her is almost funny. She looks like she could be someone’s grandma—a halo of rough, choppy silver hair, eyes set deep with wrinkles, sweatpants. She looks like she should be going to the grocery store, not staging a kidnapping. “You—”
I don’t let her finish.
I wasn’t lying to Sam before. When I pushed Officer McClintock, it was the first time I’d ever tried to hurt someone with what I could do. When I was in the Blank Room, trying to hide that I’d changed, I’d accidentally move things around. I’d want the glass of water from across the table, and suddenly it’d be zipping toward my hands. There’s a learning curve, I guess, for controlling the intensity of it, but no one has to tell you how to do it. I look at something, I want it to happen, and somehow it does. The answer is in the ask.
I want to hurt this woman; so I do.
I fling both hands out and she shoots back into the hallway with a scream, against the wall. The impact cracks the plaster, leaves her limp. I jump over her legs and run the short distance to the living room. Lucas is still there, moving beneath the blanket, but they’ve already dragged Sam out through the kitchen door. They kicked it in so hard, it broke off its hinges.
“Sam!” I scream. “Sam!”
They’ve pulled a hood on over her head, bound her hands in front of her like she’s some kind of criminal. I feel the last of my calm burst into ash. She’s struggling, not making it easy for them, but not fighting—not until she hears my voice.
The two men are built like football players—one with dark skin, the other light, one with no hair, one with a ponytail, both in the same camo jackets you see some hunters wear. I take in all these details in the span of a blink. The only thing that really matters is that they both have guns; one has a small one pointed at Sam’s head. The other has a shotgun pointed at me.
“What do we have here—?”
I don’t let the man holding Sam finish.
“Don’t—! Run!” she chokes out, trying to turn back toward the house. My hand is out again and the night air tackles the man holding her, drags him back toward the trees. It’s panic, or it’s an accident, I don’t know, but the gunshot cracks the second before I knock the gun out of his hand.
I’m not fast enough with the other man. I should have hit them both at once. Sam is screaming, trying to get her hood off, calling my name over and over again, and I barely have a second to dive back into the house before he fires the shotgun in my direction.
“I’m fine only taking one of you!” he yells. “Bitch!”
He’s taken a whole section of the doorframe out—literally—he’s blown it into splinters around me. I stare at it, ears ringing, reaching up to touch a warm, wet cut on my cheek. When he fires again, the shot whips through the wall over my head, smashing into the cabinets.
I don’t even see the old woman come up behind me until she has an arm locked over my throat and is dragging me up.
“I got her—I’m coming out! Stop shooting, you idiot!”
I thrash, twisting, trying to drop low out of her arms as she drags me forward. The broken glass and wood whirls around us. I can’t focus on any one thing long enough to use it to defend myself. The man with the shotgun is still aiming it at me, and he doesn’t take kindly to being tossed violently to the side. Before I can turn to the man limping back from the trees toward their pickup truck, the old lady is already cutting into my skin with some kind of knife. I can barely move without the edge biting into my throat.
“Be a good girl, now….” The old woman smells like coffee and stale sweat, and the hand she uses to cover my mouth tastes even worse when I bite it.
The knife digs in harder.
“Brat!” she spits. To the men, she says, “Make sure that one’s secure. We’re going to have to drug this one.”
One of them tosses Sam so hard into the truck that the whole thing dips. I hear her scream around her gag as she lands on her bad leg, and my vision flashes red. The closest man must see it in me, because he