“Oh, for the love of—” Juliet shifted on the cooler, heightened color flooding into her cheeks as she snapped, “Leave her alone, Simon!”
Caleb’s hand rested on the back of her neck, a silent reminder of his presence.
Simon frowned at her. “Hey, I’m on your side.”
Kayleigh carefully placed a slide of blood under the lens, her shoulders hunched as the debate surrounded her.
“Well, I’m on her side. Jesus, it’s like she hasn’t had enough to deal with. Just like us.” Juliet tipped her head up, met Caleb’s lifted blond eyebrow. “Tell him that he’s an idiot, would you? Maybe he’ll hear man-speak.”
The scarred side of his mouth lifted as incredibly blue eyes turned to the injured Simon, who met his gaze with a scowl. “You’re an idiot.”
“Fuck you, Leigh.”
With a hmph of disdain, Juliet shifted, the plastic cooler creaking. “Kayleigh— Can I call you that?”
“Please,” she returned, not looking up. “First name’s fine. I think maybe I shouldn’t broadcast the family connection.”
“Yeah.”
The microscope wouldn’t be a huge help, not yet, but she wanted a control of each sample, a first glimpse at the strain she was dealing with. Of the four samples she had, three had come from the GeneCorp lab. From them, Simon’s genetic strain had come directly from her—from their—mother, but Juliet’s and Jessie’s were a different strain, each mapped on the Salem pattern. And then there was Kayleigh’s.
The untampered witch allele as a control.
“Kayleigh,” Juliet continued, oblivious to her focus, “you know that we’re all from GeneCorp, right?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Well, I should tell you that—”
“Jules, wait,” Caleb inserted, but she spoke over him loudly, “My name isn’t actually Juliet.”
It took her a moment, but the silence following this announcement filtered through her concentration.
Kayleigh raised her eyes, gaze blurring some as it focused from the eyepiece to the earnest green eyes staring at her. “I beg your pardon?” Why would it matter?
Simon watched in silence, scowl black and braced, and Danny hovered behind him, a hand rubbing the back of his head in abashed uncertainty.
Caleb’s stare promised murder if she got this one wrong.
What was going on? Kayleigh’s eyebrows knitted. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s happening here.”
Juliet smiled weakly. “I mean, it is my name. My sister named me. When I was born, though, my name was Eve.”
For a long moment, nobody moved. Even Kayleigh blinked at her, the words circling her head sluggishly.
When they finally sank into her brain, she very carefully put the vial she held down on the tray with the other two.
Caleb tensed, a wall of leashed menace behind Juliet, but the girl tilted her head. “I had a case number and everything, but I was also Eve.”
Eve. Twenty-five years old.
GeneCorp.
Her mother.
“Eve,” Kayleigh repeated.
Juliet nodded.
“Eve, as in the Eve sequence?”
“If I say ‘in the flesh,’ will that get me glared at?”
Kayleigh didn’t have the heart to smile. “She did it. She actually managed to unlock the puzzle. But . . .” Her gaze turned inward, flashed through all the data she’d managed to send to her comm, before the device had fried in the cathedral.
The puzzle was in her brain. That unknown liquid that was so much garbage until it paired with the Salem gene, that was it. Somehow, it factored in to everything.
“How did Parker get that vial of stuff?” she asked quietly.
Caleb grumbled for a moment, then said more clearly, “We thought it might give her an edge over you.”
“Me.” Kayleigh laced her fingers tightly together before anyone could see how badly they shook. “Because she was trying to find out what was happening in Sector Three, right?” Two nods. One stare.
Danny jammed his hands into his pocket and looked downright embarrassed. “Grams locked on to that fact, too. Parker sort of . . . became a pawn.”
“Like you,” Juliet added, not unkindly.
Kayleigh nodded back, but for what reason, she didn’t know. Eve. Her mother had done it, after all. “But where did the syringe come from? Was . . . was my mother manufacturing it from wherever she was hiding?”
Caleb’s eyes narrowed. “Jessie found it. After Matilda—”
When he stopped suddenly, Simon continued with a candid, “Matilda killed herself, Kayleigh.”
“Oh, God.” She didn’t mean to say it. Didn’t know how to bottle it up inside as her stomach kicked viciously. As if something black and raw and ruined tried to force itself up through her chest. “Suicide? But Dad— He said you did it, Simon.” This was worse, somehow. So much worse. “Why? Why did she—”
Abandon everything for a second time?
“He was half right. I’d been sent to finish the job,” Simon said bluntly. “She’d become a liability.” But as Kayleigh stared at him, fingers clasped to her chest, the hard edges of his anger softened. Deflated. “Christ, I’m sorry. That was harsh. Kayleigh, I swear, if I had been even ten minutes sooner, I could have stopped her.”
Caleb shook his head. “No way. She was damned good at what Naomi calls her ‘mysterious stranger’ routine. Trust me, nobody could have stopped her. She did what she did because she knew it was best.”
“Best?”
Simon’s mouth twisted. “Your— She killed herself so I wouldn’t have to. I needed pieces in play, and she . . . I don’t know, she knew that or something.”
“Matilda was a good woman,” Caleb said flatly. “A scary woman, but everything she did was to make this”—his unscarred hand lifted, waved to encompass her, Juliet, the tent, beyond—“happen. I can promise you that.”
Kayleigh wanted to scream, but all she did was turn what she hoped was a calm face to Juliet and whisper, “Thank you for telling me. That’ll change how I go about reproducing the sequence.”
Simon gripped the arms of the chair. “Can you?”
She nodded, once. “I’m positive. And with Ev—” She caught herself. “With Juliet as a base and a trip to pick up some equipment, I can do it in a matter of hours, after all.”
“Kayleigh, I’m sorry. I heard—” Juliet caught herself, amended whatever she was going to say with, “I know everything that happened must have hit you really hard. I just wanted to tell you the truth right away.”
It was Kayleigh’s turn to nod. And then, because she couldn’t help herself, she blurted, “Are you my sister, too?”
In her peripheral, Simon bolted upright. Whatever color he had drained from his face, as if it never occurred to him. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“Simon, damn it, sit down before Parker kills me!”
He sat, rolling his eyes at Danny. “She’s weird about blood, relax.”
Kayleigh watched Juliet, who looked taken aback. “I . . . Er, no? Maybe? I don’t know.”
Well. The pragmatic part of her mind kicked into gear, forcing her to sit up straight, reach for the microscope slide with brisk efficiency. “I can find out,” she said simply. “It just seems that since my mother . . .” Her throat ached. “Since Matilda took a direct hand in Simon’s genetics, and I think maybe mine somehow, if she . . . if . . .” If Kayleigh had so much more family than she’d ever dreamed, maybe she wasn’t so alone after all.
Maybe it wasn’t enough.
She couldn’t finish her thought. Didn’t know how to frame it. The reality of it, the weight of the whole, crashed down on her. Kayleigh’s head dropped, chin to chest, and she took a sobbing breath.
“Oh, Jesus,” Caleb said, on the verge of masculine panic.
“Shit,” Simon swore.
Plastic creaked, and suddenly, Juliet’s arms wrapped around Kayleigh’s shoulders.
“Jules—” Caleb hovered
, hands upraised. “God damn it, Simon, did you have to be so harsh?”
Kayleigh choked back another sob, blinking fast to keep tears from falling. “I’m fine,” she managed, only to shudder out a broken laugh as Juliet countered, “No, you’re not, and it’s okay.”
“Aw, look at her,” Danny said quietly. “She’s not at all like the scary monster I’d pictured.”
“Shut up, Granger.” Simon’s voice hovered somewhere between indecision and apology.
Kayleigh held very, very still until the horrible hole in her chest filmed over with the barest filaments of calm. She didn’t cry, she was done with sobbing over the things she couldn’t change, but she sniffed back the threat of tears and whispered, “I’m all right.”
Juliet’s embrace loosened.
Another hand, larger, squeezed her shoulder. Then, Caleb’s voice. “If you have everything you need, we should go.”
“Okay, honey?”
Honey. Just like Shawn called her.
Shawn. Damn it. She’d gone hours, nearly a full day without allowing herself to think about him. The fragile stitches holding her insides together strained as she took a deep breath, forced him—his smile, his rich laugh, the way he’d caught her arm with such naked pain in his eyes—down deep where she couldn’t touch it again.
One life-altering debacle at a time.
“I have what I need,” she said, pushing her hair back from her face and smoothing her hands down her borrowed sweater. The maroon garment hung on her, too big in the same way Juliet’s was, but Naomi had given her another pair of pants. If Kayleigh felt stupid working in a medical tent wearing synth-leather pants, she didn’t have the luxury to worry about it.
Juliet rose, pulling her sleeve down over her arm. After murmured good-byes, Caleb escorted her out.
Danny lingered by the entrance, dark brown eyes—so much like Shawn’s, her traitorous memory whispered—questioning.
Kayleigh resolutely stared at her table, the separate vials of blood, as Simon stepped past the cooler. “You shouldn’t be up—” she began, only to end it on a “What?” when he sank to his knees at her side.
Hazel eyes dark with pain, Simon braced one hand against her leg, the other clenched on the back of her chair. “Listen to me,” he said, so intently that it was almost a growl.
Wide-eyed, she glanced at Danny, who met her look with a shrug.
She tried logic again. “Simon, Parker needs you to not overexert yourself.”
He ignored her, letting go of her leg to cup her cheek; a gesture that would have sent her nerves into a melody of anticipation had it been Shawn.
But it wasn’t. It was Simon.
Her brother.
She wished she’d known.
“I owe you an apology so many times over,” he told her, every serious note striking like a hammer. “Kayleigh, I played a lot of games up there—”
“Don’t,” she whispered, reaching up to cup his hand against her cheek. She drew it away, but held it tightly between her palms as he frowned at her. “Simon, I wasn’t any sort of angel. I didn’t know what my—” She caught herself. “What our mother had done. I didn’t know anything about it, but I don’t know now that I would have done anything differently. Not then.”
Simon, to her profound surprise, smiled. Haggard as it was, the skin around his nose and mouth reddened by degeneration, it still lit something wicked and sharp in his eyes.
That was the Simon she’d known.
“Lauderdale had this thing, didn’t he?” Simon’s tone was wry. Knowing. “You never wanted to disappoint him.”
“You did.”
“I went out of my way,” Simon said, “even before I knew that Mattie had used his genes for me, too.”
Kayleigh blinked. “Did she?” Not just a half brother, then? She didn’t have the strength to let this one blindside her. “Okay.”
He shrugged. “But the choices I made were mine alone, and I didn’t make them for any of the right reasons.” His mouth curved, turned crooked. “Not until Parker. Kayleigh, don’t blame yourself.”
“There’s no one else to blame for how I lived my life,” she told him, honesty so sharp, she knew that he saw her bleed. His smile faded. “We’re responsible for our own choices, I can live with that.”
“Can you?”
She shrugged and let go of his hand.
He rose, cursing under his breath.
Danny scraped both hands through his black hair, squinting up at nothing. “You know what? I think I’m going to go check on . . . uh, something else.”
Kayleigh let him go without comment. Instead, she sprang to her feet as Simon winced, one eye squinting. She seized his arm. “Sit down,” she ordered, but her tone softened, gentled because she didn’t know how else to handle him. His illness, his impending fatherhood.
His death? God, where was her newfound power when she needed it?
She needed to fix something, damn it. She couldn’t touch her own messed-up world, but maybe she could do something good for him. For Parker.
“This is the deal,” she told him, guiding him back into his chair and ignoring his muttered curses. “You rest until I have this fixed. I’m going to have you patched up soon.”
“Kayleigh.” He thrust out his jaw. “Yell at me, if it’ll make you feel better. Do something. You’ve been walking around for hours half dead, and Shawn’s worse.”
“I don’t want to talk about Shawn,” she said evenly. Folding her arms over her stomach, she sighed. “And I’m not going to yell at a dying man.”
“You need to let it—”
“Simon,” she cut in, injecting her voice with steel, “you are dying. It’s my fault—” She flung up a hand. “Shush. It’s at least my responsibility. And Parker is pregnant, so you do what I say or—”
Too late, she realized his mouth hung open. That he’d snapped upright in his chair, his fingers clenched around her wrist.
She winced. “Um.”
“You’re sure?” When she nodded warily, something she’d never seen before slipped into his eyes. Bright. Serious in a way that had nothing to do with a threat to handle. Under the strain and exhaustion, under the dull glaze of degeneration, something resolute flickered to life. “How?”
She guessed he knew the mechanics. “I just . . . I think when Mom—our mom died, her abilities started to come to me. Medically, Simon, I can’t be sure. But I . . . just know.”
For a long moment, he stared at nothing. Kayleigh disengaged from his grip, waited for him to collect his thoughts.
She knew the feeling.
When he did, she saw them file into place with an almost audible click. “We need to talk.”
“No, we don’t,” she demurred. Because if he started talking, he’d bring up Shawn again. She’d fielded it once already, she didn’t have the energy to do it again. Shawn was done. Over.
They’d all made their decisions.
“Fuck.” It was half a laugh, half a despairing sound. “You should see your face. You’re hurting so badly.”
“Simon, I don’t want to talk about anything but your prognosis.”
“Kayleigh.” Simon touched her hands. “Listen to me. Shawn didn’t kill Lauderdale.”
“Please, he took the shot—”
His mouth twisted. “Shawn took the shot, but he’s shit with a gun. He missed. I didn’t.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Naomi sat outside the fourth triage station, a tin can of half-warmed soup cradled in both hands. Exhaustion drummed through her body like a mantra; she was tapped of everything she’d ever had and then some.
So many wounded.
Her head fell back against the crate she leaned her back against, one of a handful scoured out from stockpiles all over the city. Inside were supplies to be distributed among the wounded.
People had really surprised the fuck out of her.
“Excuse me.” The easy, masculine voice peeled through yawning layers of fatigue, curved her m
outh up into a weary smile. “This seat taken?”
Without opening her eyes, she tipped her head. “It is now.”
Phin settled to the ground beside her, his shoulder warm and solid where it braced hers. “How are you holding up, witchy woman?”
By a thread. “Oh, you know,” she murmured, rattling her half-empty tin can without removing her forearm from the brace of one knee.
“That great, huh?” Fingers touched her cheek, tracing tendrils of magenta-streaked hair from the glued-on mask of sweat stuck to her face. She opened her eyes, unable to help the little kick her heart gave as Phin’s warm chocolate eyes smiled into hers. “When was the last time you slept?” he asked gently.
She licked the warm metal ring pierced through the center of her lip. An action that drew his gaze, even as his mouth hiked at one corner. “Are we talking the kind of sleep where you get a whole dream all the way through?”
His chuckle was as much a physical stroke as it was a mental balm for her soul. “I’m going to assume that’s a no.”
“That’s definitely a no,” she confirmed, too tired to argue as he plucked the can from her fingers. He set it down, pulled her hand from her knee, and dug his thumbs into her palm.
Every muscle from hand to shoulder gave out at once.
Her eyes drifted closed again, appreciative moan earning an answering sound from him. It was easy to forget sometimes that Phin wasn’t just the topsider he’d been born as, that he’d earned his stripes and more down in these streets. Naomi spent a lot of time trying to protect him; he spent a lot of time calling her on her shit.
But when he got his hands on her, all bets were off.
Pleasure rippled through her as his fingers dug into her fatigued muscles, easing corded tendons with the skill of a masseuse. He’d practically been one, once.
“How many more wounded need your help?” Phin asked.
“Not sure.” She groaned as his fingers left hers, only to ease into a sigh as he found her other hand. “I’ve got the current emergencies under control and Juliet’s gone for the night. If anyone else is carried in . . .” She’d have to get her ass in gear.
With what, she didn’t know.
Karina Cooper - [Dark Mission 05] Page 26