Gift of Death (Gifted Book 1)

by Lin Augustine

  “Iris…” she says finally, her voice small and shaking. She hugs Iris close. “No, it can’t be. Please. You can’t be dead. Please. Iris, wake up.”

  Ron stands up, her legs unsteady and her mind whirling. Ron heads toward Carl, staring at him, mystified. She waves a hand in front of Carl’s face.

  “Carl,” Ron says loudly. “What happened?”

  He doesn’t reply so she shakes his shoulders. “What happened, Carl?”

  His eyes focus on her and he opens his mouth like he’s trying to say something, but he just keeps smacking his lips, as though he doesn’t even know how his mouth works.

  Ron looks back at Iris, who Giselle is still holding close with tears flowing down her face.

  Chrys said she can kill someone with a touch, and Hunter—she looks back at Carl—can manipulate emotions. Is it possible to manipulate someone’s emotions so much that they become a dazed vegetable? And also, Chrys and Hunter must be back in the forest by now. There’s no way Hunter could still be manipulating him from here, right?

  Ron steps away from Carl and goes back to Giselle and Iris. She sits on the floor, looking at the two of them, her brain scrambling. She needs to make a plan—desperately—but she can’t stop looking at Iris’s still body. Her mind goes blank and her face becomes wet.

  She looks away, burying her face in her hands.

  Think. Think.

  Whatever happened here, she’s pretty sure it had something to do with Chrys.

  But Chrys would never kill Iris. She must have been provoked somehow, maybe by Carl. And what if Carl saw everything? As soon as he goes back to normal, he’d probably tell everyone that Chrys did it, and if Giselle knew Chrys did it, what would happen to Ron?

  Ron just needs to stay in this town for a couple days, tops. Just until Chrys can finish her task so they can leave together. Besides, if people think Chrys is a murderer, then the police will be looking for her and she and Ron will have a much harder time continuing their life on the run.

  Ron is going to have to lie about this too.

  She looks back at Iris, the tears starting to flow again.

  Chapter 30

  Hunter sits me down at my desk. I look around, vaguely aware that the cabin is still empty. My stomach growls. Hunger is faint somewhere, perhaps under the blanket of calm. My mind feels jumbled and my body numb. I’m aware of the chaos below but only peaceful or neutral thoughts are allowed past the blanket, only calm feelings. It feels so foreign but nice.

  Hunter kneels down in front of me. “Chrys, I’m going to remove it now, okay?”

  I just look around the cabin, my mind unable to focus on anything.

  And then, like a rug ripped out from under me, the calm blanket flies out of my mind, everything beneath it rushing to fill its place.

  I see Iris’s dead body stiff on the floor and feel the cold, foreign energy circulating in my body. It’s not really there—it fades after a couple minutes—but the memory of it makes me feel like it is.

  Suddenly, I can’t breathe. My hands tremble. I feel like throwing up.

  I clutch my chest. There’s a painful pressure there. It hurts so much, like my pounding heart is going to give up any moment now, and just stop.

  Hunter, eyes wide, holds my shoulders at arm’s length. “Chrys, it’s okay. Take a deep breath. You’re not dying. You’re having a panic attack. Breathe.”

  I try to breathe but my lungs feel like they’ve stopped working. I clutch my chest tighter, gasping for air. Tears stream down my face.

  “Hunter,” I gasp. “Make it go away.”

  “I can’t. Just try to breathe. Try to think of something happy. Think of your friend Ron.”

  I think about Ron but that just makes Iris come back into my mind, too.

  “Make it go away, please!” I sob.

  “You have to deal with this on your own, Chrys.” He’s gripping my shoulders tighter. “I can’t make it go away. It’ll still be there. Always. The longer you avoid dealing with this, the worse it’ll get. Don’t you remember what I told you about my town?”

  “I don’t care. Please! I can’t deal with this right now. Not right now. Please. Make it go away.”

  “Chrys—”

  “Please!” I yell out with my eyes closed. I feel so lightheaded and my body is so tense.

  And then, the blanket. Instead of creeping its way in, this time it just falls onto me, crushing down the panic and the fear.

  I open my eyes, taking a deep breath. It’s so much better now. What was I even concerned about?

  Hunter lets go of my shoulders, looking at me with a worried expression. “Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have just removed it all at once.” He stands up and starts pacing around the room. “It’s hard to quit cold turkey, right? I’ll just slowly ease up on it. Wean you off of it, you know?”

  He stops pacing to look at me. I just look back at him blankly.

  He grabs the sides of his head. “Dammit! This is bad. Oh, god. What have I done? Why did I lay it on so thickly? You probably just needed a thin coat to begin with, maybe. I could’ve tried that first. Why didn’t I try that first?”

  The cabin door opens and Remington and Ana Maria walk in.

  Ana Maria runs over to me. “Chrys, you’re back!” She points at her eyes. “I’m all healed. Man those wounds were deep. Took forever.”

  Remington goes to Hunter. “What’s wrong, man? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I did something bad, Remy.”

  “What?” he says.

  Ana Maria waves a hand in front of my face. I follow it with my eyes.

  “It’s Chrys,” Hunter says, “I’m… keeping her calm.”

  Remington turns to me quickly and bends down to see my face more clearly. “Why? Why are you doing that?”

  “She killed someone in town—accidentally—and she was freaking out. I told her I’d just calm her down until we got back. But I just tried to remove it and she was begging me to put it back. I-I couldn’t stand seeing her like that so I just…”

  Remington stands up straight and passes a hand through his hair. “Oh, jeez. Ana Maria, can you heal mental stuff?”

  “I wish,” she says, frowning at me.

  I blink back at her.

  “Then you have to tell Li,” Remington says. “She’ll tell you what to do. I’ll stay here with Ana Maria.”

  “Or we could all go,” Ana Maria says.

  “No, there’s no need for you and me. Besides, you were talking my ear off in the infirmary about wanting to finish making your stuffed sea slug. Why don’t you work on that now?”

  She frowns, keeping her eyes on me. “Fine. I guess.”

  Hunter takes my hand and pulls me up. “Come on, Chrys.”

  “Oh, Remington,” I say in a monotone. Something is bubbling up to the surface about him, something I want to tell him, but I’m not really sure what, so I just say, “I need to tell you something.”

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “I don’t know…”

  “Is it about Giselle? Did you give her my letter?”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s it. Sort of.”

  “You didn’t give it to her?”

  “I gave it to my friend. She said she’d pass it along.”

  He nods. “Thanks. I appreciate that. Anyway, you two should go quickly—catch Li in her office. It’s almost dinner time so she might leave soon.”

  Hunter, still holding my hand—something about that seems strange, by the way, but I’m not sure what—pulls me away. I follow him, stepping around the unfinished board game that’s still out on the floor.

  We go out of the cabin.

  As we walk across the field, Hunter says, “I’m going to let up, just a little bit. That should be fine, right? It’s just a little.”

  The blanket
of calm in my mind gets thinner and I become more aware of the sensations in my body—my heart beating dully, the warm air on my skin, Hunter’s hand in mine.

  Something breaks through the blanket. It’s a thought. Hunter is holding my hand but he shouldn’t be doing that.

  I pull my hand out of his.

  He stops and turns to face me. “What’s wrong?”

  “You can’t hold my hand.” I try to think of why, exactly, he shouldn’t do that, but it can’t break through the blanket.

  “Okay, I’m sorry.”

  His face turns pink, and that reminds me of something else, something that manages to wiggle out from under the loosening blanket. It’s what Ron said about Hunter.

  “Do you like me?” I ask, aware that some part of me would never have asked that, but that part is smothered down now.

  Hunter rubs the back of his neck, which is also becoming red. “Uh, is it obvious?”

  “Not to me. But Ron said something about that. I just wanted to know if it’s true.”

  “Yeah, it’s true.”

  “But why? We just met.”

  He sighs. “I don’t know. This kind of thing never makes any sense. I just know that when I’m around you, things feel a lot better.”

  “Even though my emotions are a mess?” I say, feeling everything beating on the blanket, trying to get past.

  He shrugs. “Everyone has messy emotions.”

  “Then what makes me special?”

  “I don’t know. But, look, it doesn’t matter. I don’t expect anything from you. I know how you feel. And I’m really sorry for doing this to you. I’ll make it right, I promise.”

  “It must feel nice for you though, me being so calm. It feels nice to me too, so you don’t have to—”

  “No. It doesn’t feel nice. It’s wrong. It’s not who you are. I don’t want you to be like this.”

  “You don’t want me to be calm?”

  “I do want you to be calm. Just not like this. All of that stuff you can sense beneath the calm, I can sense that too. It’s disturbing. There’s so much buried there, and you have to confront it. You used to be really good at changing your emotions, making yourself feel less depressed, happier. Can you try to do that now?”

  “No, I don’t want to see that stuff down there anymore.”

  “But you have to eventually. I’m not going to keep it locked up for you forever.” He turns away. “Let’s go to Li.”

  He keeps walking to the Main House and I follow him. We get to Li’s office. Hunter knocks.

  “Come in,” Li calls.

  Hunter opens the door.

  “Oh, you two are back already,” Li says, hidden behind stacks of books on her desk.

  “Li, we need to talk to you,” Hunter says.

  Li gets up, her head visible above the books. “Alright. Come into my lounge then.” She goes through the side door, leaving it open.

  We follow and sit down on the sofa.

  “What is it?” Li asks. She looks at me with furrowed brows.

  “Chrys accidentally… killed a woman in town,” Hunter says. “I’m keeping her calm right now. She doesn’t want to confront it.”

  “Ah that explains it,” Li says, crossing her legs. “I thought she looked out of it.” She turns to me. “Well, Chrys, if you can’t even confront this, how do you expect to complete your third task? It’s going to be much more difficult.”

  Third task? I’m vaguely aware of needing to do a task but I can’t remember what it is.

  “I’m trying to slowly ease up on it,” Hunter says. “I took it away all at once earlier and it was just too much for her to handle. Oh, I’m also still, uh, keeping a guy. He saw everything.”

  Li turns her attention to Hunter. “You’re keeping him?”

  “Yeah, he’s pretty heavily under.”

  Li sighs. “Release him. Focus on Chrys.”

  “But what if he freaks out too?”

  “He probably will, but nowhere near as bad as Chrys, I’d bet. Just let him go.”

  “But he witnessed everything. He’ll probably tell—”

  “Hunter, let him go.”

  Hunter sighs. “Fine.”

  “By the way, this distance is way larger than your hometown was. And in a pocket universe too, not to mention. Your range is amazing. And you can even maintain it while not even focusing?”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of like a background program, I guess? It runs while I’m asleep too. That is, until I get way too drained. Then it just shuts off and I black out.”

  “That is truly remarkable.”

  “Is that something I should be proud of?”

  She shrugs. “Take it how you wish. I just think it’s worth complimenting.”

  “But what should I do about Chrys?” he asks, gesturing to me.

  “Gradually removing it, like you said you would, seems like the best plan. I’ll get Elise to come and I’ll watch over her cabin for her in the meantime. Maybe she can help counsel Chrys in her mind, to help her deal with it.”

  “Elise, yeah. She can probably help.”

  Li smiles and gets up. “Just wait here. Try to reduce it a little bit more and see how she does. I’ll try to get Elise over asap. But even if she’s not here yet, you know how to contact her, if you think Chrys needs help.”

  “Okay.”

  Li leaves.

  Hunter turns to me. “Chrys, I’m just going to loosen it up, just a teeny bit.”

  The blanket becomes slack, more and more things escaping from the sides. Tiny things.

  I touch my stomach, the hunger in it more pronounced, or perhaps it’s just that I’m aware of how bothersome it is now. My mind feels heavy with tiny worries, like what on earth should I do about Hunter? Is Ron okay? What about Carl? Also, don’t I have his scanner in my bag?

  The tote bag is still slung on my shoulder since I didn’t have the presence of mind to remove it earlier. I take it off and dig through it. I pull out the scanner.

  “Why did you take this?” I ask Hunter.

  “It seemed important. That’s the scanner you told me about before we got to town, right? The one you said detects the gifted?”

  I nod, turning it over in my hands. I find a power button. I press it.

  The screen lights up and reads, “Please point at the target and press the trigger.”

  I point it at my arm and press the trigger. A loading screen appears and then a large red X with that buzzer sound I heard when… when…

  A sinking feeling in my stomach crawls forward.

  I drop the scanner and it clatters on the floor. “Something bad happened. What-what happened?”

  Hunter leans over and picks up the scanner. He puts it on his lap. Then, he takes my head between his hands, forcing me to look him in the eyes. He says slowly, “Chrys, you—accidentally—killed Iris.”

  I shake my head, making him let go. “No. That didn’t happen. If that happened, I would feel terrible.”

  He slumps. “You did feel terrible. That’s why I’m making you calm, remember?”

  I look down at the scanner, brows furrowed. “Oh.”

  “So you do remember?”

  “I’m aware that you’re influencing my emotions but I don’t really know why.”

  “I just told you why.”

  “Yeah but that-that can’t be.” I look up at him. “I never touch anyone.”

  “Well, you touched Iris somehow. I don’t really know what happened either. I only came after she was already on the ground.”

  “Then why do you assume I did it?”

  “It had to have been you. There’s no way she just died from a natural heart attack.”

  “Maybe—” I put up a finger, “maybe she isn’t even dead.”

  “Maybe. But, if you did u
se your gift, would you know if the person is dead without having to check?”

  “Hmm.” I put my hand on my chin. “Wait. What is my gift again?”

  He sighs and slumps back into the couch. “Oh jeez.”

  The door opens. I look back to see Elise coming in. She sits down where Li was and just looks at Hunter and he just looks at her.

  I stare at them, fascinated.

  Then Elise turns to me. She looks at me as though she’s saying something, but her mouth isn’t moving and I don’t hear anything. I tilt my head to the side.

  Elise taps the side of her head and then points to me.

  I point at my head and then spread my arms out. What?

  Elise points at me then at her head then at her ear specifically.

  I shake my head, not getting it.

  Elise sighs and turns back to Hunter. She shakes her hands at him then points at me.

  Hunter turns to me. “Chrys, can’t you hear her in your mind?”

  “No. Was she saying something?”

  “That’s weird,” Hunter says. “Maybe what I’m doing is blocking Elise out somehow.” He turns to Elise and is silent for a moment. “Hmm, she can hear your thoughts though. You just can’t hear her.”

  Elise slumps into Li’s chair, letting her head fall back with a groan.

  “She says I should just remove it completely and she’ll help you through it,” Hunter says. “Are you okay with that, Chrys?”

  “No! Don’t remove it!”

  Elise sits up and glares at Hunter. She jabs her finger at me several times.

  “She’s saying I should just do it anyway.”

  “Don’t, please,” I say. I have a faint sense of foreboding about what might happen if he removes it completely. All I know for sure is that I like how this feels.

  Elise keeps glaring at Hunter.

  “Don’t listen to whatever she’s saying,” I say quickly. “This is a good level. It’s fine like this.”

  Hunter sighs. “Enough! I’m just going to keep doing what I was doing. Gradually. That’s what Li said to do too.”

  Elise rolls her eyes and gets up. She leaves.

  “She said she’s going to bring Li back.”