Hidden (Hidden Series Book One) (14 page)

He leaned back in his chair and sighed. I
slipped my shaking hands under my thighs to hide them.

“You remember when we were talking about
them before and stopped?” he asked. I nodded fast, near cardiac
arrest. “It’s because some hunters are terrible. I didn’t want to
scare you. This hunter that the wolf described seemed like the
worst it can get. He said he was into breeding these things called
copies
. Women hunters can pass their psychic powers to their
babies if they use their powers when they’re pregnant.”

I grabbed two handfuls of thigh, pinching my
skin so that I wouldn’t fly up from the chair.

“How?” I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t really
know how to explain it. It’s not like our powers. Not passed
through blood, generations of magic. It’s like the powers they
have, the psychic stuff, affects the kid. Like drinking and smoking
and drugs. The baby comes out weird.”

“What do you mean, it comes out weird?” I
whispered.

“Like craving hunter things. They don’t act
like normal kids. They want what they were made to want. They want
to kill. The wolf said they act exactly like the hunter moms in
every way. How they talk, walk. Like an imprint. Not its own
person.”

He pretended to gag up his food while I
thought of my mother – who so obviously passed me her powers –
hunting creatures with a big, round belly.

My mind floated back to the say-no-to-drugs
assembly we were mandated to attend a few years ago. The nuns
showed us horrible pictures of babies affected by drugs and alcohol
in an attempt to scare us away from ever forming the habit.

I looked down at my arms, then my legs,
suddenly feeling like I belonged in an incubator.

“But they’re human?” I asked.

“Technically, yes, but they’re not what we
think of as human. Ones with families. Innocent and powerless. They
are born evil because they can only act like the mother. Do the
math, a vicious hunter makes an imprint of herself. What does she
get? Another vicious hunter, without waiting years to train it.
After humans won the war, they would send copies out to patrol the
streets to find us. They were useful, I guess, until the treaty
forced hunters to stop slaughtering us. Now it’s just a few of them
left, I hear. They live alone in little cells when they’re not out
doing something awful. They don’t talk much. They don’t enjoy
things. Well, maybe killing our kind since that’s what they’re made
for. Besides that, they have no personalities because the mothers
didn’t give them one. I heard the powers … like … wipe their brains
clean and they can only pick up what they experience in – what’s it
called – utero?”

I nodded. “Utero, yeah,” I mumbled.

“Utero is a weird word,” he said, chuckling
as I strained myself against the chair. I was close to falling out
of it.

I wasn’t depressed. I was a copy, bred to
hunt and kill magical kind. Not to smile and laugh and be normal. I
was never meant to do those things. My heart fluttered, and he
rubbed my shoulder, like he could hear every nervous beat. “So
hunters do this. Not agents?” I asked, just to fill the
silence.

“Agents follow the rules. Most hunters too.
It’s just the awful ones who don’t care that it’s a major offense
to make a copy. Very illegal. Violates the treaty on their
part.”

My skin crawled, so vivid and real I
expected to see it moving. I started to feel
wrong
in my
chair, like I shouldn’t be here, like my birth was a terrible
mistake. An illegal one.

“So what would Lydia Shaw think of a copy?”
I asked.

“Probably what everyone thinks. They’re too
dangerous to exist. The wolf said they kill without thinking, in
the most vicious and savage ways. I’m talking … breaking your neck
with a look or burning your house down with a thought. And they’re
faster than hunters, meaner too. But don’t worry, we’re targets for
hunters who need to make money, and they don’t ever have copies.
They’re afraid of them too. Odds are, you’ll never meet one of
those dangerous, psychic monsters.”

I
was
a dangerous, psychic monster.
An awful thing that shouldn’t exist, like I’d always thought I was.
Just without having magic. I didn’t
suspect
that I was a
copy. It felt like complete and utter truth, a suffocating reality
that hovered around me for the hour I sat with Nathan on the
patio.

I reached my arm around him on the second
floor to say goodnight, ready to fall apart alone in my room.

“Oh,” he said, like he wasn’t expecting the
hug. “Okay … goodnight.”

I heard the disappointment in his voice. For
some reason, his mind was closed off to my creepy, inborn psychic
abilities, but I knew him well now. He wasn’t ready to go to
bed.

“You want to come hang out for a while?” I
asked, regretting it immediately. I didn’t think I could hold it
together much longer.

Then he smiled, and I knew I’d endure
however many hours of gripping tension in my chest to see his face
this way. Eager to be with me, even if only as friends.

I let him control the remote, and he
thankfully bypassed the news and settled on cartoons.

I nestled in my corner of the sofa and
braced a pillow against my chest. For endless minutes, it was the
only thing holding me together. Pressing the meltdown further
inside of me would only make things worse for later, but I had to
do this for him. And every time he laughed at the talking dog, the
hurt from the night subsided a little.

I fixed my eyes on the red dot next to the
power button on the TV. I’d always had a habit of staring like the
hunters. Just like my hunter parents who bred me. Whitney was so
gracious to bring it to my attention when we were thirteen.

She was screaming at me in our room after a
disastrous dinner in the cafeteria. Sienna had managed to find a
new low – she’d stolen the orange from my tray. This time, she
wasn’t trying to cause a scene, just a little chuckle before
leaving the cafeteria, but the moment her hand touched the only
thing in the world that could make me feel something, I screamed to
the top of my lungs.

Sienna threw the orange at my feet, laughing
so hard she cried, and I scrambled after it like a puppy. So I’d
been listening to how much I’d embarrassed Whitney and had ruined
her life yet again for forty-five minutes while discretely sniffing
the ends of my fingers, letting that scent pull me away and touch
something in the middle of my dead heart, something calm and, in a
way, too painful to explore.

“Stop that!” she’d said.

“Stop what?”

“
That
. What are you staring at? Your
fingers? The floor? You always do that. I risk so much being around
you. The least you could do is look at me when I’m talking. Take
your eyes off of nothing for one damn minute!”

Then she started up again, going on and on
about how I’d ruined any chance of her being in Sienna’s group as
the citrus scent dulled from my finger tips.

I never congratulated Whitney for getting
what she wanted, and I never figured out why oranges made me feel
like I’d found something I’d lost a long time ago.

“Did you hear me, Chris?” Nate asked. It
didn’t sound like it was the first thing he’d said. And the volume
was muted. When did that happen?

“Huh?”

“I asked if you wanted me to leave. I
should’ve let you deal with whatever was upsetting you instead of
trying to distract you all night. I’m sorry. I’m just new at
this.”

I uncurled myself out of the ball I was in
and grabbed his hand. “No. Thanks for cleaning and cooking for me.
You’re amazing. Best friend ever.”

That’s when the fact that a human and a
shifter couldn’t be friends by law crushed me. He looked down at
our hands and lifted one corner of his mouth. That’s when I
realized I couldn’t let go.

“I’m trying,” he said. “Probably a little
too hard.” I shook my head, smiling at him. It faded suddenly as
the heartache flared again. “If that pillow isn’t working, I have
two arms over here.”

He held them open, and I just stared at him,
in complete shock. He wanted to hold me, and I’d never been held.
Not like that, not more than a hug. “You wouldn’t mind?” I asked.
He pulled me with no effort at all and cradled me in his lap. I
wrapped my arms around him, sinking deeper into his chest, getting
lost in the airy smell of his skin.

“Is it about the cleansing I walked in on?”
he asked. I nodded in the groove of his neck. “I’m sorry it upset
you so much.” He tightened his arms around me, rocking us
slightly.

I wished the cleansing had a chance of
working for me. I’d always thought magical kind were the worst
things out there, and I’d hated myself for being one, but in the
same hour I’d found no magic in my blood, I learned that I was
something worse, something bred.

Every flash out I’d ever had made sense now.
And I had the audacity to lie in the arms of someone my parents
would’ve wanted me to cage and probably kill for maybe no other
reason than being what he was. But I still couldn’t let go.

I squeezed him tighter every time I thought
of a time I’d wanted to kill, how I knew I could do it even though
I’d never gone through with it, and how hurting people felt as
natural as blinking. My parents gave me more than fifty-two million
dollars. They were awful and had made me that way too.

That was why they’d hidden me at a human
school. They were human.
I
was human, the worst kind of
human.

“You probably don’t need to cleanse. I
wouldn’t be able to be this close to you if you were evil,” Nathan
said. “I’d smell it on you.”

I leaned back to see his face. “What?”

“When I need to be cautious of people, they
smell weird to me. It’s a dog thing. Or maybe a shifter thing,” he
said. “It makes me an excellent judge of character.” I felt my
eyebrows draw together and my face scrunch. “Seriously! Okay,
Sophia, you think she’s sweet, right?” I nodded. “You’d be right.
She smells sweet. Like pure sugar. Paul too, just under a layer of
smoke.” He laughed and I giggled, like a real, girly giggle. How
human teenager of me. “Emma smells like them, just faintly,
powdery. And Remi smells like she acts. Sour. Like milk before it’s
rancid.”

“Gross.”

“You’re telling me. I have to smell that for
three hours a day! She needs to change her attitude or something,
or I’m going to start walking around with air freshener.”

I laughed and leaned back into him. He’d
done it again, managed to make me forget about my awful life.

“And me?” I asked.

He pulled my left arm from his side. He held
my wrist to his nose and inhaled. “Sweet, but not like the rest of
them.” I rolled my eyes. Of course I didn’t smell like them. “Not
just like sugar. You smell more specific than that. Like cake
batter. And …” He paused, taking another whiff. I tried and failed
to suppress a shudder. “Spice. Like something spicy was dumped in
the batter.”

“That sounds disgusting,” I said.

“The opposite, actually. Best thing I’ve
ever smelled.” I knew I’d imagined the coarseness in his voice. It
didn’t matter if it was real or fake. It stunned me either way.
“That’s why I wanted to be your friend. You smell better than
everyone here. And the belly rub … obviously.” He laughed, but I
couldn’t. I was somewhere between wanting to scream about being a
copy and wanting my first friend to give me my first kiss.

Nathan grabbed my shoulders and pulled me
away from his chest.

“Do you feel better?” he asked. I nodded,
not entirely truth or lie. He smiled, a heart shattering smile, and
pressed his lips lightly, friendly, against my cheek.

Three different cartoons came and went as I
lay in the arms of my friend who’d kissed me. I didn’t want him to
fear me, so I didn’t mention the blood test. I didn’t even know how
to start that conversation.

I will hate the time 10:45 for the rest of
my life – when he saw me dozing off on his chest and said
goodnight.

I stood at the door after locking it,
wishing it were depression that was about to crush me. I’d been
naïve to think it would be that simple. Like the problem I’d had my
entire life could be explained by a survey.

I closed my eyes and saw myself in the
playroom in my dorm. I must have been around four. Sister
Constantine, a tall and stocky woman, had just brushed my hair into
pigtails and switched my shoes to the correct foot.

“Leah, are you going to be friendly today
like I asked?” I nodded, lying at an early age. She pointed to
Sienna, Esther at the time. She was jumping around a circle of
girls, about to choose her goose. “Just do that. Just do
something
other than sit in the corner today.”

I didn’t. As soon as she’d walked way, I
bypassed the game and colored in a quiet corner until playtime was
over. And I did that every day, drawing in silence, only moving
when Whitney would annoy me enough that I’d get up and push her on
the swing or be the body on the other side of a checker board. I’d
thought I was just quiet until the savage side of me emerged.

It wasn’t magic. It was something that
seemed far worse.

“Oh my God,” I whispered, crawling in bed. I
let the pain crush me, grind me into nothing against the sheets. I
felt powerless against it. Like it didn’t matter how hard I tried,
how many positive things I’d say to myself. Nothing would work.
Nothing would change me.

When my phone beeped in the sitting room, I
wanted to ignore it, but since there was a chance it could be my
friend, I slunk out of bed to get it.

It was. I opened his message, tears still
pouring from my eyes. His face popped up on the screen, eyes
crossed with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. I laughed at his
silly face, wishing he were here in person.