Cherry Blossom Girls Box Set

by Harmon Cooper

  “This is your last warning,” I told the man with the knife. “Scratch that, this is your first and last warning. You made a mistake by assaulting her, and the mistake could cost you your life. Run now. That’s my suggestion.”

  “The fuck it is,” Knife Man slurred, “coming here with two hot bitches thinking you own the goddamn place. This is our bar! Right, boys?”

  The men that had gathered around grunted in agreement.

  “Well, I warned you.” I looked at Veronique. “They’re all yours.”

  The blade of the man’s knife began to bend backward until it was aimed at his wrist. The metal thinned, elongated, and lightly pricked his skin.

  He dropped the blade. “What kind of goddamn witch are you?”

  The answer to his question came when Veronique used her abilities to pull the fillings from his teeth.

  Hunks of metal and enamel burst out of Knife Man’s mouth, carrying blood and saliva with them. The fillings hovered in the air before his face, and about the time he realized what had just happened, they cut him down like bullets.

  His friends were quick to react.

  A bald biker with several piercings swung his pool stick at Veronique. Grace stopped him mid-swing, and the towering brute turned to his compadres, his mind now hers.

  “Gary? What the hell are you doing?” one of the men cried as his former friend swung his pool stick at the shortest guy in the group.

  With three engaged or down, one of the last members of the biker gang pulled a gun. “I don’t know what the hell you two are, but this ends now!”

  Except it didn’t.

  The tiny screws holding the gun together unraveled, and his weapon fell apart in his hands. He started to back away, but Veronique pulled him over to her using the metal on his belt and the buckles on his boots.

  The final biker still standing turned to the door, a fire lit under his ass.

  “Grace.” I nodded at the man trying to escape and he stopped, turned toward a pool table, and lay down on it.

  “Make sure he isn’t drunk,” I reminded Veronique as she stood before the gunless man, who was now on his knees.

  I’d seen what happened if she took the life force of a drunk person.

  Not that I wouldn’t mind another shower encounter, especially after two days of traveling with her and not quite getting the cold shoulder … yet not getting the warm shoulder either. But I wasn’t ready to handle her, nor Grace, in a drunken state.

  “He isn’t drunk,” Grace said, her eyes blazing white. Damn, she looked beautiful. She was in her Asian form, her thick, bleached blonde hair pulled into a tight ponytail. But rather than go with the Asian’s body, she had her normal voluptuous shape, with more curves than a Fibonacci spiral.

  The guy who’d had his fillings ripped out earlier grabbed my ankle.

  Bad idea, I thought as I kicked him in the chest with my other foot, adrenaline surging through me.

  I’d never actually attacked someone before.

  Sure, I’d wrestled once or twice, but that was just horsing around with friends. I’d never punched anyone, and I’d definitely never kicked a person in the stomach.

  But this was Gideon Caldwell reborn, Gideon stripped from his past. As Nic Pizzolatto wrote in one of his earlier books, before True Detective became an HBO hit, “The past isn’t real.”

  And with each action I took that was foreign to the old Gideon Caldwell, I gave the new Gideon strength, separating him further from the past. Not that I wanted any of this to go to my head, and not that I truly agreed with Pizzolatto’s quote; I really just wanted to be hardened, ready for what lay ahead.

  But as it would turn out, I’d never be quite ready for what was to come.

  Veronique placed her hand on the now gunless biker’s throat and began the devil’s work, red energy swirling around her wrist as she fed, her skin turning radiant almost instantly.

  That’s what this was about.

  I knew we were out of place at the biker bar and that our appearance would stir up trouble, but Veronique needed to feed, and regular food just didn’t seem to do it for her.

  It really was like being friends with a vampire, and I didn’t know if she suffered some type of hunger that would turn her against me if she didn’t feed regularly. That was also on my mind: Let the predator feed or be fed upon.

  “Don’t do it all the way,” I said quickly. “No killing if it can be avoided.”

  So maybe I wasn’t that hard yet. I still had a moral compass, even if it was cracked.

  “How’s toothless?” I asked Grace.

  “He’s drunk.”

  “What about the guy you turned, the one with the pool stick?”

  “He’s sober.”

  I placed my hand on Veronique’s shoulder, which sent a spark of fear down my spine. After a moment of hesitation on both our parts, she let go of the gunless man and turned.

  “Yes?” she asked, her dark eyes narrowing on me.

  “Remember, feed on them, but don’t kill him. We don’t want to leave a trail. Grace is going to wipe everyone’s memories anyway.”

  She sighed, blowing a bit of the hair out of her face. “As you wish.”

  Veronique fed on the biggest biker with the pool stick first, then the one that had lain down on the table, and finally the bartender.

  It was a big meal.

  Chapter Two: Stranger Danger

  It had been two days since we left the East Coast, two days of driving, swapping out vehicles, staying in posh hotels, and just trying our damndest to keep on the run.

  I wasn’t the type that could drive all night, and even though Grace could technically take over my mind and have me drive for us, I wasn't keen on that idea either.

  I also wasn’t stupid enough to think they weren’t somehow tracking us.

  I didn’t know enough about Grace and Veronique’s drives to know if they could give off GPS signals – or even scarier, if they could be taken over somehow by an unseen force.

  But they hadn’t yet, so I tried not to think about it.

  I’d continued communicating with David Butler in Texas, and we were set to meet once we arrived.

  I wasn’t nervous about this, considering I had Grace and Veronique with me, but maybe I should have been.

  Because of the success of Mutants in the Making, I’d received tons of messages, and as I’d predicted, the tinfoil hat crowd had made their presence known.

  I stopped replying to most emails unless I saw pictures or some type of photo evidence. Nothing compared yet to the pictures the man from Texas had given us, and the fact that Mother was in them only made me want to get down there even more.

  Whoever the mysterious ‘Mother’ was, Veronique and Grace had her on their hit list.

  I hadn’t been able to discover much more about her through their drives, and I’d definitely probed around, at least in Grace’s. Neither were very forthcoming about Mother either.

  Veronique had let me plug in only once, for just a moment yesterday morning, but she was hesitant to let me play with her stats; I was still working on gaining her trust. While it would have been easier to have Grace simply take over her mind, I was opposed to that strategy.

  Still, the sooner I could understand what she was capable of, the better.

  I had seen a glimpse of their combined abilities back at the Rose-Lyle facility. Veronique had drained Angel and was able to externally transfer his life force energy into the air, where Grace used her telepathic abilities to keep it in a sphere, which she used to destroy the facility.

  So, there were ways forward, and I was pretty sure one of these ways was through adjusting Veronique’s skills.

  But that could wait. MercSecure and whatever federal authorities were after us could find us tomorrow or they could find us in a week; there was really no telling when they would attack.

  But they would attack. Of that I was certain.

  Then there was my personal life, and how much it had changed since
Grace showed up on my doorstep.

  The fact that my picture was on her drive was still a mystery. I hadn’t been able to find it again, which was odd, because it didn’t take me much clicking to find it the first time.

  The first installment of Mutants in the Making had become a number one bestseller and had already garnered over two hundred reviews. Many were positive, but an increasingly high amount were not. Other authors had started to dig in, claiming my story was bullshit, and I knew that my writer buddy Luke had come to my defense several times.

  The cover of the second installment was ready, but I still needed more time to flesh out the book and edit it. I guess calling it a ‘book’ was somewhat of a misnomer because it was shorter than that – barely a novella – but it made more sense in my mind to call it that.

  “Grace, what do you think of the second cover?” I asked as I moved over to the bed with my laptop.

  It was a couple hours after the bar incident, and we were at the Hyatt in downtown Chattanooga. Grace and Veronique were both on the bed, watching another home makeover show, as they had been since we arrived.

  “I like it,” she said, her eyes flashing white.

  “You didn’t even look at it …”

  Grace had done this a couple times over the last two days, briefly taking over my psyche and then giving it back to me. It was at the point where oftentimes, I didn’t know if I was thinking my own thoughts or if it was Grace thinking them with me. Sometimes I thought I was thinking Grace’s thoughts, and sometimes I thought we were a collective mind, thinking together.

  It was definitely eerie.

  “Veronique?” I asked. “Do you like the cover?”

  She simply nodded, still glued to the television.

  The plan was to get to Shreveport, Louisiana, tomorrow and arrive in Austin the next day.

  As we had done thus far, we would probably change vehicles at least twice on our way south tomorrow. This had proven easiest to do at a gas station, but it was also fairly simple at a WalMacy’s or a mall along the highway.

  Anywhere there were people, we had vehicles.

  “Well, I’m glad you both approve,” I said as I closed my laptop, ready to take in the views outside.

  I went to the balcony and leaned over the edge, looking down at the city of Chattanooga. The sun was setting in the distance, casting orange stripes across the Tennessee River. There was something about the city that I liked; it was small like New Haven and filled with shadowy corners, which gave an air of intrigue to the location.

  I wished we could have stayed longer in Tennessee, as I heard Nashville was pretty sweet, but our destiny was farther south, in the Lone Star State, and from there possibly west.

  Of all the quacky emails I’d gotten, I still hadn’t received one from the West Coast.

  I knew there was something out there, though; I’d seen some information about it on Grace’s drive. I had also received another message from the scientist who worked at the Rose-Lyle facility.

  Still hadn’t replied to that one.

  “Choices, choices, choices,” I mumbled as I stared out at the river. Cars moved in the streets below and I watched a particularly aggressive driver in a large car swerve around an SUV, narrowly missing a Kia hybrid as the big vehicle twisted onto the highway.

  Damn, if there weren’t bad drivers everywhere.

  “Enjoying the view?” Veronique asked, startling me.

  Just hearing her voice caused the hairs on my neck to stand at attention.

  She walked up next to me and placed her arms on the rail. She was dressed like a country singer now, with her pearl snap collar shirt and an extra tight pair of Wranglers. It had been her choice, and there weren’t many options at WalMacy’s that were her size.

  “It’s nice, right?”

  She nodded. “Grace is tired tonight; I think she’s going to bed.”

  “Oh?”

  I had a feeling she was hinting at us spending the night together, but I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t want to project those thoughts onto her. So I just shrugged and tried to change the subject.

  “I’d really like to plug into you soon and play with your stats and skills.”

  “Plug into me? I’m sure you would,” she said as she moved closer to me and leaned on the balcony.

  “You know what I mean.”

  Grace didn’t mind if I plugged in and searched through the files and subfiles on her drive. I had played with her Opacity a number of times, and last night, she’d asked me to turn her clear while we banged.

  Which was … like having sex with a ghost? I don’t know. It was cool, though. Still, I hadn’t been able to discover more as to why my photo was on her drive, and I was no longer able to find the photo.

  Weird.

  Yesterday morning, when Veronique had let me plug in, she’d quickly decided against it and told me we could do it later.

  The thing was, I wanted to see what was actually modifiable with her skills.

  Plus, there was information on her drive that wasn’t on Grace’s – like the snuff videos. And who doesn’t like a good superhero snuff video? The last time I checked Veronique’s skills, back at the hotel in Stamford when she was unconscious, portions of them had been grayed out.

  I knew there was more to what she could do; I’d seen it firsthand back at the Rose-Lyle facility.

  Just as Veronique moved a few inches closer to me, so that our bodies now touched, my phone buzzed.

  “Are you going to answer that?”

  But I was no longer focused on the flirty way she asked the question, I was legitimately freaked out.

  No one had this number.

  When Luke and I spoke, we did so over GoogleFace. And he never called me, so I was unaware of what the phone’s ringtone even sounded like.

  “It’s an unknown number,” I told her as I looked at the anonymous face icon flashing on my phone’s screen.

  “Answer it,” she said.

  I took a deep breath and decided to go with Veronique’s advice.

  “Hello?”

  “Please, do not hang up the phone,” a man said on the other end. “My name is Ken Kim, and I’m the scientist at the Rose-Lyle facility who sent you the email. Two emails. And do not worry, I’m not tracking this call or anything. I need to talk to you. I need to tell you what’s to come. Your life and the lives of Subject S and Subject V are in danger. Please, do not hang up the phone!”

  “You have fifteen seconds,” I told him as I turned my back to the balcony. My knees suddenly shaky, I sat down and crossed my legs. Veronique crouched next to me, her hand on my shin as I put Ken on speakerphone.

  “Again, my name is Ken Kim, Dr. Ken Kim, and I’m not your enemy, Gideon.”

  “Yeah? How the hell am I supposed to know that?”

  “For starters, I’m guessing you found the ports on both of their necks, otherwise you couldn’t have done what you did back at the facility. Well, I’m the one who put all that information on their drives; I put it there with the hope that someone could possibly uncover and unravel a little bit of this mystery. Far-fetched at the time, but then Sabine got out.”

  It didn’t add up. How could he have possibly known Grace would escape and that Veronique would come looking for us and later switch sides? It was too hard to believe, even for a fiction writer like myself. But there was something about the way he spoke that seemed genuine.

  “You have thirty more seconds,” I finally said.

  “Please believe me, I cared about … Sabine. Has she told you her backstory by now?”

  “Yeah, being kept in isolation all her life and escaping after tricking two scientists.”

  “I was one of the scientists that interviewed her every day. My colleague, Bobby, was the one she used to escape. Is Sabine there? I’d love to talk to her.”

  “You’re never going to get to talk to her again,” I said with a growl. “But you can talk to me. You have one minute now.”

  “If I only hav
e one minute, then I’ll explain how I gained access to your phone number. I’m a bit of a hacker, which was why I was able to put all that information on their drives. The code Sabine gave you to access the drives? I gave her that code.”

  “How? From what I recall, you were knocked out by the other scientist.”

  “Before that.” He cleared his throat. “And yes, Bobby did knock me out. He’s since been fired and … disappeared. He’s disappeared. I can’t talk about that right now, though. And there’s nothing we can do about it anyway. Ask her about it when you speak to her again. She’ll tell you the truth.”

  I looked at Veronique, who quietly stood and walked back to the room. She returned seconds later with Grace, who locked eyes with me and instantly transferred what she knew into my brain.

  “So if you are the one who gave that code to her, what is that code?”

  “1QAZ2WSX3EFV4321QWEASD,” he said. “That’s the access code.”

  Grace nodded.

  “And how did you gain access to my number?”

  “They’re following your trail – ‘they’ being MercSecure and the federal government. Why aren’t you sending encrypted emails? Let’s start there. You know they can track that, right? I mean, you’ve been wise to do some things like change cars and change rooms, but you give them a crumb every time you send an email.”

  I bit my lip. I had no idea if he was right, but it did seem possible. “How’d you get my number, then?”

  “Remember when you bought a phone in Stamford?” Ken asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s how I gained access to your info. You see, the analysts they’ve got on your case have gone about this the wrong way: Rather than check the employees at the Okay Buy who had phones, they’ve gone after each and every phone number issued that day. But somehow, the way you and Sabine orchestrated it, the phone wasn’t purchased through normal means, nor was it registered in a normal way. So I checked the employees and their phone numbers and narrowed it down to yours, and that’s how I'm talking to you. Now.”

  “Okay, makes sense. I’ll be getting rid of this phone then.”