Through the Static (13 page)

Chapter Fourteen

At first, there was only darkness. Fog and silence. They gave way slowly, hints breaking through. A whispered voice, soft and low and somewhere in the distance. A gentle, fluttering touch against his cheek. Warm fingertips.

Jinx could
feel
warm fingertips. And he could hear. The voice was in his ears and in his mind.

Aurelia was still in his mind.

His heart boomed, legs twitching with the impulse to rise against the weight of a lingering haze. He tried to wrench his eyes open, but the muscles in his face refused to yield. Still as stone, he struggled wildly inside himself to move. To respond. To push away the sluggishness tugging him back toward the darkness, the fatigue echoing deep inside his bones.

“It's time to wake up, Jinx. Can you hear me?” Aurelia faltered, her words and her hands both ceasing in their motion on his skin. And then there was just her voice in his head. The most beautiful voice in the world.
“Can you open your eyes for me?”

Light filtered in through the crack between his lids, revealing a blurry image of a face. A heart-shaped mouth and a shimmering fall of soft, red curls. Lips turned up into a ghost of a smile.

“There you are.”

Her mind was all relief, but it didn't hold a candle to the lifting of his heart. Aurelia was here. Beside him and in his thoughts.

“You didn't do it.” His throat was parched, his words cracking with the effort of speech. So slowly, her face came into crisper focus, and he could drown in it. In her presence and her touch and then in the gentle brushing of her lips against his.

Her eyes glittered, and she shook her head. “No. No, I didn't.”

She hadn't cut him loose. Maybe she wanted—

Movement elsewhere in the room distracted his focus, and her eyes pinched, her hand on his cheek holding his gaze on hers. They weren't alone. His body coiled; he had to protect what was his. She
needed
protection from…from… He frowned. Hazy waves of memory struggled to reassert themselves.

They weren't alone.

“Shh. It's fine. Everything's fine.”

Except it wasn't. She was hiding something from him.

Only…no. It wasn't just her. His whole neural system felt subdued, like he was thinking from underneath a blanket, his thoughts whispery and slow.

She stroked her thumb against his bottom lip and offered him a brittle smile. One he didn't quite understand. It was sad and happy, careful and frightened and cracking with the force of something she still wasn't saying.

“Do you remember?” she asked. “Before? When I was getting ready to sever you?”

He did. There'd been the pierce of a needle and a slow numb. An opening door and people. Faces.

One face.

There had been no pain.

His eyes widened, a panic rising from someplace far away and a memory he couldn't quite recall. She brushed soothing fingers over his skin, touching his cheek and mouth and the corners of his eyes. She intertwined the fingers of her free hand with his. “It's going to be all right. It's fine.” That shaky smile was back, the emotion in her eyes and in her voice too much for him.

He touched her hair, and she captured his hand, bringing it to her lips to kiss his fingertips before squeezing his fingers tight.

“You have to stay calm. I gave you a light neuro-circuitry suppressant before we brought you around. Everything else is out of your system, but I had to. Just in case…” As her voice trailed off, she cast a quick glance over her shoulder then back at him. “Just before you overloaded, you saw something. Something…
wonderful.
But it activated circuits in your mind. Ones that were never supposed to be stimulated again.”

The answer hung there, just beyond his reach. He had seen—he'd seen—

“Jinx,” she said, quieter now, throat choked. “You were never alone. You were never, ever alone.”

And with that, she moved aside, out of his vision but not out of his reach. He could still feel her hand in his, could still taste her mind.

But all he could
see
was that face.
That face.

Unclouded by static, real and there and so close he could touch. It was the face of a woman, a woman he knew and didn't know.

His eyes blurred and hot rivulets ran down his cheeks as he stared into a memory he couldn't access, into kind eyes that looked at him with a love like no other. One he couldn't have imagined, one that—

He had never been alone. Not even before.

“Jack,” the woman said. She was crying, too. “Jack, do you remember me?”

Yes. No.
“I don't know.”

Aurelia squeezed his hand, then let it go. He mourned her touch but there was too much in front of him to process. The eyes before him were so similar to his own, and he'd seen them so many times, staring at him through the static. In the back of his mind, deep within the recesses that had been laid to waste so many years ago, he felt the burn. Smelled the singe of wires smoldering. But it didn't overwhelm him this time. Not like it had before…

He remembered numbness and staring into these eyes. He remembered hitting the ground.

“I remember…” What? What did he remember?

“Jack.” She laid a hand over his, and the touch was nothing like Aurelia's. But it wasn't unfamiliar or unwelcome. It was a touch he knew. “Jack, I'm your mother.”

The floor fell out from underneath him, and in a rush of whooshing air and blackness, he plummeted through the scorched earth of a life he'd lost. A room full of comfort and that face, staring at him, lullabies and safety and a hand on his and he
knew
her. Of course he did.

Of
course
he did.

“Mom?”

“Oh, my dear, sweet boy.” She was on him, her arms flung around his neck, body racking with a sob. He remembered this. He remembered the way she smelled.

And the wreckage of his past fell into place, the timbers left among the ashes resurrecting themselves into the skeleton of a story. His story. He had been loved, and he had never been alone.

He hadn't sold himself into a life of violence.

He'd been taken.

Aurelia watched the truth bloom across Jinx's mind in a slow unfurling. The ghosts in the static took shape before her eyes, the weight of so much regret suddenly releasing. By the time he was done processing what Isabel had told him, he looked like a different man. A better man. A man who didn't hate himself.

In fits and starts, with her hand clasped around his, Isabel told him the same story she'd told Aurelia, but it sounded so different now, when spoken directly to the one she had lost.

She'd lost her
son
. So many times, when Isabel had proposed one ridiculous security measure after another, her eyes hard and her arms crossed, Aurelia had wondered what had happened to make her so distrusting. And now she knew.

“You were twenty-two,” Isabel said, staring at Jinx as if still in disbelief. “Working as a medic and on your way to becoming a doctor. You were so smart, always. And I was so proud of you.”

A shadow passed over Jinx's mind. Aurelia wanted to reach out and take his hand, but the intimacy of the moment between mother and son seemed wrong to interrupt. She glanced up at Isabel, hoping she would see the fear in Jinx's eyes.

Aurelia shouldn't have worried.

Isabel's mouth crumpled, and she rubbed the back of Jinx's palm with both her thumbs. “Aurelia told me about how you survived this. What they did to you, but how you stayed yourself. How you got yourself back in spite of everything they made you do. I'm still…I'm still so proud of you.”

A dam burst in Jinx's mind, and Aurelia's own chest felt like it would crack. The pure relief racing through his thoughts staggered her, buoyed her up and made it seem like everything was going to be all right.

“I didn't want to,” he choked out. “I never did. All the things I've done…”

“I know, baby. I know.” Isabel pulled him into an embrace, and while he'd seemed to be resisting, the minute her arms were around him, he melted into her, looking for all the world like a boy. A scared, hurt boy, there in the shell of the strongest man Aurelia had ever known.

Still speaking softly in tones of comfort, Isabel stroked his shoulders. “I never knew what happened to you, but I never stopped looking. And I never stopped loving you.”

That was hardly half of it. While Jinx had been knocked out, Isabel had told Aurelia everything, from the unplanned pregnancy, back when she'd still been in school, to Jinx's father's abandonment of them both. About raising a beloved boy alone, watching him grow into adulthood, and then one day coming home to find him gone.

Working with police who found only dead ends and who said her child had likely run away. Being told to wait for him to show up. To give up. But she never had.

As Isabel shared all of this with Jinx, Aurelia felt the same joy for him, but it was tempered by a selfish gnawing, too. Jinx had a life to go back to after all. Would he still need her?

He sat up straighter, twisting from where he was sitting, there on the edge of the bunk. Turning away from Isabel, he met Aurelia's gaze with one that told her everything she needed to know.

“Always.”

She crossed her arms in front of her, hands balled up into fists and her lips curling into a smile. Her hope was too much to hold.

Wanting to give Isabel and Jinx their privacy, she rose. As she did, her gaze caught on Stan's figure, still standing near the door. His arms, too, were crossed, but there was no smile on his face or in his eyes. He was jumpy. Uncomfortable. And completely uninvolved, even though this was precisely the sort of puzzle that would have riveted him just a couple days ago.

His gaze met hers for an instant before glanced away, hands moving to his pockets as he returned to his nervous pacing. It wasn't the first time he'd captured her attention since he and Isabel had arrived, but with Jinx laid out, neural system overloaded, Aurelia hadn't paid him much mind. Isabel's gaze had darted to him several times as they'd sat vigil over Jinx. Aurelia had raised an eyebrow in question, but each time, Isabel had shaken her head. Only once, she'd leaned forward, tone quiet to the point of conspiratorial as she'd whispered, “He's just not the same. But after what happened…”

Guilt churned hard in Aurelia's gut. God, here she was, acting suspicious of him after she'd left him for dead. Even after all they'd been through together, at the first sight of trouble, she'd abandoned him to save her own hide. But he'd looked…dead. He'd looked dead. How on earth was he still alive? And how had he escaped those men?

With light steps, she crossed the room toward him. At her approach, he jumped in his skin, rounded on her and put his back against the wall. “Aurelia. You're—” He stopped, as if forgetting what he'd been about to say.

She pulled up short, glancing back at Jinx and Isabel and then at Stan again. “You've been awfully quiet over here.”

“Family drama.” He shook his head.

“Incredible, isn't it?”

“Incredibly unlikely. Millions to one.” He said it with such distraction, like he'd actually done the calculation in his head.

She chuffed. “They aren't the only ones defying the odds.” Putting a couple feet of distance between them, she leaned back against the same wall and looked him up and down. “Isabel said you wouldn't let her examine you.”

His hand went to the bandage on his head. “Already got checked out.”

“And?”

“And.” His eyes met hers again. While devoid of accusation, there was a darkness within them she'd never seen before. A horror she couldn't name.

She shivered and said, “I see.” She wished she could
un
see.

He twitched. With a glance at his watch, he pushed off the wall and paced, then came back and did the whole operation again. Everything about it broke her heart.

“Do you want—” She was about to ask if he wanted to talk about what had happened to him, but it seemed impossibly naïve. He should be furious—should be yelling at her, screaming at her, doing
something
to punish her for what she'd left him to when she'd run. She stopped herself and ran a hand over her face. He didn't have to accuse her. She knew what she had done. “I'm so sorry, Stan. I can't even tell you.”

Another darting of his eyes toward his watch. A shuffle to the side. And then he stood straight, the shifty twitching finally stopping as his gaze went to the ceiling.

And for a second—one brief, irretrievable moment in time—he looked at Aurelia, and he looked like Stan. Her Stan. Her friend.

He spoke just two words. “I'm sorry.”

A silence slammed across the landscape of her mind, leaving it dark and cold and lonely. Understanding dawned, hanging like a threat. In horror, she turned. Saw Jinx stand, heard Isabel calling him Jack and asking what was wrong. But Aurelia only had to take one look at him. With just one look, she knew.

She should have known it all along.

It all happened so fast. As Jinx's mind was torn from hers, her whole nervous system screamed, an aching hole left where his thoughts had been. She wanted to cry out for him, to run to him.

But before she could move—before she could say a word, the trap door in the ceiling burst open. Her voice was choked in shock and dust.

And everything she'd worked for was lost.

Chapter Fifteen

So fast.

It happened so, so fast.

In one instant, Jinx was sitting beside a memory, listening to the story of a happy childhood, spent in a home where he was safe and cared for. His mind was connected to his lover's, with no signs of her planning to let him go. And he was happy. Inconceivably, deliriously happy.

And in the next, it was gone.

There was a crackle in the wiring at the base of his skull, a flash of blinding static and all his senses went numb. His lungs seized and a flame scorched its way across his brain.

When he opened his eyes again, it was not to peace.

He was on his feet, the voices in his head not a lone, dulcet tone but a cacophony of shouting and strategy. His forehead was torn with a searing pain, and everything was slipping away.

“We have him.”

A voice directed at him. Curse.
“Report, soldier.”

“Present.”
The response formed before he could think, the transmission automatic and beyond his will.
“Three enemies.”

Enemies. He'd called them enemies. His gaze darted from one disbelieving face to another. Hazel eyes the color of love shone back at him from across the room, blooming with hurt, but he couldn't hear her voice.

He couldn't remember.

Enemies. If they were not of his Three, they were enemies.

“Male is not a threat. Copy?”

Jinx shot a glance at the man in the corner, the one with the bandage on his head. He was all over the place, pacing back and forth. Harmless enough. And if Curse said he was on their side…
“Roger.”

“Are you armed?”

Jinx reached back automatically to the waistband of his pants where he would've normally tucked his weapon, but there was nothing there.
“Negative. Disarmed by captors.”

“Prepare for assault.”

And then there was the same voice again. The voice that had spoken as he had awoken to this life.
“One mind, one mission.”

“One mind, one mission.”

“One mind, one mission.”

Everything was in motion. The woman with the hazel eyes was still staring at him even as the ceiling behind her fell away in a cloud of raining splinters and dust. Curse and Charm hit the ground and rolled to stand, weapons drawn. Instinctively, Jinx reached out and put his hand on the shoulder of the woman beside him, pushing her to the ground. There was no struggle, only a cry of pain he ignored as he pinned her.

He looked down to see her staring back at him. A flash of light shot across his vision, and he winced. From the depths of the static in his brain, a face emerged. A face he knew. It stared back at him with the same eyes as his captive. With
his
eyes.

Mother,
a voice in his head whispered.
Her name is Mother.

He didn't recognize the voice. Tuned it out and pressed the woman harder to the ground.

Screaming pierced the impacts and breathing and all the
shouting shouting shouting
in his mind, and he whipped his head around to see the redheaded female being shoved against the wall. Incomprehensible words were spilling out of her, froth and venom echoing as she fought.

As she was slammed backward, her eyes connected with his across the room.

The dissonance hit him like an impact. A fresh burst of agony in the center of his forehead.

Enemy.
Lover. Friend.

Aurelia.

Trust.

Enemy.

Love.

He banged the back of his head against the railing of the bunk behind him, but it did nothing to clear the clashing words all fighting for dominance inside his mind. The unknown voice was gaining power now, overwhelming Curse and Charm and their commands to subdue and report. To look away.

He couldn't look away.

He remembered… A flurry of images and sensation tore through him. Kind eyes and her naked breast, his hands on her skin, stitching and healing. Her fingertips in his hair and her body underneath his. Her lips. Kindness.

Love
.

Lightning streaked from the base of his skull down his spine, and he closed his eyes.

“Bring your prisoner here, soldier,”
Curse ordered, and it was a relief to have that command in his mind. Clarity amidst chaos.

This was all he was. A soldier. Nothing.

He was nothing.

He lifted the woman from the ground and ignored the quiet voice repeating,
Mother
. Once Jinx reached the other members of his Three, Charm grasped the older woman's hands, securing them behind her before pushing her back to the ground. The redhead was similarly bound, sitting against the wall.

Don't look.

He didn't. He didn't even think he could.

Curse put a hand on his shoulder.
“Good to have you back.”

Hidden memories belied his words, an undercurrent of hostility radiating from both Curse and Charm. Visions of his own face as seen from below, incensed and struggling. Pain and blows.

You did that,
the secret voice told him.
You hurt them. Don't you wonder why?

He shook the thought off. Looked his leader in the eye.
“Was I gone?”

He had been. He knew that. But it was all so dim. Like a dream inside his dreamless sleep.

Curse smirked and squeezed his arm.
“Not at all, my brother. Not at all.”

Aurelia's lungs felt like they were tearing from the force of her screaming, her feet and legs all cramping with the way she kicked. The leader of the Three slapped a piece of tape over her mouth, silencing her, but it did nothing for the shredding in her chest.

She couldn't stop screaming.

When he shoved the butt of his gun against her temple, slamming her into the wall and then pushing her to sit, it was almost a relief. She saw stars, so she didn't have to see
him
.

Jinx. Jack. Whoever he was.

God, she didn't even know.

He wouldn't look at her. She'd recognized the conflict in his eyes when their gazes had connected, had felt the struggle to come back to himself deep in the shuddering synapses of his mind. But now he was staring straight ahead into the eyes of his commander, his expression blank. It was like he'd never known her. Like she'd never known him.

Had she?

And the vision of him, silhouetted against the opening in the ceiling was so familiar. So like the worst moment of her life, it made her quake. Because it was a new worst moment.

It was happening all over again.

A foot nudged hers, and she turned her head. Isabel's face was streaked with tears, her temple bleeding from where Jinx had struck her as he'd tackled her to the ground. A shiver racked Aurelia's body. One minute, he'd been staring at his mother like she hung the moon, soaking up her words and holding her hand. The next he'd had her life in his hands.

“You okay?” Isabel mouthed.

Aurelia nodded and instantly regretted it. Her head ached.

In no possible universe was she okay.

She looked up at Jinx again. He was holding a silent conversation with his leader, Curse, and Aurelia probed the edges of their minds. Where two days prior it had only taken a few passes to open a conduit into their communication, today she came up empty. The gaps in their security had been closed. Everything was tight.

She closed her eyes and squeezed back the threat of tears. She could have prevented all of this. If she'd just done that damn sever. If she'd closed up the hooks into his brain, they could never have taken him back. He'd still be hers. She might have lost her connection to his mind, but…

Her ribs hurt inside her chest. How could she have been so selfish?

Three more pairs of boots hit ground in front of her, bodies spilling in through the door in the ceiling one at a time and coming up with guns pointed, ready to attack. Aurelia's stomach lurched as her gaze narrowed in on the blue LED behind each man's ear, the tattooed network of stars. She recognized the man she'd disabled the night he'd attacked her car, could feel the sickening way his abdomen had burst as she'd pierced it with her shattered glass. He was standing tall, but the bunching of his shirt around his middle hinted at bandages. And the way he looked at her, it seemed he recognized her, too.

“At ease,” Curse grunted. He tilted his head and held up one hand. Satisfied, he nodded, then directed his attention back at the two Threes at his command. “Cepheus?” One of the men stepped forward, a big man with copper hair and hard eyes. “You're down here with these two. Aries. Orion.” He pointed at the last man in the room and then at the one she'd injured. “You're with us.” Curse's gaze shifted to settle on Jinx. “Spellcaster wants to see us.”

Jinx's throat bobbed, but he showed no hesitance.

“What about me?”

All eyes shifted to look at Stan. He was back to wringing his hands, hunched over himself, one eye spasming.

Curse lifted the corner of his lip. At the shift in the man's expression, Jinx faltered. The motion was subtle, just a half step backward and a twitch of his hand. But it was all Aurelia needed.

From behind the tape, she cried out, but Charm's arm was already up in front of her, Curse's smirk deepening. Addressing Stan, he said, “We thank you for your service.”

The deafening blast of gunfire split the room as crimson spattered the wall behind where Stan had been standing. His body sank to the ground in a limp pile. Aurelia's cry stuck in her throat with her sob. She'd already given him up once, had already seen him die in front of her. In that brief moment when he had been himself again, before everything had gone to hell, it'd been clear he'd been compromised. But to see him slaughtered in front of her again…

Curse kicked the body and muttered, “Shitty-ass reanimation algorithms. Lucky he didn't give us away sooner.” Gesturing at the man he'd called Aries, he said, “Take care of that.” Then to everyone, “Come on.”

The man lifted Stan's broken body to his shoulder and shoved it up through the hole in the ceiling before hauling himself through. One by one, they each disappeared above. With only Cepheus and Charm left behind him, Jinx reached up to touch a hand to the edge of the opening, then stopped. As if fighting with himself, he wrenched his head so slowly to the side.

His gaze connected with hers across the room, and her hands went limp inside her bonds. His eyes were haunted. They looked like regret.

They looked like goodbye.

A shudder traveled through his body and his gaze turned forward again. In one smooth movement, he leapt and pulled himself through, never looking back. Even after Charm let Cepheus help her up, even after the trapdoor was firmly shut behind them, Aurelia kept her gaze fixed on that point, though. On the last place where she had seen him.

It didn't matter that Isabel was tied up beside her or that Cepheus stood guard over them.

Her mind stayed fixed on the moment when Jinx had left her all alone.