by Kelly Oram
“She’s too powerful!” Reynolds argued. “We need to terminate her!”
“No!” Teddy shouted. “You can’t kill her! We’ll move her somewhere else. Outside the mountain. I’ll find a way to develop something that breaks her connection to the electricity.”
“I want her alive!” Donovan said. “She’s the first subject ever to have been created instead of born. She’s the key to everything we’ve been trying to accomplish!”
“She’s too fast. The second that door is open, she’ll be gone.”
A spark of hope burst through my heart. “Demakis is right,” I whispered to Carter. “I only need them to open the door. Give me your hand.”
Carter gave me a skeptical look. “You’re going to drag me out of here at superspeed?”
I blinked in surprise. Was it possible there was something about me Carter didn’t know? Well, he was going to like this. Assuming I got it right, anyway. I’d been practicing with Teddy over the last month, but I was still unpredictable at transferring my power.
My power responds to my desires on a subconscious level. The problem was I’d been too defensive for too long, so my power almost always responded in a defensive way. Right now, while I was in total crisis mode, Carter’s odds weren’t looking too good—but I had to try.
“Not exactly. Give me your hand!”
Carter frowned, but warily held out his hand. I took it and tried to concentrate. I told myself not to hurt him, to help him and give him my power, but the instant I pushed the energy away from me to him, he ripped his hand away and cursed up a storm.
“Why are you zapping me?” he asked, his voice actually sounding a little betrayed.
“I wasn’t trying to. I’m sort of under a lot of stress at the moment!”
Outside, I heard Donovan ask what I was doing.
“She’s trying to give him her power,” Teddy explained.
“She’s what?”
“Jamie can share her energy with people and it temporarily gives them her powers. She’s done it to me a few times. It’s amazing.”
Donovan gasped and stared at me with a new animalistic gleam in his crazed eyes. He wanted my power. He looked like he could practically taste it. Great.
“Geez, Teddy! Why don’t you just tell him all of my secrets you stupid, lying, betraying jerk!”
“Can you really do that?” Carter asked.
“Yes, but it usually only works when I kiss someone, which I am so not doing. I’ll take you with me to hell before I make out with you, Carter.”
“Likewise,” Carter said dryly.
With that, I got mad and sent another wave of energy through the building. The whole place shook again, and in the distance a number of small explosions rocked the complex.
“Forget the freak, boss. This place is going to blow,” Demakis said, tugging Donovan’s sleeve. “That much power is better off destroyed, anyway.”
“Jamie!” Teddy shouted, banging desperately on the glass. “Why are you doing this? Just stop! Please! Before you get yourself killed!”
“Screw you, Teddy!” I trained my glare on Demakis. “If I have to go down, I’m taking you all with me!”
Another explosion shook the building, one I hadn’t caused. I’d done enough damage that the place was starting to destruct on its own now.
Frantic shouts came out of a radio Demakis held, informing them that the fusion reactor was melting down and there was no stopping it now. Everyone was evacuating and they strongly suggested Donovan do the same.
“We need to go, boss,” Demakis said. “We have ten minutes tops before this whole place goes up like Hiroshima.”
“Not without the girl.” Donovan looked at me again. I didn’t know what he suddenly had to smile about, but he certainly looked pleased with himself about something. I saw him pull a small black box from his inside breast pocket. I barely had time to curse before I dropped to the ground.
Apparently, Donovan had an upgraded model of his supersonic torture device. It hurt so much worse than the first one had. It felt like the sound waves were shaking apart my brain.
Carter stood over me, shaking me out of concern. He didn’t know what was going on. He was talking to me, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. It took everything in me to keep my thoughts focused. Any second now, they were going to open that cell door and shoot me with very powerful tranquilizers.
I grabbed Carter’s hand again and tried to calm myself. Ryan. If I couldn’t give Carter my power, Ryan would die. This action might just save Ryan’s life. With a deep breath, I tried to ignore the pain in my head and pictured Ryan’s face. His eyes as blue as Lake Tahoe, his perfect smile, the feel of his lips…
Carter gasped and I could tell by the way his hair was sticking up that it had worked. “Run!” I choked out. “Find…Ryan! North…rim…”
I screamed again as the pain became too much.
Carter scooped me into his arms and the second the door slid open he took off, but I was ripped from his grasp. Teddy was holding me in place with his telekinesis. Carter hesitated, but I shouted, “Go!” and he blinked out of sight.
Demakis had a gun ready, but now that the door to the cell was open I was able to use my lightning bolts. I was in so much pain, but I wasn’t weak thanks to the nuclear energy source right down the hall from me. My blast hit him just before he pulled the trigger. His dart whizzed past me.
Teddy stared in horror at Demakis’s unconscious form. My lightning bolts were so powerful now that his entire chest was charred black where I’d hit him. There was no way he’d lived through the strike.
“Jamie, you killed him.”
“Was going…to do…the same…to me…”
“We must go, 4281,” Donovan said tugging on Teddy’s shirt.
“And leave Jamie?”
“Demakis was right. She can’t be controlled.”
“No! I won’t leave her to die!”
Donovan sighed and closed the door to my cell. He then pulled a pistol from his pocket and shot the lock, trapping me in this room permanently.
Teddy banged on the window, but there was nothing he could do. “It’s your choice, 4281. Come with me and we’ll find others, or stay here and die with her.”
Donovan didn’t wait around for Teddy to decide. The building was falling apart around us. Teddy gave me one last pain-filled look and then disappeared from sight, leaving me to die alone.
The jerks hadn’t even turned off the torture device before they left.
I curled up in a ball on the floor, covering my ears, though it did nothing to block out the pain. At least I’d saved Carter. I’d saved him and he would find Ryan. I knew he would. Ryan would be safe. The other prisoners were now free, and Visticorp was about to be destroyed. If I had to go out, at least I could go out knowing I’d done my best and managed to do some good along the way.
Tears fell from my eyes and I was surprised that even though I was about to die, my tears were tears of joy. I closed my eyes and thought one last time about my parents. They’d been so good to me my whole life, and I knew they’d be proud of me now. Carter would find them after he found Ryan. He would tell them what happened. I trusted him to do that.
Lastly, I thought of Ryan. If anything was going to make dying at the age of nineteen okay, it was the fact that I knew what true love felt like. I’d experienced more happiness in the last year because of Ryan than most people felt in a lifetime. I might not get to spend the next sixty years with him, but my one year was enough.
I looked down at the ring on my finger and imagined us standing in front of Elvis whispering “I do” to one another while some crusty old lady played “Love Me Tender” on the organ. It would have been perfect.
I reached up and clasped the sunshine necklace hanging around my neck. My heart filled with peace and I whispered one last “I love you, Ryan” before sending a final surge of energy into the reactor.
I pushed with everything I had in me. My energy was so great that my entire body became
consumed with it. I felt so incredibly powerful—so indestructible—and yet at the same time it was as if I were coming apart cell by cell. My body was on fire.
I felt it when the reactor finally exploded and then, suddenly, I felt nothing.”
I opened my eyes and saw nothing but stars. Millions of them. There was not a single cloud in the big, open sky above me. It was breathtaking.
I wasn’t sure why, but my first thought was that I was in heaven. But if I were in heaven, then where was God? Where were the angels? Where was anybody?
Slowly, I sat up. My body felt stiff, but not injured. I wished I knew what had happened. Or where I was, for that matter. I was…I was…
Was I lying in the bottom of a crater?
All around me was a wall of mountain that rounded out into a perfect upside down dome. I sat dead center in the middle of it as if I’d fallen from the stars and left a dent in the earth when I crashed.
But that wasn’t possible.
Behind me, there was a gasp. I turned around to see someone running down into the hollowed out earth toward me. I wasn’t sure how I could hear him from so far away, but he was thanking God over and over again.
“You’re alive!” he said when he reached me. He threw his arms around me in a fierce hug. “I can’t believe you’re alive! I only came back because I had to see what was left after the explosion. I never dreamed…”
His voice trailed off and he hugged me again.
“What happened?” I asked the stranger. “Where am I? Is…is this heaven?”
The stranger, who was right on that edge of turning from a boy into a man, pulled back slowly and stared at me as if he feared for me.
“You don’t remember?” he asked.
I tried really hard to think back, but my memory was a complete blank. After a moment, I shook my head.
The boy watched me for a minute, taking his time to decide what to say next.
I studied him for some sort of recognition. It was clear he knew me, but I didn’t think I’d ever seen him before. “Do I know you?”
The boy was startled from his thoughts. “You don’t remember me?” he asked incredulously.
“Should I?”
He hesitated. “Do you know who you are?”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course I do.”
I tried to recall my name, but it wouldn’t come.
“I…” Panic started to set in. I had to know who I was. “I’m…My name is…”
My heart started to pound so hard I thought it might jump out of my chest. It wasn’t there. My name wasn’t there. In fact, nothing about myself was there. My memory was completely gone.
I started to tremble, and quickly the stranger wrapped his arms around me. The action caused as much panic as it did comfort. “I don’t know you!” I whispered, pulling myself free of him. “I don’t know me!”
“Calm down,” the boy whispered. “You do know me. You just don’t remember right now. There was a terrible accident. Nobody else in the whole world would have survived, but you’re not like other people. You’re very special.”
I hated not understanding what was going on. I hated feeling scared. “What happened?”
“You are very powerful, and some bad people tried to kidnap you because of it. They wanted to study you—experiment on you—take your power. You blew up the entire building.”
“I—I what?”
The boy smiled affectionately at me. “You have superpowers. I do, too, actually. We can do things no one else in the world can. You used those powers to save yourself.”
As if he couldn’t resist, as if the thought of me being hurt pained him to his very soul, the boy pulled me into his arms again and squeezed me tightly. “I can’t believe you’re really okay.”
I wasn’t sure I was okay, but I wasn’t dead, so I guessed that was something.
Once again I pulled away from the stranger and eyed him curiously. “What’s my name?” I asked.
He looked at me with another calculating expression, as if he were giving me another chance to remember it on my own. When I didn’t, he said, “April. You’re April O’Neil, and I’m Antonio Stark.”
He picked up my hand and examined the diamond ring on my finger. I hadn’t seen it there until now, but I knew what the significance meant.
I gasped. “Is this…? Did you…? Are you my…?”
Antonio smiled at me. “Come on. Let’s go home and I’ll explain everything to you.”
Home. With him. Something about that didn’t feel quite right. Maybe that’s just because I couldn’t remember him. But what other choice did I have? Stay here in this crater, in the middle of nowhere?
“Okay.” I nodded. “Maybe once I see something familiar it will come back to me.”
Antonio’s answering smile was a little sad. “Let’s hope so,” he whispered quietly, and then he kissed me.
COMING NEXT FROM KELLY ORAM:
UNGIFTED (Supernaturals #2) - 2014
Kelly Oram wrote her first novel at age fifteen–a fan fiction about her favorite music group, The Backstreet Boys, for which family and friends still tease her. She’s obsessed with reading, talks way too much, and loves to eat frosting by the spoonful. She lives outside of Phoenix, Arizona with her husband and four children. Connect with Kelly through social media: Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and Blog.
Table of Contents
TITLE
ALSO BY KELLY ORAM
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
EPILOGUE
COMING NEXT FROM KELLY ORAM
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
