Read Heroes 'Til Curfew (Talent Chronicles #2) for Free Online

jumping over. Dylan grabbed my hand
as soon as my foot touched the ground and started pulling me along
again.
    “It’s too open here,” he told me.
    It was. We were standing on a basketball
court, surrounded by other basketball courts. I was supposed to
notice these things, but my brain was pretty much fried.
    “Not much farther, and then we’ll rest,
okay?”
    Yeah, rest, great.
    Next thing I knew, we were in one of those
sprawling, wooden play structures, and Dylan was guiding me up a
narrow, circular stairway into a tower room worthy of fairy tale
play. I sank to the floor and he sat down facing me, so he could
see out where the tower opened out onto a bridge. It was the only
spot that could afford anyone a view of us.
    “So, is this where—” you bring all your
dates? Bad, bad brain. “—rre I get to rest?”
    He pulled his gaze back from the outside
world to my face. “Yeah, take a break. You okay?”
    “Yeah, sure.”
    “Your head hurts.” He reached out to me,
taking my face in his hands and massaging my temples with his
thumbs. It felt amazing.
    “Like brain surgery with a butter knife. You
okay?”
    “Sure. I didn’t have much to do but stand
around.”
    “Just fought off Corey, jumped out a window,
ran from the cops for a few miles…”
    “See? No big deal.” He grinned that grin at
me that made my gut do a somersault.
    “And then there was that part where you were
invisible.”
    Dylan’s hands dropped from my face, and I
could have cheerfully bitten off my own tongue.
    “I was? Are you sure?” he asked, trying to
laugh it off.
    But as long as it was out there, we were
going to talk about it. “Why didn’t you tell me you were a
Talent?”
    “I don’t know. It just…never came up.”
    “Never came up? How hard is it to find the
time to say, ‘Hey, you know how Kat induces hysterical blindness,
Eric starts motors, Marco has super-strength? Well check this one
out.’ And then Poof! you disappear.”
    “Please don’t refer to me and say ‘poof.’ It
messes with my ultra-masculine identity and ego and shit.”
    “Oh for—Look, all I’m saying is that I don’t
see what the big deal was that you were keeping this a secret for
the last month.”
    “You keep your Talent a secret.”
    “Not from you.”
    “It’s not like you told me.”
    “You found out before I could tell you.”
    “You never would have told me.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “What are we fighting about again?”
    “We are not fighting.”
    “Yes we are.”
    “No, we’re not.”
    Dylan burst out laughing. He tried to keep
it quiet, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. I had to laugh too,
a little, just because he was. But he was out of control, falling
over on the floor with it. I couldn’t imagine what struck him as so
damned funny.
    It took him a while to wind down and then he
lay on his side across the floor from me, propped on one elbow,
legs sticking out onto the bridge.
    “Sorry about that. Just sort of lost it. I
guess I’m just relieved.”
    I couldn’t imagine why telling me about his
Talent was such a big trauma for him. “Better now?”
    “Yeah.” He was tracing a knot on the floor
with his finger, and his head was tilted down so that his shaggy,
sandy hair hid his face. “Heather called me and said you were with
Marco, that you were in trouble. Scared the piss out of me.”
    That’s how messed up I was. I had forgotten
to ask how he’d found me. “How did Heather know?”
    “You guys walked right by her house. And you
think pretty loud.”
    “So I’ve been told,” I said dryly. That was
Heather’s favorite excuse for knowing my personal stuff. It’s
always my fault.
    He shook his head, and I really wanted to
get my hands on that hair. In that hair. “It figures that
the first night I’m not watching is when Marco decides to mess with
you.”
    “He didn’t exactly—Wait, what? Oh my God,
are you my stalker?”
    “Oh, not you too. I wasn’t stalking you, I
was