Ghost Heart (The PSS Chronicles #3)

by Ripley Patton

  My fingers trembled, but I didn’t touch it, and my eyes moved past it to the next item on the table. It was Mike Palmer’s matchbook, the one he’d left as a warning for us not to go to the Eidolon. Or as a way to entice us to go. I still wasn’t sure which. The gasoline soaked message once written on it was unreadable now, smeared into oblivion.

  I had thought a lot about that matchbook and the weird actions of Palmer. Why had he come to the house in Indy and not burned it to the ground when he could have? Why had he warned us away from Shades? Why had he said that strange thing in the car to me about Marked brats never listening? Referring to us as Marked was not CAMFer terminology. It was something someone from The Hold would say. But there was no way Mike Palmer could be from The Hold. If he was a double-agent, then I was the fluffy pink princess of Unicorn Land. I just couldn’t believe that. My mind wouldn’t bend that far.

  I had no idea why Fineman had included the matchbook in this line-up. Maybe just to confuse me.

  The fourth item on the table was a small knife. Why would they give me a weapon? I could use it to stick anyone who came into the room. I could use it to fend off Anthony. But then what? They were watching me from the fucking mirror. I was underground in a heavily guarded building, and there were surveillance cameras in every room and corridor. There was no way I’d get out.

  The knife was useless to me and they knew it. Still, why put it in a row of things that had belonged to me? I didn’t own a knife, had never really wielded one in my life.

  Except once.

  And then it all came rushing back.

  I had pulled a knife from a CAMFer on the night of the Eidolon. I had used it to try to get away from them, and I’d been brutally beaten for it.

  So many of my memories from the night of the Eidolon were a blur, like some nightmare I’d stuffed down deep inside of me.

  When I was awake, it was easy to focus on the here and now. My cell. My survival. These men. My hatred and determination to thwart them. I did not think about what had happened to my friends. I did not let my mind wander to Nose and Yale, and Marcus sinking away from me. I couldn’t let myself. It would undo me. And so, I hadn’t thought about this knife either. I’d taken it from inside one of them, and they’d taken it back, and that had been the end of it.

  What was Dr. Fineman up to, presenting me with this line of items?

  Dog tags.

  Cube and bullet.

  Matchbook.

  Knife.

  One of these things was not like the others. Three of them my ghost hand had taken from inside people. Four, if you counted the cube and bullet separately. That much made sense. Dr. Fineman was desperate to understand my power and use it for himself. He’d already grilled me about what I’d done to the two men at the pool; the one kid, Paulie, I’d pulled that useless magic eight ball out of, and the other guy, Gary, who I’d only felt up. Fineman had even brought them into this room with me and tried to make me reach into Gary again. And I’d laughed in their faces.

  Presenting this lineup to me was probably just another attempt to get me to demonstrate my power, but why include the matchbook? It wasn’t from inside anybody. Then again, maybe Dr. Fineman didn’t know that.

  “What do you think of my little peace offering?” he asked, making me jump and yank my hand away.

  I whirled around to find him coming through the open door.

  Behind him came Anthony, a smirk on his face and a gun in his hand, which did not bode well for me.

  “These are your things, are they not?” Dr. Fineman asked, coming toward me. “Some important to you. Some important to others.”

  I moved around the table, putting it between us, my hands clutching the back of the metal chair so they wouldn’t reach out and strangle him.

  He stopped on the other side, looking down at the contents lined up across its dull surface. “Now, now. No reason to be frightened of me as long as you cooperate,” he said, smiling in a way that made me want to curl up into a fetal position. “How about a little trade? You tell me about each of the items on this table, and I’ll tell you something you want to know.”

  “You’re a psycho and a pathological liar,” I said. “That’s all I really need to know.”

  “You think I’ve lied to you?” he asked, tilting his head to one side and examining me. “Perhaps I have, but not nearly as much as some. And I assure you, I do have information you want and need. I have been researching PSS for the last twenty-three years. I know more about how it works and what it can do than any human being on this planet. There are things I can tell you about your hand that no one else can.”

  “If you know so much, why ask me about the things on the table? Can’t you go poke them in your lab and figure it out yourself?”

  “Stubborn girl,” he said. “I’ve already studied and tested every one of these objects. Of course, you already know where each one came from, what poor soul they belonged to before you so kindly relieved them of it. What you probably don’t know is that each of these items has a unique PSS signature.”

  I tried not to show my interest, but he must have seen it in my eyes.

  “Oh yes, they all resonate PSS.” He reached down to pick up the dog tags. “Take these, for example. Their signature is a match to the razor blades I took from you in Greenfield.” He rubbed the tags between his long, pale fingers. “They also match the PSS signature of the blood I took from your classmate, Miss Wainwright. Of course, because of this, it was easy to conclude they were made from the blades. And I already know what they can do. It is what your hand does during the extraction process that I’m most curious about.”

  Wait. Something he’d just said didn’t make sense. All of these items resonated PSS? Even the matchbook? I hadn’t taken that out of anyone.

  “How does it change the very nature of what you take?” He droned on. “How does it bend their signature to your will? That is what my lab won’t tell me.”

  “And neither will I,” I said. Because I don’t know, you pompous ass. But even if I did…

  “Oh, you will,” he said, dropping the tags back on the table with a clatter, his eyes falling to the cube. “Otherwise, you are of no use to me, and a scientist has no room for things which do not serve his research or his purpose.”

  “I’m not going to put that cube back in you. It’s not gonna happen.”

  “No, no, of course not. That would be unwise.” His eyes came back to me. “Especially after you’ve so carelessly put something inside of it which shouldn’t be there. We will have to find some other means of experimentation.” Was that fear in his voice? Was he afraid I’d try to put the cube back in him against his will? What would happen if I did? Would he become trigger-happy like Jason on top of his mad-scientist psychosis? Would he fall into a coma again?

  “We must narrow down our options,” he said, picking up the cube and tucking it in his lab coat pocket. “We must select the best possible test subject.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. I’m not sticking my hand into anyone for you.” Until you take this cuff off and I skewer you and Anthony like a giant CAMFer shish-kabob.

  “We could bring in your friend, Passion,” Fineman threatened. “She might be willing to volunteer if Anthony was convincing enough.”

  “Fuck you! You don’t have Passion. I saw her get away.”

  “How do you know we didn’t pick her up after that?” His eyes bored into mine.

  I couldn’t help myself. My eyes darted to the tags. I glanced away quickly, but not quickly enough. He’d noticed and he picked them up again, holding them out and swinging them in front of me. “You can feel her through these. Can’t you?”

  I looked over the doctor’s shoulder and saw Anthony smirking.

  “Anthony,” Dr. Fineman said. A word. A name. A threat.

  I tried to run. I bolted away from the table but Anthony was on me, seizing me by a fistful of my hair. He yanked me back and slammed me down into the chair, twisting my left
arm behind it. Cold metal gouged into my wrist and I heard a handcuff click into place. Then he grabbed my right arm and pinned it to the table, forcing my ghost hand palm up, the control cuff they’d put on it scraping the table, metal against metal.

  Dr. Fineman dropped the dog tags into my hand, curling my fingers around them, squeezing them into a fist.

  I couldn’t stop him, couldn’t phase my fingers through his or anything. With the control cuff on, my ghost hand was useless.

  But I tried not to think of Passion. I didn’t want her to feel this. In my mind I imagined a two-way mirror, just like the one in the room, but I was the one standing behind it, separate and only an observer.

  “Where is she?” Dr. Fineman demanded, putting his face in mine. “What do you see?”

  “What?” I sneered “You’re not a fucking mind reader? Too bad for you.”

  Anthony’s fist crashed into my right ear, sending my neck whipping to the side, pain thundering in my head.

  It broke my concentration and, for a moment, I saw Passion clearly in a different room than before. She was sitting next to a hospital bed with monitors and machines in the background.

  The person in the bed was Marcus.

  Marcus was alive.

  He wasn’t stuck at the bottom of the river where I’d left him.

  And he certainly wasn’t on a mission for the CAMFers because they had Danielle. That had just been another of Fineman’s lies.

  Marcus was alive and safe.

  I didn’t feel the throbbing in my head anymore. I didn’t care about the pain or the trickle of blood down my neck. I didn’t even feel the next blow from Anthony, or the next.

  If Marcus was alive, he would come for me.

  He would get up out of that bed, and he would come.

  This must be the same CAMFer compound they’d held him in, so he’d know exactly where to find me.

  All I had to do was wait and survive until he did.

  10

  MARCUS

  “So, how are we feeling today?” Reiny asked in her chirpy nurse voice.

  I wasn’t really awake yet. I’d been dreaming about a girl with a PSS hand who was definitely NOT my sister. This girl was dark and mysterious. She wore black lipstick, had a killer curvy body, and a challenging gleam in her eyes. And her PSS only went up to her wrist, not to the elbow like Danielle’s. In the dream, we’d been in a bathtub together, the girl’s bare legs pinned between mine, her wet T-shirt clinging to her—

  “It looks like you’re feeling much better,” Reiny said, glancing down at the bed sheet.

  Fuck. I was tenting it like a big top at a three-ring circus. I quickly rolled onto my side, staring out the window and trying to think of something else, anything else, plus ignore the fact that a pretty nurse had just commented on my morning boner.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. “It means your blood is flowing to all the right places again.”

  Shut up. Now. Please.

  “Were you thinking of something in particular? A memory, maybe?”

  “No,” I said, desperate to distract her from that particular topic of conversation. “What day is it?”

  Someone had pulled the curtains aside a little, and the trees outside were stark and bare, just a few brown leaves clinging to limp stems.

  Limp stems. Think about limp stems. There, that was better.

  “It’s Thursday,” she said, crossing my line of vision and casually pulling the curtains all the way closed.

  There was something about the way she did it, as if she didn’t want me to look outside. There hadn’t been anything out there except the bare, brown trees. Why wouldn’t she want me to see them? I was used to decoding the most subtle passive-aggressive cues. You didn’t survive the foster care system without learning to decipher the dark secrets every human being was trying to hide. And Reiny was definitely hiding something.

  “Your speech is almost completely back to normal, which is extraordinary,” she said, coming to the side of my bed and checking the IV bag plugged into my arm. “And your vitals are all improving by the hour. I’ve never seen anyone heal this quickly.”

  I’d always healed fast, even when I hadn’t had Danielle’s help. But after the accident, it had gotten even faster. Thanks goodness I wasn’t in a normal hospital, or they’d be calling in the government by now. Reiny seemed surprised, but not freaked out, and she worked for my uncle, so he’d probably schooled her in keeping the family secrets.

  I hadn’t noticed her nose ring before, but it made me wonder how old she was. Thirty, maybe, but it was hard to be sure. She was petite and pretty, and I was guessing she was of Native American descent. The silver ring in her nose stood out against her smooth brown skin.

  Fuck. I looked past her to the window again, trying to think of anything NOT related to attractive women.

  “So, you work for my uncle,” I said. My uncle. Just the topic I needed to dampen my enthusiasm. “How’d you land such a great—” I couldn’t think of the word. It just wasn’t there. I knew what I meant. I just didn’t have the word for it.

  “Job?” she tried to fill it in for me.

  “No,” I shook my head. “More like music.”

  “Aha, gig,” she said, smiling. “You still have a few gaps in your speech, but don’t worry. It will come back. The less you think about it, the easier it will be. And if you lose a word, just skip over it. You’re doing amazingly well, considering.”

  “Considering what?” I asked, since she seemed so talkative. “What happened to me?”

  She stepped back and set my chart aside, looking at me, evaluating me. Not my health. She was weighing something else.

  “You were found at the bottom of a river,” she said finally, her directness surprising me. “You’d been clinically dead for more than seventeen hours, and we had to get your body back to normal levels of oxygenation, warmth, and blood flow before your chest could initiate its natural reboot.”

  “I was in a river?” The water. I remembered the water. “How did I get there?”

  “We aren’t sure,” she said, but now she was lying. She obviously knew more than she was letting on.

  “How did you find me?” My mind raced with questions, but I’d have to be sly about how I approached this. Sometimes, if people didn’t want to tell me something directly, I could come in from the side and get them to tell me indirectly.

  “The girl that was here in your room yesterday,” Reiny said, “her name is Passion, and she found you. Then your uncle had you brought here for specialized care and recovery.”

  So, what was the connection between this girl Passion and my uncle? How had she known who I was, and who he was, or that we were related? My Uncle Alex hadn’t shown the remotest interest in me since he’d killed my parents for leaving The Hold. Why the sudden benevolence now? He must want something from me. That was the only reason I could think of. And how had Passion found me at the bottom of a river? Maybe the CAMFers had dumped me, thinking I was dead, and she’d witnessed it. What if she knew what had happened to Danielle? I needed to talk to her. She might have a clue about where they’d taken my sister.

  “Can I talk to her?” I asked. “I mean, it sounds like she saved me, and I’d like to thank her.”

  “I think that would be fine,” Reiny said. “The more you converse, the more your language skills will come back. But you need to understand you’ve suffered something very similar to a stroke. You not only lost language function, you also have some short-term memory loss. This is a common side-effect of the time you spent without normal brain function, and we expect it to come back gradually on its own. In fact, it’s best that it comes back naturally. You shouldn’t force it by asking too many questions.”

  The memory loss thing didn’t surprise me. Everything was pretty jumbled in my head, and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t piece together the details of what had happened after the cops had caught me and Danielle. Sometimes I got flashes of people and events, l
ike waking dreams with no context. The most frequent one was the girl with the PSS hand, but there were others. Other people my age with PSS, on a camping trip or something. And then in a big, fancy house. But if Danielle had been taken, and the CAMFers had tossed me in a river, thinking I was dead, how much memory could I have lost? There was no way those flashes could be real. What if the CAMFers had done something to me before they’d thrown me in the river? What if they’d fucked up my brain on purpose? What if they’d taken memories out and put false ones in? Shit. How could I trust anything I remembered?

  “I won’t force it,” I agreed, the lie coming as easily to my tongue as the truth. Probably easier.

  How convenient for my uncle that I’d lost my memories and shouldn’t ask about them. Now his people could tell me whatever they wanted, and I’m sure he’d be the hero of it all and I’d be the ungrateful nephew.

  “Would you like to see your cousin, Samantha, too,” Reiny asked, “or would that be too much?”

  “I would love to see Sam.” The words burst out of me. My little cousin, Sam, the skinny girl who’d followed me around asking questions about everything. I hadn’t seen her for ten years.

  “Okay then.” Reiny took hold of my arm and began removing my IV. “I think we can take this out so you can move around a little.”

  “Thanks,” I said, turning my head away so I didn’t have to watch her pull the needle out.

  “Remember, try to focus on the here and now.” Her cool fingers pressed a cotton ball and Band-Aid to my inner arm. “If you start to feel overwhelmed at any point, just let them know or push this, and I’ll come running.”

  I turned to see her pointing at a nurse-call button attached to the bed.

  “Oh, and are you hungry?” she asked. “I could have someone bring up some breakfast.”

  “I’m starving,” I said, recognizing the smell drifting up to the room from downstairs. It was bacon. Frying bacon.

  “Good. That’s an excellent sign too. Oh, and I thought you might like to put on some real clothes before you have guests, so I brought these.” She pointed to a neatly folded pair of boxers, jeans, and a T-shirt on the stand next to the bed. “Do you need help getting dressed?