She wanted to have lunch with this man.
And dinner. And breakfast.
For the next sixty years.
She wanted the heat in his eyes to be real. She wanted the sex they’d just shared to have meaning beyond immediate gratification. She wanted this kiss …
She wanted this kiss to last forever.
God, god, god help her …
“Sixty-two,” the computer said, and then fell silent.
With her eyes tightly closed, through the sweetness of that kiss, Mac had done what she vowed she’d never do.
She’d given this man—who could never truly love her—her heart.
“Can’t you make me fall asleep?” Anna asked. “Just by telling me to?”
“We could try that,” Bach said. “But it’s not always easy to do. Although first, I’d like to take advantage of your conscious mind.” He smiled to try to soften his request—she was sitting across from him in his office, his desk between them, and she was so serious. So somber and subdued. “I’d like to ask you a few questions. If that’s okay.”
She nodded, but now her eyes were guarded, as if she knew what was coming, and she not only didn’t like it, but she didn’t see what it had to do with making contact with Nika.
“First I want to show you something that I found, purely by accident,” Bach told her, and instead of giving her a mental push—his usual way of asking for access to another’s mind—he did the equivalent of gently laying his hand on her head, which he hoped came across as less aggressive. He tried to make it far less of a command and more of a request.
Anna closed her eyes and sighed her displeasure as she granted him entry. “Great, I can’t wait to see what you …”
But her voice trailed off, because Bach didn’t waste any time. He led her directly to it—to the dream she’d been having before Nika hijacked it with the violent images they believed were projections from the girl’s captivity.
The hospital. Nika on the table, sitting up after getting scanned for those sinus infections, giving Anna that baleful look. The doctor in his white coat, standing with his back to them both as he looked at the results from that scan …
Bach stepped directly into the dream, gently taking Anna’s arm and leading her around the man, so that she could see his face and—
Anna’s eyes flew open as she gasped, as Bach let her push him all the way out of her head.
“That was David,” she said now. “In the lab coat. In my dream.”
Bach nodded.
“He’s not a doctor,” she said.
“And yet your subconscious assigned him that role—and made him turn his back to you.”
“Why? What does that mean?” Anna asked him.
“What do you think it means?” he countered.
She shook her head as she held his gaze, but he waited, and she finally spoke. “That … I’m still not completely over what he did? That despite moving hundreds of miles away, I still think of him as a threat? Or maybe it’s that I blame the hospital and the doctors for letting the Organization hack their records and kidnap Nika. Those doctors must suck, and David definitely sucks, so in my dream he’s playing the doctor …? It could be anything. Including the fact that the doctor reminded me—in some way—of David, and I just didn’t notice it at the time. Except wait, I’m pretty sure the doctor we saw was a woman and … I don’t know. I give up. What do you think it means?”
“I think David’s presence in your dream is significant,” Bach told her. “And I think you probably dream about him more often than you remember. You’ve been working—successfully—to overcome the trauma of his attack, and I think that’s symbolized by his facing away from you. If I were counseling you, I’d recommend that you learn to recognize his presence in your thoughts—both conscious and subconscious, and try to make him smaller whenever he appears. Shrink him or push him away, into the distance. What he did to you is never going to go away—it’s a part of you, yes—but it doesn’t have to define you. And it already doesn’t. You’ve done good work.”
Anna smiled at that—just a brief twisting of her lips—before, as always, she brought them back to her single-minded purpose. “But what does any of this have to do with Nika?”
“I don’t really know,” Bach admitted honestly. “Not for sure. It’s all just theory.”
“You asked,” Anna remembered, “before, if Nika knew I had nightmares about David. And yes, I’m pretty sure she does know that.”
“That was one of my theories,” Bach said. “If I had to make an educated guess, I would say that Nika is aware that something traumatic, something even nightmarish, happened between you and David. I believe it’s possible she’s subconsciously using him as a link, as she reaches out to your unconscious mind.” He smiled. “Of course, maybe it’s just coincidence. Maybe we’re digging too deep, and the link is that you were having a nightmare—and Nika’s currently living one. Still, my gut says that David didn’t show up in your dream by accident.”
Anna nodded, still so somber. “So … what do we do now? Do you think that if you can brainwash me into falling asleep,” she said, and he inwardly winced at the use of that word brainwash, “and use Dr. Diaz’s controlled dreaming techniques to make sure that I dream about David—oh joy—we might somehow …? Activate that same link and reach Nika?”
She was amazingly bright. “It’s a shaky theory,” Bach said. “But … Yes. That’s what I think.”
Anna exhaled hard. “Okay, then. Let’s do it.”
She was also amazingly courageous.
Bach cleared his throat. “May I ask you some questions first?”
She sighed again, even more heavily this time. “About David.” It wasn’t a question.
He answered it anyway. “Yes,” he said.
“What don’t you already know,” she asked, leaning forward in her seat, “simply from spending time in my head?”
“I don’t know all that much,” he admitted. “I was focused on getting you out of that memory loop.”
She sat back again and just looked at him. Again, he waited.
“You asked me—before—if I wanted to talk about it,” Anna said. “I should have asked you the same thing. I could feel you. With me. It made it worse at first, because I could tell that was the first time something like that had ever happened to you. It brought me back even more thoroughly into the experience. What you were feeling. The disbelief and powerlessness.”
The idea that he might have made the memory worse for her was sickening. “God, I’m so sorry.”
“You’re apologizing to me? Are you kidding? You came back. You didn’t have to, but you did. My point, however, is that even though it didn’t actually happen to you, it kind of did, and you haven’t had two years to come to terms with it. I should have warned you, going in—”
“And I should have been able to pull you out of that loop,” Bach cut her off. “Immediately. But I couldn’t. And, yes, I do want to talk about it with you, because it …” He stopped himself. Took a breath. “It did impact me. But let’s plan to do that after we get Nika back, okay?”
Anna nodded, looking down at her hands, clasped tightly in her lap.
“Let’s start with the basics,” Bach said quietly. “David. Who was he?”
“He was my boss, at least at the beginning,” Anna told him. “It was … complicated.” She looked up at him. “Actually, it wasn’t, but that’s what I told myself. It’s complicated. But, really, it was very simple. He was married. I knew that, and … I let him get too close.” She closed her eyes. “God, I was stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking, but he was so …”
She forced herself to look at Bach, and he could see the shame in her eyes. “He was persuasive,” she continued, “and I was …” She shook her head. “Wrong. It was wrong, and I did it anyway. And then one day, I woke up and I finally did what I should have done right from the start, and I put in a request to be transferred. But by then, it was too late. The damage was
done. And he went a little crazy. Coming by the apartment. Begging me to come back. Leaving messages about how much he loved me. Creating a scene in the corporate cafeteria … Of course, Jessica, his wife—she found out about the affair. And even though it was over, even though it was after-the-fact … It must’ve been her. But someone set it up to look like I’d been stealing from him, from David—as if I’d sold important documents to a competitor. He was the president of the R and D division of a company that … It doesn’t matter. Or maybe it does, because it’s so stupid. One of the things we were working on was a way to develop condiments—like catsup and mustard—that not only didn’t spoil, but had no calories or nutritional value. Kind of like—I don’t know—flavored paint? It was as disgusting as it sounds and when it was consumer-tested, it failed miserably—no one wanted it. The entire project was going to be dropped, everyone knew it, but … I should have stayed away from him after we broke up, but he called and said he’d found an earring that I’d lost months before—it was my mother’s and I wanted it back. I hadn’t yet heard about the missing documents, so I went to his townhouse to get the earring and, I don’t know, apologize again? But he didn’t have the earring—or if he did, he didn’t give it to me. Instead, he ambushed me. He accused me of corporate espionage. He said that I’d used him from the start to get those chemical breakdowns. And then he hit me. I tried to leave and … You know the rest.”
Bach did know. “How long were you together?”
“Two weeks,” Anna said, tears suddenly brimming in her eyes, and he knew she was almost unbearably ashamed. “It started while we were on a business trip to Phoenix. And then it kept going, even after we got back and …” She shook her head, forcing back her tears.
“Two weeks is not very long.”
“Yeah, well, it was two weeks too long,” she countered.
“You said he came to your apartment,” Bach prompted her. “After it was over …”
She knew where he was going and she nodded. “Yes. Once. And he only came over one time during those two weeks we were”—she cleared her throat—“sleeping together. In fact, it was seeing him with Nika … I remember thinking, God, I couldn’t let her fall in love with him, too. The next day, I did it. I ended it. I put in for the transfer—I was in the secretarial pool—isn’t that such a cliché? The secretary and the boss …? Anyway, I took an immediate leave of absence, and Nika and I went out of town. When we came back, I was in a different department. Not that that kept him from calling me night and day.”
“Tell me about when he came over, after you broke up,” Bach said.
“He was drunk,” Anna said. “And he started crying and swearing and … He just went to pieces. Nika was scared. I was, too. I asked her to go into her room, and she did, and then I got David out of there. I got him a taxi and … When I went back inside, Nika didn’t want to talk about it, so … We both pretended it never happened.”
“After the rape,” Bach said. “What did you do? Did you go home?”
Anna nodded. “I showered and … Made dinner for Nika. The next morning I got a message from the personnel office telling me not to come in—that I’d been fired. I didn’t fight it. I didn’t want to.”
“You didn’t press charges?” he asked.
She just looked at him.
“Are you sure he only came to your apartment that one time?” Bach asked. “That he didn’t come by after the rape? Maybe while Nika was home alone?”
“If he did, she never told me.” She shook her head. “And I never thought to ask.”
“Of course not,” Bach said. “That’s not something you would ask. What happened today that you’re not telling me about?”
“I do ask her that,” Anna said with a fleeting smile. “Now. But this was almost two years ago. When she was eleven and she still volunteered information about her day.”
“But if David did confront her in some way,” Bach pointed out, “Nika might not have wanted to tell you. And even if he didn’t approach her again, she still might have recognized that he was a danger or threat. What I want to do to test our theory is to bring him front and center in your dreams; use him as a kind of a lightning rod, to see if we can’t connect you to Nika, nightmare to nightmare.”
“Fantastic,” Anna said, even though it was anything but. Still, it was obvious that she was willing to set aside her own fears and discomfort to try to help her sister. “Let’s try it.” She paused. “Unless you need to take a break …?”
“What?” he said. “No.” He stood up. “Let’s head back to the sleep lab.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “How’s your back?”
“My back’s fine,” he reassured her, and of course, right then, it twinged. Still, a twinge now and then was nothing.
“Then why not just do it right here?” Anna pointed to the sofa where Bach had taken his share of naps through the years. “I’d actually be more comfortable without a bunch of people watching, if that’s okay.”
He nodded. Without the use of the sleep aid, there was no need for medical monitoring. What he’d be doing was not all that different from what he’d done to Anna to get her to climb into his car. Still … “It’s for your safety,” he told her. “The lab techs who watch. They make sure you’re not exploited or taken advantage of.”
“You would never take advantage of me. You want Nika to attend your school. You’re not going to jeopardize that.” Anna lay down on the sofa, her hair fanned out across one of the throw pillows as she looked up at him expectantly. “And yes, that was me being a jerk. I think it’s kind of obvious that I trust you by now, Joseph. So let’s find her.”
Bach smiled and reached out with his mind—and this time she was ready and waiting for him.
Thank you, he told her. I’m glad. Now, sleep.
TWENTY
“Hey, babe, how is he?”
Elliot looked up from his conversation with the nursing team to see Stephen standing in the door of Edward O’Keefe’s room in OI’s critical care unit.
“Hi, Kyle, Lynda,” Stephen quickly added. “Sorry, I didn’t see you there.” The look he shot Elliot was pure apology, even as his cheeks tinged with his embarrassment.
“Ted’s a fighter,” Elliot answered Stephen’s question, even though the old man was dying. He believed firmly in the power of mind over body, and as long as O’Keefe was willing to fight on, he wasn’t going to provide—even to the guy’s subconscious—the suggestion that he should surrender.
“Um … mind if I borrow Dr. Zerkowski?” Stephen asked the nurses, as he gestured with his head for Elliot to come out into the hall.
Elliot did, murmuring some nonsense to the wide-eyed nurses, who muttered some nonsense back, closing the door tightly behind him.
“Sorry,” Stephen said, wincing. “Sorry! I honestly didn’t see them. I think I was dazzled by the sight of you.”
That would’ve been lovely to hear, if … “Are we on the down-low with the Less-Than staff?” Elliot asked. He’d filed a report on the theory that sexual and emotional intimacy could enhance integration levels, but he hadn’t used any names. Just subjects A, B, C, and D. “Because I don’t think I knew that.”
But Stephen was already shaking his head. “I just didn’t know how you want to play this, since we work together. Things like, what I should call you when other people are around—not babe obviously. I just …” He laughed, still ruefully embarrassed. “Props to me for not just grabbing and frenching you.”
Holy crap. “That would work for me, quite nicely, in my office, with the door closed,” Elliot said. “And I’d like to point out that you are welcome to drop by any time you want.”
Stephen’s smile was less embarrassed and more genuine now. “Good to know.”
“As far as outside of my office goes,” Elliot added, “I think we can start by finding the middle ground between babe and Dr. Zerkowski. Elliot seems just about right. Although despite not being a big fan of terms of endearment, I do find babe
oddly appealing.”
And there they stood, foolishly grinning at each other.
But then Stephen got serious again and asked, “So how did it go with Dr. Bach and Anna? I went down to lab seven, but they were already gone.”
“It wasn’t successful,” Elliot told him.
Stephen didn’t drop the f-bomb very often, but he did so now, under his breath. And then he said. “Do they need me to try again? I could try again. God, I really don’t want to try again …”
“Anna had a negative reaction to the sleep aid,” Elliot explained. “But Joseph hasn’t given up. He seemed pretty confident that he could use what you showed him about controlled dreaming. And Anna’s okay. They were both just a little shaken and they needed a break.”
Stephen nodded. “Good. I mean, not good that they were shaken, but … I mean, I’m not going to say that I won’t try again. I would just … prefer not. To.”
“Yeah, I’m getting that,” Elliot said, looking at him hard. “What aren’t you telling me? You said it wasn’t painful when you tried to connect with Anna, when her blood pressure flipped out—that you didn’t feel anything at all.”
“I didn’t,” Stephen said. “And maybe, in part, that was because I actively didn’t want to make that connection. I’ve been thinking about this—about why my integration levels suddenly started to bounce.”
Elliot just stood there, waiting for him to explain.
“Telepathy is new for me,” Stephen finally said. “And yes, I’ve had some experience going into the heads of other Greater-Thans. And sometimes—like with Mac, who’s even less experienced than I am—it can get messy. But most of the time, at least with Dr. Bach, he’s completely in control. He shields his thoughts and stays away from my shields, even though I know he could break through them. I can trust him to stay separate.”
He paused, and because Elliot knew where he was going, he continued for him. “But going into the head of a fraction …?”
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