by Nia Shay
"What if they have? Now quit sniveling, you wretch, and get moving."
"Well, I'm a bit concerned," Markus added. "What was that anomaly at the end?"
"What anomaly?" Briggs bit off the words, his voice gruff with impatience.
"Her eyes glowed, Hermann! You saw it better than any of us. By all accounts that's never happened before. What does it mean?"
Brax's laugh echoed deep in his chest, grating against my ear. "Her father's blood is awakening at last. Did you really think it would lie dormant forever?"
Twenty-Seven
I drifted, and I dreamed. I found myself in a magnificent wild growth garden, a sea of vivid color and heady fragrance. Cabbage roses the size of actual cabbages nodded lazily on wrist-thick stems as I strolled by. I followed a meandering path lined with white pebbles...and wondered what the hell I was doing here. Wasn't something important going on somewhere else?
Crisp air eddied around me, filling my nose with pungent scents. "Relax," the breeze seemed to say. "Enjoy the quiet."
I bit down on my unease and kept walking, trailing my fingertips over the soft petals as I went. Up ahead, the sun blazed merrily in a mild spring sky. Its soft blue was the only color in this entire place that wasn't overblown. The very sight of it calmed me in earnest.
"Yes," the wind sighed. "Everything here is peaceful. Just surrender yourself."
Me, surrender? That didn't sound like something I'd do.
"You only say that because you've never tried it." A thick tendril of ivy caressed my wrist, winding around it. "Submission can be very...gratifying."
No, that didn't sound right at all. I'd been submitting to circumstance most of my life, and I'd finally begun to realize it wasn't my cup of tea. With a frown, I slipped my arm away from the vine and kept walking.
"Relax." This time the trembling leaves whispered it. "You're thinking too hard."
Yeah, probably, but I couldn't help it. It still seemed I'd forgotten something vital. Something had happened....
"And it's over now."
"No," I said aloud. It wasn't. That much I knew for certain. My head felt full of cobwebs, but I hadn't gone completely clueless. I kept up my determined pace, following as the path forked sharply to the left.
The air before me seemed to shiver, and I gasped as a cloud of blue butterflies appeared out of nowhere, like they'd broken loose from the sky itself. They flung themselves at me in a fluttering wave. "You don't want to go that way."
"Oh yeah?" I grumbled. "Well, it's gonna take more than the butterfly brigade to stop me."
One of the swallowtails broke from the bunch to hover before my eyes. Its wings bussed my cheek. "Why do you always have to be so difficult?"
"'Cause that's how I roll." I brushed the insect aside and kept going.
The path ended shortly, terminating at the base of a huge, ancient willow tree. A single rose bush stood in the shade of its sweeping boughs. As I approached, fist-sized buds swelled and burst open with unnatural speed.
At the same instant, the sunlight dimmed, and I looked up in alarm to see a gaping black hole had opened in the pristine blue of the sky. Storm clouds poured out of it as I watched, blotting out the sun, turning day to night in a span of heartbeats. I wrapped my arms around myself, chaffing against a sudden chill.
"What's the matter?" Brax stepped out from behind the willow tree, smirking. "Don't like the new landscape? Shall I change it back?"
"No thanks," I shot back. "This is better than Rainbow Brite's Technicolor dream garden. But I think I preferred you as the voice of the wind."
"Ingrate." At a snap of his fingers, my nondescript black outfit transformed itself into a clingy white sheath dress that fell to my ankles. "There. Much better."
"Knock it off!" I snarled, tugging at the fabric.
"No offense, dear heart, but you have the fashion sense of a zombie."
"So what?" I shook my head to free my hair from the complicated updo Brax had conjured, but it stayed stubbornly in place. "I'm not here to look pretty. I'm here to...to...."
"To rest," he finished smoothly. "You've had a rough couple of hours. Don't you remember?" He ended on a lilting note, his eyebrow slanted at an infuriating angle.
"No." I glared at him. "For which I'm sure I have you to thank." I'd been trying to remember something a moment ago. I'd come close, too, and so he'd shown up to distract me.
"It's for your own good, sweetness. Trust me. Some things are better off forgotten."
A note of tension in his voice caught my ear. I paused to study him, noticing fine lines of strain at the corners his eyes and mouth. "You look like hell," I informed him.
His chuckle held a sharp edge of bitterness. "Well, I'm not here to look pretty, either."
How unlike him, through it irked me that I apparently knew him well enough to notice. But knowledge is power, as they say. If I could figure out his weaknesses, maybe I could get to him. He'd already told me his biggest one, assuming I believed him.
"Poor Brax," I crooned, then focused on repeating those two words over and over in my mind as I walked toward him with a coquettish smile on my lips. "Am I wearing you out?"
I couldn't tell if I'd actually managed to shield my thoughts from him or not. He stood his ground, raising an eyebrow at my approach. "You are a full-time occupation," he agreed. "Even when you're not fighting me."
"Oh, please. You wouldn't know how to act if I wasn't fighting you."
"Not true," he countered, grinning as I came within arm's reach. "Most of the time you're very...what's the word I want? Accommodating."
Filthy pervert. Oops--I forced my mind to blankness again. "You know what's funny?" I asked him.
"Do tell."
"Isn't it weird that you have all these pet names for me, and I haven't got one for you?" I inched even closer. "Of course, I only just found out your real name."
He shrugged. "'Call me but love and I'll be new baptized.' By the way, you can't attack me here. Don't waste your energy trying."
"Wasn't planning on it. Love." I curved my hands over his shoulders, rose up on tiptoes, and kissed him.
Much to my annoyance, he didn't seem surprised in the least. So much for my shock-and-awe tactics. At least he hadn't pushed me away, though. Instead, he drew me in and wrapped his arms tight around me, probably intending to keep me still and out of mischief. Fine with me. I freed one hand and stroked it up and down the length of his back, making him groan.
Then I reached out blindly behind him. I found the rose bush easily enough by touch. The thorns bit into my fingers, but I forced myself to grab a stem and snap off its bloom.
"Was there a purpose to that?" he murmured against my lips.
I drew back sharply, breaking free of his embrace. "You didn't seem to want me anywhere near these," I replied, brandishing my prize with a grin, "so I figured they had to be significant somehow."
He scowled, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. "Very clichéd symbolism, anyway," he muttered.
I glanced up from a critical examination of the flower, which hadn't yielded any of kind of secrets. "Hey, I'm not the one who stuck us in here."
"I beg to differ, sweetness. This is your subconscious, not mine. I'd have preferred something more in a naked tickle fight, myself."
I scowled right back at him. "Well if it's my subconscious, then I should be the one in charge here. Right?" I had to stop myself from stamping a foot to emphasize the point.
Brax just shrugged. "Should be. But does it seem like you are?"
"Oh, damn you, anyway." My frustration boiling over, I threw the rose at him, watching it explode into a shower of crimson petals as it struck him in the chest. I turned and stalked off down the path.
"Where do you think you're going?" he called after me.
"Away from you!" I shouted without looking back.
"Oh, really?" An amplified chuckle rang out like a roll of thunder over the darkened horizon. "Good luck with that."
I bit my lip to hold back a scathing
response. Instead, I busied myself with kicking over rocks, tearing at leaves and blossoms. I'd dig up this whole damn garden if I had to. If this was my dream, my mind, then what I wanted to know had to be in here somewhere. It was just a matter of finding it.
"Temper, temper." The butterfly returned, staying aloft in effortless defiance of the storm winds. With the huge black eyespots on its upper wings, it was eerily like having Brax's disembodied eyes hovering in front of me.
I paused in the midst of my destructive spree to smile sweetly at the insect. "Did you get the impression I was angry, dear heart? That just goes to show how little you know me." With that, I squatted down and began to scoop up handfuls of dirt.
The butterfly alighted on my shoulder. "Hope you don't uproot a brain cell by mistake."
"What do you care if I do?"
"Oh, Jandra. You know full well that I care."
"Whatever." I batted at him until he darted away again. "If you cared about me, you'd help me."
His disembodied sigh caused the wind to gust, whipping the rose canes around me into a frenzy. I flinched as they swung close to me, despite knowing they weren't real.
"Since when do you take such a narrow view of reality, sweetness?" As if his voice had cued them, a growth of thorny vines snaked toward me with a will of their own.
I shied away, but not quickly enough. Vines whipped around each of my wrists and ankles, twisting tight, forcing a cry from my throat as the thorns slashed into my skin. Bright beads of blood welled and dripped to the ground. "There, now. Still convinced you can't do yourself any real damage from within?"
"You're the one who's doing it, asshole!" The butterfly was nowhere to be seen, so I screeched it at the sky as I struggled against the thorns. They dug in, and it hurt, but I didn't care. "Or else someone's cutting me up for real and you're not letting me wake up and fight back."
"Actually, they haven't done much to you as yet," Brax's ethereal voice assured me. "But if you're so determined to see for yourself, be my guest."
With that, my restraints drew taut, spilling me over onto my back in a spread-eagle. I screamed my outrage, but the sound quickly died in my throat as my head struck the ground. Dazed, I lay staring up between naked branches which just minutes ago had been green and vibrant with life. Now it all looked gray, black, dead. Except for the stars above, which began to swell and blur together until everything went white.
I didn't pass out, though, not really. Eventually, I began to make out shapes in the midst of all the whiteness. Something round above me, a large, darkened rectangle off to my right. A ceiling overhead--I lay inside a room now. A sterile white room, with an array of lights hung on a flexible arm above me, and a hard metal table under my back.
I'd seen a place like this before. Not in real life, but in movies. This was an operating room.
I craned my neck to look around. I was alone but for a battalion of gleaming steel carts lining the far wall, and a number of sinister-looking machines I couldn't name. Fear bubbled in my veins as I looked at them. I didn't even remember coming to the hospital--I hardly ever got sick. Why the hell would I need an operation?
The gunshot. Oh, God, I remembered it now. The sound seemed to echo in my ears all over again. Another scream wrung from my throat as I felt the hot slug tear into my back and burst, shredding muscle and splintering bone, destroying me from within. Blood showered to the floor in a noisy patter.
I lost it for a while. I lay there helpless against the pain, weeping brokenly. The oddest sensation drew me back to awareness--something wet and silky sliding along the mass of agony that had become my lower abdomen. I shrieked, striking out feebly with arms and legs. My right hand connected with something solid, which grunted in protest.
I forced my eyes open to see the perpetrator. Brax looked up at me and grinned, his lips and chin stained red with blood. "Sorry, dear heart. Couldn't help myself." He crouched over me again, his tongue sweeping from my navel up toward my ribs. "Mmm. You're delicious."
"Stop that," I wheezed.
His lower lip jutted in a playful pout. "Oh, if you insist." He sat back, a chair materializing out of nowhere to stop his descent in the nick of time. "I'd love to take a bite out of you," he added, one hand lingering on my body, "but I don't want to spur on this delusion that you're injured somehow."
"I am injured." I gestured to his gory face, which he'd begun to lick clean with the quickness of a cat.
"No." He paused in the middle of his task to hike an eyebrow at me. "The nephilim is injured. You are not."
"But we're bonded. His wounds affect me."
"Only if you let them, sweetness."
"Are you stupid or something?" I cried, flailing my arms with a frustrated strength they hadn't possessed a moment ago. "Look at me!"
"I see." His tone was calm, significant. "Do you?"
Growling, I struggled to sit upright, intent on proving to him that my life was leaking away. I took his arm for support when he offered it and looked down at my lower body. Gone was the long silken dress--I wore only a bra and panties now. A strange black gash marked the boundaries of my pain, blood oozing from its tattered edges at a pace that quickened as I watched.
"There." Brax clutched at my hand. "You see it now, don't you?"
"Um, yeah." I saw it, all right, and it was fucking gross. Not to mention utterly bizarre looking. But it made sense to me after a long moment. I was still unconscious, still dreaming. What I saw was nothing more than an illusion.
"A psychic wound," Brax murmured, completing my thought. "Not a physical one."
Of course. A mental construct, symbolizing Zeph's pain as it filtered down to me through our mental link. No wonder it looked nothing like a real wound. The glimpse I'd gotten of his broken body had been brief and tainted by shock--I could only imagine what it might have actually looked like in detail. Just as I was praising myself for my lack of creativity, a thick loop of intestine welled up into the hole, glistening in an unnatural light.
I retched. "Oh, God!"
Brax moaned in apparent rapture and darted forward, his sharp teeth bared. I shot out a hand and caught him by the hair, intent on dragging him to a stop him before he could do me any more damage.
His head snapped back with no resistance at all. Startled, I released him. "Oh, hurt me again," he purred. He laid his cheek against my side, rolling his eyes up at me as he flashed an upside-down grin. "I've been such a baaaaad boy."
"Shut up. And no eating my insides!"
He snorted, straightening up. "You pretty girls are all the same. You hang it all out there, but you get pissed off when somebody stares."
"I didn't exactly choose to have my guts hanging out of my body, jackass!"
He flicked a narrow glance at me. "Then put them away."
"I can't."
Or could I? I glanced at the chair he'd created for himself, also a construct, a thought made real. Just as my thoughts, my sensations had made this wound. Hell, maybe I could unmake it.
Sucking in a deep breath, I focused my thoughts, picturing myself as healthy and whole, shoving the pain to the back of my mind. The edges of the gash slowly seamed together in response, like a gruesome mouth closing. It wasn't easy by any means, but by God, it was working.
"Good." Warm fingers stroked my shoulder. "Keep it up."
I clenched my teeth, fighting against sensation, imagining cool numbness to take the place of burning agony. I forced those feelings that weren't mine out of my head and slammed the door shut behind them. Finally the illusory wound squished shut, complete with a rather disgusting sound effect, and vanished.
"That's my girl!" Brax beamed, wiping a hand over my stomach. The blood sluiced away cleanly, showing nothing but perfect white skin underneath. Not even a scar.
"Wow. I did it, didn't I?" I grinned as I sat up, absurdly pleased with myself. "Now what happened to my clothes, you perv...oh, stop that, damn it!"
Brax raised a suggestive eyebrow at me, curling his tongue aroun
d a red-stained finger. "No sense in letting it go to waste, is there?"
"It isn't real. And even if it was, it's mine." I scowled at him and mentally zapped the blood out of existence. Sliding down from the table, I conjured a simple top and jeans for myself--plain, boring black ones again.
I expected him to pout. His satisfied smile surprised me. "Very good, dear heart. Finally you're exerting a little control over your life. Feels nice, doesn't it?"
"Yeah, it sort of does. I think I could get used to it."
"Well, don't jump the gun. First we have to get you out of here."
"Right." I looked around, frowning. "What is this place, anyway?"
"Welcome to Facility A." He gestured to our surroundings with an expression that suggested he'd have preferred to be standing in a cesspool. "Birthplace of the technology which ultimately lead you and I to this miserable existence."
"It's a hospital, right?"
"A private research lab," he corrected.
"Same difference. So why did they bring me here?"
His mouth tightened. "You heard what Markus said. You are the culmination of two decades of scientific trial and error. He wants to make more just like you--but first, he'll need to take you apart and figure out what makes you tick."
Twenty-Eight
I gasped. "You mean they're going to...." My voice died in my throat as a parade of mad scientist horror movie images raced through my mind, too quickly to put into words.
Brax nodded grimly. "All that, and more."
"How...how do you know?"
"Personal experience, dear heart. Years of it." He grimaced. "Since you've been unresponsive all this time, they've only taken some blood and surface tissue samples so far. They won't start experimenting on you in earnest until you're awake and able to enjoy it."
Oh...oh God. "So you're keeping me asleep?" I squeaked.
"Trying to. And it would be easier if you'd cooperate." He moved closer, placing an arm around my waist for support. I must have looked ready to keel over. "I would've spared you all this," he murmured, rubbing slow circles on my back. "If only you'd trusted me sooner."
