“Can we get the movie going?” Scott asked, wiping his hands on his pants and leaving behind dark water marks where he touched. “I don’t want to be out too late tonight.”
“Why?” Zack asked, peering at him with snarky amusement. “You afraid of the dark or are you gonna start going to bed early like an old man?”
“Yep,” Scott said with a nod as he slid back onto the couch in front of my widescreen TV, “I am going to bed early tonight. I want to be in bed by nine so I can be back out again before ten.”
“Why would you go to bed just so you can get back up again?” Kat asked with a frown. “That doesn’t make any sense— oh.” The rest of us remained silent as her hand came up to her face, covering it from sight.
“Movie?” Scott asked again, a Cheshire smile twisting his lips into a grin as he turned his head around to look at me, still at the table.
After starting the movie, I settled down and let myself begin to relax, my preparations done. The couches were set up in a right angle in the little pit that was my living room. Scott and Kat sat on one couch, Kat’s head resting on Scott’s shoulder, her blond hair entangled in his brown, fuzzy mohair-looking sweater. I pondered that fashion statement until I realized she was wearing a similar one and that she had picked the ensemble out for both of them.
Reed sat next to me, slouching against the big, overstuffed armrest. He turned his head to give me a casual look. I didn’t blame him for keeping his distance; after all, a brush of skin contact with me for more than a few seconds was painful. I returned his smile and watched him lean his head against the back of the couch, his focus back on the TV screen where Keanu Reeves was running into a flip off a pillar as bullets tore the lobby of the building apart around him, gray stone turning to dust and flashing through the air as he moved in slow motion.
“I could do that,” I said under my breath. The bullets fly around Keanu and his billowing black trench coat as he kicked a black-clad guard so hard the man flew through the air.
“That looks so fake,” Scott said. “How old is this movie, anyway?”
“1999,” Zack said. “I was in middle school at the time, and it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen when my dad rented it for us to watch.”
“You’re kinda like that creepy thirty-year old guy that waits for his teenage girlfriend outside the local high school,” Scott said, shaking his head.
“Excuse me?” I said with a raised eyebrow. “He’s twenty-five and I’m eighteen. Your girlfriend had a centennial.”
“What?” Kat’s ears perked up. “Yeah, but I don’t remember any of it. I’m just as mature as you guys.”
“Setting the bar kinda low there, Princess,” Reed said under his breath.
I saw Scott laugh, his face split into a wide grin. “She may not remember any of it, but I’m telling you she’s got muscle memory from—”
Kat slapped him on the shoulder, her mouth open in faux outrage. “Shush!”
“I rest my case,” Reed said with an upturned eyebrow.
It got quiet again after that and the noise of the onscreen action took over. I leaned my head against Zack’s arm, and felt his heavy sweater against the back of my neck. I lolled my head to look at him as he watched the movie, focused intently on the screen. He was handsome, still as much so as the first time I had seen him. His spiked sandy blond hair and brown eyes were winning combination to me. My eyes followed his smooth jawline, and I found myself wanting to reach out and run my fingers over his face, no glove, but I resisted. I settled against his arm and watched the movie, feeling warm. The smell of the food and the light dab of my boyfriend’s cologne combined into a single, hearty, familiar aroma that put me at ease.
The last light was dying outside the windows, the sun sinking below the horizon. The flickering of the TV from the movie was reassuring, and kept me looking back even as my eyelids started to get heavy. I took a slow breath, and a moment later I jerked back to wakefulness. The sun was gone, the TV was off, and Zack was looking at me with a faint smile.
“Did I fall asleep?” I asked, blinking at him.
“Yep,” he said, still sweetly endearing. He had a glove on his hand, and it brushed against my cheek, coming to rest next to my eye as he kissed me on the temple.
I looked around; the couches were empty. “Everyone else…did they leave?”
“Yeah,” he said softly. “They left a while ago, when the movie was over. We didn’t want to wake you.”
“Did they at least have fun?”
“Yes,” he said and brushed his hand against my hair, stirring my bangs.
“Oh, good.” I ran a gloved hand over my face, as though I could brush the sleepiness out of my eye. I felt wetness at the corner of my mouth and wiped at it. “Was I drooling?”
He laughed under his breath. “Just a little.”
I felt sleep bear down on me again, teasing my eyes to close. “Okay. If they’re all gone, I’m gonna go back to sleep.”
“Okay,” he said in a whisper. “I’ll carry you to your room.” I didn’t protest as I felt him take up my weight and lift me from the couch. I heard him strain as he did it, but every step was smooth, and he was warm; I was pressed against his chest, the soft cotton of his shirt, with his smell filling my nose.
He lay me down on the bed and I felt his lips again, this time on mine. “See you tomorrow, sweetheart.”
“Stay,” I said, and my hand went to his face, and I traced the line of his jaw as I watched him through half-closed eyes.
“You want me to?”
“Mmmhmm.”
I rolled to the far side of the bed and felt it shift as he got in, but he kept a foot of space between us. It was the only way to be sure I wouldn’t accidentally roll over in the middle of the night and press my face against his. I could hear his breathing in the darkened room. The lamps outside radiated a faint glow that spread along the ceiling and the corners of the room. After a moment I heard him murmur something. “I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too, Zack.” My hand made its way across the bed and found his in the usual place, and I felt our fingers interlace through the leather both of us wore. It should have been so cold, so distant, but I felt the warm reassurance of his touch, even through the cowhide. I threaded my fingers through his and gave a gentle squeeze before I drifted off again.
“Hey,” Zack said, his face clear in front of mine. We lay on the bed, and the light was more intense now, sparkling against the walls, almost surreal. Zack’s skin carried a darker tone, as though the shadows around the room infused it, casting him in stark black and white contrast.
“Hey,” I said, and reached out. My gloves were gone, and so were my sleeves, and everything else. Naked, my fingers brushed against his jaw, he drew a sharp breath and his eyes closed. “Hurts?”
“Just the opposite,” he said, suddenly close to me, his skin pressed against mine. “I could stand some more of it.” He smiled without showing his teeth. “So, does this make you the girl of my dreams?”
“You always use that cheesy line, you know.”
His kisses were like fire, like a sweet hot shade of touch. I knew they weren’t real, yet they felt fuller than the real thing. I looked into his eyes and felt the stir of something else there, like I could look deeper into him, and I resisted the call from within to do it. I focused on the sense of his skin against mine in the dream, and held onto that moment, that feeling.
“How do you do this?” he moaned as I ran a hand over his chest, causing him to tingle.
I could feel what he felt as I did it. “Dreamwalking is part of my metahuman abilities,” I said, kissing him on the neck and sending him into ecstasy. “You know that.”
“Yeah, but I get the feeling that the other people you’ve talked to in your dreams didn’t get this…” He shuddered, his mouth opened slightly and he let out short, gasping breaths, “…sensation from being in a dream with you.”
“True,” I said, and kissed him on the bicep, caus
ing him to sigh loudly. “But that’s because with them, I was insubstantial; a ghost without touch.” I felt myself fade into a shadow, as though I had become blurry, and I passed through him, reappearing at his back, where I planted a series of slow kisses and a caress along his shoulder, causing him to shudder. “I’m only real in your dreams.”
“I’m…not complaining. But you seem pretty real when I’m awake, too.”
“Yeah, but you can’t touch me there. Not like this. Not like here. I wish we could…” I ran a hand over his shoulder.
“This is working plenty well enough for me,” he said and moaned again as I traced my fingers along his spine. “This is unlike anything I’ve ever…it’s just…so good.”
I smiled and kissed him again, back in front of him now. I looked into his eyes through the haze of the dreamwalk, and I paused. His eyes were normally perfect, creamy brown, like the color of sugared and creamed coffee. “What?” he moaned as I hesitated, and he pushed himself against me again, brushing against my skin, and he sighed, a little noise of ecstasy. I held fast, though, unmoving, as he moaned in pleasure from the feel of my skin against his in this dream world, and he dissolved into the sounds of a man deeply, totally satisfied.
I held back though, frozen, unable to move, locked into the dream and the horror of thoughts I couldn’t—wouldn’t—share with him.
His brown eyes were gone, replaced with blue—bright, crystalline, cerulean—exactly like the ones I saw when I looked in the mirror every morning.
4.
I walked into Ariadne’s office at the crack of nine the next morning to find her already behind her desk, a file in her hands, her reading glasses on. She wore them infrequently, only when she was actually reading, and as soon as I appeared at the door she hurried to put them back in her desk drawer, laying the file down in front of her.
“Why do you do that?” I asked as I flopped down in the chair across from her.
“Do what?” she asked, almost looking innocent.
“Put away your glasses when someone comes into the room?” I nodded at the drawer to her side where she had stowed them. “Everyone knows you wear glasses when you read.”
“I…” She paused, as though thinking about it. “I don’t know, actually. Just one of those things I’ve never given any thought to. Vanity, I suppose.”
“But you don’t wear make-up and you don’t worry about how you dress…?”
I watched her face sag a little, before she formed a tight smile. “What can I do for you, Sienna?”
“I’m here for the interrogation. I thought I was gonna play bad cop, worse cop, with Fries this morning.”
“Not ‘til eleven,” she said, picking up the file and opening her desk drawer again. She slid her glasses on and looked at me over the half-lenses. “I do have something you can do until then, though.”
“Oh?” I perked up. “I hope it involves beating someone up. Because I like to play to my strengths, you know. Also, physics. I’m good at math.”
“Not physics, nor beating people up. You’re behind on your quarterly physical exams,” she said, running a finger over the file as she read along with it. “You need to see Dr. Sessions.”
“I’ll get around to that one of these days,” I said.
“You’ll go today, right now, if you want to continue to be cleared for duty.” She looked up and found me with her gaze, more severe than usual. “This isn’t negotiable, and it isn’t just for you; we expand our knowledge base about metas from these exams, so help us out, will you?”
“O-kaaay,” I said, dragging out the last syllable. “But only because you asked me nicely.”
“Thank you,” she said as I made my way to the door. “And Sienna?” She looked up at me as I turned around at the door. “Try not to kill Fries. Now that he’s here, we want him alive.”
“You sure? Because you told me if I felt in peril, I could kill, so it might be that he gets a little smart-mouthed with me and I feel threatened—”
“No.”
“What if I didn’t kill him, maybe just took a spleen or something?”
“No.”
“But it’d grow back!”
She shook her head. “Take it easy on him. It’s an interrogation. You’re there to extract information, not his gallbladder.”
“The gallbladder would be easier. Maybe less messy, too.”
“Parks is an expert interrogator,” she said. “Follow his lead. You’re only there as a counterpoint, watch him work. This isn’t a one-time interrogation so don’t be surprised if you don’t get much in the way of results. We have him now, there’s no reason to get impatient when he’s not going anywhere.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
I made my way across the campus. I was successful at suppressing the thought in the back of my mind about Zack’s eyes turning into my own during our dream rendezvous last night. After all, it was just a dream. I toyed with the idea of bringing it up to Dr. Sessions, but he knew so little about succubi I doubted it would be of any use to me, though he was certain to fawn over it like he did any other piece of irrelevant but interesting data.
The cool air was comfortable against my skin; I preferred the chill of autumn now that it was here, because I didn’t look so out of place walking the campus in long sleeves, long pants, gloves and a coat as I did in the summertime. Talk about stares, especially when I went to the mall. Just as well, the skin on my legs and arms was beyond pale; I might as well have been a vampire. Well, not exactly like one. At least not the ones I’d seen.
A pile of leaves had blown into the small entry alcove to the rebuilt science building. It was different than it had been before Aleksandr Gavrikov had blown it up; the old building was brick, a 1970s facade and an interior not much more updated. Now it was all new and modern concrete, a more rounded profile instead of the square, blocky facility it had been before. I wondered how much of the Directorate had been destroyed and rebuilt since I had arrived. The proportion was not in my favor, whatever it was.
I knocked at the door to Dr. Sessions’ office. The doctor looked up from his desk at my arrival, his bald head shining by the light of a lamp that was lit on his desk. He looked at me through his overlarge glasses, taking a moment to readjust them. “Oh, Sienna. Good.” He blinked a few times, and then stood up, hitting his knee on the underside of his desk. I watched him cringe. “Ouch. If you’ll come with me.” He gestured toward the hall as he limped his way past me.
I followed him past the new drywall panels, and the glass windows that looked into the various labs. There were a few men and women in white coats working within them, messing around with who-knows-what as I walked by. We stopped at a room with a wooden door and he opened it for me. I shrugged and walked in. “Gown on the back of the door,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Doc, is this really necessary?” I looked at him with constrained irritation. “Dr. Perugini has told you I’m healthy after conducting a physical, I feel fine—”
“Research, Sienna,” he said with a suppressed smile that tightened the lines around his eyes. “We understand so very little about how metahuman abilities work, frankly, so it’s important to take every opportunity to further our understanding. I promise I’ll make it as quick as possible.”
“Fine,” I said with a sigh, and he closed the door. I took off my clothes in silence as I put on the gown, felt the cold touch of the tile floor on my feet, the nip of the air as I removed my shirt and jeans. The heat exchange above me was faintly letting out some warm air, which helped. I sat on the examination table, a padded monstrosity that sat in the corner. The faint smell of alcohol from the disinfectant station above the sink permeated the room, and the soft groan of the table felt like it could be audible three buildings away. “I’m ready!” I called out, hoping Dr. Sessions was still standing outside the door and hadn’t wandered back to his office and forgotten about me.
The door creaked open and he stepped inside, wearing a buttoned-up lab
coat. “This won’t take long,” he said, as he closed the door behind him. A blue latex glove rested on the handle as he closed it, catching my attention.
“That won’t protect you,” I said, pointing to the glove. “Keep that in mind.”
“I’m well aware of the spectrum of your powers,” he said as he circled around behind me. I kept a wary eye on him as he walked to the sink and started pulling things out of the cabinets above the counter. “I am, after all, the one who did the experiments to test those powers.”
Shortly after I had arrived, Sessions and a few of his lab assistants (I never caught their names) took turns touching my exposed skin. It never lasted more than a few seconds, but they determined the threshold at which most people begin to experience effects from my touch (three seconds) and how long it takes the average human to pass out (about six seconds). For obvious reasons, we never definitively answered how long it would take me to kill a person. I was pretty sure it was something like twenty seconds. I’d never seen them pass out from it, though. I’d just seen them scream all the way to the end.
“I’ll need to draw some blood,” Sessions said. “I’d also like to get saliva samples—”
“You want me to spit in a petri dish?” I looked at him with a combination of loathing and skepticism. “Are you a real doctor or did you get your degree in the Caribbean?”
“Harvard Medical School,” he said with aplomb. “Highest Honors.”
“Your mother must be so proud.”
“Oh, she is,” he said, as though what he were saying were of no more import than giving me a weather update. “Very proud indeed.”
“I wonder what that’s like,” I said, muttering under my breath.
“Shall we begin?” He lifted his head up and smiled brightly, causing me to stir. I felt his touch as he pushed up my sleeve, and I watched him as he started to draw blood. His blue latex glove was on my bicep, and I resisted the urge to flex hard and knock it away just to show off. My muscles didn’t look all that big. Actually, they were roughly the size of any of the other non-meta women at the Directorate. I had the strength where it counted, though—performance.
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