by Koch, Gini
Christopher came over, knelt down and took care of it. “Jeff, why didn’t you tell me?” He put his hand on Martini’s upper arm.
“Couldn’t . . . promised . . .”
“It’s okay, Jeff. It’s all right.” I held him more tightly and tried not to be afraid.
“He’s fading fast,” Claudia said as she came over. “We have to give him some adrenaline.” She had a needle in her hand.
Christopher grabbed her wrist as I shouted, “Nothing from this room!” Claudia looked confused. “Everything in here’s suspect. Beverly wasn’t kidding—Yates doesn’t want Jeff or Christopher to reproduce. Jeff needs adrenaline when he’s like this, so don’t trust something that says adrenaline if it’s in here.”
Claudia shook her head. “We don’t have any more time.”
I couldn’t let him die, couldn’t lose him. But somehow, I knew what to do. I put my hands on both sides of his face, so he had to look at me. “Jeff, baby, it’s okay. Just look at me, only at me. I know it hurts, all the emotions, all the feelings. They aren’t trying to hurt you, baby. Come on, you can shut them out, I know you can.”
“Can’t . . . burned out . . .” His eyes closed.
“Jeffrey Stuart Martini, you open your eyes and look at me.” He did, and he looked shocked. “You know how to block. I know you’re tired, but it’s not an option. Yates is still out there. If you die, he wins. You promised me you’d never let that happen.”
“Mother?” Christopher whispered.
Lorraine came over and put her hand on his shoulder. “Hush.”
I could see Martini trying and also see him failing. My mind kicked—I had to do something, too. Just as Beverly had, I needed to send emotions to him. But not the ones that caused pain.
I focused my thoughts onto how being around him made me feel—safe, happy, smart, funny, pretty. I concentrated on what making love to him had been like, how incredible and satisfying. And I thought about him and Christopher and what they meant to each other. “You can’t leave us, Jeff,” I whispered. “We both need you around too much.”
It was helping, but it wasn’t enough. “Take care of him for me,” Martini managed to gasp out.
I had to hold onto him. There was only one thing I hadn’t done, one emotion I hadn’t allowed to surface. I admitted to myself that the emotion was real. I thought about what being without him would mean and how I’d realized somewhere in the last two days that I couldn’t face it. There was a word for this feeling, but I’d been afraid to say it, because I wasn’t sure if it was just lust.
But it wasn’t.
His eyes opened, and he managed a half-smile. “Really?”
“Really.”
He winced. “Guess I’d better . . . try to hang on, then.”
“I’d appreciate it.” I laid him down on the floor and wrapped myself around his head, stroking his hair and kissing his forehead. I could feel him getting a little stronger.
Footsteps, a lot of them. I could feel and hear them. “We’ve got company coming.”
The girls flanked us, Christopher, Tim, and Reader moved in front of us, and the five pilots stayed spread around the room. Everyone had their guns cocked and aimed. We were ready, remembering the Alamo. Walker waited until everyone was set, then he flung the door open.
CHAPTER 54
“PUT THOSE GUNS DOWN,” my mother snapped.
No one moved. “Um, guys? Meet my mother.” No one moved. “Oh, and guns down.” All the weapons lowered.
“That’s my girl,” Martini murmured.
Mom looked at the scene. She was next to me and Martini in a moment. “Jeff looks awful,” she said as she pulled a hypodermic out of the pouch around her waist.
“It’s been a crappy day,” he croaked.
“Gee, thanks.”
He managed to grab my hand. “Other than you.”
I kissed his forehead. Mom handed me the hypodermic and a vial. “Excuse me?”
“He’ll get like this more often than you’ll be happy about. You want to learn how to save his life now or when you’re alone?”
She had a point. I took the hypodermic. Mom talked me through how to fill it.
Claudia pointed to a spot on his chest. “He needs it right in his hearts when he’s like this. You slam it in, then push the plunger down.”
I was going to plunge a huge needle into Martini’s chest. This didn’t sound exactly like “good girlfriend” material. He squeezed my hand. “I’d like to live.”
“Girlfriend, just pretend you’re mad at him,” Reader offered.
Actually, a good plan. I raised the needle and hit the magic spot on his chest. He bellowed, but I saw his body movements start to come back. I pulled the needle out once all the contents were inside him. Claudia disposed of it. I was too busy hanging onto Martini, who was thrashing.
“This is normal,” Lorraine hollered as Melanie and Emily brought a gurney in. Christopher, Reader, and Tim helped us move Martini onto it.
“This is normal?” We were strapping him down. He was still bellowing.
“It’s ugly, I know.” Claudia said next to me. “But only when he’s this close to dying. Otherwise, it’s not too awful.”
“Wonderful.” A thought occurred. “How often is he close to dying?”
“Every month, month and a half,” Reader answered.
Mom shrugged. “I told you to choose wisely.”
Christopher grinned. “Thanks.” He looked over at me. “He has to go into isolation. He’ll need more than twelve hours, not sure how much. You can’t go in there.”
I kissed Martini’s forehead. “Hang on, Jeff. I’ll be waiting for you.”
He moved his head and kissed my mouth. Even strapped to a gurney and at the edge of death the man was a great kisser. “Good.” His head dropped back, and he stopped thrashing.
Christopher, the girls, and their pilots ran off, escorted by a few other Dazzlers, their mothers included.
“Where’s Yates?” I asked Mom as we left the area.
“He didn’t show.” She sounded angry and frustrated. I could relate.
“We have what looks like all of Al Dejahl in custody.”
“Yeah, I know.” She smiled. “At least it’ll slow him down for a while.”
“Yeah, no more Fugly Army, no more terrorist scum. He’ll have to start recruiting again.”
“That’s what worries me.”
“How’s Dad?”
“Fine. He’s with the translation team. They’re fixing up Beverly’s misinformation.”
“So, in his element.”
“Pretty much. Duchess the Wonder Dog, as the other gals are calling her, is there, too.” Mom was quiet. “You sure you want to pick Jeff?”
“Over Christopher?” She nodded. “Over anybody, even Christopher, so yes.”
“Okay.”
“But Christopher probably comes along with the Martini package, so you’ll get to keep the son you always wanted.”
She chuckled. “Nice work on Beverly.”
“I killed her.” I didn’t feel remorseful at all.
Mom gave me a long look as we made the elevator banks and headed down to the transient floor. “I know.”
“Who told you?”
Mom shrugged as we got off the elevator. “She was trying to kill the man you love. I didn’t have to question what you’d do. Besides, who else but you would have used a baseball bat?”
“It’s not like I spent my life hitting people with a Louisville Slugger.”
“No, but trust me when I say I’ve seen you in action now, and using Beverly’s head for batting practice is definitely your style.” We got to my room and went in.
“Superfast beings shouldn’t piss off the comics geek-girl.”
“Glad all the money we spent on those things has paid off.” Mom put her hands on my shoulders. “You don’t feel remorse now, but you might later. Just remember—it’s one thing to kill an innocent. That’s hard, sometimes impossible, to g
et over. But many times evil needs to be killed in order to be stopped. And Beverly was evil.”
“I know.” I hugged her. “Thanks for backing me up, Mom.”
She kissed my head as she hugged me back. “Thanks for letting me.” She sighed. “I’m going to start identifying which A-Cs might have been involved in this with Beverly. It’s possible she was acting alone, but unlikely.”
“Emily and Melanie feel the same, but they have no idea who could be involved. Me, I suggest you start with the rest of Beverly’s encryption team.”
Mom gave me a “duh” look. “Thank God you’re here.” Her sarcasm knob was turned up to eleven.
“Hey, I’ve gotten used to dealing with people who trust everyone. What should I do?”
“Take a shower. You need one, and it’ll help. You won’t have Jeff to keep you occupied for at least a day, based on how he looked.”
“Will do. Oh, and Mom? There’s an abandoned drainage pipe on the fifteenth floor. It’s how we got in, and I think we should put some security on it.”
She smiled. “That’s my girl. I’ll take care of it.”
She left, and I got undressed. My Aerosmith shirt was the worse for wear but still salvageable. Same with my jeans and even my Converse. I was about to step into the shower when there was a knock at the door.
I looked frantically for a bathrobe and found one hanging inside the bathroom door. This was definitely a five-star hotel. I wrapped it around me and answered the door.
Jerry was standing there. “Hey, I see you’re about to shower, but I’m clear that Commander Martini has the prior claim. The guys and I just wanted to give you something.”
“It couldn’t wait?” I let him in.
“Nope. We have to head back for debriefing.”
“Even the boys with Claudia and Lorraine?” My poor girls.
“Yes. However, Commander White’s requested we be moved to Centaurion Division as soon as possible. Our superiors estimate the five of us’ll be here within a month.”
“I’m really glad.”
“Me too. Especially since we’re assigned to your team.”
“Come again?”
He grinned. “You might want to talk to Commander White about it, but apparently you’re in charge of a new active division, and he figured you’d want your regular team with you.”
Christopher wasn’t dumb at all. But this was sort of life-changing news. If you join with us, you won’t be going back there anyway. Well, White had warned me.
“I’m proud to have you guys reporting to me.”
“Yeah, our first orders are to teach you how to fly.” Jerry grinned. “I volunteered.”
“No one I’d rather learn from.”
The smile left his face, and he reached into his shirt pocket. “We wanted to give you something. So you’d remember all of us, just in case something happens between now and then.” He handed me a photo. There were six young men in uniform in it. I recognized five of them. One I didn’t. He was about Jerry’s age, slender, with strawberry blond hair and a great smile.
I turned the picture over—they’d labeled who each of them were. The one I didn’t know was Lt. Wm. Cox.
“He would have been proud to serve under you, too,” Jerry said quietly. “We all loved him like a brother. Believe me when I say this, Kitty—we’ll follow you to hell and back for how you reacted when he died. Not a lot of people would charge a monster, after all, and not too many more would worry about the family of someone they’d never met.”
I nodded. I couldn’t speak. He kissed the top of my head. “I’ll let myself out. And see you in about a month, Commander Katt.”
The door closed, but I didn’t get up. I just stared at the picture. I finally forced myself to put it somewhere safe—into an inner pocket inside my purse. Then I went into the shower.
I stood under the warm water and finally let myself cry. I cried for what seemed like hours as the water washed my tears down the drain. Finally, though, the tears stopped. And I was left with one certainty: This wasn’t over yet. I wasn’t letting William Cox die for nothing.
CHAPTER 55
I SPENT MOST OF THE NEXT DAY and a half sleeping. I really wanted to see Martini, and during one period of actual consciousness I convinced a random A-C to take me to the isolation area.
It wasn’t one or two chambers, as I’d been naively expecting. It was over a hundred isolation chambers covering a full half of one of the lower levels. The A-C explained that all empaths needed isolation from time to time, as blocks and empathic synapses wore out. Reader had told me this, of course, but somehow I’d still imagined something small and somewhat cozy.
The A-C went about his business, and I wandered through the chambers. There was nothing cozy here, and it was easy to see why Reader felt creeped out in this area. They reminded me of large tombs with medical beds and equipment in them and not much else. Each one had a large window in the door, so you could look in. The empath inside couldn’t look out—the beds were turned so the occupant would be facing a blank wall.
Per my A-C guide, there were smaller home models for use with empathic children. There were a few of those down here, too. They looked like space-aged coffins. The mere idea of having to spend time in either kind of chamber was horrifying, but nothing compared to seeing Martini in an active one.
I reached his room. There were two A-C security guards and some medical personnel outside, monitoring. I was allowed to peek in—and a quick look was enough. There were tubes and needles going into Martini all over his body. There were even some going into his head. I wanted to break down the door, rip everything out of him, and take him away, pronto.
“You need to leave,” one of the doctors said quietly. She didn’t sound as though she was trying to be nasty.
“Why?”
“The rooms are emotion-proofed, but Commander Martini is very powerful, and he can feel your distress.” She showed me an electronic pad that was flashing red and orange.
I felt awful. “Sorry.”
She smiled. “It’s okay. Isolation is harder for nonempaths to watch than it is for the empaths themselves.”
I found that hard to believe, but didn’t argue. I headed back, but I got lost. This was like getting lost in some creepy Egyptian tomb or the Frankenstein burial ground. I wasn’t a fan, and I got jumpy fast. I kept thinking someone was following me, but every time I turned around, no one was there. A few times, I was sure I’d just missed seeing whoever it was, but I was too chicken to go find out. By the time I finally found the elevators, I was an emotional wreck. I managed to find my room, crawled into bed, and hid under the covers until I fell asleep again.
For my next bout of consciousness I wanted to talk to Reader, but he and Paul were also sequestered, though only in their rooms, not in some horrible Chamber of Horrors. I couldn’t blame them or resent it.
I spent the time instead sending a lot of text messages to a lot of people, in which I practiced lying in new and unusual ways. Work seemed to find my absence acceptable; I wasn’t sure if this was a reflection on what they thought of my daily contributions or if White had cleared things for me already. I decided not to care.
To everyone else, I managed to make what was going on with me sound totally boring, to the point where no one other than Chuckie seemed worried or even interested. Chuckie refused to buy any line I tried to pass, mostly because I refused to let him call me. He was like my mother— I couldn’t lie to him because he never fell for it—and there was no way I could hope to fool him if he could actually hear my voice.
I finally told him that my parents were with me and they were okay with things, and he let it go. I rejoiced that I’d managed to lie to one of my best friends for exactly three seconds, congratulated myself for clearly hurting Chuckie’s feelings for another three seconds, then wallowed in guilt over it for a nice long while. The guilt was exhausting, but the crying really tired me out, and I fell back asleep to dream about fighter planes somehow carryi
ng everyone I knew and cared about crashing in the desert.
By the time I dragged out of bed in the late afternoon of the second day, I was lonely, and by the time I’d wandered the whole Science Center—avoiding the Tomb of Creepiness level, supposedly for Martini’s health and well-being and not because it terrified me—I was getting pathological.
I was in full Dazzler uniform now, complete with rather sexy black Aerosole heels—at least they bought the comfortable designer shoes. My own clothes were still being cleaned, or burned, I wasn’t sure which.
Talking to my parents would have been fine, but they were both busy. Mom was with White, discussing moving part of her antiterrorism unit over to base out of the Science Center, and Dad was so deeply engrossed in the translations that a food, drink, bathroom break, and bed rest team had to be assigned to him.
Tim, Claudia, and Lorraine were still debriefing the A-Cs and American military personnel on most of what had gone on. I would be asked to give a full report in a day or so, but since I was new to everything, I was given time off.
Our dogs had the run of the place, thanks to Duchess, who was still the heroine of the day. Pretty much every Dazzler wanted her own pit bull now, and I couldn’t blame them.
The cats were still in my parent’s room, and I went to visit them, to find Christopher in there, all three cats on the sofa with him, purring up a storm.
“Your parents told me I could come in any time.”
I sat down on the sofa next to him. “That’s fine. I don’t think you’re a total jerk any more.”
He laughed. “Good to know.” He looked down at Sugarfoot, who was in his lap. “Is my mother still in your mind?”
I’d been wondering the same thing myself. “I don’t think it’s her so much as her influence.”
“What do you mean?” He still wasn’t looking at me.
“She was dying, and she knew it. Either she willed it to happen, so she wouldn’t give birth to a superbeing, or the impregnation, if we can even call it that, affected her system so badly it killed her. But she knew she was going to die.”