The fourth time Anna pushed her finger into the unlit metal panel above the stenciled numeral ten, it occurred to her she hadn’t gone anywhere because she kept mashing the button of an elevator that had been dead for years. As if the collapsing ceiling, dangling wires, off-the-rails doors, and knee-high junk piled inside hadn’t been enough of a clue. She stood in silence, vaguely aware of the seep of water trickling down her back under her clothes. Her gaze shifted to the puddle of rainwater by the glassless doors at the front of the lobby.
The darkness outside felt like a metaphor for the shadow devouring her life. Water patted to the floor around her; the short sprint from the car to the door had left her soaked to the skin. The wetness felt unreal, as did her presence here. At any moment, she’d wake up somewhere else, perhaps back in Coventry Tower. Maybe she had never made it out of Agent Gordon’s interrogation chair and she already floated at the banks of the Thames, the usual fate of a Cov.
Maybe everything from the moment she awoke handcuffed to a chair to now had been a dream playing out in the instant between a bullet to the head and death.
Anna looked at her hand, finger still extended to the inoperable button. A droplet gathered on the knuckle of her middle finger and fell. The pat of it striking the floor shocked her with the force of someone clapping in front of her face. Aaron repeatedly reminding her of his doubts about Archon had not had one one-thousandth the effect of looking into the thoughts of a woman made deathly afraid of her own child. When Aaron broke the implant, the cascade of guilt came back over the telepathic link and left her speechless. Someone had programmed Melissa’s parents to hate her: to want her out of their house.
Why?
She cringed, hearing Aaron’s voice in her mind. He wanted her.
Someone had programmed Deacon Bell to confess to Old Bill. Someone had programmed Talis to grovel before Aaron. No, it can’t be. Anna shivered, wondering what someone had done to her or her friends. Her mind slid backward down a tunnel of doubt, landing in Plonk’s flat. Anna felt naked again, her hands fixed behind her in cuffs with Archon’s angelic face floating in front of her. How heroic he seemed; gallant James Mardling there to save the poor, wretched girl, fallen back upon her old vices.
What vices? She blinked, returning to the now. I’d been on drugs, hadn’t I? What drugs? Her mind grasped at open air searching for the word. How could she forget the name of the thing that had almost killed her? James’s glowing face told her she didn’t need to worry about that nasty stuff anymore.
Anna snapped out of her daze and an uncomfortable weight settled around her shoulders. She ducked past the broken elevator doors and left a trail of water down the hall to the stairwell. When she reached the second story, a metal squeak preceded a hollow slam echoing off the bare walls. Her mind lifted bits and pieces of the past, matching the sounds to similar noises from her days in Coventry Tower. The Angry Ones bursting in looking for a place to crash, younger kids playing, older teens fighting over chems and food, and East End Boys kicking on doors to see which flats had an appetizing young woman.
Lights flickered overhead.
She shied away from the faltering bulbs. That aspect of her mind that messed with electronics whenever her emotions strayed from calm had been the reason she’d tried the drug she still couldn’t remember the name of. The drug had suppressed her power, allowing her to hide as a normal, but she had been overconfident. Rather than controlling herself, using it only to stay undetected, it had consumed her entirely.
Another door thudded closed somewhere near the top of the vertical shaft. She trudged along, trying to make sense of how so much of her past seemed to have ceased existing. On the fifth floor, she remembered a man she used to live with as a child. He’d worked for the government, assuming the role of her caretaker and posing as her father for the neighbors’ benefit. The memory of his face summoned a legion of tiny sparks spider-crawling over the cinder blocks. A secret government agency killed her mother and left her in the custody of a man shitless about psionics and who knew fuck-all about them. What sense did that make? Why would a man so terrified of her power stay there and use alcohol to cope, rather than quit?
How could he not have known what he was getting into?
As much as she tried to hate him for beating her, her mind summoned only indifference at his death. A few fleeting pangs of shame lapped at the edges of her heart, as if wondering why she wanted this shouting, drunken, father-impersonating, intelligence agent to love her. She thought of Aaron’s wry smile but remembered the concern in the rest of his face.
I have to know.
Her stride picked up speed; she covered the last few stories fast enough to get her heart racing. At the tenth floor landing, Anna paused to glance at a trail of water from the roof access to the interior hallway. Cold wind forced its way in around the broken excuse for a door, making her squint as she crept over. Outside, Aurora frolicked naked in the rain.
The mere sight of her made Anna shiver and gather her coat with a squish.
Anna frowned at the wet footprints. I wonder what bad news she gave him this time.
The air grew mercifully warmer the deeper into the corridor she walked. She tried not to pay attention to the clingy, wet clothes wrapped around her as she hurried along to their living space.
At the sight of a small hand slipping out and grasping the edge of the door, she halted a few paces away. Alexi pushed the faux cherry wood slab to the side and stepped into the hall. He looked bored and lonely. The boy took a step into the hall before he noticed her and jumped with a start. His ice blue eyes no longer held the angry vitriol they’d brimmed with in the lounge, and his clothes looked more or less new: a burgundy sweater with beige slacks and plain black sneaks. If not for the lack of an emblem on his breast, he might have been off to a private academy. His whole posture had changed, all the aggression gone.
The boy pulled unkempt dirty-blond hair away from his face and smiled. “Oy, sorry mum. I didn’t see ya there.”
Anna blinked at his English accent. “Alexi? Are you alright?”
“Who’s Alexi? Are you nutters?” His eyes narrowed to a squint for a moment before he laughed. “Oh, you’re takin’ the piss.”
His innocent smile made her feel sick to her stomach. She couldn’t reconcile this boy with the growling, homicidal ragamuffin Aaron had to disarm.
“Uhm…” She looked over his head, into the room she shared with James. “I might be a little woozy from the weather. I must have you mixed up with someone else.”
“Aye, there’s a right lot of us, aren’t there?” His grin broadened. “I’m so happy Archon found us before the Met got us.” He leapt into a hug, sniffling. “They would’a separated us.”
After clinging for a moment, his fear lessened. The boy took a step back, wiped his face, and smiled again. “Is it okay if I go hang out with my friends?”
Numb, she nodded, unable to speak. Why is he asking me that?
“Thanks, mum!” Alexi gave her another brief hug before running off to the stairwell.
Anna stumbled into the room, slid the door closed behind her, and peeled her coat off. She draped it over the back of a chair by an unused table on her way to James, who sat behind his desk. Absorbed in his work, he didn’t react to her. She remained silent, dripping and staring at him like a puppy that had wandered in from the rain.
“You should take those wet things off before you catch your death,” said James, not looking over.
“What happened to Alexi?”
“He is Alastair now.” James continued fiddling with holographic models of buildings.
“James.” A trace of whine added to her voice. “I’m serious.”
“Are you asking what happened to the boy he used to be? Why he was so aggressive and angry?” James tapped a finger on the desk. “Let me see. Alexi was pressed into combat at the age of ten when the Russian Resistance swept up his family. Suspicious neighbors reported him to the authorities for being psionic. He w
atched the authorities kill his grandparents and drag his mother off to who-knows-where. That sort of experience tends to leave a mark.” A long, virtual building slid sideways across the holo-panel, as if adhered to James’s finger. “Or, perhaps his mind shattered when he had to take refuge under three dead men, one of whom was his oldest brother. Their mission to steal food had met with unexpected complications, and he had to crawl under corpses and play dead while Citizen Management troops walked within inches of him.
“Now that you mention it, I think what truly made the lad homicidal was what the older boy kept doing to him at night when no one was there to hear him cry out. The Resistance made their homes in old sewers, you see, and their bunk was all the way at the end of a cistern, in the dark. A few weeks after he turned eleven, he shot the other boy at point-blank range and dragged the body into the mire.” James finally peeled his glare off the holo-panel and made eye contact. “He learned that guns fix problems. Tell me Alexi would be happier than Alastair, and mean it, and I shall put him back the way he was.”
Tears streamed out of her eyes. “You can’t just make awful things go away.” She folded her arms, shivering in the air-conditioned space. “What will happen when whatever you did to him breaks down? What will he do if his memories return?”
He raised an eyebrow, almost scoffing. “Breaks down? Indeed. You must have mistaken me for a normal telepath. I rather think he need not worry about that. Now that the boy’s demons are no more, he can focus on strengthening his abilities. He had blamed his gift for what happened to his family and not used it since. You did, of course, see how happy he was on the way out? He is quite fortunate that I care so much for our charges.”
“Why did you make him British?”
James chuckled. “The amount of psychological trauma in that boy required I construct an entirely new personality. I had to use what I knew. Of course, I built on the similarities. Alastair’s father left because he could not deal with a psionic child. He and his mother lived on the streets around Coventry Tower. He spent his days roving with a pack of urchins, living a carefree life of begging and playing like something out of a storybook. He remembers the time fondly, if not a touch blurrily.” He swiped his thumb across the screen, laying down a road made of metal tiles.
“What game is that?”
He smiled. “I am designing our future home. A quaint little village.”
“Please tell me you’ll not call it Jamestown or something droll.”
He frowned.
Teeth chattering, Anna slipped out of her boots and wet clothes before moping over to the autoshower tube. Alexi’s—or Alastair’s—smiling face haunted her as she thought about what James had done. Was he better off? If it had been her, would she want to remember something like that? She had been fortunate, due in large part to Penny, not to have suffered any sexual abuse on the streets of London. At least, not until she’d started working for Mr. Blake—but that was her own fault, and she’d been an adult by then.
“How much of my past did you rearrange?” Anna’s voice echoed in the tube; she had to yell over the building whirr of the machine.
I cannot hear you over the device, dear.
His voice in her mind, clear despite the noise made her jump. She shifted around to peer through the steam-covered plastic at him. How much of my life is your dream?
James smiled. Your life is all I dream about, my dear.
Hot soap distracted her for a moment, purging the stiffness of cold, rain-soaked clothes from her muscles. She let off a moan that could’ve been confused for sex, and let herself enjoy it.
Relax, Anna. We can converse when you are no longer frozen. He crossed to the food assembler, winking at her before tapping the controls.
Anna lost herself in the warmth of a shower for a while. Fifteen minutes later when the tornado of heated air ceased, she hesitated with three fingers on the door handle, dreading the temperature outside. Her breath echoed in the closed tube and the foggy cylinder grew opaque. James got up from his desk, rushing over with a long terrycloth robe in hand. Torn between adoration and doubt, she emerged and allowed him to wrap the garment around her, winding up with her back to his chest.
“Something still bothers you.”
“I’m not sure it’s right to just erase a bad memory.”
“What harm could come of it?” He raised one hand in a half-shrug. “It is not as though he has anything to gain from remembering other than pain. The other boy cannot harm him further, and Alexi had the shame of what happened to him and the horror of murder weighing on his innocent heart.”
Something gnawed at the back of Anna’s mind. What had happened to the boy struck a nerve she couldn’t remember having. Mr. Blake left her locked naked in a stripper’s cage overnight as punishment for ‘not dancing well enough.’ The scene replayed in her mind. He staggered in the next morning, like the arrogant king of the underworld, and yelled at her for lazing off the previous day. The cage door squeaked open and he reached for her, brandishing a truncheon. He wanted to teach her a proper lesson on how a whore should behave. Anger overwhelmed her and she pulled all the electricity out of the sound system, through the cage and out her arms. Blake had turned to a cinder in the middle of Bristol City.
Killing him shouldn’t make her feel dirty and worthless. Why, then, did the image of his sneering, fat, face make her want to curl up and hide? Something’s missing.
“How much of what I think I remember is real?”
He rested his chin on her shoulder. “You were quite determined to destroy yourself on some street chemical. I decided to spare you that.”
“Is that all?” She couldn’t stop thinking about Alexi. “That boy wasn’t even the same person. What if someone speaks Russian to him?”
“Oh, drat. I forgot to erase that.” James made a pensive face. “I suppose he’ll know it, but not know why he knows it. I can clean it up later if there is a problem. Honestly, can you call him a person the way he was?” He rubbed her shoulders. “He was little more than a shell, ready to lash out. Think about it, Anna, he was about to shoot someone because they would not let him cheat at some silly game. Alastair is much happier.”
He refused to use his powers. That’s the tragedy to James. Anna tensed for an instant, expecting a response from her idle thought, but he hadn’t been eavesdropping. A psionic who wouldn’t use his powers couldn’t help ‘the cause.’ How much had he changed her? Even at her life’s lowest point, she never imagined herself capable of kidnapping a young girl. At the time, it had been what Archon wanted—and so she did it. Without Althea in front of her, the idea didn’t bother her much. The guilt had existed only as long as she stared into those sad, glowing eyes. The silly child hadn’t even hated her for it. She told me I was sad inside. Had Aaron been right? A wistful smile lingered for seconds on her lips at the memory of him calling her a block of sweet coated in a bit of sour.
“How much of me did you change?”
James let his hands slip off her shoulders. “If you must know, I did manipulate your environs to a degree for your own benefit.”
She spun to face him, mouth agape. “James…”
“The problem with addicts, my dear, is that they are seldom capable of realizing the state they are in. Without my intervention, it is doubtful you would still be alive.” He caressed her cheek. “That, my dear, would have been a tragedy.”
Anna tensed.
“The mere thought of a woman as beautiful as you suffering as you did, fills me with rage.”
“You don’t sound very angry.” She glanced down at her toes, peeking out from under the crumpled robe.
James raised a hand, catching a floating cup of Earl Grey. Behind her sounded the ka-chunk of the food assembler door closing. He guided the cup into her hands.
“I have nothing to be angry about. You are here, healthy, and safe.”
Smelling the tea reminded her of her ‘father’s’ loathing of the flavor. Once, in a drunken haze, he had mentioned
he couldn’t stand it because it had been her mother’s favorite. It doesn’t make sense he hated it because it made him think of her. Why would a CSB operative care?
“There are things that don’t make sense in my head anymore.” She sipped the tea. “Why would the man claiming to be my father detest this tea because my mum fancied it?”
James glanced upward, tapping his lip while thinking. “There could be a few reasons. Perhaps the man had been minding her detention cell and had to fetch it for her every day. Your mum was gifted as well; perhaps she did something to him in her escape attempt.”
Images from the information Mamoru had discovered replayed in her mind. A blonde figure sprawled face down, shot in the back. Anna had been a toddler when the CSB murdered her mother in the street like a common criminal. The woman hadn’t even been armed. Emotion weakened her legs, and she found herself leaning into James for support.
He cocked an eyebrow.
“Why did they kill her, James?” Anna sniffled. “She was only twenty-three. What possible threat could she have been?”
“Paranoia seldom shares a bed with logic or reason. She knew about their breeding project. Even if she had no intention to do so, she could have gone public.”
She pushed herself to arm’s length. “Did you make me think fondly of you?”
“Annabelle…” He wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb. “It hurts to hear you ask such a thing.”
Her glare didn’t soften.
“No, my dear. I never forced you to have feelings for me. In fact, I attempted to talk you out of it. Do you remember me assuring you that you did not need to offer yourself as some manner of gratitude for my assistance?”
“I…” She looked down at his chest. “Yes. I’ve the oddest fondness for black lace underthings now.”
“You went a few years without.”
She looked away. “I didn’t have the credits to spend on them.”
“The least I could do was offer you basic dignity.”
He had given her dignity. Her worst memory was the shame she felt when he found her at Plonk’s flat. The chem merchant had tricked her into kinky sex in exchange for drugs, and refused to let her leave after because she didn’t fuck him ‘good enough.’ He wanted his money’s worth. If James hadn’t found me, I could still be leashed to that bastard’s bed.
Angel Descended (The Awakened Book 6) Page 24
