by Jade Kerrion
Mill Run River was a tributary stream of the South Branch Potomac River, and Franklin was a three-hour drive from Pioneer Labs in Boonsboro, Maryland, just an easy car ride away. Galahad was not convinced, though. “This doesn’t make sense. My life at the lab wasn’t easy. I spent hours every day studying or in physical training. And then there were experiments, a few of them horrific, but I’ve never suffered that kind of pointless abuse—not for a single day in my nearly twenty-five years at the lab. Whatever your association with Pioneer Labs, it was not as a subject there.”
Danyael’s response was a thin, humorless smile. “Just keep reading.”
In the folio was page after page of police and welfare officer reports, capturing the essence of Danyael’s life from the point where he had been found up until around the age of twelve. Almost an hour later, Galahad reached the last page in the folio and set it down with a troubled expression on his face. “You’re an alpha mutant,” he said.
“Yes,” Danyael said, his voice quiet. “There are only two ways to attain that classification. One is to have some truly devastating abilities. The other is to be born with the abilities, as opposed to having them manifest at puberty, as is usual with most mutants. I’m classified as an alpha mutant on both counts. The evidence, as you can see, is fairly convincing.” Actually, the evidence was damning. In the file were many interviews with people who seemed to be normal, decent people, people who claimed they had no idea what had come over them when they were found physically, emotionally, or mentally abusing a helpless, friendless child.
“How could it have taken them so long to figure out that you were a mutant?” Galahad asked, looking up at Danyael, who was standing by the French windows, staring out at the patio and the manicured lawn beyond.
“No one around me could think or feel clearly long enough to reach that conclusion until Lucien found me,” Danyael explained, his voice dispassionate. He fought to hold on to the center of calm deep within as hazy memories tumbled through his mind. Just memories. All in the past. They can’t hurt me now.
He glanced over his shoulder, then turned around fully, and rejoined Galahad at the table. “For reasons we’ve never been able to figure out, Lucien is immune to my primary empathic powers, which allowed him to react with his natural compassion. He was only fifteen then, but he was able to protect me from any further attacks. When I was finally diagnosed as an alpha empath, the Mutant Affairs Council assigned a telepath to work with me until I learned how to control my empathic powers.”
“How long did that take?”
“Years.”
Galahad slipped the reports back into the folder and shut it. “What is it like, being a mutant?”
“I can’t say. I’ve never had the privilege of being anything else. For now, I live in New York City. You can’t throw a stone without hitting a mutant. For the most part, I can keep a low profile there.”
“Why? You’re an alpha empath. According to the report, you’re among the most powerful in the world. Why do you hide?”
How could he explain, when he didn’t even know the answer himself? Habit? Training? Post traumatic stress disorder? Some of those, perhaps even all of those. Danyael shrugged, offered the simplest answer, because it was also the most truthful. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be normal.”
“Except when you’re not.”
Danyael acknowledged Galahad’s rebuke with a half smile and a slight incline of his head. Time to move on; there was nothing to be gained by examining his many personality flaws in exacting detail. Deflecting attention was what he did best, and he did it so easily and smoothly that Galahad did not even notice. The surge of his empathic powers was subtle, a reinforcing of Galahad’s ego, just enough to tug Galahad’s attention back onto himself.
Galahad tapped lightly on the folder to focus their attention back on the task at hand, the task that would shed light on his own past. “Let’s start with the lab. Have Xin pull the records of all female employees who worked there at that time, and you can look them over, see if any sparks something in you.”
“I don’t remember those years.”
“You’re an empath. You should know—better than most—how memories imprint permanently into the emotional psyche. If you see a face and something in you reacts to it, you may have found a lead worth investigating.”
Danyael hesitated, the fierce internal struggle reflected in his dark eyes. “All right,” he said after several long moments, “We’ll give it a try.”
They found Xin in Lucien’s study. She glanced up from the three computer screens in front of her and smiled distractedly, her mind focused on her work. Still, her politeness was innate. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”
She listened as Galahad summarized their plan. “It sounds simple enough, and it could work,” she agreed. “Pull up a chair, boys. I’m already in their system; it shouldn’t take too long to find the relevant employment records.” Her fingers flew over the keys, accessing records and files that were—theoretically, at least—protected behind firewalls. Five minutes passed in silence. “And here they are…just twelve female employees.” She leaned back in her chair. “Not big on equal opportunity employment, at least back then. Here, Danyael, check them out.”
Danyael held his breath, anticipating something—anything—each time he saw a new face pop up on the computer monitor, but nothing happened. He shook his head at the twelfth photograph. “It’s not any of them.”
Xin shrugged. “I’d have been surprised if it was. I’m not usually that lucky the first time out of the gate. I’ll run a background check on each of them anyway, see if there are missing children in there somewhere. Any other ideas?”
“I know you don’t have clear memories of your childhood, but you must have something, Danyael,” Galahad insisted. He leaned forward, resting his arms, fingers interlinked, on the desk. His eyes were intent, searching. “What do you feel when you think about the past?”
What did he feel? For a fraction of a second, the emotional shields wavered, and feelings flooded through the room like a tidal wave. Emotions so tangible as to be like tastes to the tongue swamped through the silent observers. Confusion and bewilderment; aching, hollow loneliness; quiet, hopeless longing; a desperate, denied need to be held, to be loved; the silence, the emptiness punctuated by sharp bursts of pain, followed by pulses of throbbing agony. And then screaming terror, the rending shock of abandonment, a wound so visceral that not even time could soothe away.
Distantly, Danyael heard Xin’s sharp gasp and knew that the torrent of emotions had to be pushing hard against her psychic shields. Her shields would have muted the impact and absorbed a portion of his empathic energy, but not nearly enough. Tears spilled unchecked from her brown eyes. She was not crying for him. She was crying for herself. His pain—the heartache of an unshielded alpha empath—had transformed into her pain.
As suddenly as the emotions had flashed through the room, they vanished.
Danyael yanked them all back in a stunning demonstration of skill, control, and willpower. Psychic shields clamped down so hard he had to fight to breathe. Without a word, he pushed to his feet and walked across the length of the room, as far away as he could get from Xin and Galahad. He pressed his forehead against the cool glass window, his body shuddering as he fought to contain the pain he had buried so deep that he had forgotten he still carried it. “I’m so sorry,” he murmured. He curled his fingers into fists. How could he have allowed his emotions to leak through? So careless. So stupid. He should have known better. He couldn’t make mistakes like that. People had gotten hurt—people had died once before when his mental and emotional shields collapsed. He could not let it happen again.
“His mother,” he heard Galahad say softly. “His mother threw him into the river.”
His mother. He had always wondered, but could not bring himself to believe. Galahad, who had handled his pain without the benefit of psychic shields, must have somehow seen to the heart of the m
atter. Perhaps Galahad suspected, as he knew, that there could be no other explanation for the depths of his heartache. Something within him remembered, even though he did not have any conscious memories of those early years.
Danyael closed his eyes. He inhaled shakily. Perhaps it was time to accept the fragile fiction of his life for exactly what it was—fiction.
He turned and walked out of the room without a word to either of them.
But nothing silenced the word that rang again and again in the vaults of his mind. Mother—
CHAPTER SIX
Alex Saunders looked up when he heard the quiet knock on the door. “Come in,” he called out, and nodded a greeting to the young woman who entered his expansive office. “Miriya. All done?”
“Almost,” she confirmed. The heels of her boots clicked against the hardwood floors as she approached his desk. “Everyone has checked in. The alpha mutants have been relocated to our North Carolina installation, per your orders, and everyone else is comfortably ensconced in guest suites here or in the Baltimore office.”
“Then what’s the problem?” he asked, anticipating the “but” in her sentence.
“We caught the power signature of an alpha mutant who has not checked in. Actually, we saw it once last night, just after midnight, but for a variety of reasons, thought it might have been just an error in the readings. And then it flashed again, a few minutes ago.”
“Who is it?”
“Danyael Sabre.”
Alex frowned. “Danyael? What is he doing here? He’s based in New York City. When did you say he came down?”
“Likely last night. I went back through our records here and in New York and searched his energy signatures. There’s strong evidence that he was in New York City until late yesterday evening. The machines recorded strong traces of his secondary power signature in Brooklyn, at the free clinic where he works. But after midnight, his primary power signature showed up here, in McLean, followed by a secondary flash. We thought it might have been a mistake with the machines—they do screw up every now and again.”
“Not with an alpha, though. Their signatures are too powerful to be a machine glitch.”
Miriya acknowledged the implicit rebuke with an incline of her head. “And then his primary flashed this morning, once again in McLean.”
“Damn.” Alex leaned back in his seat. All in all, the expletive was a mild one considering the potential for absolute disaster implicit in Danyael’s presence in an area already riding high on a host of irrational emotions. “What could he be doing here?” he mused aloud, not expecting an answer to his rhetorical question.
Miriya offered none. “I’ve contacted his controller in New York, who is understandably in a bit of a panic over how Danyael managed to get out of New York without her knowing. She insists that Danyael has been historically easy to manage and very responsive to the requests of the council.”
“He is,” Alex confirmed. His relationship—if anyone could have been said to have a relationship with the painfully reclusive young man—went back some sixteen years, when Danyael had been first identified as an alpha mutant at the age of twelve. The child, beaten but not broken by a lifetime of horrendous abuse, had been grateful, thankful for the training that allowed him to control his powers and attain some semblance of a normal life. Danyael had never balked at the “big brother” oversight of the Mutant Affairs Council the way many other mutants did, but if Danyael was rebelling now, he had certainly chosen the worst time for it. With D.C. in an uproar, his emphatic abilities would amplify the chaos and heighten the madness to unprecedented levels.
Alex leaned back in his chair, damning the fact that he had no good choices available to him. He liked and trusted Danyael, but he could not afford to have an alpha empath loose in Washington, D.C. in the midst of the crisis. “Find him, Miriya, and bring him in.”
“Or put him down?” she asked explicitly.
Alex winced. How could it even have come to that? An execution order on Danyael Sabre? He hesitated, mulled over it for several long seconds, and then for the sake of the country, he finally nodded. “Only if there are no other options available to you.”
Miriya nodded in acknowledgement. Her green eyes gleamed in her sharp-featured face. “Do you have any advice for me?”
He reassessed everything he knew about Danyael’s strengths and weaknesses. “Just be careful, Miriya, and don’t get overconfident. There are depths to Danyael’s power that he doesn’t typically draw from, but they’re available to him. If you need to take him down, do it fast, because if he actually cuts loose, he’ll most certainly drive hundreds of unprotected minds to suicide.”
She blinked in surprise, perhaps re-evaluating just how difficult the mission could actually be, but Miriya—supremely talented and immensely confident in her abilities as one of the most powerful telepaths in the country—said nothing. She nodded, turned on her heel, and strode out of the office.
Alex sighed. He swiveled his chair around to stare out his windows at the sweeping view overlooking the Potomac. Danyael. Please don’t let this be what I think this could be. For God’s sake, remember your training.
If he did not, Alex Saunders knew that there would be absolute hell to pay.
~*~
Jason Rakehell awoke hungry and in pain. For a moment, he stared up at the ceiling and waited for his head to clear. His right arm throbbed, reminding him that he needed medical attention. He ground his teeth. How could it have gone so wrong? The previous night was supposed to be his night of triumph. That morning, he should have woken with the glorious knowledge that the greatest insult on humanity was dead, slaughtered by his hand.
Instead, all he had to show for it were soot-blackened clothes and a throwing dagger. She attacked me…she fucking attacked me…and then she took it…saved it.
And I was once engaged to her. Bitch.
His cell phone shrilled. His handsome face etched in a scowl, he rolled out of bed and fumbled for the cell phone on his bedside table. The call came from a number he did not recognize. He did not bother. Tossing the cell phone back onto the crumpled sheets, he walked into the bathroom. Dumped carelessly in the sink were the bandages and bottle of antiseptic he had used to treat his wound the day before. He ignored them, though his arm screamed for attention, and headed straight to the shower.
Showering took a long time with his damaged arm hampering even the most basic movement. He probably needed to get it checked. He sniffed at the wet, bloodstained bandage as he dried himself with a bath towel he had picked up off the tiled floor. The injury had the metallic scent of blood, but did not smell putrid.
The phone rang again. Frowning, he strode over to the bed. Five missed calls. The cell phone had probably been ringing incessantly while he took a shower, though whoever was so desperate to reach him had left no voicemail messages. Curious, he accepted the call. “Yes?”
“Jason?” It was a painfully familiar voice, yet one he had not heard in a long time.
“Well, well.” His scornful drawl did not conceal the surging anger. “To what do I owe this pleasure, Father?”
“I just read the police reports. You and your damned fanatics were behind the attack that resulted in millions of dollars of property damage and sixty-seven people dead, six of whom were my employees.”
“Don’t forget the extreme damage to your reputation when the cameras captured those monsters coming out of the lab and killing innocent emergency personnel and bystanders,” Jason mocked. “Have you found them yet, Father?”
“You’re the monster!” Roland Rakehell’s voice trembled. “Intolerant bigoted bastard!”
“Fuck you.”
“Is this how you repay me? I gave you everything!”
“Except a father. You’re more of a father to that damned monster you created twenty-five years ago.”
“It doesn’t excuse what you’ve done. You tossed away the sixty or more lives trying to get to Galahad. Where is he?”
“Con
sider it dead,” Jason snapped. “Oh, and thanks for calling.” He hung up the phone, and just to keep the cell phone from ringing again, pulled out the battery.
Dressing slowly, he considered his options and tried to keep his thoughts focused on Galahad instead of dwelling on his father. He had to find Galahad and Zara. Her condo in Georgetown would be the first, the most obvious place to start. If he did not find her there, he would have to expand his search to the list of her friends who might have been willing to harbor her and Galahad. Jason’s upper lip twisted at the thought. He would find her. He would flush her out, and when he did, he would kill Galahad, just as he had always planned to do.
~*~
Hungry…
Thirsty…
They slipped through the lightly wooded forests that bordered magnificent estates. The scent of blood and reek of death accompanied them. A dog caught their scent. It started a barking frenzy. The bark ended in a whimper of pain. “Stupid animal! Shut the hell up!”
Humans…cruel…
Hurt it, kill it…
As one, they turned from their destination, ignoring the instinct that pulsed within them like an open wound, drawing them closer to the one they sought so desperately. With silent grace, they loped out of the woods. The human, so secure in his world, so unaware that the rules of his world were changing all around him, was both blind and deaf to them as they approached from behind. He kicked the dog cowering at his feet. “Dumb mutt! You’re waking everyone up!”
The dog, afraid of its owner, yet even more afraid of the six grotesque forms that had slipped out of the darkness of the woods behind the house, crouched into a snarl, its teeth pulled back, exposing fangs. The man aimed another kick at the dog’s ribs. “What are you growling about, you dumb mutt! I said shut up!”