Cadence had been hopeful that Cassidy would awaken quickly after Dax since she had actually Transformed before him and wasn’t all that much younger than he was, though sometimes those three years seemed like decades. But by the wee hours of the morning, when the sun was about to come up, her sister still wasn’t awake, and Cadence watched as a restless Brandon paced back and forth in front of her cot. Liz was still asleep, and Elliott and Jamie were on the other side of the room discussing something through their IACs.
Dropping her head into her hands, Cadence began to wonder how much longer she could stay awake. She had thought she’d be back in her bed hours ago, but then, she’d had no idea her sister was going to pull one of her stunts again either. She remembered the quiet, obedient girl Cassidy used to be and wondered how they’d gotten themselves here. Cadence couldn’t help but think about how much of it was her own fault.
“Holy hell,” she heard Brandon mutter but didn’t look up right away. Her eyes were heavy with sleep, or lack thereof, and since he didn’t seem to be shouting or running, her head came up slowly.
It took her a moment to understand what he was gawking at. From her angle in the chair next to her sister’s bed, everything looked relatively the same. But then Brandon took a few steps closer to Cassidy’s bed and gently pushed down on her leg, and Cadence’s eyes widened when her sister’s body dropped down an inch or two.
Cadence shot out of her chair, her eyes flickering from Cassidy to Brandon and then back again. They watched as her sister slowly began to lift off of the mattress one more time and came to levitate about two inches off of the bed. “Jamie!”
Before the doctor even made it over, Cadence put her hand on Cassidy’s arm, but she didn’t push her all the way down, only applying enough pressure to watch her sister sink slightly and then rise back up to where she’d been floating before. Brandon’s eyes were wide as saucers, and he was slowly shaking his head, unable to speak. She glanced over his shoulder to see their mom was still asleep and was grateful for it. Liz Findley would not be able to handle this.
“Uh… I don’t know,” Jamie said, standing at the head of Cassidy’s bed and running his hand between her streaming dark brown hair and the pillow. “I guess… she’s learned a new trick.”
“What the….” Elliott stopped himself short of saying the F dash, dash, dash word in front of his son, but he seemed to be just as dumbfounded as Cadence felt, if not more so. She began to wonder if Cassidy had somehow made herself more of a Vampire by taking the Transformation serum, though that didn’t make any sense.
As they continued to stare at her, the petite body above the bed began to stir. It didn’t cause her to drop back down, though, and when Cassidy opened her eyes, she was still a good two to three inches above the mattress.
“Why are you all staring at me?” she asked in a groggy voice, somehow managing to sit up without realizing she was floating.
“Cass…” Brandon said, shrugging at her and the bed, trying to suggest she figure things out on her own.
“What?” she asked, still confused. Her boyfriend cleared his throat, and then carefully placed his hand on her leg and pushed down. As soon as her tushy hit the mattress, Cassidy’s forehead crinkled and then she said, “Wait—what?”
“You were levitating,” Jamie said as if it were a medical diagnoses, something matter-of-fact that had an explanation. Of course, he’d already stated he didn’t have one of those.
Cassidy spun her head around to look at him. “I was what? Levitating? But how?”
“That is the million dollar question,” Elliott said for all of them.
Cassidy continued to stare from one of them to the next until she heard her mom stirring in the bed next to them and mumbled, “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah, you think?” Cadence asked. Seeing her sister seemed okay—other than having some new funky magical power--she remembered that she was irate. She folded her arms and waited for Liz to realize she’d fallen asleep, but she was now awake, and her youngest daughter was also awake. And in really big trouble.
It took the mother what seemed like several minutes, though it wasn’t, and eventually, she stretched and said, “Oh, dear,” as if she hadn’t realized she was in a bed or where that bed was. Liz slowly turned to face her daughter, and since Brandon had stepped out of the way, she got a clear view. “Cassidy Elizabeth Findley,” she was muttering before she even swung her legs over the side of the cot. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Cassidy began, but it wasn’t going to be enough to simply apologize this time. Cadence knew, as her boss, she’d have to do something to punish her sister for acting so recklessly. “I just didn’t want to be left out.”
“I may have accepted that answer when you no longer wanted to attend high school or when you wanted us to let you start your training early, but this is exactly the sort of thing that I have been afraid of all along, that you would do something so completely dangerous--again. Do you have any idea what you could’ve done to yourself? Do we even know if she’s all right?” That last question was addressed to Jamie, and Cadence took a step back because she realized her mom had this, and maybe she wouldn’t need to do anything after all.
