The Dysasters Read online

  “Yes, I would, sweet Eve,” he said.

  Hand in hand, Eve and the only father she’d ever known left the building that looked from the outside like any other Florida beach cottage. Eve kicked off her shoes as they reached the sand. The muggy August air was thick and hot and damp, and there was almost no breeze. Eve wished she had on a tank top, but the wish was fleeting. It was more important that her arm was covered. She wanted to keep what was hidden there to herself—if only for a day or two.

  They walked along the beach, letting their feet dig into the warm sand, inhaling the breath of the ocean until the beach curved around the far side of the island that looked out onto open waters. There Stewart stopped to stare out at the star-filled sky and the fat, risen moon.

  Eve concentrated on her element—earth. Finding her connection without evoking the element, she embraced the calm she had already called to her during that terrible time at the stadium when she saw her mother, crumpled and dead in the middle of that horrid, muddy field, and felt peace and protection spread from the painful spot hidden under her sleeve throughout her body—though she was careful to hold it to herself—careful not to let any energy leak from her hand joined with his. And then slowly, carefully, she began asking the questions that had begun to take over her mind.

  “Father, I didn’t want to say anything in front of the boys, but I’m worried about how tired you’ve been looking lately.”

  Stewart shook his head slightly, pulled his hand from hers, and waved it dismissively. “All is well, sweet Eve.”

  “But Father, forgive me if I’m overstepping, but you have always told us that we have to take care of each other, and it’s not just that you’re tired.”

  His gaze left the night sky and found her eyes. “What are you getting at, Eve?”

  Eve clung to the earth’s calmness. “Well, you weren’t like this before.”

  “Before? By before do you mean before the scientific community sneered at me and ruined me? Yes, you’re quite right. I have changed. We all must change.”

  She cleared her throat and tried again. “I understand things are different, have been different since your research was shut down, and I don’t mean any disrespect, but Father, you seem completely obsessed with these teenagers.”

  “Of course I am. I’ve been obsessed with them for eighteen years—waiting for all four pairs to mature. The time is now, and my plan to bring the first pair here has already failed. It seems I should have been more obsessed. Perhaps then today would have ended differently.”

  “You’re brilliant. You created us. Why do you need those kids? Surely you can find a way to cure us if you just keep researching?”

  “There are things you do not understand, Eve. Things I haven’t wanted to bother you or your brothers with. Just trust me.”

  “I do! But can’t you trust me, too? What things do you mean?”

  Eve saw anger harden her father’s expression, but it faded quickly as she smiled up at him. He touched her cheek and then made a sweeping gesture around them, taking in their private island. “My princess, how do you think I’ve kept all this going for the past two decades?”

  “Your fertility clinics made a fortune and rich men paid you a lot of money for your research.”

  “They did indeed. And then the scientific community shunned me for that very research. I invested wisely, but even the vast amount of money I had eventually runs out.”

  Eve felt chilled. “Are we broke?”

  Stewart’s smile was sly. “Not quite. And not for long.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Bring me those teenagers and you will understand—you and the scientific community that scoffed at my research.”

  “I wish you would trust me enough to tell me everything,” Eve said.

  “Really? Do you? And yet you hide yourself from me.”

  “F-Father, I don’t know what you—”

  “Show me. I know it’s there. It must be. It’s why you didn’t go to the motel with the boys.” Into the companionable silence, Stewart’s words were like a physical blow.

  “It’s nothing. Not important at all right now. You’re what’s important right now.”

  “Show me!” His voice hardened as he turned to face her.

  Resigned, Eve bowed her head and brushed the sleeve of her top up over her elbow. Smooth skin, the color of a fertile field, was marred only by a purple crystal the size of an egg that was growing, tumor-like, from the middle of her forearm. The jewel caught the light of the moon, changing silver to deep purple and shimmering from within its faceted surface.

  “Never hide this from me. You know better,” Stewart said as his fingers skimmed lightly over the amethyst jewel. “This one is big. You must have been terribly upset.”

  Eve forced herself not to flinch at the pain his touch caused.

  “But you were not supposed to manifest earth. You must save your power and only use it when absolutely necessary. You’re stronger than the boys, but you are not immortal.”

  “I didn’t mean for it to happen, but when I saw Cora—when I realized she was dead—I lost control. An earthquake manifested. It’s what created that explosion in the parking lot. Father, I had to calm it. I had to or it would have swallowed Foster and Tate and the entire town.”

  “And called much more attention to what happened there than a rogue tornado or two. So, to protect your family you calmed the earth, knowing what the price would be—knowing the agony it would cause you.”

  “It’s only amethyst, Father. It isn’t difficult to bear, and really only painful here.” She touched the raw jewel gently. “The rest of it helps me. Calms me. Protects me. Just as it does the earth.” Her voice sounded small and she was ashamed of herself—ashamed of the unasked question her words held.

  “We’ve discussed this for almost two decades, Eve.” Stewart’s voice flattened and took on the emotionless tone of a lecturing biology professor, though Eve saw the desire in his gaze and how he couldn’t stop staring at the tumor-like jewel. “You have to disperse the energy and remove the stone. If you don’t what does our hypothesis tell us?”

  “That the energy will build until I can’t control it, and the jewel will spread over my skin, eventually encasing me.” She spoke the words by rote, sounding as emotionless as he pretended to be.

  “And?” he prompted.

  “And it would kill me,” she finished. “All right. Do it. I’m ready.” Eve held her arm out to him.

  He finally managed to pull his hot gaze from the jewel to meet her eyes. “I only do this to help you. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “If it weren’t dangerous you could keep it. Keep all of them.”

  “Yes, Father. I know. Go ahead.” Eve lifted her arm higher, offering it to him and bracing herself for what must come next.

  With a sigh that held so much need that it sickened Eve, Stewart pressed the palm of his hand against the hunk of amethyst. Quickly Eve covered his hand with her own and closed her eyes. She reached through her body—through her feet that connected her to the sandy skin of the earth—and found just a small piece of her element. Focusing that power she pulled it up, up through the soles of her feet … up her legs … her core … up her spine to rush over her shoulder and build in intensity until that raw earth energy blasted into the amethyst jewel—and from the jewel directly into Doctor Rick Stewart.

  The older man gasped and his body went rigid like an electrical shock was jolting him, but Eve knew different. She watched with emotionless eyes as Stewart gasped in pleasure before his hand fell from her arm and he dropped softly to his knees in the sand. His breathing deepened and when he looked up at Eve his pupils were fully dilated and his expression was unfocused. Stewart’s face was filled with such calm—such serenity—that he appeared to have youthened several decades.

  “Oh, Eve! You were right. It is sublime. Leave me now and let me grieve for Cora and for all that was lost today by mysel
f…” His words faded as Stewart lay against the sand. Eyes wide and fixed, he no longer saw her—no longer saw anything as the power of Eve’s jewel surged within him, filling him with a high that no drug could ever hope to replicate—a high to which he was completely, irrevocably addicted.

  Silently, Eve turned from him. Her steps were heavy as she traced their tracks in the sand. Absently, her hand brushed at the jewel in her arm and it shattered, raining colorless specks that reminded Eve of smashed eggshells.

  As always after Father drained one of her crystals, Eve felt tired and empty, as well as ravenous. The sense of calm with which the amethyst had gifted her was gone, leaving an absent, aching place, but she couldn’t indulge in the luxury of longing, of wishing she would, just once, be allowed to keep her power. Father would spend the night on the beach, riding the high he’d siphoned from her.

  The jewel was big. He’ll be out for at least eight hours. I have to help my brothers find some trace of Foster and Tate before he wakes—before he takes out his anger on one of them. Again. And what was he insinuating tonight? That those kids will somehow make him money? Somehow fix his relationship with the scientific community, which means he’s planning on going public—showing he’s not dead and forgotten. That has to be good, doesn’t it?

  “Those kids—those four pairs of air, fire, water, and earth—they must be our only hope. Through them Father can discover how to fix us, and he has to … he has to start researching and experimenting again.” Eve spoke to the sandy island, feeling her connection with earth in her every step. “He has to fix us. He is the only one who can. It was Father who created us, and Father who broke us.”

  Eve trudged toward the cottage her brothers shared. As she walked, her own words echoed around and around her mind, the energy will build until I can’t control it, and the jewel will spread over my skin, eventually encasing me …

  And for the first time, Eve let herself wonder for just a moment if becoming a living jewel of the earth would be more terrible than being a living drug for an addict.

  8

  TATE

  “Okay, slow down. The left turn should be just around the next bend in the road,” Tate said, raising his hand and squinting against the setting sun. “Yeah, that’s it.” He pointed across the dash of the truck at a gravel-covered lane securely blocked by a wide, high iron gate. A fence fed into the gate—one of those big, black metal privacy fences. Tate estimated it must be at least eight feet high and it looked like it enclosed the property on the other side of the gate, too. That would be a bitch to climb over, he thought, noting the pointed black tops of the fence and imagining them snagging pants and flesh if anyone was stupid enough to try it.

  Foster wearily put the truck into park. She stretched, yawning loudly, and then rubbed the back of her neck as she silently stared at the gate.

  Tate’s gaze went from the barricade to Foster, and back to the barricade.

  “Um, I know there’s no house number.” Tate paused and squinted, trying unsuccessfully to see down the shady little road. “Or even a house, but I swear this is the right place.”

  “I believe you.” She turned and looked at him as she reached back behind the bench seat for the satchel she’d said had been her mom’s. “You’re the best navigator I’ve known. Way better than I am.”

  “Hey, thanks! I’m good at directions. Real good. I don’t think I could get lost if I tried.” Tate smiled, though it felt odd—strained. Then he realized it was the first time he’d really smiled and felt, just for an instant, happy since the day before when a tornado and this girl had torn his life apart. Mom and Dad are dead. The thought caused him physical pain. His expression instantly sobered, which Foster, of course, didn’t notice.

  “You’re welcome. And I’m serious.” She kept talking as she felt around in the bottom of the big satchel. “I’m crap at navigating. It would’ve been awful to try to find this place by myself, especially with cell service being out the entire trip.” Foster closed her eyes and smacked herself on her forehead. “Balls! I can’t believe I forgot. Where’s my phone?”

  Tate glanced around the messy cab of the truck, kicking burger wrappers and empty cups aside. “Here it is.” He leaned down and pulled it from the sticky napkin sandwich that had formed around it.

  “Thanks,” Foster said absently as she snatched the phone from him, working her sparkly cover off as she spoke quickly. “Good. Still no service. Okay, look through that glove box for something small and sharp—like a paper clip or a thumbtack.”

  “Okay, no problem.” Tate popped open the glove box and pawed through the papers and old, discarded crap, trying to ignore how hot and sore the cut on his leg felt.

  “Will this work?” He offered her the rusty paper clip that held the truck’s insurance paperwork together.

  “Yep, it should.” Foster took it, stretched it open, and stuck the little end into a tiny hole along the side of her iPhone. A thing popped out, which she grabbed and then shoved in her pocket before she tossed the phone into the satchel and went back to searching the bottom of it.

  “What’s that thing? The guts of the phone or whatever?”

  She gave him a look like he’d asked her the stupidest question in the universe—but Tate was beginning to think that’s just pretty much how Foster looked all the time.

  “It’s a SIM card, genius. Where have you been for, I don’t know, since 2000?”

  “Hey, I have a phone. Well, I used to. It’s in my gym locker. I use it. I just don’t take it apart.”

  “The failures of the public education system never cease to amaze me.” Foster shook her head. “Ah, here it is!”

  Without saying anything else to him, Foster got out of the cab and went to the gate. With a resigned sigh, Tate followed her. She was holding a little leather pouch she’d finally found at the bottom of that satchel. It reminded Tate of what his g-pa called a coin purse, and he figured the key to the gate was inside. But instead of unlocking the gate Foster studied the ground around it until she found a fist-sized rock, which she picked up and carried to the stone pillar to the right of the gate. She reached into her pocket, took out the SIM card, held it against the pillar, and then with impressive dexterity, she smashed the rock against the card without also smashing her fingers.

  Then she turned to face him.

  “No cell phones unless we buy burners, and even then we need to be careful,” she said.

  “But how are we supposed to call people?”

  “We aren’t. You aren’t. Ever.” She turned her back to him and then went to a keypad he’d just noticed that was recessed into the brick column. She opened the coin purse–looking thing and pulled out a piece of paper, punching the numbers written there into the pad. There was the click sound of a release and the gate swung open.

  “Good. That means we have electricity.” She spun around and headed back to the truck, but Tate didn’t move. “Hey,” she called as she opened the driver’s door. “Come on. This is the place.”

  “I have someone I need to call.”

  Foster frowned. “No. It’s not safe.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Cora said it’s not safe, and I trust her. Completely. Even though she’s dead. All of this”—she made a sweeping gesture at the land behind them—“was set up by Cora for me.” Foster hesitated and then corrected herself. “For us, actually. To keep us safe from the people who are chasing us.”

  “But why are they chasing us?” Tate insisted. When she didn’t answer—again—he started to get pissed. “Look, I need answers. I’ve come with you, even though the only place I want to be is home trying to figure out how I’m supposed to go on without my mom and dad, but I’m here—mostly because there is obviously something bizarre going on with us and the weather, and I need to understand what.”

  “And men are chasing us,” Foster added.

  “That, too,” he admitted. “But I have a grandpa—my mom’s dad—he’s all that’s left of my family. He li
ves in Texas and he’s going to be devastated when he finds out what happened.” Tate paused and felt himself deflate as he realized the rest of it. “G-pa’s gonna think I’m dead, too. Oh, god, I just thought of that. Foster, I have to call him.”

  “Okay, I get it. But let’s talk about this at the house.”

  “I don’t see a house,” Tate said stubbornly.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s the point—that you can’t see it from the road. Come on, get in. We’ve come all this way, you might as well see where we were going,” Foster said.

  Tate gave a sharp nod and went back to the truck, climbing into the passenger’s side. “I need answers.”

  “Tate, so do I. That’s why we’re here. Just trust me a little while longer,” she said as she drove through the gate, which closed silently behind them.

  “Do you trust me?” Tate swiveled in the seat to look at her.

  She glanced at him briefly and he could see her hesitation, and also see her decide to tell him the truth. “No, I don’t. But don’t take that the wrong way. I’ve only trusted one person in the past five years, and she’s dead.”

  “You do seem like the kind of girl who has trust issues,” Tate said.

  “That sounds like misogynist bullshit. I’m not a girl with trust issues. I’m a person who has learned through hard life lessons that people suck.”

  “I don’t know why you think I should trust you if you won’t trust me,” Tate said.

  “It’s simple. I don’t suck.”

  Tate snorted, but his attention was pulled from her by the neat farm that appeared at the end of the long entrance drive. There was a big, gray, two-storied house that had a giant wraparound porch sitting back from a much smaller building that reminded Tate of something that could have been a storefront in one of the old John Wayne movies his g-pa liked to watch. Over the top of the store in what looked like freshly painted red letters was the cheery logo: STRAWBERRY FIELDS. Pastures stretched on either side of the driveway, and a barn that matched the house sat near one of them. Behind the house Tate saw several produce-filled fields that ended at a thick line of trees. Just peeking out from around the rear of the house was part of what must be a giant garden. He could also see the edge of something that looked like a chicken coop. Nothing stirred except for the lazy breeze and a bevy of chipmunks that scampered from the little storefront and disappeared into the waving grass.