Born to Darkness (37 page)

He was embarrassed though—it was radiating off of him—and he quickly made his excuses and left them there at the nurses’ station, to await the chopper.

It was only after the elevator closed behind the man that Shane finally spoke. “That was pretty intense.”

“That’s the way it works,” Mac told him. “And with a little distance, in just a few hours, he won’t remember why he was so
attracted. He’ll forget what he was feeling, completely. And he’ll be like,
wow, that was weird. Good thing she didn’t say
yes.”

“I didn’t forget,” Shane pointed out as her cell phone buzzed with a text from Elliot.
Chopper ETA: ten minutes
.

Although when she checked—yeah. Elliot had sent that message ten minutes ago. And there, through the windows, was the approaching OI helicopter, its thrumming sound growing louder and louder. She unlocked the brakes on the hospital bed as she looked across the old man and into Shane’s eyes.

“That’s because I slept with you,” Mac told him.

“Yeah, I remember that, too,” he said with that smile that could melt her insides—if she let him. “Very clearly.”

“Maybe what we need to do,” she told him, “is ask Dr. Bach to go into your head, and block those memories.”

Shane was taken aback. “He can do that?” he asked, then added, “What if I don’t want him to?”

Mac didn’t answer. She just pushed the button that opened the doors. And even if she’d answered with the
tough shit
that she was thinking, Shane wouldn’t have heard her over the noise and the wind from the chopper’s blades as they rushed to get Edward O’Keefe safely to Obermeyer Institute.

Nika had just finished the O she was painting on the window in catsup, when she heard the sound of the door being unlocked.

She quickly pulled the curtains closed and licked her finger clean, even as she braced to defend herself from whomever might be coming in.

It was a woman, and at first glance, she looked so much like Anna, Nika’s heart soared. But it wasn’t her sister. Whoever this woman was, she was much heavier than Anna. Her face was rounder, fuller. But then Nika saw that she wasn’t quite a woman—she was still a girl. A teenager. And she wasn’t fat, she was pregnant. And even though her skin, like Anna’s and Nika’s, was mocha-colored and her hair was dark and curly, her eyes were a brilliant shade of green instead of brown.

They were also hard and cold, and with her tightly pinched mouth, she looked dangerous, despite her swollen body and her drab-colored, loose-fitting dress.

She stopped about ten feet away from Nika and said, “This is your safe room. Learn to use it to recover, replenish, recuperate, and you’ll survive. Waste your time in here on things you cannot control, and you will not.”

“Where am I?” Nika asked.

The girl shook her head, her mouth tight again. “Listen to what I’m saying. I’ve been where you are—I’m trying to help you, girl.”

“Then
help
me,” Nika pleaded. “I need to get out of here—”

“There’s no way out.”

“There must be,” Nika argued. “If you’ve been where I am, and you’re walking around now, free …”

The girl laughed, but the sound was harsh. “I’m not free.”

“But you can open the door,” Nika pointed out. “Let’s get out of here. If we go, together, maybe—”

“What?” the girl was disdainful now. “You think you can save
me
?”

“I think we should try!”

“Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”

“At least call my sister, tell her where I am—”

“So she can be taken, too? Of course, if she’s not like you, they’ll kill her. They’ll bleed her, use her, work her until she’s dead, like Zooey and the others. They don’t get a safe room like this, you know. Only the special girls do. But if you stop being special—and you will, if you don’t keep your strength up—you won’t come back here. And then they’ll just use you up.”

“Use me for what?” Nika asked, trying not to cry. “I don’t understand—”

“Try,” the girl said, her arms now wrapped protectively around her belly. “To understand this: That
all
you need to know is that when you are in this room, you must eat and you must sleep. You must focus on your health.” She pointed to the bed. “Lie down.”

Nika lifted her chin defiantly as she refused to move from in front of the closed curtains that blocked the window where she’d
written two-thirds of that SOS. Still, her voice came out with a definite wobble. “I’m not tired.”

“Do you honestly think they’re not watching and listening, that they don’t know what you were doing in here? Lie
down
on the bed, girl, so I can clean off the window, and if you’re lucky, they won’t send a sedative through your system, because you
can’t
recharge the way you need to if you’re drugged.”

But Nika shook her head.

And the girl’s voice got tighter. “Your time in here is running out. They need you back in the line within eight hours, so you eat the food they bring you, and you soak in the tub, and you stretch and exercise your muscles—and you sleep as much as you possibly can and—There, did you hear that?”

Nika had heard something, a hissing sound from the contraption in her left arm and she looked at it as the pregnant girl continued, “You don’t want to sleep? Too bad—they’ll make you sleep, only it won’t help you the way that it could. You best get on that bed, child, before you fall on your face.”

But it was too late. The world blurred and the girl’s voice faded and the lights dimmed and Nika felt her legs give out beneath her as she crumpled to the floor.

The last thing that she saw before the world went black was the pregnant girl looking down at her, one hand pressed against her belly as she grimly shook her head and said, as if from a great distance away, “You think you’re special, but you’re not. Not really. There are always more girls. That’s one thing this goddamned world will
never
run out of.”

“This is frigging nuts,” Mac said, breaking the silence that had fallen over Dr. Bach’s office, after Dr. Zerkowski—Elliot—had given his report.

Shane was sitting there, trying to absorb all he’d just learned, and even though he wouldn’t have phrased it as bluntly in a roomful of people he didn’t know all that well, it
was
mind-blowing.

Apparently,
he
wasn’t responsible for Stephen Diaz’s sudden burst of new powers.

Apparently,
Elliot
was.

The two men were sitting side by side, and they both looked pretty damn at ease, considering that they’d just confessed not only to getting it on all morning long, but to the fact that they were in love. Of course, they’d couched it all in more scientific-sounding terms. Intimate physical contact and intense emotional connection.

Still, Shane couldn’t imagine being that nonchalant about the total surrender of
his
privacy.

And he was still freaked out by the very graphic illustration of Mac’s power, back at the hospital. He hadn’t really believed her capable of casting such a spell over a stranger until he saw it in action. And now he was reviewing everything he’d ever said to her, every conversation, every moment of contact—wondering if he’d come across as annoyingly single-minded as Dr. “Marry Me” had.

Shane also understood Mac’s reluctance to embrace Elliot’s going theory—which was that the hormones and proteins, created not just by sexual desire but also by intense emotional connection, could cause a marked increase in a Greater-Than’s integration.

If Mac accepted that,
and
it was also true that Shane was as responsible for Mac’s enhanced power as Elliot was for Diaz’s … 
That
meant Mac was into Shane for more than just his usefulness in bed.

Which made Shane pretty freaking happy—although how much of that happiness was the residue from the voodoo she’d hit him with repeatedly over the past few days, he had no clue.

Although to hell with
that
. Happy was happy and Shane hadn’t been anywhere close to happy, not like this, for far too long.

Mac, however, was decidedly
not
happy.

“I’m down with part of the theory,” she said now. “I’ve been using sex for years to accelerate my ability to heal,” she pointed out. “And I realize what I’m about to say is going to make you touchie-feelies recoil in horror, but most of the time, there was absolutely zero emotional connection.”

She purposely wouldn’t meet Shane’s eyes, even though he was steadily watching her. So he murmured, “Ouch,” which made her glance over.

Her eyes were intentionally unapologetic as she shrugged. “Sorry,” she said, sounding not at all sorry. “It was sex. It was intense, true, but—”

She was lying, and they both knew it. “We made plans,” Shane reminded her. “To meet again. Next week.”

“And if I was in town,” she told him, glancing around at the other men in the room, clearly uncomfortable with the personal nature of their conversation. “I might’ve shown up. Or I might not’ve.”

Her body language dismissed him, but he wasn’t ready to be dismissed. “You would’ve shown,” Shane told her. There were few things in life he was absolutely sure of, but that was one of them.

“If I did, it would’ve meant the opposite: that I
didn’t
give a shit about you. Get over yourself, Laughlin—”

“It’s entirely possible,” Elliot interjected, “that just like every talent or skill we’ve encountered with Greater-Thans, it varies according to each individual. Obviously, I haven’t run any tests with you and Shane, Mac, but I
can
tell you that Stephen’s been at sixty-one for the past several hours—including a thirty-minute stretch when I was in the ER with Edward O’Keefe and he was over in security. The computer’s been running a continuous jot scan on him—Stephen, I mean—and he didn’t dip, didn’t drop, not even a decimal point. Not after we had a conversation, um,” he cleared his throat as he glanced at Stephen, “in which we sorted a few things out. He’s been holding steady at sixty-one, despite the separation, without any additional intimate physical contact.”

“You might as well say
sex
,” Mac shot at him. “We all know you mean sex, so you should cut the bullshit.”

“This conversation isn’t easy for any of us,” Bach spoke up for the first time in a while. “I don’t think it’s asking too much to allow Elliot to use whatever terminology he prefers.”

“Fine,” Mac said, heavy on the attitude. “But just because Diaz jumped to sixty-one doesn’t mean that it’s
not
purely about the
intimate physical contact
. Maybe, for him, it’s enough to know he’s gettin’ some tonight. It’s been fifteen years, right? I’d be horny, too.”

“It’s not just about the sex,” Diaz said quietly.

Elliot glanced at him again, and the smile the two men exchanged echoed Diaz’s sentiment plenty.

Shane knew that Mac saw the exact same thing that he did, and she looked even less happy. In fact, the muscle in her jaw tensed as she clenched her teeth.

Elliot accessed the comm-station. “Mac, you’ve been bouncing between fifty and fifty-five ever since you got back to OI. Have you been—”

“You’ve been probing me?” she interrupted the doctor, her voice loaded with outrage.

“No,” Elliot countered evenly, “but we have been jot scanning you.”

“It’s called probing if it’s done without the subject’s knowledge or permission—”

“And you waived your permission the minute you disobeyed direct orders and left OI, with Shane Laughlin in tow. So quit wasting time with the indignant crap and answer the questions. Have you been in Shane’s company the entire time you’ve been back in the compound?”

“Yes,” Mac said, even as Shane answered, “No.”

She looked at him and he reminded her, “We both used the head—the bathroom. We were apart for that. You also had a conversation with Elliot about Mr. O’Keefe. In the ER.”

“I wasn’t
that
far away from you,” she pointed out. “Even in the bathroom.”

“Maybe, for
you
,” Shane said, since she seemed to like the theory that all Greater-Thans responded differently, uniquely, to intimacy, “it was enough of a separation.”

“Wait,” Elliot said, his eyes on the computer monitor as he stopped scrolling through data, “here’s a spike that brought you up to fifty-seven. It was about ten minutes after you came in on the helicopter with O’Keefe.”

“You grabbed my arm,” Shane remembered, “to keep me out of the ER.”

“You’re currently a high Fifty-five,” Elliot told Mac as he finally looked up. “Let’s see what happens when you touch him.”

Shane looked at Mac, who turned to look at him, and for a fraction of a second he saw sheer misery in her eyes. But it happened so fast and then it was gone—and she was holding out her hand to him.

He took it, and just as it always had done, heat surged between them—instant and powerful.

“Bang,” Elliot reported. He laughed. “Fifty-seven—just like that.”

Mac yanked her hand free, and when she spoke, her voice was tight. “Now don’t you want to see what happens if he feels me
up?” She was obviously angry—Shane didn’t need any empathic skills to know that. She turned to Bach. “I’m
not
having sex with him in a lab.”