Rouge (22 page)

“Hunter-” Eli gaped in
complete shock. “What... what the hell was that?”

Hunter didn’t move. She was
paralyzed, her eyes wide and unblinking, gazing at the bed and remembering the
alleyway. But the heat wasn’t angry or terrified here, just aroused.
Just
like my mother before their bed burst on fire and my father burned.
She
could have easily repeated history, only it would have been Eli’s lifeless body
burning beneath her fingers.

“I...” Words were whisked
away from her along with the heat, leaving her feeling empty, like a house with
no furniture. She couldn’t even look Eli in the eye.

“Hunter,” he said cautiously.
“What’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer. Her mind
taunted her with horrible images of Eli’s body burning.
I could have killed
him. I could have set him on fire. I could have killed him.

He came around her, grasping
her shoulders and forcing her to look into his face. He was paler than usual,
but not nearly as horrified as she expected. It didn’t make her feel any less
sick to the stomach.

“Everything’s fine,” he
assured her. “The fire’s out.” He looked back at the scorched bed sheets and
then at the roof, as if flames had fallen from the light above the bed. “How do
you suppose that actually happened?”

She didn’t so much as shrug.
He has no idea...

Eli sensed something was
clearly bothering Hunter. She stared up at him, feeling suddenly vulnerable.
What if she hurt him again? How could she control it this time?

“Eli-” she stepped away from
him with her hands raised. “I can’t… I just… I have to go.”

And without looking back –
which she so dearly wanted to – Hunter picked up her jumper and ran from Eli’s bedroom.

“What? Why?” He followed her
down the stairs. “Was it something I did?”

“No,” she assured him,
collecting her bag and throwing open the front door, wishing he would go away.
The fire wasn’t out yet, and she was afraid if she stayed with him for one more
moment, it would set him alight again. “Please Eli, I just need to go.”

Eli sighed, his face
earnest. “I know you’re lying Hunter. Look, I don’t know what happened just
then, but it was probably a spark from my light. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.” He
reached through the open doorway to take her hand, but she backed up onto the
porch. The hurt that crossed his face was like watching someone kick a puppy in
the head. “If this is about what happened to your parents, I just want you to
know I understand. We can take things-”

“Eli,” she snapped, wincing
at the bite in her tone. She wished she could tell him that he’d done nothing
wrong, that she was a danger to him and that she didn’t deserve his company.
She wanted to flush the fire and go back to making out on his bed forever and
ever, but despite her confidence, she just wasn’t ready. No matter how much she
cared for Eli, she wasn’t strong enough to give herself to him. Not yet, at
least. She had pushed it too far this time. For now, she had to stay away.

Hunter looked up from the
ground and stared at Eli with a deep regret.

“We shouldn’t be doing this.
I’m not...” she exhaled in frustration, finding it harder to piece together a
sentence that he could understand without stabbing him in the heart. “I’m not right
for you.”

Eli blinked furiously and
she prayed he wasn’t crying.

“Are you... are we breaking
up?” he asked with a thick voice.

Hunter wished she had the
strength to say yes, but either she was too selfish a human being to give up
the only good thing she had in her life - even if it meant putting him in
danger - or some part of her really couldn’t let him go. She didn’t deserve to
be alone. No one deserves to be alone.

“No Eli,” she said with
tears brimming in her eyes. “But for now, I need to leave.”

“Hunter...”

She turned her back on him
before the innocence and hurt in his eyes won over her willpower and drew her
back into his arms.

As the wind picked up outside, Hunter stalked
down the street to the main road and scanned traffic for a taxi. A few tears
trickled down her cheek and she swatted them away, determined not to let her
fight with Eli – if that was even a fight – get her down. In truth, she just
didn’t want to give the fire the satisfaction. It had overpowered her tonight,
true, but that only gave her the fortitude to train even harder.

A yellow cab pulled in next
to her and she smiled to the driver and ducked in the backseat. There, she
found a passenger already buckled up on the other side.

“Oh,” she started, moving
backwards. “Sorry, I-”

“Mind sharing a cab,
Sweetheart? You’re not gonna get a free one in this traffic.” The driver urged
her inside and she reluctantly sat beside the man. “Where you headed?”

Hunter gave him the address
and tried to relax, focusing on the howling hot wind outside. The man next to
her was staring, as New York men always do, but there was something about his
stare that drew Hunter to meet his gaze. He was balding, with a slim face and hollow
cheeks. He smelled strongly of antibacterial, the kind they use in hospitals
and tattoo parlors, but he looked like he belonged in neither. He wore all
black and his gray eyes regarded her as someone he might know distantly but
could not recognize.

Hunter forced a smile and
went back to staring out her window.

“Have you got some sort of
blood deficiency?” asked the man in a calm, slippery tone.

Hunter frowned, followed his
gaze and saw that under her sleeve, the skin of her forearm showed the faintest
glow of orange in her veins. Hunter crossed her arms and covered them as best
she could.

“No,” she said.

He nodded and stared ahead,
but the smile on his lips struck a chord of fear in her heart.

“Actually, it’s a um… a
bracelet my mother gave me. It’s the new fashion.”

The man glanced at her
again. “Right. No one likes to be different these days, do they?”

Unsure what he meant, Hunter
laughed nervously and hoped he would stop talking to her. She thought about his
words long after the man left the cab a few blocks from her stop, unable to be
rid of his knowing gaze and strange smell.

She had to be more careful,
or soon everyone would start asking questions.

“Who can tell me what the missing
equation is?”

Not a hand shot up in the
entire physics lab, and Hunter thought to herself with a roll of her eyes,
God
- we’re all doomed.

Miss Smart eyed them with
the air of a disappointed mother. “Really, guys, I know it’s getting to the end
of the year and you’re all exhausted, but I expected better.” Her sharp young
eyes moved around the room, peering over the rim of her glasses, and rested on
Hunter for a fraction of a second before she turned back to the board to finish
the equation herself.

Sighing, Hunter settled back
in her chair and twisted her pen around in her hand. For the past half an hour,
she’d seriously considered stabbing herself in the neck with it. She was sure
none of her classmates would lift a finger to stop her bleeding out.

The day had begun horribly.
When Hunter arrived, she purposefully waited on the opposite side of the
building to where she and Eli usually met - near the science building - and set
herself the task of writing up study notes. But she couldn’t concentrate at
all. She lit two cigarettes and ended up sitting there, alone again, wishing
she’d never left last night.
I really can’t keep him out of my life, can I?
I’m a danger to him, and I still selfishly put him at risk.
The bell rang
for class before Eli arrived.

She didn’t meet him at her
locker. Either he took the hint when she’d said she wanted to be left alone and
decided to give her space – which best suited Eli’s gentlemanly disposition -
or he was furious that she hadn’t given him a reason. But as Joshua said, it
would be too dangerous for him to know. She had to keep lying.

Hunter twirled her pen
around in her fingers and wondered why that was. Some part of her knew it was
right to keep her powers secret, either because Joshua asked her to or because
it was simply expected.
That’s what happens in movies anyway. The hero never
tells anyone about his powers, especially the ones he cares about for fear they
get themselves mixed up in dangerous business that the hero has to eventually
rescue them from. And someone almost always ends up dying.

Was it worth the risk?

But you can’t even call
yourself a hero yet Hunter,
said
the fire teasingly.
You have to save someone’s life and get your face on TV
to earn that title. Maybe you should design a cape or wear glasses.

Hunter sniffed a laugh and
hadn’t realized how loudly she’d done it or how quiet the lab had been until a
few students sitting around her turned to stare. She looked at her books and
pretended nothing had happened.

In all she’d been through, Hunter
never actually considered using her powers. She was too busy trying to get rid
of them, banish them to the dark depths of her soul where they could never hurt
anyone, learn to control them, or else forget about them altogether and 
try to have a normal life with Eli. Never had she actually thought about
stepping up and using her powers to save people until that moment, in Miss
Smart’s afternoon physics class.

Yet the idea was so
preposterous that she almost laughed again.
Me? A superhero?
It was so farfetched
that she entertained herself for a few minutes thinking about costumes and
names and her face in the papers. She imagined herself jumping into burning
buildings to save children or catching criminals and putting them in prison.
Dear
God, what would Joshua think of me?
She smiled to herself, knowing he would
be absolutely livid. Then she remembered the Agents, the men he warned her
about and the company they worked for. Would they know it was her? Would they
uncover her identity and take her away?

The bell signaling the end
of class rang shrill throughout the school and students began collecting their
books and sidling out of class in a swift mob. Hunter made to follow when she
was called out of the crowd by her teacher.

“Hunter? Could I speak with
you for a moment?”

Snatching her things off her
desk, Hunter hurried to the front of the classroom.

“What’s up Miss Smart?” she
asked.

Miss Smart looked a lot
wearier these days in comparison with the woman she knocked over on the first
day after break. Perhaps it was simply the stress of the upcoming exams, and
Hunter had the urge to ask if she was alright when Miss Smart lowered her thin
glasses that hung by a glittering string from her neck and fixed Hunter with a
grim look.
Uh oh, I know that look.

“I want to talk to you about
your work,” she said.

Hunter’s stomach fell. “I
know I’ve been slack lately Miss Smart. But I understand the work, and I can
pass, I just need to-”

“Passing isn’t what I’m
concerned about,” Miss Smart interrupted. This time her voice held something
else, something that sounded like caution. She clearly had other things on her
mind. “I’ve seen your work this semester Hunter. I know you’re a talented girl.
But there are a few interesting answers in your theories. For example, the last
assignment on Coulomb’s Law, you wrote this-” she slid three stapled sheets
under Hunter’s nose. “I’ve never seen an equation like it before, and it
certainly wasn’t Coulomb’s.”

Hunter bit her lip. She’d
written that assignment the day after Joshua had explored the theory behind her
powers. There were several equations that stuck in her mind. She must have
confused them with the subject they were researching. Hunter pushed the work
away from her and shrugged.

“I guess I was just
side-tracked,” she lied, hoping Miss Smart believed her. “It doesn’t even
matter.”

“I thought you might say
that. But I recognized the algebraic symbols you used.”

Hunter felt her heart lurch
painfully. “I - I don’t understand.”

Miss Smart drew another
piece of paper from her file, and Hunter’s heart lurched again when the title
of the article leapt out to her as though someone had shouted it: ‘
SWEDISH
LABORATORY DESTROYED: FEUCOTETANUS NO MORE
.’
It was the same article pinned with a golden tack to Joshua’s photo board in
the lab.

Hunter forced herself to
remain calm, even though the fire inside her was burning, crackling, seeping
under her veins. She wrapped her bare arms behind her back so that the golden
glow that usually coursed under her skin wasn’t visible.

How did Miss Smart get this
article? What did it have to do with Hunter? Did she suspect anything? Looking
up from the paper again, Miss Smart was watching her very closely through
narrowed brown eyes. That’s when Hunter realized there was no way a connection
could be made between Hunter having superpowers and this article.