“I don’t want to talk about Tyler.” He slammed another drawer and moved on to the bottom one.

“What are you looking for?” she asked quietly.

“Something that doesn’t make me look like I spent twenty minutes doing exactly this.”

“Are you sure you don’t have a spandex suit under those clothes?”

“I do, in fact. Little surprise for later.”

Quinn snorted. “What you’re wearing is fine.” And it was: a soft blue T-shirt that clung to his body and made his eyes almost vibrant.

“Are you nervous about what you told me? You said you were in danger.”

He gave up on rummaging through the drawer. “We are. We’re always at risk of someone coming to town to kill us all.”

“The Guides, right?”

“Yeah. But we try to keep our heads down and not reveal our talents. That’s one of the rules: we have to demonstrate our abilities to earn a death sentence. When we were younger, Tyler and Seth used to beat the shit out of us to try to force us to use our powers, but we’re stronger now and they mostly stay away.”

Until this afternoon, she thought. But then she picked up on what Nick had said, that Tyler and Seth used to beat the shit out of them. Like his twin brother, Nick was tall, and landscaping gave his body some solid definition. She couldn’t imagine anyone beating the shit out of him—but then again, if everything he’d told her was true, maybe he’d been afraid to fight back.

“I just don’t understand why,” said Quinn. “What do they care?”

Nick glanced over. “We scare them.”

“They’re scared of a little breeze?”

“Remember Homecoming? Remember the tornado that formed over the soccer field? Ripped out a few trees?”

“Yeah?”

Nick gave her a significant look.

“No way,” she said.

“Way.” He grimaced. “I lost control of it. Ended up breaking my leg in three places.”

More events were clicking into place. “You said you threw out your knee playing soccer.”

“It made for a good cover story.” He looked away from her eyes. “Air is everywhere. I heal fast.”

“Can you fly?”

She couldn’t keep the hushed wonder from her voice, and Nick smiled. “No. Too much weight. I can’t focus the air pressure enough for that.”

“What does air pressure have to do with anything?”

“Are you kidding? Air pressure is awesome.”

She rolled her eyes. “You are such a nerd sometimes. You’re lucky you’re hot or you couldn’t get away with saying things like air pressure is awesome.”

“Seriously. Air pressure affects everything. Haven’t you ever heard the expression nature abhors a vacuum?” He grinned. “Actually, we were doing this experiment in class once where Dr. Cutter was trying to prove a point with a balloon, but I kept making it pop—”