*Note* If you haven't read the Prologue or Chapter One, please go to my portfolio and do so now! You'll get a better understanding of what's going on, and chances are you'll enjoy the story much, much more! Thanks!
Chapter Two
The man tilted his head, looking at her with his glowing eyes. He seemed to be taking in every one of her features, lingering on her hair and eyes.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
The old lady came to the rescue, trudging slowly on her crippling legs. She gasped as she took in the sight of a man with devil eyes holding Ness by the hair.
“You!” she cried, a strange tone filling her voice. “Get off her!” Her voice was strangely calm, but it was laced with something that Ness couldn’t identify. She looked at her rescuer, eyes wide and terrified. When the old woman saw Ness’s expression, she paused for a moment and then said to the monster, “You shouldn’t be in the women’s room, you—”
But exactly what he was, Ness never found out. The man gave a sickly snake’s smile and raised an arm. There was a burst of black light and then the old woman was gone.
He turned Ness around so that her back was to him. “Do you see what power can do if you don’t go along with me—if you don’t do what I say?” he whispered in her ear.
Ness whimpered. She had never been a particularly brave person.
The man grabbed her hair, put it to his nose, and sniffed loudly.
“Ganelon will like his new prize,” he said as he exhaled the shampoo smell of Ness’s strange hair. “He’ll have one of you before she even comes into her power.”
She tried to twist out of the man’s grasp, but he was too strong. “Let me go!” she wailed, praying that someone had heard her scream and would run into the bathroom to help her.
“Don’t struggle, girl. You won’t win without your power.”
It hit Ness like a bolt of white lightening. Power...her power!
It was too late to save the lady, but if she collected her thoughts she could save herself.
Breathing slowly, she focused her concentration on the warm body behind her. She pictured him flying over her shoulders, hitting the wall upside-down and sliding to the ground....
As she thought it, it happened. She heard his gasp, heard him hit the wall, heard the squeak and a nasty crack as he slid down and hit his head. Most of all, she felt her power rise up inside her and press its way out like a caged lion desperate to escape.
Concentrating again, she willed the man to fly across the room and into the opposite wall, away from her only exit. It happened just as she’d pictured it, and she ran from the bathroom.
She was breathing hard when she went back to sit with her mother.
“Where have you been? They’re starting to board,” Cassandra scolded. “I thought I told you to be back soon.”
“Now boarding rows thirteen through sixteen,” the woman at the gate announced into a microphone as if she heard Cassandra’s words.
“Your hair is all over the place,” Cassandra commented, her eyes raking Ness’s hair. She ran a hand through it to smooth it right before they stepped up to the gate, removing all traces of a stranger’s fingers from the cloud of red. “Did something happen?” she asked, her voice suddenly serious. Her eyes were scanning the crowd, searching for someone that could have harmed her daughter.
“No,” Ness lied, trying to control her breathing. “Nothing happened—I just wandered too far and I was trying to run back before they started to board. I guess I was too late, huh?” Ness let out a pathetic laugh. “I got kind of lost. This place is really confusing.”
She couldn’t tell her mother what just happened—as if she’d believe Ness when she said that a man that looked like a cross between a cat, a snake, and a human attacked her. She definitely couldn’t tell her the truth about how she’d gotten away.
“Alright,” Cassandra said skeptically. She turned and motioned for her daughter to follow her.
Once they had boarded the plane, Cassandra and Ness quickly found their seats in coach after walking through the leather-seated first class section.
“Have you ever flown first class?” Ness asked her mom, her eyes following a girl her age who sat daintily on the edge of one of the comfortable seats.
“Why would I waste my money on that when coach is the same? They just get their food first,” the always-practical Cassandra replied.
Ness sat in her own cloth-covered seat, finding it quite comfortable—which was a good thing, as she felt a headache coming on.
It happened every time she used her gift after long periods of ignoring it. She never knew exactly when her power came to her, but one day—she couldn’t have been more than eight years old—she discovered that she could move things with her mind. If she used it a lot, it got stronger, like a muscle. If she ignored it, it started to get weaker—it didn’t go away like she hoped it would—and its strength hurt her eyes and her head after she used it.
No one knew her secret, but she always had a feeling that her grandmother knew. That’s why she hated it so much when called the Devil’s Child—she feared that it was true.
She pressed on her eyes with her thumb and forefinger in an attempt to dull the pain. She could still feel the power inside of her, begging to be unleashed again. Ness desperately wanted to wake up one morning and feel that the strange sensation her telekinesis gave her had disappeared, but she knew it would never go away. She told herself that every day since she discovered it.
So what’s the point of ignoring such an unusual gift? her mind prodded.
Ness sighed and leaned back in her seat. Maybe because it feels like such a curse.
* * * * *
“Drive slowly! Don’t tailgate!”
“Alright, alright...I get the point.”
Jonas Gonzales grabbed his car keys and gave an exasperated look to his two best friends, hurrying them from the house before Mrs. Gonzales could yell any other warning.
“Come on…go. I don’t need to hear anymore from her today—”
“You’re never going to hear the end of it,” Max McCloud said as he slipped into the backseat of Jonas’s white Subaru. “You should have never rear-ended that guy.”
“It’s not my fault he stopped all the sudden!” Jonas exclaimed, frustrated. “You were here. You saw.”
“Yeah...we saw,” his other best friend, Landon Jameson, said.
Max and Landon exchanged glances. Jonas, though he was a skilled driver, was sometimes crazy behind the wheel.
“Oh, come on, I’m not that bad,” he protested as he pulled out of the driveway.
“I don’t see why you didn’t just freeze time right before it happened,” Max said.
“I didn’t realize that the guy stopped,” Jonas told him. “It happened too fast…”
“Sometimes your power really sucks,” Max commented from the back seat.
“At least I don’t disappear when a girl looks at me,” Jonas retorted.
Landon sighed, shifting his gaze from the car’s radio to the view outside the window. Once again, he was sitting in on an argument that no other people on Earth would ever experience. Usually Landon tried to avoid talking about it, but it couldn’t be ignored: they were, after all, unlike everyone else in the world.
They each had a dark secret that kept them separated from other people. A power—a gift and a curse—lay within the folds of their being.
Landon quickly searched his brain for a new topic, trying to prevent the subject from being discussed further and also to stop an argument.
“Yeah, so, um...Max...how are things with that one girl? What’s her name...Jordan?”
“Thong!” Jonas yelled, and Landon slapped himself on the forehead. Good job, he told himself. Another bad subject. Jonas and Max—despite their strong friendship—loved to bicker over petty things.
“I talked to her online last night,” Max admitted, turning red, “and I do not have one of her thongs.”
He was nervous about anything that had to do with girls, and it always caused his power to kick in. Landon saw him shaking his hand fiercely in the back of the car, trying to make it reappear.
“What would you do if you went invisible in front of her?” Jonas asked thoughtfully. He didn’t intend to be mean this time.
“I’d ask Landon to erase it, I guess,” Max replied as he pushed his glasses further up on his nose. “Unless she thought it was cool and wouldn’t freak out.”
“I think she’d freak out. Sorry, Max,” Landon said truthfully. “And I wouldn’t erase it from her head. What if something went wrong? What if I erased everything?”
“You should learn to…to embrace the fact that you’re telepathic,” Jonas remarked with a sideways glance. “I know I would.”
“No. It’s worse than your powers—I can know everything about someone. It’s like…it’s like I can steal their soul. It’s…unnatural.”
Max let out a short laugh, but Jonas shrugged and said, “We’re all unnatural. It’s just something we have to live with.” Then he laughed, too, despite himself. “I bet the three of us will never even find one girl to be just a friend without her freaking out—if she found out, I mean.”
“And she has to get past the way we look, too,” Landon muttered, glancing at his reflection in the side-view mirror. All of them had strange coloring—most especially Jonas, whose brown skin just didn’t fit in with his golden eyes—and they got their fair share of double-glances whenever they went out to the mall—or any other public place, for that matter.
“So, Landon...will you read her mind for me?” Max asked hopefully.
“No!” Landon yelled a little too loudly. “Going into other peoples’ heads is wrong. I don’t even know why I have this stupid gift.”
“You have to have it for a reason. And figuring out girls might be one of the reasons.”
“And, what...you can become invisible to follow girls into the locker room?”
“Sure, why not?” Max replied, wagging his eyebrows suggestively. “We should try it when school starts again.”
Landon ignored the comment. “I don’t see any other guys with powers like ours—”
“Aww, c’mon, Landon, we’re just special,” Jonas said as he laughed.
Suddenly, he slammed on the brakes and pressed his hands on the horn. The three boys flew forward in their seats as the horn blared, saved only by the restraint of a seat belt. Jonas yelled obscenities out the window.
“Jesus Christ, learn how to drive! Like I need another accident.” He switched lanes and sped up, driving past the classy car in front of him. He glared and thrust out his middle finger.
Moments later he regretted it—he’d flicked off an undercover cop, after all.
Sorry, that just doesn't sound right.
Its all just my little opinion. Feel free to go hound mine, I'd love it.
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And, last sentence, you don't need "after all". It's not really fair to crack down on editing stuff just yet, so I won't. Unless...have you written all of this already?
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