by Rysa Walker
“Just a theory,” Daniel says.
“A damn good one. I’ll talk to Kelsey.”
“Maybe you should sleep first? You’re swaying back and forth like you’re drunk.”
“If I sleep, there’s a very real risk that Cregg will be in control when I wake up. My walls—”
“Your walls remain up to some extent when you’re asleep. We could see them. They’re not exactly solid, but I wouldn’t have wanted to cross that border.”
“You never planned to steal my body.” I tell him about the collection of documents that I found at Cregg’s townhouse. “There were also bank accounts that Alexandra—” I stop, suddenly remembering. “Did you guys call someone? We can’t just leave her there.”
“Porter’s taking care of it. He left a message at the local Sanctuary for Psychics office, and also with one of the Cregg campaign offices. She won’t starve to death in that place, if that’s what you’re worried about. But . . . back to the issue. It’s not humanly possible for you to stay awake indefinitely.”
“I know that. I’m just trying to give the second injection a bit more time to kick in. And . . . it’s getting better. He’s weaker. I actually looked in the mirror when I brushed my teeth this morning and didn’t see him.”
Daniel looks like he wants to argue some more, but he doesn’t. “You know, even without the medicine, I believe you’re stronger than Graham Cregg. And I know that all of us together are stronger.”
I give him a half-hearted smile. As much as I hope he’s right, there’s a considerable part of me that’s terrified he isn’t. Cregg has managed to shut me out whenever he wanted for the past month or so. He used me to set up a murder attempt on my own father. And he fooled the others on more than one occasion. Okay, maybe not Taylor, but then she shares Daniel’s skeptic gene. And she’s Taylor.
“I’ll sleep. Just not yet.”
“Okay. The reason I came out here in the first place was to ask you to hold off on mentioning Sariah to the others. Just to give me time to . . . wrap my head around it. I hate asking you to keep secrets again, but . . . none of them even know about her. I’d have to tell it all, from the beginning. I’m not ready for that yet.”
“I won’t say anything. But just so you’re aware, Taylor was wondering what you and Sophie were talking about when we were at the Waffle House. And we both know how she feels about keeping secrets.”
“You mean how Taylor feels about other people keeping secrets. She’s perfectly happy to keep her own. But yeah . . . if Taylor gives you any crap, send her to me.” He takes a sip from his mug. “And to be clear, I’m not planning on keeping them in the dark forever. I’m done with that kind of secrecy. I’m . . . I’m even going to tell Mom about my ability. She might be better off not knowing, but it isn’t fair to keep her oblivious when everyone else knows. I’ll tell her about Sariah and Caleb at the same time.”
I’m surprised to hear him mention Caleb, let alone use his name. In the past, whenever Daniel thought about him, it was as the kid or the boy. There was a dark tinge to those thoughts, not directed at Caleb but surrounding him. Feelings of anger and of guilt. Of responsibility and of denial.
“Is Caleb . . . yours?” That question has been bugging me since I first picked up his thoughts about Sariah and her son, and it tumbles out, even as I’m thinking I shouldn’t ask.
Daniel swirls the tea around in his mug for a long time before answering. “He could be. Sariah said no, but . . . she may have been lying. She did that sometimes.” He laughs softly. “It’s one of the things we had in common.”
“How—” I stop, annoyed at myself. “I’m sorry. You say you’re not ready to talk about it, and I start peppering you with questions.”
“No. I said I wanted to wait to tell the others. I hadn’t decided yet whether I wanted to talk to you about Sariah. But I answered your question about Caleb, so . . . I guess that was me deciding. You’re wondering how she died?”
I nod.
His jaw tightens, and for a moment, I think he’s changed his mind about answering. When he finally responds, his voice is harsh. “She trusted the wrong person.”
“Senator Cregg?”
“Among others. Sariah was Delphi, too. She was first generation, though. We met when I was in the military. I joined to find out everything I could about the Delphi program. Dad was suspicious that Cregg was starting the research up again. Beth—the woman who owns this cabin? After the Delphi Project was officially shut down, she continued working with Decathlon Services Group. Beth worked with them in Afghanistan for a couple of years—nothing connected to Delphi, just general contract-management stuff. Then in early 2014, she returns stateside and finds out Graham Cregg has requested for her to be transferred to his subunit.”
“That’s Python, right?”
“Yeah. Only Beth didn’t want the transfer. Told Cregg her current position was less stressful. That’s saying something when she’d just been in Afghanistan, but I’m guessing the fatality rate was higher at Delphi.”
Daniel’s biological father was one of those fatalities. More than a dozen of the original subjects committed suicide during the five years after the program shifted from military to CIA funding. Even more of them suffered bouts of aggressive behavior. This included dozens of military personnel at Fort Bragg who took part in the test phases of the Delphi serum. Many second-generation adepts currently at Sandalford have a parent who died or went missing. Still others grew up in homes where abuse was common or only narrowly avoided, due at least in part to the PTSD-like symptoms the first-generation Delphi subjects experienced.
Cole Quinn, Aaron and Taylor’s dad and Daniel’s stepfather, was another supposed suicide. His death was much later, though, after he began poking around in Graham Cregg’s efforts to relaunch Delphi. Cole struggled for more than a decade with bouts of anger and aggression. Aaron once said there were punching bags throughout the house where they grew up, so Cole would have a way to vent. It must have worked. Aaron said his dad could be irritable, but he never hit them. Never hit their mom. And it says a lot that I’ve never once heard Daniel refer to the man as his stepfather, or even think of him that way. He was his dad, end of story.
“But, next thing Beth knows, there’s a reorg and her position is eliminated. She was pretty sure Cregg was behind it. That’s when she contacted Dad, and after some soul-searching, she decided to take the job in order to pass along information to him so that he’d be in a better position to blow the whistle.”
“So . . . you knew a lot more than you let on to Aaron and the rest of the family.”
Daniel sighs. “You could say that. Mom and Dad kept stonewalling me anytime I asked questions. And finally I had enough of it. Dad suddenly found himself telling me absolutely everything without really understanding why. Or even remembering that he’d done it.”
“You nudged him.”
“I did. Kind of wished I hadn’t afterward, since I was constantly on edge just like Mom was, worrying about what he was doing. Worrying that if he drew attention to us, Cregg would realize Taylor and Aaron were adepts. And frustrated that I couldn’t do anything to help. Neither of them was happy when I joined the Army. After my brief stint at Fort Bragg, I wound up overseas, working with human trafficking—combating it, that is. Do you believe in fate?”
The question is a major non sequitur, and it catches me off guard.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Well, I don’t. I wound up stationed at a base in Italy, maybe twenty miles from the Decathlon European headquarters. And I suspect my supervisor made sure of that after I started asking around, trying to find out details on the early Delphi experiments that happened at Bragg.”
I’m not following his logic. “As . . . punishment?”
“What? No, no. Because he wanted me to uncover stuff that he couldn’t tell me directly. Colonel Smith is still with the unit. I gave Magda his contact info back before I wound up in the coma, although I told her it might
be best to keep my name out of it. I’m pretty sure he’s the reason the kids from the Fort Bragg school ended up at Sandalford when their funding got cut.”
Daniel spends the next few minutes describing his assignment and how he stumbled upon a connection between the Python subgroup and a jobs program that he suspected was a cover for sex trafficking. And right in the middle of all this, he learns that the candidates—mostly girls, mostly young and pretty—were being given some unusual psychological tests.
As interesting as all of this is, I’m starting to wonder if Sariah comes into the story at some point, or if he’s just spilling everything else in his head so that he doesn’t have to talk about her.
“I’m getting to the part about Sariah,” he says, sensing my question. It’s the second time that’s happened, and while it doesn’t exactly surprise me, I do find it a little disconcerting. Hang out in someone’s head for a few months and you get to know them pretty well, I guess.
“Sariah worked for a large international nonprofit. Her focus was the same as mine, ending human trafficking. Our paths kept crossing, although I’ll admit that wasn’t entirely accidental on my part. She was a few years older than me. Smart, pretty, passionate about her work. And she was seriously anti-military—not uncommon in her field, given that the military provides a huge market for sex trafficking. Sariah believed that programs like the one I was assigned to were nothing more than a microscopic Band-Aid the Army was trying to slap over a gaping wound, more to cover their ass than solve the problem.”
“Was she right?”
A ghost of a smile. “Sariah was almost always right. But I wouldn’t admit it. Where’s the fun in that? We ran into each other in a bar one night and spent three or four hours arguing. And . . . then we wound up back at her place. When we woke up the next morning, both of us were like, major mistake. This is never happening again. But it did, two days later. And pretty much every day after that. We’d argue and then . . .” He laughs, but it’s a little tremulous, like he’s close to tears. “That pretty much sums up our relationship. We’d argue, and then . . .”
I don’t say anything, but I am totally and completely unsurprised to learn that Daniel finds arguing sexy. Like I told Aaron, Daniel and I would not make a good couple.
“Eventually Sariah and I both reached the point where we had to admit that we didn’t want to stop. She had a boyfriend, a guy with her company she’d been dating on and off for a couple of years. He’d just left on a three-month field assignment—Kazakhstan, I think. She said she’d been trying to get up the nerve to end it. That she thought he was doing the same.”
He clears his throat. “Anyway, long story short, Sariah had been hearing rumors since she’d arrived in Vicenza that one of the programs run by Decathlon was actually a cover for a trafficking ring. And then she’s talking to her mother on the phone and discovers that one of her cousins in Bulgaria—that’s where her mom was from originally—had applied for an au pair position advertised on fliers in the town square.”
The cousin said the company put her through a strange battery of tests and wanted to hook her up to an EEG. Wanted to give her a series of vaccinations, even before she agreed to the job and even though she showed them proof that she was fully immunized. The girl got cold feet after the second interview, something that didn’t really surprise anyone in Sariah’s family. Most of the Tsvetkova women were very intuitive. Some even claimed they possessed second sight.
The local police weren’t interested in investigating. Neither was the military. There was no way a big multinational with that many government contracts was involved in something as sordid as sex trafficking. And so Sariah decided to take matters into her own hands. She spoke fluent Bulgarian, along with several other languages, and even though she was twenty-three—a few years beyond the age they were seeking—she could easily pass for late teens.
Daniel didn’t particularly care for the plan. It wasn’t sanctioned by Sariah’s employer, either. But he said they both felt they’d run into a brick wall. So the next time the employment service, which went by the name Pair Au Pair, posted one of their fliers, Sariah took a few days off and traveled to Bulgaria to visit her extended family. Daniel couldn’t get clearance for travel, so he had to wait in Italy.
“She wore a wire as a precaution,” he says, “and three of her male relatives—one of them local law enforcement—sat in a car a few blocks away, ready to storm the place on her signal. Nothing happened that first day, but she was convinced that it was indeed a human-trafficking setup. Told me on the phone they seemed much more interested in her appearance than in her education, even though she was told she would be tutoring kids if she was accepted. A big red flag was that they showed her a picture of the same family they’d showed her cousin, the Zimmerman family of Plano, Texas. Of course, it had only been two months. Maybe the Zimmermans were still in need of a nanny. But it seemed odd.
“Then she got a call to come back for a second set of interviews. A new battery of tests. They give her the same spiel about immunizations that they gave her cousin. She says no. They insist. And I guess they were more impressed with Sariah’s test results than they were with her cousin’s because they didn’t take no for an answer. She gives the signal and her relatives kicked the door in. The lead tester for Pair Au Pair pulls out a fat wallet and starts handing out Euro notes. Sariah leaves with her recording, and her family is a few hundred Euros richer. Would have been a major win if not for the fact that she got a dose of mystery serum. And about three weeks later, we find out she’s pregnant.”
I look toward the house when I hear the screen door close again. It’s Aaron. I’m a little worried that seeing me here talking to Daniel is going to trigger his jealousy, and I half expect him to turn back around. But he just watches me for a moment, hands in the front pockets of his jeans, the same way Daniel did before deciding to walk over. The Quinn brothers don’t look much alike, but I’m struck by how similar their mannerisms can be sometimes.
Aaron starts across the lawn toward us.
“We’ll have to finish this some other time,” Daniel says. There’s a faint note of relief in his voice.
“Sure,” I say softly, “but can I just tell you I’m really, really sorry? I should have opened with that, but . . . it’s hard to find the right words.”
“There are no right words. But it’s okay. I saw it in your eyes.”
“Good morning!” Aaron gives me a smile and then looks at Daniel. “Were you guys talking about what we discussed last night?”
“Oh, no,” Daniel says. “I’ll let you field that one. I think she’ll give you a lot more latitude on that issue than she will me.”
“She is sitting right here,” I say with a touch of annoyance.
“I know,” Aaron says. “And I promise I’ll fill you in, but it needs to wait. Taylor unlocked the iPad. More importantly, however, Pfeifer is awake. And he’s asking to speak to his daughter.”
My stomach drops. I should have been expecting this. Preparing myself for it. But I really hadn’t. I stood there watching him sleep, not exactly hoping he wouldn’t wake up, but completely avoiding the thought of an awake, coherent Scott Pfeifer.
“So . . . he knows who I am.” It doesn’t surprise me that he pieced it together. The look in his eyes yesterday—dear God, was that really only yesterday?—wasn’t quite recognition, but it was definitely something beyond the stare you give a stranger. It held the seed of recognition, waiting to grow.
“Yeah,” Aaron says. “I told him you’re sleeping.”
“He’s got maybe a dozen hitchers in his head right now,” Daniel says, “each with some sort of psychic ability. I’m guessing at least one of them picked up on the fact that you were lying.”
“With Sophie blocking,” Aaron says, “they may not have been able to read me. But yes. They probably also picked up on the fact that I’m worried about Anna being in the same room as him. Maybe even in the same house.”
“I can’t
avoid him forever.” I don’t add that part of me would like to do precisely that.
Daniel and Aaron exchange a look, then Aaron says, “Every single one of those hitchers has a reason to hate Graham Cregg. We already know Sophie can’t control him completely. If they find out killing you would kill him . . . do you think Sophie can stop them?”
I stare into my empty cup, feeling more than a little stupid. Am I the only one here who didn’t even think about how my father’s hitchers might react to my hitcher? No wonder Sam looked so alarmed when he saw me standing in the doorway, watching Pfeifer sleep.
“Do we have more of the antipsychotic?” I ask.
“We do,” Aaron says. “Two more syringes and maybe a dozen pills. We weren’t sure how long we’d be gone, and you’ll need a shot every two weeks. Deo just grabbed what Kelsey had in stock. Which means she’ll definitely know they were taken if she does any sort of regular inventory. We dissolved two of the pills in the yogurt Pfeifer is eating now. The injection would be better than constantly crushing pills, but can you imagine him—or them, to be more precise—willingly submitting to a needle?”
Daniel agrees. “I don’t even think we should attempt it after what happened to Whistler and Davis last night. Plus . . . Anna was under Kelsey’s care when she was started on the medication. Sam was really hesitant about us even giving him the pills, and he’s got a point. What if Pfeifer has a bad reaction? Although I guess odds are he’ll do okay with it since Anna did.”
I start to ask why that makes a difference and then realize the answer is obvious. We share a nose. We undoubtedly share many other attributes as well. It just didn’t occur to me, because having family—having anyone who is a blood relative—is an entirely foreign concept to me.
Plus, I need sleep. My mental processor seems to be snagging on obvious connections.
If the two of them weren’t standing here, I’d probably give myself a good slap in order to wake up. Instead, I put my mug down and sink my face into my hands, rubbing vigorously.