Surviving Today

by Mande Chambers

  “Touché.” She sighed. “Why does he have to look so damn good? And why the hell do I keep having the urge to jump his traitorous bones?”

  “Probably for the same reason that I’m drooling over your douchebag brother. Even though I’m still pissed as hell at him, I care about him.” Corbin pinched the bridge of his nose with his good hand. “Despite everything he’s done or how badly he’s hurt you, you still love him. That just doesn’t go away. Especially when you leave things unresolved.”

  Megan’s eyes widened as she looked over his shoulder. “Speaking of unresolved…”

  With that cryptic statement, she took off in the opposite direction.

  What the…

  “We need to talk, Corbin.”

  Son of a…

  Corbin stiffened at the sound of Charlie’s voice behind him. He adjusted the strap of the sling, keeping his back to his ex. “Don’t you have someone to go and torture?”

  “I came here to talk to you.”

  “Then you came two thousand miles out of your way for nothing.”

  “What happened to your arm?”

  “Throwing knife and I had a misunderstanding. Not that you really care.”

  Charlie laid a hand on his good arm. “Corbin, look at me.”

  Corbin closed his eyes. His breath hitched at the familiar feel of Charlie’s touch. He could feel his steely resolve slowly breaking apart.

  So he did the only thing left to do.

  He turned the tables.

  He flipped his arm over, grabbing a hold of Charlie’s forearm. He then proceeded to flip his ex over, letting go as Charlie landed on the dirt with a muffled curse.

  Charlie took a few rapid breaths, blinking up at Corbin. “Okay. I might have deserved that.”

  “Did you know Charlie? That’s all I really want to know.”

  Charlie stayed on his back on the hard ground, swallowing hard. “Did I know what?”

  “Did you know what they were going to do when you lured me to D.C. the other night?”

  Charlie groaned, pushing off the ground. Wiping off his pants, he kept his gaze trained on the dirt. “I knew it was a possibility,” he answered softly.

  Corbin turned away. “Then there is nothing left to discuss.”

  Energy crackled through the air, similar to lightening. He pulled out of everyone’s minds, looking up at the sky from his hiding spot in the hayloft.

  Looking down at Megan, he quickly realized that she wasn’t the one doing it. She was looking at the sky with the same confused look as everyone else.

  Uh-oh.

  It looked like this cat was about to go leaping out of the bag and through the open window. There was no more hiding for him. No one else on the property had the ability to control atmospheric energy other than Megan.

  Well, he did, obviously, but no one knew he was here. He had kind of followed Charlie here. Curiosity had gotten the best of him.

  “What the hell?” Logan murmured.

  “Megs, you’ve got to calm down.”

  Megan looked at Scott. “I’m not doing that.”

  “Then who the hell is?” Corbin wondered.

  “Whoever it is, they are powerful,” Derrick said.

  “They may be more powerful than the original four,” Julian added.

  Well, that was his cue. Before they freaked out anymore and went on the offensive, he needed to show himself.

  So, show himself he would.

  He stood up from his spot just below the window overlooking the scene outside. Brushing the hay off of his clothes, he sighed as he looked around at the relative safety of the loft and took a moment to appreciate the silence.

  Then he called up the energy that had become as familiar to him as breathing and jumped. He faded from the hayloft and materialized in the middle of the group scattered about the yard.

  “What the hell?”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  The surprised exclamations continued. He patiently waited for the shock to wear down. The comments ended with Charlie folding his arms over his chest and proclaiming, “I told you we had bigger issues to deal with and that we needed to talk.”

  He looked around the group. His light blue eyes met a very angry pair of brown ones. He nodded at the owner. “Uncle Charlie.”

  His eyes moved on to the next set of brown ones, these ones widened in shock. “Uncle Logan.”

  He grinned. “Uncle Corbin, you’re going to catch flies.”

  His eyes narrowed, but he picked his jaw up off the ground and closed his mouth.

  He moved his eyes to the figure beside him, her emerald green eyes narrowed, and he swore there was steam was coming from her ears. “Megan. I guess you and Scott are capable of playing nice. Who knew? I definitely didn’t.”

  Megan turned her glare to Charlie. “You have got to be kidding me! He can teleport?!”

  “The energy storm is my doing too,” he pointed out.

  “You’d be wise to keep your mouth shut. You’re in enough trouble as it is,” she warned.

  “About that…” Charlie gulped, looking from their uninvited guest back to his baby sister.

  “You have five seconds to tell me how the hell he has abilities, Yves,” Scott threatened.

  “He inherited them honestly, guys! Don’t kill the messenger!”

  He felt every pair of eyes (eleven including Charlie) bore holes into him, but he kept his gaze and focus on Megan and Scott.

  “Apparently, you guys passed down your other set of DNA too.”

  Yep, folks. That’s right.

  Megan Nox (Annelise Yves) and Scott Raleigh (Reece Whitfield) were his parents.

  His name was Levi Whitfield and he was eleven-years-old.

  And he was the first superhuman on Earth to be born, not made in some lab.

  CHAPTER 36

  November 2000

  “If you’re going to cheat on my brother, at least have the decency to break it off with him after everything you’ve put him through this year.”

  Fuck my life.

  Shanna glared at Carter as she stepped onto the front porch. He was standing in a dark corner of the porch, out of view from the overhead light, smoking a cigarette.

  He had a point, but she’d be damned if she was going to give him the satisfaction of admitting it. She hadn’t planned tonight and it was never going to happen again.

  Famous last words there, Corelsand.

  It wasn’t as if Carter knew what had happened, he was just speculating because he’d seen her get out of a guy’s car.

  “Have something against light? The army turn you into a vampire or something?” she replied, dropping her gym bag at her feet as she resigned herself to the fact that this conversation was happening.

  He took a drag off the cigarette, exhaling a perfect ring of smoke. “Not particularly. I saw you exit the car with a male driver and stepped off to the side out of view. It’s after midnight.”

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

  “I’m serious, Shan.”

  “And I am deadly serious when I tell you to butt the hell out and leave my relationship, complicated as it may be, with your baby brother to me.” She crossed her arms over her chest, pulling her coat tighter for warmth.

  “Fair enough. It will shatter his heart if he found out you were screwing around with one of his friends. Especially if it was one you claimed to hate more than anything or anyone else on the planet.” He snubbed out his cigarette. “He’d probably get over it if it was someone he didn’t know. Yeah, that’s right. I saw who dropped you off.”

  “He’s my training partner. That’s all.”

  Carter’s eyebrows shot up to meet his hairline. “So that’s what they’re calling it nowadays, huh?” A smile pulled at the corners of his mouth.

  She groaned, rolling her eyes. “We workout together.”

  “It’s definitely a workout.” He laughed at her exasperated expression.

  “On a serious note, you’re only fifteen.”r />
  “Thanks, I couldn’t have figured that out for myself.”

  “Be careful. Things have a way of falling apart at the worst time and the truth always comes out.”

  “Tell me about it,” she muttered as she picked up her bag and headed into the warm house.

  It was the story of her life. Of course, tonight’s fiasco was as much her fault as it was Patrick’s. She could have said no. She could’ve stopped him at any time.

  She had just needed the distraction. The familiarity. No secrets. No lies.

  Yes, she was deluded enough to attempt to convince her self of that. It seemed to be working just fine.

  Maybe she would bring it up in her therapy session next week. It was probably time for her to stop and find a more productive way to deal with it all.

  She descended the stairs to her room. She would just have to make sure no one else saw the cuts until they were healed. She didn’t have the energy to come up with a lie to cover for the real reason she was cutting herself.

  Patrick had caught her at a weak moment. She had been distracted by the incident last night.

  She could make excuses until the sky fell, but the fact was, she had made a conscious decision to sleep with him.

  She dropped her bag on her bed with a sigh.

  What was she supposed to do now?

  Banging her head against the wall until her common sense returned didn’t count.

  “You’re awfully quiet.”

  Shanna sighed, pushing her food around on her plate. She knew she was being uncharacteristically silent, but she honestly didn’t have anything to say. She had a lot of thinking to do and she had been putting it off all day. If she began to think, she started to feel guilty and that was sure to get her into more trouble.

  Besides, what was there to say that wouldn’t give the situation away? She was stuck at the table with Patrick and D. She’d freaked out on D two nights ago and screwed Patrick last night.

  That made for some awesome conversation.

  If she said too much, D would know something was up and, in all honestly, she would end up spilling her guts.

  That wouldn’t end well for anyone.

  She smiled at D. “I’m just tired.” She avoided eye contact with Patrick.

  “Sleep’s overrated.” Patrick took a bite of pasta. “You can sleep when you’re dead.”

  “No one asked you,” was her automatic response as she stuffed a French fry into her mouth to keep from saying more. It didn’t work. “Shouldn’t you be out annoying Zeke?”

  Wow, she really needed to watch her reactions to him.

  He wasn’t solely responsible for what happened.

  Too much snapping—or sniping, depending on which side you were on—would draw unwanted attention. A certain amount of sarcasm, attitude, and snide remarks was expected.

  Overdoing it would bring on questions better left unanswered.

  And for the first time in her long life, she wasn’t prepared to lie. It wouldn’t be right to add insult to injury by fabricating some pathetically stupid story to cover up what was going on if outright asked.

  “That’s never stopped me before,” Patrick returned calmly, putting down his fork and leaning back in the straight backed chair. “And he’s at work. You know that.”

  D watched the two of them in mild interest. Annoyance might have been a more accurate description. “You seem to have plenty to say towards Lanthani,” he pointed out, draining his can of Pepsi.

  You would figure that after a millennia or more, he’d run out of ways to torture me…Wait.

  Shanna stared at D like he’d lost his mind. Plenty to say? Everything she had said to him while at the table had been sarcastic and no more than five words at a time. If she thought it would do any good, she would reach across the table and cut off Patrick’s tongue. Alas, the demon’s tongue would grow back.

  Yes, her violent streak was coming out to play. It seemed to like him. He seemed to like to bring it out in her.

  “Among other things,” Patrick muttered.

  “Shut up, Lanthani,” she warned as she finally gave up the pretense of eating and pushed her plate away. “Sometimes your input just isn’t needed. More times than not, it just complicates matters more.”

  “Well, you would know.”

  Oh, for the love of…He did not just say that!

  While she silently seethed, dreaming of all the ways she could get around the whole Hunter’s not being able to kill their master rule, Patrick added, under his breath, "Să-i spun? Sau vrei să …?"

  Shall I tell? Or do you… she mentally translated. Did he seriously just ask her that in Romanian?

  "Eu nu sunt împotriva spunându-i."

  Yeah, she could tell he wasn’t against telling him. He was making that fact pretty obvious while he had fun torturing her. She knew he was just getting back at her for cutting instead of coming to him, but it still wasn’t cool.

  There was nothing more dangerous than a vindictive demon.

  Wait. She lied. There was nothing more dangerous than a vindictive Greater Demon.

  “Prostia trebuie să fie noul putere,” she countered easily. Like Patrick, she was fluent in many languages.

  Patrick grinned at her spunky reply, looking like a proud daddy.

  And, yes, she had told him stupidity must be his new power. She was essentially calling his bluff.

  D looked back and forth between the two of them. She could see his confusion and anger growing by the second.

  Uh-oh.

  “Ah. Can’t get that off your mind, huh?” Patrick answered, in English, the edges of his mouth twitching. “You know, about that other thing.”

  She rolled her eyes with a barely contained groan. She had walked right into his verbal trap. “I forgot about it the moment it happened,” she replied, pushing back from the table. She paused, adding, “Și am avut mai bun."

  What? She had had better. Maybe. It could happen.

  Patrick smirked.

  “Since when do you speak…what language was that?” D cut in.

  “Romanian,” Patrick supplied, his eyes never leaving Shanna. “My mom was Romanian. My Aunt and I taught the Galvin and Corelsand kids a little growing up.” Patrick took a long gulp of his own Pepsi, the lie sliding off his tongue like honey.

  Nice save, Lanthani!

  The guilt of this whole situation was eating her alive. Which was odd, because when her inner demon took over, she was usually able to separate its actions from her own.

  Not this time.

  “And, on that note, I’m going to go. You two enjoy guy time now. That’s an order.”

  She turned from the table and headed for the basement at a dead run.

  “I won’t tell him about last night if you promise to come to me instead of cutting yourself again. I see that you’re keeping your end of the bargain, my lips will stay sealed until long after he’s dead. If not, I sing like an overanxious canary.”

  Shanna looked up from the book she was reading, a look of confusion on her face. “Are you blackmailing me, Lanthani?”

  “It’s for your own good, my dear.”

  She placed the book, pages down, on the coffee table. “Well. That’s a new one.”

  He cocked his head to the side, listening to whatever D was doing quietly upstairs. She couldn’t hear a thing without deploying her supernatural hearing. “You might want to decide quickly, Corelsand. Tiern’s going to realize I am down here in 10…9…8… And I’m not the one with anything to lose here.”

  “Fine. You have a deal. And you’re a douchebag.”

  He was gone before she picked her book back up.

  CHAPTER 37

  August 2015

  “Ground his ass.”

  Brian raised an eyebrow, reaching into one of the front pockets of his black tactical pants. “How do you know I have MP bracelets on me?”

  MP—otherwise known as Magnetic Pulse—bracelets were an invention of her father and Cristian’s, along wi
th their army of evil scientists, to control those who had abilities. It effectively neutralized any superhumans’ powers. MP’s also came in the form of pulse waves in a canister and in cute little black boxes that could be stuck anywhere in a room.

  They also worked wonders on witches, warlocks, and a select variety of other supernatural creatures with magic like abilities.

  Christoph and Cristian wanted a failsafe invented that would allow them complete control of—more like a way to torture—out of control soldiers. More often than not, it was used as a cruel form of punishment.

  Christoph’s all-time favorite method of torturing them all was a drug cocktail called Obscurity. That was what the team that had captured her and Scott in D.C. had used on them prior to their waking up tied to a chair.

  While the drug cocktail was only good for twenty-four hours, and the mental reboot needed afterwards was both dangerous and a bitch, MP devices were effective until taken off or shut off.

  The Obscurity serum was known to be lethal when the wrong dosage was used and the side effects of it were hellacious in any dose. The serum completely shut down, then reconfigured a superhumans cerebral cortex. When the drug wore off, it essentially rebooted the cerebral cortex like a computer.

  Megan snorted. “Please. Don’t insult me. You came ready to party last night. You knew exactly what you were walking into, mainly because you were the one who injected the new Obscurity serum, and you wouldn’t have come unprepared. And, besides aren’t the Moderatoris Sui supposed to always be prepared, kind of like the supernatural version of the boy scouts?”

  Moderatoris Sui—or Controllers, the English translation of the Latin phrase—were a unique group of the Munera trials. They were wolf shifters that Christoph and Cristian created to hunt the superhumans that went rogue. Their only power was their ability to shift into a wolf and communicate telepathically when necessary.

  Wait. That wasn’t entirely accurate. The more powerful ones could send out a PMP to search for superhumans in their general vicinity.