Cursed (12 page)

The door slid upward, and Julius helped me into the seat. In a moment, the door closed and Julius was next to me. The car lit inside. “Drive. Anywhere. Level three,” Julius said.

The only way I knew the car started was that it moved automatically. We slid through the parked cars and toward a circle of light. Sunlight washed over me as we moved onto a street at ground level and merged into a line of traffic. We approached a ramp and maneuvered into a line of traffic about three stories from the ground.

“Auto-drive,” Julius said.

“Destination?” the metallic female voice asked.

“Just drive.” Julius’s hands slipped into his lap as the car automatically merged into traffic. He leaned the back of his head onto the rest and briefly closed his eyes, before turning to me.

“Are you hurt?” Julius asked. He watched me, concern etching lines around his face.

“No. You?”

He shook his head, “No. I ... I don’t know how we weren’t hurt. Hell. It wasn’t meant to be like this ...” he whispered before I’d noticed he’d spoken more to himself than me. He turned his attention to me, face taunt, eyes dark and intent.

A wave of exhaustion crashed over me, and I was unable to block it out. My emotions backhanded me with a swift slap. My nightmare was still living. It was happening again. Against all odds, somehow, somewhere, they’d found me. And now Julius was involved. Now I had more to lose than just my own life.

“Tell you. I’ll tell you ... everything.

I’d put his life in danger. Whatever he had to tell me was nothing compared to the bombshell I owed him. After his kindness, I’d brought him into my world. A world he didn’t deserve any place in.

It would be stupid of me not to think he wouldn’t have questions. He’d taken me from the capsule, seen me in the alley, and now had been with me when Seth had attacked again. Hell, he’d been in as much danger as I was.

There was a war in my head, struggling against the urge to tell him and the mantra I lived my life by. Don’t get involved. Don’t become affectionate with anyone. Don’t get caught. But I’d done all three. And put all those people in the garden in danger. I’d become complacent, selfish enough to feel comfortable even for that moment, come out into the open longer than I knew I should. And this Seth—whoever he was—had found me because of that.

And now, by allowing myself to seek comfort with Julius, I’d also put him in more danger than I had any right to do. I sighed, knowing that I had to tell him for his own safety, but that this would be the last time I’d seek comfort from him. After I told him about myself, I’d disappear. I would never see him again.

I had a lot to be grateful for. He’d healed me, body and mind. Had given me sanctuary, kindness, a moment of peace. I was thankful. I had something to remember.

I watched him as we drove. I wanted to memorize what I saw, his face, mannerisms, the way his muscles slid beneath his skin on his arms. His gaze rested on mine, nonjudgmental and patient, and my heart lurched. I recognized trust when I saw it. So stupid of him. I swallowed before I made myself stop, before I could think too much about what I was going to tell him.

“You’re going to think I’m crazy.”

“Katia ...”

I cut him off. “I’m not who you think I am, Julius. There’s a reason why this is happening to you. Why it happens to everyone I ...”, what was I going to say—love?—“ ... my friends. There’s a reason why your life’s in danger, and it’s because of me.”

I had to tell him, and I had to tell him now. Before he might say something to me to make this all right. To make me think that him being in danger was just a part of being with me. Because Heather thought that way, and I only brought her torture and death. I’d learned that lesson well. Everyone was in danger around me, and he at least deserved to know why before I disappeared from him for good.

I glanced at him again, judging his reaction, but only read openness and a desire to listen. No judgment. I licked dry lips. It was a temptation to unleash my secrets. I’d carried them for so long. I hadn’t even told Heather about the full extent of my abilities, and she had known me pretty well.

It was so wrong telling him, I knew that, but he was offering a place for me to confess. Confide. A chance to not feel the weight that I’d shouldered on my own for so long, yet the urge to tell him was overwhelming. There would be release. Blessed release. The lure of comfort sucked me in. The temptation to relinquish this heavy weight was so vast, and God help me, I couldn’t hold it in any longer.

“I’ve done things. Bad things, Julius. Things you don’t want to know. But I was so sickened. I couldn’t do them anymore. Even if it meant I would die, I swore to myself I’d never do the things he wanted me to do again.” Julius stayed silent. There was no recrimination, just sadness. I made my hands into fists.
Hell
, this was hard.

“Who... who wanted you to do these ... things?”

“My father. Victor,” I answered. “He gave me the scars you saw on my body. He did it with his own hands.” I smiled at knowing I’d made my father so angry. It made the pain sweet. I’d made him mad one particular time. I’d remained silent, unresponsive for days. He snapped. He’d whipped the belt from his waist, stripped me bare and used it on me. His face etched with lines that made him look like the monster he was. It was only that perverse reality that got me through the worst of the whipping. I wanted him to look like that always, but he only showed that face to me. He hid it from the rest of the world.

“But ... why?”

“Because I owed him. He’d taken me in from the world when I was all alone and too young to look after myself. Had given me expensive “medicine” that made me sick and changed my body. For years, he did that. He made me into what I am, and I needed to work off my debt to him. I’m weak, Julius. I wanted to die to get away from him. I wanted to die to end it all.”

“You don’t deserve to die, Katia.”

I gave him a feeble smile. He wanted to believe the best in me, but there was no “best.” There was just survival. “All I succeeded in doing was to kill my friend. My only friend. They found her and I ... I watched as they did things to her ... I stood and watched them kill her, and still, I didn’t cave. They’d done their worst. He ... he’d done his worst, and he still couldn’t break me. I could have stopped it. I could have given in and done what they wanted me to do.”

“And what if you had? What would that have achieved?”

I know what that would have achieved. My energy. Strong enough to kill people with no more than a thought. I could do it from half a world away, stuffed in a cell never to see the light of day for as long as I lived. Victor’s personal assassin. “I’d be evil on earth.”

“What is it you can do, Katia? What did your father change you into? I can see no evil in you.”

He was so blindly kind to me. Although I drank it up, I didn’t deserve to be on the end of that look. I looked into his face, made sure he saw me. This was when I was going to break that trust. This was when I’d see the affection fall away as the horror of what I was registered.

I stared at my hands clenched in my lap, fingers working and reworking. I had to force the words past my lips. “Telekinesis.”

I expected to see shock or abhorrence or fear. I didn’t expect to see the sympathy. Or compassion. And even though I didn’t want to see any of that, it was a balm to my heart. No one else had understood. No one else had listened. No one else had been interested enough to make me feel like a person and not an experiment. Call it stupid, but I wanted to tell him. Everything. I wanted him to know everything I was, even the evil parts. The parts I didn’t want to see in myself. Because if he knew them, maybe I wouldn’t see the compassion and understanding on his face and he wouldn’t want to see me again and it would make the leaving him much, much easier. Easier to face revulsion than pity. Or maybe even ... affection. I didn’t even know what to do with that. Didn’t know the first thing about love.

Maybe if I told him, he would leave me before I’d have to leave him.

I watched the passing street below through the window. I didn’t know how to cope with anything other than disgust. Even Victor’s scientists had been hesitant around me. Maybe it was because they knew what I could do to them that made them edgy. Wise men.

“I call it my thought-energy. I used it to protect us just before. It’s never been like that before.”

“How?”

“I sent it around us like a bubble. Only this time, it worked as fast as I thought it.”

“You just think ... and it happens?”

“It never used to. I had to concentrate hard until I had a headache. But the more I use it now, the easier it gets. You have to understand how evil I am. I can break limbs with a simple thought, Julius. I’ve done ... more ... worse. I was cruel. I know how to torture. I know how to kill.”

Victor had taught me well, and being the compliant daughter I had been before I ran away, I’d done anything to make my father proud of me.

“I was a child, but I was old enough to know better. I didn’t know how to say no. I was the biggest asset to my father’s work. I was the protégé. Then I learned that they were going to make others just like me. I couldn’t let that happen. Couldn’t put other people through what I’d gone through.

“Victor, my father, started on young men. The drugs he poured into them sent some mad. That was at best. At worst, their brains grew too fast. They grew and grew and ...” I shuddered remembering husks of men, screaming in pain, bleeding from their ears as their brains fell apart in front of my eyes.

“What made those men so different from you?” Julius asked.

I shrugged. “It takes years and a developing brain to make the changes he did with me. He’d started on me when I was a baby. I was sick all the time, but looking back, it was the drugs he filled me with. He poured drugs into me that made certain parts of my brain develop larger and stronger than normal. I’d been genetically modified from birth. My body was irrevocably changed.”

I choked back the sob that hurt my throat. I’d started and the damn had broken. I couldn’t stop. It all came back to me, and I relived the hell that was my life. “I took a chance and ran. I got away. I escaped. I didn’t stop running for years. I eluded them. Imagine that, a sixteen-year-old managing to escape the most highly trained organization in Australia. I was free for the first time in my life. I made a life for myself, but I was never anywhere for long. I was too scared to make any friends. To stay at any job. Then one day, I got sick. I was slow. I paid the price, and they caught me. After eight years of freedom, I got complacent. Thought my father had given up. That he’d lost interest in me.

“My father tried to make me do those things again, but I’d learned that normal people didn’t do things like that. Those things were evil. What Victor had made me was an abomination of nature.”

Julius’s hand clenched my arm, but I hardly felt it. “Trust me when I say you are not an abomination. You are a survivor. You have to believe in yourself.”