already had more than her fair share. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d tried to dislocate his digits. “I have a confession to make—I get hot just thinking about being belly to belly with you.”
“Talk is cheap, mister. Instead of driving aimlessly around Chicago, we could always go back to my place—”
“Since I’m positive Rainier and his zombie demon somehow killed both Gabrielle Litte and Briella Fields, I’d feel like a sitting duck in a place they already know about. And for what it’s worth, I’m not driving aimlessly. I’m...feeling.”
“You’re feeling what?”
He hesitated a second, then figured she had a right to know. “I’m testing to see if my gift of finding hidden things is returning. Not that it was ever that hot to begin with, what with my mom crippling me at birth.”
“Lovely,” he heard her mutter. “Real Mother of the Year material there.”
“In her mind, she was trying to save me. And who knows? Maybe she did shelter me from the more dangerous aspects of knowing where things are. And I’ve always wondered if I would have survived her if I’d displayed anything stronger than my quiet little instincts. Luckily the feelings I used to have—I called it my inner compass—were so low-level no one even noticed them, least of all my mother.”
“But you noticed them when they vanished.”
He squeezed her fingers, grateful she understood. “Something’s happening to me. It’s not working like it once did. This isn’t on a subconscious level, though I suppose that’s what I’m waiting to feel now. What’s been happening to me lately has been...I don’t know. Weird.”
“What’s been happening?”
“Dreams.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Sometimes they’re waking dreams. Though I guess things like that are referred to as visions. Or insanity.” Nate tried not to grimace at how loopy this shit sounded. But since they were in this together, the least he could do was serve up the truth. “And these images I’m seeing don’t necessarily focus on stuff I’m wanting to find. For instance, instead of dreaming about your whereabouts when I was trying to find you, I kept getting this no-faced giant of a guy standing in a cavernous snow globe telling me not to look in his direction because he wasn’t ready for me yet. At the time I thought I had to lay off the late-night snacking. Geez, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah.” She nodded, and he had to admire how she didn’t try to sugar-coat it. “That must have been some kind of snacking.”
“Except that wasn’t the problem. Soon after that, I had the same dream while wide awake, only this time it hurt.”
“What do you mean, it hurt?”
“I mean it made a hangover seem like a pleasant summer breeze. Worse yet, I felt that exact same pain when we met up with Rainier and his zombie demon. It hammered me right between the eyes and pulled me in their direction, even though finding the person or people who’d targeted Gabrielle Litte and Briella Fields wasn’t on my to-do list. At that point all I wanted to do was keep you safe.”
She made a thoughtful sound. “I think your gift has decided you’ve finally grown up.”
He shot her a quizzical look. “You’re going to have to explain that one to me.”
“Up until you lost your gift, you’d always used it to find the things you wanted, and for the most part it was pretty accurate, right? It was certainly accurate in finding me when I was stumbling my way out of the Smokies.”
He nodded. “That’s basically how it worked, yeah. I’d concentrate on a person or object, and most of the time I’d get a quiet little hunch to go in one direction or another. Sometimes, though, I’d get nothing at all, or worse—a false feeling and a total wash-out on whatever it was I wanted to find. Like I said, in terms of power I’m pretty much a zero.”
“Or it’s possible you’ve been misusing your gift this entire time.”
There was a beat of silence. “I think you need to eat. Your blood sugar’s low.”
“I’m serious, Nate. When you made the choice to embrace your gift and learn how to use it to help others, it was under the threat of being discovered by your mother, who would have done heaven knows what to you. You had to stifle everything in order to survive.”
“She hasn’t been around for a long time, Ella.”
“But by then you got used to manipulating your gift quietly, subconsciously pushing it in the direction you wanted it