The rest of his sentence gets lost as the world rushes back to life around me. There’s a roaring in my ears that I can’t shake away. Then my hearing finally clears as he says, “I don’t want her to get hurt.”
Why does Nicole know the secret I’m not allowed to know? And why would whatever they’re doing wind up hurting me? It’s bad enough knowing Griffin has betrayed me with Adara. I expect that from her and should have known better about him. But Nicole? She is the closest thing I have to a best friend on this island.
How could they do this to me?
In that instant, my mind focuses entirely on one thing: getting away from this beach. Away from where I learned about this latest betrayal. Away, away, away.
Eyes closed, I feel a tingling spread over my skin.
When I blink open, I’m in my room.
Great, I finally do something useful with my powers, and I can’t even enjoy it. I’m too busy worrying about my world crumbling around me.
“I didn’t hear you come home,” Stella says when I stumble out of my room two tear-filled hours later.
I barely glance at her before continuing to the kitchen. All my crying has left me severely dehydrated and I need liquid like nobody’s business. Taking a dirty glass from the sink, I fill it with tap water and chug. I don’t even have the energy to twist the cap off a Gatorade.
“What happened to you?”
I flick Stella a glance over my glass. Her generally superior look gradually fades as I just stare at her.
When I finish the last drop in my glass, I set it in the sink and start to leave the kitchen. Stella steps in front of me. She grabs my shoulders with both hands, dips down to look in my eyes, and announces, “You autoported.”
“What?”
“Autoported,” she repeats. “You shimmered yourself home, didn’t you?”
“How can you tell?” Then I remember she can read minds. “Never mind.”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “Your mind’s too much of a mess for me to read right now. You have a residual glow in your eyes. That only happens when someone has recently autoported.”
I shrug. I’m in no mood to be analyzed or critiqued or judged or whatever she’s trying to do right now.
“I know you’re hurting,” she says, her voice soft with understanding, “but autoportation is the most advanced of all dynamotheos powers. We need to figure out how this happened.”
“Stella, I—”
She squeezes my shoulders. “I wouldn’t ask you to do this right now unless I thought it was really important.”
Her pale gray eyes are steely with resolve. Clearly, I’m not escaping this session. “Just let me splash some water on my face.”
Stella nods and lets me go freshen up.
When I get back, she’s in the dining room with a bunch of papers spread out over the table. She glances up when I walk in.
“Feeling better?”
“A little,” I answer honestly.
“Good,” she says, “because I need you to tell me everything about the situation that led to your autoportation.”
As I sink into the chair opposite hers, I meet her eyes straight on. I don’t really want to tell her what just happened—we may be friendly at the moment, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to share personal details of my love life. But, the truth is, I’m a little freaked out by the whole autoportation thing. It’s not like I controlled it. I didn’t even see it coming.
What if I accidentally autoport myself to the Gobi Desert? Or the bottom of the ocean? Or the middle of a Mary-Kay convention? I shudder at the thought of all the makeup and pep.
Considering the risks of not understanding what happened, it’s far less frightening to tell Stella the truth.
“Well, I went for a run,” I begin. “To clear my head . . .”
For the next thirty minutes, I spill every last detail of the last few days, everything from the instant I turned Damian into a surfer dude up until I autoported back to my room. I even trash on Adara and her boyfriend-stealing games, despite the fact that she and Stella are friends.
Stella doesn’t say a word. Just scribbles notes in a pink spiral-bound while I babble on. And on. And on.
“All I could think of was being away from there and then . . .” I gesture toward my room. “I was.”
Finished, I take a deep breath and slump back against my chair.
Wow. I feel a lot better just getting that off my chest.
“I’d like to try an experiment,” Stella finally says. She places her pen in the center of the table. “Simple telekinesis. Pick this up.”
When I start to reach for it, she says, “No. Not with your hands.”