Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (Wicked Lovely 5.50)

The two of us made it as far as Muskogee before the truck broke down, which wasn’t bad, considering Grandpa Jake’s Chevy was older than Kissy and me combined—and temperamental to boot.

“Think she just needs to cool off?” Kissy asked me.

I considered the question. “Did you go over forty miles an hour?”

My sister smiled serenely. “I think I hit eighty back on sixty-nine.”

“Then the truck needs to cool off.”

I leaned forward to get a glimpse of Kissy’s eyes, but she popped on a pair of plastic sunglasses before I could assess just how intense the situation had gotten.

I didn’t want to think about what would happen if the two of us wer

en’t quick enough—if the truck wouldn’t start back up, or we got lost, or the cops pulled us over for playing hooky.

I didn’t want to think about it, but I did.

I imagined Kissy seizing, her limbs twitching, the light in her eyes blinding her to anything else. Up until that night three years ago, Kissy’s ’pulses had been a regular thing, and I’d seen her with shining green eyes often enough to know that the more she resisted, the worse it got. Impulse didn’t even begin to cover the strength of this thing that took over my sister, telling her that she had to do this, that, or the other. Sometimes the this in question was a little something—walking to school instead of taking the bus, leaving a bottle of water at the end of a long dirt road, whispering nonsense words to a man she’d never met—and sometimes, it was big.

By the time Kissy was five, my parents had learned not to ask, let alone argue, because if Kissy couldn’t or wouldn’t do what the ’pulse wanted her to, things got ugly. In the three years she’d been ’pulse-free, I’d almost forgotten what it was like to know that my sister’s body might turn on her at any second. Fever, seizures, hallucinations—

We have to go to San Antonio.

Good Lord Almighty, I hoped we’d get there in time.

“You think you’d be okay grabbing breakfast while the truck cools down?” I asked Kissy, trying not to make her sound like some kind of invalid, because I was no fool when it came to my sister’s temper.

She took a deep breath and then nodded. “We can’t go anywhere until the truck cools down anyway.”

I got the feeling that it wasn’t me she was talking to.

“If we grab something to eat now,” Kissy continued, “we won’t have to stop later.” Having pled her case to the universe, she opened the driver’s side door, and I waited to see if she’d be able to do it.

First one foot out of the truck, then another.

“I’m good,” she called back.

I opened my door and joined her on the pavement. We’d broken down in full view of a McDonald’s, which was either lucky or not, depending on just how fond (or not) you were of Egg McMuffins. I came down on the not side, but Kissy had a long-standing love affair with grease, and far be it from me to stand in their way.

After giving the truck an encouraging pat on the hood, the two of us hightailed it across the highway, Kissy in the front and me on her heels, same as always. A few minutes later, I was drinking orange juice out of a little plastic container that felt about a million different kinds of wrong, and Kissy was chatting up the boy behind the counter, who had probably never seen something like her in his whole entire life.

Kissy was the kind of girl who could make sweatpants, mismatched flip-flops, and gaudy red sunglasses look fashionable. The shades hid her glowing eyes, but there was no masking the giddy energy vibrating through her entire body. Kissy always said the ’pulse felt like someone had hooked her up to jumper cables and given her a real good charge, and even just standing there, watching the boy watching her, I knew he could feel it too.

My sister was electric.

“You two related?”

I turned to see a new boy—one who hadn’t yet fallen under Kissy’s thrall—looking thoughtfully at me.

“You two,” he said again, jerking his head toward Kissy. “Are you related?” He had an accent, and not a Southern one, either. I tried to place it, but couldn’t, and I realized that thinking about his accent probably wasn’t good manners, when I could be answering his question instead.

“Sisters,” I told him.

The boy nodded. He was older than me, maybe even older than Kissy, like he was already in college or working full-time at his daddy’s garage. Taking a closer look, I thought that maybe he’d been out boozing the night before, because he looked real tired, and he was wearing a baseball cap pulled down over the top third of his face. His eyes—what I could see of them, anyway—were shadowed and bloodshot.

“Sisters,” he said thoughtfully. “At the McDonald’s at six twenty-seven.”

I wasn’t sure how one was supposed to respond to such a blatant statement of fact, so I went back to thinking about his accent and how his words sounded like they were coming from the back of his throat instead of the front.