[16]

                                    

                                          
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
                          
Caden swears as he pulls his phone out of his pocket and dials a number.
                          
"Hey Rand?" he says, putting the call on speaker.
                          
"Yeah?"
                          
"Melissa just told me that her father sent her a text at 8:30 saying that he was stuck in traffic, just minutes after the car crash."
                          
There's a few seconds silence on the other end, and then, "Where are you? I'm coming to pick you up."
                          
"Just down the street from Melissa's place, but we'll head back and wait for you there."
                          
"Okay, don't do anything stupid. I'll be there in five."
                          
He hangs up and Caden shoves his phone into his jeans pocket as he starts walking quickly back the way we came.
                          
A thought occurs to me then. "How do we know that the text wasn't delayed?"
                          
"It doesn't matter if it was delayed or not. The only accident that happened on any of the roads in our area was theirs. They couldn't have been stuck in traffic because of an accident because there was no accident."
                          
"How do you know?"
                          
"Because..." He sighs. "I have the ability to feel the pain of anyone within a kilometre radius of me. Not small pain, like falling over and scraping your knee or cutting your finger with a knife, but severe pain, like breaking a bone, or losing a limb or dying. And I can tell you, the only pain I felt tonight was that of your mother."
                          
"Jeez, that's...harsh," I say, but really I'm thinking, My mother's pain was severe?
                          
He nods solemnly.
                          
 "Does it hurt as much for you as it does for them?"
                          
He shakes his head. "The pain is always dulled, but it can still hurt."
                          
"So every time I had a heat attack, you could feel it?"
                          
He makes eye contact with me for a moment and an expression passes over his face that I don't recognise, before saying, "Yeah," and looking away.
                          
We walk in companionable silence for a minute and when we stop out the front of my house, he says, "About Friday. I'm sorry for what I did. I might have overdone it a tad-"
                          
"A tad?" I interrupt calmly, doing my best not to suddenly explode at him. "You didn't have to go around telling everyone how pathetic I was and how you'd told me all this made up stuff and I'd believed it. All you had to do was keep your distance. My life is already hard enough, and you should have known that." I can't stop myself from being angry at him, even if he did have a justified reason for doing what he did, but I can try to conceal it anyway. Thanks to him, school on Monday will probably be that much worse.
                          
"Listen, I really am sorry. At first, I was just going to keep my distance, but then Branden confronted me, and I don't know, I just started making stuff up so he wouldn't get me back for punching him the other day, and..." He sighs. "It got really out of hand. But I had noticed I was being watched and so I couldn't do anything to stop it."
                          
"If you were being watched, why did you go after me at lunch?"
                          
"Because of the wind. Your real mother has an ability known as aerokinesis, which is basically an affinity with the air. I assumed that you might have it too, since abilities are usually hereditary, and because I could feel them watching us, I knew we had to get out of there before they came after you. And they would have, because that was probably the first time they saw you use your powers after being swapped. So, anyway, I made up something about going to the bathroom and dashed after you."