gifted

by Charmaine Ross

  Maybe if I told him, he would leave me before I’d have to leave him.

  I watched the passing street below through the window. I didn’t know how to cope with anything other than disgust. Even Victor’s scientists had been hesitant around me. Maybe it was because they knew what I could do to them that made them edgy. Wise men.

  “I call it my thought-energy. I used it to protect us just before. It’s never been like that before.”

  “How?”

  “I sent it around us like a bubble. Only this time, it worked as fast as I thought it.”

  “You just think ... and it happens?”

  “It never used to. I had to concentrate hard until I had a headache. But the more I use it now, the easier it gets. You have to understand how evil I am. I can break limbs with a simple thought, Julius. I’ve done ... more ... worse. I was cruel. I know how to torture. I know how to kill.”

  Victor had taught me well, and being the compliant daughter I had been before I ran away, I’d done anything to make my father proud of me.

  Victor wound his arm around my shoulder. I looked up at him, hoping to see him smile at me, but he didn’t. I hoped after I did what he wanted me to do that he would. Maybe even give me an ice cream after dinner.

  “I want you to concentrate, Katia. Did you know that arms have bones inside of them, but they can break?”

  I nodded. Anything my father said to me I drank in. I looked at the man who sat in the chair in front of us. He was sleeping, and his chin was tucked into his chest so that I couldn’t see his face.

  “Now, I want you to concentrate on his arm. See if you can feel the bone inside with your mind, then I want you to break it.”

  “Just like the stick I broke last week?” I asked. I’d had to go to bed for a few days after I did that. I looked at the ground. I didn’t really want to do that again. “It made me really tired.”

  “It will be better this time. Trust me. I gave you some special medicine to help you with your strength.”

  I nodded. The doctor had given me several injections of something. It had made me feel sick, but he said that I had to do it for my father, so I did. “Okay. I’ll try.”

  “Good girl. Now concentrate.”

  Victor bent so that his head was next to mine. “One, two, three. Now ... go.”

  I willed the thought-energy in my mind, brought it into my stomach like I’d been told. My head had started to throb in time with my heartbeat. I could feel my lunch prodding the top of my stomach.

  “I can’t do it, Dad!”

  I started to cry. Victor faced me, and instead of a smile, I saw that he was angry with me. That was worse. I started to tremble inside. If he was angry, I would get a spanking. “You can do this, Katia. Now do it!”

  I turned back to the man in the chair. I tasted vomit in my mouth, but I didn’t want to stop because that would disappoint him. I searched for the energy, felt it stirring sluggishly to life inside of me. Then I concentrated on the man’s arm, just like I did the stick. I imagined that there was a stick inside his skin. I reached out with my mind. My whole body shook. I was hot, cold, shaking, and weak. Drops of blood stained my front as my nose started bleeding. I went down onto one knee, but Victor held me steady.

  The man groaned. There was a crack and a tearing sound. A slice of white bone pierced the man’s sleeve. Blood stained the material. I dropped to the floor, and my stomach released its contents. I had to blink my eyes into focus, but when I did, I saw that my father was smiling at me. It had been worth it. I had made him smile.

  “I was a child, but I was old enough to know better. I didn’t know how to say no. I was the biggest asset to my father’s work. I was the protégé. Then I learned that they were going to make others just like me. I couldn’t let that happen. Couldn’t put other people through what I’d gone through.

  “Victor, my father, started on young men. The drugs he poured into them sent some mad. That was at best. At worst, their brains grew too fast. They grew and grew and ...” I shuddered remembering husks of men, screaming in pain, bleeding from their ears as their brains fell apart in front of my eyes.

  “What made those men so different from you?” Julius asked.

  I shrugged. “It takes years and a developing brain to make the changes he did with me. He’d started on me when I was a baby. I was sick all the time, but looking back, it was the drugs he filled me with. He poured drugs into me that made certain parts of my brain develop larger and stronger than normal. I’d been genetically modified from birth. My body was irrevocably changed.”

  I choked back the sob that hurt my throat. I’d started and the damn had broken. I couldn’t stop. It all came back to me, and I relived the hell that was my life. “I took a chance and ran. I got away. I escaped. I didn’t stop running for years. I eluded them. Imagine that, a sixteen-year-old managing to escape the most highly trained organization in Australia. I was free for the first time in my life. I made a life for myself, but I was never anywhere for long. I was too scared to make any friends. To stay at any job. Then one day, I got sick. I was slow. I paid the price, and they caught me. After eight years of freedom, I got complacent. Thought my father had given up. That he’d lost interest in me.

  “My father tried to make me do those things again, but I’d learned that normal people didn’t do things like that. Those things were evil. What Victor had made me was an abomination of nature.”

  Julius’s hand clenched my arm, but I hardly felt it. “Trust me when I say you are not an abomination. You are a survivor. You have to believe in yourself.”

  I woke to rough hands tugging off my clothes. My vision was a whirl of fetid breath, body odor, male strength, and desperation. I hit out, but a fist slammed into my chin, tilting my world. He took that moment to push my feeble hands aside and work at the waistband of my jeans. The button came free, the zip scuffed open. The top of my jeans was peeled away, leaving me open and vulnerable.

  I screamed, kicked, raked my fingernails over his flesh, but it didn’t deter the stench of sexual strain that rode in waves from his body. I sucked them in, and it made my stomach heave and buck in response. He crawled up by body, his heavy weight stopping me from wiggling free. Something soft and rigid stabbed my thigh. His excitement.

  I did what Victor taught me to do. I opened my thought-energy and willed it into the center of his head, felt the pull of weakness that went through my body when I used it. He grunted as pain held him, but his erection slid into my folds, unwanted and foreign. He moved his hips and the head of his penis touch my entrance.

  I jerked back, igniting the thought-energy with desperation, letting it whip free and unfettered. His head snapped back. A thin stream of blood dripped from his nose and out of his ears. His eyes turned back until I could only see the whites. He was held frozen over me while I melted his brain.

  I let the thought-energy dissipate, and his body slumped over mine. “Heather!” I called, fear tainting my voice.

  The body was shoved aside, and I worked free of his weight. I staggered to my feet, my head spinning as I zipped my pants up. I ignored the residual lethargy that swamped me when I’d used my thought-energy to this extent, ignored the need to sleep.

  “What happened to him?” Heather asked, her eyes wide and scared as she looked at me. She’d only been sleeping a little ways away and hadn’t known the man was on top of me wanting to do unthinkable things.

  I looked at the body, his pants bunched around his knees, backside bare to the world, finding it hard to feel any compassion at all at his death. I shrugged. “He tried to rape me.”

  “But ... he’s dead.”

  I shrugged again, “We’d better get going. Not as safe as we thought here.”

  Heather held my wrist as I turned to pick up my things. “I know he tried to do an evil thing to you, but you can protect yourself with your thoughts. Surely you could have just ... knocked him out or something.”

  I frowned as I regarded her. It hadn’t occur
red to me. It would have been just as effective. “I guess I could have, but he had to pay.”

  “Katia, you know I think the world of you, but sometimes, you scare me. Don’t turn into what Victor wants you to be. You have a choice. You are so much more than what he wanted you to be.”

  “You keep on telling me that, but I’m not.”

  “Not yet. But you will be. It hasn’t all been for nothing.”

  I found the truth of her softly spoken words, saw that the act of killing that man was as evil as what he tried to do to me, knew that she was right. I wasn’t going to be my father’s daughter. Heather thought I was better than that, and so I would be.

  I blinked back tears that would do me no good. “What I did was ... as evil as he is. If I forgive myself, then he has won. You barely know me, Julius. What you do know is that I’m a nutcase with a background better suited to a sci-fi novel.”

  Julius studied me for a moment. “I can tell you, you’re not a nutcase. I think you’re strong for coping so well with what’s been done to you. And I’ve seen some strange things myself.”

  I put my hands to my face. Hearing him like this was making what I had to do so much harder. “Don’t say good things about me. Please. You don’t know who I really am.”

  “I know you’re caring. Gentle. Intelligent. If you saw what I saw, you’d say the same things. You haven’t been given a chance to show anything other than fight and survive. You haven’t given yourself a chance. You’ve been through more than what any one person should have to go through in ten lifetimes,” Julius said quietly.

  His eyes were on me, intense and warm. Sympathetic. I had made him feel sorry for me, and there was no room for anyone to feel that way about me. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m a good person, Julius. You don’t know anything about what I can do now. I’m stronger. The energy is easier for me to use. Quicker. And now I’ve put you in danger because of it.”

  It was too much. The kindness he’d given me over the past few days. Now understanding. He’d made me feel human. As though I was someone good enough, not just a vessel to be used. Something I’d never felt, and it was getting to me. I willed back tears that threatened to spill, hating that I’d shown him such weakness.

  Julius’s hands were on my cheeks, the tender pads of his thumbs tracing a soft line. So gentle. So soft. Such temptation. “I see someone who needs to heal. I see a beautiful woman who has had no kindness in her life through no fault of her own. Your father was a monster, but you have overcome that. You have a quiet strength inside of you. I’ve never known anyone quite like you.”

  I wanted to believe him. I really did. It would be so nice and easy to let it all happen. Julius reached for my hand. I shook, not from fear, but from wanting to feel as though I were loved. Even if it wasn’t the truth. The yearning to be touched as though nothing else mattered, as though nothing else was out there ready to tear me limb from limb.

  Understanding shone in his eyes. Understanding for what I didn’t know. Then, desire lit their depths. I stopped thinking. I was frightened beyond belief because I knew I stepped over a line I didn’t want to even draw. But I couldn’t seem to summon the willpower to pull back. Something inside me melted beyond being scared.

  I wanted his mouth on mine. Feel his soft lips, his tongue, taste him. His hands on my body. My breasts. I wanted—needed—someone to touch me as though he cared. The way a man would love a woman. The need was intoxicating. Primal. I ached. Body and soul. Lips tingling, senses alive. For him.

  Then his eyes dulled; the spark died. His expression became introverted. His fingers loosened their hold, dropped from mine. Katia,” his voice was strained, hoarse. “I can’t ...”

  I nodded, swallowing hard, reality slamming into me, “Of course. I understand ...”

  He ran his fingers through his hair, spiking it in all directions. “No you don’t, damn it! That’s the point. This isn’t the time or the moment. When I kiss you ... if you allow it ... I don’t want it to be like this. Not after what you’ve been through. I’d like to think kissing you isn’t just a reaction. I want it to be an intention.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Pain emanated from his eyes, his features strained. I breathed in hard. One gasp. Two. My mind started ticking. He wanted me as much as I wanted him. Crazy. Just crazy. And yet I was ... elated.

  “There’s more. Much more, Katia. I don’t think you’re going to feel the same way about me once you know what I’ve done.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I want you to know that no matter what, I’ve tried to help you. You have to understand that. Just ... try to forgive me when you know.”

  “It can’t be that bad. Honestly. I know bad,” I said, but at the same time, my heart stumbled. Julius couldn’t be bad. He just couldn’t. He’d shown me such kindness. Such compassion. I was indebted to him, but it was more than that. Much more. People had shown me odd kindnesses in the past, and they could have told me they were murderers and I would have shrugged it off. Hell, when it came down to it, I’d murdered, too. But from Julius, there was something indefinably different about him. About how I felt about him. The trouble was, I’d let him in. Even though I knew I shouldn’t have, and I’d tried, he’d slipped past my defenses and had found a place in my heart.

  I thought he maybe even might even ... care a little about me. Then again, maybe I’d just been plain old stupid. Either way, I really didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to know.

  Didn’t want that pain.

  “This involves you. God, this is so hard to tell you. Know that I’ve fought so long and hard. This started before you came to me, and I only did what I did because I was caged into a corner. I’ve fought all along, but ...”

  Dread seeped through the euphoria of his declaration only moments before. I was hot and cold all over, barely keeping myself together. This was going to be bad, certainly something I knew I wouldn’t want to hear. “What the hell have you done, Julius?” I whispered.

  “I didn’t want to involve you in my mess. I’m not using you ... Hell, this is coming out all wrong. There’s so much I’m asking of you. How the hell are you not going to think the worst of me?”

  I wanted to reach out. Tell him whatever he did, it didn’t matter. That we would deal with it. Nothing could hurt me more than what had been done to me already. Surely, nothing was as bad as what I’d seen and done.

  Surely.

  Screaming metal. A lurch sideways. I was thrown against the door, my head cracked against the window. A booming crunch and the car was spinning. Falling. I grabbed onto the console to steady myself, disoriented, heart pumping, mind spinning.

  “Manual control,” Julius yelled. He fought to pull the car out of the spin. The engine screamed, and we lurched side to side, up and down. We cut the spin, the back of the car jolting into the ground.

  My head snapped backward. Julius’s P.A. bobbed about in the space of the back seat. I hadn’t even noticed it had come into the car with us, and it had heard everything. The engine whined in protest, and there was a moment where we hung like a downed seesaw. My body slammed into the seat as we screamed upward.

  Julius wrenched the wheel just before we flew into the line of traffic above us. We veered away. Horns blasted, cars scattered.

  “Julius!” I screamed.

  He uttered a curse, wrenching the wheel in the other direction just before we slammed into the side of a building. “Behind,” Julius said between clenched teeth.

  I spun around in the seat to look out of the back window. A car drew level behind us. Sleek. Black.

  Seth. Fuck.

  There was a glimpse of his head behind the dark windows. He rammed into the back of us again. I was slammed into the seat. Our car tipped crazily. “It’s Seth. How the hell did he find us?” I yelled.

  I clutched the front console, trying to steady myself. Julius glanced at the rearview mirror. The muscle in his jaw worked; his face shone with perspiration; his knuc
kles were white on the wheel. “I don’t know. But we have to get rid of him. Hang on.”

  I gripped what I could. The nose of our car tipped, and we raced upward without warning. I gritted my teeth against nausea as my gut touched my spine. I dragged in my breath through my nose, fighting against the force of gravity. Too high. We were going too high. I lost sight of the ground and choked back hysteria. I gouged my fingertips into my thighs.

  We dodged lines of traffic, carving through the air. “He’s still behind us!” I yelled.

  Julius nodded, throwing the car sideways in a tight right curve. There was a moment of floating before I was collected in the seat, and we dropped. I held my hand against the roof of the car as we sailed downward.

  Julius threw the car to the left. I glimpsed the rear of Seth’s car below us, before Julius clipped him. The car jolted with the impact, and I was slammed into the door. Seth spiraled away from us, throwing black smoke.

  Julius tipped the car downward and slipped below a line of traffic. The shadow of cars was above us, the rumble of their motors loud overhead. We looked out of the windows. “Where’d he go?” I said.

  Julius strained to look. He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “How does he keep finding us?” I said.

  The muscle worked at his temple. “There’s only one way this is going to end. I’m going to get you out of this mess, Katia. Whatever it takes. Enough is enough. No matter what you might see. When I tell you to run, I want you to run and don’t turn back. Do you hear me? Don’t turn back.”

  “But ... no ... What about you?”

  “It’s gone too far to worry about me. You know everything you need to know, Katia. Remember my notes on the LearnX. Permission. You need permission.”