Face the Change (Menopausal Superheroes Book 3)

by Samantha Bryant

  Dr. Elizabeth Ayres glowed. Her entire body seemed luminescent. It reminded Cindy of fireflies, a soft golden glow that was neither fire nor sun but appeared natural all the same. Beautiful to behold, and terrifying at the same time. Without quite realizing what she was doing, she reached out with her fingers wanting to feel the light.

  “No,” she called out. “Don’t touch me.”

  Cindy stopped in her tracks. Something in the woman’s tone had expressed it wasn’t merely a personal preference, but more than that. She held up her free hand in a gesture of surrender. “Okay.”

  “People who touch me tend to end badly, my dear. I am a danger to myself and others.” The woman laughed, no humor in the sound.

  Cindy let her hand fall and wrapped it around her body. The fingers tingled, whether from the threat or from actual electricity, she couldn’t say. “What happened to you?”

  “That’s classified,” Mekai spoke up.

  Cindy laughed, but Mekai’s face remained stony, and she realized he hadn’t been joking. She arched an eyebrow at him. “Classified? That’s the card you’re going to play with me?” After setting the bowl of her formula back on the counter with a clatter, she pulled a syringe out of her bag and filled it. “I’m going to go dose my father, who doesn’t officially exist, with this top-secret formula now.” She stalked out of the room.

  Her father still lay on the sofa. As far as Cindy could tell, he hadn’t stirred at all since they had first put him there. Feeling for a pulse, she touched his neck and recoiled. His flesh felt wrong in a way she found hard to express. Not as pliable as it should have been, the temperature cooler than expected. Not quite like touching a cadaver. Cindy had handled more than one of those in her medical training. Not quite like touching a live patient, either.

  His pulse still beat, a little uneven, but fairly strong. She stretched out one of his arms. It was stiff and difficult to maneuver. It was better not to think about that too much. She felt for a vein and, with some difficulty, found one in his left elbow she thought would work for administering the shot. Rubbing his arm to bring the vein to the surface, she watched her father’s face. It remained placid.

  She picked up the syringe. As she did so, an image of Patricia’s face flashed across her memory, looking irritated, the way only Patricia could. “You’ve got the bedside manner of a barracuda,” her old friend had said. She had been right, of course. She nearly always was. It was one of the most frustrating things about her.

  The lack of a bedside manner had been part of what had driven Cindy away from direct patient care and into the research laboratory. In the lab, she never had to see people suffer, or listen to them whine about their insignificant discomforts while others fought for their lives. In the lab, she could focus on the medicines and what they could do. It was clean and concise, unemotional and smooth.

  Luckily, her father wasn’t in any position to complain about her bedside manner. She jabbed in the needle and slowly pushed the plunger. From administering the same thing to herself, she knew that it burned as it went in, but her father showed little reaction, just a twitch of the mouth and a flicker of movement behind his still-closed eyes.

  She watched Anton carefully, looking for signs her formula was working on him. It wasn’t clear how much more it would do for him. After all, the communication between his brain and this body had to be different than for her. Maybe Anton’s initial improvement was all he would achieve. It might help if she knew what medicines he’d been taking to avoid organ rejection, but the man was anything but forthcoming about the procedure he’d developed and relied on all these years.

  Behind her in the kitchen, she could hear Mekai and Dr. Ayres talking. She couldn’t make out most of the words, but the discussion sounded a little heated. Cindy thought she heard Dr. Ayres say something about “that madman.” She could only have been referring to her father. How much was Mekai telling her?

  “Evangeline.” Her father sat up suddenly, gripping Cindy’s arm.

  She tugged it loose from his grasp. “No, Anton. Not Evangeline. It’s Cindy. My mother is dead.”

  Anton’s eyes seemed fevered, and his gaze bounced over her face and around the room. “Evangeline, where am I? What’s wrong with me?”

  “You’re in my home, Anton.” Cindy looked around to see Dr. Ayres and Mekai standing a few feet away.

  “Elizabeth?”

  Now Cindy was confused. Her father knew Dr. Ayres?

  Mekai stepped into the middle of the group, spreading his arms as if afraid one of them might attack someone. Cindy wasn’t sure which one of them he thought might become violent.

  Anton Lorre swung his legs to the floor and stood, relatively easily. He only swayed a little as he moved toward Dr. Ayres, halting when Mekai laid a hand on his chest. “I don’t understand. Elizabeth, they said you were dead.”

  “I heard the same thing about you.”

  Some hours later, Cindy and her father, Mrs. A, and Mekai were seated at the large formal dining room table eating terrible take-out Italian. Everyone was laughing—everyone except Cindy, who scooped more overcooked noodles into her bowl, watching with wide eyes as her father and Mrs. A flirted with each other. It was surreal. Dr. Elizabeth Ayres batted her eyelashes like some kind of schoolgirl, and her father ate it up like caviar.

  “You always were a tease, Elizabeth.”

  “Oh Anton, you’re impossible.”

  He waggled his eyebrows at her, and she laughed again. “You don’t know the half of it, sweetheart.” Was that supposed to be a Groucho Marx imitation? Why on earth was Dr. Elizabeth Ayres acting like this?

  Cindy cocked her head to one side and stared at Mekai until he finally felt her gaze and looked at her. He almost spat out his tea, catching the exaggerated disgust on her face. He winked at her and raised his cup as if in a toast. Cindy went back to watching and listening. Mekai would be no help.

  At least the discussion was fascinating. She’d learned more about her father’s past at this one meal than in the past few months sharing lab space. So far, she’d gathered that Elizabeth Ayres and her father had known each other as students and had been good friends throughout their early careers. To hear Anton Lorre tell it, they might have been lovers, but Phillip Ayres had stolen her heart one summer when the two of them shared a lab in Prague. “I knew I should have gone with you,” Anton said. “But I had the chance to study in Geneva, and I couldn’t pass it up.”

  She’d also learned that Elizabeth’s work in bioenergetics was directly responsible for the woman’s condition now. The scientist had developed a technique for viewing the flow of energy through a body, and during an experiment, there had been some kind of feedback through the machine. She had nearly been electrocuted. The subject, her husband, actually had been.

  When Elizabeth awoke, her husband was dead, and she was charged with electrical energy. It had been that way ever since. That first time, she blew out the lighting and security system and destroyed several pieces of equipment while she and her colleagues tried to figure out what was happening. It got worse when she was under stress or duress. When she’d tried to return home, she had killed their cat simply by touching it.

  Bertrand had approached her and offered to help. The snake, Cindy thought. The more she learned about Bertrand, the less Cindy liked that she and her father were accepting his help. His motivations were murky, and she didn’t like being indebted to the man. Still, he’d been of service to Dr. Ayres. She’d been living quietly in a series of suburban houses he’d arranged for her for decades. So long as she controlled her emotions, she was able to live fairly normally. With Bertrand’s help, she had simply dropped off the grid, so to speak, continuing her research in her home.

  “I knew it.” Anton thumped his hand on the table, startling Cindy out of her contemplations. “When they gave us the data on energy transfer within the nervous system, I knew it was your work. Bertrand would never admit it, not even to me. He kept your secret well.”

&nb
sp; “Good for both of us that he did,” she said. “Though it has been lonely. It’s so good to see you again. Though of course, you don’t look a thing like you did when we were young.” There was a little bite in her voice, and Cindy looked up and caught the sharpness in the other woman’s gaze. Maybe she was up to something with all this flirtation.

  Her father didn’t notice. He gestured at Dr. A and smiled appreciatively. “You, on the other hand, haven’t changed a bit. You’re still as lovely as ever.”

  Dr. Ayres demurred, and Cindy tried to cover her desire to gag with a cough. Dr. Ayres turned to look at her, and Cindy did her best to school her face into an expression of quiet interest.

  “And this is your daughter?” Dr. Ayres sounded skeptical, and why wouldn’t she be? After all, Cindy appeared to be all of twelve or thirteen years old.

  “She is. Don’t let her appearance fool you. She’s sixty-eight years old.”

  “Sixty-seven. My birthday is not until April.”

  Dr. Ayres aped surprise, even though she already had the facts on both herself and her father from Mekai. “Stand up,” she said, a bit imperiously. Warily, Cindy laid down her fork and obeyed. “Come closer.” She did. Dr. Ayres examined her closely, though she kept her hands folded against her own chest. No touching. “Not a line in her face. Remarkable. How is this done?”

  “She—”

  Cindy cut her father off with a wave of a hand. She could certainly explain her own work on her own behalf. “It’s a formula I developed. A mutated form of cancer that reactivates senescent cells. As you can see, it is highly effective.”

  “In fact, it’s too effective,” her father said, all bluster again. “When she came to me, she was rapidly becoming a child. Luckily we were able to counteract the effects and halt the youthening before she became completely infantilized.”

  Cindy glared at him. “We” was quite a reach. As was the suggestion she had come to him. He had been little more than her kidnapper and supplier. She alone had figured out what to do and developed the treatment. It wasn’t the first time a man had tried to lay claim to her work as his own. It stung more coming from Anton, though she wasn’t sure why. Had she expected him to tout her skill like a proud father?

  Dr. Ayres narrowed her eyes. She had not missed Cindy’s reaction. “And is this the same formula you have injected into Anton?”

  The man coughed and nearly choked on his food. “What?”

  Cindy ignored him, addressing her remarks to Dr. Ayres as if he were not blustering a few feet away. “More or less. I’ve adjusted it since. I’m hopeful it will regenerate his current body significantly and avoid the need for more murder and body snatching.” She put an accusatory emphasis on the last words. “When I’m back in a laboratory setting, I think I can do something with the medicines used to fight organ rejection.”

  “How dare you.” Anton stood and threw his napkin down on the table dramatically. Mekai rose preemptively, his hand near a pocket that Cindy suspected held a weapon of some sort.

  Dr. Ayres raised a hand. Light crackled across her fingertips visibly. “Sit down, Anton.” Glaring at all of them, the man obeyed.

  “You used this on me?” he said through clenched teeth, obviously trying to contain his anger.

  “It was either that or let you slip into a coma and die. You know I’m right. You were losing control of this body, and I’m certainly not about to help you take another one.” Anton picked up his fork and manipulated his wrist and arm, seeming to consider what she was saying carefully. Cindy laughed at him. “Did you think your recent improvement was some kind of miracle?”

  “You approved this,” he said to Mekai.

  Mekai shook his head. “I’m just your ride. I’ve got nothing to do with your family drama.”

  Cindy quaked with rage inside, but she kept her body still and her voice calm. “I do not require his approval for my work. Or yours, you ungrateful dinosaur.”

  “Is this what your work has become, Anton?” Dr. Ayres sounded sad. “All your ambition boiled down to merely extending your own life? At the cost of the lives of others? Whose body is this you are wearing now?”

  Anton looked down at his hands on the table. “His name was Daniel Price. He was my friend and colleague when I was Victor Chaney.”

  “And you killed him and stole his flesh?”

  “It wasn’t like that. I loved them all. Daniel, Vivian, the child… Danny.” His voice went strangely soft on the final name, and Cindy narrowed her eyes, a suspicion rising in her gut. He went on. “Daniel was trying to help me. Victor’s body was failing. It began as it always did, with neuro-degeneration. But Daniel was too intelligent for his own good. He figured it out, at least in part. He told me he would have nothing to do with my plans, that I should leave and never see him or his family again.”

  He stood and stalked over to the end of the room, seeming to study a painting hanging on the wall. “I loved them.”

  “But you loved yourself more.” Dr. Ayres’s voice was soft, not unkind but still stern. Disapproval emanated from her in the form of a static charge that swept across the room.

  “Easy, Mrs. A,” said Mekai.

  “I’m fine, dear.”

  Anton walked back to his chair. He didn’t sit but stood behind it and gripped the upper part of the seat with his hands. “It wasn’t only about me. It was the work. If I died, I would never know. I would never find the missing piece. If I died, it was all for naught.” He ran a hand over his head, causing the sandy-brown hair to stand up on one side at a cock-eyed angle. “It wasn’t without cost for me, either. I’ve never seen Vivian or Danny since.”

  There it was again, the softness around the name “Danny.” Cindy was sure there was more to this story than he let on. Could he have fathered a child in another man’s body? Cindy’s mind spun on the ramifications. If they found Danny and ran his DNA, whose would show up in the test? Daniel Price, Victor Chaney, or Anton Lorre? Did this mean she had a sort of half-brother?

  Dr. Ayres sounded tired. “Come. Let me show you to the guest rooms. You’ll need some rest.”

  “Elizabeth? You do understand, don’t you?”

  She nodded coldly. “Yes, Anton. I think I do.”

  Jessica’s Word to Her Mother

  Jessica sat across the table from her mother, Eva, two cooling cups of coffee between them—neither of them drank tea anymore. Eva Roark looked apprehensive, and she had every right to be. What Jessica planned to do was dangerous and could put her mother and her children in danger, too. The Department would do what they could to protect her identity and keep her family safe, but she and Eva both knew there was no foolproof system. Eva more than anyone. She was the one whom Cindy Liu and Helen had held captive after all. She still had the hand-shaped burn scar on her elbow to prove it.

  “Are you sure about this?” she asked Jessica.

  “As sure as I can be.”

  “What does Walter say about this?”

  “He understands the risks better than anyone, Mom. He thinks I’m doing the right thing.”

  Eva stood up and walked over to the window to look out at the yard where the boys were playing. Jessica joined her, knowing it was best to give her mother time to think. Pushing the argument would only make Eva more intractable. Jessica fought the urge to shake her mother and beg her to understand.

  The game of “soccer” mostly seemed to involve kicking the ball, then yelling at each other while they chased it. While the two women watched, Max picked up the ball and ran around the side of the house with it, holding it with both hands over his head like some kind of trophy. Frankie chased him yelling, “You can’t use your hands in soccer. Leonel says so.” They could both hear Max’s maniacal giggle.

  Jessica could feel her mother’s gaze on her. It felt cold and angry. She didn’t turn but pressed her face against the glass to track the boys until they ran out of view. She kept looking at the spot where they had disappeared as she spoke. “I know what you’re going to
say, Mom.”

  “Do you? Well, I’ll say it anyway. You seem awfully willing to put your children in harm’s way.” Eva crossed her arms over her chest, one hand resting on the scarred area of her arm.

  She didn’t say I’m a bad mother, but she might as well have. Jessica could hear the echoes of overheard discussions late in the night when her mother and father though she wasn’t listening, and they fought about what to do about their only daughter. Reckless. Foolhardy. Didn’t think this through.

  Jessica sighed deeply, then tucked the long front strands of her hair behind her ears determinedly. She wasn’t some child taking a huge risk because she thought it would be exciting. She had thought this through, and she knew she could do the most good by agreeing to these new responsibilities. Taking her mother’s hands in her own, she said, “They are already in danger, Mom. Every day. As long as Dr. Liu and Helen Braeburn are out there, my boys are in danger and so are you.”

  Eva raised a hand to her throat, looking stricken. Jessica went on before her mother could speak. “They already know where I live. Have you forgotten how that handprint got burned into the back deck?” They both glanced at the back door, and Jessica saw a small shudder shake her mother’s slender shoulders. “While I’m with the Department, I can help track them down and get them put away. The Department is my best bet for keeping my family safe.”

  “But what about the next crazy person your work brings into your life?”

  “How likely do you think it is my next case will be someone who already knows me?”

  “But you’ll be on the news. People will know your face. They’ll find us.”

  Jessica smiled. She’d been waiting for this part. “Oh no, they won’t. Just wait until you see.” Jessica flew from the room, literally, and came back in holding a garment bag. Levitating to hang the hook on the curtain rod, she unzipped the bag as she lowered herself to the ground again.

  Eva sat down heavily in the old-fashioned telephone chair by the window and let her hand drop onto the small desk, knocking unorganized bills onto the floor. “I am never going to get used to seeing you do that.”