The Returning

by Rachelle Dekker

  The source of her new strength dropped down beside her, and she glanced up to meet eyes that were wide and scared. Kane. His face pale and his shoulders shaking. She was gripping his ankle, and his entire body was shrouded in the white-hot presence of the Father’s light. He reached out his hand and took hold of Elise’s forearm, and more fireworks flew across the room.

  He was an anchor. The strongest one she’d connected with. He was keeping her alive, holding her together, channeling enough power that the entire hospital felt like it was covered in light. Kane was doing it. And then, in an instant, it was over. The pain dissolved, the buzzing faded, and the light that had ignited the room returned to the souls of all around, leaving them with only silence and hope.

  Elise took several short breaths, trying to return her breathing to normal. Her mind spun, images of people’s pasts playing back and forth like repeating videos. She lifted her eyes to see people pushing themselves off the floor, shaking their heads, weeping with joy, searching for answers, all their eyes holding the same expression: I remember.

  She tried to push herself up, but her arms were shaky and she slid back down. Then a strong pair of hands gripped her shoulders and carefully lifted her to her feet. Willis. He looked concerned, and she forced a small smile to signal she was unharmed.

  “Elise,” Sage said, and they all knew that meant it was time to go.

  Sam was already moving, Kennedy and Lucy right behind him. Elise turned to see Kane standing beside her, his eyes on the ground, his fingers still trembling. She wanted to reach out and touch him, but Willis was pulling her toward the exit, and she wasn’t strong enough to fight him.

  They moved quickly, leaving behind a room filled with people processing what had just happened to them. She could hear the laughter of the children as she turned the corner and headed back for the service hallway. The sound echoed in her mind, and she smiled. Had they really just cured all those people?

  Willis stepped away from Elise to assist Sam in sliding the service elevator’s doors back open, and Kane stepped up beside her. She looked at him, and he looked back. His face was drenched in sweat, his eyes filled with tears. He opened his mouth to say something but couldn’t find the words. The light was that way, she knew—overwhelming, powerful, beautiful, humbling. Perfect love always was.

  Elise wanted to tell him it was all right not to have anything to say, but a strong weariness fell over her and her vision swayed. Kane came in and out of focus, her head suddenly seeming to weigh a hundred pounds. She stumbled and heard someone call her name right before she slipped from the wall propping her up and headed for the ground. Her world went dark before she hit the floor.

  23

  Jesse followed the armed guards into the main lobby of the hospital. It had been cleared out a couple of hours ago, and everyone who’d been present during the disturbance had been transported to the Genesis Compound immediately. CityWatch guards had searched for Elise and her team in every crack of the building, then widened the search to ten blocks in all directions. They’d come up empty-handed. Again.

  They had discovered an hour after the initial storming of the building that the lobby wasn’t the only area affected. In fact, they’d had to clear the entire hospital—all the rooms, on every floor, all the way to the top. Jesse’s mind swam in horror at the thought. This hospital, though smaller than some, easily held several hundred people, and none of them any longer showed signs of the Genesis Serum. Jesse fought off a shiver; he had to keep his composure so that this didn’t escalate any further out of control. It seemed impossible that all of this destruction was coming from Elise.

  The reports from the victims were the same as before. One moment they were going about their days, and the next they were being consumed with memories. Their minds had become twisted by the past, by events they didn’t even know had taken place. Painful and inescapable. Then, as the memories shoved their way back into their brains, an overwhelming sense of purpose and peace, always accompanied by light, replaced their pain.

  And they saw her—a beautiful young girl with raven-black hair welcoming them back to the truth. That last statement was corroborated by them all—welcoming them back to the truth—which was then followed by madness, as if their minds were still recovering from what had happened to them. Many spoke in gibberish, others cried, some laughed hysterically and said nothing more, but all had a new presence behind their eyes. A presence with the renewed capacity to ponder all the moments leading up to this one and even search for answers. The kind of behavior that had driven the Scientist to invent the Genesis Serum in the first place.

  People were working madly all around him. Sweeping each floor for evidence, trying to make sense of how Elise and the other Seers were doing it. Looking for the scientific explanation. Jesse worked to keep his mind focused on the task at hand, but each time he had a moment of silence to wander, his thoughts returned to the past.

  He remembered Remko standing inches from Aaron, his gun raised. And then he pulled the trigger. But nothing. Jesse had watched as a broken man had shot his rebel leader several times to no avail. The bullets seemed to evaporate into thin air before leaving their chamber. Jesse feared the same mystical power that had stopped live bullets was now working through the streets of his city.

  How were they supposed to fight against something they couldn’t see? Against a madness that seemed to be stronger than science? If Roth were standing beside him now, he would scold Jesse for even thinking there was another power greater than science, but Jesse’s mind couldn’t comprehend how anything else was possible. It crawled within him and wreaked havoc on his mind. He couldn’t let this insanity continue, or he would surely lose all they’d built.

  Elise was the key; she always had been. The Scientist had been convinced the only way to prevent what was happening was to have Elise eliminated, but Jesse sensed that another way was possible. He knew her. She didn’t have a malicious bone in her body. Her mind was naive and fresh. She was being manipulated by the rebels, used for their agenda. He had to find her, had to help her see that she was not bringing good to this city but rather destroying it. He knew if only he could separate Elise from those Seers, then he could reason with her.

  Can you? Can you save her?

  The voice was growing stronger, following him daily, and his separation from Elise had increased how often it spoke to him. Like the devil himself was taking up residence inside his chest. Hissing, whispering. Worse, he found himself taking comfort in not being alone. Was that comfort causing him to seek out the voice’s counsel more often? Jesse couldn’t cope with his own madness in the face of what was before him, and he reverted his thoughts to Elise.

  The problem is finding her, he thought. Finding her and then getting to her before she destroyed the minds of his men. Even with the Genesis Serum rushing through the veins of his CityWatch soldiers, Jesse could see hints of fear whenever Elise came up in conversation. They were afraid of what she could do to them, as was Jesse. Getting close to her was no small task. But if they could just get to her, take her out of the equation, then taking out the rest of the Seers would be simple.

  Jesse was working through a plan in his mind when someone called his name. “President Cropper?”

  It yanked Jesse out of his thoughts, and he glanced over his shoulder to see two guards escorting a young man in a white lab coat. One of the head scientists over at the Genesis Compound. Jesse knew the compound’s rooms were currently stuffed with patients, so seeing him here filled Jesse with concern.

  “I’m headed to the Genesis Compound after this. Can it not wait?” Jesse demanded.

  The doctor shook his head, and Jesse cursed under his breath. He motioned for the guards to leave them. He then gave the scientist a slight nod to continue, and the man did, hesitantly.

  “We’ve encountered some difficulties getting those attacked at the hospital readministered,” the scientist said.

  “Difficulties?”

  “It seems as t
hough none of them can be readministered.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The common Genesis formula no longer has any effect on them.”

  “That’s impossible. They were all injected successfully before?”

  “Yes; something in their genetics must have changed. We are searching for a solution—”

  “How could all of them now be different?” Jesse asked, realizing the volume of his voice was starting to draw attention.

  “Sir, I have all available personnel working on the issue—”

  “I want every scientific and medical mind in the city working on this! Nobody leaves that compound until those people are readministered. Is that understood?”

  The scientist nodded. “There is something else.”

  “How could there possibly be something else?”

  The man swallowed and continued. “It seems they have all also been healed.”

  Jesse felt his heart race.

  “All signs of infection, sickness, and pain are gone. From all the patients.”

  Jesse’s mind ached in an effort to comprehend the vastness of what the scientist was reporting. Like bullets disappearing from a fired weapon, more impossibilities were being presented to him.

  The blood is the key.

  An image of Roth standing before him in the Council Room, the other members dead around him, the Scientist’s old, wrinkled hand holding out large syringes filled with a dark-red substance, speaking with a voice not his own. “The blood is the key,” he had said, and Jesse heard the darkness say it now.

  The blood is the key.

  But could he trust the voice? Should he? Was it worth the risk of giving it more power? He had to do something.

  The head scientist standing before him spoke, breaking the silence. “I’ll head back to the Genesis Compound and get everyone on the serum issue. I’ll keep you up to date on all advances.”

  Jesse nodded his approval. “I’ll go with you, but first we need to go by the Capitol Building. There’s something there I need.”

  Jesse couldn’t risk any other new developments causing more chaos. The madness had gotten out of hand, and they needed a solution. Maybe he already had one.

  Regardless, Elise had to be contained. Before leaving, Jesse turned to a guard a foot away and told him to instruct the CityWatch’s commanders to meet him at the Capitol Building in an hour. They would work around the clock until Elise was found.

  But first he would listen to the haunting voice and try to save those already taken, and then he would save the rest. The future of the Authority City depended on it.

  Jesse stood behind the thick glass panel. On the other side was a sterile white room containing a woman strapped to a medical chair. She had a crazed look on her face, her mind bending in and out of reality as her images of a life she wasn’t supposed to remember crashed around inside her head. The young scientist who had delivered the news that Elise’s latest victims were immune to the Genesis Serum stood beside the chair while a guard stood on each side of the single door that led into the room. The young man held a small syringe of the dark substance that Roth had given Jesse.

  Even from this side of the glass Jesse could hear the whisper of the moving essence call to him. It tickled at the back of his neck and made his teeth chatter. He felt equal measures of fear and anticipation as the young scientist prepared the subject for injection. The woman thrashed about, yanking at her restraints and mumbling through the protective gag across her mouth.

  The young scientist looked hesitantly at the syringe in his hand and then back at the glass for a final time. He had asked more questions than Jesse was comfortable with after Jesse had retrieved the blood from his office, but like others in the Authority City his veins pumped enough of the Genesis Serum to make him compliant.

  With a final swallow, the young man pressed the needle of the syringe into the tip of the plastic tubing that ran toward the injection spot in the woman’s arm. She watched as the dark blood slowly crawled through the thin tube toward her, and she yanked more violently against the ties that held her down. Almost as if her body knew what was coming and was trying to rescue itself.

  Jesse watched anxiously. He had no idea what would happen once the substance reached her bloodstream. He wasn’t even fully convinced anything would happen, but something strange and powerful had filled Roth’s body that day he stepped into the Council Room. Something had brought him back from near death, something Jesse didn’t want to admit he recognized.

  The young scientist took a step back, the full amount of blood now swimming through the plastic tubing, and watched as the first drops of darkness entered the woman. She clenched her eyes shut and her body went deathly still. She was bracing for something, and after a pause that seemed to still time, her body convulsed back to life. It jumped away from the chair, the straps nearly snapping from the pressure of her movement. Her body lurched and twisted as the rest of the blood drained into her veins. The two guards at the door moved closer in case she needed to be restrained further, and the young scientist moved all the way back against the far wall.

  The woman’s back arched, the top of her skull grinding into the metal medical chair, her eyes rolling up to look at the wall behind her. Her arms twitched and her legs shook as her entire body quivered under the power now shooting through her system. Her eyes were open wide in horror as her body seemed to bend farther than was possible and then collapsed against the chair like dead weight. Again she went utterly still.

  Jesse stepped closer to the glass, his eyes craving whatever would happen next. He noticed the rise of darkness within himself, the pleasure he was getting from watching the dark blood work its way into another, and he swallowed the bitterness collecting on his tongue.

  It seemed as though an entire minute passed as the woman lay there motionless. The guards backed off, and the young scientist slowly stepped toward her chair to read her vitals. Jesse could see her chest rising and falling softly, so he knew she was still alive.

  Suddenly she took a huge gulp of air, her eyes snapping open and her body coming back into motion. The room’s other occupants all jumped with her sudden movement and waited, tensed, as she lifted her head from the back of the medical chair and stared through the glass directly at Jesse.

  His breath caught in his throat as her coal-black eyes met his. He saw the darkness that sang to him when he was alone, that whispered to him constantly, that had driven Roth into the Council Room. That same darkness was captured in her eyes and flowing through her veins. The blood was darkness in its purest form, and it had overtaken the vessel before him.

  The woman held Jesse’s stare for a long moment before her head fell back against the table and again she was out cold. Jesse’s heart raced long after her eyes were shut and she was once more under the veil of slumber. He couldn’t shake from his mind the image of her eyes as the young scientist ran tests on her body and the guards stood watch, poised to move if she sprang to life again. Jesse couldn’t erase the power he’d felt in her stare or the way he’d felt the darkness stir inside his chest.

  He turned away from the glass and considered what the Scientist had given him. A weapon to turn the awakened over to the darkness. To give them completely to its power, to offer them up to be used as it saw fit. If Elise was curing people with light, then maybe the only way to combat her attempts to ruin this city was to drive it out with darkness. Fire with fire.

  The darkness rumbled excitedly in Jesse’s brain.

  Yes, he thought, the blood was key.

  24

  Elise’s eyes fluttered open slowly. The room started to take shape through her sleepy haze, and she noticed the ache between her eyes. She tried to recall what had happened to her but couldn’t. Her mind was still cloudy. The room around her was bathed in the light of the fading sun, dark-orange beams piercing through slits in the closed curtains. She was lying on several stacked sleeping mats, tucked under a heavy blanket, and she suddenly realized how wa
rm she was.

  She shrugged off the blanket and tried to push herself up to a sitting position. Her head swam with the motion and a soft thudding started at the back of her neck. She pushed through her discomfort and finally got herself upright. She steadied herself and considered standing, but before she could move any farther, someone opened the door and entered the room. Willis.

  “You’re awake,” he said softly, shutting the door behind him.

  Elise attempted to stand, but Willis was beside her so quickly that her intentions never manifested.

  “Whoa there. I’m not sure standing is such a good idea,” he said.

  “What happened?” Elise’s voice was gravelly, her throat dry.

  Willis handed her the glass of water he was holding and she gratefully took it. She sipped the water, slowly at first, and then downed the rest as if she’d been dying of thirst.

  Again she searched her mind for her most recent memories. They’d been at the hospital. The children had been powerful; she had images of them moving around the lobby, laying hands on people and starting their Awakening process. She remembered the intense pain, the overwhelming number of people’s memories, and . . .

  “Kane,” Elise said out loud.

  “He’s fine,” Willis assured her. “He’s in the next room with the others. We’re back at the factory. You passed out at the hospital. Do you remember that?”

  “I remember the hospital. Is everyone all right?”

  He nodded. “We made it out and back here safely, but it was close.”

  She had passed out. She remembered it slightly now. Her head had suddenly felt so heavy and her world had gone dark. But she didn’t remember traveling back, so they must have had to carry her. How long ago had that been?

  “You’ve been sleeping off our last encounter for two days,” Willis said as if reading her mind. “How are you feeling?”