The Power of Love Read Free Page B

inside, but it was tougher for you,” Lacey pointed out. “You bumbled a lot, remember? And besides, Beth also loves Ivy.”
    She turned back to the window. “A killer dress,” she said, then walked on. “What I really want to know is what everyone sees in this chick.”
    “It was nice of you to save a chick you think so little of,” Tristan remarked dryly.
    They passed the photo lab where Will worked and stopped in front of Celentano’s, the pizza parlor where Will had drawn the angels on the paper tablecloth.
    “I didn’t save her,” Lacey replied. “Eric was just playing—but you’d better figure out what kind of game it is. I’ve known some real creeps in my life, and I’ve got to say, he’s not someone I’d like to party with.”
    Tristan nodded. He had so much to learn. After traveling back in time through his own mind, he was sure that someone had cut the brake line the night his car had slammed head-on into a deer. But he had no idea why.
    “Do you think Eric did it?” he asked.
    “Went after your brakes?” Lacey twisted a spike of purple hair around a daggerlike fingernail. “That’s a leap, from being a bully in the deep end to committing murder. What did he have against you and Ivy?”
    Tristan lifted his hands, then let them drop. “I don’t know.”
    “What did anybody have against you or her? They could have been after just one of you. If it was you they wanted to get rid of, she’s safe now.”
    “If she’s safe, why was I brought back on a mission?”
    “To annoy me,” Lacey said. “Obviously you’re some kind of penance for me. Oh, cheer up, Dumps! Maybe you just got your mission wrong.”
    She slipped through the door of Celentano’s without opening it, then reached up mischievously and jangled the three little bells over it. Two guys in T-shirts and grass-stained cutoffs stared at the door. Tristan knew she had materialized the tips of her fingers—a trick that he had just recently mastered—and managed to pull on the string of bells. She jangled them a second time, and the guys, unable to see either Lacey or Tristan, looked at each other.
    Tristan smiled, then said, “You’re going to scare away business.”
    Lacey climbed up on the counter next to Dennis Celentano. He had rolled out some dough and was expertly flipping it above his head—until it didn’t come back down. It hung like a wet washrag in midair. Dennis gaped up at it, then leaned from one side to the other, trying to figure out what was holding up the dough.
    Tristan guessed that the dough was going to be one more pie in the face. “Be nice, Lacey.”
    She dropped the dough neatly on the counter. They left Dennis and his customers to look at one another and wonder. “With you around,” she complained to Tristan, “I’ll be earning gold stars and finishing up my mission in no time.”
    Tristan doubted it. “Maybe you can earn some more stars by helping me with mine,” he told her. “Didn’t you tell me there was a way to travel back in time through somebody else’s mind? Didn’t you say I could search the past through someone else’s memory?”
    “No, I said I could,” she replied.
    “Teach me.”
    She shook her head.
    “Come on, Lacey.”
    “Nope.”
    They were at the end of the street now, standing in front of an old church with a low stone wall around it. Lacey hopped up on the wall and began to walk it.
    “It’s too risky, Tristan. And I don’t think it’s going to help you any. Even if you could get inside a mind like Eric’s, what do you think you’d find? That guy’s circuits have been curled and fried. It could be—to use one of his terms—a very bad trip for you.”
    “Teach me,” he persisted. “If I’m going to learn who cut the brakes, I’m going to have to go back to that night in the mind of everybody who might have seen something, including Ivy.”
    “Ivy! You’ll never get in! That chick’s got you and everyone else closed out cold.”
    Lacey paused,