Born to Darkness

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “But I’m not,” she said, except her voice sounded breathless—and not in a wow, I can’t wait til you fuck me way. “Baby, I’m not …”

  “FYI,” he said, as the lights around them flickered and then went out. “It doesn’t work for me unless you scream.” The emergency lights came on, casting the room in an even more artificial glow, and revealed the fact that the scar-faced man was smiling. It was awful. “Or bleed.”

  Shane was back on his feet immediately as the emergency lighting system clicked on, bathing the smoke-filled room in a dim bluish light.

  He could hear the shouts of the Organization’s security guards in the hallway, but fuck that. Mac was in peril, and he was going after her.

  He used Goatee’s jacket to shield his hands as he picked up the handgun, and he opened the door.

  The behemoth was still standing right there, his surprise at seeing Shane written all over his ugly face. He raised his sidearm, and if he’d been any faster, Shane would have been dead. As it was, he just had time to send out a blast of heat, which made the man drop his weapon. In fact, most of them did, but a few got some shots off, even as Shane took out as many as he could before they ran away.

  He felt the slap of a bullet graze his shoulder before he slammed the door shut again, and the thing was so fucking hot it practically cauterized the wound even as it made it.

  Which, unfortunately, didn’t mean it didn’t bleed. It just didn’t bleed as much.

  So much for being bulletproof.

  Still, he had to get to Mac. But how? Apparently his metal-heating talent didn’t work outside of the room he was in—or all the guards would have already dropped their hardware before he’d hit the hallway.

  Okay. Think. Or shit—experiment. What else could he do?

  There was something called dematerialization, which would allow someone with that power to walk through walls. He could feel Mac—she wasn’t that far away. Please, God, he just wanted to get to her, to help her. But again, he had to focus. And picture the floor plan in his mind. It would be a problem to walk through a wall and find himself in an elevator shaft.

  He’d start out relatively easy and try to move back into the bathroom.

  Shane took a deep breath and started to walk—and slammed, hard, face-first into the wall.

  Son-of-a-bitch. Add dematerializing to the no-can-do list with bulletproof. And color him a moron for not checking first with, oh, say, his hand? But Jesus, he just wanted to get to Mac …

  The smoke was getting thick, so Shane went back through the hole he’d made, into the bathroom where Goatee was still on the floor.

  Maybe he could do that telepathic thing that Nika had done with Bach—leaping into his body and pushing his conscious mind aside. Possession, they’d called it.

  Maybe he could possess Goatee, and walk himself out of here as a prisoner. Except, if he was going to possess someone else, why not go big?

  Shane remembered the very brief audio report he’d accessed that detailed what Nika had said she’d done to leap into Dr. Bach’s head. She’d used her anger to channel her power, and had focused on reaching out to Bach.

  As far as recipes went, it was pretty vague. But if there was one thing Shane had plenty of right now—it was anger. So he closed his eyes and he pictured Mac.

  And he pictured the man who’d been closing in on her with that knife.

  “You really think I’d be stupid enough to take those hooks from your arms?” the scar-faced man asked Mac.

  “Love is a funny thing,” she said, then gave him a blast of her voodoo so extreme, it should have affected him in the same way that it had with Shane in the car, in the OI parking lot. It should have disarmed him, so to speak, but he just laughed.

  Mac knew that as long as those restraints were on her arms, there was nothing she could do to stop him. Still, she couldn’t quit. She couldn’t stop trying, sending out wave after wave of her power.

  Although, as he pulled his knife free from the bed and used it to cut her, just a thin line on the inside of her thigh, she wished for the first time in her life that she’d spent more time in training, in the telekinetics lab doing those freaking jigsaw puzzles. If she’d harnessed her telekinesis, if she’d learned to hone it and control it, then maybe she could have taken his knife from him and used it to slash his own throat. Maybe she could have picked him up and thrown him back against the wall with enough force to break his neck, without risking the wild randomness of her power accidentally yanking off those restraints and tearing open her wrists.

  He dug deeper with his blade, and she made a sound of pain, despite her intention not to. She turned it into a curse. “Fuck you!”

  “Mac!” Anna said, as across the room she started to cry.

  “Look away, Anna,” Mac told her as the monster used his remote control to adjust Mac’s bed. “Turn your head. Don’t watch this. And for God’s sake, don’t cry. He likes it when you cry. Think about Bach, okay? He’s coming to get you—I know he is. He loves you—did you know that?”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, it kinda took him by surprise, too. He’s pretty freaked. But he’s the maestro—he’s pretty smart. He’ll figure it out.”

  “Do I bore you?” Scarface asked as her knees went up in the air, and her feet went back toward her butt.

  Mac tried to keep her knees together—to no avail. So she looked at him as if she’d forgotten he was standing there. “Whoa, dude, yeah, I guess you kinda do.”

  She knew, in immediate hindsight, that that was too much, that she’d pushed him too far. Because he grabbed the knife and she knew that he was going to gut her with it. And she also knew she had to try to disarm him, which was going to kill her anyway because of those damn hooks, when suddenly he dropped the knife, and it clattered to the floor—and please, sweet Jesus, let him be having a massive stroke … Which he may well have been having, because he doubled over and then straightened and then doubled and doubled some more.

  “Are you doing that?” Anna asked her.

  Mac shook her head. “No.”

  “I am,” Scarface said as he went back and forth a few more times. “I’m doing it. It’s me, Mac. Shane.” He coughed then, as if emptying his lungs of water or a great deal of smoke.

  What? Mac was staring—she knew she was. But it couldn’t be Shane. How could it possibly be …?

  “Don’t play games,” she all but spat at him. “Fuck you—fuck you!”

  But the man took that remote out of the pocket of his lab coat and pushed the button that would bring her legs back down, even as he used his left hand to fumble himself back into his pants.

  He turned and got a glimpse of Anna, and he quickly turned away. “Sorry, Anna,” he said, coughing again, as he searched for the button that would put her legs back down, so that she, too, would no longer be lying there, flapping in the breeze, as if ready for a doctor’s examination.

  It was then he caught sight of Mac’s arms. “Holy shit, what did they do to you?”

  “Don’t you touch me!” she warned him. This was impossible. Shane wasn’t a Greater-Than. How could he have done this? It didn’t make sense …

  “I kind of have to,” he told her, “if I’m going to get those hooks out. God damn them!” Again with the wracking cough.

  Enough was enough. “Okay,” Mac said, trying not to cry, certain she was calling this bastard’s bluff. “Get the hooks out, asshole. Do it. Now.”

  “I get why you don’t believe it’s me,” he said, matter-of-factly—and so like Shane that she almost broke down. “I admit I’m looking a little bit worse for wear, but … It is me, Michelle. I need to work fast, because Cristopher—did you know this asshole’s name is Cristopher, without an H? He wants his wreck of a body back, pretty freaking badly, and I’m new at this so …” He carefully disconnected the hook that was in her left arm from the restraint that held her, and then sprang the restraint.

  “Holy shit,” she said. He was actually setting her free. �
��How … is this even possible?”

  “Yeah, this is the part where you’re going to be pissed at me,” he said glancing up to look at her in a move that was totally Shane-like, except for the fact that he coughed again—and he was wearing Scarface’s ugly-ass face. “After you went missing, I kind of volunteered for the rescue mission. But I didn’t have an exit strategy, so I got some Destiny from Elliot, and I used it. To help, you know, save the world?”

  “What?” Mac was barely aware of the fact that both of her arms were free from the bed—but still impaled by those awful hooks—as he added, “Smiley face emoticon?” and shot her a very strange version of that same toothy grin he’d given her that first night they’d met.

  It was Shane—it was really Shane! She grabbed him by the front of Scarface’s lab coat as he freed her legs. “What have you done? You could have jokered. My God, Shane, Destiny is horribly addictive!”

  He nodded. “Yeah, well, I’m a former SEAL.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” he confessed, as he pulled away from her, to shuffle over toward Anna’s bed, where he unfastened her restraints, too. He helped her down from the bed, then came back toward Mac. “I guess I thought it might sound more plausible and, I don’t know, acceptable to you than the truth.”

  “Which is …?”

  “That I love you madly.”

  Oh, God! “But there’s no cure! Death. Death’s the cure.” She was going to be sick.

  “That depends on which addiction you’re talking about,” he told her, stifling another cough, as he examined the hooks that still pierced her arms. “The drug? Yeah, there’s a cure. Elliot found one. Well, it’s more like maybe a cure, but I’m optimistic. As for you? I’m pretty sure it’s going to be death that ends that addiction.” He looked into her eyes. “Hold on to me tight, honey, because this is going to fucking hurt.”

  Anna knew that Shane was right. It had to have hurt like hell.

  But as she hovered nearby, hoping he wouldn’t actually need her help, he removed the hooks from Mac’s arms. And then he covered the wounds with his hands until her bleeding slowed.

  His breathing was sounding more and more labored, and his coughing was worsening, and when Mac could finally again speak, she looked up at him and asked, “Where are you?”

  Shane had to know that she meant where was his physical form, while he was here in possession of this man named Cristopher.

  But he just shook Cristopher’s head as he handed Mac the man’s huge knife, handle first, as his coughing continued to wrack him. “He’s going to be back soon. I’m losing control. You’ve got to kill me.”

  Mac nodded, but Anna could see that she didn’t want to do it—drive a knife into the body of her lover? Even if it wasn’t actually her lover’s body, it was still Shane who was in there. “You’ve got to get out of him, first.”

  “I will,” he said, between his coughs. “But not until after you do it. I’m not going to let him have control until I know he’s dying.”

  “But you don’t know how it works,” she shot back hotly. “What if once he starts to die, you can’t get out?”

  He touched her face so gently with one of those big misshapen hands. “Please, Mac. There’s always a what if. What if I leave and he kills you both? You said it yourself. There’s a chance that I’m already dead.”

  “But you said you’re optimistic!”

  “I am,” he said, struggling to breathe. “Always.”

  “What if you stay in Cristopher’s body,” Anna suggested, “and take us to where they’re holding Nika? Do you have access to his thoughts—can we find her that way?”

  “I don’t,” Shane admitted. “At least not when he isn’t trying to wrestle me to the ground to take his body back. I think you can understand why I’m not interested in inviting him to do that.” He coughed again. “It’s a great idea though—my taking you out of here, but I really am on the verge of losing control.”

  “You’re losing control because you’re choking,” Mac told him fiercely. “There’s a fire—it’s nearby—I can smell the smoke. Don’t make me have to search for you!”

  Shane shook his head. “Please don’t. There are too many guards, and you aren’t completely bulletproof—not the way you need to be. You need to kill me—now, Michelle—and take Anna and get the hell out. I’ll worry about me.”

  Mac shook her head. “No. You tell me, I’ll kill Cristopher, Anna and I will come get you, and then we’ll get the hell out. Together.”

  Anna nodded, even as Shane shook his head again.

  “You’re in the security control room, aren’t you?” Mac asked him. When he didn’t agree, she looked at Anna. “That’s where we’ll search first. Of course, if he’s not really there …”

  “Fuck. I’m in the ladies’ room next door,” he capitulated, but then admitted, “But I don’t know how to get there from here.”

  “I do,” Mac said. “I’ll be able to find you. I’ll follow your emotional grid.”

  “Oh, God,” he said, coughing hard. But then his face and his eyes changed—just for a moment—as Cristopher struggled to break free.

  Anna took a step back as Mac refreshed her grip on the handle of that knife.

  Then Shane was back—but for how long? “Mac,” he said. “Please. I’d do it myself, but I really don’t want that knife in these hands.”

  Mac nodded as she gazed up at him, as tears filled her eyes. “I’m coming to get you,” she promised.

  “Please don’t,” he whispered.

  “I have to,” she told him. “I love you.”

  Shane smiled, and somehow he managed to make Cristopher look beautiful. “My day just got really good. I’m going to work extra hard to live. Please do the same.”

  “I will.” Mac laughed, even as her tears escaped down her cheeks. “I’m so screwed, aren’t I?” she said, and drove the knife, hard, into his heart.

  Calm blue ocean. Calm blue ocean.

  Nika knew that she’d never find Joseph if she didn’t come out of this panic, so she breathed the way he taught her. Deep inhale, hold … Exhale completely.

  Nice and slowly. Ten counts in, ten counts out. Over and over and over.

  Nightmares still swirled around her—that same stupid dream with the ancient animatronic dolls from the Small World exhibit at Disney. She’d been having that dream since she was four—the way their heads tilted from side to side as their mouths moved, out of sync with the song.

  David, coming by the apartment when Anna wasn’t home, chasing her up the stairs as he called her those awful names …

  Her mother, dead, lying in that coffin.

  Calm blue ocean. Calm blue ocean …

  When Mac opened the door, the hallway outside the room was dimly lit and filled with smoke.

  She moved out into it, keeping a firm grip on Anna’s hand, pulling the other woman along with her. She knew where to go. She could feel—Shane was close.

  There was a lot of activity in the corridors—guards with guns who seemed to be leaderless.

  At first Mac had considered the white hospital gowns they were wearing to be detrimental, but now she realized they worked to their advantage.

  All they had to do was cower, and the guards would leave them alone—they had bigger fish to fry.

  There was a crowd of guards outside of the control room—which was close to the entrance of the ladies’ room where Shane was holed up. Instead of fleeing the smoke, they’d outfitted themselves with what looked like firefighter’s masks, which was too bad. Mac had been hoping that the area would be clear.

  But the entrance to the men’s was around the corner, so she pulled Anna through the door.

  Some clown was actually in there, taking a leak.

  “Hey!” he said as he saw them, and Mac used her imprecise telekinesis to toss him against the wall, hard enough to knock him out.

  Or kill him. She didn’t particularly care which.

  “Gr
ab his weapon,” she ordered Anna, who staunchly did just that. She even took off his air mask and went through his pockets, looking for more ammunition.

  “Heads up,” Mac warned as she grabbed hold of one of the urinals—there were three along the wall—and pulled, attempting to use her hands to guide her telekinetic power.

  She ended up nearly crushing her foot and had to dance somewhat wildly to avoid the pipes and pieces of wall that came with it, but her effort created a hole—one through which noxious smoke came pouring out.

  She started to squeeze her way in, but bumped into Shane, whose eyes were watering, even with a piece of cloth tied up and over his face. And she ended up pulling him back with her into the men’s room, instead. Pulling him back, and clinging to him tightly, gratefully—he was still alive!

  He held on to her for a moment, too, but then pushed her away in order to pull off his makeshift mask—and vomit in the nearest intact urinal, even as he coughed and wheezed and hacked. And apologized.

  Mac just held on to him as he finally cleared his lungs and took several deep gulping breaths—although this air was getting fouled pretty quickly, too.

  “So much for the big, romantic, hallelujah, we’re still both alive kiss,” he said, glancing up at her with that expression that was pure Shane Laughlin. “But here’s something almost as good. Check this out.” He flushed the urinal without touching the handle.

  Mac laughed despite herself. “That’s some talent,” she said. “What else can you do?”

  “I’m still figuring it out,” he told her as he pulled away to rinse his mouth in the sink, and to cough again. “I’m not bulletproof, and I can’t walk through walls. My biggest guess so far is that I’m really, really great in bed.”

  She laughed again. “I was thinking more in terms of potentially life-saving talents?”

  “I can heat metal and start fires,” he told her. “Blow shit up without explosives.”