Two more Enforcers emerged from the vehicle, a man held secure between them. Their idea of ‘secure’ involved not only the manacle setup Cassie had already experienced, but also some sort of metal helmet that came all the way down over the prisoner’s shoulders. It looked like a kind of primitive diving apparatus Leonardo da Vinci might have designed, except there were no openings to see through.
The contingent of Enforcers started escorting the figure, hobbled almost to the point of immobility, over to where Nate stood. After a couple seconds of painfully slow progress, Nate apparently decided he’d had enough. He walked over to the man and ripped the manacles apart one at a time. Last, he reached for the helmet. Almost on cue, every single Enforcer raised their weapon. Nate turned and said something to Alfaro, who then barked an order. The Enforcers obeyed, each lowering their rifles, but most took a few steps back from the prisoner as if he were a live grenade.
With a shake of his head, Nate lifted the helmet. The shock of recognition caught Cassie unprepared. The prisoner, rubbing his wrists and blinking his eyes, was Etienne Leclair. Nate led him away from the nervous circle of Enforcers.
As the two approached, a slurred, half-conscious voice snapped Cassie’s attention back to her prisoner-patient. “A prisoner exchange? I’m worth a dozen.”
Cassie was about to send Ballantine back into dream land when Etienne interrupted. “Please. Allow me.”
He looked at Ballantine and narrowed his eyes. Ballantine made a little ‘eep’ sound and then was quiet. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
Now that he was closer, Cassie saw signs Etienne had been beaten. One cheek was badly bruised, and she detected loose teeth inside his mouth. The eye on that side was swollen nearly shut.
Cassie placed a hand on his face and let her power flow into him. His features returned to the rugged handsome state she remembered. He smiled, taking her hand to deliver a courtly kiss on the back of it.
“Merci, sweet Cassie, for the solace of your touch.”
“It’s good to see you again, Etienne. I assume you and Nate have something planned for this human garbage? Please tell me it will be painful.”
Etienne regarded her for a brief second before an eyebrow rose almost imperceptibly. “Perhaps it is pain that makes him, as you say, this garbage. Would you heal him of that pain? Or have you changed so much this day?”
Cassie felt the rebuke in his words, but Etienne was wrong.
“No,” she said, her words soft, a near whisper. “He feels nothing. Only want and desire. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself. I may have changed, but he never will. I can feel it.”
Etienne glanced at Nate, who nodded back. Although he was outwardly agreeing, Cassie caught a hint of suppressed jealousy from Nate. Etienne held out his hand for hers. She smiled at Nate before extending her hand, accepting the mental link.
Instead of the quaint Parisian setting she expected, Cassie found herself and Etienne standing in a featureless white room, with Ballantine sitting in a chair between them. Although his eyes were fixed, oblivious to his surroundings, she could feel the anger and frustration raging in him.
“I can sense his mind,” Etienne said in his mind-voice. “But you see places I can’t – his body and heart.” He extended his dream-hand. “Combined, perhaps we can see the whole - and fix what is wrong with this man.”
‘Fixing’ Ballantine, in the veterinary sense, did hold a certain appeal for Cassie, but even this new her couldn’t turn away from the chance to save someone, even if that someone was Ballantine. Reluctantly, she accepted Etienne’s invitation to merge. She took his hand. Her vision exploded.
What she saw was wondrous. It was humanity, in all its flawed splendor, laid out as if under dissection. She saw herself – mind, body and soul. All of her faults and failings shone bright. For a moment, she thought that must be wrong, some defect in her sight. Then she examined her positive aspects – her compassion and her intelligence. They burned brighter but only slightly, flames rising from the dimmer glow of embers, strength balanced by weakness. She looked to Etienne and saw the same – his shortcomings tempered by his sense of honor to produce a greater sum.
Then she looked at Ballantine. Where the two of them held varying levels of light, he had voids. His dark fires guttered low and sullen without antithesis. He was all ego and id without a super-ego to rein in his urges. Where she’d seen nothing but evil before, now she knew this man was damaged – injured and sickly. The revelation was transformative. Cassie doubted she would ever again be able to hate another human being, no matter how flawed, twisted or ugly they might be.
“He lacks the warmth that we take for granted,” Etienne’s mind said.
He lacks brightness. He lacks empathy.
Her healing instinct took over the link. Just as she had superimposed the imagery of proper bone and blood vessel structure over an injured boy’s elbow in her first attempt, she saw what wasn’t right and tried to make it so. The green energy flowed through her and Etienne, drawing on each of their abilities to reform the mind under her mental scalpel.
There was resistance. Ballantine’s psyche lashed out, desperate to protect its gnarled core from change. The healing energy surrounded him, gently seeping into the cracks in his twisted mind. He thrashed and recoiled from the soothing green, fearful of what it might bring, fearful of the unknown. Then the fear subsided.
“It is done,” Etienne said, and the link dissolved. She returned to her body and her normal perception of the world. She felt drained, and from the slump in Etienne she knew this endeavor had cost him also.
Cassie felt a change in Ballantine. It was hard to define, but his emotions felt different, very un-Ballantine.
“What’s done?” Nate asked. His face was wary, filled with concern.
“We fixed him,” Cassie said. “They don’t have to worry about him controlling people or stealing their bodies anymore.”
“You took away his powers?” Nate said. “But we agreed that was a terrible thing; that it destroyed the essence of who he is. Granted, he’s a monster, but do we have the right to do that? To kill his essence?”
“No, mon ami. We have taken away nothing. We have actually given him something he lacked.” Etienne laughed. “The solution came from Cassie, from her compassion and mercy.”
Nate’s jealousy spiked, causing Cassie to lay a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“What sets someone like Ballantine apart from someone like Cassie?” Etienne said. “What is it that makes him capable of hurting others without care?”
“I dunno,” Nate answered. “Pure sick-ass evilness?”
Cassie shook her head as she peered into Ballantine’s face, gauging the extent of change in him. “He didn’t care, Nate. He had no ability to put himself in another person’s place, no sense of how anyone else might feel. No sympathy or sense that anything mattered outside of his own narcissistic self.”
Etienne laughed. “He was born without an empathy bone. So, we gave him one.”
Cassie peered deeply into the altered sensations she was picking up from Ballantine. For the first time in his life, Martin Ballantine was thinking about someone other than himself. His ego was like a swimmer caught in a whirlpool of regret and sympathy. Every effort he made to break free of the current only made it stronger. She only hoped she could explain all of what she saw to Nate.
“We’ve placed a layer of empathy around the mental control channels for his powers. He can’t access them without being filled with a sense of compassion and understanding. He’s confronted with the consequences of his actions before he even acts, so much so that his mind recoils from the idea.”
Cassie looked at Ballantine, sifting through the tone of his emotions. They were much subdued and tinged with contrition, something she wouldn’t have thought possible.
Nate took the billionaire by the shoulder and gave him a little shake. “There’s some fellas over here who ar
e itching to meet you, Martin. Is it okay if I call you Martin?”
Ballantine refused to even look at him. The bluster and arrogance were gone. Nate shrugged dramatically, then began leading the cowed villain over to the waiting Enforcers. He looked back at Cassie. “You and Leclair stay behind me. This isn’t over yet.”
The four of them approached the gathered XAC troopers with caution. Nate stopped well short of the federal agents. Once again, the Enforcers shouldered weapons at his approach. This time Alfaro didn’t order a stand-down.
Nate turned and waved to the cameras. Shutters snapped and whirred as a dozen lenses and microphones focused on him.
He wants this on-record, Cassie realized. Clever boy.
“Sergeant Alfaro, I’m turning over custody of this prisoner, Mr. Martin Ballantine, to you for trial on charges of murder, attempted murder, and failure to register as an Emerged Exohuman. I believe Detective Walsh has filed the required charges and waived local authority.”
The sergeant picked up the domed helmet that Etienne had worn and approached Ballantine. Nate spoke up in a voice that would have made any theater actor proud, reaching all the ears and microphones around them.
“You won’t need that, Sergeant. Mr. Ballantine is no longer a problem. Thanks to the heroic efforts of Dr. Whelan and Mssr. Etienne Leclair, master mentalist, his abilities are now tethered by a strict morality. You may actually find him a candidate for rehabilitation. It’s not like he’s the kind of threat that would require invoking Section 154, right?”
The Enforcer sergeant froze, a deer in live television headlights. His eyes darted from the video cameras trained on him to Nate and back to the cameras. Cassie could feel anger welling up, but he was a trained soldier. Discipline won out. He motioned for an agent to take custody of Ballantine. Then he turned his attention back to Nate.
“Guardian 175, thank you for your service in this problem and the US government is glad we could assist by allowing Mr. Leclair a temporary furlough. Once we have him back in custody--“
Walsh interrupted the Fed, motioning to a suited man standing among his officers. The man stepped over to stand beside Etienne.
“Actually,” Walsh injected, “Monsieur Leclair will not be accompanying you at this time. This is Monsieur Julien Cousineau, The French Consul General to Atlanta. He is here to escort Leclair to the Consulate to make sure there are no, um, misunderstandings between our two countries regarding lawful treatment of their citizens.”
The sergeant’s anger was almost incandescent in Cassie’s senses. His heart was hammering, and his blood pressure was through the roof. In contrast, his outward demeanor was that of control.
“Of course. We value our French allies and trust that they will abide by the international accords regarding exohuman activities--“
“None of which apply to my countryman,” interjected the Consul.
Alfaro glared at Nate, who smiled his brightest in return.
“This is a discussion that needs to happen far above my pay grade, sir. I remand Mssr. Leclair to your care, pending further instructions from my superiors.”
Etienne shook Nate’s hand and moved to stand beside the Consul. They exchanged words, tense and brief, before moving away together.
“That leaves only one last matter,” the sergeant said. He removed a folded paper from a pocket in his flak vest.
“I have a warrant here for the arrest of Dr. Cassidy Siobhan Whelan, for multiple violations of the Exohuman Control Act. Unless she’s under the protection of a foreign government also.”
Cassie could tell Nate wanted to knock that sarcastic expression off of the sergeant’s face. But he remained calm, turning to gesture to Walsh. The detective looked puzzled for a second, then scrambled in his pockets until he proudly came up with a folded piece of paper of his own, handing it over to Nate.
“Sorry to upset your day even more, Sergeant, but this is a full pardon for Dr. Whelan. It releases her from XAC jurisdiction now and in the future, recognizing her human rights as a free citizen. If you look closely, you’ll see that it’s signed by the Chairman himself.”
By Cassie’s reckoning, Alfaro was about ten blood pressure points away from outright explosion, but he calmly accepted the paper and read it carefully. When he spoke, it was pitched low,
“This pardon is conditional on you delivering…”
“A body?” Nate inclined his head toward Ballantine, now manacled and helmeted. “It doesn’t specify the body’s condition. Besides, I don’t think the Chairman would appreciate you twisting his words into some sort of ‘kill order’ for my prisoner.”
With a nod, the sergeant handed the paper back to Nate. He executed an about face and made a circling gesture over his head. The XAC Enforcers retreated back into their vehicles and prepared to leave.
Alfaro stopped and looked over his shoulder at Nate.
“This isn’t over, exo.”
Cassie took a step forward, standing beside Nate.
“You’re right, Sergeant.” Her eyes narrowed and a she felt the corners of her mouth tick up slightly. “This is just the beginning.”
CHAPTER 35
Cassie folded the last of her grandfather’s shirts and placed it in a storage box on the bed. She looked around to see if she had missed anything. With a sigh, she covered the box. Her hand rested on the lid for a moment, tapping her fingers.
Nate stood in the doorway of Riley’s room and made shuffling sounds. Cassie read his concern and reluctance to intrude. She knew he would stand there indefinitely if necessary. He had proved that over the last few weeks, waiting patiently while she cared for her grandfather in his final days. She looked up from her reverie, relieving him of his silent sentry duty.
“I brought some more boxes,” he said. “In case you need them.”
She smiled a little, as much as was possible surrounded by the accumulated artifacts of a long life. She motioned for him to drop the boxes in the corner with the others already piled there. The boxes were only an excuse for him to check on her. He had maintained a careful balance between being giving her space and attending to her needs these last weeks. She was sure he’d also had a hand in keeping the prying eyes and ears of the public away from her - he and Bill Walsh. The staff at the nursing home had adopted her as one of their own, fiercely guarding her from nosey interlopers. So far, even XAC had kept their distance.
She’d done what she could for the others living out their final days here. She couldn’t heal them; aging was a natural process, not an injury. All she could offer them was the same thing she provided for GranDa. She eased their suffering and comforted them. It was different from her job as a surgeon. These weren’t lives to be saved. They were souls to be reassured, hands to be held. This was something she could do even without her powers. She felt like she’d learned more in the last couple of weeks about caring for others than in all of her years of medical training. It was a humbling experience to let go of those people. She’d lost several patients during her time here. No, not patients - they were friends. Friends she had barely gotten to know before they left on whatever journey awaited.
A furry form rubbed against her legs. Scratch purred, lending his own support to her. She’d brought him to visit GranDa soon after the Ballantine hubbub died down and the little stinker had immediately made himself a fixture in the nursing home. Everyone loved him and lavished him with treats and affection. Instead of wandering amongst apartments, his new routine took him from bed to bed, where wrinkled hands stroked his head or simply rested on his fur. Cassie wondered which of the two of them had provided more comfort. The habit that had earned his name was completely gone and Cassie felt good leaving him in this place.
She looked at the picture frame she discovered she was now holding. It held the photo of Granny in the Navy. Yes, this would do nicely. GranDa should have this. Looking up, she realized another reason Nate had come. It was almost time. He looked so handsome in a suit and tie. Hell, he was gorgeous whatever he w
ore, whether it was jeans and a tee shirt or fitted steel gray. She set the frame down on the made bed and went to the closet. It was empty save for a single black dress and a matching pair of low-heeled pumps.
“All that’s left is for me to change,” she told him. “Tell the driver I’ll just be a moment.”
He wanted to come and hold her, she felt that. She wanted it too, but was grateful he only nodded and left, pulling the door closed behind him. If he had given in to that urge, if he had come to her, then she wouldn’t have been able to keep it together. He was her rock, and his embrace gave her license to let go, to open the floodgates of her pain because she was safe in his arms. She looked down at the gold bracelets she wore, another reminder of how he kept her safe.
“I just need to change,” she repeated to herself.
At his Lair, another set of golden arm bands awaited her, should she decide to accept them and what they represented. These bracelets held her fearful side fully in check. The new ones would allow her to consciously unleash them, focused and tamed. They would allow her to use those energies in positive ways. They lay on a workbench alongside a reinforced black body suit and a pair of sleek rocket boots of the same color. A golden belt, a v-shaped girdle, completed the collection. Nate had told her they were hers if she wanted them, but he made it clear that the decision was hers. He would support her either way.
She started changing clothes. She slipped out of the comfortable sweatpants and Nate’s old hockey jersey, exchanging them for the uniform of mourning. She looked at herself in the mirror and tried to decide if she should pull her hair back. GranDa had often reached up and run his thin fingers through her loose locks. Near the end, he had sometimes mistaken her for her grandmother. Granny had always worn her long red hair down, even when it faded to coppery-silver. Cassie smiled. Down then.
Her eyes drifted again to the framed photo on the bed. Her clothes weren’t the only thing she’d change today. She knew what she wanted. It was her choice. She picked up the frame and pried the back off. The photo would go with GranDa, but the embroidered cloth patch would be hers.
Burden of Solace: Book 1 of the Starforce Saga Page 25