Talent to Burn (Hidden Talent #1)

by Laura Welling

“Eric trusts me. You can make up your own mind.”

  Jamie was still shaking his head. “Count me out.” He opened the door and got out of the van. He walked over to a meager square of dead grass next to the restaurant, and began kicking a tire that was half-buried in the ground, some kind of cheap-ass playground equipment.

  She watched him through the windshield. “Are you in or out?”

  “Let me talk to him.” I climbed out of the back of the van. A cold wind scattered burger wrappers across the parking lot. Jamie wasn’t even looking in my direction—in fact, he seemed to be talking to himself while he continued to kick the tire.

  “Hey,” I said, my voice sounding pretty calm, I thought.

  “You’re not seriously planning on trying to talk me into this.”

  “I came over to see what you were thinking.”

  “I’m thinking this is insane.” He stopped kicking the tire and turned to look at me. “We’ll find him some other way.”

  “You said yourself we’re out of leads.” I couldn’t stop thinking about Eric’s voice on the phone. I needed to see him. “I’m going to do it.”

  That got Jamie’s attention. He grabbed me by both upper arms. “Don’t do this.”

  Shrugging my shoulders, I tried to appear more casual than I felt. “It’s no big deal. She’s Eric’s girlfriend. He trusts her.”

  “You’re going to take an unknown pill from a virtual stranger. You have no idea if she’s really his girlfriend.”

  “Who else would she be?”

  “Maybe she has him brainwashed.”

  Now I laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  His hands tightened on my arms. “Cat, you can’t trust anyone. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, that’s it. Don’t put your life in her hands.”

  “You’re overstating it. It’s not that big a deal.”

  He released me. “If that’s what you think, then I’ll drop it.”

  “Are you going to come?”

  “No.”

  I bit my lip. It was one thing to be brave with Jamie at my side. Going alone was a different story. Still, I couldn’t get past Eric’s voice on the phone.

  “I have to go.”

  “Why?”

  I crossed my arms. “Something is wrong with Eric, and I need to help him.”

  “What do you mean?” Jamie looked into my eyes. The skin on his jaw was tight, his face pallid and gray.

  “He said he’d like to see me one last time. I don’t know if he’s injured or what, but it sounded to me like he might be dying. I have to go. There is no other choice for me.”

  “Christ.” Jamie raked one hand through his hair. “This is insane.”

  “You don’t have to come,” I said, taking a step toward the van.

  He grabbed me from behind and held me close. His voice was gruff in my ear. “I thought I could change your mind, but…you’re not going alone. If you’re going to do something stupid, we’re going to do it together.” Slowly, he released me, and I turned to him. “Cat, are you one hundred percent sure you want to do this?”

  I nodded, and he sighed.

  “Right. Let’s go.”

  Back in the van, I held my palm out to Justine. “Give me the pills.” I took mine, and Jamie followed suit.

  “You’d better get comfortable,” she said, and started the engine.

  I stared through the windscreen and hoped I was doing the right thing. As I started to doze off Jamie’s fingers threaded themselves through mine.

  The room lay quiet and twilight dark, although there were no curtains on the cracked window. Birdsong echoed in the distance, but I didn’t recognize the bird.

  I moved my head to get a better idea of my surroundings, and regretted it immediately. Still woozy, I guessed, as the room shift-tilted around me. I closed my eyes again. I’d survived the pill and the journey, and my hands weren’t tied or anything crazy like that.

  After a few minutes lying still and breathing deeply, I ventured to open my eyes again, and cautiously turned my head. I appeared to be lying on an animal skin rug on the floor of a wooden cabin. Jamie lay next to me, still sleeping.

  I wondered how Justine had gotten us inside. She was much smaller than either of us. Someone must have helped her—Eric? Or were there other people here? And where was “here”, exactly?

  Sitting up carefully, I looked around. There was a doorway leading to a bedroom. Perhaps it was ungrateful but I wished whoever had dumped us had dumped us on a bed. My body ached from an unknown amount of time spent on the floor.

  Another door presumably led outside. This room looked to be a living area. I confirmed that I was, in fact, sitting on a cow skin rug. From the deer head on the walls that had seen better days to the old brown couch covered in a Labrador retriever throw, everything said hunting lodge.

  We must be somewhere fairly rural. I didn’t know how long we’d been asleep. We could be anywhere within a few hundred miles of the airport.

  I stood up, provoking a moment of vertigo, and steadied myself before walking over to the window. The lodge looked out over a clearing in the woods, surrounded by other small cabins, with a larger Quonset hut over to one side.

  There were a few cars scattered about, including the trusty brown van, but no people in view. Looking at the sky, I guessed it was approaching dusk rather than breaking dawn. We’d been out for six or seven hours then, which meant we could be an hour out of Baltimore, or as far away as North Carolina, New York State, or maybe even Kentucky.

  A shuffling sound came from behind me and I turned to see Jamie stretching out his arms and legs. In one fluid movement, he rose to his feet. Again, I was surprised by the amount of grace he had for such a big guy.

  “Get your beauty sleep?”

  “I did.” I briefly filled him in on my observations.

  “Let’s go find your brother.”

  “Should we work out how we’re going to do this?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know what there is to plan. You want to see him, we both want to help him, let’s go tell him.”

  “There’s more than one car out there. Who do you think the other people are?”

  Pausing in his journey to the front door, he scratched at his stubble. “That’s a pretty good question.” He counted off the possibilities on his fingers. “One, he’s being held against his will. Justine’s his girlfriend, so that seems unlikely. Two, he’s made some new friends while on the run. That’s a hard time to meet people, because you don’t want to trust anyone. Look at what we had to go through to get here.”

  “Three?” I prompted.

  “Three, he’s met up with some old friends.”

  “I don’t know that he has any friends outside the Institute.”

  “Could be other ex-Institute people like yourself and Eric, or they could be friends of Justine’s.”

  “Okay. Four?”

  “I don’t think I have a four.”

  I blew my breath out, realizing that I had been holding it. “I kind of hope they are her friends. I can’t imagine any ex-Institute people that would be…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Normal. It’s a strange place.”

  “You haven’t talked about it much.”

  I nodded. “Let’s go talk to Eric.”

  “Don’t want to talk about it now either, huh?”

  I looked at those dark eyes that knew too much about me, by far. How dare he read what was inside my soul? Talents. They were all the same. “I want to see Eric.”

  Brushing past him, I headed for the door, but he caught my shoulder in one hand.

  “Cat,” he said, “we’re on the same side. Remember? I wouldn’t have taken that pill otherwise.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Now, can we please go find Eric?” His hand slipped from my shoulder and I felt both irritated at him and guilty for being sharp. “I’m sorry.”

  His face was neutral. “Let’s go.”

  We headed out into t
he clearing, and I made for the Quonset hut. It looked like the only game in town. As we got closer, I noted that it had seen better days, with broken windows and patches of rust adorning the semi-circular building. This whole place had an air of decay, as though it had been unmaintained for a while. In woods like this, it probably wasn’t even that long. Nature has a way of re-assimilating civilization.

  There was a peeling door in the center of the short end of the hut, closest to us. I took a deep breath and put my hand on the handle. It turned under my fingers, and the door opened inward.

  The man who stood in the doorway wasn’t Eric. He was middle-aged and grizzled looking, and although he hadn’t shaved lately, his hair was buzzed. His hooded eyes sunk deep into his face under craggy eyebrows. He was surrounded by a thick, foggy aura, like his own personal storm cloud.

  “Good evening,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  The grizzled man turned out to be named Miller. I thought he looked familiar, suggesting Jamie’s theory about ex-Institute people might have some merit.

  Four people waited for us in the Quonset hut, but Eric was missing. One of the four was Justine, who looked out of place in her high-heeled boots and tight satin shirt. The others were all dressed in what I can best describe as mountain man couture. The last few years in the Pacific Northwest had left me intimately familiar with this style, having a wardrobe derivative of it myself. Jamie stood out almost as much as Justine in his leather jacket and huge black boots.

  “I’m Darla,” said a short, round woman with witch-wild gray hair. “I’m Miller’s wife. And this is our daughter, Tiffany.”

  Tiffany, somewhere between fourteen and seventeen, I would guess, slouched against a wall in the corner, chewing gum and picking at her fingernails. She’d offset her plaid flannel shirt with about half a pound of eyeliner. Maybe Justine had given her lessons. “Pleeztameetcha.”

  “Where’s Eric?” I said without preamble. We’d had to go through enough hoops to get here.

  Justine said, “Out in the woods.”

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “He comes, he goes. Not really.”

  “What’s he doing out there?”

  She gave me a look I couldn’t work out. “Hiking. Climbing trees. Thinking.”

  On that anticlimactic note, I didn’t know what to do with myself.

  “Do y’all want something to eat?” Darla said.

  We agreed, but my enthusiasm waned when it turned out to be a thin, gray-ish stew. I don’t know what the meat in it claimed to be, but I hoped it was more squirrel and less opossum.

  I pushed the stew around on the tin plate with my fork. The whole weird family sat and watched me, while Justine stared into space and Jamie wolfed the stew down as if it were the first meal he’d had in a week.

  “Are you going to eat that?” he asked. I pushed my plate over and watched him gulp the meal down. I had no appetite.

  The door creaked open, and I swung around to see my brother, or what remained of him, standing in the doorway.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Fourteen years since I’d seen Eric. He had been a boy then, and now he was a man. As a man, he was thinner than he had been in childhood: much, much, thinner. I couldn’t believe how drawn and gaunt his face had become. His cheeks sank in beneath his cheekbones.

  His skin was yellow with the remnants of a fading tan, and cast with gray hollows under his eyes and through the shadow of stubble on his jaw. He’d buzzed his hair, showing off too clearly the shape of his skull. In my dreams, he’d had long hair. I wondered at the difference.

  Finally, my gaze came to rest on his eyes. They were blank holes in his face, like footprints in snow.

  This wasn’t the Eric I’d known before. This was a dead man walking.

  I stood and walked over to him. We had never been a demonstrative family, but I felt as though I should hug him, or something. I must have twitched my intent, because he took a step back.

  “Hey, sis,” he said, his voice more casual than I’d expected. “I guess you made it here. Welcome.”

  “Can we take a walk?” I snuck a glance over my shoulder. I didn’t want to have this conversation in front of strangers. Especially weird ones.

  He shrugged. “Sure, why not.” Turning, he held the door open for me and we went out. He paused in the clearing.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, working hard to keep my voice calm.

  “Trying to work out where to go from here.” Eric took a deep breath, sucking in the scent of pine needles that surrounded us. “Miller is trying to help me.”

  “Who is he, anyway?” I bit my tongue on all the comments I wanted to make about the oddness of Miller and family, and why Jamie and I had to go through such extreme measures to get here.

  “Miller was CIA in the Cold War. He trained remote viewers. His specialty was teaching people to control their Talents. He worked at the Institute for a while, but he quit.”

  “How did you find him? Are you sure you can trust him?”

  Eric laughed, a dry, hollow sound. “Justine found him. And no, I don’t know if I can trust him, but I don’t have a lot of choices at the moment.”

  “Eric, what happened?” I stopped walking and looked at him. “Why did you leave the Institute? What happened in Vegas? Why do they want you to come back?”

  “That’s a lot of questions, Cat.” Eric kept walking, but turned over his shoulder to call out, “Come on. I’ll be happier if we keep moving.”

  I jogged to catch up. The sky darkened by the minute, and I didn’t want to lose him in the woods.

  He started to talk as he strode along. “As you know, I used to love it at the Institute. I loved being special. I even loved their idea that I could be some kind of super soldier in the war on terror. One of the founding members of the Talented Corps. Eric, the ultra-patriot. Eric, serving his country. Eric, the powerful Talent. Except that I wasn’t Talented enough for what they really wanted.” His voice was bland, as if he was talking about the weather, but his walking pace increased. I struggled to keep up.

  “As you may be aware, they spend a lot of time trying to turn people with a little Talent into people with a lot of Talent through training and various other techniques.”

  I shuddered. Oh yes, I was familiar with their methods. I’d spent years blocking out memories of the stress training—the idea being if you put someone under enough stress, they would produce sufficient cortisol and adrenaline to unlock their latent Talents. It had never worked on me.

  “They hired a new researcher, a Dr. Jenn. Her team developed a new drug, codenamed Nova-22. It was supposed to be a Talent amplifier—you’d take it, and it would turn off the inhibitions that had been holding back your Talent. Kind of like LSD for psychic powers.”

  I didn’t know whether to be frightened or excited about what that might mean for me. “Does it work?”

  Eric sighed. He glanced at me and slowed his steps. At last, I could keep up.

  “I took the drug. At first, it worked great, especially on the pyrokinetic powers. Before that, I could start a fire in something flammable—great for campfires, vandalism, not much of a weapon. With the drug, I turned into a human flamethrower.

  “The drug has some side effects. It’s an upper. I felt like Superman, and the creepy thing was that although the effects of the drug wore off, the superhero thing didn’t. What did it matter that I needed a drug to have superpowers? They were still mine, the power was mine.” His eyes had taken on a glassy look, and his mouth twisted itself into something of a sneer.

  He didn’t look like himself. Had I been wrong about him? Had he killed those people deliberately? “Eric, you’re frightening me.”

  He gave himself a little shake, like a wet dog, and looked more human. “I still have the echo of that feeling. I don’t like it.”

  My tension level ratcheted down a notch. “I can see why.” I didn’t like it either.

  He went on. “In th
e experiments, I set things on fire. We started with targets—here’s a sack of potatoes! A terrorist doublewide! There were animals too.”

  My stomach rolled. “You set fire to live animals?”

  “Dead ones. But, as you know, I’ve done worse things than that. And some of them you don’t know about yet.”

  I worked hard at keeping my face calm, at not showing him how I felt: scared and sick at the same time. Now we were getting to the heart of it, and I didn’t want to do anything to stop him from telling the story. “What happened?”

  “We were also working on remote fires—I would look at a picture of something, and try to set it on fire. I was starting to get the hang of that, but fires at a distance were smaller, weaker, like the ones I could set without the drug. They started to increase my doses, kept me on a maintenance dose so I was up all the time.”

  I might not be a scientist, but it sounded like a terrible idea to me. Wasn’t it obvious to them how it would end? “Had they even tested that?”

  “Oh, I was a guinea pig, and a totally willing one. Until one day, when they gave me a picture of a building, somewhere in a dusty desert. When I closed my eyes, I could see myself outside the building. I stretched out my hands to start the fire, and a little girl came running out. She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old. Then others came out behind her. Catrina, it was a school, and they wanted me to burn those children.”

  “Oh my God.” I could barely believe it. My stomach turned, sick with horror.

  “I didn’t do it. I came back to myself, I told them I’d been there in my mind, and it wasn’t a military target. They didn’t believe me, insisted their intelligence proved it was an artillery installation. That was the day I quit.”

  “I’m glad you did.” I reached out toward him then dropped my hand, remembering how he’d flinched earlier at my touch. If he wouldn’t do that, then I was sure he could be saved. There was still a moral code in him. “I can’t believe they let you go.”

  “I didn’t tell them. I just told Justine I wanted to go, and we took off. I still had that Superman thing happening, and I didn’t believe they’d be able to catch me.”