gifted

by Charmaine Ross

  I was lying on a hard table. I tested my limbs. I was bound tight. I tried to rip free of the bonds. I twisted my wrists. Pulling my hand with as much strength as I could. Skin stretched and split. Warm wetness coated my skin. Blood. I could use it to slip my hands through.

  I lifted my head, but a bond around my neck crushed my throat. I worked against the suffocating reflex pain, struggling like hell to ignore it. The bonds started to tighten of their own volition, crushing my larynx, wrists, ankles. I struggled to breathe, gagging and choking.

  I sought the energy to free myself. Pain scorched my mind. Burning electricity seared inside my brain. Energy other than my own. My body went rigid, joints locking, muscles tightening, teeth clenching. I crashed beneath a pitch-black wave.

  I floated somewhere just beneath the layer of consciousness. A gray world where I didn’t belong to my body. Where the pain receded into a distant part of me. I felt it niggling somewhere close, but at least it was bearable in this part of my mind. I drifted in this abyss.

  I detected a light, like a watered down version of a bulb hanging somewhere over me. A portal back to full consciousness. To Julius! I drifted upward. The closer I got to it, the more the pain screamed through me. My wrists, arms, throat. It was a bad move. I drifted down toward the black. It was comfortable here. I let myself hang in the semidark. My little black burrow became a haven away from the pain.

  A voice. I heard it as though I were underwater. Curious, I edged closer to the light. There was an edge of pain, but I could cope with it now. I went closer, breaking slowly through layers of consciousness, becoming aware of my physical body.

  Beautiful air slipped into my lungs. The bands had been loosened. I could breathe easier. I heard someone groan. Me. My throat was bruised, battered, and sore, but I was alive. Someone prodded my wrists, adjusting the bands, relaxing them. Relief swept through me. I was ridiculously grateful. Two people worked over me. I didn’t recognize either of them, and they gave me as much attention as they would a lab rat. My world spun as I battled the terror that really was just beneath my reserves of self-control.

  It was happening again. I was a lump of meat. An anomaly. A something to study and poke and prod and find out what made it tick. Didn’t they realize I was a human? I had feelings. I was a person no matter what my body was able to do.

  Despair like none I’d felt before swept me up in a vortex where angst and anger and hopelessness attacked me with gaping jaws and piercing teeth. My heart raced, throwing itself against its cavity, screaming to break free just as my body strained against the bonds. Searing pain flashed through my brain, the same foreign, searing energy. Someone screamed. A gut-wrenching sound. It was me. I screamed. Pain pounded through me as though I were being ripped in half, and I dove back into the darkness. Found the part of me that could separate from the pain. I huddled in the quiet place until the pain was distanced. I shivered, crumbling into myself.

  I tried to use my thought-energy to loosen the bonds, but as soon as I did, the electric pain stopped me. I must be bound by some sort of electrical response to my brain patterns, which meant I couldn’t use my thought-energy. I tested it by allowing a trickle of thought-energy, and the electrical pain swelled to override it.

  Better to stay in the cover of semiconsciousness. At least I was safe here in my little gray space. They couldn’t hurt me. No one could get to me here. It was a place where there was nothing physical. Just a space where I could hide. Stay away from their prying eyes. It was a haven. I drifted. Shutting down.

  But, didn’t I deserve more than that? Hadn’t I felt what it was like to finally be held with gentle hands? And loved? It all seemed so far away here. If I thought too hard, the gray turned to white, and I knew what happened in the light. Pain. Danger. But ... I wanted someone to hold me again. Make me feel human. A woman. Desired. Loved. Surely there was something about me that didn’t need to be used. Or abused.

  Julius. A kiss. So achingly tender it brought tears to my eyes. Gentle hands. Holding me so tight. I couldn’t believe hands could hold me like that. Make me feel more alive than I had ever been before. Discover feelings I never knew existed. That I was capable of that depth of emotion. Good emotion. Loving emotion. Not the feelings that made me worse than I already was. They made me better. Made me smile. He’d made me feel like there was something to live for. Treated me like he meant it.

  There was another reason to fight. A sleeping child. No, not asleep. Comatose. In her own private little hell. Just like I’d been. I’d promised to release her. Promised to find her and give her back her life.

  I didn’t know if Julius was dead or alive. I didn’t know if I’d failed him after I’d found him. I peeked at the watery light still hovering above me. Knew I’d find the answers I sought there.

  Through there was the pain. But I needed to know what had happened to Julius. I cared about him. Hell. More than that. I loved him. If he was at the mercy of their hands ... I just couldn’t sit here and cower in the dark. I grasped the strength I’d found through him, the strength that was the only thing that was going to get me out of here.

  I rose tentatively upward. There was pain, but it was tolerable. Distant. If I wanted to know if Julius was alive, I had to open myself up to the light. I locked the pain away, putting it in a part that couldn’t touch me.

  They wanted me to cower here in the dark. It would be easy for them to do anything they wanted to my body while I was locked somewhere in the depths of my mind. That couldn’t happen. That would mean defeat. That would be too easy. I hadn’t come all this way to cower at the last minute.

  I grit my teeth, rising through another layer. There were hands on my arms. A prick into my skin. A needle in my arm. In my vein. But nothing that was too painful. I could cope with this. If I kept my thoughts in measure, kept my emotions in hand, I could beat the shock of electricity that made me spiral into this pit.

  I surfaced. Breathed in through my nose. Careful to keep my thoughts calm. Relax my body, despite the bonds that threatened to crush my bones, suffocate me. If I relaxed, there would be no pain. I could stay conscious. I would have a chance.

  I blinked the room into focus, ignoring the technicians as much as they ignored me. I didn’t even know if they knew I was awake or if they cared. They kept going about their business. One came and took my blood, then injected a fluid into the IV. My hand tingled and went ice cold with whatever poison they put in me.

  They couldn’t ignore me if I spoke to them. I licked dry lips, monitoring my heart rate. “Where am I?” My voice sounded like I spoke through a grate. Hoarse and dry.

  One of the technicians gazed at me for half a second, then continued on with her business. I didn’t really expect them to answer, but at least they knew I was awake and had found a way to beat the explosion in my brain.

  I couldn’t use my energy, but I’d spent most of my life living without it. I had my wits and my experience. I wanted answers, and I’d keep on asking for them.

  “I’m at the facility, aren’t I?” No answers from either. I’d take that as a yes. “Are you working for Victor?”

  I watched them from the corner of my eye as they moved about the lab. They were working on something just behind my line of vision. I wasn’t able to turn my head. Frustration hammered through me. My heart pumped, and there was a spike of an electrical current through my brain. I continued to breathe slowly. In. Out. My heart rate lowered. That was good. If I could keep a tight rein on myself, I’d be able to stay conscious.

  “You know, you could offer me a drink if I’m to stay here like this.” Nothing. Another blood sample. This was getting monotonous. “You can’t do anything to me that hasn’t been done before, you know.”

  “Oh my dear. I only just touched the tip of what’s been done to you.”

  I stiffened. My eyes darted as far as I could see. My heart rate gathered speed. I knew that voice. It swarmed my senses and ricocheted right through me into a million shards of pain. My blood turned
to ice, freezing my body and my mind. He spoke as though we were long-lost friends. As though we were past lovers that bred conversations of familiarity, had spent years apart and were meeting as friends once more.

  It shouldn’t be true. Even though I had spent time searching for evidence of him, in the back of my mind, I knew I didn’t want to find any. Had hoped beyond all reason that what I had seen, the events that had happened would add up to nothing other than my overactive imagination.

  Victor.

  He stepped into my line of vision. My eyes locked onto him. I couldn’t wrench my gaze from him. “It’s true,” I whispered. Seth hadn’t lied. He’d taken the greatest amount of delight in telling me the truth.

  “Did you think that I would let you slip between my fingers and let the barrier of time take you away from me? You are mine to do whatever I please.” He smiled and revealed his even white teeth. The smile didn’t make his eyes.

  “Do you like my new invention? I think it’s being quite effective keeping you in place. I gather you’ve learned not to get too ... excited. However, I warn you that you’re right on the edge.” His voice. The sound of evil incarnate. It was beyond logic, but since when had my life ever been rational. I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing. I listened to the sound of air in my lungs, in my ears, trying to keep hold of the urge to scream. Fighting my horror. I couldn’t be taken down by the pain again. I had to stay in the here and now.

  I blinked beads of stinging perspiration from my eyes, reeling against the horror. “This can’t be happening. Not again,” I whispered. The electrical current whipped through my head. I fought against the torrent of despair that rocked me.

  His eyes glinted coldly. The same eyes that I’d had untold nightmares of. He looked down on me, watching me inspect him. He hadn’t aged even though more than a hundred years had passed.

  If you didn’t know him, you might say he was a handsome man. Somewhere in his late fifties. I’d never known for sure. Lean. Olive skin against silver hair. He wore a goatee, silver but marked with the darker hair color of his youth. I always thought he hid thin lips behind it. And a permanent downturn.

  His face was relatively unmarked. There were a few lines from the corners of his eyes and across his forehead. But then, he never truly smiled. Never showed any emotion.

  “I assure you I’m as real as you.”

  “How?”

  “It’s a simple case of cell renewal. My little experiments with you worked. It was a simple process of shutting down the cells’ dying process. You saw the capsules? Well, the newer version anyway. They are the fountain of youth.”

  “How many had to die for you to perfect your technique?”

  His lips compressed. “As many as necessary. They gave of themselves for a greater purpose than just their little lives.”

  “You were always good at making sure you weren’t the one to give your life for the greater purpose.”

  “I wouldn’t be so ... emotional if I were the one hooked up to electrodes like those.”

  “Why don’t you try them yourself? Might punch a bit of morality into your brain.”

  He moved to the side, and I saw him working some controls in the corner of my vision. He spoke to one of the technicians before he glanced at me. “You’d be surprised how many people are prepared to pay money for my knowledge. And pay well.”

  “Don’t tell me there are others out there as warped as you?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. There are always people willing to pay for their ... rebirth, shall I say. A country wanting to know how a particular germ might destroy a body. How a military can be made invincible. It has been that way since the dawn of time. I haven’t invented anything new in that respect. I’m just smart enough to turn it to my advantage.”

  “A century of manipulation. Is that why you kept me all that time?”

  “Haven’t you noticed how much stronger you are? I’d thought I lost you in that landslide. All my work, just gone. Imagine my astonishment when you turned up on the radar after all this time. A century of my drugs going through your system. I’ve seen what you can do now. It’s quite remarkable.”

  “How did you know ...” Then it hit me. He was connected to the world, “The P.A.s.”

  I watched his reptilian eyes skate over me. I was reduced to a piece of meat. An anomaly. His creation. That was the only reason I was still alive. “Why didn’t you just leave me alone?” I hated the way my voice shook, but I needed to finally know.

  “I wasn’t an opportunity to be used by you. I was a little girl who needed a family. I could have had a normal life if you’d just left me alone. A true mother and father. You took that all away from me. Instead, you turned me into a monster. You’re nothing but a fucking freak.”

  I had to be careful to keep my heart rate in check, but it was hard. My breathing became erratic, and my pulse quickly followed. Pain edged into my brain. I resisted it, reaching past it.

  He seemed to realize it, too. His eyes widened a fraction, the cool blue measuring me. “I admire you, Katia. Most would have crumbled years before you did, but you kept on going. Picked yourself up time after time. I wondered how many times you’d be capable to keep up the fight. You’re a born warrior. Better than most men. I tried to model others based on you, but they all failed.”

  Electric pulses seared into my brain, but I held them at bay.

  “Take these electrodes off me, and I’ll show you just how far I can keep going. There will be no end until you are lying dead at my feet.”

  “Such pretty words. I would like to stay and chat, but now it’s time to get back to business. Seth?”

  Seth’s tall form came into my line of sight. His black, glittering stare was on me, making me feel dirty. My heart raced harder. The pain level rose, and I struggled to keep conscious. “Come back for more?” I ground out.

  He watched me with as much fascination as Victor. If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn there was a slight, begrudging admiration.

  “Let’s not waste any more time.” Victor’s voice had lost all tone. He was all business. I stifled the chill that tore up my spine.

  Seth moved, and I saw that he clutched someone by the arm. My vision blurred against the pain. I struggled to stay clear of the cloud of black that would take me if I gave in. The face peered down at me. Tension radiated from him in palpable waves. I blinked tears away. Recognition.

  Julius!

  Chapter Seventeen

  Fuck. They still had Julius. He was pale. Blood stained his torn shirt. He was shrunken. Defeated. Complete and utter grief stained his face.

  “Let him go, you fucking bastard,” I bit out. I was almost lost to the storm of pain that tore through me, but I held on to consciousness with every ounce of willpower I had. I had to stay conscious. Had to stay in the here and now.

  Seth’s hand dropped from his arm. Julius remained as still as marble. Why wasn’t he moving? Fighting? There was something wrong. His face was pinched tight, his lips compressed in a straight line. His eyes dull. Almost dead. He was on edge. What the fuck was going on?

  I tried to will the words into his mind. Fight. Resist. Be free. If only he could hear me. “Julius?” I croaked.

  His eyes flickered to me. The grief, so stark and strong, made me breathless. “There was no choice.”

  “No choice? I know you know Seth, but it’s okay. I won’t let them torture you.” Pain edged the blackness closer. I wouldn’t let them use Julius the way they used Heather. This time, I wouldn’t hold back. This time, I would use my thought-energy and free us.

  “Julius. We need to start,” Victor said.

  “Start?” I whispered.

  The silence screamed. The room shrank around my skin, and the air became stifling, thick as sludge. My stomach pulled like it was being sucked into a black hole. The world became a tornado, and I was the epicenter.

  I heard Victor move to lie on a gurney beside mine. The technicians worked around him, d
oing things I couldn’t see. Julius’s eyes were trained on my face, his expression full of sorrow. Such deep, deep sorrow.

  “Run!” I screamed.

  He stood motionless, except for the steady rise and fall of his chest. Why wasn’t he moving? Why didn’t he try to get past Seth? It didn’t make any sense. He could push past, get away, get help, get away from the horror that was Victor and at least have a fighting chance of survival. But he just stood there watching me so deeply saddened.

  Then it clicked.

  I was so, so stupid.

  I’d been played.

  He wasn’t going to run. He was in on it!

  “You’re with them,” I whispered.

  “Katia ... I’m so sorry. Believe me.”

  I fought to breathe, to comprehend. Struggled against the slippery slope of tormented despair. There were no words. No thoughts. Bleak reality slapped me in the face.

  Julius had betrayed me.

  I thought he was helping me, maybe even fond of me, and I’d fallen for it like the stupid, gullible little fool I was.

  “I believed in you,” I whispered.

  “He knows everything,” Victor said. “Always did. He did a good job keeping you right where we wanted you, don’t you think? Bringing you back to health. Giving you a ‘safe house.’ Maybe if you listened a little deeper to yourself, you might have had an inkling. But you didn’t want to listen. Never did really. Always the stubborn Katia willing to put up fight after fight. It has been entertaining watching you run around. I have to admit, he has made you use your abilities to far greater effect than you ever would for me.”

  My solar plexus buckled in on itself. My body went instantly numb. I’d believed every single word he’d said to me. Sucked it up like the sap I was.

  So. Fucking. Stupid.

  I remembered his soft touch on my body, his soothing words that spoke to my soul, and the comfort I felt in his arms. Any warmth, any love, anything good that I’d ever known in life slid away. My soul was a barren entity. Totally and utterly empty.