I Gotta Feeling

by Kress, Alyssa

  Holding the Cloak higher put the thing above her head. It was possible to hold in one hand, but not easy.

  Making a disgusted noise, Benjamin whirled from the keyboard. "Like this," he criticized, and fidgeted with the folds of the material while Zara kept on holding it up. As he flicked and tugged on the material, he ended up enveloping her inside it.

  Zara couldn't see a thing. Gray material surrounded her. Then, after a clicking sound, the world suddenly...appeared again. Only, it wasn't exactly the real world surrounding her, it was more like a projection of the world on a moving screen.

  Zara barely had time to process what was going on when she heard Beetle-brow exclaim. She turned to see—on the moving screen—the guard start toward her. On his face was a horrified expression. The same instant, Benjamin flipped through the movie screen, took her by the waist, and scooted them both a few feet back from where they'd been standing.

  Beetle-brow sailed right past them.

  "We're invisible, aren't we?" Zara whispered, awed.

  "I believe that was an excellent demonstration of success, yes," Benjamin whispered very quietly back. He scooted them a bit further out of the way while Beetle-brow searched this way and that with eyes open so wide you could see the whites all around his irises.

  Benjamin was grinning from ear to ear, little-boy exuberance tagging on to fully male triumph. He bent to kiss Zara, a kiss tasting of joy and excitement. "Now, my love," he murmured in her ear. "Think of some way to lock this clown in the room while we escape, would you?"

  "Oh, right." Zara took Benjamin's face to kiss him again. "Leave the hard stuff to me, why don't you?"

  ~~~

  "Where are we going?" Aletheia whispered to Felix, determined not to panic or be any other kind of pain in the neck. She didn't want to give Felix an excuse to leave her behind. Not now that she'd seen Felix needed her.

  "I have no idea where we're going," Felix whispered back. But the confidence in his stalking stride did not waver as he led her by the hand down the dingy hall of the rickety warehouse building.

  Given the hunting aura hovering around him, Aletheia was certain Felix would find his prey. The only question was what he would do with said prey once found. With doubt, Aletheia eyed the gun Felix held in his free hand. Considering his conscience-stricken reaction to killing their guard, would he be able to pull the trigger?

  How Felix could think he was evil surpassed belief.

  A wave of love for him rose up in her. Hastily, she battled it down. Despite her concern and determination to help him, she wasn't going to love Felix. He didn't trust her. Even worse than that, he didn't believe in himself. Investing in him emotionally would be poor judgment.

  "I hear something," he murmured, almost too soft for her to hear. He stopped.

  Aletheia stopped, too. By holding her breath, she could hear voices. They seemed to be coming from behind a door that stood slightly ajar several paces beyond Felix's frozen position.

  "—burn down the place."

  It wasn't difficult for Aletheia to recognize Colonel Viceroy's commanding voice.

  "Seems a bit dramatic," Goddard's nasal accents argued.

  "Not at all, and an excellent way to explain the bodies."

  Ice streaked through Aletheia. They were discussing killing her and Felix. Poor Zara, too, wherever she was being held prisoner. And they were discussing it so blandly, as if pondering travel arrangements.

  "The only question is whether to take Dr. Cooper with us to our Caribbean island," Goddard mused.

  Beside her, Aletheia felt Felix stiffen at this news. Apparently Benjamin had come and put himself in their power, after all. She, herself, went cold. Oh, her poor, misguidedly heroic brother.

  "Once he fixes the Cloak, who needs him?" Viceroy wanted to know.

  "Imbécile," Goddard snapped. "How can you still not understand this technology? It is si délicat. Today it works, tomorrow it does not."

  "But Cooper's a live wire," Viceroy argued. "He's not scared enough."

  "Then, mon ami, you must make him scared."

  Viceroy laughed. "Yes, I suppose I know how to do that. How much longer do we give him to fix the damn thing?"

  "I'd say another twenty minutes, before we...give him additional incentive."

  "Start torturing the girl?" Aletheia could swear she heard Viceroy rub his hands together.

  "Be careful," Goddard warned sharply, "or he may grow stubborn and refuse to fix it altogether."

  "I know what I'm doing."

  Out in the hall Aletheia could sense Felix grow tenser by the millisecond. Power visibly gathered within him. With a sidelong glance at his face of stone, she realized he would pull that trigger, after all. The idea filled her with both relief and gratitude. Despite his earlier horror, he was ready again to do what was necessary.

  "Stay back," Felix ordered, and dropped her hand in order to catch the handle of the door. With a sharp move, he threw it open. Gun first, he stepped into the room.

  Beyond his shoulder, Aletheia could see Viceroy and Goddard, seated at a beat-up wooden table. The room around them was ringed with aged and moldy-looking crates.

  "Nobody will be visiting Dr. Cooper for any reason whatsoever," Felix announced in a voice of everlasting hellfire.

  Viceroy and Goddard froze.

  Aletheia didn't love Felix, but her heart swelled. He would do what needed to be done. She could count on him.

  But at that moment the hair on the back of her neck stirred. She whirled. A horrified gasp escaped her.

  A specter approached, the guard Felix had strangled.

  Apparently the guard Felix had only attempted to strangle.

  "Felix!" Aletheia shouted.

  Felix swiveled. His eyes widened. Before he could react, the guard shoved Aletheia into the room and then leapt at Felix with a roar.

  Shunted to the side, Aletheia could only watch the two men grapple, and marvel at Felix's agility and strength. It was a matter of seconds before he'd knocked the other man to the ground, out cold.

  "Not so fast, Roman," Viceroy's voice rang out.

  The army colonel had retrieved his smug smile. He'd also retrieved the gun he'd earlier held on them. He pointed it now straight at Aletheia.

  "Put the gun down, Roman," Viceroy said. "Nice and easy, if you don't want me to put a bullet through your girlfriend's brain."

  Felix, still staring down at the sprawled guard, froze. Aletheia had never seen his face look so hard.

  But then, she'd never seen Viceroy look quite like this, either. Fear pooled in her stomach. If she'd ever imagined Felix was ready to pull a trigger, Colonel Viceroy looked beyond ready. He looked downright eager.

  "Hands in the air," Viceroy commanded Felix.

  Slowly turning to face Viceroy, Felix put his hands in the air. While Aletheia felt her fear expand, she sensed Felix's potential for violence grow. She knew he would do whatever was humanly possible—or more—to protect her.

  "Now, very slowly," Viceroy crooned, "kneel down. Put the gun on the floor. Slowly, now. Very carefully. I'm a nervous man. It wouldn't take much for my finger to pull this trigger." He kept his gun pointed at Aletheia.

  Slowly, carefully, Felix lowered until his knees hit the floor. He placed his gun on the scuffed wood planks.

  Aletheia's heart felt like it was going to beat out of her chest. She knew if she weren't involved, Felix would have taken his chances in a shootout with Viceroy. Instead, he was following terms of surrender.

  "We should keep the girl alive," Goddard put in, watching the scene with bright, curious eyes. "At least until Cooper finishes fixing the Cloak. As his sister, she could prove useful."

  "But Roman is just a liability," Viceroy remarked.

  "Yes. Best to kill him now, before he can make any more trouble," Goddard agreed.

  Aletheia's thumping heart took an extra jump. A combination of horror and fear held her paralyzed. No, she wanted to shout, but her tongue felt like it was glued to the
top of her mouth. Her limbs felt like they were nailed to the floor.

  Viceroy shifted the aim of his weapon from Aletheia to Felix. He lifted a little, aiming.

  Felix simply knelt, looking straight at him.

  Emotion crested within Aletheia as Viceroy sighted along his gun barrel.

  No, she screamed in her head. Felix couldn't die, not like this, not right now, in front of her very eyes.

  Not when he didn't even know that she loved him. She loved him!

  "Felix!" The horrible paralysis that had gripped Aletheia burst in a rush. With her exclamation, she threw herself in front of him, blocking the path of the bullet.

  What she thought she'd accomplish, she had no idea. She only knew she couldn't watch him die. She tensed, waiting for impact with flashing heated metal.

  Impact didn't come. Instead, as Felix grabbed Aletheia with an oath and rolled her beneath him, they heard Viceroy gasp.

  Aletheia looked up from her position on the floor to see an expression of pure astonishment on the army colonel's face.

  The gun had disappeared from his hands.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Felix half lay, half knelt on the floor where he covered Aletheia. Inside him bone-melting fear crashed against red-hot fury.

  She'd tried to sacrifice her life to save his own.

  He wondered if his inner storm was causing his eyes to malfunction. Had Viceroy's gun truly vanished? For a moment, everybody simply froze and stared.

  The gun was gone.

  Felix decided this fact a split-second before the guard he'd knocked to the ground came to the same conclusion. Felix launched himself across the floor toward the gun he'd earlier set there. He beat out the guard by a hair.

  "Stop," Felix snarled. "Nobody move."

  Nobody moved. The guard Felix had beaten went rigid in his place on the floor. Viceroy and Goddard stared in stupefaction. Even Aletheia went still.

  Of course they all obeyed. Felix was a total agent of darkness. Inside, he felt rocked by alternating waves of triumph, fury, and elation. But the worst part was: he was enjoying it. He was positively thrilled by it. Indeed, he was more than a little frightened by his own excitement. As he backed to a position from which he could cover them all, his senses felt like they'd been sanded raw. Sights, sounds, and even scents, hit him with ten-fold power.

  His brain felt similarly sensitized. How had that gun disappeared? The question was no sooner asked than the pieces of the puzzle came together in his mind. "Benjamin?" Felix called.

  "You got it." Benjamin's voice, a cheerful sound, seemingly came out of thin air. In a distinctly less friendly tone, his voice continued, "Goddard. Take out your weapon, nice and slow, and put it on the table in front of you."

  Goddard's face showed utter horror. "The Cloak," he murmured, "He fixed the Cloak."

  "Benjamin?" Aletheia looked about the room excitedly, stepping toward Felix as she did so. Lightly, she touched Felix's back, as if she needed to hold onto something steady.

  Ha. He was steady? He was a ship tossing in a storm. She'd almost died. In order to save him. The knowledge both enraged and thrilled him.

  Afraid he needed more control, Felix moved away from her touch, toward Goddard. "Your gun," he reminded the man. "Then on the floor, both of you, with your hands on your heads."

  Slowly, Goddard removed a thin pistol from an inside jacket pocket and placed it on the table. His eyes searched the room blindly all the while.

  Felix tried to disguise the maelstrom inside with a sardonic tone as he spoke toward nobody visible. "You did exactly what I told you not to do, Benjamin, didn't you? Turned yourself in to them."

  "Yep. And you're welcome." Benjamin's reply was jaunty. "Not only have I taken care of Viceroy and Goddard for you, but we locked Eyebrows in a room and knocked out Pimples on the way down the hall."

  Then, as Viceroy and Goddard lowered to the floor, Benjamin stepped out of nothingness.

  Seeing a man appear from midair was a strange, disorienting sight, one that set the mouths of the men on the floor gaping. Behind himself, Felix could hear Aletheia's sharp intake of breath.

  Benjamin grinned. "But I couldn't have done all that alone." He reached to the side. As the sound of sirens commenced, approaching from a distance, a pretty woman in a summery dress stepped out of nothing, too. With a clicking sound, a pile of gray material appeared on the floor by her feet.

  "I hope nobody minds," the woman murmured, "but I called the cops. If there's no other obvious reason to want them, I was kidnapped."

  "So you took the guard's cell phone, as well as the keys," Benjamin crowed. "Good work, Zara sweetheart."

  "It only made sense," Zara muttered, looking embarrassed by the praise.

  Benjamin laughed, took her in his arms, and kissed her. It was a big, juicy kiss.

  Felix felt that kiss low down in his gut. When Aletheia's hands landed once again on his back, he glanced toward her.

  From Aletheia's eyes shone the most incredible light. In that moment, what with his surrender to the darkness, Benjamin's incredible appearance, and that erotic kiss, Felix was so het up that—he felt like he understood the light in Aletheia's eyes. Yes, for one terrifying moment, he thought he understood it, and even felt something in direct response to it.

  Wild. His emotions—his brain—were completely out of control. He felt... Was that love?

  No. He had enough rationality left so that when Aletheia leaned infinitesimally closer to him, when he had the chance to kiss her as thoroughly and committedly as Benjamin had just kissed Zara, Felix jerked back. The fear portion of his emotional storm leaped to the fore.

  Danger! The darkness inside him screamed the warning. Love? Don't take the chance.

  Don't you dare believe someone could love you.

  It was an old and powerful warning, sharp and huge. The fear behind the warning was gigantic. The fear was so immense that it sucked into itself every scrap of the emotional energy seething around Felix in his darkness. Like a powerful whirlpool, every feeling he'd been experiencing the past few hours swirled into his fear.

  Felix experienced one horrible, gut-dissolving moment of utter terror before the sheer power of the one united emotion catapulted him right out of the darkness. Like a submarine-launched missile clearing the water, he broke free of the whole tempest and rose fast.

  The scene lay before him just as it had an instant before, Benjamin with his arms around Zara, the men lying on the floor, and Aletheia looking up at him. But everything was different. Instead of being a part of it all, deep in his darkness, Felix was to one side, cool and collected. Very cool. More cool than he'd ever been in his life.

  The fear was gone.

  Every emotion was gone.

  No anger, no triumph—and definitely no love.

  "Felix," Aletheia murmured, with a confused frown. She patted his back. Her voice was soft and her touch was sweet, but Felix felt no emotional response to it.

  It was as though a hot fire had passed through him, so hot it had eaten up any smoldering kindling in its path. His darkness was gone, not even grumbling in the depths. Just...gone.

  For the first time in his life, he was completely free of it, free of its power over him, free of his weakness to it. Oh, yes, he was utterly untouchable.

  And very alone.

  The sirens wailed to a crescendo, then powered down. The police had arrived.

  ~~~

  In the fancy downtown Boston hotel room, Aletheia settled with a newspaper in the easy chair by the window. Unable to concentrate enough to read, she jumped when she heard a noise at the door. Her heart skipped a beat.

  Felix. Finally.

  She'd been waiting for him for hours.

  The police had released her late that afternoon, the day following all of their adventures in the waterfront warehouse. There'd been a lot of questions down at the station, and the arrival of various officers of the federal government. Aletheia didn't blame anybody for the delay and
excitement. The authorities hadn't had an inkling about the plot involving the invisibility cloak until the two Boston police units had pulled up in front of the warehouse.

  After her release, while waiting in the hotel room, she'd thought about Felix, Felix whom she'd decided she wasn't going to love.

  Oh, right. Like that was going to happen. Her brain had thought it could call the shots on this one, but her brain had been wrong. Somewhere deeper inside, she'd made her decision. It was a decision like the other major decision she'd made in her life, to leave school in order to take care of her family. These decisions weren't based on good or bad judgment, but on something bigger than that. Truer.

  Wrong or right, whether it was a good idea or a bad one, she was stuck with it.

  Now the hotel room door opened and Felix stepped through.

  He hesitated, as if surprised to see she was there. Other than that, he had on his densest mask. She couldn't discern his emotional state.

  Nevertheless, Aletheia set her newspaper aside and rose with a welcoming smile. "I thought they'd decided to keep you," she joked. He might look unaffected by seeing her, but he was not. She knew he was not.

  All the same, she restrained the urge to run and throw herself into his arms.

  Stone-faced, Felix did not quite look at her. "No, they didn't need to keep me. The police eventually grew convinced Goddard and Viceroy were holding all of us hostage in cooperation with terrorists. But Homeland Security wanted as much information on Goddard as I could give them." He lifted a shoulder. "I suppose those additional questions are what took them longer to get through with me than with you."

  "I suppose." Aletheia watched as Felix walked over toward the chest of drawers. He seemed to be holding himself decisively distant. She sucked in her lips. "Are they letting you leave town?"

  "For the moment." His tone was measured, careful, as he opened the top drawer. "I may have to return at some point, but they don't need me any more right now." He paused. "I assume you and your brother are being allowed to leave, as well."

  "That's right, I can go anywhere I want." Aletheia forced her smile to brighten while a ribbon of fear curled through her. This conversation was incredibly strange. The sheer emptiness of Felix's attitude unsettled her too much to dare add the rest, I can go anywhere, even with you.