Page 37 of Diagnosis Attraction

She was tired, and it wasn’t so easy to do, but she finally felt the flow of power from her to him.

A stream of fire shot from his hand, and the rock blasted apart. She pulled him down, ducking behind the bridge rail as shards of stone flew into the air.

“Nice,” she approved.

“But dangerous. We need to figure out how to regulate the power,” he answered.

“Can we bring it down to a little sizzle?” She pointed to another target, a tree stump that had gotten lodged in the water between two boulders. “Try to just tap it,” she said. “Maybe you don’t need me to do that.”

Matt focused on the stump, and she felt him concentrating. After a few seconds, she saw sparks striking the bark.

“Nice,” she approved. “If it were a person, I wonder how it would feel.”

“Discomfort? Disorientation?”

They stayed on the bridge, leaning against the rail, both marveling at what they’d been doing. A few days ago, such an ability would have been unthinkable. It was empowering to realize what they could do together, but it didn’t solve Elizabeth’s basic problem.

“Let’s go back to where we started,” she said.Memories.

She turned so that she faced him. He wrapped her in an embrace, and she leaned into him, closing her eyes as she tried to grab on to something from her past.

She knew Matt was keeping the exchange directed away from himself, trying to help her dig out nuggets from her past.

The easiest memories to reach were from her childhood. And not all of them were bad. She remembered being enchanted by a trip to the zoo with her parents. She remembered a trip to Disney World where she’d insisted on riding the Space Mountain roller coaster. She remembered being the best girl basketball player in her high school class. And then sheremembered the time she had missed a shot and lost a playoff game for the team.

Matt rubbed her arm. “Don’t focus on that.”

“I felt horrible. I had finally found something that made me valuable to the other kids, and I blew it.”

“We all have stuff like that. ”

The next picture that came to her knocked the breath from her lungs. It was like when Matt had hypnotized her. She saw young women huddled together. Only now, she felt their fear and knew that she was the only one who could save them from a horrible fate.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Who are they?Matt asked.

“I don’t know,” she almost shouted in her frustration as the mental image faded. “But they’re depending on me, and I have to help them.”

“Okay,” he answered, giving her his full support. “But how do we do it?”

“First, I have to figure out who they are—and where they are.” She swallowed hard. “And I think there might be something at my house that tells me.”

He gave her a long look. “You think it’s safe to go to your house? You might not know why those men were chasing you, but it’s a given that they know your name. Now that you’ve escaped from them twice, they probably have your house staked out—hoping you’ll come back.”

“I know that.” She dragged in a frustrated breath and let it out. “But I think I have to. I mean, I can’t just keep running away. I have to figure out what’s going on.”

“Inconvenient,” he answered in a dry voice that might have fooled her if she hadn’t already learned a lot about him.

“I probably have records on my computer.”

“And somebody probably already got to them—after the car accident when you were out of commission.”

She nodded, hating that they were in this bind. She needed to know more about herself, and she knew she couldn’t do it alone. She also knew that Matt was following her thought processes.

“We have your address, and we can get there, but we have to be very cautious.”

It was instructive to see how he thought as they drove toward Arbutus, a middle-class community where her house was located. He stopped at a drugstore and bought them both Orioles baseball caps, which they pulled down low to hide their faces. He also bought two Orioles tee shirts. Hers was oversized and hung far down her arms and body, but it created a different look for her. A roll of duct tape completed his purchases.

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