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here.”
    “It’s no trouble.” He smiled. “Really.” He loosened a button at his collar, exposing a little more of his tanned neck, and I wondered where he’d gotten the tan. I’d always assumed his muscles were the kind you got at a gym, but maybe I’d been wrong. I swallowed hard. I was starting to remember the reasons why this was a terrible idea.
    “I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow.” God, I hoped it was true.
    “You know you can stay as long as you need to.” He watched me, hands kneading the back of the chair. Nervous that I’d take him up on it?
    “Uh, thanks. Maybe I could just borrow your phone charger? I have to cancel all of my cards.”
    He went and got it, and I took it with me into the spare bedroom before he could ask again if I was okay.
    None of my credit cards had been used yet, miraculously, and the nice service rep promised to send me new ones within the week. I had to give her Jackson’s address even though I hoped I wouldn’t still be here when they came.
    Jackson’s spare room was the same way I’d left it almost a year ago. He’d been using it as an office before I’d gotten dumped on him—a desk and a couple of filing cabinets occupied one corner, a bookshelf full of architectural magazines and reference books sat in another. In the closet, he’d stacked boxes of his past ten years of tax returns, piling them on top of each other to make room for me to hang my clothes. The accountant in me approved.
    I changed into pajamas and crawled into his excessively comfortable guest bed. I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t even pretend that I was tired. Who was I kidding? Even if I
could
afford the deposit on a new apartment, I only had ten days. I checked the clock on the bedside table. Nine days.
    It wasn’t that I couldn’t go home. But even the thought of being around all the shadowminds I’d grown up with was more than I could bear.
    I used to be a converter, like Jackson. The gift ran in my family. By the time I was five, Shane and I were having conversations in our heads. We were twins, and the connection between us had been as easy as breathing. By the time I was ten I could lift potted plants and light candles from across the room. It was as much a part of who I was as my name and the mole on my hip. Then I’d been attacked.
    The man who hurt me had been another converter, a friend. He had an ability none of us knew about—he could draw energy from other people to boost his powers. Pulling, it was called. Unfortunately, that sort of thing didn’t often go well for the subject, and I’d caught him dumping a body. He’d lashed out at me with enough force to kill a normal. I guess I’d been lucky. He’d only destroyed my powers and left me for dead, shoving my body into the mud under an abandoned fishing shack.
    The first thing I remembered, coming out of it, was seeing my Uncle Lionel standing over me. He asked if I could hear him, and his voice sounded strange. It felt remote, as though he were talking over a phone line, and it had taken me a few minutes to realize something was wrong. Between the words he spoke out loud, there was silence. Either he’d achieved the kind of mental quiet meditation masters spent years perfecting, or I couldn’t hear his thoughts.
    I’d spent a long time thinking my powers would come back. My brother spent even longer. Every moment I was around him, I could tell he was scanning my mind, looking for any sign that I felt him there. He was careful never to bring it up, but when you’ve been mindspeaking with someone for decades, it was hard to keep secrets. After a while, I couldn’t take it anymore. I left, and while I was gone, Lionel had been killed. The man who’d been like a father to me, gone. There was nothing left for me there, not now. Just reminders of a life that wasn’t mine anymore.
    California was about as far away as I could get. It felt like as good a place as any to start my life over. If only I had any idea what