by Jena Leigh
Unable to stand the dazzling brightness any longer, Alex allowed her eyes to close, hoping to ease the pain being inflicted by the mid-afternoon sun.
“Are you okay?” asked Nate from somewhere inside the van.
“Geez,” said Kenzie. “What the heck happened to your eyes? You look like Brian did that time we tried to adopt a stray cat.”
Alex felt a rush of cool air brush past her and a static charge radiate through the atmosphere.
“Heck of a way to find out you have an allergy,” Kenzie added. “Poor kid looked like he was baked out of his mind for the next three days. Although, let’s face it, that’s a hilarious look for any four-year-old.”
Someone blew out a slow breath.
Alex figured it was probably Nate.
“Are you alright?” asked Grayson. Judging by his close proximity, it was his hands that currently rested on her arms.
She wasn’t entirely sure whom the boss was addressing so, instead of replying, she turned her head toward the area where the newcomer had appeared. “Decks? Is that you? Were you hurt?”
There was a moment of quiet during which Grayson released her and the newcomer took his place.
Warm fingers took hold of her chin.
She didn’t need her sight to know who was standing in front of her. The shiver of electricity. The warm, enticing smell of cinnamon laced with ashes….
Declan.
“Let me see, Lex,” he said. “Open your eyes.”
His voice was low, stripped of inflection. Alex could tell he was pissed.
She did as he requested, clenching her teeth in an effort to keep the pain from showing. Any time she opened her eyes, they burned like the devil. It was why she’d been trying to keep them shut.
Her aunt gasped, standing much closer now than she’d been just a moment earlier. “What happened?”
“I was standing too close to Ozzie’s electrical… disrupter… thing… when it went off,” said Alex, blinking away the tears that filled her eyes as she held them open. “It didn’t detonate when it was supposed to and I was afraid I’d set it wrong, so I stepped out from where I’d taken cover to check it out and, well… It sort of just…”
“Bang?” Kenzie offered.
She nodded slowly. “The blast was painfully bright. It felt a little like being blinded by a camera flash, only a heck of a lot worse. I still can’t really see anything.”
“How could you have been so stupid, Lex?” Declan demanded. “You never should have gone back in. I’m going to kill Oz for giving you a feedback device when you obviously had no clue how to use one. It’s not a damn toy, Alex. You could have been—”
“Have Ozzie take a look at her eyes and check her over for other injuries as soon as you’re back at the safe house,” said Grayson, cutting Declan off mid-rant.
Alex huffed. Her own interruption would have contained, at the very least, three inventive curse words and an unrelated insult pertaining to Declan’s parentage.
What right did he have to be so angry? If she hadn’t gone back in for him, he’d still be stuck on the third floor playing hide-and-seek with a room full of agents.
Grayson’s voice seemed to be moving away from the van as he added, “Tell Oz I want a full report on the contents of that flash drive as soon as possible. Cil and I will meet you at the safe house later. We have other business to attend to first.”
“Let me know what Ozzie says, okay Lee-Lee?”
“I will, Aunt Cil.”
Ozzie was more tech wizard than actual physician—or in this case, ophthalmologist—but before he came to be known exclusively for his specialty with electronics and information acquisition, he actually spent three-and-a-half years in med school.
She’d called him “Dr. Oz” exactly once since finding out.
Her ears were still burning from the verbal rebuke that followed.
Grayson’s voice was a fair distance away when he added, “Oh, and Declan?”
“Yeah, boss?”
“If Ozzie thinks Alex’s eyes won’t heal on their own, take her to see Holly,” he said. “I promised Kento Nakamura I’d keep both of his children out of this mess if I could help it, however, so you’re only to involve Holly as a last resort. Understood?”
“Yeah, boss.”
Holly Nakamura—“Holls” to her friends—was a delightfully brazen, pixie-haired childhood friend of Declan and Kenzie. She had a mouth on her that could shame a sailor and a regenerative Variant ability that had the potential to heal Alex’s eyes in an instant.
They’d met briefly when a quick trip to Ireland had gone awry, leaving Alex with a laundry list of injuries—not the least of which being a punctured lung. Holls had been called in to help Alex heal her wounds.
Their interaction had been fleeting, but memorable, and Alex had always hoped to meet the girl again someday.
Her train of thought was immediately sidetracked by another, more pressing issue. Her eyes really, really hurt. The pain slicing through her temples was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. She wiped again at the involuntary tears trickling down her cheeks.
“We’re clear, Alex,” said Nate. “No witnesses. Now’s as good a time as any.”
Nate’s words caused her chest to constrict.
Time to jump, he means, she thought.
Alex swallowed hard and prayed her reaction hadn’t been obvious to anyone else.
“Yeah. Got it,” she said. She reached her left arm out in the direction of the van, but her hand found nothing but empty space. “Um, Decks? A little help finding something to grab on to?”
Declan took hold of her wrist and guided her fingers toward the door handle, saying, “You do realize you’ve just asked a blind girl to teleport four people and a van a distance of over a thousand miles, right, Nate?”
Kenzie snorted. “Last time I checked, distance wasn’t a factor for jumpers as powerful as you two.”
“And blindness?” asked Declan. “What about that?”
Alex gripped the door handle. “Hey, I jumped back to the van without issue, didn’t I?”
“Who else is going to do it, Decks?” asked Nate. “You?”
The comment was a low blow, but Alex was far too annoyed at Declan to bother with coming to his defense.
Declan had teleported a vehicle and its occupants once before, but that Mercedes Coupe had weighed significantly less than the utility van in question. And in all the time since, Declan had never once been able to jump with any vehicle larger than his Honda sport bike.
It was true that Declan had been injected with the VX-2 and that he now possessed the same absorption ability as Alex and Samuel Masterson. But in an unexpected twist, either the treatment that saved his life or the altered version of the drug itself had turned him into something altogether different from either of them.
Something significantly weaker.
The nearly unbridled power that accompanied Alex’s and Masterson’s absorbed abilities was missing in Declan. He was still noticeably stronger than he had been before his DNA was altered, but not by much. He might have been leaps and bounds beyond most normal Variants, but he was nowhere close to approaching Alex or Masterson in terms of strength.
For Alex, teleporting the van and its occupants was a walk in the park.
For Declan, it had—so far, at least—proven itself to be just as impossible an undertaking as it had been for him in the past.
Personally, Alex thought he might still be capable of the task if he simply tried a little harder, but Declan’s wounded pride had prompted him to give up trying ages ago.
“Unless you want to be the one to explain to Grayson why we abandoned our lone surveillance vehicle in a Chicago alleyway, Decks, I suggest you quit your bitching and get in,” said Nate.
A moment of silence followed before the chassis gave a faint creak and Declan climbed into the back of the van.
“We still clear, Nate?” asked Alex.
“Do it,” he replied.
>
She drew a slow, steadying breath, threw any sense of self-preservation out the window—and jumped.
Alex, the van, and its three occupants disappeared from the deserted alleyway in a flash of violet light and a crackle of electricity.
* * *
Cecilia Cross scowled at the man seated across from her in the booth. “So you won’t help us at all?”
She wished his cowardice came as a surprise.
Sadly, Carson Brandt was nothing if not predictable. This meeting was proving to be exactly as disappointing as she’d warned Jonathan it would be. Why they were even bothering with this futile recruitment attempt was beyond her.
Cil shook her head in disgust. “You’re just going to sit back and watch while our kind fight and die to settle a dispute that affects you just as much as any of us? Do you even realize what’s at stake here?”
The Scotsman’s trademark sneer had somehow grown more obnoxious in the six weeks since she’d last seen it. When everything first hit the fan a few months earlier, he’d been a frequent guest at the safe house. At the time, she’d assumed he understood the importance of their cause and had decided to do his part. Instead, just as soon as Alex returned to the present, he left again without so much as a backwards glance and had yet to return.
He shrugged. “Hardly any concern of mine now, is it? I disappeared from the Agency’s radar once before. I can easily do it again. And it’s not my fault you lot kickstarted the apocalypse.”
Cil was suddenly struck by the similarities between the fire-summoning, morally-bankrupt, arsonist for hire seated in front of her and a lowly cockroach. Both filled her with the same sense of repulsion—and they were both equally as likely to be the last creatures standing in the wake of a world-ending holocaust.
“I’d hardly consider this the end of days, Carson.” John Grayson wiped a spot from the white ceramic mug in his hand with a napkin before taking a slow sip of his coffee.
“Give it time, brother,” said Brandt. “You’ve done more than poke the bear, this time. You flat out kicked the hornet’s nest.”
Grayson frowned at that. “If you’d been paying attention,” he said, “you would have noticed that under the circumstances we had little choice but to defend ourselves and retaliate. What Dana Carter and her Agency lackeys did to Nathaniel, Aaron Gale, and Alexandra was absolutely unforgivable. She crossed a line and it forced our hand.”
Brandt cocked his head to one side, staring at Grayson as though the reply amused him. “And how, pray tell, do you see this fiasco ending, Jonathan? Peaceful de-escalation? A treaty signed over afternoon tea and a tray of biscuits?” It was his turn to snort in disgust. “For one of the world’s most powerful pre-cogs, you’re alarmingly naive.”
Cil sighed, more than ready to leave this diner and abandon the murdering nutjob seated across from her as a lost cause.
She ought to be back at the safe house right now taking care of Alex. Not sitting in an uncomfortable booth a thousand miles away, drinking coffee with a madman.
Damn that Ozzie and his slipshod inventions. What on earth was he thinking, giving Alex that machine when she hadn’t been trained to use it? The little man would be getting an earful the next time she saw him.
Across the table, Brandt was still studying Grayson.
Grayson, for his part, was studiously analyzing the contents of his mug.
Frustrated and eager to get this meeting over with, Cil broke the silence.
“Jonathan’s right, Carson. This isn’t the end of days,” she said. “But it will be the end of our freedom if the Agency is successful in crushing this uprising. Do you really want to live in a world where you’re cataloged and quarantined at the whims of an organization that sees us only as weapons to be wielded or threats to be dealt with? Dana Carter wants only to use Variants to her advantage—and there’s no room in her future for anyone that opposes her. She’s made that abundantly clear.”
Brandt narrowed his eyes. When he opened his mouth to reply, Cil cut him off.
“You have two choices, Carson,” she continued. “You can either run and hide until the Agency inevitably catches up with you—at which point they’ll either deposit you in an icy grave or lock you away in the deepest, darkest pit they can find…. Or, you can embrace whatever shreds of humanity are left in that dark heart of yours and you can do what you must already know is right. You can stand up and fight with us and help us remove the threat the Agency poses to our kind once and for all.”
She half expected Grayson to contribute something to her argument, but he remained silent and straight-backed beside her in the booth, sipping idly at his coffee.
For a long, quiet moment Brandt only stared at her, his gaze appraising. “Well, when you put it that way… what’s there left for me to argue?”
Cil blinked in surprise at his unexpected one-eighty. She hadn’t said anything just now that Grayson hadn’t been spouting to him ad nauseam over the phone for the last few weeks.
Why the sudden change of heart?
Grayson set down his mug. “So you’ll join us?”
Anyone who didn’t know John Grayson well would have read his tone as indifferent.
Cil knew better. Brandt, too, judging from the way his smirk had returned in full force.
In truth, Grayson was relieved.
Though why he was comforted by an alliance with a certified psychopath was a mystery to Cil. The man gave the term “wild card” a whole new meaning.
Still. Grayson had seemed certain that it was necessary, and that was enough to convince her.
“What can I say?” Brandt shrugged. “Cil makes a solid argument. And whether you want to acknowledge it or not, Jonathan, the old world is ending. In times like these, I suppose it’s in my best interest to ‘hold with those who favor fire.’”
The reference to the Robert Frost poem didn’t go unnoticed.
Brandt knew poetry?
The man was just full of surprises that afternoon.
“Now then,” said Brandt, “comrades. Where do we start?”
Three
“So are we going to Ireland, or what?” Alex asked.
The scattered conversations taking place in the great room of the main house continued without registering the interruption. A few yards from where she now sat, Declan argued pointedly with Oz, Nate provided Aiden with a run-down of what had transpired during that afternoon’s mission, and Kenzie muttered nonsensically to… well, to herself, apparently—but no one answered Alex’s question.
“Hello? Anyone?” She waved a hand through the air in the hope of getting someone’s attention. “Bueller?”
Under normal circumstances, being ignored like this would have been annoying, but now that the world around her had been reduced to a collection of painfully intense lights and indecipherable shadows, it was borderline infuriating.
A breeze drifted in through the open windows, bringing with it the fresh smell of mountain air warmed by the summer sun. She tried to focus on the pleasant sensation of the wind rushing past her skin, as opposed to the ache and the itch of her injured eyes and the thrumming pain that radiated in waves through her right arm.
Outside, it was a beautiful late August afternoon. The sparse forest and gentle sloping valleys that surrounded Ozzie’s safe house in the northwestern Montana Rockies were bathed in varying shades of green. It was downright placid compared to the bustling city they’d just left behind.
It was also far more isolated than she’d ever thought possible. They were at least thirty miles from the nearest town, and eight miles off what passed for a “main road,” out there in the country. If it wasn’t for Aunt Cil, Ozzie, Alex, and Declan acting as a sort of Variant taxi service, getting to and from the old ranch would be problematic at best.
Still, she wondered how much longer they’d be safe there.
The Agency was bound to find them eventually, and when they did…
“It’s amazing,” said Kenzie, somewhere to Alex’s le
ft. “Her eyes are even more bloodshot and cloudier than they were half an hour ago. It’s so gross. Where’d I put my cell? I need to record this moment for posterity… and potential blackmail purposes.”
Kenzie’s ramblings grew faint as she wandered out of earshot.
“I spoke to Holly about an hour ago and let her know you’d be dropping by,” said a soft voice to her right. “She’s expecting you.”
Alex smiled. “Hey, Brian.”
“Is it as painful as it looks?” the boy asked.
She shrugged—then struggled to suppress a wince at the rush of agony that followed.
Stupid shoulder.
Truthfully, there was an ache piercing both temples that put her worst caffeine-withdrawal headache to shame, but it was the constant sensation of having specks of grit in both eyes that threatened to make the situation unbearable.
After looking her over, Ozzie had given her something for the pain, but it had barely taken the edge off. She’d been gripping the seat of her chair determinedly for the last fifteen minutes in an effort to keep from rubbing her eyes raw and making both sensations worse.
“It’s fine,” she said.
“You’re a horrible liar, Alex,” Brian said. She thought he might be smiling. “What Ozzie would be telling you right now, if my brother weren’t still antagonizing him, is that your eyes should eventually begin to heal on their own, but it will be another few days, at least, before the inflammation subsides and your vision starts to return. If you don’t absorb a regeneration ability in the next forty-eight hours, you’ll likely suffer some permanent damage. After that window closes, the scarring on your retinas will be irreversible.”
One day, Alex was going to get used to the sound of her favorite ten-year-old speaking with the vocabulary and intellectual authority of a licensed physician. Today was not that day.
