by Anna Durand
The spinning sensation decelerated. Bent over, held up by her trembling arms, she sucked in breath after breath and willed her senses to calm.
David. He was unconscious and alone with JT.
Who had a knife.
She felt a twinge in her back. It was nothing compared to what she'd felt the moment earlier, when JT stabbed her other self. But she had a horrible feeling that within moments the damage to her psychically generated body would catch up with her real body. She must help David before that happened.
A hard object lay beneath her right hand. She glanced down, felt a bitter smile curve her lips, and clenched her hand around the grip of her gun.
Through sheer force of will, David peeled his eyelids apart. It felt like a Herculean effort. Everything was blurry. He blinked until his vision cleared.
JT stood over him wielding a bloody knife.
David felt his body awakening, though not fast enough.
JT raised the knife high and thrust it downward.
A shot boomed.
JT jerked, dropped the knife, and toppled onto David. The knife plunged tip first into the sand inches from David's neck. JT's lifeless body lay draped over David's torso. A dark stain had spread outward from the gunshot wound in JT's back.
David shoved the dead man off himself. He scrambled to his knees, and then pushed up onto his feet. He spotted his savior twenty feet away, past the front bumper of the SUV. David smiled as Grace slowly lowered her gun.
Then she collapsed.
He bolted past the vehicle and straight to her. As he cradled her in his arms, he felt the warm wetness soaking into the back of her shirt. Shit.
Lifting her carefully, he carried her across the open expanse to where Sean lay unconscious. He settled Grace down on the ground beside the boy. Sean could heal her. If David could wake him. The boy was alive, he could tell that much.
David grasped Sean by the shoulders and shook. The boy's head lolled. David slapped Sean's face. The boy's eyelids fluttered, opened for a split second, and drifted shut again.
A sensation of static electricity washed over David. He recognized the feeling of psychic energy pulsing and crackling in the air. Letting go of Sean, he turned to Grace. The energy. The rising power.
It was coming from her.
Chapter Thirty-One
Everything around her seemed remote and detached, as if she sat inside a hermetically sealed capsule ten miles away, watching the scene through a telescope. As her eyelids drifted closed, she glimpsed David's anguished expression. It triggered no emotion in her. She couldn't feel anything, either physically or emotionally. She was a free-floating spirit.
She was dying. The realization came to her, but still she felt nothing.
Her mind, her spirit, floated through a multicolored mist. Without form. Without attachment. Without anything that had made her human, that had made her … her.
Something tugged at her. It held her in place, though she wanted to float higher and farther. A feeling pierced the numbness, pricking her like a needle. She tried to pull away from the tether, but it refused to let her go. He refused to let her go. David was speaking to her, and though she couldn't hear his words, she felt them tugging at her, felt him begging her not to leave. She couldn't do this. She couldn't go. As good as it felt to float away, she had to fight it.
Energy surged through her like a bone-jarring shiver. In its wake trailed a tingling warmth that scoured away the numbness. Pain struck her hard, convulsing every muscle in her body, and then it faded away. A new feeling coursed through her very essence, a sensation of clear and infinite knowledge. It burned bright for an instant, only to vanish as quickly as it had overcome her.
She opened her eyes.
David, kneeling beside her, stared down at her with an expression of unbridled awe. A few feet away, Sean had sat up and now gazed at her with an identical expression.
Grace pushed up onto her elbows. What the hell was wrong with them?
The back of her shirt felt wet and sticky. Blood, she realized, and her heart skipped a beat. Oh right, she'd been stabbed in the back, and not metaphorically. She felt fine now. Strong, actually. Healthy and right and —
David leaned forward, bracing himself with one hand. He ducked his head over her shoulder to peer down at her backside. Straightening, he gazed at her with a more subdued, but still awestruck, expression on his face.
"You healed yourself," he said in a breathless voice.
"Huh." It was all she could think of to say.
David glanced at Sean, who looked quite well now, and then swiveled his head to take in the panorama around them. As she pushed up into a sitting position, Grace followed his gaze. In the distance, the commandos had begun to rouse. They sat or crouched, scratching their heads and palpating formerly injured body parts.
Formerly injured. Why had she thought that? They couldn't have magically healed.
She had.
The truth sliced through her on a sharp chill.
David met her gaze and nodded. "That's right. You healed yourself and Sean and me. You healed everyone."
"Everyone?" The word came out as a squeaky whisper. She gathered up the tattered remnants of her composure, cleared her throat, and said, "How did I do that?"
David shrugged.
"I thought you knew everything about this psychic stuff," she said. "If you don't know, then I really don't have a clue."
His lips twisted into a partial frown. He looked at the ground.
He knew something — or thought he did. She slid closer to him, and her hand bumped into her gun, which lay on the ground beside her. Clambering onto her knees, she sat back on her heels. Their faces were inches apart.
"Tell me," she said.
He sighed and lifted his head to look at her. "You won't like it."
Planting her hands on her hips, she said, "Tell me anyway."
"I think you tapped into the Golden Power." She must've looked as startled as she felt, because his expression softened and he reached out to grasp her shoulders. "Think about it. How else could you have healed not only yourself but everyone in the vicinity? Sean can only heal others, not himself, and only when he's in intimate proximity to them." He smiled. "You healed everyone — including yourself."
She stretched out her hand to run it through his hair, feeling for the scratch that had bled so copiously moments earlier. It was gone.
Wow.
She brushed her fingers across his cheek and let them settle on his lips. She whispered, "Just don't ask me to do it again. I have no idea how I did it in the first place."
He smiled against her fingers.
She let her hand drop to her side.
"What did it feel like?" he asked. "Tapping into that power."
Clear and infinite knowledge. Oh yes, she remembered that feeling vividly. The certainty. The completeness. The power.
A cold rock settled in her gut. Whatever she'd tapped into had given her more than infinite knowledge. It had given her infinite power, at least temporarily. If JT had succeeded …
But he hadn't. And all of JT's research, contained on the flash drive, belonged to her now. She would destroy it as soon as she got home. The threat was over.
No.
She grabbed the gun, leaped to her feet, and fired twice.
Twenty feet away, Waldron had just raised his own weapon and taken aim at David. Instead of exacting his revenge, however, he collapsed onto the sand — dead. She'd shot him twice in the chest. He'd raised only his head and one arm to surreptitiously take aim. From her vantage point, David had completely blocked her view of Waldron. She hadn't seen him lifting his gun. She hadn't heard it either, because he made no sound. Some fragment of the infinite knowledge she'd touched had stayed with her, and warned her of Waldron's attack.
At least that was her theory.
>
She marched past David and straight to Waldron. His eyes were open and blank, devoid of life. A small pocket knife lay open on the ground beside his body. He had apparently managed to get it out of his pocket — his back pocket, she presumed — and cut himself free of the zip ties. She and David had been a little distracted by her almost dying and then healing herself and everyone in the vicinity. For all she knew, she'd inadvertently healed Waldron too, giving him the ability to make his attempt on David's life. If Waldron had succeeded, she had no doubt she would've been next.
I healed everyone.
A chill whispered over her neck, raising the hairs. She sprinted toward Battaglia. He was still bound, though he writhed on the ground in a vain effort to tear free of his restraints.
He spotted the gun in her hand. His face blanched. He stopped wriggling.
She tapped the gun against her thigh.
"Please," Battaglia whined. "Don't kill me. I was just doing my job."
She had no intention of killing a helpless man, but he clearly thought everyone was as nasty as he was. Given his current state of groveling, however, he possessed neither the ruthless determination of Xavier Waldron nor the maniacal drive of Jackson Tennant.
David came up beside her. He glanced at her gun and then at Battaglia.
The trussed-up commando whimpered.
Shaking his head, David said, "He's not worth a bullet. He's a coward underneath it all."
"I know." Grace tucked the gun inside her waistband. "We should go before his buddies snap out of their confusion and come for him."
"How do you suggest we get out of here?"
"In the car."
He stared at her. After a couple seconds, he slowly turned to look in the direction of the overturned SUV.
Except it wasn't overturned anymore.
The SUV sat upright, tires on the sand. The top was a little banged up, the windshield was missing, and the other windows were cracked. But she knew — she just knew — the vehicle would hold together long enough to get them out of here.
"You did that?" David asked, in a surprisingly calm tone.
She shrugged.
Though she didn't remember doing it and hadn't consciously known she'd done it, some part of her had known. When David asked how they would get out of here, the answer popped into her brain.
Without a word, David took her hand and led her to the SUV. Sean trailed along behind them. They had to crawl through the windshield to get inside the vehicle. Sean went first, wriggling between the front seats to get into the back. David took the driver's seat, leaving Grace as the passenger. When David saw there were no keys in the ignition, he started to ask a question. Grace cut him off with a wave of her hand, although she hadn't intended the gesture to silence him. Instead she had, without thinking about it, waved her hand in the direction of the car's engine.
The engine grumbled to life.
David said nothing. He simply shifted the car into drive, executed a U-turn, and headed up over the rim of the depression and onto the flat desert floor.
"Which way?" he asked.
She pointed, and he followed her direction without hesitation.
The lingering knowledge and energy from whatever source she'd tapped into was beginning to drain away. She felt it. Oh well. It had been borrowed power anyway. But even as the power boost faded, a fragment of knowledge stuck with her. It glistened like a diamond in her mind.
"Where should we go?" David asked.
"I know where my grandfather is," she answered. "We're going to get him."
Chapter Thirty-Two
The clunky, beat-up SUV somehow made it all the way back into town. They rented a nondescript sedan and headed out of town in the direction Grace indicated. David drove. Grace hunched in the passenger seat, stiff as a crash test dummy, fighting desperately to hold on to the knowledge of her grandfather's whereabouts. With each passing moment, she felt the information slipping away from her.
She leaned sideways to glance at the speedometer. It read sixty-five miles per hour.
"Drive faster," she hissed.
David floored the accelerator. The car lurched forward, and she watched the speedometer surge upward.
Without looking at David, she murmured, "Thank you."
"You're welcome."
She chanced a sideways look at him and caught his amused expression. "What's so funny?"
"Nothing."
"Hmm." Spotting a T intersection up ahead, she said, "Turn left."
David braked with caution and veered left onto a paved road with two narrow lanes and virtually no shoulder. They'd left Reston a couple hours earlier, abandoning civilization to drive deep into a wilderness populated with towering pine trees and little else. Though they passed the occasional overgrown two-track driveway, they saw no other signs of human occupation.
Still, David followed her instructions without question.
She relaxed her death grip on the edges of her seat. Glancing at David sideways, she asked, "Are you always going to do whatever I say?"
He chuckled. She supposed that substituted for a response. She supposed she knew the answer to the question anyway. Until today, David had done almost nothing that she told him to do. He was following her orders now because he recognized that she'd acquired some extraordinary, if temporary, knowledge that they needed right now. She shouldn't count on him bending to her will on an everyday basis. Not that she would really want him to. Life would get pretty boring if he always acquiesced to her.
The paved road petered out into gravel. Grace instructed David to make a couple more turns, onto two-track roads that got bumpier and bumpier. As she began to seriously consider duct taping her teeth to her jaw, the trees opened out into a little clearing. The two track dead-ended at a rough-looking cabin nestled amid the trees. The windows were boarded up. A generator hunkered alongside the cabin, apparently powered by a nearby propane tank.
David parked the car near the cabin's front door. After climbing out through the car's nonexistent windshield, Grace walked a few yards away and bent her head back to stare up at the trees. There, high above, a small satellite dish sat mounted to the top of a tree.
Inside the car, Sean started to climb into the front seat, heading toward the open windshield. David, halfway out of the car, leaned his head back in to whisper something to Sean. The boy nodded and climbed into backseat again. David strode toward Grace.
"Well?" he said.
"The windows and doors are electrified," she told him. "Do you know how to turn off a generator?"
"Yes. You're sure there's no backup power source?"
"Positive."
David marched toward the generator. Within a few minutes, he accomplished his task and returned to her side. The cabin looked the same. No lights had been visible before, thanks to the boarded-up windows.
"Guards?" David asked.
She shook her head. "A male nurse with a gun. He would've seen us coming, but I, um … convinced him otherwise."
David's eyebrows rose. "From a distance?"
She gave him a sheepish smile. "Uh-huh."
He looked impressed and a little mystified. She felt mystified too. When she'd manipulated someone's mind before, it had taken an enormous amount of concentration and willpower. Today, the same task had taken almost no effort and she accomplished it from quite a distance, without even thinking about it really. She simply knew it needed to be done and did it. Of course, the level of thought projection required was swiftly eroding the last of her enhanced power. Soon it would slip away from her completely — along with the vast, eerie knowledge she'd obtained.
David strode up to the front door, twisted the knob, and thrust it inward. A thirtyish man dressed in a flannel shirt and blue jeans leaped up from his chair. He didn't even think to reach for the gun strapped to his hip. Grace made sure of tha
t. The final effort triggered a sharp, though not intense, pain behind her eyes.
Rushing forward, David grabbed the nurse's gun and forced the man to sit down again. The nurse glared at David with a mixture of confusion, anger, and fear. David stared back at the man with such intensity that the nurse squirmed in his seat. Then, as if someone had flipped a switch inside his brain, the nurse slumped against the wall and his eyelids drifted shut. He was asleep. And, Grace knew, someone had essentially flipped a switch in the man's brain. It hadn't been her, though. David had taken care of the task. He'd put the man to sleep, exactly like he'd done to her once.
Grace stepped across the threshold into the cabin. They stood inside a narrow entryway that dead-ended to the right, but to the left, it opened into a dimly lit room. She could see a sliver of the room beyond. David led the way, swinging rightward into the room. Grace walked a couple yards into the room and froze.
Nestled against the far wall, covered with a blanket, lay a human-shaped lump. The gray-haired man beneath the blanket sat up, yawned, and smiled at her.
"Grandpa," she whispered, afraid to say the word too loudly for fear she would wake up from the dream. But this wasn't a dream. She knew that with a certainty that came not from her brush with the Golden Power, but from her heart and soul.
Tears stung her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. Edward McLean looked relatively healthy, though a little disheveled and in need of a shave and haircut. David hurried over to Edward and helped the older man to his feet.
Grace ran toward the men. She flung her arms around her grandfather and hugged him fiercely. When she stepped back, dropping her arms to her sides, he reached out to pat her shoulder.
"I gather it's over," he said to her. "JT is — "
"Gone," Grace said.
"And the flash drive?"
"I mailed it to myself, to keep it away from JT and his goons. But once I get it, I'm going to destroy it."
David cleared his throat. "Maybe you shouldn't."
She glanced at him sideways. "Excuse me? People died for that damn thing. It needs to be thrown into an erupting volcano so no one else can get their hands on JT's research. It's too dangerous."
