by Jody Klaire
Boy was I glad to hear it. Still, I didn’t trust my voice enough to speak. I could even feel the tears brimming. Clearly, I needed therapy. Well, more therapy.
Her aura waved around like it was doing a happy dance. After a second of silence she shook off whatever thought was in her mind and her aura quietened down. “So, you ready for the real work?”
“Are you going to make me do push-ups?”
Renee squeezed my arm. “Aeron, if I make you do any more physical training, there won’t be clothes to fit you.”
I followed her to the car, stowed my pack, and smiled at the fact she’d already put the seat way back so I could actually get in.
“So, where are we going?” I asked as we set off down the endless strip of road. There was nothing but frosty white on the sparse dirt either side. “And where are we?”
Renee smiled. “Can’t tell you. But it’s going to take a while so just relax.”
I stretched out my legs as much as the space would allow and pulled open the top shirt buttons. Why anyone thought it was smart to look like you were choking, I didn’t know.
“Probably a good idea if you ditch the fatigues,” Renee murmured as she glanced at me. “You have got something else, right?”
“Jeans and a t-shirt,” I said.
“The same pair that I bought you in the summer?”
I looked down at my hands and Renee chuckled, her soft chuckle once more.
“What am I going to do with you, Lorelei?” She grinned at me. “You must be the only woman on the planet who only owns a handful of clothes.”
“Not like there was much point when General-Nit-picker-Frei had me crawling around in mud all day.” I sighed. “You know what happens when I’m in water.”
“She made you do that course?” Renee scowled so much that her glasses slid down a little.
“Made my jaw feel a lot better though,” I said, rubbing my chin.
“You could have drowned!”
I shrugged. Renee had seen my healing in action. It was a weird thing that happened when I stood in running water. It removed all the afflictions from people that were stored up in my hands and it seemed to fix me too. The problem was, it sucked me under. Not a clever thing to do on my own.
“She pulled me out,” I offered. “She was furious though.”
“Yes, you probably messed up her hair.”
I raised an eyebrow at the snarky remark. “Do I detect mutiny?”
“No,” Renee said. “Just realism. It takes her ages to do her hair.”
I stared out at the barren landscape, trying to get some clue as to where we were. No mountains, no foliage, just frosted grasslands and a couple of rocks. If it had been warmer I’d have figured it could be a desert or someplace. I sighed. I didn’t have one iota, it looked like the middle of nowhere. Thank goodness I didn’t have to navigate in my new role as a CIG secret service . . . well . . . whatever I was. What use I was going to be was yet to be revealed to me.
“Have you heard from your mother?”
I turned at Renee’s tentative tone. “Why? What has she done now?”
“She hasn’t done anything,” Renee answered, her eyebrows rising over the rims of her glasses. “I just thought that perhaps she had checked up on her daughter.”
“Ha!”
Renee jumped and flashed me a startled look.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, staring down at my pants. Maybe it was still kinda raw. “Considering I never knew that she existed up until last year, I’d be surprised if she can remember me.”
“Aeron.” Renee squeezed my leg. I looked up to see her gentle smile. “You know her reasons and if you’re going to have to answer to her, you’re going to have to get used to her being in your life.”
“No,” I said. Uh, uh was I getting used to nothing. She abandoned me. She took off and left. I’d done my good daughter routine. “You take the orders and do all the protection stuff. I’m just there to cause chaos.”
“You’re there to use your skills.” Renee slowed the car. She took her glasses off and fixed me with her intense gaze. “You’re an important part of the team.”
“Why?” I knew Renee had missed me but I was nobody special. No doubt my mother had just wanted me out of the way so she could live in Nan’s cabin. “Mommy dearest is the one who sees the future, you protect the person in question—”
“POI,” Renee interjected. “Person of Interest.”
“Yeah, them too,” I said. “And Franken-Frei and the I’m-not-at-liberty-to-say crew figure out what is going to happen and stop it.” I stared out at the sparse nothingness. It seemed to echo how I felt about everything. Lost in a wilderness. “You worked well without me before—”
“We didn’t.” I looked at her and she nodded, her eyes blazing. The rims of her irises caught the light, the edges tinted with cyan. “I mean it, Aeron. We had great intentions but you know better than to place all your assumptions on visions.”
I winced even at the mention of them. I got visions sometimes, all fire and raging infernos burning through into my mind. My mother was welcome to them.
“That’s not the point,” I said, trying to shake off the shiver creeping up my spine. “There’s no real place for me. Sure I may be able to fix you up if you really need it but this,” I motioned to the fatigues, “is never going to work and you know it.”
Her blonde eyebrows dipped, sandy-colored strands of her fringe flopped into her eyes. “Then why are you even trying?”
I sighed. “Because I have to. My mother blackmailed me into it or have you forgotten?” What could I have said? No? My father adored her and had waited his whole life for her to crawl back into town. He needed someone to help raise my half-sisters. It was my fault they had lost their mother. My fault. What could I do?
“You could have said no,” Renee said, her aura darkening.
“If I did that,” I shot back. “I wouldn’t get to see my favorite head shrinker now, would I?”
Renee laughed. “That’s Doctor head shrinker to you.”
When we met, she was undercover as a psychiatrist. Sometimes, she was still that doctor lurking below the surface. Lilia, my mother, was a hero to her and most of the CIG people. For some reason that made Renee want to close the chasm between my mother and I. I’d tried to explain a million times that it wasn’t that I didn’t like Lilia, more that I didn’t know her. She had abandoned me and my dad to go play hero. That made me mad sometimes. I tried not to feel that way but I did. And, I was sick of pretending otherwise.
“Stop it,” I said as Renee’s energy flickered. “If we are meant to end up like an episode of The Waltons, we will.”
As always, my reading Renee made her nervous and her fingers gripped the wheel tighter.
“I forgot how freaky it feels around you.”
I patted her on the hand. I got the flash of where we were and where we were headed. “Well, we got a ten-hour road trip to get you re-acquainted.”
“Hey!” She protested, rubbing her hand from the static shock.
I grinned, relaxing back into the seat. “Missed you too, Doc.” I closed my eyes. “Missed you too.”
Chapter 3
“AERON . . . AERON, WAKE up.”
I peeked open one eyelid to see Renee’s weary face hovering over me.
“S’matter?” I opened the other eye, wondering when daylight had disappeared. “Where . . . what time?”
“Time for food,” she said, giving my arm a shake. “I’ve forgotten just how heavy you sleep.”
I sat up and stretched out, smacking my elbow on the doorframe and grunting. I felt like I’d been crinkled up like one of those Chinese fans. “How long was I out for?”
“Five hours,” Renee answered with a tinge of irritation in her voice. I’d never learned how to drive or I would have tried to take the reins—well, the wheel—for a while to help.
“Sorry,” I offered as I opened the door and then closed it as I tried to control the case of shiver
s. “When did we take a wrong turn and hit Alaska?”
“It’s been like that for over an hour,” she said, peering up as the snow covered the windshield. “It’s not even forecast until tomorrow.” She reached back into the backseat and threw me a jacket. “Change out of those and I’ll get the order in.”
“Here?” I peered out of a tiny gap in the snow-dusted windshield. We were in the middle of a town. A pretty place with bubble-windowed shops. Their twinkling lights bathed the snow with gentle yellows along the misty tree-lined street.
Renee nodded at the white fluff outside. “Here. Look at the windshield, it’s already covered.”
She headed out into what looked like a blizzard. I started wriggling and crashing about the car as I tried, not too successfully, to de-CIG myself.
I got a mental image of someone heading past the car rocking with my muffled curses. It made me thankful for the snow. I got out of the car and smiled at the bemused-looking man and nodded. At least what I attempted to do was smile. What actually happened was I shivered, nodded, and made a strange stamping action as the cold wind rattled up through my unzipped jacket and tickled my insides. Maybe we’d bypassed Alaska and ended up in Antarctica.
I locked up and headed past the gawping man toward a lodge-like cafe. Snow was building up alongside old-worldly windows. It was well taken care of, I could see that, and the shiny trucks parked alongside said that, wherever we were, money wasn’t any kind of obstacle.
“Coming down ain’t it?” I said as the man followed me, his eyebrows raised. Brown hair jutted out from under his woolen hat.
Wish I’d had a hat.
He was shooting for some kind of explanation. I was barely keeping my bubbling laughter from bursting out but my shoulders were shrugging. He must have thought I was crazy, but to his credit, he managed a polite smile.
It was a hell of a lot warmer inside the café. The dry warmth made my ears and cheeks burn as they thawed. Note to self: always pack a hat.
The café looked like a place that you would see in tourist haunts—maps of the area framed up next to pictures of what the town looked like way back when. There was even a dedication to the skiers and mountaineers who had lost their lives. I wondered if the broken ski crossed by a rusted hammer was just symbolic. I resolved not to go nowhere near them. Objects tended to store up the energy of whoever had used them. When I touched them, I saw flashes of memories, kinda like my own version of one of them USB drives that Renee had told me about. Either way, I didn’t plan on reliving it.
My eyes worked hard to adjust from the dark outside and were still fuzzy as I wandered in further. The lighting gave it a homey feel. Like walking in from the cold and ending up in the pioneer era. Then again, the stainless steel counter top and shinier-looking kitchen gave the impression that, although these folks wanted you comfortable, they were no slouches in the kitchen. My stomach rumbled. My kind of people.
Renee sat staring out of the window as I approached, something odd in her mood. I’d seen her mad, exhausted, scared, and all manner of emotions but whatever was going on behind the grey eyes, it was dark.
“You okay there?” I said, slumping into the seat opposite and mumbling my apology as my knees collided with hers.
Renee jumped and then sighed as she rubbed the bridge of her nose. The waves of tension made me clench my jaw.
“What’s wrong?”
She shook her head and shot me a glance, the one that said, “We’re in public so quit interrogating me.” I gave her a look back that said, “Stop being a moody pain-in-the-butt and I’ll think about it.”
“Your meals, ladies,” the waitress said, plonking our plates in front of us. I looked down at the fried eggs and bacon and grinned so wide that my jaw cracked, loudly.
“Thank you,” Renee said as I shoved as much of the food onto my fork as I could manage. I shoveled it into my mouth and groaned; bacon was the elixir of heaven. The salty taste danced around my taste buds as the yolk followed and I sat there, eyes shut, savoring the moment. Oh yeah.
I heard a polite cough and opened my eyes to two sets of amused ones.
“Good?” the waitress asked.
Renee was stifling her laugh, her mood lifting, if only a bit. “She is a sucker for fried food.”
“So I see,” the waitress said. “You want a drink with that, honey?”
Over the course of my life, I’ve been conditioned that when people meet me, they really don’t like me. When I was growing up, everyone figured me for a freak and so the genuine warmth in this stranger’s voice had me stunned. I guessed I must have been looking at her like she’d landed in front of me in a halo of lights as Renee kicked me under the table.
“I . . . er . . . I—”
“She’ll have a Coke,” Renee said.
I nodded, still completely shocked. The lady shook her head with a smile and wandered off with me staring after her.
“Did they cook it in whiskey?” Renee shot at me, kicking me again to stop me gawping.
“She talked to me,” I said. I knew I sounded simple but I couldn’t help it.
“She works here,” Renee said, her aura filled with a yucky green color. There was snappy, then there was her. “She wouldn’t be very good at her job otherwise.”
“No, I mean she really talked to me . . .” I shook my head at Renee who looked like she might commit me. “Like I was . . . well . . . like folks talk to you.”
Renee’s aura filled up with pink again and she reached across the table and patted my hand. “They didn’t in CIG?”
“You kidding me?”
“No.” Renee leaned her elbows on the table. I half expected her to slip into shrink mode.
I took a couple of moments to sneak in some more delicious food. If she started to ask me how I felt about it, I was leaving, cold or no cold. “I was Lilia’s kid . . . the kid.”
“Ah,” Renee said and started to eat her own food.
Being the super-seer’s kid was enough to make me feel like I had a neon sign above my head. It had taken some getting used to and a lot of control. I went from the loner, the freaky kid that everyone hated in Oppidum to the hero who saved the town from a killer. That was before I had the undivided curiosity of an entire base. I’d been through the entire spectrum: from freak, to loner, to convicted felon, to outcast, to hero, to the kid of some big hero in CIG. It was a transition that still confused the heck out of me. Yet, apart from my fellow inmates and Renee, there hadn’t been anyone who actually just talked to me. I was used to being gawped at, but being treated like I was everybody else? Not so much.
We sat there in silence—well, not quite silence, mostly chomping noises and appreciative groans about the food—and I realized that I was half ready to stay here, wherever here was.
“Some people are just nice,” Renee said, placing her knife and fork down. She’d left all the crunchy bits of the bacon. “You haven’t gotten to see that yet.”
I stole the scraps off her plate. I loved the crunchy bits. “Or she just doesn’t know I’m a freak yet.”
Renee gave my hand a sharp tap. “Don’t do that. You’re an amazing woman. She’d love you.”
I crunched away, sure that Renee was just being nice. “Really?”
Renee sat back, her stare certain. “Yes. Don’t judge everyone by Oppidum’s standards.”
I narrowed my eyes. A challenge, huh? “So, if I wander up to her and tell her that I can see how much she wants her son to go to college? Or that she doesn’t want him to follow her husband into his business? Or that she has arthritis in her left wrist, she’ll still want to be friends?”
Renee gazed out of the window, once again looking lost and tense. “I can’t speak for her but you scared the crap out of me and I’m still here.”
“You wouldn’t have been if you weren’t making sure that I wasn’t killing young girls.”
Her grey eyes snapped to mine. “I never believed you would.”
“Uh huh.”
&n
bsp; She kinked her eyebrows up in the middle. “I did not.”
“You did in the institution. You thought I had tricked you or have you forgotten?”
Renee’s gaze flickered between my eyes and empty space, then she dropped her chin and sighed. “Point made.”
“It’s not your fault I’m a freak,” I said, offering the waitress a smile as she brought our drinks. “I’m just glad you like me in spite of it.” Before Renee could argue, I turned to the waitress. “Do you have pie?”
The waitress laughed and beamed at me. I got a burst of warmth from her that made me smile back. “I think I got just the thing for you.” She turned to Renee, paused, and tapped her finger to her lip. “I think you are the cheesecake kind.”
I felt the flicker of panic from Renee. She was always on her guard. She’d lived her life undercover for so long that the closer someone got to the truth about her as a person, the more on edge she became.
“Cheesecake, huh?” I said, trying to cover up Renee’s sudden blanching. “What flavor do you reckon?”
The woman closed her eyes as if she were trying to sense something. I used that moment to touch Renee’s hand, giving her a shock and me a weird flashed image.
“Strawberry,” the woman guessed.
She was way off.
Renee snapped her hand away from me and feigned happiness. “Yes, you have me there. I’d love a piece.” She weren’t all that keen on strawberry and she only liked cheesecake without gelatin in it. In the mass of weird flashes, I got a memory of her finding a lump of gelatin in her cheesecake as a kid.
“I never fail . . . it’s a gift,” the woman said as she hurried off, answering a couple of other customers on her way.
Renee narrowed her eyes at me. “You had no right.”
“It wasn’t intentional,” I muttered, the cold sweat dribbling down the back of my neck. “I was trying to comfort you.”
Murmuring a quiet “oh,” Renee leaned her head back and let out a sigh. “I’m sorry. I—”
“It’s okay. I wasn’t the only one who crawled back in her shell, huh?” I didn’t want to show her how much the flash had affected me but my hands were so clammy that when I wiped them on my knees I felt the damp through my jeans.