“Look, I’m not asking you to have sex right here on the floor,” Elliot said. “Just touch her. For God’s sake, are you an idiot? She needs your help. Take. Her hand!”
It was Mac who reached out first, real turmoil in her eyes. Shane met her halfway and they intertwined their fingers. And it was just like back in the bar, when he’d touched her wrist. Except this time the images that flooded his mind were memories. Mac, kissing him, devouring him, as he pushed himself deeply inside of her …
And this time, instead of pulling away, she clasped his hand even more tightly. And Shane realized that she was in tremendous pain. Whatever they were doing here, it was hurting her—more, even, than she was already hurting—and he tried to pull free, but she wouldn’t let go. In fact, she gasped, “More,” and God, talk about stepping through the looking glass. But here he was, and this freaky world was apparently where this incredible woman lived. And the hard truth was that if she was here, he wanted to be, too. And if she really believed that he could help her, simply with body contact …?
Hands still clasped, Shane pulled her up into his arms so that he was cradling her against his chest, so that she was in his lap.
Her ass pressed against his raging hard-on—way to be a sick, twisted bastard. She was badly injured and in some crazy amount of pain while just a few yards away her boyfriend or husband or whoever-the-hell-he-was-to-her was battling some insane super-villain, while Shane …? He wanted to shag her.
Nice.
Across the room, the joker had started to scream, as if he were being tortured. It was blood-curdling and hair-raising, and just as abruptly as it started, it stopped.
And with that, the joker stopped fighting. He collapsed on the floor in a very small, unthreatening, slightly smoking heap, while the furniture vanished—instantly pulverized into huge sprays of sawdust.
Mac clung to Shane for only a fraction of second longer, too, before pulling free from his arms and scrambling up to her feet to meet Bach, who was already heading toward her.
Diaz, however went toward the joker, announcing, “He’s out! Medical team, we need you in here, now!”
“Are you all right?” Bach asked Mac.
She glanced back at Shane, her expression unreadable, before she nodded. “I am now. What the hell happened? Littleton wasn’t using when we picked him up. If he was, I would have known it.”
“Belay that, med team.” Diaz called. He was down on one knee, beside the joker. “He’s not just out, he’s flat-lined.”
“What?” Mac went toward the fallen man, obviously horrified.
“Flat-lined?” Shane repeated as Elliot, too, went over to the joker, his medical wand in hand. “As in …?”
“His neck’s broken,” Elliot reported as Diaz stood up and backed off. “But if that hadn’t killed him, the massive brain hemorrhaging would have. Whoa, his brain practically imploded.”
“Aw, shit,” Mac said. “Shit.”
Bach looked at her. “What did you do to him?”
She was instantly defensive, chin high. “It wasn’t intentional.”
“I know that,” he said evenly. “I’m merely gathering information.”
She didn’t look convinced. “It hurt,” she told him. “The healing process.” She glanced at Shane again. “Accelerated, it was more painful and … So I didn’t block it, I flung it at him, the way we did with that other joker, last night. I thought maybe …” She shook her head, clearly pissed. “Shit.”
Bach nodded. “Whatever you did worked.”
“Yeah, but I double-whammied him,” Mac said. “The drug made him paranoid and I found his fears and I took them and somehow … amplified them back at him. That, combined with the pain I was throwing …” She shook her head again. “I don’t really know how I did it, sir. I’ve never been able to do anything like that before—definitely not to that degree.”
“You’re integrated nearly ten percent higher than normal,” Elliot told her.
Mac again turned to look first at him, then at Shane, with an expression of complete surprise that she tried to hide. She was clearly exhausted, though, and she covered it with her anger and frustration over killing the joker.
“You’re up to fifty-nine,” Elliot continued, as he moved back to the comm-station. “Diaz is …” He cleared his throat. “Still at sixty.”
“D is enhanced, too?” Mac looked over at Diaz then, and Shane realized that, even with all of the near-death drama, this was the first time he’d seen either of them exchange so much as eye contact.
And whatever he’d seen—or imagined he’d seen in the lobby when he’d first come in … There was nothing there now. Friendship, sure. They knew each other well. They were teammates—he’d recognize that bond anywhere, having lived it with his SEAL team for years. Why he hadn’t seen it that way earlier was …
Probably because jealousy, which he was prone to experiencing, made him not just crazy but stupid, too.
“You believe Shane’s responsible for this boost in their power?” Bach was asking the doctor.
Elliot hedged. “Partly. I have a new theory that needs a little modification and … a bit more research. Let’s all take a break, and meet in Dr. Bach’s office at … fourteen hundred hours should do it.”
“I may not be back by then,” Mac said flatly, arms folded across her chest. “With Littleton dead, we need to find—”
“Yeah, actually you will be back,” Elliot cut her off as he turned toward her. “Because you’re not going anywhere. Until you can control your enhanced power …?” He shook his head. “You’re not leaving the facility.”
She started to argue, but he cut her off.
“Not going to happen. Besides, according to your most recent scan, you haven’t slept in nearly sixty hours.” Elliot looked at Diaz. “You could use some downtime, too.”
But Mac was not one to go silently into the night. Or morning as it now was. “We’ve got a missing girl,” she informed them, her self-disgust heavy in her tone, “and I’ve just killed one of two men who can tell us where she is. And—oh yeah—we have no idea who or where the other man is.”
“We’ve got a name for our second man,” Bach told her, told all of them, even though Shane wasn’t in the loop. Missing girl? What missing girl? “Devon Caine. Analysis is already working to find him.”
“Still,” Mac insisted. “I should be out there, on the street. And obviously, the enhancement only works when I make contact with Laughlin. My integration levels were only slightly elevated when I was med scanned earlier, which means—also obviously—that enhancement drops rapidly without that contact. If I go out, without him—”
“That’s not an obviously,” Elliot countered. “Not to me, anyway. Plus, it doesn’t take into consideration the fact that the human body needs to rest. That goes for all of you.”
“Fourteen hundred in my office,” Bach decided. “Fully rested.”
For a moment, Mac looked as if she was going to argue, but she wisely zipped it, even though she grimly shook her head in obvious disgust.
“We’ll want you at the meeting, too,” Bach said, and Shane realized that the man was talking to him. “But until then, we can’t have you wandering the compound. Mac will see you to your quarters.”
“Sir,” she started, this time ready to get into it.
But Bach cut her off. “Apparently, you and Lieutenant Laughlin have a few things to discuss.”
“No, sir, we don’t,” she said.
Shane spoke, quietly but absolutely. “Yes, we do.”
Mac looked at him. And nodded. “Fine. Let’s do this, then. Right now. Let’s go.” She turned and headed briskly toward the door. Shane hurried to keep up as she raised her voice so that the others could hear her. “I want a report on what the hell happened—how Littleton went from dumbass dealer to Puff the Magic Dragon. I want to know who fucked up by not taking his product away from him when he was admitted into our holding cell. And I want that info sent to me, ASAP.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She just slapped the door open and led Shane into the hallway, past the security guards, and all the way back toward a bank of elevators.
It wasn’t until she pushed the button that she turned to look at him. “So,” she said, obviously through gritted teeth. “Dorothy. Welcome to fucking Oz.”
TWELVE
This was going to suck.
Shane was standing there, just looking at her, as the elevator doors opened with a ding.
In the hours since she’d left him in the street outside of her apartment, Mac had nearly managed to convince herself that he couldn’t possibly be as fabulous as she’d remembered. His eyes really weren’t that blue nor was his smile that sweet—except they were and it was.
Even after being as frazzled as she knew he had to be from witnessing Rickie Littleton joker so horrifically, Shane still managed to exude a cool calm.
Mac also knew that he was still worried about her, no doubt a result of having found her knocked stupid by the fire-breathing freak.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t hit the Med Center and get you checked out?” Shane asked in his black-velvet voice as he followed her into the elevator. “Dr. Zerkowski said you were bleeding internally. And a head injury isn’t anything to sneeze at.”
“I’m fine now.” She pushed the button for the lower level, intending to escort him back to the barracks, as ordered, through the tunnels that connected all of the buildings on the Institute campus. That would get them there the quickest. “Do you really think he would’ve let me walk away from him if I weren’t? And he really does prefer being called Elliot.”
Shane was frowning slightly as he looked at her. “You just look a little …”
Mac caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the elevator’s back wall and … Great. They were going to start with this. Fabulous.
“Shitty?” she finished his sentence for him. She’d stopped at the CoffeeBoy on Route 9 and used the pair of plastic scissors she always carried with her to quickly cut her hair short again. The job she’d done had been lacking in both skill and finesse. But it wasn’t her hair that he was looking at. “That’s not because I was hurt. That’s because, in reality, I usually look, well, kinda shitty. That’s just … my face. This is what I actually look like when I’m not trying to get laid.”
“Pale, was what I was going to say,” he told her. “And tired. You don’t look—”
“Yeah, well, tired’s a given,” she spoke over him, because really, what was he going to say in response to her shitty, no matter how accurate a descriptor it was. “I still haven’t learned to control my sleep cycles. Bach can get by on maybe six hours, once a week. I’m not even close to doing that. But that’s not why I look … the way I look. Today.”
The elevator opened into the sub-basement and she led the way out into the main lobby for the tunnels. It was, thankfully, empty.
“The tunnels are color-coded,” she interrupted her true-confession session—thank God—to give him the standard tour-guide spiel, but he stopped her.
“I got it,” he said. “Dr. Zer … Elliot gave me all the info last night. The blue path’ll take me back to the apartments. Yellow goes to the Potential training classrooms. Red’s medical.” He laughed a little, which made charming crinkles appear around his eyes. “In case I forget how to read the signs.”
“Not everyone who comes here can read,” Mac told him a tad sanctimoniously as they started down the brightly lit path with the blue line of tiles on the wall, because staying on that inane topic was better than telling him the truth. If she kept talking long enough, she could time it so that she didn’t have to tell him before they reached his apartment. At which point, she could drop her bomb and exit. Fast. “Some are very young children. And some of our Potentials can’t read English. Not many, but some are recruited from other countries.”
Shane took her conversational ball and ran with it as their footsteps were muffled by the tunnel’s skid-proof floor. “I’m still not exactly sure how I got onto OI’s recruitment list. I got an e-mail—out of the blue—inviting me to enter the program, but …”
Mac glanced at him again—to find him looking kind of sideways at her. No doubt he still couldn’t quite figure out what was different about her. He probably just thought it was morning-after reality, rearing its ugly head. So to speak. Except she wasn’t picking up any revulsion from him—just confusion. Along with—damn—a genuine chime of desire, and—shit—a whiff of affection. Perfect.
Clearly the sex they’d shared had been good enough for him to want a replay—regardless of what she now looked like.
But of course it was possible—highly likely in fact—that whatever she’d done to him with her charismatic power hadn’t yet worn off.
“How long have you been out?” she asked him, forcing herself to focus on his question about his own recruitment—how OI had found him. “Of the military?”
“Not quite a year,” he told her.
“Well, that’s not it, then,” Mac said. “I was thinking maybe you just left, and your medical records only recently went public and … You visit a hospital any time in the past few months?”
“No,” Shane said. “But I did get a full medical scan about two months ago. Drug testing for, you know. That cage-fighting thing.”
Mac looked at him, a bit sharply.
“What?” he said, picking it up, still watching her. “You thought I was BSing you about that? I’m really blacklisted, too, Michelle. I’m not the one with all the secrets—including the fact that you had a broken ankle while we were getting it on. Jesus. Did that hurt like hell when it was healing, too?”
“No,” she told him, surprised and rattled by his point-blank approach. This was where they were both awkwardly supposed to pretend last night had never happened, not bring it up or discuss any aspect of it. And still he watched her, as if he couldn’t believe his good luck at finding her again. She, however, was having a moment of serious surrealness. Last night, while she was letting him rock her world, she’d never, in a million years, imagined that she’d ever be walking with him, like this, through OI’s tunnels. “It’s, um … Well, I’m not really sure what happens, but having sex is, um …” She cleared her throat. “For me, it accelerates the healing process and … It … doesn’t hurt—really doesn’t—when I’m … Not when, um … I think the pleasure drowns out any pain, so … no.” He didn’t say anything so she kept going. “Plus, you need to understand that—this morning—I was leaning on the pain, so I could project it and … I was trying, actively, to use it to take down Rickie Littleton—the joker.”
And take down Littleton she’d done—to the tune of killing him and bringing them back to less than square one, in terms of finding Nika Taylor.
God damn it.
“Ah,” Shane said. “So … It’s not me, necessarily. It’s sex that allows you to heal faster …?”
“It’s sex,” she agreed, but then admitted, “And you.” She cleared her throat again and changed the subject. “It was—probably—the med scan. That you had for the cage-fighting thing. I bet that’s how we found you. Those records go into the international medical database and … We hack ’em, pretty regularly. Your integration level is seventeen, which is significantly higher than the average fraction’s ten percent, which is why that e-mail went out to you. That plus your military training … You’re disciplined. You’re, like, the perfect Potential. You know, aside from being male and … Too old.”
He looked at her, but didn’t comment.
So she continued. “Our usual recruits are girls. Estrogen naturally boosts integration levels and … But the best age for us to acquire a Potential is around ten or eleven. Pre-puberty. Of course, it’s the hormones that create the spike in most girls’ levels, so we often don’t identify them as Potentials until it’s already too late. And I mean it’s too late only because most girls who are recruited when they’re older don’t stay with the program—I don’t know i
f it’s a fear of being different or … Ironically, it’s the rare boys who usually excel, regardless of when they join. That’s why we still look to recruit men your age as Potentials.”
His brow was furrowed as he attempted to interpret her babbling. “So … the Obermeyer Institute hacks into the medical records of people—mostly children, and among those children, mostly girls—from all over the world?” he asked.
“There are still some countries whose med records aren’t online,” Mac said. “We’ve gotten some of our best Potentials from them. But it’s unconventional—the way we find out about them. We keep a constant watch for reports of disturbances—so-called poltergeist activity or accusations of witchcraft, or even stigmata or other unexplained physical mutilations or illnesses that can be a part of a belief-induced fervor. Really, they’re looking for anything unexplained that might be traced to an untrained, out-of-control Greater-Than. With the poltergeist thing being the most common.”
“Poltergeist,” Shane repeated. “I’m not sure I’m following. Are you saying that poltergeists—like that old horror movie—are … real?”
“Yes, but, no.” Mac shook her head. “Not like the movie, or … Not like your old dead creepy Uncle Moe who was also a serial killer and is now terrorizing the new owners of the house where he sliced and diced his victims … No spirit-world shit. I’m talking about unexplained events—doors opening and closing, furniture moving, dancing teacups without a Disney animator in sight. Even, yeah, statues crying tears of blood—all of which can be the result of a living person—usually a teenage girl—who has uncontrolled telekinetic powers. Most poltergeist disturbances take place in a home that includes a female child between the ages of eight and sixteen. Sometimes it’s a boy, but that’s, well, it’s really rare. Anyway, in a majority of the cases, the telekinetic activity takes place unconsciously, usually because the child is under some kind of duress. Sexual abuse being a biggie.”
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