Resistance (The Variant Series #2) (14 page)

In the shifting glow of the lightning, Kenzie could see him kneeling beside Alex.

“I know it’s hard, but I need you to relax,” he said.

Alex’s fingers curled into the rug on which she lay, but she made no other sign that she’d heard him.

Kenzie could just make out a mattress sitting on the floor to her right. Suddenly, she knew where they were.

“Why the cabin?” she asked, hopping up to get the lights.

“Leave ’em off, Kenzie,” said Declan, still leaning over Alex. “She’ll just blow them out.”

Declan’s hands hovered above Alex’s torso as bolts of electricity struck repeatedly against his open palms. He was trying to drain off the excess energy, but from the looks of it, he wasn’t doing such a great job. Alex was summoning more power than Declan alone could handle.

“Shit,” he was saying. “
Shit
, Alex. What did you do? How did this happen?”

Alex’s eyes were open, but unseeing.

Kenzie threw open the blinds and let a shaft of afternoon sunlight into Declan’s darkened bedroom.

“I know we need to knock her out,” she said. “But, Decks… I can’t touch her while she’s like this. She’d electrocute me before I could even try it.”

“Out of the room, Kenzie,” Declan ordered. He’d pulled his hands back from the tangle of electricity surrounding Alex and was now on his feet and edging toward the open doorway.

“What?! We can’t just
leave her
like this!”

“We’re not leaving her,” he said. “But I have to jump downstairs to get something, and I don’t want you alone in this room with her while I’m gone.”

Declan slammed the door closed behind them and jumped, leaving Kenzie alone to pace the upstairs hallway outside of his bedroom.

Inside, she could hear the crackling of electricity. The same rumble she’d felt in the school was now causing the hardwood floor beneath her feet to shudder.

Declan reappeared with a gun in his hand.

“
No!
” Kenzie shouted as Declan slowly twisted the doorknob. “Dammit, Decks, you can’t just
shoot
her. Have you lost your freaking mind?! There’s got to be some other way!”

The door slid open.

“Declan,
please
,” she pleaded, panic raising the pitch of her voice.

Her brother raised the gun and aimed for Alex’s inert form.

Kenzie reached out to grab his elbow. “Declan,
don’t
—!”

The gun fired with a soft hiss of air. A tranquilizer dart hit Alex in the shoulder.

Only, it didn’t work.

Instead, the rumbling beneath their feet intensified, causing the furniture, books and picture frames inside Declan’s room to shudder violently.

As items began falling from shelves and crashing onto the floor, Declan shot her a second time.

Then a third.

Alex’s eyes drifted closed. The shuddering stopped. The lightning dissipated.

It was over.

Declan hurried to Alex’s side, reaching down to check her pulse.

“Is she…?”

“She’ll be alright,” he said, collapsing into a seated position beside Alex. “She’s just unconscious.”

Kenzie fought to slow her breathing. 

It was over.

It was over
.

“What was in that stuff you shot her with?” she asked.

He turned the gun over in his hands. “Ketamine mixture. It’s the same tranquilizers the Agency uses to incapacitate telekinetic Variants. She’s going to have a bitch of a headache when she wakes up.”

Kenzie eyed the gun. “And where the
crap
did you find something like that?”

“Grayson’s desk,” he said with a shrug.

“Is that why we’re here?”

“What?”

“Is that why you chose to jump to New York?”

He paused to take in the disaster area that was his bedroom in the cabin and shrugged.

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. Declan looked back to Alex. “I just knew we needed to isolate her. This seemed like a better idea than jumping to Antarctica or the Mojave. Plus I remembered seeing the tranq gun back when I, uh,
borrowed
Grayson’s Glock. Thought we might need it. Guess I was right.”

“So what now?” she asked. “Hospital? Back home?”

“A hospital’s not going to be able to help her,” he said. “Or worse, they’ll try and wake her up. We need to keep her sedated. If she comes to before those abilities are out of her system…”

There was a scary thought.

Declan stared at Alex and shook his head slowly. “There’s no way to hide what just happened from the Agency.”

The cabin fell oddly silent.

“What
did
happen?” she asked.

Another shrug. “Guess we’ll have to ask her when she wakes up. But I think it’s safe to assume Masterson had something to do with it.”

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked.

He frowned. “What? That Alex was right about what… about
who
she thought she saw in the woods?”

Kenzie nodded.

Her brother shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

She stared down at where Alex lay, unconscious on the floor.

Maybe.

Maybe this was what Masterson tried to do before, in the woods, only Alex managed to get away from him before he could finish the job.

Her thoughts circled back around to the damage Alex had inflicted on the girls bathroom.

She winced. “You think the Agency will try to use this as an excuse to take her?”

Declan didn’t answer.

Not that he needed to. The expression on his face said it all.

“We should get her back to Bay View,” she whispered. “Grayson will know what to do.”

With a slow nod, Declan held out one hand to Kenzie and took Alex’s lifeless hand in the other. They jumped.

— 12 —

W
hen Alex and Connor began dating, there’d been this party. One of those
my-parents-are-out-of-town, my-brother-rented-a-keg, let’s-party-like-it’s-1999
sort of parties.

You know the type.

Anyway.

Alex, eager to please, let Connor talk her into trying alcohol for the first time.

It wasn’t
really
the first time she’d had alcohol. She’d tried wine before.

But a few sips of Aunt Cil’s merlot after dinner was a far cry from three Smirnoff Ices and two shots of Aristocrat vodka on a mostly-empty stomach.

The aftermath was brutal.

By comparison, that self-inflicted misery was
nothing
compared to the post-tranquilizer hangover Alex woke up to at one twenty-seven
A.M
. on Sunday morning.

For the next two hours, Alex lay curled up on the bathroom floor of the Grayson family’s Bay View home, alternately praying to the Porcelain God and wishing she could just pass out again so that the pounding in her skull would cease.

Cil dabbed Alex’s forehead with a wet washcloth.

The cool cloth felt fantastic. Alex told her so.

Her aunt frowned. “Can you make it back to the bed?”

Sprawled out on the marble floor, Alex shook her head, then winced at the ensuing spike of pain that radiated up from the back of her neck.

“Floor’s fine,” Alex slurred, cradling her right arm beneath her aching head. Her voice was raspy. “Bed’s too far.”

Kenzie sighed from where she sat, perched on top of the bathroom counter, clad in brightly patterned pajama pants and a black tank top. The redhead and Alex’s aunt were in the room when Alex woke up, and neither had left her side since.

“I could get Nate or Declan in here to carry her back to bed,” suggested Kenzie. “Declan did this to her. Least he could do is help out with the aftermath.”

Alex shook her head again, then bit back a curse. “
Ow
. No. Don’t want—” She swallowed. “—anyone to see me like this.”

Especially
not Kenzie’s older brothers.

“Floor’s fine,” she said again.

Her aunt leaned back against the side of the garden tub, shifted the position of her injured leg and let out a long breath. “I’m going to kill him.”

Declan?

“I’ve killed him once before. And now I’m going to do it again.”

Ah. Masterson.

“Only
this time
I’ll do it right. I’ll tranq him, I’ll shoot him, I’ll
behead
him and
then
I’ll freeze him.”

Kenzie raised an eyebrow. “Miss Cross, remind me never to get on your bad side. You’re kind of terrifying when you’re angry.”

Alex wanted to laugh, but wasn’t sure it was worth the headache.

“I’m so sorry, Lee-Lee.” Cil carefully ran a hand over Alex’s head, smoothing down her hair. “This is all my fault.”

Alex reached out to take Cil’s hand, then pulled back at the last moment. “Not… your fault,” she managed. “It’s mine. Should have trained. Could have fought him… or at least run away.”

Masterson’s powers were officially out of her system, but Alex couldn’t help but wonder how much of this hangover had to do with the tranquilizers, and how much of it had to do with the abilities-overload.

The last time her head hurt this bad, it had been a result of absorbing Kenzie’s telepathic ability for the first time.

A soft knock echoed through the wooden door.

“It’s Brian,” said a small voice. “Can I come in?”

Kenzie looked to Alex.

“Sure.” Alex closed her eyes. “Let him in.”

She listened as the youngest member of the Grayson clan quietly made his way into the room.

Something scraped across the bathroom counter. She opened her eyes again.

The ten-year-old had placed a tray of items beside the sink. On it lay a sleeve of saltine crackers, a bottle of some sort of glacier blue sport drink, a darkly tinted bottle of medicine, and a glass tumbler filled with ice chips.

“
Ice
,” Alex rasped, thinking of how good the frozen chips would feel against the ragged remains of her throat. “Brian, you’re my hero.”

The boy’s expression lit up with his signature thousand-watt smile.

Cil reached for the glass and offered it to Alex. Fighting her way into a seated position, she accepted.

You’d think that with four people occupying one bathroom they’d be a little short on room.

You’d be wrong.

The bathroom had a large walk-in shower, a four-person sauna and a massive garden tub, with a long counter containing his and hers sinks that stretched a good seven feet before curving at the end and transforming into a large vanity.

Even though their new beach-front home had fewer rooms than the cabin they’d left behind in New York, it was still a magnificent seven thousand square-foot estate.

At Casa de Grayson everything was sprawling and high-end, with the sort of finishings that Alex wasn’t sure she could even identify, much less put a price on.

Not that retching into a designer toilet made getting sick any less disgusting.

Kenzie informed her earlier that this guest suite was technically
Aiden’s
(since he’d made arrangements to live with the Grayson clan until he’d once again saved up enough money to afford another place of his own), but that he’d been kicked out and told to bunk with Nate in the pool house until Alex recovered.

When Alex begged the redhead to apologize to her cousin on Alex’s behalf, Kenzie made a joke about Aiden being just as comfortable sleeping in the
pool
as in the pool house, and assured her that he really didn’t mind.

Brian hopped up to sit beside Kenzie on the counter. “Miss Cross?” he said. “My dad wanted to talk to you when you get a moment. I think he finally heard back from the Director. He’s in his office.”

Cil carefully tucked a stray lock of hair behind Alex’s ear. “Will you be alright, love?”

Alex nodded.

Her aunt carefully rose to leave, cane in hand, then paused. “Where exactly
is
his office?”

“Downstairs, through the foyer, past the game room and on your left,” said Brian.

“Of course it is.” Cil offered up a sardonic smile. As she headed out the door, she threw over her shoulder, “Lucky I have an excellent sense of direction. This place is bigger than the hometown I grew up in.”

Cil disappeared around the corner.

“Missed you, Alex,” said Brian. His smile faltered. “I’m really sorry I didn’t see this coming.”

As John Grayson’s only biological son, Brian had inherited his father’s gift of prophecy. In the short time Alex had known the boy, she’d gotten the feeling that—despite his age—Brian’s abilities already surpassed those of his father.

It wasn’t all the two Grayson’s had in common, either. Looking at him now, Alex was struck once again by just how much the boy resembled his dad.

“Not your fault.” Alex forced a smile for his benefit.

Brian nudged his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. “I know. Still feel bad, though.”

Alex popped another ice chip in her mouth and stared curiously at the tiny bottle on the tray.

The boy followed her gaze. “It’s an antiemetic.”

“A what-now?” asked Kenzie.

“Stuff to stop the barfing,” he translated.

“Oh. Right.” Kenzie ruffled his mousy brown hair. “What are you doing up,
Brain
? It’s the middle of the night. You should be asleep.”

Alex smiled at the nickname. “Brain” fit Brian to a T. At ten, Brian had already forgotten more about science, math and literature than Alex could hope to learn in a lifetime. He soaked up information like a sponge, and yet, he was still very much a kid. It was a fascinating—and endearing—combination.

He shrugged his slight shoulders. “Everyone
else
is awake. Why not me, too?”

“Everyone’s up?” Alex asked. “Why?”

Brian seemed bemused by the question. “Uh. Cause Masterson’s back? And you’re
sick
,” he said. “I mean… duh.”

Kenzie gave a small laugh. “Yeah, Alex,” she said. “
Duh
.”

“I think they’re all waiting to see how you feel, now that you’re conscious again,” he said.

Alex felt sheepish. She set the glass of ice aside and laid back down on the cold marble floor.