Emotionally Charged

by S. A. Fenech

  I’d spent almost every minute by Dean’s side since we were admitted to hospital. Our little romance and bizarre brush with death was the gossip of the staff and came with a mix of sweet sympathy, coos of cuteness, and tuts of “just a silly teenage thing.”

  They didn’t understand that I really might die without Dean by my side. After whatever I did to Jake, Donny, and Jamie, everything I sensed, every emotion of the people around me, hammered into my brain like the drummer of a death-metal band thrashing his skins.

  There had been other changes as well. Everything was strange and different and painful. It was only near Dean that I found solace. The hospital staff didn’t know; they just saw my puppy-dog eyes for him and, as long as I didn’t interrupt his care, let me camp out in the armchair in his room.

  My parents were great about it all. I knew there would be a big talk with them down the road, but for now, they were just being here for me, and letting me be here with Dean. Mom and Dad took shifts so at least one of them was with us during daylight hours, but often they had to duck away to get back to the contractors repairing the house and Mom’s shop after the quake. We were still in Dean’s hometown, and since we didn’t own a car they’d had to hire one, and had been driving two hours each way to be with me.

  I felt guilty as all get-out about it. But it made me love them even more.

  On top of that, I wasn’t sure what was happening with health insurance, or what the extended stay in hospital and all the tests were costing, or whether Dad’s leave from work was paid or unpaid, but they were being good adults and organizing everything so I was oblivious to the details.

  I even had a visit from Terry, my parents’ cop friend. I was sure he was more curious about the case than my wellbeing because he asked a bunch of questions about Jake’s team and what had happened in the park. Apparently, he’d recently been promoted, so maybe he was practicing his detective skills. Maybe he thought he was helping my parents out with answers. I don’t know, but it was beyond awkward so I was glad when he left.

  The doctors didn't know what was wrong with me, which made them hesitant to discharge me. To them, five kids came in bloodied and unconscious and only two had woken up, and I’d woken up as a gibbering mess. I tried to act as normal as possible and not let on anything to do with the whole super-powers thing, but it was hard with my mind so messy. Not sleeping wasn’t helping the issue.

  I’d like to say I was getting used to the lumpy vinyl armchair in the corner of Dean’s hospital room, but it was just as much of a torture device as it had been three days ago. Still, I slept—or tried to—in there beside him rather than go back to my room down in a different ward.

  I needed to be by his side.

  I wanted to be by his side.

  Daylight streamed in through the blinds despite them being drawn, but I was exhausted from another night of broken sleep and stubbornly kept trying to snooze. Dean’s cocktail of heavy-duty medication meant he slept easily and often, his body working hard to mend the damage from Jake’s bullet.

  “Mumble, mumble, tests, mumble, mumble.” A voice reached my sleeping mind.

  “Huh?” I tried to swallow, my mouth dry and tasting like hospital. My eyes didn’t want to open. Maybe I’d dreamed it. I tried to let sleep take me again.

  “Wake, mumble, mumble, time, mumble, mumble.”

  I groaned, exhausted.

  I thought it was a nurse. I remembered something mentioned yesterday about tests. Right. I had to have some scans done. The doctors were still trying to work out what had happened to me and the others, what with the weird comas and all. Sure, I tried to say, but just flopped my head forward in a vague nod and tried to stand up.

  “Poor girl, mumble, happened, mumble, recover, mumble.”

  A soft squeaking sound approached me. I was barely conscious, yawning and trying to get my stuck eyelids to open as Tara, the petite nurse who’d been looking after me, put an arm around my shoulder and helped me into a wheelchair. The one that had been sitting nearby for Dean’s use since he was under strict no-walking orders.

  I wanted to argue I didn’t need the wheelchair, and something else, there was something else I needed to argue. But I was already being wheeled down the hall.

  I couldn’t turn my brain on. There was too much noise in my head. I tried to wave back at the nurse but she kept pushing me along. I shook my head, trying to clear it, but the pressure was building too quickly.

  “You okay, love?” Tara slowed down to check on me, but it was too late. I wasn’t sure how far we’d walked, but I knew it was too far.

  I was awake now. And I was too far from Dean. Too far from his blocking powers, and my head felt like it was going to explode.

  Because of this place, this hospital, full of people who were sick and dying, and the loved ones of people who were sick and dying. People who were angry at the world for their prognoses. Women in the pain of labor and experiencing the elation of meeting their babies for the first time. People about to go into surgery, or even simply preparing to receive an injection. And without Dean to block my powers, every one of those scared, sad, angry, or elated emotions came flooding into me at four times the strength it should have.

  I wasn't just an empath anymore; I was four empaths.

  And it was too much.

  Not only did the power from the emotions rampage through me, but now I could see them. Flowing streams of shimmering and juddering colors. Auras that haloed bodies and reached out to me like iron filings to a magnet when I passed by.

  Wincing in pain, I reached back and clutched at Tara’s hand. “Go back.” I pleaded the words out, and they were followed by a rough cry.

  My vision blurred and my head lolled back. The nurse crouched beside me, flashing a light in my eyes. She spoke, but I couldn’t hear past the pounding sound in my ears. With a concerned look, she started pushing the wheelchair again. Faster. In the wrong direction. No. No, wrong way.

  The world spun around me and my veins and muscles felt like they were about to burst. I grabbed onto the arms of the wheelchair and felt the plastic split and crumble, the metal bending like butter in my fingers.

  In the swirling faces around me, I saw a familiar one. Dad. The expression on his face said everything about how I must have looked. He ran down the corridor towards me.

  “Take me to... Dean!” I tried to hold eye contact with him but kept wincing from the waves of emotion. I needed him to understand. I used every last bit of my focus to get the words out. “Must. Be. With. Dean.”

  Dad turned away from me, looking to the nurse for answers as she continued to push me along. She didn’t have the answers. Dad, listen to me!

  I pushed myself out of the chair as it was still moving. The force of my action knocked Tara and the wheelchair across the corridor. The momentum was too much for me too, and I landed facedown on the ground. I could feel myself losing control of my body, my muscles jerking and seizing from the uncontainable influx of energy.

  Dad knelt on the floor with me, cradling my head as my body shook and I slipped into unconsciousness.

  I didn’t know how long I was out for, but I slowly came to. The first thing I saw was Dean, his body bent with pain, supporting himself on his IV stand. He was so far away, but I saw him like a beacon, the lighthouse to the storm of emotion raging through me.

  I blinked, the rest of the world coming into focus. There were nurses all around, checking on me, on him, and on Tara where I’d sent her flying.

  “So sorry,” I whispered to her through clenched teeth. She looked embarrassed more than anything, as though she’d somehow caused this with a self-destructing wheelchair. Everyone seemed at a loss to explain what had happened. I guessed ‘that girl’s got superpowers’ was pretty low down on what most people would believe.

  Dad looked down at me, frowning, but he sighed with relief when I looked back. He glanced across at Dean, then back to me, then to Dean again. Dean was pushing through the chaos to get closer to me. His nurse
was following behind, scolding him for being out of bed, but he didn’t listen.

  He knelt on the ground next to me, those blue-gray eyes calm yet intense. “I woke up and you weren’t there. Came to find you. Figured I should just follow the signs of chaos.”

  “Thanks,” I replied. “I hope you didn’t bust your stitches.”

  “I’ll survive. Looks like you needed, well...” His sentence faded out.

  Him. I needed him.

  I smiled my thanks. I swallowed my guilt at being so dependent on him.

  Dad was halfway through a discussion with the nurse about my seizure.

  “This is exactly why we need to do the tests,” she said.

  “She needs to recover first,” Dad argued.

  “I’m fine. I’ll be okay, really. I can do the tests. But ...” I looked to Dad, hoping he’d understand, “... can you and Dean both stay with me?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Dad could have said no to letting Dean tag along to my tests.

  But he didn’t.

  I wasn’t sure how much he saw, or believed, or understood from when I collapsed, but I saw him talking to Mom when she came in, and I saw them talking to the nurses, and I saw forms being signed and arrangements being made, and suddenly I was moved to a private room right beside Dean’s. Well, my belongings and medical charts were moved. I’d remained right by Dean’s side. I didn’t want to suffer through an experience like that again. And I liked being near him. He made my heart do a soft, gentle flutter-flutter.

  Having my own room, my own bed, with only a thin wall between myself and Dean made a huge difference. I got to sleep and wow, I’d really needed that.

  It was hard at first. My mind still wouldn’t turn off and I found myself reliving the moment Jake shot Dean and what happened after, and my half-asleep self would turn the moment into a nightmarish vision of vampire me sucking the souls out of the people who’d wronged me.

  But soon I did sleep, and it was long, and deep, and much-needed.

  The next day I shuffled around into Dean’s room. I felt sheepish, knowing he could have his privacy now. And maybe he wanted it after having me by his side every moment recently. But he greeted me with a small smile. The kind of small smile that from him, I knew, was huge.

  Dean was poking at a tray of hospital food.

  “I never used to understand why people complained about hospital food. When I was a kid, I loved sharing my mom’s food when I visited her.”

  I moved closer and sat on the bed beside him. I wanted to be even closer, I wanted to hold him through what must have been a sad memory, but it was always hard to tell with Dean. He’d changed a lot, and was so much more open. But he was still Dean.

  “Now I’m a bit older... yeah, I can see what people mean about this food being awful.”

  “You’re still eating it anyway,” I pointed out.

  He looked at me with his mouth full of fruit jelly. “Well, yeah.”

  My heart swelled happily at his display of typical teenage boyishness. He seemed to be healing well.

  “Want some?” He pushed the tray closer to me.

  I’d just had my own breakfast but grabbed a piece of chewy cold toast to nibble on anyway.

  “Okay, so,” I said, trying to get focused, “I’ve got Detective Phillips coming in this afternoon. And I have no idea what to tell him. And I don’t think he’ll be satisfied with the I’m not ready to talk yet response again.”

  Dean put his plastic cup of fruit jelly down. “How much are you planning to tell him?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I want to tell the truth. I don’t want to lie. But that’s only going to make me seem crazy. I can’t really prove it, and what I can prove about my powers, well, I’m not sure I should be proving that. Feels like revealing that could come with way too many consequences, you know?”

  Dean nodded.

  “But the police are still wanting some kind of answer though, for how we all ended up out there, passed out in the park like that, and why the others still haven’t woken up.”

  “What else could cause something like that? Drug overdose?”

  “Been screened for that already. It’s one of the tests they ran straight away.”

  “Gas leak?”

  “Out in the open? And how do the broken bones get explained?” I cringed, having flashbacks of our fight. I never thought I could be so violent.

  This would be the third time the police had come to talk to me. The first I’d just said “later,” and considering the state I was in, they’d accepted that. The second time I’d tried to explain that all I did with Jake was hang out, and I hadn't known they were criminals. Or at least not until it was too late. I’d already embellished the story beyond the truth. I’d blushed when I lied and said Jake was obsessed with me, which was why he’d come after us and why he’d shot Dean.

  After he’d shot Dean... that was when my story fell apart. And those were the answers the authorities were still waiting on from me, that I knew the detective would be pushing for the next time I met him.

  “Hypnosis,” I suggested with a sly shrug. “I’ll tell them Jake was a master hypnotist or mentalist type, and he’d manipulated us all into a death cult and made us attempt to commit suicide by not breathing until we fell into self-induced comas.”

  “Wow.” Dean raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Yep, that’s the winner.”

  I half whimpered, half sighed. “I am so screwed.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Detective Phillips sat across from me in my new hospital room, adding a strange elegance to the place with his neat suit and well-groomed appearance. I was tucked into bed, messy hair on display, giving my best impression of ‘poor girl still recovering.’ Dad stood beside me. Or ‘loomed protectively’ would be more accurate.

  Dean had offered to be here as well, but I didn’t want any added stress for him. I’d bet anything he was probably sleeping right now, and I knew he needed it. He’d done his time with the detective already. All the police really wanted from him was a finger pointing at who pulled the trigger.

  They seemed to want a bit more from me.

  I looked Detective Phillips in the eye and knew I could manipulate him, make him think and do what I wanted the way Jake had done to me. The detective may not have been physically attracted to me, but power rushed through me and emotions blazed from him that I could use to smooth through all his defenses. But I didn’t want to. I couldn’t manipulate someone like that. Not unless I really had to.

  “The moment this goes beyond what my daughter is comfortable with, I’m calling in legal counsel,” Dad said to the detective.

  “Of course, Mr. Mirawi.” Detective Phillips flashed a ‘just think of me as a friend here to chat’ smile. “Now, Olivia, has anything more come back to you from the night in Stanford Park?”

  “No. Sorry.” It was the best option we could come up with, after going over ideas. Saying I simply couldn’t remember anything seemed safest.

  I waited anxiously for the questions to continue.

  Detective Phillips just nodded. “I’ve been talking to your doctors, and while they don’t know what caused your collapse, they say it’s likely that brain function would have been impaired at the time, so amnesia is completely understandable. I won’t press the issue, but if anything does come back to you, it’s important to share any detail, even if it seems small.”

  I tried not to look too relieved, but then I realized he wasn’t leaving. He had a tablet device in one hand and swiped to scroll through whatever he was looking at. “We’ve been reviewing evidence surrounding the bank robbery and the surveillance video corroborates your testimony that you weren’t aware of what was going to happen. It’s a little blurry at times, but we could still clearly see you trying to protect the people in the bank.”

  I gulped, knowing it had all been caught on video. The reminder of that awful event sent my stomach plummeting. “It was so horrible. I couldn’t believe they were like
that, that they would do those things. After the bank, I didn’t want to see them again, and we only met them at the park because I was trying to talk them into turning themselves in, to stop what they were doing.” It was a small lie, but still a lie. I blushed and I wondered if the detective had worked out my tell yet. “I guess that wasn’t the right decision, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Dad put his hand on my shoulder. “You could have come to me and your mom, Lollipop. You know you can tell us anything. We could have helped you.”

  I nodded, but knew I couldn’t have gone to them. Not that time. They didn’t understand the danger it would have put them in. They didn’t know the whole truth.

  “I have another video here to show you, if you think you’re up to it,” Detective Phillips said. His expression was calculated and my shoulders tensed.

  Another video? Of what? It was clear I was only going to find out by agreeing to watch it here with my Dad. But then what would he discover about me or empaths?

  I was still gaping, unsure, when Detective Phillips turned his device around, the video already running on the screen.

  It showed a hospital room with three bodies laid out on life support. Two gorgeous and blonde, the third statuesque and dark-skinned. Jake, Jamie, and Donny. I frowned, looking from the screen to the detective, confused as to what I was looking at, when movement on the screen caught my eye and there was Emma, standing over the beds. She watched them for a short time, then the image changed to the view of a corridor at night. The video quality was good enough that I could see the room number. Dean’s room number. And Emma stood there, staring through the small window in the door. The expression on her face was not a nice one.

  “She was watching us? When was this?” I gasped.

  “Can you confirm that this is the same girl from the bank? That she was part of this group?” the detective said.