Chapter Thirteen
Hey, it’s me. My phone got wrecked in a rainstorm on the camping trip, and I’ll have to get a new one. I got a real bad bout of the flu, and I don’t think I’ll be in class this week. Or it might have been food poisoning. Some bad beans, or something. But don’t worry! I’ll be fine. I’ll call you this weekend when I get a new phone. I love you. Bye.” I hung up Carl’s phone with a guilty sigh.
“Will she really buy that?” Carl asked.
I shrugged. “As long as I call her regularly, she’s usually too busy to check up on me.”
He blinked at me blandly, as if not sure how to take that.
In the past three days, I’d gotten better at keeping my emotional projections in check. The first couple of days with the collar, I’d been oozing my feelings all over the place. It was a small victory to leave him wondering, but totally satisfying. I gloated silently as we made our way to the lounge.
Three days with no word from Julian had left me two options — go stir crazy, or find something to do. Luckily, activities abounded in Monique’s cast-away clubhouse. The Madame herself remained very elusive, but Carl, Dawn, and Ian had gladly taken me under their wings. I’d gotten my tour, and discovered the compound was much larger than I’d originally thought. The basement level, where we boarded, was only one third of it.
The two levels above ground were the front of the whole operation, which was disguised as a community center and counseling office. They housed a full gym, swimming pool, offices, and Monique’s behind-the-scenes laboratory. That’s where it got interesting. She had made a business out of psychic research. Volunteer guinea pigs only, but some of the contraptions in those rooms made me feel lucky I’d gotten off with just a collar.
My favorite place was the rooftop, which had been converted to a playground and garden. It was great to get fresh air, to feel the night sky draped around me, to see the moon and stars, and know I wasn’t going to be entombed underground forever.
At least I had some friends to help the time pass.
My new friends, as it turned out, were some of Monique’s star pupils, now her employees. They had stayed on with her into adulthood. Most of the other people our age or older were transients, there to recover from some trauma or lay low. The rest were Monique’s staff. Men and women in white coats worked in the labs, and a host of normal folks worked at the community center among those with a psychic slant — a perfect cover. Carl was a counselor there. I thought it was a little unfair to read people’s minds and call it therapy, but who was I to judge? The only other people I encountered were inconspicuous men who always seemed faded into the background. These, I’d learned, were armed guards.
The bulk of Monique’s boarders were orphans and runaways. Though, I hadn’t seen any. Whether by luck or some other means, she’d cleared them out and sent them on a retreat right before Julian and I arrived. I didn’t mind. It was easier to get along with fewer people, even if the place felt like a ghost town sometimes, especially late at night when I was the only one awake; patrolling the halls alone, pining for Julian.
Julian, off somewhere, immersed in subterfuge and danger…
Carl snorted and shoved the lounge door open. “Please. Don’t get me started.”
I rolled my eyes. Carl hadn’t been pushy, per se, since Julian had left. Needy was more like. It would have been annoying, if I hadn’t enjoyed his company so much. Every time he caught me thinking of Julian, he had to get his dig in. So far, though, I’d been true to my word. Carl’s blood was tempting in comparison to the bottled stuff Julian had scavenged, and so was his body. But not more tempting than what Julian had promised. Safety. Security. Seduction…
Carl chuckled.
I cut off his laughter with a glare. “You could just stay out of my head.”
“I try, but I can’t help it. Your mind is so dirty.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Now, that’s unfair. You don’t blush for me like that,” Ian said as we approached the beat-up couches in the center of the room.
“That’s ‘cause you don’t make me shy.” I winked and bent down to kiss him on the cheek.
Dawn clicked her tongue in disapproval. Ian grinned. Our blatant flirtation bothered her, but she wouldn’t admit it was out of jealousy. Ian and I had an unspoken arrangement to push her a bit. It wasn’t that I was taking his side. I just liked him a lot, and they belonged together, even if she refused to see it.
“I make you feel shy?” Carl piped up to a collective groan from Dawn and Ian.
“So, what is it tonight?” I cracked my knuckles. “Anyone feeling up to challenging my title as the Queen of Halo?”
Another groan.
“How about something a bit more interesting?” Ian suggested.
“Like what?” I loved hanging out with the three of them, but I was definitely chafing under Monique’s guard, literally and figuratively.
“You don’t have to,” Dawn said. Her green eyes were wide with her typical over-worry.
“I told you guys, she'll be down for it.” Carl threw his arm across my shoulders, all casual-like.
I shrugged him off. The guilty look Dawn and Ian exchanged piqued my interest. Truth was, I was a Wii Bowling match away from imploring Monique to send out an APB on Julian. Any distraction was welcome. “What do you guys have in mind?”
“We thought you might like to stretch your powers, give it a go.” Ian’s accent always got thicker when he was excited, and his scent changed.
Without any psychic abilities to rely on, I’d been honing my Undead senses. Sort of like one sense taking over when another fails. I doubted Julian would be able to sneak up on me anymore. I could smell everyone in a twenty-yard radius like I was reading a menu. I could hear the fabric brushing against their skin, their toes wiggling in their shoes. I’d made use of the gym and the pool. I’d gotten faster and stronger. A lot faster and stronger.
I could taste the tentative curiosity in my friends like not quite ripe fruit. I couldn’t wait to get the collar off, but I was glad of the progress I’d made. “How can I stretch my powers?”
“The inhibitor chamber.” Ian smiled so wide, his tan skin crinkled at the corners of his eyes. The inhibitors were his pet project. Ian was a psy-cybernetics genius.
“She hasn’t said yes yet.” Dawn placed a hand on Ian’s shoulder, scowling down at him.
His smile drooped, the sad puppy eyes clashing horribly with his mischievous grin. I had to smile at the two of them, her the angel on his shoulder, him the devil on hers.
“Shouldn’t we ask Monique?” I deferred to Carl for a tie-breaker.
“She’s already okayed it,” he said. “She’s curious to see how you do.” I gave him a skeptical look. He understood the source of my mistrust. “You’ll be safe in the chamber, Alex.”
Why shouldn’t I be suspicious? It was like being handed the key to your cell after years of imprisonment. Okay, that was a bit dramatic, but still. Why now?
“Dawn’s right. You don’t have to,” Carl said.
I always wondered what he saw there. Sometimes he looked at me with such unguarded sympathy. It made me feel fragile, and I didn’t like that. I was tough. At least, Julian thought I was, and that’s what I was trying to be. I rolled my shoulders back. “No, let’s do it.”
The inhibitor chamber was exactly what it sounded like. A room on the ground level, outfitted with hundreds of Ian’s custom-designed inhibitor beams. I’d seen it, and seen it used, but it had never crossed my mind I would actually go inside. In theory, and in the testing they’d been able to do, the chamber formed a perfect bubble using the inhibitor fields, a barrier no psychic energy could penetrate. Even with my collar off, I should be safe inside the bubble.
Ian had taken the better part of an afternoon explaining to me how he’d cracked the code, modeled after brain waves. After years of work, he’d finally been able to pinpoint the frequency of psychic energy and resonate it. With his mixture of focusing crys
tals and electric current, he could amplify, reflect, shape, and null out the energy. I’d had enough physics to know he would win a Nobel Prize, if only he could tell the world about it.
They had never tested the chamber on a member of the Grigori. They —we— were more than just your average psychics. Every human has a latent, untapped psychic capability. Most of Monique’s patients and pupils had somehow stumbled upon their skills. Some of them, like Carl, or Dawn, who had a keen empathic ability, would actually stay with Monique to study and practice. Monique was no slouch in that department herself. Or so I’d heard. The combination of a little talent and a lot of knowledge went a long way.
But I was different. My powers, or potential powers, were enormous. Through selective breeding over several millennia, the Grigori had isolated themselves and amped up their psychic gene pool. It wasn’t a matter of if with us, but when and how our powers surfaced. This much, everyone in Monique’s lab knew, though they’d never studied a full-blooded Grigori, or even a half-breed like me.
“Do you suppose she’ll ever stop fretting?” Ian asked me as he pasted tiny sensors to my temple and neck. Dawn stood in the corner of the white-on-white room, lecturing Carl about his suggestion he join me in the chamber.
Carl leaned against the wall casually, looking bored and slightly amused.
I smiled. “I doubt it. It’s in her nature.”
Ian snorted.
“Besides, you like her like that.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But I’d like it if she could turn it off long enough to give me a chance to tell her how I really feel.”
“She knows,” I said, completely certain.
He studied the control panel in his lap and flipped some buttons back and forth, running through checks. His mouth pressed into a tight line. “She does a hell of a job pretending not to. I don’t suppose I blame her, with me stuck in this godforsaken chair.”
I cupped one side of his face and saw the raw vulnerability in his soft brown eyes before he could cover it up with a lascivious look. “She loves you.”
He blinked with something akin to awe. “Are you telling me that as a psychic?”
“No.” I shook my head and smiled. “Just as a woman.”
His face fell for a moment, but then he grinned. “That’s enough to keep the hope alive, I guess. You had me worried for a minute that your collar had stopped working.”
We laughed together as the other two came towards us wearing twin curious looks. Ian cleared his throat. “You’re ready to rock and roll.”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
Carl reached around my neck and unsnapped my collar. I got a momentary rush of feelings from all directions that made me see spots and sway on my feet.
He steadied me with a firm grip on my elbow. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” I rubbed at my raw skin. “I guess if I don’t want to wear it anymore, I can just stay in here all the time, huh?”
Carl gave me a half-smile, but looked down at the floor.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Dawn chimed in, most likely channeling Carl’s uneasiness.
None of them would meet my eyes, and with the collar off I caught a hint of alarm and anxiety swirling around us, despite the fact that all three of them were well-trained in shielding. “Guys, is there something you’re not telling me?”
“It’s the way the chamber works,” Carl said. “Psychic energy has to go somewhere, Alex. With the field in place, it can’t exit the chamber. The only place it will have to go is back to you. That’s why I wanted in.”
I raised my eyebrows at Dawn. Her face had gone white, her protective instincts now making perfect sense. I didn’t want Carl on the receiving end of whatever I could come up with either. I shook my head. “No way.”
Carl made a frustrated sound.
“So I can blow you up instead of me? I don’t think so.”
“We won’t let you blow yourself up either,” Ian assured me. “If things get out of hand, I’ll set the field to absorb the energy instead of reflecting it. As a Grigori, you can handle more than an average person, and the field can handle the rest. I designed it. Don’t worry.”
He wheeled towards the door. Dawn reluctantly followed.
“See?” I spared Carl a coaxing smile. “I’ll be fine. If I can dish it out, I can take it.”
Carl knew better than to argue with me when my mind was made up. He was extremely good at choosing his battles. Shoulders slumped, he left me alone in the chamber, except for the cinder blocks and rubber balls at the other end of the room.
We’d also set up a pan of water and a candle. Ian wanted to see how my powers interacted with the different elements. Some Force Agents could manipulate things down to a molecular level, even air. My friends’ concerned faces floated in the dark glass of the control booth window, peering in on me like the experiment I was.
I took a couple of deep, unnecessary breaths and paced in a small circle, willing myself to relax. My stomach twisted in a knot of nerves. Nobody knew what to expect, me most of all. I was definitely curious about what I could do. You can’t possess the sort of power that makes the people around you so cautious and not wonder.
“Ready?” Ian’s voice said over the ‘com.
I gave him a thumbs-up.
“You’ll feel a distortion while the field generates.”
I held still and waited. A faint electronic buzz echoed around me, and all the hair on my body stood on end. I forced myself to breathe calmly as a crackling wall of purple lightning formed a dome on all sides.
“Stabilizing,” Ian’s voice echoed. The dome wavered in front of me like an oil slick in the air, and then dissipated. “See the marks on the floor?”
I turned a wide circle. There was a faint purple glow marking the outline of the inhibitor field. I glanced up to the booth window and nodded.
“Go ahead then.”
“Easy for you to say,” I mumbled. I focused on the pile of cinder blocks opposite me. “Just use the force, right?”
My powers hovered on the fringe of my consciousness, but they felt like an atrophied muscle after weeks in a cast: the potential was there, but as soon as I tried to flex, it went limp. I was acutely aware of the inhibitor field — that felt more familiar to me than my own powers.
I squatted down and stared at the bricks —hard— like they’d done something to piss me off.
Nothing.
No one had been able to coach me in this. Telekinetics were rare, and the most powerful ones they’d studied here could bend spoons and cause a table to shake. I was a Force Agent. Something to be feared.
If only I could figure out how to control it.
I gave my audience a helpless look, feeling stupid. Maybe if I called the bricks out loud? Here, brick, I thought, patting the side of my leg where no one could see. I rolled my eyes at myself and sighed. Maybe if somebody hurled one at me I could deflect it.
“This isn’t working.”
“Try something lighter.”
I waved Ian off and focused instead on what I could feel: the inhibitor field. I walked to the invisible edge of it and splayed my fingers wide, drawing on the tingling sensation. It traveled up my arms and spread across my scalp, like the static in the air before a lightning storm. Just push on it, I thought, trying to imagine the tingling as something tangible. I closed my eyes and tried, but all I got was a stinging jolt up my arm that heated my fingertips. I hissed and shook my hand out. “Ow.”
I crossed my arms over my chest in defeat, feeling like a freak on display. A knot lodged in my throat, because a part of me had wanted to impress my friends. Maybe even Julian too. I had always been a star, a quick study: straight A’s, varsity, overachiever, most valuable player. That was me. I’d done everything I could to make my mother proud. Soccer had been the only thing I did for myself, because I loved it. If only I could tackle this the way I had that sport. It would be a piece of cake, if someone could only show me how…
“A
lex.” Carl’s voice sounded over the intercom.
I jerked my gaze up to the reflective window. They were all staring behind me. I turned to see a blue ball rolling towards me, one that had been inside the large yellow bucket a second before.
It came across the concrete floor at an unnatural speed, not slowing down. It should stop, I thought. It did, on a dime.
“How did I do that?” I stared at the ball as if it would grow legs and walk away. Maybe I’d been trying too hard. Any time my powers came online, it was unintentional, a reflex. Maybe I was using the wrong part of my brain. Maybe it was like those Magic Eye posters, where you have to squint or un-focus just enough to see the superimposed image.
So, I visualized kicking the ball, focusing with the back of my brain. I snuck up on the thought. In a way, it took more concentration than what I’d tried before, more finesse. I imagined a goalie at the end of the room and saw myself broad-siding it to sail away with a gentle backspin. The ball shot from the floor, bounced off the far wall beyond the inhibitor line and flew back at me. I ducked. The ball changed directions to sail up and nail the observation window with a loud wham! The Plexiglas vibrated as the ball dropped to the floor.
I smiled to myself. “Cool.”
Chapter Fourteen
I practiced my imaginary kicking technique a few times, then tried throwing and pulling. After working out the kinks, I finally started to get the hang of it. I could feel the fibers in my brain stretching, the pathways re-aligning, like a web forming in a seldom-accessed corner of my mind. The more I practiced, the more solid the webbing became, and the easier it was to access the ability. It sounds funny, but I had to concentrate on not concentrating. Once I had moved the whole pile of bricks from one side of the room to the other, Ian urged me to try the water and fire.
It was harder with something not solid, like my brain refused to let me break the rules of reality ingrained in me from birth — gravity, fluid dynamics — things you take for granted. Eventually I just let go of my preconceptions and managed to form a floating ball of water. Fire came easier. I painted my name in the air with flames to cheering over the intercom, and decided being a Grigori wasn’t so bad. I would be a hit at parties.
Cloak of Deceit: An Alex Moore Novel Page 15