Winter's Wrath: Sacrifice (Winter's Saga #3)

by Karen Luellen

  Evan had already thrown the doors to the back of the van open and was crouched next to Paulie’s silent body, desperately searching for a pulse.

  He looked up at Theo. Through all his intellect, all his genius—he still looked out of the wide eyes of a scared thirteen-year-old boy, and shook his head.

  Everyone was stunned into silence for the briefest of moments before fear shook them by the shoulders.

  “Get Farrow and Cole onto the plane.” Margo’s voice took on a hollow echo as she barked an order to Evan and Meg.

  She set Theo and Alik to moving all their things from the cars to the plane.

  Without a word of explanation, Meg knew her mother was standing guard over them with her uzi poised at the ready, her sharp soldier’s eyes scanning the tarmac for any sign of threat.

  Within three minutes, they were loaded and ready to go. “What should we do with Paulie?” Alik asked his mom.

  “We have two choices, leave him here or bring him with us. This is his home, and he has friends here who will give him a proper burial. He wouldn’t want us to waste time on his body. He’d be yelling at us to get the heck out of Dodge.” She smiled softly at the sheet-covered body of her longtime mentor and friend.

  Everyone nodded solemnly and hurried up the steps into the plane.

  Chapter 8 Emotional Signatures

  Meg sat staring out the window of the commuter plane.

  She hadn’t said a word to anyone for the first three hours of the flight.

  There was nothing to say.

  Nothing could bring Creed or Paulie back.

  Margo sat beside her for the first hour, trying to get her to talk through the trauma of what happened, to express the anguish Meg felt more than anyone else on that plane if only because of the freaking gift she was given.

  Meg was so full of anger at the world. She was afraid if she opened her mouth she’d explode in a tirade so excruciating and unending, she’d wind up in a straightjacket with duct tape over her mouth.

  So instead, Meg redirected all that energy over the last three hours as they flew thousands of feet above the Pacific Ocean, into searching for Creed’s emotional signature. Paulie’s death was horrible; vivid in her emotional memory, but it was the unknown about Creed that was driving her crazy.

  Meg was so desperate to find him her whole body ached from the immense, sustained concentration she expended in her search. She sent her energy out, flew through blackness, desperately looking for his warm-red signature engrained into her soul from the moment she wrapped herself around his anger and freed him earlier that very day. It felt like years ago.

  At first Meg had hope, but the longer she searched fruitlessly, the more his missing signature only pointed to one explanation.

  Creed was dead.

  A fresh batch of warm tears slid down her face.

  Her mother’s strong, worn hands pressed a soft bundle of tissues to her eyes.

  “Meggie, I’m so sorry,” she said simply.

  Meg hiccupped, and continued to cry tears of sadness.

  “That any of us was able to escape today is truly amazing. You do realize if it weren’t for your gift, none of us would be alive, don’t you? And Williams would be free to rein evil over an unsuspecting world?” She was trying to help Meg see the bigger picture and appreciate the positive. Meg just couldn’t.

  Unable to stay silent any longer, Meg groaned, “Mom, Creed didn’t have someone rescue him when he was a little boy in Williams’ lab. He had to grow up alone, abused and abandoned surrounded by metasoldiers who only knew that way of life. In his entire life, Creed never felt love—only bloodthirsty, competitive, violence—but he turned away from that. Instead of embracing the hatred fed to him, he stepped out on faith and chose us. No one ever sacrificed one tiny thing for him, but he sacrificed everything for us.” Meg buried her face into her hands.

  Margo rubbed her daughter’s back and just let her cry for a while before saying, “You’re right, Meg. Everything you said is true. It’s just all the more reason we need to respect his last wishes. If someone so conditioned to hate and destroy, can find love and loyalty, then we must know God’s will is for us to go find others who need rescuing from Williams. In the name of our Creed, we need to make his sacrifice mean something to everyone.”

  She squeezed Meg’s shoulder once, tenderly and left her to her thoughts.

  Meg resumed staring out the cabin window. The water below shimmered in the red-orange glow of the setting sun. The line of clouds hovering in the distance took on a darkened, shadowy feel and stretched from one side of her view to the other. It looked so peaceful, beautiful. How could the world be full of such majestic beauty touched by the hands of God, and still have so much evil rising, blackened and contagious? Maze whimpered in his sleep at her feet and laid his warm, heavy head on her toes, sighing softly.

  Meg sighed, too.

  Okay, Meg, she thought, enough is enough. You can’t change what’s happened. Suck it up, and get on with living. She gave herself a mental slap.

  She unbuckled her seat belt, slipped her foot out from under her furry best friend and stood in the aisle to stretch, forcing the tightness out of her achy muscles.

  Her family noticed her, but tried politely not to stare. They were all worried about her; she could feel it.

  Meg walked to the back of the plane where Dr. Andrews was hovering over his son. Evan was changing Farrow’s I.V. bag.

  “Any change?” Meg asked them.

  Theo looked up startled, as though Meg were a stranger for a moment. He had been lost in thoughts of his son as a little boy and of Jenna, Cole’s deceased mother. Meg wanted to touch his hand to reassure him, but she hesitated, still unable to forget what happened with Creed on the Island. She remained guarded.

  Evan answered, “Farrow has been drifting in and out of consciousness. I don’t think it’ll be too much longer before she awakens. Now that her wound is cleaned, her metahuman rapid healing is doing its job. Since we transfused Creed’s blood, her body is recovering beautifully.” He coughed, uncomfortable at his own use of the word “beautifully.”

  Meg was more worried about Creed’s blood floating in this woman’s body. For some irrational reason, she felt a wave of jealousy at the thought.

  “Let me know next time she’s semiconscious. I’ll see if I can’t get a reading on her emotions. It’ll help to know if we’ll need to tie her down for the duration of the flight.” Meg tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice, but she was pretty sure she failed by the surprised expression on her little brother’s face.

  Changing the subject, Meg asked, “How’s Cole?”

  Evan glanced nervously at Dr. Andrews before speaking. Meg could tell he was unsure how much detail to reveal for fear of its effects on the boy’s father.

  He cleared his throat, “He has not regained consciousness. His stats have remained unchanged over the last three hours, though they are unusual. His blood pressure is very low, lips pale, but his temperature keeps spiking. I’ve been wondering if the febrile seizures you experienced were part of your metahuman condition struggling with the foreign malarial parasites or if they were just a metahuman condition that happens anytime there are—high-risk circumstances.” Evan looked at his sister pointedly, feeding his true level of concern for Cole through his emotions. He was very worried Cole wouldn’t survive the night.

  “His human body could be trying to adjust to the metahuman physiological changes,” Meg offered, more for Theo’s sake than Evan.

  “Or his human body could be rejecting the changes,” Theo’s voice croaked with pain.

  “Let’s not think that way just yet,” Evan said encouragingly.

  Mmmmm

  All three of them turned to look at Farrow, who had just moaned.

  “Um, Meg. You wanna do your thing now?” Evan asked. He was staring at the girl’s stunning face and watching her brows furrow.

  “Yeah, I do.” Meg pursed her lips and concentrated on the fem
ale meta.

  Her emotions were foggy, disconnected. She was more in a dream-state than conscious, but Meg stayed and pressed deeper to see if she could feel something she could work with. Instinctively, she placed her hand on Farrow’s shoulder to try to sharpen her empath connection and gently shook to rouse the girl into a bit more consciousness.

  It worked.

  Meg felt her.

  She was a troubled soul; worried, unsure and alone.

  Farrow felt a huge need for belonging and was trying to use her connection to Williams to fill that void in her heart. She was using Williams to gain a sense of power and therefore a sense of belonging, but she was already figuring out the flaw in her plan. Williams left her to die in a muddy hole in the middle of the Pacific. He was supposed to rescue her, but he didn’t. She was as expendable as any of them, and she hated the Director for his heartlessness. She was crying silent tears at the feelings of abandonment.

  “Meg?” Evan was shaking her shoulder. Meg opened her eyes to see she’d been moved away from Farrow and made to sit down. Evan’s honey eyes were crisp with worry.

  “I’m okay, Ev,” Meg breathed.

  “You were hard to bring back. It scared me. Maze, too. He was the one who shoved you away from Farrow.”

  Maze laid his head in her lap and looked up at Meg with love in his intelligent yellow eyes.

  “Good boy, Maze,” she cooed, rubbing his ears just the way he liked.

  “I need to learn how to control the depth of my readings. Sometimes I slip too far, and it’s hard to climb back out. It feels like walking on the edge of a steep ravine.” Meg shook her head trying to clear it. “Have mom and Alik come here so we can all talk.”

  Once everyone was caught up on her most recent reading of their guest, they began throwing around ideas.

  “Well, she seems as if she might want to join us if she’s so desperate to belong,” Alik mused. Meg glanced at him and tried not to read the interest on a more personal level that he was feeling for the girl.

  Good grief! Stupid men! Meg scowled inwardly.

  “She also has that need for power,” Meg reminded the group, still suspicious of the girl. Never mind if that suspicion wasn’t entirely warranted.

  “I say we go try to wake her. She probably needs to be part of this conversation,” Evan concluded. “Don’t worry, Meg. She’s unarmed, injured, stuck in a plane thirty-thousand feet in the air and we’ll be watching her every move.”

  I guess I can’t argue with all that stupid logic, Meg scowled inwardly, following her brothers down the aisle toward the sleeping assassin.

  Chapter 9 For War

  “Farrow. Farrow, wake up.” Margo was gently shaking the girl’s shoulder, trying to coax her awake.

  The metahuman grimaced, rolled her head and curled into a ball on her side. Even Meg had to admit, she looked very small and vulnerable.

  “Meg, can you reach in and take away some of her sadness? It may help her ease into consciousness,” Evan suggested.

  Meg sighed. “Right.” This time she kept her hands to herself. Meg reached out with her warm white blanket and draped it over the girl’s sadness, reminding herself that Farrow was just an innocent who had been caught up in Williams’ evil. Like Creed, no one came to rescue her either.

  Those thoughts gave Meg renewed determination to help. She stretched her emotional blanket around the girl’s darkness, bundled it up and pulled it away from her. With a prayer, Meg tossed it up into the sky. She sensed Farrow’s body shudder, muscles contract, then relax.

  Meg opened her eyes and sighed deeply. She had to sit down, momentarily spent from her work.

  She noticed something about this evolved gift that she didn’t like at all. Not only was it disorienting and exhausting to slip into someone else’s mind, she was also starting to get some intense headaches afterward. Stabbing, vice crushing, headaches came on quickly and seemed in direct correlation with how much effort she expended into the empath reading.

  Meg rubbed her temples and watched as Farrow’s eyelids fluttered.

  “Farrow? I’m Meg, and you’re here with my family. You’re safe now. No one’s going to hurt you. My brother treated your wound, and you’re healing just fine. It’s okay to open your eyes.” Meg sent gentle waves of calm across the emotional connection still tangible to her, and felt the pain in her own headache surge.

  Farrow’s large doe eyes opened slowly, as though she didn’t completely trust what she would see.

  “Am I dreaming?” The girl’s voice was scratchy around the question.

  “No, dear. You’re finally awake. Though you’ve been out of it for a couple of days,” Margo said gently and offered her a reassuring smile.

  Margo reached out to accept bottled water from Alik’s hand and tipped the bendable straw so she could hold it still for Farrow to take a sip.

  “Take a couple sips. Slowly,” Margo warned holding the straw still for her. She obeyed, taking two small sips, eyes wide with a mixture of awe and disbelief.

  “How are you feeling?” Evan asked.

  “Different,” she responded without hesitation.

  “Different in what way?” Evan pressed.

  “I was so angry—furious,” she started and wrinkled her brow remembering more of her dreams of abandonment, “but now—” her voice trailed to a stop. “You’re the metas the director wants so badly. And you,” Farrow locked eyes with Margo. “You were my target.”

  “We are the Winter family. I’m Margo, and you’ve just met my daughter, Meg. This is my youngest, Evan. He was your doctor, by the way. And this is my older son, Alik.” Mom looked at the drawn face of Dr. Andrews. “That’s my dear friend, Dr. Theo Andrews and the young man on the stretcher across the aisle is his son, Cole.”

  Everyone murmured “hellos” to the dark-eyed beauty who had been their assigned assassin.

  “I know this seems surreal,” Meg said to the only other female meta she’d ever met, “but we really do only want you to get better and ask you to join us, if you’re willing.”

  “You did it, didn’t you?” Farrow asked Meg pointedly, skipping the implied question. No one in the room knew what she was talking about, except the empath.

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I used my gift to help ease your sadness.”

  “That is your gift?”

  “It is part of it now,” Meg offered a tired smile through the pounding in her head.

  “I was told your gift was to read emotions.” Farrow slowly sat up as they talked.

  “It is, but I’ve evolved.”

  “Evolved?”

  “It’s kind of a long story, and I don’t mind sharing it with you, when you’re feeling more up to it.” Meg adjusted the gurney’s sheet around the girl’s legs to help her feel more comfortable. Meg sensed she was feeling very vulnerable.

  “Are we on a plane? Where are we going?”

  “Yes, we’re over the Pacific Ocean. We’ll be landing in LAX in a few hours to refuel.” Meg didn’t offer any more information about their final destination intentionally.

  “You have to understand our concern, Farrow,” Alik began. “We need to know we can trust you not to hurt us. Williams came to hunt us back on the Big Island. He brought fourteen mutated metasoldiers with him. We escaped, but not before we lost two of our own.” Inwardly, Meg nodded approval of her brother not identifying the names of their dead.

  Farrow looked around the room at her former targets.

  “Why did you rescue me?” Her voice was small.

  “Because it was the right thing to do,” Margo answered simply.

  “But, I hurt your family,” Farrow grimaced thinking about how many of them she had personally harmed.

  “Yes, you did,” Meg locked eyes with the former assassin. “We are willing to forgive you, if you’re willing to help us fight against Williams.”

  The two watched each other carefully for a full fifteen seconds before Farrow broke the silenc
e. “What happens if I refuse your offer?” She narrowed her eyes, testing them.

  “We’ll get you safely stateside, then leave you tied up in a motel room, just to give us a head start,” Alik smirked.

  “Alik Winter!” Margo swatted him. “This poor girl does not know you’re kidding.”

  “Who’s kidding?” Evan grinned. “I say forget the comfy motel. Surely there’s a janitor’s closet at the airport—one with big spiders and hairy rats. That’ll do nicely.”

  “That’s enough out of you two,” Margo scolded her sons. The boys kept elbowing each other and exchanging chuckles.

  “Sorry about them. The boys can be so obnoxious sometimes.” Meg glared at her brothers.

  “You have to appreciate our predicament. We would like to take a leap of faith and trust you to help us. If you choose not to, well, that’s your choice. We would have to think of a reasonable way to let you leave us unarmed and unable to harm us.” Dr. Winter patted Farrow’s hand. “Think about it, dear.”

  Farrow stared down at her target’s hand, warm and reassuring and whispered what Meg sensed she had been thinking.

  “I was made for war.” Farrow’s voice was barely above a whisper, “He even named me ‘Farrow’ because of the anagram ‘for war’ hidden inside. I would be worthless to peaceful people like you.” She never looked up. She felt so much self-loathing and shame for everything she was, especially now that she compared herself to the Winter family. Farrow saw them as good people and herself as ugly and flawed in contrast. She realized good people healed their enemy and offered friendship.

  She couldn’t stand it anymore.

  Farrow lay back down on the bed, and rolled over to face away from the kindness surrounding her. “I’m very tired,” she said in a muffled voice.

  Margo and Meg exchanged looks.

  “Rest, Farrow. When you’re ready to talk, we’ll be here.” Meg said, trying to offer soothing waves.

  Chapter 10 Blood is Thicker Than Serum

  Watching the Winters drive away from him was the most poignant, gut-wrenching thing Creed could remember living through, and that was saying a lot.