Unseen

by Stephanie Erickson

  19.

  Owen was waiting for me, and he rushed to catch up to me when I flew past him without pausing. “Mackenzie, wait.”

  “I do not wait for murderers,” I said, giving him my back as I climbed the stairs two at a time. I had to get out of there. I needed away from these people.

  “Please, let me explain.”

  I turned to him. “Who are you?” Right there in the staircase, I demanded the answers I’d been waiting for so patiently.

  “What?”

  Wrong answer, I thought, and turned my back on him, pressing on toward the ground floor.

  “Mackenzie, please, I don’t understand your question.”

  Rather than look at him, I continued moving. If I can just get back to the light of day, maybe this will all be a bad dream. “You know damn well what I’m asking you.” I burst through the front door, squinting at the brightness of the morning sun. But Owen was still behind me.

  “I can’t read you anymore. I really don’t understand. Please, let’s talk about this. Don’t leave this way. Let me try to explain.”

  “What do you have to explain to me if you don’t understand what I’m asking?” I turned to face the first and only man to break my heart. My impatience for his secrets had dried my tears.

  He looked at me, his hands held out to me in surrender, but he said nothing.

  “Did you just act like you had feelings for me to get me to join the group? Was I your assignment? Acquire the exceptional reader?”

  Horror filled his face, but I felt like it was an act, all of it. I couldn’t trust any of them. “No! That wasn’t it at all.” He reached for me, but I pulled away. “Mackenzie, I care very much for you.”

  I eyed him with suspicion. “Fine. Then tell me the truth. How many people have you killed?”

  He sighed. “Maybe we should focus on how many people I’ve saved.”

  “How many people have you killed?” I demanded again.

  He didn’t answer at first, so I was surprised when he eventually spoke. “Four,” he said after what seemed like an eternity. “So far,” he added.

  Horror made me retch right then and there, losing everything I’d eaten in the last few hours on to the pavement. I wiped my mouth. Four people. He’d taken four different lives.

  “I trusted you. I thought you were different. Someone who could be a real partner. But you turned out to be the worst one of all. You’re a—” I choked on the word, “—murderer.” I whipped around, hoping I’d smacked him in the face with my ponytail.

  I crossed the parking lot in record speed while he jogged after me. “Mackenzie, please. Consider the consequences before you leave this way.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “No! But there are other dangers.”

  “What dangers?” I looked at him, seeing a cold, hard killer instead of the man I’d grown to care about. Where my body had once been drawn to him, it was now violently repelled. He disgusted me. I needed to get away. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. I was fine without you before, and I will be again.”

  I tried to open my car door, but Owen grabbed my arm. “Mackenzie,” he said, looking deep into my eyes. A flash of the old desire bubbled up, but the leftover bile in the back of my throat didn’t make it hard to push it back down.

  I tried to free my arm, but he held fast. “I care about you. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “Oh, yeah? Like what? Like I could be a totally normal person who never kills anyone or commits a crime of any kind for her whole life?” I spat. “Sure, I’ll probably die a lonely old maid, but at least my conscience will be clear.”

  He looked at me in that special way he had, where he seemed to be seeing into my very soul. “You may not live long enough to become an old maid.”

  I glared at him. He was just trying to manipulate me into staying by using scare tactics, or at least that was what I told myself. The look in his eyes said he was telling the truth, but how could I trust him after everything he’d kept from me?

  “You want answers? Stay long enough to hear me out, and I’ll give them to you.”

  My car keys jangled in my hand as I debated what to do. Even now, I didn’t want to lose Owen. But I also didn’t want him to be a killer, and I certainly didn’t want to join him down that path. “You’ve had plenty of chances to tell me your secrets.”

  He had no defense, but at least he didn’t look away.

  I sighed. What could it hurt to listen to him? “Fine. You have ten minutes, and then I’m out of here.”

  “Do you want to go back inside, where it’s a little more comfortable?”

  I leaned against my car. “I’m as comfortable as I’m going to get. Nine minutes, thirty seconds.”

  “You know, I wasn’t alone like you were. My whole family could read minds.”

  He’s finally telling me a little more about his family? I tightened my hands into fists, refusing to get sucked into his story this easily.

  “We were like peas in a pod. My little brother was annoying at times, but I still loved him, the way brothers do. My folks were great at teaching us about our abilities, helping us get through our awkward childhoods with this extra little complication. They didn’t tell us how to control it or anything, not like the Unseen do, but they helped us cope, told us what was normal, what to expect in public, stuff like that.”

  “Must’ve been nice,” I said, with more bitterness in my voice than I’d intended to show.

  He smiled warmly, thinking about his family. “It was nice, for a time… then they were taken away from me one by one. My brother was the first to go. They said it was a rare form of cancer. A quick and silent killer, they called it. One day, he was fine; the next, he was gone.” He paused, a deep frown creasing his face.

  Despite my anger toward him in that moment, my heart went out to him. I didn’t have any siblings, but I imagined it was immeasurably difficult to lose one.

  “How old were you?”

  “Hmm?” He looked at me like he’d forgotten I was there for a moment. “Oh, I was twelve. Jason was ten. My parents were destroyed, as you can imagine, but we soldiered on, clinging to each other for support. Some days, that’s all we did—hold each other up until it was time to go to bed, then start over again the next day. It was horrible. I didn’t think it could get any worse, but then it did.”

  “My mom usually took me to school, but she had an early meeting one day, so Dad took me. If she’d driven me, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten into the accident. Or I guess I could have been killed with her. It’s hard to say.”

  “Well, you can’t blame yourself. It was just an accident.”

  He smiled, though this time the expression was bitter. “Yes, that’s exactly what I was told. It was just an accident. Unpreventable. Tragic. I heard a lot of those words. In less than a year, half of my family was taken from me. The worst part of it was that my mom was the best one of us. She loved without question, which I find to be a rare quality in people.” He shrugged. “Maybe that’s why I care for you so much. You accepted me even though I couldn’t answer your questions.”

  Just how deep did his feelings go? My knees nearly gave way. It was too much. I opened my car door and sat down in the driver’s seat.

  Owen continued his story without commenting on my movement. “The last person to go was my dad. They said he fell onto the train tracks. Another ‘tragic’ accident. It had been just over a year since Jason, just over a year since my family was whole.”

  He looked off into the distance, squinting into the sun. “After that, I bounced around in the foster care system for a few months until David found me. He pulled some strings and brought me here, gave me a home. Eventually, he told me the truth.”

  “What truth? That they’re all murderers?”

  “No, that my family had been killed one by one by the enemy—a group trained to eliminate other readers. He’d worked hard to find me before the enemy could. The disorganization of the fost
er care system is probably what saved my life.”

  It echoed of David’s story about the little boy who’d been shot. I looked at him skeptically. Was this the truth or another lure? “And you just took his word for it?”

  “No, I didn’t. I was still reeling from losing my whole family. I couldn’t get my mind around some elaborate conspiracy theory. It just seemed too unlikely. But I also didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I hung around and heard him out. He showed me the evidence they had against these people.”

  “These people?”

  “The ones who’d hunted my family down. Even my ten-year-old brother. How much of a threat could he have been? They killed him anyway. They said it was a mercy to kill him first.” A hatred I’d never seen before clouded his eyes. “They weren’t even sorry.”

  My emotions warred with themselves. “Sounds like you weren’t very sorry about the four people you killed.”

  “No, I suppose I’m not. Three of the four were kill-or-be-killed scenarios, and I chose my own life over theirs. If that’s selfish, fine. But don’t judge me too harshly until you’ve looked down the barrel of a gun.”

  “And the fourth?”

  “The fourth was—” he hesitated, “—difficult. He was unassuming, and he actually seemed like a nice guy on the surface. I questioned David more than once, since I wanted to make sure we had the right guy. He just didn’t seem like he had it in him. Long story short, I got my hands on some direct evidence linking him to a plot to release a massively deadly airborne virus at the Olympics that year. It would have killed at least ten thousand people. In the end, I chose to take one life in order to save many.”

  I tried to get my head around it. Everything he was saying made sense. It was reasonable. Certainly, I wouldn’t expect him to stand there and be killed if someone was threatening him. The fourth man’s death was a little harder to rationalize, but if what he said was true, he had saved a staggering amount of people.

  He reached for my hand, pulling me out of my internal debate. “Mackenzie. The bottom line is, there are truly bad people out there, and the Unseen aren’t them.”

  I looked at his hand holding mine. It was big, and it covered my entire hand, making me feel encompassed by him. Protected. “Enemy is a dangerous word to use flippantly. I imagine the mothers who are without their children find you to be the enemy, don’t you think?”

  He opened his mouth to answer, but I kept talking. “And what about the wives without their husbands? You’re their enemy too. And those children who have to grow up without a father or mother…” I shook my head. “No matter how you slice it, it’s still killing.” I shook loose from his hand. “I’m sorry, Owen, I truly am, but I just can’t do this…”

  Before I could see the expression on his face, I got the rest of the way into my car, shut the door, and drove away, not once looking back to see Owen—and the Unseen—disappear from my life forever.

  20.

  Despite the fact that it was a four-hour drive, I barely even registered the length of the trip to Maddie’s.

  I’ve never felt this betrayed, I thought over and over and over again. Owen’s face flashed through my mind, and regret stabbed me in the gut. But I thought again of those families David had mentioned, the families of the “enemy,” as it were. But maybe I was thinking about this the wrong way. Enemy was such a loaded word—replace “enemy” with “danger” and maybe the Unseen’s mission was more palatable. Owen said he’d killed four people, three of whom were a direct threat to him. They were all a danger that needed to be eliminated. The fourth was a danger to thousands of others, although not a direct danger to him.

  I shook my head, trying to recapture the anger I’d initially felt. Now you’re rationalizing killing, I told myself, justifying it even. This isn’t a Bourne movie. This is real life. And real death. But what would I do if someone held a gun to my face? Would I try to protect myself? I had no idea. Despite the fact that I hadn’t had an easy road, it hadn’t exactly been that difficult either. I’d never faced death, and I intended to keep it that way for as long as possible.

  Owen’s voice echoed in my mind. You may not live to be an old maid.

  The story of his family played like a movie on fast-forward in my head. I knew he was trying to show me that some readers weren’t safe when they stood alone. It occurred to me that he might have made the story up to convince me to stay, but something about it held an element of truth. And that look in his eyes…

  Despite having spent the entire drive thinking through every angle of my situation, I didn’t feel any better by the time I pulled into the parking spot in front of Maddie’s apartment. I don’t know how long I sat there, staring blankly ahead, but Maddie snapped me out of it when she knocked on my window.

  “This is a nice surprise!” Her muffled voice floated through the closed window. Her expression changed when she saw my face. She shifted her bags to one hand and opened my car door. “I was just coming home from the store. Mac, what happened? Did that bastard break your heart?” When I didn’t answer right away, she retracted her statement. “If he didn’t, I take back the bastard comment.”

  I stared straight ahead, my hands still on the steering wheel. “They lied to me, Maddie. All of them.”

  “Who?”

  “The Unseen.”

  “The what?”

  I wasn’t loyal to them anymore, was I? How much could I tell her? None of it, if I still didn’t want her to know I was a mind reader. All of it, if I finally wanted to share my secret with the one person in the whole world I could trust without hesitation.

  While I debated, Maddie frowned. “All right, why don’t you come inside and tell me what happened from the beginning?”

  She must have helped me out of the car and into her apartment, because the next thing I knew, I was sitting on her couch with a mug of tea between my hands.

  She stared at me expectantly, showing more patience than I’ve ever seen from her. I expected her to start yelling, ‘Spit it out already!’ I was sure she wanted to, but she didn’t. I looked at her then, and it dawned on me that for the first time in our long friendship, I didn’t have my iLs and I wasn’t hearing her thoughts.

  At least I’d gotten some control out of this mess, I thought.

  I took a deep breath. “Honestly, I’m not sure how much I can tell you.”

  She nodded but waited patiently.

  “Things started out great. They taught me to live without my iLs.”

  “Wow. I haven’t seen you in public without it since we were kids. How did they do that?”

  “It was part of the training. I had to learn to be without it.”

  “Jesus, Mac, you didn’t tell me any of that! Was it hard?”

  “At first, but I caught on a lot quicker than any of the therapists who treated me when I was a kid would’ve believed.” The tea she gave me was warm and calming as it slid down my throat.

  “Okay, so they taught you to live without your iLs. Sounds good to me. When did things go south?”

  “Today.”

  “Right. I figured as much since you showed up like a zombie at my door, after not getting more than an occasional text from you for like five days.”

  I just looked at her, not really processing her comment or her sarcasm.

  “Okay, something is really wrong here, and I’m just trying to get my head around it.” Panic was replacing frustration in her voice. “So what happened? Did the hot guy cheat on you? I’ll kill him if you didn’t already.”

  “No, Owen didn’t cheat on me.”

  Confusion played across her face. “I don’t understand…”

  “They lied to me.” They’re killers. It was on the tip of my tongue, ready to spill out, but something held the words back, perhaps the instinct that once said, they could never be unsaid.

  “Lied to you about what?”

  There it was. The question I wasn’t prepared to answer.

  Tears pooled in my eyes when I looked at her,
and she was by my side in an instant, her arms around me. “Mac, you know I’m only good at tough love.”

  I looked at her while the tears spilled down my cheeks.

  “Why did you come here? If you want my help, you have to tell me what you need from me.”

  “I came here because you’re the only family I have. The only person I trust in the whole world.” It wasn’t a lie, so why was I hesitating to tell her my secret? She’s right; she can only help me if she knows what happened.

  “Maddie, throughout our entire friendship, I’ve been keeping something from you.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I knew you took that Barbie. I knew it! Mac, it’s not a big deal. We were like five. It’s certainly not something to be blubbering about more than twenty years later.”

  I stared at her, wondering if she could possibly be ready to hear what I had to say. It was too late, though. I’d set the ball in motion, and there was no stopping it now. “I’m a mind reader.”

  She laughed at first, but the sound cut off abruptly when she realized I was serious. “You mean your Spidey sense?”

  “My Spidey sense is reading minds.”

  A new wave of panic spread across her face and she swallowed hard, having a hard time coming up with a response.

  Reaching out for her mind, I read her thoughts purposefully for the first time.

  Holy shit, she’s lost it. She’s gone totally crazy. What can I do for her? Should I take her to a hospital?

  “I’m not crazy, Maddie.”

  “No, of course not. No one said you are.” She turned away from me a little bit. “I just need a moment to process this.”

  Think faster. She knows I think she’s lost it. I had an aunt who was institutionalized. Maybe I should call my mom. She might know what to do.

  “I don’t think your mom will be able to help. I’m pretty sure my case is different from your aunt’s. Also, the less people who know my secret, the better.”

  “I…” She trailed off.