The Struggle(92)

There was a long stretch of silence and then, “Is that guy out there?”

“Deacon is here with me.”

“Hi!” Deacon chirped. “I’m one of the guys who kidnapped you.”

My eyes widened as I looked at him. He just shrugged.

“Not you,” came the response. “The other guy. His name is Gable.”

“No, he’s not here,” I answered, wondering where he was since I hadn’t seen him yet. “Do you want to talk to him?”

There was another gap of silence. “No.”

“Josie is the daughter of Apollo,” Deacon said from where he’d positioned himself on the other side of the door. “But she doesn’t have any cool abilities like you do.”

I flipped Deacon off.

“I don’t have any abilities!” the girl shouted.

“That’s not what I hear.” Closing my eyes, I tilted my head against the wall. “I hear you can bring dead plants back to life. That’s really cool.”

“And also something that mortals can’t do,” Deacon pointed out. “But we’ve already had this conversation.”

“Deacon is right, though. I don’t have any special talents,” I said, and Deacon snorted. I ignored him. “Well, I can control the elements, but that’s like nothing.”

A couple of moments passed. “You said your name is Josie, right?” The voice was closer to the door.

“Yes.”

“Gable mentioned you. He said you’d been taken by . . . by freaking Titans.”

“I was. I got free. I was lucky, but some like us weren’t as lucky. I know you don’t feel this way now, but you should know how lucky you are that Deacon and Luke got to you first. If you’ve seen what I’ve seen, you wouldn’t doubt that for a second.” Opening my eyes, I found Deacon staring at me. “Nothing they’ve told you is a lie. The Titans were looking for you, and if they found you, you would . . .”

“Would what?” she asked.

Lowering my gaze to the floor, I said, “You’d wish you were dead.”

About a minute went by and I was afraid she was going to ignore us. “I couldn’t always bring plants back to life.”

Deacon pushed off the wall, his face sparking with interest. I was guessing this was new info. “You couldn’t?”

“No. It started a couple of weeks ago. I found out by accident. I knocked over an old flower that I had in a vase, and when I picked it up the damn thing came to life,” Cora said, and then she laughed. “At first, I just kind of ignored it. Because, come on. Then I did it again, a day later. I reached down to pluck up a dead dandelion and those little white wispy things came right back to life.” Another brittle-sounding laugh emerged. “I feel like I’m going crazy.”

I had no idea why that ability had started to show recently. “You’re not.”

“That’s not all.”

“It’s not?” Eagerness filled Deacon’s voice.

“I can tell things. Like when someone is sick. They have this grayish glow to them, like an aura. I thought I was having vision problems,” she said, and the more she talked, I had to wonder how she thought she was a normal mortal. “And I know when women are freaking pregnant! At least I think I do. And by the way, that got me fired.”

I blinked slowly.

“Do tell,” Deacon murmured, eyes glittering with interest.

“So I was working at the indie bookstore and my manager came into work one morning, late as usual with her husband, and when I looked at her stomach, I could see this little ball of light that for some reason, in my head, was shaped like a baby! A freaking fist-size ball of light shaped like a baby.”

Deacon and I exchanged looks.

“So what else would I do? I blurted out that she was pregnant,” Cora continued on from the other side of the door. “Little did I know, her and her husband had hit a major dry spell, and if she was pregnant, it couldn’t have been her husband’s.”

“Oh my,” I said.

“Yeah, oh my. So she fired me that afternoon.” There was a thump from the other side of the door that I really hoped wasn’t her head. “Of course, I learned to not just blurt out random hallucinations real quickly.”

Deacon grinned. “Smart move, but it probably wasn’t a hallucination.”

Cora’s sigh was audible through the door. “This is real, and you guys aren’t going away, are you?”

“This is real and we really don’t want to leave you,” I said, pushing off the wall. “You have to be hungry, right? We can get food and answer all the questions you have.”