Wilde Storm

by S. E. Babin

  And just like that, I suspected what happened. “Because Watson was spying in order to keep tabs on us and he was followed.”

  “I wasn’t spying on you.”

  “Then what do you call it?”

  He sighed. “I cared about your mother. I cared about you. I just wanted to make sure you were doing well.”

  “How long did you lie to my father before he got suspicious?”

  He blinked in surprise. “Over a year,” he said shortly.

  “So, he sent someone to follow you and you led them right to our door.”

  Silence. I threw up my hands. “Why don’t I remember this?”

  More silence.

  A sick feeling crept into my being. “You did something to me, didn’t you? That’s why I don’t remember anything. Why I didn’t remember meeting Watson.”

  “We felt it was best to put a memory block on you.” My mother fiddled with her hands as she spoke quietly.

  “You altered my memories?” Of all the conniving and dirty things someone who loved you could do. I opened and shut my mouth a few times before I could spew the only word I wanted to say. “Why?”

  “We thought it was best at the time,” was all my stupid friend John Watson could say.

  So, my father had caught up to us at least once during our time on the run. And I couldn’t remember any of it. “Are there any other decisions you decided to make concerning my person I should know about? Am I really Sherlock’s daughter? Am I really immortal? Are you really my mother?”

  “Penelope.” Her sharp reprimand did nothing but anger me.

  I stood and towered over both of them. “I’ll say this one more time. Stop. Fucking. With My. Life.”

  I stalked out the door and slammed it behind me.

  I was over this place. I’d help Masters, but after that, I had some decisions to make. In the absence of my father, there was no one here who could stop me from making my own decisions. It was high time I embraced my legacy, faults and all. My mother was a flawed woman, and so far, everyone I’d met around here was flawed as well. I’d been forced to undermine my abilities since the time I’d been a little girl. And now that I was here, it felt like I was forced to continue doing that, but my father…he’d been the one to encourage me. So who was right here? My mother? Or my father? Whatever the truth was, I knew in my bones both of them were messed up people.

  And I couldn’t even wrap my head around Watson. I’d always felt like he’d been one of the few truly there for me and he’d been hiding a pretty big secret concerning me too. I cursed under my breath, calling them all dozens of names, and as I rounded a corner, I ran smack into Cass.

  I held out my hands to straighten her and looked her over closely. Same cool blonde hair, same intelligent gray eyes, but ever since she came back, I hadn’t let myself get too close to her. Because she’d betrayed me as well.

  Once I knew she wouldn’t fall, I offered a cool nod and kept on my way.

  “Penelope?” she called, concern coloring her voice.

  I lifted a hand in a wave and kept walking.

  I banged on the door of Aaron’s rooms, not giving a crap whether I woke him up or not. He answered the door, took one look at my face, and swung it open to allow me entrance.

  I stepped in and took a huge chance. “I have something in my rooms I need to show you. Get dressed and let’s go.”

  One blond eyebrow rose and amusement quirked his mouth. “Does this thing you want to show me involve naked time?”

  I gave him a withering stare. “Shoes. Shirt. Let’s go.”

  He snapped a mocking salute. “Five minutes, sir.”

  I plopped down on his couch and waved him away.

  Less than five minutes later, he’d pulled a t-shirt and a pair of jeans on. He hadn’t bothered to shave, not that it bothered me, but he kind of looked a bit like a pirate. He slipped a pair of loafers on and opened the door. I walked in front of him and we headed to my rooms.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked me during the silent walk.

  I shook my head once.

  “Very well.”

  I left Aaron in the living room while I rummaged around in my closet. I pulled out the box and the two vials—one the immortality serum, the other the vial I’d found in Irene’s office.

  I brought them in and set them on the coffee table.

  Aaron, to his credit, didn’t start messing with stuff, but curiosity was written all over his face.

  I picked up the first vial and held it at eye level. “This is the rest of the immortality serum my mother gave me.”

  Aaron let out a low whistle.

  Then I picked up Irene’s vial. “I found this in a locked, hidden compartment in Irene’s office. I have no idea what it is.”

  He leaned in to take a closer look. “It bears a resemblance to your father’s serum. And mine.”

  I nodded. “I thought we could use a small sample and compare them to see if it’s the same thing.”

  He pointed to the box. “So, what’s in there?”

  I shrugged. “No idea. I can’t open it.”

  “Hand it over.”

  I picked up the box and Aaron took it by the bottom. He lifted it up and studied all the sides and seams. “Interesting,” he murmured. “I’ve never seen this kind of lock before.”

  “Me neither. Any ideas on how to get it open?”

  “Have you tried fire?”

  I snorted. “And then some.”

  “We can take it to the lab.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want anyone to know about this.”

  Aaron lowered the box back to the table and gave me a considering look. “But you told me?”

  I glared. “Don’t make me regret it.”

  He raised his hands in surrender and laughed. “I’ve already made you regret too many things about me. Hopefully those days are over.”

  “Good. Masters’ daughter is here.”

  “I know. You want to get to the lab today?”

  “Yep. Let me throw on some jeans and better shoes.”

  “Take that vial so we can figure out what’s in it.”

  I was hesitant to do so, but figured it was smaller and easier to conceal. We should be able to at least get it on a slide before anyone noticed. “I’ll take Dad’s too so we can compare them.”

  “Good plan.”

  I headed to my room to change and minutes later, we were back in a mostly empty lab. Without the presence of my father, a lot of this place seemed to have lost direction. I wondered about Louise and if she was running the show. I may need to talk to her about his absence and make sure she kept order around here.

  We both slid on white lab coats and Aaron grabbed two slides and two stainless steel pipettes from the supply cabinet. He stood by me and leaned against the counter where I worked, keeping an eye on everyone to make sure they didn’t get too close. Within moments, I had samples of both serums on the slides, ready for examination. I quickly capped both and concealed them in my pockets.

  Once the first slide was secure on the scope, I leaned in to examine it. This was my father’s and I was already familiar with the look and feel of it, but wanted to refresh myself before I looked at the new one. The technology he used was foreign to me and I never fully understood what I was looking at. I was also not a chemistry expert when it came to identifying things solely by sight. I needed special equipment, but even if I had it, there was a failsafe my father put in to prevent exactly what I was trying to do. One of the many reasons no one had been able to successfully duplicate it. It would degrade as soon as someone started poking at it.

  Aaron had taken the time to fix the other slide to the microscope. I saw him look and a furrow appeared on his brow. That couldn’t be good.

  “Want to look at this one?”

  I stepped back and allowed Aaron to take my scope as I went over to his. I didn’t even have to be all the way focused to realize they were two completely different things.

  “We
ll…shit,” I whispered.

  “Yeah,” Aaron responded.

  “We need a chemistry expert to overcome the failsafe. Plus, I don’t think my dad has all the equipment here. If he does, I don’t know where it is and don’t think anyone is going to up and volunteer that info, especially when we don’t tell them what it’s for.”

  Aaron chuckled. “We don’t just need an expert. We need someone brilliant.” He peeked at the scope again. “Or someone willing to act as a test dummy.”

  That sure as hell wouldn’t be me. My test dummy days were over.

  We’d only used a single drop of it, but since we didn’t know what it was, we had to make sure we rendered the ingredients inert. “Grab the bleach.”

  Aaron laughed. “Good plan.”

  I took the second slide out and placed it into a glass bowl I’d grabbed from one of the above cabinets. Aaron came back holding a bottle and poured some inside the bowl. Whatever was on the slide flared blue and sizzled.

  I looked back to see if anyone had seen that. Fortunately, everyone appeared to be minding their own business. We continued looking into the bowl and watched as that single drop turned black and disappeared. I tossed the slide into the biohazard container, washed the bowl out, and did the same thing with the other one. There was no flare this time, just a hiss and a little smoke as whatever material was in it became rendered inert.

  “One question answered that brings up several dozen more.”

  “I know someone who can help us with it.”

  “I always get nervous when someone says they know a guy.”

  Aaron grinned. “But I do.”

  “Let’s put this one to the side and focus on the thing that got us into all this trouble in the first place.”

  Aaron headed over to the fridge. “When you’re ready, then. We’ll have to go to him. He’s…shy.”

  “Makes me want to pack a bag right now.”

  “So suspicious, sweet Penelope,” he called over his shoulder.

  “So many times burned,” I muttered to myself.

  Aaron brought over the defunct healing serum and set it down on the counter.

  “Tell me exactly what you did,” I said.

  When Aaron and Watson hooked me up to the filtering system, it was supposed to have a single tube withdrawing blood and serum in order to fool Lila. But Aaron had modified the system to force it to withdraw every drop of the immortality serum from my blood, thus somehow rendering the failsafe my father included in it ineffective. What he didn’t think about was I was never injected with the serum. It was passed to me by my mother and had molded to my DNA. It had mutated into something different and would continue to mutate every time a Holmes or someone injected with it sired a child. My mother and father were both injected, so I wasn’t sure how different I would be than other children with only one part possessing the serum, especially if that person was injected. I was a test case scenario no one had banked on.

  When Aaron tried to modify the serum to remove the immortality aspect of it and force it to work to cure diseases, he had some success, but my DNA made the serum act wonky. If wonky was the right word to describe sending diseased parts of people hurtling through space and time. My father had offered him some of the serum to experiment on, but my mother told me not to trust him. He’d given me a few drops of it and I still had it, but I wasn’t sure it would be enough. And I didn’t want to use it for fear of what the side effects would be.

  Before Gwynne had stolen it from him, he’d gone back to the drawing board and tried to find a way to remove my DNA, but now I knew it wouldn’t work. It was mutated. Not a true strain.

  “I know the serum triggers a response in the hypothalamus to stimulate anti-aging chemicals to the body.” My brow furrowed as a thought occurred to me. “Put some of it on the slide.” I’d never looked at my own DNA before and wondered if I could tell at least a little bit of what he tried to do by looking at under magnification.

  Moments later, Aaron slid over and let me look at his serum. Normally DNA looked like a twisted ladder. Mine…didn’t. I blew out a slow breath and tried not to freak out. If it looked like that when I was just immortal, what did it look like now? “Dude,” I muttered under my breath.

  “Yeah…your DNA looks like half of a Ferris wheel,” Aaron said. He wasn’t kidding.

  “I want you to draw some blood.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yep. Do it.” I held out my arm. “Right now.”

  Aaron’s eyebrows rose as if to gauge whether I was serious. Once I waggled by arm around impatiently, he headed over to the supply cabinet. He led me over to a seat, tied a piece of plastic tightly around my bicep, and tapped around, looking for a good vein. By now, we’d attracted the notice of a few lab techs. I held up a hand. “No need to worry. I asked him to.”

  They turned back to their business, but every so often I felt the weight of their stare. Aaron was a competent phlebotomist. Almost pain free and quick. He held up the vial, his mouth a thin slash of white against his tanned face.

  “Oh.” The serum in the past was a pretty silver mixed with the red of my blood. This was not even close.

  Aaron lowered the vial before anyone else could see it, unstrapped the tourniquet, and pressed a cotton ball to the puncture. I held it so he could put a bandage over it.

  He helped me out of the chair and I walked woodenly over to the microscope. I let Aaron run with it. Moments later, he exhaled heavily. “Do you want to see?” he asked.

  “Do I need to?”

  A bitter laugh broke from him. He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “I don’t know what your father did to you, darling.”

  I looked into the scope. Even though Aaron had withdrawn a vial of blood, most of it was a shimmery purple. The occasional slash of red showed through, but the large majority was pure science. I inhaled sharply and turned the dial to magnify it more. My DNA was completely unrecognizable. If that’s what it was. “I-I don’t think I’m human anymore.”

  Aaron touched me on the shoulder. “The telomeres in your DNA…they are quite long.”

  A broken half-whispered sob came from me. “I’m not an idiot. I can see exactly what they are.”

  The telomeres were essentially the caps on the end of DNA which kept the chromosomes healthy…and young. They acted much like the caps on shoelaces. Without the telomeres, the DNA frayed—causing aging and disease. But, again, normal DNA looked like a twisted ladder. My DNA now looked like tiny sunbursts, each of the spikes capped with a telomere as long as the spike. When cells replicated, the telomere shortened, but in my case, I was sporting around more telomeres than any other human on Earth.

  “I’m immortal.” I thought I probably was, but this solidified it for me again.

  Aaron squeezed my shoulder. “Darling…I think you’re a lot more than just immortal.” He disposed of the slide and carefully ruined all evidence of my DNA. Instead of throwing the slide away, he wrapped it carefully and tucked it into his shirt pocket. I watched as he meticulously cleaned up the area and gathered everything. “We can work on the rest of this later. We need to go somewhere to talk. Privately.”

  I nodded, numb.

  Aaron hung his lab coat up and helped me shrug mine off. He led me through the doors and when I opened my mouth to speak, he cut me off. “Not now.”

  He steered me into my room and barked at me to get my DAR. I ran into the room, dug in one of my drawers, and came up with it. I was strapping it on my wrist when Aaron punched something in to it, grabbed my arm, and took me with him.

  17

  I swayed on my feet as the scenery came into place. I didn’t recognize it. We were in the middle of a forest somewhere. Very little light poured through the trees. It was chilly but beautiful.

  “A little warning next time?”

  Aaron didn’t seem inclined to agree. “I worked with COTO for a long, long time, Penelope. I’ve worked with scientists like your father, not as brilliant and possibly not as d
riven, but motivated all the same.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “When is the last time your father examined you?”

  I thought back. “Maybe a week or two?”

  “There’s no way to know how much your DNA has changed in that time. I don’t say this to scare you, but I think if you aren’t in danger now, you will be.”

  “From my father?”

  Aaron shook his hands. “From his enemies. I’ve never seen the likes of you. I’ve never seen DNA altered like that and the person survive. Are you having any problems?”

  I hesitated.

  “God’s above, Penelope! I’m half in love with you and you still don’t trust me!”

  My mouth fell open and tears pricked the backs of my eyes.

  He squeezed his eyes together and cursed. “Look. Just please. Please trust me.” He gripped me by my upper arms. I hadn’t told him about Watson and my mother yet.

  I pulled him down to the forest floor to sit beside me.

  And I told him everything.

  “What about when we were in Irene’s building? Did you experience it then?”

  I had to think about it. Everything had been moving so fast. “I don’t think so, but sometimes I don’t remember things when they’re heated like that. When it does come on, it feels like double vision. Seconds before it happens, I see an image of it in my mind. Then it just goes away, but my body reacts and it reacts correctly every single time.”

  “And your memories?”

  When I told him about the memory block my mother and Watson had placed on me, he looked sick and appalled. “Your father must have damaged the block somehow. It’s weakened and your memories are leaking when you sleep.”

  “I just wonder what else they’re keeping from me.”

  He pulled me closer into a hug and I leaned on his shoulder. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”

  I hadn’t had much time. “Mom is leaving and Sherlock is indisposed.”

  He snorted at that one.

  “He’s all but made me invisible to the Time Soldiers, and they’re distrustful of me. So…I don’t know.”