Born to Darkness

by Suzanne Brockmann

  He shook his head, no. “But I saw him dying.”

  “Well, dying people can be saved,” Mac told her friend. “You also saw Anna carrying me away, but you didn’t see the part where we both came back. Right?”

  Diaz nodded.

  “So come on, asshole,” Mac said. “Let’s go back in there and make sure Elliot knows that he’s going to survive this. And then let’s prep a room …” Her voice shook and she had to start again as she looked over at Shane and met his eyes. “Let’s prep a room for Shane.”

  Bach didn’t wait for the elevator. He took the stairs up to the Medical Center, where Nika was being checked by the doctors, where Anna was being given a medical scan, too.

  She was already done and wearing an OI jumpsuit, just sitting out in the hall outside of Nika’s room. She saw Bach immediately as he turned the corner, and she got to her feet and …

  He was grinning like an idiot as he moved even faster, and now she was running toward him, too, and he held out his arms and she all but flew into them.

  And they were both laughing, only Anna was crying, too, as she said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you for bringing Nika back to me,” as she threw her arms around his neck, as he actually picked her up and swung her around, as he told her, “She’s amazing, she’s really incredible—and you are, too. We couldn’t have done any of it without you—without your help.”

  Anna laughed at that. “Yeah, I was some help, huh? You’ve been so patient and kind and …” She smiled happily up at him. “… amazing. You’re amazing, Joe. All of you are. But especially … you.”

  Bach knew that he should kiss her. He wanted to kiss her, and he knew she wanted it, too. But decades of not kissing the pretty girl made him feel awkward, and the moment was gone.

  But that was okay, because she and Nika were going to live here now, and there’d be plenty of moments in their future.

  “She’s been asking about you,” Anna told him as she pulled out of his embrace and took his hand to gently tug him toward the examination room. She peeked in the door, adding, “Good, she’s dressed.” She pushed the door open and pulled him inside, saying, “Look who’s come to see you, Neek.”

  “Joseph!” Nika broke into a huge smile as she jumped down from the exam table and threw herself at him.

  Bach had to let go of Anna’s hand to catch her. She was almost as tall as Anna, but she hugged him around the waist as he hugged her back, smiling at her older sister over the top of her head.

  “Subject’s integration level has just spiked!” the doctor, a woman named Elizabeth Munroe exclaimed. “Excuse me, Dr. Bach.” She pulled Nika away from him. “Nika, dear, I need you back on the table, sitting very still.”

  “What’s going on?” Anna asked, her smile fading, as Nika did just that.

  “I … don’t know.” Bach moved closer to the computer where he saw that—good God—Nika’s integration level had jumped to nearly forty-five.

  “Just like that,” Dr. Munroe murmured to Bach, “she went from thirty to forty-five and … Dr. Bach, you’re being jot scanned, too. You’ve had quite a significant increase as well. You’re up to …” She turned and looked at him, her eyes wide. “Seventy-eight?”

  “I’m pretty sure I spiked before I came into the room,” Bach said. With his integration levels in flux, he’d ordered the computer to perform a continuous jot scan on him as soon as he entered the building. He backed up his record and …

  Dr. Munroe looked over his shoulder, tapping one short but neatly trimmed fingernail against the computer screen. “No, sir, you’re wrong. Here’s where you spiked, and it’s exactly when Nika spiked.”

  How could that be …?

  Bach looked up to find Anna watching him, and the expression on her face was …

  “Computer,” he said. “Access JB-one. Voice response on. What’s my current integration level?”

  “Seventy-seven, and falling,” the computer replied.

  “Please note any increase,” Bach ordered, and reached for Anna, pulling her almost roughly back into his arms. She embraced him back, but it was decidedly halfhearted and more of a self-defense move—to keep her face from being crushed against his chest.

  “Still dropping,” Dr. Munroe said.

  He released Anna and went to the table. “Neek,” he said. “Another hug?”

  She was far more enthusiastic as she hugged him again. “What’s going on?” she asked, and the computer spoke over her.

  “Seventy-eight-point-four-three-three.”

  Anna grabbed Bach by his arm, pulling him away from her sister. “I think we need to talk. Outside. In the hall. Now.”

  “Did I do something wrong?” Nika asked them both.

  “No,” Bach told her.

  “Absolutely not,” Anna said. “Just … I’ll be right back.”

  Bach was silent as Anna closed the door tightly behind her. She just stood there, feeling sick, waiting for him to look at her, and he finally did.

  “You know what I’m going to ask you, right?” she said.

  “I do,” he said quietly. “And the answer is no.”

  She nodded. “So … Mac hooks up with Shane and her integration level goes through the roof. Stephen Diaz proposes marriage to Elliot—and I’m sorry, but I’ve got to believe that that occasion wasn’t consummated with a cup of tea—and his integration level skyrockets … Am I really supposed to believe that you just want to have sex with my thirteen-year-old sister? That you didn’t actually, or maybe virtually, while you were in her head—”

  “You know me better than that,” Bach told her, his voice rough. “Anna, my God, I honestly thought it was you. I thought my integration level went up because of your dream. Because of … What I wanted from you.”

  “Apparently not,” she said.

  “I like Nika, yes,” Bach said. “But in no way do I want to …” He shook his head. “That’s crazy. I don’t understand.”

  “What’s not to understand?” Anna asked. “You touch her, and you spike. She touches you and she spikes.”

  “She’s thirteen,” Bach said.

  “No shit,” Anna said, her heart breaking for too many reasons to count. “You spent a lot of time with her. Deep inside of her mind. She’s special—you said so yourself.”

  “I agree,” Bach said. “But …” He shook his head again. “She’s thirteen.”

  “Then why did you spike?” Anna asked.

  But he just kept shaking his head. “It’s true,” he said, “that I have a connection with her, but—”

  “I don’t make you spike,” Anna pointed out.

  “You should,” he said.

  “But I don’t. Nika does.” She took a deep breath. “We can’t stay here,” she realized.

  “Oh, God,” Bach said. “Anna, no.”

  “How can we stay? Except there’s no way we can leave,” she said, thinking aloud. “Nika will be grabbed immediately and …” This time the Organization would kill Anna. “We’re stuck here, aren’t we? We have to stay.” She took a deep breath, exhaling it forcefully. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Under no circumstances will any ‘testing’ be done between you and my sister, unless I’m also in the room. In fact, under no circumstances will you ever be alone in a room with my sister.”

  “Anna, come on, you know me better than—”

  “Are we in agreement?” she said, trying not to cry as she watched him.

  The muscle jumped in Bach’s jaw as he clenched his teeth. “It’s standard procedure here at OI—what you requested. Female students are not … It’s standard.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “It kills me,” he whispered, “that you honestly think I would …” He shook his head.

  “I think,” she said carefully, trying to keep her voice from shaking, “that my sister has the ability to make you a super superman. I think that’s probably worth a lot to you—in fact, I know it is.”

  Now Bach, too, had tears in his eyes. Bu
t he didn’t deny it.

  “I think that I don’t really know you all that well,” Anna continued, “and that … I have to protect my sister.”

  “I understand.” He nodded again, then added, “Anna, I’m so sorry.”

  And the stupid thing was that she believed him.

  “Just leave us both alone for a while, okay?” she said. “I’m going to need a little time to … I’m going to need some time.”

  Bach nodded again.

  And Anna knew that this was it. His chance to pull her into his arms and say, The hell with spiking integration levels and the unbelievable powers that they bring. I want you.…

  But he didn’t do it.

  Instead he turned and walked away.

  Shane had vetoed his own plan to take a few hours and have the equivalent of a last meal, a last drink, and a last chance to make love to Mac.

  The idea that he could joker—just suddenly, randomly—scared the shit out of him. But as Diaz and Kyle and the rest of the medical team prepared to stop and then restart Shane’s heart, he did ask for a moment to talk, privately, with Mac.

  Kyle showed them into the hospital room where Shane would recover. If he was going to recover, that is, instead of die.

  As the nurse shut the door behind them, Shane looked at Mac. She was as tightly wound as he’d ever seen her—and he’d seen her pretty tight.

  She couldn’t sit still and she bounced from the bed to the chair to the other chair to the cabinet to the window, as Shane took off his boots and sat up on the bed, stretching out his legs.

  “Whatever happens,” he told her quietly. “It was worth it.”

  Mac turned from the window to face him. “How can you say that?” she asked.

  “Because it’s true.” He shrugged. “This way? I don’t know, maybe it’s a good thing. We don’t have to crash and burn.”

  Mac shook her head as she came back toward the bed. “That’s really stupid. Good news, I’m going to die so we won’t have to have a bad breakup? That’s moronic. And I know you’re not a moron.”

  “Not that I’d ever willingly leave you,” Shane said.

  “Then don’t,” Mac said fiercely. “Let’s just take our chances with the drug. We’ll have the doctors monitor your dosage—”

  Shane was shocked. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes,” she said. “No. I don’t know. God damn it! God, you suck!”

  “You don’t want me to leave you,” he said, because he needed to be sure he’d heard her right.

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no, either. And she finally sat down on the edge of the bed. Close enough for him to take her hand. Close enough to intertwine their fingers.

  Shane took that as an affirmative and smiled. “Well, all right,” he said, but then asked, “Do you believe that I love you?”

  Mac didn’t answer him right away. “I believe that I love you,” she finally admitted. “And if you’re convinced that’s enough—”

  “I trust you,” he interrupted her. “If you say you love me, I trust that you’re telling me the truth. I mean, because there’s really no way for me to know. Neither of us is telepathic, at least not the way we’d need to be to verify such a thing. So in the same way that you have to trust that my love for you is real, I have to trust you. It’s a two-way street, Michelle.”

  She briefly closed her eyes. “Don’t call me that,” she whispered.

  “It’s a beautiful name,” Shane said, “Michelle.” And when he tugged her closer and kissed her, she kissed him back, sweetly at first, and then deeper, hotter, hungrier.

  As always, he could sense her fear, and he pulled back to look into her beautiful eyes.

  “I knew this guy from my SEAL team,” Shane told her. “Scotty Linden. He saw this woman at a bar, and it was love at first sight. But she left before he could talk to her. We spent a full week scouring every resort on St. Thomas, looking for her. And all the time we were looking, Scotty created this … this fiction about her. Who she was, where she’d grown up, why she was perfect for him.

  “Last day of leave, he finds her and … He’s a good-looking guy, very charming, and he sweeps her off her feet. But then it’s the morning after, and they finally start to talk, and he finds out she’s nothing like he’d imagined. She’s not shy or sweet. In fact, she’s very opinionated and assertive, and he’s scared shitless, because he’s already asked her to marry him, and she said yes.

  “So he kisses her good-bye, and he conveniently goes overseas. He’s gone for months, only she e-mails him the entire time. And he e-mails her back, because even though he knows he’s going to break it off, he’s not a total asshole.

  “So months pass, and he’s still writing to her, and he finally goes home and … They’ve been married now for five years. He loves her, heart and soul, but it started out a total sham. But he never would’ve met her, let alone gotten to know her, if she hadn’t caught his eye that night in that bar.” He kissed her, and she didn’t resist him, but he knew despite the pretty story, she was afraid.

  “This is going to work,” he told her quietly. “This procedure. And after it works, we’re going to give this thing—you and me—a go. Okay?”

  Mac closed her eyes. And said, “When you’re with me, I have faith that this is going to be enough.” Her voice broke. “But when you’re not here …”

  Shane kissed her again. “Then I’ll just never leave you,” he promised, his own voice rough, because they both knew damn well that he might be on the verge of leaving her forever.

  She kissed him back, so fiercely. And then, because she couldn’t do it with her mind, she slid down off the bed and crossed over to the door, and she locked it. As she came back, she unfastened her pants, and kicked off her boots. “I really don’t think you’re going to joker in the next thirty seconds,” she told him.

  “Thirty seconds,” Shane said, laughing, despite the tears in his eyes. “I mean, I can do quick, and I’m always up for creative, but that would be a new record for me.”

  “Not quite,” she reminded him, as she hit him with a wave of …

  Hoh-ly shit … She’d done this to him before.

  And he was no fool. He opened his pants and yanked them down his thighs as she threw one leg across him and straddled him and …

  He came close to the very instant he was inside of her, and he knew she was coming, too. It was everything she’d made him feel back in the car and then some, because she was moving on top of him, laughing down at him through her own tears, loving him so absolutely. And Shane caught her mouth with his and kissed her as he just kept coming and coming and coming.

  And he knew he had it right—that whatever happened?

  It had been worth every minute.

  Bach was on hand for the procedure.

  It was over relatively quickly, with no complications—which was a plus.

  Both Elliot and Shane were in good health to start with, compared to Edward O’Keefe.

  Still, the old man’s death was troubling.

  Bach tried not to carry any negative energy with him as he went to see Mac as she sat vigil at Shane’s bedside, as he stopped in to see Diaz and looked down at Elliot’s too-still form.

  But there was nothing he could do—no way he could help them.

  So he left. He stopped in, too, to the observation room overlooking laboratory one, where Nika was beginning to explore her power, under the tutelage of Charlie and Ahlam.

  Anna was in the room with her, reading a book. But she looked up at the mirrored glass as if she knew—somehow—that Bach was there, watching.

  It was funny, the way life worked out—or didn’t work out, as the case might be.

  Bach went back to his office and shut the door.

  It took one week, four days, seven hours, and sixteen minutes.

  After the first few days, the doctors who came in—Munroe and Cleary and Masaku—started making noise about the sinking probability of a coma patient�
��s recovery.

  Mac had kicked their asses out of the room.

  She played music she hadn’t listened to in years, and she danced. She read aloud from books she thought Shane might like—classics by authors like Robert Parker and Lee Child—interjecting her own comments and color. She’d brought in her laptop and played movies, giving Shane a blow-by-blow of the action on the screen.

  She exercised his body, gave him massages and acupuncture treatments, rubdowns of all kinds.

  She slept beside him at night—curled up with her arms around him.

  And she talked to him. And talked. More than she’d ever talked in her life.

  And after one week, four days, seven hours, and sixteen minutes, she apparently said something that Shane felt the need to respond to, because he woke up.

  It was a little crazy, because after one week, four days, seven hours, and sixteen minutes of telling him about the patheticness of her life even before her mom had died, it took her talking about something absolutely mundane—that she was thinking about painting her bedroom walls blue. She’d told him that she was just thinking about it, and she’d probably take another dozen years of living here at OI to actually get around to doing it, when Shane opened his mouth and volunteered to help.

  “You sure about that?” Mac said, her heart in her throat, as she reached for the buzzer that would call the nurse. “Because you’ve been kind of busy lately.”

  It was then that he opened his eyes and he looked at her and smiled. “Am I alive or is this heaven?”

  “You’re alive,” she managed, as tears filled her eyes.

  Shane reached for her hand, tugging her closer. “God, that must’ve sucked.”

  Mac nodded.

  “But I’m still here,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Mac told him. “I am, too.”

  “I see that you are,” he said, and then he kissed her.

  And Mac knew that she was in trouble, because now the really hard part of letting herself love this man had begun.

  Stephen knew from the shouting and noises of celebration coming from down the hall, that Shane had come out of his coma.