by Dale Mayer
She shrugged. “I’ve looked at separating our energy. I’ve looked at killing off memories. I’ve looked at all kinds of things,” she said, “but Lizzy and I were basically as close as sisters back then. We did everything together, and we were united against a common enemy. We even blended our energy and did the whole blood-swear thing,” she said, with half a smile.
“And how would you ever learn about that?”
“From an old movie,” she said, with a shrug. “Remember? Everything we learned was from everybody else.”
“I am remembering that,” he said. “So, if you can’t separate from her, what can you do to stop her from seeing you?”
She frowned. “What I always did was hide in other people’s energy.”
“And that in itself is fascinating,” he murmured, “and believe me. We’d all like to know a little more about your process.”
She shook her head. “Too bad,” she snapped. “I’m not up for being forced to do that.”
“All we were planning on doing,” he said, his eyebrows raising, “was asking you.”
She immediately flushed and waved a hand at him. “Well, pardon me, if I don’t quite trust you yet.”
“We know you don’t trust us yet,” he said. “But it would be nice if you weren’t quite so quick to judge us.”
She frowned at that because this was just more evidence that she was a terrible person, which she probably was. But she was out for one thing and one thing only, and that was survival. “Don’t you have something better to do with your time?” she asked him quietly.
He laughed. “Nope, you’re not getting rid of me that easily.”
She glared at him. “You know it’s for your own health and well-being, right?”
“You’ve tried that line before too,” he said, with a smirk.
She groaned. “Well, it’s your funeral.”
“Yep, and I’ve heard that a time or two myself.”
She shrugged. “I can imagine. Are you always this irritating?”
He burst out laughing. “Glad to see you’re feeling so much better. No more pain is cloaked in your voice either.”
“Cloaked?”
“Of course, cloaked,” he said. “You were struggling to hide it before.”
She frowned in irritation. “Will you always read everything I do?”
“No, not always,” he said, “but generally I can read a lot, yes.”
“I don’t think I like that,” she announced.
“I don’t think I like that,” he said in a mocking tone.
Immediately she glared at him again. “See? There you are. Making sure I don’t like you.”
“I’m not ensuring that you like me or not,” he said. “I’d say it’s irrelevant, but it is relevant in the sense that you do need to trust me.”
“So you say,” she muttered, “but sometimes you’re just not someone I want to have anything to do with.”
“Only sometimes?” he asked, in that same mocking voice again.
She flushed. “There you go again, laughing at me.”
“Nope,” he said, “that’s where you’re wrong. I’m not laughing at you. I’m just easing the tension between us.”
She glared at him. “That just makes me feel worse.”
“Why would you feel worse?” he asked in astonishment.
“Because it makes me sound like I’m the one who’s not cooperating.”
He shook his head and chuckled again. “Do you feel like you are cooperating?”
She shrugged. “Maybe not as much as I could, no.”
“Well, then go by that,” he said, “and hopefully other people will have other things to say.”
She frowned. “It always makes me feel like I’m on the wrong end of the stick. I’ve had to play catch-up so much in the last few years,” she said. “It’s not a comfortable place to be.”
“Of course not,” he murmured. “Where you started, and now, with all that you’ve done, have tested your comfort zone, and you’re still improving. Now you’re growing and moving beyond all that.”
“Growing where?” she said, with a shrug. “All I’m doing is running continuously, running away from Lizzy.”
“Which is why we’ll find a way to take a stand and to stop her from doing this. Presumably we can’t talk her out of it because she’s forced to do it, or it’s become a burning passion of her own to hunt you,” he said. “But we have to find a way to make this all come to a tidy stop, so you can go on and live a life. You haven’t had the chance to have one yet, and we would all like to see you get that opportunity.”
“When you say all—”
He chuckled. “Remember? More than just Stefan and I are out there.”
“You mean, Dr. Maddy?”
“She’s one of them, yes,” he said, “but she certainly isn’t the only one though.”
“See? It’s just hard for me to imagine that this whole group of people out there wants to do good.”
“Was it hard to understand that this whole group of people in that compound wanted to do bad?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No, never, because I was living that. But to think that there might be a group in reverse, that’s a bit hard to believe.”
“Well, one day, when you truly trust us, I’m sure Stefan can set up a group meeting with the local people and a virtual meeting with the others, to prove that they exist and that you should believe it,” he said calmly. “Whenever there’s a negative, there’s usually a positive somewhere to counteract it, but oftentimes you have to hunt a little harder to find it.”
“See? That’s the part I don’t get. I mean, Stefan could be out doing whatever he wanted to, so why would he help me?”
“Because Stefan has made it his passion to help gifted people like us. Stefan is the go-between for us and the authorities. Like he says to me often, he deals with the police so we don’t have to. Otherwise you’ll have to ask him anything else beyond that.”
“I’d like to,” she said calmly, “but it’s not like he’s around for me to talk to.”
“But he could be, if that’s what you wanted.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that he’s available a lot of the time, and he does work with a lot of gifted people and helps them adapt to their abilities. Sometimes we win, and sometimes we lose.”
“What do you mean by lose?”
“In case you hadn’t figured it out, these abilities are not the easiest to control, and sometimes we get people who can adapt to that, and sometimes it’s … too much.” He stopped, his voice drifting away.
“They go insane, you mean?”
“That’s one of the possibilities,” he said. “Some people can’t handle the energy afterward.” He paused. “You have to understand that your particular ability to cloak your presence from others who understand energy is pretty amazing.”
“I’m sure Stefan can do it.”
“He can, indeed,” Hunter said, with a solid nod. “But I’m not sure he could do it for as long as you can.”
She shrugged. “Desperation breeds all kinds of skills.”
“And that’s how you learned to do everything—to keep yourself safe, wasn’t it?”
“Of course,” she said, with a smile. “Nothing like knowing you’ll get punished if you can’t do something.”
“And you watched others getting punished.”
She nodded. “Are we getting food today?”
“Well, that’s a valid question,” he said, chuckling, as he walked forward and checked out the fridge. “Meaning, are we eating today at some point in time, or are we leaving the house and getting food? You were just changing the subject.” She glared at him; he shrugged and said, “And I’ll let you get away with it for the moment.”
“How generous,” she said, with half a snort.
“Not always,” he said, “but sometimes there’s a time to retreat.”
“Which is what I was doing there.”
“Now the question is, what do we need to do to keep you safe, long-term? Because doing what you were doing worked great, until suddenly it didn’t work anymore. Yet I suppose you have no idea how they found you, do you?”
“No, I don’t,” she said, “but believe me. I’ve been racking my brain to figure it out.”
He nodded. “Of course you have, but there’s never any easy answers in this psychic world about do this and then you get that.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” she said with a smirk.
“It would, indeed. If we do manage to find this Lizzy person, I presume she won’t be easy to talk to, will she?”
“No,” she said. “She’d changed in that last month or so when I was there.”
“In what way?” he asked curiously.
“It’s hard to describe,” she said, “but it seemed like she was leaning more toward their side of life and away from me.” She shook her head, then stepped away from the counter and said, “And you still haven’t answered my question.”
“Well, we have eggs and bacon,” he said, “and we have bread, so we’ll have breakfast sandwiches this morning,” he said, rubbing his hands together with glee.
She looked at him. “I don’t think I’ve ever had anything like that.”
“You’ve been deprived of many of the great things in life,” he said. “It looks to me like you’ve been starved for attention, for food, for safety, for comforts, for everything. You need a chance to have a normal life.”
“Which brings us back to Lizzy,” she said, nodding.
“Right,” he said, “we keep coming back around to her.”
“We don’t have any choice,” she said. “I know I can’t be free until I get her off my case.”
“That’s why we have to find something logical that will work to convince her to stop.”
“My God,” she said, “you can’t believe it will be that simple.”
“What’s simple about it?” he asked, looking a little confused.
She studied his face to see if he was serious. “I think she likes being brainwashed just fine right now,” she said, with difficulty. “I think she’s so indoctrinated that she doesn’t know logic, common sense, or the difference between this and anything else anymore.”
“And that’s possible,” he said. “It certainly happens, way more than we would like to think it does, unfortunately. But that doesn’t mean that she has everything she wants—like, maybe a chance to get off this crazy train to have a good life for herself.”
Beth nodded sadly. “We used to talk about it a lot. About what life would be like, when we got free.”
“And when you got free? Was it like that?”
“No,” she said, “because, although my location changed all the time, I was never free.”
“Because you were always being hunted.”
“Exactly,” she said simply. “Just no freedom in that.”
“Nope, there never is,” he said gently. “That’s another reason we’ll have to work hard to get you out of this scenario.”
“Not just out,” she said, sounding a little desperate. “I need to get all the way out. So they can’t ever find me again.”
He nodded. “Who in the group would have been a good marksman?”
She stopped, surprised at the switch in conversation. “What do you mean?”
“You said you were shot.”
“Yes, well, obviously I was shot,” she said, half-jokingly, her hand automatically going to her side.
“Yep,” he said, “I saw the bullet wound myself.”
“And retrieved the bullet, right? I’m not going crazy.”
With a big smile, he said, “You’re not crazy at all. But would Lizzy have been the shooter?”
“I don’t know if she shoots or not,” she said cautiously, “if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Well, it’s not quite what I was asking, but I’m asking if it could have been a random stranger or somebody who was attacking you for a completely different reason.”
“Oh, God, is the world that crazy? Do people attack each other for no reason?”
“Well, you’d hope not,” he murmured, “but unfortunately it’s certainly a possibility.”
“Wow,” she murmured, “we didn’t see any of that in the movies. I mean, we did see a lot of horrible things, but, at the same time, we also knew it was made up for TV, and they kept telling us it was make believe. But they also kept telling us that the world was a dangerous place and that we needed looking after. And that the world needed protecting.”
“And is that what you were being trained to do? To protect the world?”
“That’s what we were told,” she said firmly.
“Of course,” he said, “because the world is a messed-up place, but it isn’t all a messed-up place. Not everybody out here is trying to kill you.”
“Well, that’s good to know,” she said, with a twitch of her lips. “But again, you know trust is a hard thing when you’ve had that information poured into your brain for God-only-knows how long.”
“Right,” he said, “you’ve certainly been repeatedly exposed to a ton of misinformation that isn’t helping you.”
“Not helping me or anybody else,” she said, “and it’s frustrating because I think I know so much and can do so much. Then I find out I’m nearly incapable of doing anything because of the way the world actually runs. Without money I have nothing, but, to get money, I need a job, which unfortunately requires skills, and, if I don’t happen to have any skills, I’m out of luck.”
“What job did you start with?”
“Cleaning,” she said. “I did have skills for that.”
“Why is that?”
“Because we cleaned our own rooms,” she said. “It’s not hard to move around a cloth with some chemicals on it.”
“No,” he said, “I imagine it isn’t. And then what?”
“I started cleaning restaurants, and then I moved up to the front counter. I learned by watching the others, and I’m a fast learner,” she said quietly. “It’s not so hard when you’re desperate, and, at the restaurant, at least I got food.”
“Ah, that was a huge benefit.”
“Just a small mom-and-pop restaurant at first, and I was part of the cleaning crew, who would go in at the end of the day, since they were too tired to do a cleanup. We didn’t get paid that much but enough that I could survive while I learned a bit more.”
“And where did you sleep?”
“In the brush,” she said quietly, “for the longest time.”
He just stared at her.
She shrugged. “What else could I do? It’s not like I knew how to rent property.”
“No, of course not,” he said. “I keep forgetting how much you would have been missing in your education.”
“Missing and yet not missing,” she said, with a smile. “An amazing amount of stuff to learn is out there, an awful lot that I needed to get caught up on because we didn’t learn it through real-life experience.”
“No, of course not.”
She saw that she’d surprised him. “Besides,” she said, “nothing wrong with living out in Mother Nature.”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I personally love it, but I do like to have a roof over my head when the weather gets ugly.”
“Thankfully I didn’t have too much bad weather when I was outside most of the time,” she said.
“A lucky break for you, since so often the Oregon weather can be pretty ugly,” he said.
“I agree with you there,” she said, “but I was blessed to be in decent places whenever I needed to be. A couple times I got caught outside in the harsh elements, and once I got sick because I was soaked and couldn’t get dry. But, after I found out about the public pools, that helped a lot too.”
“Yes, you can always get showers there, can’t you?”
She nodded. “And I needed that base for a while, until I could get enough money saved up to rent a room. Once
I rented a room, I could rent a little bit bigger,” she said, with a shrug. “I had some money. I don’t think I even have any of it left now,” she said, with a frown. “I guess I’ll lose my place too, and all the money I earned,” she said in outrage.
“Well, if you give me the address, we can get Stefan to send somebody there to collect it.”
She looked at him. “Really?”
He nodded. “Why not? It’s your money and your possessions. You can go there and pick it up again.”
She immediately gave him the address. He wrote it down and sent a text to Stefan. “Do you think Lizzy would have found you there?”
“Well, somebody shot me there,” she said, with that look again.
He nodded. “Do you think they would have gone in the house?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Why?”
“I just wondered if there was any chance they would have hurt your landlord.”
She stared at him in shock. “Well, I would certainly hope not,” she said slowly, but the thought creeping into her mind made her terrified for the old lady who let out the rooms. “Her name is Sugar Mama,” she said.
At that, he stared at her in shock.
She shrugged. “I guess she lived with sugar daddies all her life. When the last one passed away, he left her the house, but she had no way to make a living.”
He chuckled. “Well, it sounds like letting out the rooms in the house made a living for her.”
Beth nodded. “She’s really sweet and good-hearted.”
“Well, that’s good,” he said. “I’m glad you landed on your feet with her.”
“Yeah, unless she was harassed or even worse because of me,” she said. “Can you get Stefan to check?”
He nodded. “That I can do.”
“And hopefully sooner than later?” she asked, worry in her voice. Because the last thing she wanted to do was ever cause Sugar Mama any trouble. “The only good thing is,” she said, “that Sugar Mama is a pretty wise old lady. And I think she sees trouble coming a mile away. She’s the one who took me in hand and warned me about some of the people around us.”
“In what way?”
“One guy down at the end of the street liked kids too much. He had a record and was supposed to stay away from the playgrounds, but he didn’t always,” she said quietly. “And a couple other guys were pretty rough and ready. One had beaten his wife, and she disappeared, and, no, I don’t know what disappeared means here.”