by PM Drummond
“So what?” I asked. “Do I lie back down or pull on the cord or . . .”
He just stood and stared at me, unblinking.
“Guide usually means a person who helps or, I don’t know, guides.”
Still the stare. Not even a head shake or snort.
The room blacked out longer this time. While it was gone, I didn’t feel my body—the translucent one or the real one. There was nothing but a gray, suffocating nowhere. In the distance, a dark-hooded person stood. Waiting. Pulses of evil washed toward me like black, oily waves on a contaminated beach. Each wave that hit me pulled energy as it receded. Pulled at my life force.
I wrenched myself away.
When the room snapped back, I launched myself at my body on the bed.
And prayed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
TESTS
My body hurt. A bone-aching weariness weighed me down to the amazingly uncomfortable bed. Every ounce of my energy had disappeared, leaving me an immobile hunk of flesh unable to lift a finger or protect myself.
Moth?
I got no answer. He’d said that my energy served as a bridge to him and the other animals.
No energy. No bridge.
A hole loomed in my soul at the loss of my guides, similar to the gaping hole left by my grandmother’s passing but a bit less devastating. Grandma had kept me from being alone with my father. Moth and the others kept me from being alone with my curse.
Correction—curses. Now it wasn’t just telekinesis. It was a plethora of other powers guaranteed to make sure I’d never be a normal girl. I suddenly had a better appreciation for Pinocchio and his yearning to be a “real boy.” That thought would have been funny and made me feel a little better if I’d had enough energy to smile. I knew I was in real trouble if I was so listless I couldn’t even be snarky.
What had drained me? That thing in the ether? Had the dark figure in the nothingness been real or just overactive imagination after my mom’s revelation? It was far better to think the drain was the astral travel maybe in conjunction with the power draw from the telekinesis needed to control the machines.
Crud. The machines. I’d forgotten all about them.
Awareness of the room bloomed—sounds, temperature, the glow through my eyelids of the glaring fluorescents above me. And it seemed all hell was breaking loose. Alarms blared on the machines. Footsteps pounded outside the door, getting nearer. Beeps of the keypad outside, cussing, the door popping open. People rushing in, shouting orders at one another, most of their words just noise not processing in my power-depleted brain.
“Crashing,” someone said.
That wasn’t good. I was pretty sure they were talking about me.
More noise and garbled talking. Hands touching me, checking me, opening my eyes. Energy flowing to me from the contact, replenishing me, if only just a little.
Their words came into focus, making more sense.
“I don’t know what happened. She’s just slipping away.”
“Her vitals are coming back up now. Heart rate, respiration, BP all increasing.”
Someone else rushed into the room. A sticky aura crawled over me.
Sarkis.
“What happened here?” he said.
“We don’t know,” Clark Kent said. “She just faded for a few minutes. All her vitals except brain activity almost flatlined then came back.”
“And you did nothing before they returned?” Sarkis said.
“No, sir.”
“Did you check the drug pump for malfunction?”
“Yes, sir. No malfunction.”
“Set the alarms to more sensitive levels,” Sarkis said. “We’ll need to monitor her more closely. We’ll move up live testing. We can’t allow the subject to expire before we get the data we need.”
“And containment?”
“I have an idea,” Sarkis said. “All of you stay here. I’ll let you know when to shut off the drug pump.”
A single set of footsteps exited, and Sarkis’s fetid presence disappeared from the room. I’d absorbed enough power from the people in the room to be more aware of my surroundings, but my body needed more. I was still too weak.
I continued to pull at the energy from the three men left in the room in small amounts, not wanting to alert them to what I was doing. My body warmed with power, Zamora’s old marker site pulsing with extra heat. I was finally getting the hang of controlling the amount of power that I drew. A little late, it seemed, but still handy. If I got out of this, which was looking more and more unlikely, more restraint of my gift/curse would be wonderful.
“Why is this one so important to him?” one of the men asked.
“He had another subject like this one years ago. He’d almost cracked the science of it, but the subject escaped,” another man answered.
They were talking about Aunt Tibby like she was just a lab rat. I clamped down on my anger to keep from draining them dry.
“This type of power is rare,” Mr. Smith said. “The other subject was a relative of this one, but the trait doesn’t show in every generation.”
The massacre at the cabin flashed through my mind. The light fading in Aunt Tibby’s eyes. She’d died for me. Not because of me, but for me. Protecting me. She died because of Sarkis. And now I knew my dad hated me because of his mom. Not really because of me either. Sure, my telekinesis had sparked it, but that was because of genetics and heredity. None of this was my fault. It’d been circumstances beyond my control. Wheels set in motion long before I was born. Indignant rage filled the hole in my soul.
Time to get some control. Time to take control of my life. But I couldn’t be stupid about it. I had to form a plan. I had to be my own best advocate. Heck, I was my only advocate. Besides Moth and Horse, and no telling what their real agenda was.
I pushed my luck and upped my draw of power from the men. A walkie-talkie crackled to life nearby, and Sarkis’s voice came from it.
“I’ve got things set here. Decrease the drip to half, and bring her to the lab.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Remember, use caution,” Sarkis said. “These things are not human. She might look like an innocent girl, but she’s a monster. A very dangerous, very valuable monster.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door of the drug pump clicked open, someone pushed some buttons, and then closed it again. The other equipment and my bed were readied for movement, and they wheeled me out of the room.
We traveled the opposite way from where Horse had taken me to find my mother. We passed two hallway intersections, the echoes of the bed wheels and the men’s footsteps loosening as we passed, then constricting again as the walls on either side returned. At the third intersection, we turned left and stopped a few feet down. More keypad punching, and we were in a large cavernous-sounding room. They locked my bed and busied themselves with moving other furniture and talking among themselves about where equipment was to be placed.
“You six go wait in observation,” Sarkis said. “I don’t want it too crowded in here.”
After some retreating footsteps, I felt eight people in the room—all men by the sounds of their voices. Within a few minutes, power buzzed through me.
“Stop the drug pump,” Sarkis said, and someone complied.
My immunity to the drug had kicked in more than an hour ago. I felt no difference when it was shut off, but I pretended to wake up. Sarkis’s face hovered over me when I opened my eyes. His smug smile and oozing aura made me gag.
“Now, now,” he said. “It’s just the drugs wearing off.”
“No. I’m pretty sure it was you,” I said and gagged again. The man’s energy was absolutely toxic.
He chuckled, and I pulled against my restraints.
“We’ll remove those in a moment. First, we need to understand each other and lay some ground rules.”
I pulled air into my lungs and concentrated on not getting sick.
“Really,” I said. “Can you please step away fro
m me. Your aura is making me gag.”
That wiped the smarmy grin from his face. Irritation flashed in his eyes, but he backed up to a monitor on a stand.
“First, the ground rules,” he said.
He flicked the monitor on, revealing my mother zip-tied to the chair in her room. Dark Clothes Guy from the Escalade stood beside her.
Sarkis’s grin was back, looking like a demented kid pulling the wings off a fly.
“You cooperate, and Mr. Jones won’t have to punish your mother.”
Power balled and burned in my chest. I fought to keep it there, dealing with the pain.
“Leave my mother alone,” I said through clenched teeth. A stainless steel tray launched itself off a table in the corner and smashed against the far wall.
“Mr. Jones. Level one,” Sarkis said into the walkie-talkie.
Jones shook my mother’s chair, and she screamed in fear.
“That’s level one, Ms. Burns,” Sarkis said. “Would you like to see level five?”
“No,” I said, clamping down harder on the surging energy singing through my body.
Sarkis snapped his fingers and motioned to a chair. One of the gorilla-like men in the room pulled the chair away from the table it was tucked under.
“You will sit in that chair, and do only what I ask of you, or your mother will pay the consequences,” Sarkis said. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.” My teeth were so tightly clenched the word came out “Yesch.”
Moth appeared midair and flitted across the room to land on the chair. Some of the tension drained from my body, and I almost cried with relief. I blew out a breath and smiled. Control. I needed control. I didn’t have a plan yet, but I had to be focused and calm.
“Yes. I understand,” I said sweetly. “Let’s get this over with.”
Momentary concern flashed across the Sarkis’s face. I unfocused a little and was perversely happy to see orange worry swirl through the black and gray of his aura.
“No tricks,” he said.
I rolled my eyes for effect. “Okay. So unstrap me.”
He hesitated before he motioned to Mr. Smith to unstrap me. Mr. Smith motioned to a goon next to him to do the dirty work. Coward. I grinned at Smith and did my best to squint my eyes and look evil. He stepped back and looked uncomfortable, and another wave of perverse happiness washed over me.
The straps loosened, and I sat up. Two of the men stepped back and tensed. I acted like I was trying to get off the bed, and then put my hand to my head.
“I’m a little dizzy. I need some help,” I said.
Sarkis nodded to two of his men and they advanced and took one of my arms each to help me from the bed. The direct contact put my energy reserves over the top.
They led me to the chair, moving the IV pole and machinery that was attached to the sticky leads on my head, arms, and torso with me. I sat, and Clark Kent detached the probes on my scalp and replaced them with a cap of round sensors the size of fat dimes with wires connecting them like a high-tech shower cap. He checked all the wires leading to a computer-ish medical device on a bench behind my seat.
“We’re a go,” he said to Sarkis and then sat in the chair across from me.
The room was about thirty feet by thirty feet. It was surprisingly bare, but scrape marks on the floor showed that they’d recently emptied it, probably fearing that I’d destroy their expensive equipment. Smart guys. The walls were the same yellowed off-white of my room and the halls, and the ceiling was twenty feet at least with a bank of darkened windows high up along one wall. Six bodies watched from behind the glass, their energy glowing dark gold with anticipation.
Moth settled on my shoulder.
“Do I get any more animals now?” I whispered.
Your path does not require it at this time, Moth answered.
I sighed, and then brightened when I noticed that Clark Kent and Dr. Sarkis looked worried at my whispering. Clark fidgeted with a few items on the table. I counted twelve shapes resting there, ranging from cubes, to balls, to triangles and trapezoids.
“Okay,” I said. “What do I have to do?”
Clark adjusted his glasses and picked up a clipboard. He glanced at two cameras, one mounted behind him to his left and one mounted diagonally across the room in the other corner. Satisfied, he turned his attention back to me.
“Um, well, yes. I’d like you to concentrate and levitate one of these items if you can.”
“Which one?” I asked.
“Any of them. Take your pick.”
I looked over the items on the table as if deciding.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Which one would you lift?”
Clark looked uncomfortable. Clearly he hadn’t anticipated this question.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“The round one looks nice, don’t you think?” I asked.
He studied the round one.
“Of course, the triangle is interesting, too,” I said.
“Well, I . . . I don’t know,” he said.
“Oh for the love of—” Sarkis said. He stormed over to the table and lifted a conical piece. “Pick this one up.”
He slammed the piece back on the table and retreated to the corner.
I shrugged my shoulders at Clark in an “oh well” gesture and squinted at the cone as if I were concentrating really hard. Then I grunted like maybe I was constipated and had to hold back a chuckle. I finally let out a breath and leaned back in my seat.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” I said. “It’s just too hard. I think maybe I’ll try the square one.”
“For God’s sake,” Sarkis said. “You threw a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man twenty feet away at the university.”
I gave a wide-eyed glance at Mr. Smith.
“Two-fifty, Mr. Smith? Really?” I said. “Wow, someone needs a diet.”
“That’s it,” Sarkis said, keying the walkie-talkie. “Mr. Jones—”
“No,” I shouted. “Okay, okay. I’ll lift the darn thing.”
All the pieces lifted off the table and hovered four feet above it.
“Tell that man to step away from my mother,” I said to Sarkis, letting anger seep into my voice.
His eyes and the eyes of his men were all on the shapes floating in the air. A few of them backed up. Without taking his eyes off the shapes, Sarkis keyed the mike.
“Stand down, Jones.”
I checked the monitor and found Jones standing a few feet from my cringing mom. Seeing her like that flashed me back to too many scenes of her cringing in front of my father.
“Sir,” a voice announced from the tinny speaker in the ceiling. “We just lost all brain function.”
“What?” Sarkis shouted.
“All her EEG lines just went flat,” the voice said. “They were almost all off the chart, then they just went flat.”
Sarkis glared at me. “Did you do that?”
I nodded.
“How?” he asked.
“I just thought of someone I dislike almost as much as I dislike you,” I said, and I let the memory of my father go.
“Sir, the readings are back,” the tinny voice announced.
Clark rushed to the machines behind me and checked a few paper tape printouts.
“That’s impossible,” he said. “No one can control these readouts.”
I wanted to offer to draw him a puppy with it, but I wasn’t sure I really could, and I didn’t want to push them that far. Playing with them was entertaining and kept my mind off my stress and worry, but I didn’t want to get to the point where they would hurt my mom.
One of the men backed into a stainless steel cart and a tray of instruments crashed to the ground. I jumped, and the shapes I levitated shot in all directions, hitting people, walls, and equipment. The blocks took on a mind of their own, crashing and ricocheting like pinballs. The bank of windows above us shattered, and the people behind it scattered, taking cover.
I hit the ground during the mel
ee and wound up staring through the table legs at Clark, who was trying to take shelter under his chair. I’d have found it funny, but I was too busy trying to be small in the midst of men shouting and running, glass breaking, and machines exploding in fireworks of sparks. I’d come almost full circle to my database programming class a few days ago. It was pathetic and disturbing on an enormous scale.
Something sparked behind me and a scorched scent and acrid smoke wafted through the air. I took a cue from Clark and used my chair as a shield and peeked behind it to find the equipment hooked to my sensor cap taking offense to the cone and trapezoid blocks embedded in its front panel. I ripped the cap off and threw it aside before it could fry my brain or even worse, my hair.
Something clamped down on my arm. Sarkis knelt beside me, blood pouring from a head wound and the beginnings of what looked like a magnificent shiner.
“Stop this now, or your mother—”
“I didn’t do this on purpose,” I said. “My little gift doesn’t do well when startled. It’s not my fault your man over there is a klutz.”
He gave my arm a shake for good measure then shoved me away from him. The blocks had settled, some of them stuck in walls, some in equipment, some just sat bloody on the floor. I knew I liked those blocks.
“Get her back on the bed and strap her down,” Sarkis said as he grabbed the table and heaved himself into a very unmanly ducking crouch.
The few men who were still standing looked at one another, waiting for someone to move first.
“Now,” Sarkis bellowed.
Two of the younger men, obviously low on the totem pole and expendable, came forward and hoisted me off the floor. They had me fastened to the bed so fast my head spun from the movement.
“Get this place cleaned up,” Sarkis said, holding a lab coat to his head wound. “Dial that drug pump to maximum and get her back to her room.”
I pretended to go to sleep when they adjusted the drug pump. They disconnected me from the rest of the broken equipment and wheeled me to my room. The two of them locked my bed wheels and left me alone. Clark wasn’t with us; he may have still been under the table for all I knew. His absence meant I didn’t get hooked back up to any monitoring machines for the time being.