Pawn (Nightmares Trilogy #1) (21 page)

On the way to the Moonlight, I called
Mom on her cell and explained that I was having dinner out and
would be home afterwards. Mom didn’t miss the deliberate omission
of my dinner companion’s name.

“With whom are you eating?” she asked
as though it were an innocent question.

Here came the make or break
point.
I had two options: I could lie, say
Devon and pray Mom believed me; or tell the truth, say Kannon and
risk interrogation
. Figuring I would need
to lie for the meeting with Mr. Wentworth the following evening, I
decided not to press my luck today and went with option one. Now
the
question was:
How much do I divulge?

“Endora Lee,” my mother said
sternly.

Great, I’d waited too long. Her
interest was piqued. “This boy I met at Elizabeth’s after the Mt.
St. Mary’s game.” Half-truth.

“What is his name?”

Bring on the twenty
questions.

“Kannon Stevens. He is a senior at St.
Paul’s. He is eighteen.” I knew the drill.

“May I have his phone number in case I
need to get in touch with you and you do not answer your cell?” Mom
phrased it like it was a question and I had an option. I knew
better, though. If I wanted to go, she had to have the
number.

I rattled off ten digits that I was
ashamed to have memorized. Mom repeated the numbers back to me for
confirmation.

“Where are you meeting this boy? Is he
coming to pick you up? I would prefer he did not since I am at
work,” she said.

There was a myriad of
reasons
why I didn’t want to tell her
where we were having dinner, the least of which
was that
the Moonlight’s normal
clientele favored leather over silk blends and two-wheeled modes of
transportation over the more conventional four-wheeled ones. The
Moonlight Diner was dad’s place. Telling my mother about it felt
like a betrayal. Maybe it was stupid, but I couldn’t help
it.

“We’re meeting at
the
diner.
”
Another half-truth. The Moonlight was a diner. But when I said
“the
diner
,” I
knew mom would think Plum Crazy since she knew Devon and I went
there all the time. Mr. Wentworth was right. I was becoming my
mother’s daughter. Nobody was better than Evelyn Andrews at laying
just enough cards on the table to let her opponent think he knew
her hand.

“What time will you be home?” Mom
followed up.

“Um, by nine,” I told her.
I didn’t exactly have a
curfew, but nine
o’clock
was likely the latest she’d agree
to, given that it was a school night. Particularly since I’d be out
with someone she had never met.

“That will be fine. Before your next
date I would like to meet this boy, though,” she
replied.

I almost told her it wasn’t
a date, but decided it was better to let her think that it was.
Her
suspicion meter
would go berserk otherwise.

“You got it,” I said. Outright lie. If
I hung out with Kannon again, he would definitely not be meeting my
mother beforehand.

My mother’s third degree had taken
nearly the entire drive to the Moonlight. I was thankful for the
distraction. It had prevented me spending the entire twenty-five
minutes panicking over the talk with Kannon. Instead, I frantically
tried to cram twenty-five minutes of worrying into five.

On the one hand, I was eager to learn
whatever Kannon knew about our condition. On the other, I doubted
the pizza sauce stain on the hem of my white sweater would impress
him. I still hadn’t decided whether to tell him about what had
happened in Greek mythology. The further removed from the situation
I became, the more ridiculous I felt for thinking I’d met a Greek
god in my dreams.

Kannon’s black Jeep was
parked in front of the Moonlight when I pulled into the lot. Even
without the St. Paul’s School for Boys sticker, I would have known
it was his. The five other vehicles in the lot were all made in a
Harley-Davidson plant, and preppy Kannon didn’t really strike me as
the
hog-riding type.

“Endora Lee,” Mr. Haverty greeted me,
holding the door open. “Nice to see you back so soon. Your friend
is already here.”

I stopped short, my mouth hanging
open. First the smiley pancakes and now knowing I was meeting
Kannon? Did Mr. Haverty have visions of the future, too?

The grandfatherly man laughed softly.
“Don’t look so surprised. Very few of my patrons are teenagers. It
doesn’t take a genius to add two plus two and get four.”

I relaxed, feeling more than a little
silly. Maybe paranoia ran in our family or was contagious, because
I was channeling my mother.

“He is sitting in the corner.” Mr.
Haverty pointed to a booth in the back of the square room, away
from the rest of the customers.

“Thanks,” I said and slowly
made my way
to the far corner of the
diner
.

The lighting in the diner was dim, but
I had no trouble making out Kannon’s lean form. He kept running his
hands through his chestnut hair, causing the curls to loosen and
fall in waves to frame his face. A glass of ice water sat in front
of him, and three times before I reached the table he picked it up
and fished out an ice cube to chew on. Kannon turned when I was
still several paces away as if sensing my approach. He smiled and
his green eyes seemed to brighten the entire room.

I slid into the booth across from
him.

“Hey,” he said softly. “I wasn’t sure
you’d come.”

“I wouldn’t have missed
this for the world,” I replied, then realized how
that
sounded. Heat
rushed to my cheeks. Who had cheesy lines now? “I mean, I do really
want to finish our conversation from the other night. You know when
I freaked out and practically threw a chair at you? Which I am
sorry for, by the way. It’s just that not a lot of people know
about… well, you know. But I shouldn’t have assumed the
worst of you
. Well, it’s
not really you who I thought was playing a joke on me. Jamieson is
underhanded and we have this whole rivalry thing.”

Kannon let me ramble. His smile became
more amused the more rope I used to hang myself.

Thankfully, Mr. Haverty
appeared before I could ask Kannon how he felt about Canada or warn
him of the dangers of being left-handed, which I was pretty sure he
was since he’d started twirling his drink straw through the fingers
of his left hand. The diner owner sat a glass of water in front of
me
and offered us menus.

“Just holler when you’ve decided what
you’d like to eat,” he told us, then moved back towards the counter
with surprising speed for a man I estimated to be in his
seventies.

I opened my menu and
pretended to study the options while I searched for
something
halfway intelligent to
say.
Nothing came to mind. Kannon remained
annoyingly quiet.

“What are you going to get?” I asked
to cover the awkward silence.

“Turkey Reuben,” Kannon said
decisively, still not glancing up from his menu.

“If you already know, why are you
reading the menu?” I asked, then cringed. That sounded so
accusatory and plain rude.

Kannon laughed. “Because it’s making
you uncomfortable. You are the most high-strung person I have ever
met. Relax, Endora. I am not going to hurt you.” Kannon seemed to
think about that for minute. “At least not on purpose,” he
amended.

I rubbed my cheek, remembering the
painful jolt of electricity. The red mark had long since faded, but
I could recall the current running through my body like it had only
just happened.

“Don’t worry. I won’t try and touch
you,” Kannon said.

The innocent promise was a stab of
disappointment to my heart. The pang of unease I always experienced
in his presence was dwarfed by my mounting attraction to him.
Kannon was like a magnet, drawing me in farther the closer I
came.

Instead of responding, I caught Mr.
Haverty’s attention and waved him over. Kannon and I ordered our
dinners – a turkey Reuben for him and grilled cheese with tomato
for me.

After Mr. Haverty left, the silence
returned. Kannon continued to fiddle with his straw, and I busied
my hands by tearing my napkin to shreds.

“So, you were sixteen when it
happened?” I said. I never won the silent game as a
child.

Kannon swallowed thickly and turned
his head to stare out the window. “Yeah. I was on a family vacation
in the Bahamas. We were snorkeling and I wandered away from the
group. I dove down to take some pictures of marine plants on the
ocean floor. There was a gap between two boulders and I could see
something glowing inside. I thought it might be an electric eel or
something cool like that. I poked my arm between the rocks to try
and take a picture. It got stuck.” Kannon rubbed his left arm and
shuddered, reliving the horrifying ordeal. “I started to panic.”
The last words were quiet, haunted.

“You don’t have to tell me the rest,”
I said, reaching for his hand on instinct. The moment before I
touched his fingers, I pulled back.

“Yeah, I guess you know the rest,
huh?”

“Oh, I didn’t drown,” I said quickly,
my hand flying to my throat.

Kannon turned to face me head-on. He
arched his eyebrows questioningly. “How did it happen for you?” he
asked softly. 

“I don’t remember. I was just a baby.
I didn’t even know I’d died at birth until I was eight and kept
having nightmares about being strangled,” I admitted.

Kannon looked confused. “A baby?” he
repeated slowly.

“Umbilical cord wrapped around my
neck,” I confirmed.

“No.” Kannon shook his head. “That’s
not right. Minos said you have to be at least sixteen to sign the
contract.”

“Contract?”

“The Egrgoroi contract,” Kannon
replied in a tone that suggested he thought me dense.

“What are you talking
about? Who is Minos? What is an Egrgoroi?” The word sounded vaguely
familiar, but I didn’t
know what it
meant.
And I had no clue who or what Minos
was.

“What happened after you died?” Kannon
demanded, ignoring my questions. “Where did you go? What did you
see?” His voice was low but urgent. The intensity unnerved
me.

“I told you, I don’t remember
anything. I didn’t go anywhere or see anything.”

Kannon’s green eyes weighed me. Then
his focus turned inward.

“What is going on, Kannon?
I’m freaking out here. You nearly electrocute me when we meet. You
somehow know my name before I tell you. You offer up some
explanation about us meeting in your dreams. Then, you somehow know
that I died and came back - something even my closest friends
don’t
know, by the way.
And now you want to know what happened in the two
minutes I was dead. You obviously know way more about this, so why
don’t you tell me what I saw?” I sat back in the booth, short of
breath from my rant.

“Tell me something first,” Kannon
said.

“Fine. What?” I shot back.

“You have the dreams,
right? You do see future events in your dreams?” The way Kannon’s
hands gripped the edge of the table told me that a lot hinged on my
answer. If the anxious expression he wore
was any indication
, the
space-time continuum
might be disrupted if I didn’t say yes.

“I do,” I admitted. “Nothing serious,
though. Mostly it’s stupid stuff, like conversations with my
friends and lacrosse plays.” I decided to keep the whole Hermes
subject to myself for a little longer.

Kannon visibly relaxed. “You just
turned eighteen. The visions are usually mundane in the beginning.
Kind of like test runs to make sure the messages get
through.”

The summer after I turned six, my
father went on sabbatical to Ireland and brought Mom and me along
for the trip. Dad’s research assistant, Angus, continually referred
to his hound as “thick” and complained that his girlfriend was
“acting the maggot.” One evening he arrived at our house for dinner
soaking wet and told my family that it was “lashing real good”
outside and he’d been “sucking diesel” the entire three-block walk.
The individual words were all English, but they didn’t form a
sentence that I understood. The conversation with Kannon reminded
me a lot of that experience.

Mr. Haverty arrived with our food,
startling us both. Maybe the tension surrounding the table was
palpable to him too because he didn’t say anything when he set our
plates before us. And he left without comment.

I picked up a French fry
and
nibbled on the
end. I
had no appetite.
Kannon dug into his
Reuben without hesitation
. Nothing,
not even death, could dampen a teenage boy’s hunger.