Mindsurge (Mindspeak Book 3) (25 page)

“Thank you,” the man said. “My son… he fell… thank you.” The man didn’t look much older than Jack. A few years, maybe.
 

He led me to a set of chairs. As he did, I quickly tried to diagnose the boy, unbeknownst to the worried father. I first looked inside his skull for any damage or internal bleeding. When I found none, I examined the wound from the inside out. It was a simple gash on the back of his head, but because of the location of the injury, it was bleeding heavily.

“Daddy, I’m dizzy,” the boy said.

“I know, champ. We’re gonna getcha fixed up as soon as we can.”

“What’s your name?” I asked the small boy. He looked to be no more than four or five years old.

“Henry,” he said softly.

This was more the level of injury for Jack to heal, but I was certain I could close the gash without feeling ill thanks to all the training Jonas and I had done. “The doctors here will get you fixed up, Henry.”

He looked up at me with big blue eyes, once again reminding me of Jack and how I needed to find Maya and Addison.

As we sat, I lifted my fingers to touch the cloth. “May I? I need to describe the wound for the doctors.” It wasn’t a complete lie.

The man was slow to answer, but then nodded.

I carefully pulled the cloth away and studied the cut from the outside this time. It was deep. Thankfully, the boy’s dad was on the opposite side from me and didn’t have the angle I did. I concentrated hard. Slowly, the separated pieces of skin moved closer until the wound closed and the bleeding stopped. I pushed the cloth back against the boy’s healed wound.

I was relieved to find that my head ached only slightly from the process. The side effects from using my abilities had definitely lessened recently. “Just keep pressure on it,” I instructed the father. “Let’s get the paperwork filled out quickly.”

“Are you a nurse? You’re so young.”

“No, but both of my parents are doctors, and I’ve seen lots of injuries in my lifetime.” That seemed to appease him.

I began asking him a series of questions—name of patient, name of parent or guardian, address, social security number. As he answered each question, I made mental note of the doors where patients were being admitted. After he’d answered the basic questions, I described the wound for the triage nurse. I knew the kid no longer needed to be seen, but I didn’t need to draw any more attention to myself. Hopefully, I’d be long gone before anyone discovered the “miracle.”

“That should do it,” I said. “I’ll just give this to the triage nurse.”

The man looked completely worn out. “Thank you,” he said.

After handing the clipboard over, I stood and made my way over to a door that appeared to lead back to the emergency exam rooms. Hospitals always had a way of making me feel like I was trespassing. That any minute someone would stop me and tell me, “Wait! You can’t go back there.” But when a doctor in navy scrubs and a nurse dressed in hot pink exited the exam room area, I slipped by them, doing my best to act as if I belonged.

Beyond the waiting room, doctors walked about and nurses typed away on computers at their stations. No one looked up or seemed to care that I was there. I peeked around curtains and through doors, looking for any sign of Maya.

As I neared the end of the hallway I heard a man yell, “There she is!”

I whipped around. The father of the young boy was standing by the door with a security guard. He was pointing, but not at me. I followed the line of his outstretched arm down the hallway—to Maya. She stood close to a wall at the far end, one hand gripping a metal railing.

Maya, can you hear me?

Her eyes popped wider, looking from the screaming man to me.

“I don’t know what she did. All I know is my son came in with a gash on his head, and now he doesn’t after that girl touched him.” The man had to realize how crazy he sounded.
 

Maya was still staring at me. She slowly backed away from the crazed man and the security guard who was trying to reason with him.

“What’s going on here?” the nurse dressed in hot pink scrubs asked. “Mister, you need to calm down. We can’t have you yelling back here.”

The little boy, whom I hadn’t noticed until now, was walking toward me. His head was cocked, studying me. He turned and looked past his father to Maya. Then back at me. “Daddy,” he said softly.

“Just a minute, champ.” Rationality seeped back into the father’s voice.

“Daddy,” he said louder. “There’s another one. That’s the girl who—”

I bolted around the corner and out of sight. I hoped I hadn’t scarred the little boy, but I wasn’t sticking around to be questioned about who Maya and I were.

The emergency room was laid out in a big square. I followed the walls around until I came to the corner where Maya had stood. As I inched closer and peered around, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

I turned and no one was there. However, I felt the familiar presence.
Show yourself, Addison,
I ordered.

Don’t be mad at me.
 

Mad at you? You’ve been helping Sandra. And you got Maya in and out of the school. She almost drowned me. Mad doesn’t begin to—

She wouldn’t have killed you.

Is that supposed to make me feel better? You betrayed Jack, the one person who would have died for you—who fought for you when you were in a coma. What about Jonas? Because of you, he’s back in Sandra’s evil web.

Sandra has my mother.
She sounded so small inside my head, her voice full of regret.

Anita. We hadn’t been able to find her when the lab began to blow up. Addison thought Anita would get out in time, but she hadn’t.
Have you heard from your mother?

She’s at Palmyra. Dr. Whitmeyer and Dr. DeWeese told me that if I led either you or Jack to them, they would let my mom come home.
 

Addison made herself visible. Because she was so intelligent, it was easy to forget how young she was when she was only a voice inside my head. But as she stood before me now, I could see the slumped shoulders of a small child, her face tilted toward the ground. When she looked up, her eyes filled with moisture. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you or Jack. Or anyone. But I had to save my mom.”

“I’ll give you a chance to make it up to us. Right now, we need to prevent Maya from being questioned by this man and hospital security.”

Addison leaned around me.
 

The father and the security guard were trying to talk to Maya. “I’ve never seen this man in my life,” she said. “I was back here getting my neck stitched up.” She leaned forward to show them the large white bandage on the back of her neck.

I aimed my mindspeak at the father.
Tell the security guard that you’re sorry and that you’ve made a mistake.

“You know what? I’m sorry. I was so distraught when I brought my son in, I must have made a mistake.”

“Okay,” the security guard said with a southern drawl, his face a mask of confusion, but most likely relieved to have the crazy man walk away. “Do you need help back out to the waiting room?”

Tell him no. You’ll be fine.

“No, we’ll be fine.” The man turned and put his arm around his son’s shoulders. They exited toward the waiting room.

I had healed the boy, and kept him from a painful procedure of staples or stitches. And it had felt good. With everything that had happened since I’d discovered what I was, I had never really stopped to consider just what it would mean to use my power for good, even if only in small ways. Jonas and Jack had tried to get me to see a different point of view, but I didn’t want to listen. It had always felt too overwhelming, knowing I couldn’t heal everybody or every illness in the world.

Maya was walking slowly toward me.
Nice work, sis.

Don’t call me sis. You and I are not family.
I reached around and grabbed the back of her neck where the bandage covered her stitched-up wound. She flinched.
If you move or call attention to us, I will shift your tracker such that Sandra will know that I have control of you, and she’ll be sure to terminate you.

Maya’s eyes widened as she nodded, grimacing in pain.

What did you do to Jack?

Her head shook vehemently.
Nothing. I don’t know. Sandra was in complete control of me.

I squeezed harder.
You’re lying. What did you do?

Addison grabbed my arm, but I kept my grip on Maya.

“Lex, she’s telling the truth. She doesn’t know what she did, only that she was being controlled by an outside force. She begged Jack and Georgia to remove the tracker. When they got so sick, and the presence controlling her left, she bolted.”

Maya’s breathing was shallow. She pleaded with her eyes for me to let her go.

With a frustrated sigh, I released her.

She backed away and leaned against the wall, placing a gentle hand on the back of her neck. “I hate you, you know,” Maya said. “But I think it’s because I’ve been taught to hate you.”

“The trackers are so powerful.” Addison touched my hand. “You and I have some power against them, and some power to resist others invading our minds, but to someone whose DNA wasn’t altered like ours…” She glanced toward Maya, who was an exact clone of Sandra, but whose DNA remained pure. “To them, a tracker is like a prison sentence. With that tracker at the base of her skull, Maya has no hope of ever being who she wants to be. Only who Sandra commands her to be.”

I thought of Jonas. Not that long ago, Ty had gotten inside his head, and at Sandra’s direction—through his tracker—he had convinced Jonas that he was in love with me one minute and wanted to kill me the next. The lines between what was true and what was a lie had blurred for Jonas. “So you think Sandra forced Maya to do something to Jack and Georgia?”

Addison shook her head. “Maybe. But she always programs someone else to do the dirty work. Wasn’t Ty manipulated to come after you through Jonas?”

Attracted to me or not, Jonas had nearly killed me at Ty’s direction. Jonas eventually fought Ty off, which led to Sandra discovering that Jonas’s natural mental powers were stronger than Ty’s tracker. So she killed Ty.
 

I let that sink in as a pregnant nurse approached us from the right. “Are you girls okay?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered. “We were just leaving.” I wrapped my fingers around Maya’s forearm and pulled her with me toward the exit. Maya may have been a victim, but that didn’t make me suddenly trust her.

You’re hurting me.
She sucked in a harsh breath through clenched teeth.

But I didn’t let her go until we exited the hospital. As soon as I did, she whipped around and came at me like she might challenge me to a catfight. I stood taller.
I dare you to hit me right now.

“What makes you so important?” she said. “What does Sandra want from you?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. And Maya didn’t deserve an answer even if I had one. When I stepped toward her again, she recoiled. Good. I needed her to fear me, even if only a little. “Right now I’m important because I have power. Your evil DNA donor wants me. She wants me so badly that she’s threatening the people I love. And that pisses me off. I also have power because no matter how badly you want to hurt me, you can’t, or Sandra will kill you.”

After a few deep breaths, she backed away and eyed Addison. “What now?”

Addison twirled her long black hair around her forefinger. “That depends on Lexi.”

Maya’s eye twitched with an evil glint. “Why would
any
part of my future depend on Lexi? She doesn’t control me.”

I studied Addison. There was worry behind her cold gaze, a vulnerability that came with being too young to make decisions on her own, yet being forced to do so nonetheless.

“Sandra’s gone.” She let go of the lock of hair she’d been fingering and wiped her palms on her leggings. “She took Jonas, and they left today.”

“What do you mean, they left?” Panic settled into my heart. Addison was still capable of mentally tracking people’s physical locations—clones and non-clones. And she’d just confirmed that Sandra had officially taken Jonas into her faraway lair.

“I tracked them to a private plane at Bluegrass Airport. They’re gone.”

“They went to Palmyra,” Maya whispered. Her eyes seemed to focus on the sidewalk in front of her. “They left me here.”

It was weird watching Maya. Sometimes it was like looking in a mirror. In that moment, I wanted to feel sorry for her. But I didn’t. She’d tried to kill me. And now she’d done something to Jack.

She raised her head, and her cold eyes found mine. “Could you remove the tracker in my skull?”

I gawked at her. Removing her tracker could kill her. “Why would I do that? You’ve brought nothing but harm to us since you arrived.”

She nodded. “You’re right. You don’t owe me anything—”

“But she knows Palmyra inside and out,” Addison interrupted. “And she would no longer be a threat to you without the tracker.”

This was exactly what I wanted from Maya and Addison—my ticket into Palmyra undetected. “That might be true, but for all I know Maya would be leading me straight into a trap.”

“I’ll help you.” Maya’s voice sounded panicked. “You need me to figure out what’s wrong with Jack. I can do that.”

“Why would I ever trust you? What’s changed?”

“It’s not about trust. It’s about
need
. You need me. And I need you.”

I thought about that for a minute. “That may be. I’ll consider it. But first, the two of you will need to find a place to stay while I make plans. You’re not welcome at Wellington.” I couldn’t possibly trust them where I sleep. “And if you sneak in using your mind tricks, the deal is off.”

“What about my tracker?” Maya asked.

“I won’t make promises. But I’ll see if I can figure out how to safely remove it.”

“You think they’ll sell the atoll to me?” I asked Coach as I kicked into the punching mitts strapped to Jack’s hands. A roundhouse left him stumbling backward a little, and I eyed him funny. I hadn’t kicked that hard.