin wore simple tuxes, but in true Fred fashion, his bow tie and accessories matched Georgia’s canary yellow, as did his gold, shimmery eyes.

Lin angled toward Dia. He leaned in and whispered something in her ear. He looked so much like Jack that my heart suddenly felt too big for my chest as I watched the intimacy between them. Dia nodded as he kissed her temple.

I gave my head a little shake. I had to focus on what was important. Dia and Lin were still recovering from what Sandra and Dr. John DeWeese did to them. And I planned to use their anger to learn more about Sandra’s operation.

School would officially be different on Monday, and I needed as many of the clones as possible to stay at Wellington. Seth Whitmeyer, Sandra’s brother, would be teaching the students here when he wasn’t fulfilling his obligations as a neurologist at the University of Kentucky Hospital. He planned to help each of us come to terms with who and what we were, and he hoped to fill in many of the blanks we all had.

I was pretty certain I needed the other clones more than I needed Seth. Dia and Lin were sure to have knowledge Seth didn’t possess. I had Dad’s journals, which I hoped would clue us in to what he had discovered before he was killed. And every day I was more and more amazed at the amount of knowledge that Jonas and Jack had hidden from me. My objective, currently, was to discover where Sandra’s operation was now located, and I would do whatever I had to do to find out where Sandra Whitmeyer and John DeWeese were hiding.

I craned my neck as I again spotted the familiar girl masked in lace. She glided through a crowd of dancers with grace and maturity, leading me to believe she was an upperclassman, yet I couldn’t figure out who she was. Her short height made it difficult to keep her in my sight. I took a step forward, determined to identify her, when an arm circled my waist and pulled me backward.
 

“Why are you hiding back here?” Jonas’s voice came out in a breathy whisper. The muscles in my waist and back tensed. He slithered in and around my mind.
 

“You can poke around inside my head all you want. You’ll find nothing.” I turned in his arms, attempting to wriggle from his hold, but he just gripped me tighter. “And I wasn’t hiding, I was scoping out the party. People-watching.” I shrugged, while glancing over my shoulder for the mystery girl.

Jonas loosened his grasp, but remained close, and to prove I wasn’t affected by him, I didn’t move. The band was loud, and he leaned into my ear to speak. “Okay, then. Tell me this. Why are you avoiding Jack?”

“Why do you care?” I wasn’t avoiding Jack. I had called him to tell him I would meet him at the party. He hadn’t answered.

Jonas pulled back and looked into my eyes, but kept his face close enough that I could feel the heat of his breath and smell spearmint. “Don’t play games with me, Lexi. We’ve all been through too much for you to close up like this and shut everybody out.”

“I’m not shutting—”

“Save it. Want to tell me about the package you got in the mail today?”

I stood straighter and took a step backward, fiddling with my gloves. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I was planning to tell him before the night was out, but I was waiting to see what else Sandra threw at me first—what other “gift” she was sending.

I glanced across the room. As I did, I spotted Addison standing by herself and staring out the windows at something below.

Addison was one of our newest students. Like a sister to Jack and fresh out of a coma, Addison seemed to know more about her supernatural ability to disappear than any of the rest of us knew about our own powers.

“I saw you.” He placed a hand on my shoulder and tugged, forcing me to look at him. “You opened a large envelope and pulled a small object and a note from it. I kept my promise not to invade your thoughts, but I sensed every one of your emotions while you processed what you read. And some of those thoughts were aimed at me. I felt fear; and an anger I hadn’t seen from you since the day you came back from your hot date with Jack two weeks ago. You know, after seeing your mom.”

I stared into his pleading brown eyes. There was an unmistakable attraction there. I shifted on my feet, but I didn’t dare look away. “Your
mother
sent me a present—a thumb drive.”

Jonas’s jaw hardened and he rolled his shoulders. “What was on it?”

“I don’t know.” Not exactly, anyway. “Said you would know the password once I received the second part of my gift.”

“What gift?” He made a quick scan of the room while unbuttoning the top button of his shirt. I’d hit a nerve.

“Don’t know that either. Said I’d get it tonight.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“Because I didn’t. Why does this make you jittery?”

Jonas’s gaze narrowed as we continued our staring battle. He looked away first and released his hold on me. He rubbed both hands across his face. A low growl erupted from somewhere deep inside his chest. “You are so frustrating, you know that?”

“I do.” But I didn’t care.

“What do you think this ‘gift’ is?” Jonas seemed to accept my careless shrug that was anything but careless. “Then we’ll just have to be patient. Something tells me Sandra won’t make us wait long.” He backed up slightly. “Where is Jack, anyway?”

“I haven’t seen him.” Though I was surprised he hadn’t found me yet. A twinge of worry sparked in the pit of my stomach. After lifting my mask to my face again, I turned and stood beside Jonas so that I could watch the crowd. The loud, fast-paced music had slowed.

“Well, his loss. Let’s dance.” Jonas grabbed my free hand and pulled me toward the dance floor. With the slightest resistance from me, Jonas entered my head.
Please don’t pull away.

There’s more,
I said.

He stopped and faced me. I reached into my wristlet and pulled out the note from Sandra. After he read it, he raised his head, and for a minute, I thought I witnessed an ounce of sympathy in the way his cheeks fell. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to dance with you.”

He led me into the middle of the crowd of slow dancers and spun me into him. His hand slid to the small of my back, burning through the thin fabric of my dress. I stared into his eyes through my Venetian mask. Reaching up, he took my hand that held the mask and guided it around his neck, then linked his fingers with my other hand.

“This doesn’t feel very brother-sisterly.” I tried to lighten the mood. Jonas had once tried to convince me that he would try to see me as a sister, seeing as he was born from Sandra’s womb and I was born of Sandra’s DNA.

Grinning, he leaned in, his mouth right next to my ear. “Like I’ve explained before, there isn’t an ounce of relation in our genetic code, and I don’t consider your witch of a DNA donor my mother. So we’re safe.”

We most definitely were
not
safe. “What about Jack? Your best friend.” I countered. “And Briana? What’s going on between the two of you?”

The muscles in his neck and shoulders tightened. He suddenly guided me in a twirl. When I came back to him, not even a molecule of air separated us. He didn’t answer my questions, but I saw the regret in his hardened jaw.

There was no question that my relationship with Jonas had always had a strange edge. I wondered if we would have dated if I had met him first. A relationship between Jonas and me would have been riddled with epic fights, I had no doubt. And it would have ended soon after I’d met Jack.

And now, a woman filled with so much ugliness and hate, who had caused so much suffering to the people I loved, was threatening the bond between Jack and me. The hate in my heart for her was too much at times. Pushing back from Jonas, I reached my hand to massage the spot on my chest, willing the pressure on my heart to release.

Jonas cupped my cheek. “Hey… you okay?”

I managed a nod.

“I’m sorry I pushed. I go too far with you sometimes.” He went too far
most
times. I didn’t know if it had to do with Sandra’s past manipulation—when Sandra controlled Jonas through the tracker at the base of his skull—or if it was simply Jonas’s personality. “But maybe you should listen to Sandra and break up with Jack.”