Elliot made a face. “Stephen. I gotta scan you, man. You know the rules. We can’t play games with your health and well-being. If you’re having a problem—”
“I’m fine,” Diaz insisted. “It’s just overwhelm. Please, Dr. Z, I need you to give me a break.” He closed his eyes. “Please.”
If he’d wanted to, Diaz could’ve gone right through Elliot. Not only was he bigger and stronger, but at fifty percent integrated, he could’ve picked up Elliot without laying hands on him, floated him through the air, and moved him away from the door.
But a significant part of the training program here at OI focused on choosing when and where to unleash one’s powers. And in dealing, respectfully, with all of the many fractions who inhabited the world. Between Diaz and Mackenzie, Mac was the one who had trouble in that department.
Diaz, however, completely embraced the zen-related philosophy and monk-like lifestyle that was supposed to allow him to train more easily as he strove to be even more highly integrated.
A man of few words, he usually moved quietly through the halls at OI, doing his work and keeping to himself—which couldn’t have been all that easy for him, considering the amount of attention he generated just by looking the way he did.
The Greater-Than was jacked. He was also about three inches taller than Elliot, and Elliot had passed the six feet mark back before he’d turned fifteen. Diaz walked around on legs that were like tree trunks, and had those arms and shoulders that … Yes. The man was in excellent physical shape. And with his dark hair worn short, those stormy-ocean green eyes, perfect nose, and chiseled features …
Needless to say, Diaz’s visits to the OI gym had become something of a spectator sport for the female R&D staff.
Even though—at least as far as Elliot knew—Diaz took his training vows and accompanying celibacy very seriously.
But the truth was that Elliot didn’t know. He and Diaz weren’t friends. They were co-workers. Acquaintances who shared a mutual respect for one another. They knew each other well enough to not be thrown if they were matched during the holiday season as each other’s Secret Santas. But while Elliot regularly hung out with Mac and occasionally shot the shit with Bach, he’d never sat and chilled with Diaz.
Not once.
But that wasn’t because Elliot hadn’t tried. For the seven years he’d worked here—including the past three that he’d lived on campus—he’d kept the friend card at the top of his deck whenever he’d dealt with Diaz.
It was Diaz who’d carefully kept his distance.
For a while, Elliot had thought that it might have been a gay thing—that Diaz was uncomfortable with Elliot’s sexual orientation. But as time went on, he’d realized that Diaz kept his distance from everyone.
“Okay. You can go,” Elliot said, but he didn’t move away from the door as Diaz opened his eyes to look at him. Eye contact. Finally. His pupils weren’t dilated and his eyes weren’t glazed. That was good. “But if I don’t see a report that you’ve been scanned again, sometime within the next thirty minutes? Don’t make me come and find you. Because I will. And that’s a promise.”
Diaz clenched his teeth, the muscles jumping in his jaw as he just stood there, staring back at him.
“You understand?” Elliot pushed.
Diaz closed his eyes and nodded. He even laughed a little as he whispered, “I understand,” as if something Elliot had said was funny.
“Good.” Elliot didn’t get the joke, but he stepped to the side.
Diaz moved swiftly toward the door and threw it open.…
And collided with Michelle Mackenzie who was on the other side, about to come in.
Diaz was moving so fast that he couldn’t stop himself even though he tried, and she was almost literally half his size, so they both went down, hard, onto the hallway’s tile floor.
“Holy shit!” Mac said, then, “Sorry! Sorry!” as Elliot scrambled after them, intending to help.
But Mac was already back on her feet, so he turned to Diaz, who was still on the floor.
“You all right?” he asked them both.
“I’m good,” Mac said, “but I kinda gave D a pretty enthusiastic knee to the junk. Auto-pilot kicked in and … Sorry, about that.”
Elliot knew from the endless testing and reports, that that kind of pain was difficult to block. It was one thing for a Greater-Than like Diaz or Bach—or even one of the trainees like Charlie or Brian—to go into an altercation with their ability to block pain already in place. In those cases, they could conceivably endure a full-on electrical current to the gonads without blinking. But the male anatomy was such that, if they weren’t blocking pain, and they accidentally got whacked, masking that pain was like stopping a stone that had been thrown into water. You might be able to freeze the stone in place, but you couldn’t still the ripples that its impact had created.
“I’m okay,” Diaz said, although he sounded anything but. “It was more the surprise than the hit.”
Elliot extended his hand to help him up, but Diaz looked at it and shook his head. He reached to help Diaz anyway, taking hold of the bigger man’s arm and—
Holy crap!
He got slammed by a wave of heat and power that came with an image that was bright and full-color: Diaz, in a room that Elliot had seen before—but where?—half-sitting, half-lying back, exactly as he was there on the floor, except he was on a bed and he was naked. And instead of reaching to help him up, Elliot was joining him, reaching for Diaz in a different way entirely as they both smiled …
The image shifted suddenly, almost before Elliot had even processed it, turning into a rapid-fire sequence of pictures that flashed through his brain with an accompanying soundtrack of something that might’ve been a thunderclap with each new burst.
That contact, with Elliot’s hand wrapped around Diaz.
Diaz’s gasp of pleasure …
The intensity of a kiss, deep, long, hot …
Sex—Elliot on top, their bodies straining …
It happened so fast and filled Elliot’s mind so completely, there was no room for other thoughts. In fact, he could barely remember how to breathe.
The images might’ve continued, but the sheer force of it all knocked him back onto the floor, on his ass. And when he let go of Diaz, it stopped—both the images and that incredible heat.
“Hey,” Mac was saying, as she swiftly moved to help him. “El, you okay?”
Elliot couldn’t do much more than stare at Diaz, who was pushing himself to his feet.
“Did he shock you?” Mac asked. “D, you need to be careful. I had this weird power surge tonight. I don’t know if it had to do with the joker we contained, or maybe it was having Bach’s skills slapped back at us, but … I’ve had some strange shit happen tonight, myself.”
“Yeah, maybe that’s it,” Diaz murmured, but he didn’t meet Elliot’s eyes as Elliot managed to grind out, “I don’t think that was an electric shock.”
“I’m gonna …” Diaz pointed down the hall. “Go.”
“Now I really want that full med scan done in the next thirty minutes,” Elliot said, as Mac helped him to his feet.
“Or you’ll come and find me,” Diaz repeated his earlier words. “I got it.” And then he did meet Elliot’s eyes—for a mere fraction of a second—before he jammed his hands in his pockets and hurried away.
Elliot stood there, dumbstruck, watching him leave. Holy crap. That definitely hadn’t been an electric shock—it had been a projection. Elliot had experienced the phenomenon before while doing tests with Joseph Bach, who, at appropriately close-range, could project his thoughts quite easily into another person’s head—even someone as less-than as Elliot.
Bach often used the method to communicate with his team while they were apprehending a joker.
Diaz’s projection had been similar in some ways to Bach’s—the unfamiliar warmth and the sensation of having one’s mind filled, completely, with another’s thoughts.
But in oth
er ways? It had been extremely different. Elliot hadn’t received structured thoughts and clear messages from Diaz, but rather something more jumbled and chaotic.
In fact, it was entirely possible that Diaz was completely unaware of all that he’d just shared.
“What just happened here?” Mac asked, as Elliot exhaled what probably sounded to her like a laugh.
He glanced over to find her watching him, so he shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, as he motioned for her to go into exam room one. “I definitely have a boatload of questions for you about this power surge you experienced, but first I need to give you a scan.”
He looked back, one last time, in the direction that Diaz had gone, but the man had finally turned the corner, way down at the end of the hall.
Holy, holy crap.
Whatever that was that Elliot had just experienced, one thing was crystal clear.
Stephen Diaz was gay.
SEVEN
“And if I don’t want to stay here,” Anna Taylor was saying, “you’ll … use your powers to muck around inside my head and make me think that I do.”
Bach agreed completely with Elliot, who’d left the room very quietly, with the faintest click from the door closing behind him.
This was awkward.
And although there were a number of ways he could’ve responded to what Anna had just said, he went with the truth.
“In order to control your thoughts,” he told her, “to that degree, I’d have to take up permanent residence inside of you. Your head.”
She was silent, just gazing at him, so he cleared his throat and continued.
“I do the best I can,” he said quietly. “That’s all I can ever hope to do. And I did what I did tonight because it was imperative that you leave the area immediately. The police were on their way to your apartment with a warrant for your arrest in connection to Nika’s disappearance.”
She reacted to that, leaning forward in her chair, her brown eyes blazing. “But that’s absurd! I’m the one who filed the missing persons report. Even if they had reason to believe I’d harm Nika—which they don’t!—do they honestly think I’d cover my tracks by spending five hundred dollars that I don’t even have?”
“It doesn’t matter what they think,” Bach told her evenly. “What matters is that they would have taken you into custody. And once you were in the system? The people who took Nika would have had access to you, but I would not have. I couldn’t let that happen.” He sat forward, too. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but if you leave here, you will be picked up by the police. It doesn’t matter why, it doesn’t matter if you can answer all of their questions and even provide a legitimate alibi. I’m sure that you can. But as they’re checking that alibi, you’ll be put in a holding cell with people who have already been given the order to kill you. You need to believe me, Anna, when I tell you that the people who run the Organization have a very long reach.”
He was scaring her. But he knew that she still didn’t believe him. Not completely. “I thought the police were understaffed. Why would they spend any time at all on this one missing little girl?”
“Because they’ve also been given an order,” Bach told Anna. “The Organization has connections everywhere.”
“Even here?” she asked. “At the Obermeyer Institute?”
“No,” Bach said. “Not here. Everyone who enters the compound gets screened.”
“Screened,” she repeated. “By you and the other Seventy-twos?”
“There are no other Seventy-twos at OI,” he told her. “We’ve got two Fifties. A fair number of Forties. Forty is considered very high. But even the Fifties can’t screen to the level that I can.”
“So you are like the prince,” she said. “Or maybe I should say king. King of the Thought Police. Nika must be very important to the Institute, to get you involved. Can I assume that I’ve been cleared? Since I’ve already been screened?”
“Yes,” he said.
“That makes it sound so much better than calling it, say, mental invasion or privacy annihilation.”
“Most people who come here, do so willingly,” he said a tad more sharply than he would have liked. “They welcome the protection.”
And there they sat, staring at each other across the conference table.
“I’m not any kind of king,” Bach added. “I’m far from perfect. But like I said, I do my best.” He stood up. “Why don’t I show you to your quarters? The facilities here are very comfortable. Maybe seeing your apartment will help you decide to stay.”
“I’ve decided,” she said, looking up at him. “To stay.”
The rush of relief made it hard to speak, so Bach nodded. And finally managed a “Good.”
“Since I don’t care where I stay,” Anna told him as she, too, got to her feet, “and I do care about finding my sister, maybe you could show me the part of the compound where your analysts are tracking Nika’s cell phone GPS and searching through those satellite images of her route home from school.”
Bach nodded again. That he could do.
Elliot was still flustered and freaked out. And aroused.
Mac could feel it—it was still radiating off of him in waves as they headed for the OI lounge, leaving the more sterile-feeling Med Center’s wing and going into the far more lavish and old-fashioned part of the brownstone building known as Old Main.
The doctor had absolutely no ability to block his emotions. And, as an occasional fifteen-percenter or maybe just as a highly intelligent gay man, he also had a naturally heightened empathy. And yes, okay, Mac was guilty of stereotypical thinking, but in Elliot’s case, it was true. He was more empathic than most people, and he was indisputably, openly gay—which was one of the main reasons he and Mac had become such close friends. As a gay man, he was unaffected by her ability to cast a sexual spell. Because of that, Mac knew his friendship with her was real.
She also loved Elliot because the man was incapable of bullshit. What made it even better was that he had no clue that he was so transparent to most of the Greater-Thans—which made his obvious choice to never even try to sling any BS doubly refreshing.
And that also made the nothing he’d said to her outside the exam room extra odd.
What was he hiding?
If it had been anyone besides Diaz in the hallway with them, Mac would’ve guessed that El had recovered sufficiently from his damaged-by-an-asshole broken heart to finally engage in a little unauthorized something-something—and more power to him.
But it was Diaz, which meant there was absolutely nothing going on. At least on Diaz’s end. He was totally blocked when it came to his sexuality.
Elliot opened the lounge door and held it for Mac to go in first.
The dark-paneled room had been a gentlemen’s club in the building’s precollege days. At this time of night, it was deserted. Most of the staff were asleep, and the Potentials were still in lockdown. But the lounge remained open. Always. The private bar at OI was on Vegas-time, open 24/7. There was never a last call.
Mac slid into her favorite booth, way in the corner, and Elliot sat across from her. “So when did you start crushing on D?” she asked her friend.
Elliot rolled his eyes, but he didn’t deny it. “Is there anyone at OI who doesn’t have a crush on Stephen Diaz?”
“You mean, besides me?” she asked, and he gave her a very pointedly raised eyebrow. “Hey. I got over my thing for him years ago.”
“I have the occasional—okay, more like frequent—hot dream,” Elliot told her with his trademark honesty. “It’s triggered, apparently, by walking past him in the hallway. And if you repeat that to anyone, I’ll deny it. The last thing I want to do is make him uncomfortable.”
He shut up fast as the nightshift bartender and cook—a tall, flaxen-haired woman named Louise—brought them their usual. She didn’t even bother to take their order, she just delivered a glass of wine for Mac—she never drank anything harder than that while in the compound—and a coffee f
or Elliot.
“Thanks,” Mac said and Elliot nodded, too, watching Louise meander back to the bar, obviously waiting until she was well out of earshot.
And here it came.
“Okay, we’re here,” he said. “In the lounge. Spill, Mackenzie. What the hell’s going on?”
Back in the med-wing, Elliot had scanned her, giving her a longer-than-normal full, and while she was up on the table in her underwear, he’d started frowning at the test results. Apparently her integration was up a little—she was at fifty-two, instead of her usual forty-nine-point-five.
“Which ankle did you injure …?” he’d asked.
“The left,” Mac had told him. “But I don’t think I hurt it that badly. It healed pretty quickly.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Elliot had said and brought over a handheld wand called a DEET that he waved across the foot in question, looking for a more detailed analysis.
“I’m fine now,” she’d insisted as he again frowned at the computer screen. “I’m walking on it. No pain.”
And that was when he’d dropped the bomb. “It’s registering as a fully healed break,” he told her. “You broke it. In more than one place. And there was damage to ligaments, too, plus a slight tear in your plantar fascia … All healed with readings of scar tissue that I’d expect to see from an injury that’s at least a year old. At least.”
Mac had stared at him. “Seriously?”
“Yup,” he’d said. “And FYI, if you’d come in with this severe a break, I would have scheduled you for surgery. How the hell did you do this?”
“I was coming down a flight of stairs,” she’d told him, “and I fell—”
“No,” Elliot had said. “Hello. I know how you did it. It was one of the few things you actually included in your report, but we’ll get into everything you left out later. What I want to know now is how you healed it. Talk about quickly … What I’m seeing is …” He was as serious as she’d ever seen him as he looked up from the computer. “It’s impossible.”
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