Willpower

by Anna Durand

  Grace looked at David. His expression was unreadable. Back to stoic man, which she supposed was a good thing in these circumstances. She felt nothing close to stoic, though she prayed her demeanor gave away no hints about her inner turmoil.

  Waldron entered the room first. David's guards urged him through the doorway next, followed by a couple more guards for good measure. Battaglia hauled Grace across the threshold after them.

  The windowless room was smaller than she'd expected, maybe fifteen feet across and twenty feet long. A good size office, for sure, but not megalomaniac big. A wood desk the size of a small boat hunkered near the far wall, its surface gleaming. A floor lamp in one corner bathed the room in golden light. A huge, overstuffed leather chair squatted behind the desk. In that chair sat a man not much older than Grace. She recognized him without introductions.

  Jackson Tennant reclined in the chair with one arm draped on each arm of the chair. His head rested lazily against the chair's back as he gazed at her with half-closed eyes. The image of him from the Time magazine article flashed through her mind. His dark brown hair was a little shaggier these days, and he wore a tan polo shirt with gray slacks rather than the jeans and T-shirt he'd donned for the magazine spread. He looked thinner too, verging on emaciated. The surfer-dude tan he'd shown off for the press had long since faded into a pallor that lent him a ghostly aura.

  "Gracie," the man said, drawing out her name as if he were savoring a piece of chocolate.

  The sound of his voice triggered another shiver. Steadying herself, she looked straight into his eyes and said, "Hello, Jackie."

  His eyes flew open. He clenched his hands into fists. "My name is JT. Only my parents called me Jackie, and they're dead now."

  Something about the tone of his voice when he told her his parents were dead made her wonder if he'd played a role in their demises. Coming from this man, no amount of cruelty would surprise her. At least now she knew one button to push to get him royally ticked off, though she still hadn't a clue just how she might use that information.

  JT twisted his expression into a peevish look as he surveyed the mini army of guards congregating in his office. Glancing at Waldron, he waved a hand in a sloppy gesture.

  "Get them out of here, Waldo," JT said. "You and Batman can stay, but make these other goons disappear already. I want some privacy."

  Grace felt her eyebrows scrunch, an unconscious manifestation of her puzzlement. Waldo? Batman? Okay, she assumed Waldo meant Waldron, since JT was pouting in the direction of the older man. But who was Batman?

  "The prisoners are dangerous," Waldron said. "We need the extra guards."

  JT snorted a laugh. "They ain't going anywhere, man. They're tied up and locked inside a totally secure facility. They're way helpless."

  A muscle ticked in Waldron's jaw. He remained silent for several seconds while JT eyed him with casual disdain. The younger man twirled a silver pen in the air with two fingers.

  Waldron blinked first.

  Hissing out a breath, he whirled to face his men. He issued quiet but stern orders to the guards, who filed out the door one by one. They shut the door behind themselves, leaving only Waldron and Battaglia inside the room.

  Batman. Battaglia. Oh brother, the lunatic with psychic powers liked to make up nicknames for everybody. What was he, twelve years old?

  Yeah, a twelve-year-old with the keys to a nuclear missile silo.

  Still twirling the pen, JT fixed his gaze on her.

  She squared her shoulders and asked, "Did you kill my parents?"

  He laughed.

  It wasn't the throaty laugh of a masculine CEO. It was the whispery snickering of a little boy who thought he'd squirreled away all the good candy without anybody realizing it.

  Her entire body tensed. She resisted the urge to hurl herself across the desk and throttle the murderous twit. He thought what happened to her family was funny.

  "What did you do?" she demanded.

  He gave a careless shrug. "They lied to me. So I punished them."

  In a voice almost too soft to hear, David said, "Easy."

  At the sound of his voice, the knot inside her loosened a smidgen. She kept her gaze locked on JT, but she took a slow, calming breath. The creep wanted to make her squirm and thrash and claw at his eyes like a wild animal. She would not give him the satisfaction.

  JT crossed his right leg over the left, tapping his right foot in the air.

  Grace willed her body to relax. If he wanted her tense and angry, he'd be disappointed.

  He sighed, shaking his head. "David thought he pulled one over on me, telling Chris-Chris and Mikey to steal Waldo's car. Everybody knows Waldo had it put in his contract that we would not under any circumstances plant tracking devices in his car or on his person." JT snickered. "On his person. I love that. It's so anal."

  Grace kept her face impassive. The twerp would get no response from her.

  JT waited only a heartbeat before continuing. "When I got back from the wild goose chase your mommy sent me on, I had Batman here review the surveillance tapes from the parking level. Then I activated the secret tracking device in Waldo's car and — ta-dah! — I had them."

  The childish glee in his voice grated on her nerves. The anger boiled inside her, contained but not extinguished. No amount of meditation would quell the fury. She could hope for nothing more than to disguise her feelings.

  JT's voice took on a mock-wistful tone. "It was so thoughtful of them to drive way out into the woods on a deserted road. Not a car in sight for miles. Not that it would've mattered if somebody had seen the crash, 'cause I made it look really authentic. Mikey lost control, nobody'll ever know why, and the car flipped. Over and over and over … " He smirked at her. "They were dead and rotting before anybody even knew they'd crashed."

  The room twirled around her, like one of those tilting, spinning rides at a carnival. Snippets of memory rushed past her mind's eye. The car. The road. The deer. She fought back a tide of nausea as her knees buckled. The ringing in her ears drowned out JT's laughter. She collapsed onto hands and knees.

  The memory hit her so hard she gasped.

  And then the present vanished, and the past engulfed her.

  The car. Her parents in the front, talking, their faces pinched with anxiety. She was in the backseat again, perched on the seat's edge, as if a wormhole had sucked her into its time-warping depths, depositing her in the past. Her past. Yet she could do nothing to change what she knew was coming. Her thoughts — the thoughts of the old her, the one who'd lived through this first time — echoed in her mind.

  How did I get here? Oh lord, I did it again.

  She'd traveled somewhere, without meaning to, without even knowing how she did it. A sense of impending danger had come over her and, wham, she knew her parents were in trouble. Knew it was her fault. Waldron must've found out about her and gone after her parents to get to her.

  Gotta do something. Gotta warn them.

  She pounded her fists on the glass but they passed right through it. Oh God, she had to manifest right now. Even in the best conditions, while safely contained in a laboratory with medical types keeping watch over her, traveling and manifesting took great concentration and energy. At this moment, with her heart pounding and adrenaline coursing through her body, she had no hope of accessing her higher level powers. Christ, she'd only begun to understand her powers at all when her parents made her run off to Texas.

  David. She needed him. But she couldn't concentrate enough to even locate him, much less connect with him.

  A breeze wafted through the car.

  Her skin tingled. Someone else is here.

  A deer galloped out into the road. It halted on the center line, eyes wide as it stared at the oncoming car. Her father slammed on the brakes. Her mother cried out in surprise as the tires squealed.

  The deer b
olted into the trees alongside the road.

  Dad let out a heavy sigh and accelerated the car.

  They thought the danger was past. She knew it wasn't.

  The breeze inside the vehicle tickled Grace's cheeks. Strange that she could feel it when she had no body, except the one she imagined, the one that was an illusion only she could see.

  The other traveler chose not to reveal his or her presence. The draft flowing through the sealed car, rustling her mother's hair, offered the sole evidence of another consciousness in the vicinity. She knew what the breeze meant. She sensed the other traveler nearby, like a storm cloud crouching at the horizon, about to unleash lightning and hail and torrential rains.

  And she could do nothing to stop it.

  Dammit, she must do something. If she couldn't manifest, then at least she could let her parents see her.

  Deep breaths. In and out. She focused all her energy on one thought.

  See me.

  Christine Powell turned her head and gasped. "Grace?"

  Their gaze met. Her mother saw her. That meant she could hear Grace too.

  "Mom," she says, "there's someone else — "

  A force hit her with the kinetic energy of a meteorite. The door behind her flew open an instant before she sailed backward out of the car. Falling, her body was falling through empty space. She smacked into the ground on her back, landing with a thud that would've hurt if she had a physical body. For a moment she couldn't breathe or move. The thunderous flow of blood through her veins obliterated all other sounds. A psychically imagined body could feel as real as a flesh-and-blood one.

  Pow!

  The sickening crunch snapped her out of her stupor. She scrambled to her knees on the asphalt. The road stretched out in front of her.

  A hundred feet down the road, the car slalomed off the pavement into the ditch. It flipped into the air, hit the ground upside down, and rolled over and over, spinning toward the line of trees.

  Grace screamed.

  The car slammed into the trees on its side. The crunch-bang echoed through the still morning air. The silence that followed rang in her ears.

  She staggered down the road, then broke into a full run. She should've been crying, should've been shaking, but all she felt was cold and numb. Thirty feet from the car, she skidded to a halt. Her muscles felt paralyzed. Her bile rose in her throat as she gaped at the bent, broken thing that had once been a car.

  A gust of wind blustered over her.

  It was him. She knew. Though he hid his identity, she recognized what he was. A sick man with too much power. He must be stopped.

  She pulled all the energy she could muster from the crossroads and hurled it at him. The energy spun around him like an invisible spider web. Though he struggled against her, she used the energy to force him to appear.

  He was a shadow figure. Dark, swirling, not quite human. His face was obscured.

  In raspy voice, he said, "You are mine."

  The energy disintegrated, and the world went black.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  On her hands and knees, shaking all over, Grace fought to catch her breath. She remembered waking up in her house on that day, lying on the kitchen floor, with no memory of what had happened — no memory of the previous eight months. The amnesia had set in on that day seven months ago. Ever since then, she'd been oblivious of the truth about her family, herself, and the dangers that lurked just out of sight.

  She had dreamed about the accident, but the dream had misled her. Faced with gaps in the story, her mind replaced what she couldn't recall with whatever seemed appropriate, but appropriate wasn't always correct. What she'd experienced a moment earlier had been a genuine memory, as real and vivid and accurate as the event itself. She knew it was right. She felt the truth of it.

  The shaking had subsided. She pushed up onto her knees, and finally, rose to her feet. Glaring at JT, she said, "You killed them. I was there, I saw it."

  He rolled his eyes.

  Since he'd already admitted, obliquely, to killing her parents, she hadn't expected much of a reaction. He felt no remorse. To him, their deaths were an inconvenience at worst.

  "What do you want from me?" she asked.

  He glanced down at his desktop, then back up at her.

  She took a few steps closer to the desk. Waldron shifted, as if considering stopping her, but JT gave a single shake of his head that halted Waldron where he stood. Grace bent forward to examine the desktop. A laptop computer occupied one corner, but another object had caught JT's attention. A mat calendar covered a rectangular section of the desktop, directly in front of JT, and atop that calendar sat a scrap of gauze stained with a dark red substance.

  Blood.

  A sick feeling started in her belly. She recognized that blood-stained gauze. Sure, gauze all looked the same and blood tended to look the same too. Nevertheless, she felt certain the gauze lying on JT's desk belonged to her. The blood stain had come from her. The dream she'd had days ago, the one where she got cut and woke up with a cut on her hand that vanished later. She'd saved the bloody gauze, feeling she might need or want proof that the dream had been, in some sense, real.

  "You stole that from my house," she said.

  "Actually," JT said, looking almost proud of himself, "Waldo got it for me. He didn't see its value, but I knew."

  Straightening, she gulped down the lump that had formed in her throat. "You knew what?"

  He smiled at her, and a chill spread through her veins. Planting his elbows on the desktop, he steepled his fingers to rest his chin on them. "I needed a link to you. A connection to help me find you, since your folks did such a bang-up job of hiding you from me. It was so rude, ya know?"

  "What do you mean a link?"

  "Blood is the essence of life. We can't live without it." Glancing down at the gauze, he sighed. "Your blood linked me to you."

  "How?"

  He picked up the gauze, lifted it to his mouth, and licked the blood stain.

  Waldron made a disgusted noise. Grace managed to restrain her own revulsion.

  JT dropped the gauze. "That's how."

  She said nothing, did nothing, keeping her eyes focused on him. If he wanted a knee-jerk response, he'd have to try harder. Licking her dried blood was gross, but not enough to break her composure. The little creep seemed to relish goading people into lashing out at him — or maybe it was only her he enjoyed goading. Either way, she would not give him what he wanted. Ever.

  "This amount of blood," JT said, "helped me find you, but it didn't have enough oomph to give me a real, blood-and-guts connection to you. I want more. I need more. And you will give it to me."

  "I don't think so."

  He chuckled. "You have no choice, Gracie. I want your power. I will have it."

  She wanted to shuffle backward, get away from him, huddle next to David, anything except stand here face to face with the craziest loon she'd ever met. Her hands trembled a little. She clasped them to hide the tremors. And she did not move. Did not break eye contact. An instinct warned her that doing either would escalate the situation.

  Pulling out a desk drawer, JT procured from its depths a large rubber band and a needle attached to a blood collection tube. He intended to draw blood from her. And do what with it? She prayed he wouldn't drink it, because that would be entirely too disgusting.

  He set the needle and rubber band on the desktop. Then he said, "You see, I need a more intimate transfer of life energy. I need your blood in my veins."

  She glanced over her shoulder at David. He looked alternately perplexed and annoyed. Beside him, Waldron grimaced as if sickened by the very thought of what JT proposed. Yeah, it was pretty icky. Not as icky as licking her dried blood, though.

  "If our blood types don't match," she said to JT, "you could die from injecting my blood into your veins."r />
  "I've already checked that. We're good to go."

  Terrific. She could only hope that he'd checked wrong, and her blood would kill him after all.

  Or she could end this farce right now.

  But how? Three against two sounded like iffy odds. Well, she had goddamn psychic powers, didn't she? Using them tended to leave her exhausted beyond description, and often suffering from a massive headache. If David had recovered enough to use his powers, then the odds would tip in their favor. They might escape before depleting their energy, psychically or physically.

  It was the only chance they had.

  Now, if she could let David know her plan …

  He said mind reading was dangerous, and she had no desire to turn into a frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic. Maybe, though, she could transmit an idea to him. No mind reading. Just thought projection. She had manipulated a man into practically giving her a car, but she didn't want to influence David's mind. She wanted simply to let him know what she intended to do and what she wanted him to do in return.

  Worth a shot.

  She closed her eyes.

  "Uh-uh-uh," JT said in a scolding tone. "Use your powers in any way and David gets splattered on the walls. Not really the décor I had in mind, but it'll work."

  She looked back at David. Waldron held his gun to David's temple, his finger over the trigger.

  Could she act faster than he could pull the trigger? She couldn't risk it. After all, she wasn't exactly an expert at this psychic stuff. Dammit.

  Maybe she could do something, without JT noticing.

  He hunched over his desk, fingering the rubber band. The pallor in his face had deepened, and his lips looked drained of color as well. From this angle, she saw that his cheeks were sunken.

  "You look half dead already," she said.

  Head bowed, he rolled his eyes up to stare at her. "I'm fine. I'll be fantastic once I have the Golden Power."

  "I don't have it. You won't get anything useful from my blood."