Born to Darkness (15 page)

Holy,
holy
crap.

Whatever that was that Elliot had just experienced, one thing was crystal clear.

Stephen Diaz was gay.

“And if I don’t want to stay here,” Anna Taylor was saying, “you’ll … use your powers to muck around inside my head and make me
think
that I do.”

Bach agreed completely with Elliot, who’d left the room very quietly, with the faintest click from the door closing behind him.

This
was
awkward.

And although there were a number of ways he could’ve responded to what Anna had just said, he went with the truth.

“In order to control your thoughts,” he told her, “to that degree, I’d have to take up permanent residence inside of you. Your head.”

She was silent, just gazing at him, so he cleared his throat and continued.

“I do the best I can,” he said quietly. “That’s all I can ever hope to do. And I did what I did tonight because it was imperative that you leave the area immediately. The police were on their way to your apartment with a warrant for your arrest in connection to Nika’s disappearance.”

She reacted to that, leaning forward in her chair, her brown eyes blazing. “But that’s absurd! I’m the one who filed the missing persons report. Even if they had reason to believe I’d harm Nika—which they don’t!—do they honestly think I’d cover my tracks by spending five hundred dollars that I don’t even
have
?”

“It doesn’t matter what they think,” Bach told her evenly. “What matters is that they would have taken you into custody. And once you were in the system? The people who took Nika would have had access to you, but I would not have. I couldn’t let that happen.” He sat forward, too. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but if you leave here, you
will
be picked up by the police. It doesn’t matter why, it doesn’t matter if you can answer all of their questions and even provide a legitimate alibi. I’m sure that you can. But as they’re checking that alibi, you’ll be put in a holding cell with people who have already been given the order to kill you. You need to believe me, Anna, when I tell you that the people who run the Organization have a
very
long reach.”

He was scaring her. But he knew that she still didn’t believe him. Not completely. “I thought the police were understaffed. Why would they spend any time at all on this one missing little girl?”

“Because they’ve also been given an order,” Bach told Anna. “The Organization has connections everywhere.”

“Even here?” she asked. “At the Obermeyer Institute?”

“No,” Bach said. “Not here. Everyone who enters the compound gets screened.”

“Screened,” she repeated. “By you and the other Seventy-twos?”

“There are no other Seventy-twos at OI,” he told her. “We’ve got two Fifties. A fair number of Forties. Forty is considered very high. But even the Fifties can’t screen to the level that I can.”

“So you
are
like the prince,” she said. “Or maybe I should say
king
. King of the Thought Police. Nika must be very important to the Institute, to get you involved. Can I assume that I’ve been cleared? Since I’ve already been
screened
?”

“Yes,” he said.

“That makes it sound so much better than calling it, say, mental invasion or privacy annihilation.”

“Most people who come here, do so willingly,” he said a tad more sharply than he would have liked. “They welcome the protection.”

And there they sat, staring at each other across the conference table.

“I’m not any kind of king,” Bach added. “I’m far from perfect. But like I said, I do my best.” He stood up. “Why don’t I show you to your quarters? The facilities here are very comfortable. Maybe seeing your apartment will help you decide to stay.”

“I’ve decided,” she said, looking up at him. “To stay.”

The rush of relief made it hard to speak, so Bach nodded. And finally managed a “Good.”

“Since I don’t care
where
I stay,” Anna told him as she, too, got to her feet, “and I
do
care about finding my sister, maybe you could show me the part of the compound where your analysts are tracking Nika’s cell phone GPS and searching through those satellite images of her route home from school.”

Bach nodded again. That he could do.

Elliot was still flustered and freaked out. And aroused.

Mac could feel it—it was still radiating off of him in waves as they headed for the OI lounge, leaving the more sterile-feeling Med Center’s wing and going into the far more lavish and old-fashioned part of the brownstone building known as Old Main.

The doctor had absolutely no ability to block his emotions. And, as an occasional fifteen-percenter or maybe just as a highly intelligent gay man, he also had a naturally heightened empathy. And yes, okay, Mac was guilty of stereotypical thinking, but in Elliot’s case, it was true. He
was
more empathic than most people,
and
he was indisputably, openly gay—which was one of the main reasons he and Mac had become such close friends. As a gay man, he was unaffected by her ability to cast a sexual spell. Because of that, Mac knew his friendship with her was real.

She also loved Elliot because the man was incapable of bullshit. What made it even better was that he had no clue that he was so transparent to most of the Greater-Thans—which made his obvious choice to never even
try
to sling any BS doubly refreshing.

And that also made the
nothing
he’d said to her outside the exam room extra odd.

What was he hiding?

If it had been anyone besides Diaz in the hallway with them, Mac would’ve guessed that El had recovered sufficiently from his damaged-by-an-asshole broken heart to finally engage in a little unauthorized something-something—and more power to him.

But it
was
Diaz, which meant there was absolutely nothing going on. At least on Diaz’s end. He was totally blocked when it came to his sexuality.

Elliot opened the lounge door and held it for Mac to go in first.

The dark-paneled room had been a gentlemen’s club in the building’s precollege days. At this time of night, it was deserted. Most of the staff were asleep, and the Potentials were still in lockdown. But the lounge remained open. Always. The private bar at OI was on Vegas-time, open 24/7. There was never a last call.

Mac slid into her favorite booth, way in the corner, and Elliot sat across from her. “So when did
you
start crushing on D?” she asked her friend.

Elliot rolled his eyes, but he didn’t deny it. “Is there anyone at OI who
doesn’t
have a crush on Stephen Diaz?”

“You mean, besides me?” she asked, and he gave her a very pointedly raised eyebrow. “Hey. I got over my thing for him years ago.”

“I have the occasional—okay, more like frequent—hot dream,” Elliot told her with his trademark honesty. “It’s triggered, apparently, by walking past him in the hallway. And if you repeat that to anyone, I’ll deny it. The last thing I want to do is make him uncomfortable.”

He shut up fast as the nightshift bartender and cook—a tall, flaxen-haired woman named Louise—brought them their usual. She didn’t even bother to take their order, she just delivered a glass of wine for Mac—she never drank anything harder than that while in the compound—and a coffee for Elliot.

“Thanks,” Mac said and Elliot nodded, too, watching Louise meander back to the bar, obviously waiting until she was well out of earshot.

And here it came.

“Okay, we’re here,” he said. “In the lounge. Spill, Mackenzie. What the hell’s going on?”

Back in the med-wing, Elliot had scanned her, giving her a longer-than-normal full, and while she was up on the table in her underwear, he’d started frowning at the test results. Apparently her integration was up a little—she was at fifty-two, instead of her usual forty-nine-point-five.

“
Which
ankle did you injure …?” he’d asked.

“The left,” Mac had told him. “But I don’t think I hurt it that badly. It healed pretty quickly.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Elliot had said and brought over a handheld wand called a DEET that he waved across the foot in question, looking for a more detailed analysis.

“I’m fine now,” she’d insisted as he again frowned at the computer screen. “I’m walking on it. No pain.”

And that was when he’d dropped the bomb. “It’s registering as a fully healed break,” he told her. “You broke it. In more than one place. And there was damage to ligaments, too, plus a slight tear in your plantar fascia … All healed with readings of scar tissue that I’d expect to see from an injury that’s at least a year old. At
least
.”

Mac had stared at him. “Seriously?”

“Yup,” he’d said. “And FYI, if you’d come in with this severe a break, I would have scheduled you for surgery. How the
hell
did you do this?”

“I was coming down a flight of stairs,” she’d told him, “and I fell—”

“No,” Elliot had said. “Hello. I know how you
did
it. It was one of the few things you actually included in your report, but we’ll get into everything you left out later. What I want to know now is how you
healed
it. Talk about
quickly
 … What I’m seeing is …” He was as serious as she’d ever seen him as he looked up from the computer. “It’s impossible.”

“Apparently not,” Mac had said. And then she’d told him that she had a theory, but that she wanted to go to the lounge to talk about it.

To her surprise, he’d actually agreed—which probably had more to do with whatever had happened out in the hall with Diaz than any desire to appease Mac.

Still, she was glad, because this wasn’t a conversation that she wanted to have sitting in her underpants on a table, with him in the role of her primary care physician. This was a conversation that she wanted to have with her friend, El.

But now here they were, and Elliot was giving her his full attention, waiting for her theory as to how and why she could heal a seriously broken ankle in a matter of hours.

Mac took a fortifying sip of wine. And then she just said it. “I’ve found that I heal significantly faster when I have sex.”

Elliot laughed. Just a little. Then he leaned forward slightly and asked, “Really?”

Mac nodded.

He took a deep breath and exhaled hard, and then admitted, “I have so many questions and comments running through my head right now, I’m not sure where to start.” He rubbed his chin as he stared first into his coffee, and then at the table, and then at the wall before looking back at her. “Okay, I give up. I’m not going to try to organize. This is just going to be random reaction. Nothing I say is in order of importance, so I’m just going to start with
How long have you known about this?
Followed by,
I thought we were friends. How could you not tell me?
Followed by,
So who, exactly, are you sleeping with?
And please don’t say
random strangers
.”

“I’ve known for years, and I should have told you a long time ago,” she admitted. “I’m sorry about that. But it was hard to separate the friend from the researcher, and I didn’t want a report drawn up on the subject.”

“Well,” he said, sitting back in his seat. “Thanks
so
much for your faith in me.”

“I
do
have faith in you,” she said. “This job is your entire life, El.”

“And isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black!”

“You know damn well that you’re going to have to write up a
report,” she shot back. “What happened with my ankle is … It’s too big. You’re honestly going to withhold
that
from Bach?”

“
You’ve
been withholding it from Bach,” he countered.

“Actually, I haven’t,” Mac said, “because, before tonight, the boost I’ve gotten in self-healing hasn’t been all that drastic—which is where we get into the answer to your last question. Who am I sleeping with.” She took another sip of wine. “Up until tonight, I’ve had, well, a boyfriend. Justin. You don’t know him. We had an apartment in the Back Bay. We were together for … a couple of years.”

“Years?” Elliot repeated with heavy disbelief.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she said again. “It was easier if you didn’t know. I didn’t want you to have to lie to Bach.” As if he actually could’ve …

He knew what she was thinking. “You suck. You were with this Justin guy for all that time …” But then he realized that they were talking about Justin in the past tense. “Up until tonight, you said. What happened tonight?”

“He dumped me,” Mac admitted. “He just moved out. I got there and he was gone. It was kind of a shock, if you want to know the truth.”

Elliot exhaled hard and reached across the table to take her hand. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “You still suck, but … I
am
sorry.”

“It’s really not as bad as it sounds,” she said. “Or … maybe it’s worse, because I … I didn’t really love him, El. At least not enough. I’m sure, on some level, he knew that, and …”

“Still, to do it that way?” Elliot said. “With no warning? That’s pretty shitty.” He sighed. “I just wish you’d told me. I mean, here you had this whole secret life outside of OI, and … I honestly had no clue.”