Winter's Scars: The Forsaken (Winter's Saga 5) (15 page)

Without thinking, Meg walked to her growling coydog and sat right beside him to rub his flank gently.

“I didn’t hurt the soldiers any more than I had to.  The humans are never going to leave us alone now.  I have just sentenced us to a life of running or entrapment and experimentation.  Take your pick!”

Maze licked her hand with his warm, wet tongue trying to calm her down. 

She stood and continued to pace
—looking more and more like a caged tiger with every graceful step.  Her dark curls danced at her shoulder blades, darkened even more by the glow of the tacky lamps in the cheap motel room.  Her eyes looked black and foreboding in their anger.  She wore her jeans effortlessly, her black boots hugging the curves of her calves.  The thin black tee covering her small chest accentuated every muscular turn.  Not every man appreciated the athletic build of a woman, but Creed did.  And for that matter, so did Cole.

They watched her from opposite sides of the room.  The orange-sherbet, polyester comforters lay creased from the many people who had used the edges as a seat over the past hour.  The laminated
wood-paneled walls glistened fake and greasy in the glow of the yellowish overhead lights.

“I can’t stand it.” Meg moved to step into the bathroom
, only partially closing the door to yank off her boots and jeans and replace them with the cheap shorts and running shoes she’d picked up at the superstore on a whim. 

When she emerged she was muttering under her breath, “I can’t breathe! I’m going to suffocate in here.”

She grabbed the MP3 player from her bag and nearly sprinted to the door.

“Meg, don’t leave.  We don’t know what’s hunting us out there.  Not only could you be endangering yourself, but we may need you to defend us.”  Theo’s very human, red-rimmed eyes looked at the wild female metahuman, making her feel even more separate from her family.  His emotions were raw and his frustration at being dragged into this world of powerful men pushing him around was enough to nearly make the mild-mannered ER doctor snap.  He just needed some semblance of control over something.  But he picked the wrong something.

Meg narrowed her dark eyes at the doctor.  “I’m leaving for a run, Theo,” she enunciated carefully, only half trying to control her gift of influence.  “And you are going to be fine with that,” she finished in a whisper.

She turned and stormed out of the otherwise barricaded motel room, bursting into the late evening night
like a hunted fox from its burrow.  Right on her heels was Cole.  “I’ll watch after her, Dad.  We’ll be right back,” he called over his shoulder as he moved to close the door behind them.

Creed had been about to chase after her, but hesitated.  He couldn’t stand hearing her use the words he was terrified she’d been saving for him.  “Just be my friend, Creed.”  He imagined her saying it so often
, it was as though the words had actually come from her mouth.  They echoed inside, defining him now. 

He sighed deeply and went back to using his knife to whittle a piece of basswood into an arrowhead.  The precise work took a tremendous amount of patience.  He forced himself to breathe deeply again and thought carefully. 

Patience, Creed.  She needs time to truly remember who she is and what she wants.  Don’t be selfish.  Give her space. Just be there for her when she comes to you.

He grimaced as his knife slipped smoothly across the basswood. 
What if she never comes back to you?
His inner self asked.

Then she was never mine.
  He answered himself, mournfully. 

She ran with speed.  Nothing outside was scary to her—she could fight the outside battles.  The people back in that motel room both scared the crap out of her and meant the world to her all at the same time.  Family is messy and beautiful, maddening and irreplaceable and everything ever worth living for.

“What are you afraid of, Meg?” Cole came sprinting up behind her.  Since becoming a metahuman, he had taken up running more than any other physical activity and excelled at it.  His long legs kept up easily with Meg’s powerful strides.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” she breathed, avoiding eye contact.  She’d seen his crisp, light-green eyes and knew the effect they had on her.  She was in no mood to be affected by anything or anyone.

“Go away, Cole,” she snapped and turned sharply down a side trail that led around the finally visible Lake Tucumcari. 

“We don’t have to talk at all, Meg.  I’ll just run with you.  No worries, okay?”

“You know I could force you to leave.  Heck, I could force you to cluck like a chicken,” Meg raised her brow—more danger, less playfulness in her eyes.  “Do yourself a favor, turn around and run back to the room.”

“Or you could just let me run with you and ignore me if you want.”  Cole tried to sound more playful than terrified at her partially veiled threat.

“I’m only warning you out of courtesy.  Go back to the room.  Now,” she ordered.

Cole stopped running and watched Meg turn away from him, increasing her speed. 

“Okay, so thanks for not doing that whole mind control thing on me.  I’ll just wait for you back at the room,” he called after her with a wave of his hand she never bothered to see. 

Cole watched her long tresses fly behind her, a wild chestnut horse’s mane billowing as she ran.  She was breathtaking. 

If it were only her looks that were noteworthy, Cole could have resisted, but her fighter’s spirit was so damn sexy to him.  Having watched her level a squadron of soldiers with her words just made goose bumps shiver to existence all over him. 

“Stop staring at me and GO!” she yelled over her shoulder.

“Was I?  Sorry,” he called back.   He turned and sprinted to the motel to wait for her.

Meg’s long strides ate the path, hungry for more.  She felt like a wild cat, prowling the night with her sixth-sense.  She could wield her gift with precision, tossing it like a harpoon into any house she passed, but she was learning to be selective these days.  She appreciated the nuggets of space everyone else’s emotions took up in her psyche and was learning to be careful about filling her mind too quickly, with too many traumas felt vicariously.

Though she could still wrap her warm, white blanket around the depression and sadness others felt, she had matured enough to know she couldn’t rescue every lost soul, not even if she spent her lifetime doing just that.  Her primary concern was her family’s survival.

She pulled her shoulders back, sensing a powerful kaleidoscope of an emotional signature.  She was attacked by an assailant who leaped from a line of bushes.  She had time to take one last deep breath before he stepped from the shadows and yanked her to him, crushing a cloying cloth against her face. 

Meg instinctively struggled but it was short lived.  The effects of the neurotropic paralyzing agent were too powerful.  The last empath reading she could decode was of her attacker.  The kaleidoscope of colors was layered in static.  This was one of Williams’ rabid dogs and he’d come for her.

Too bad she couldn’t fight him.  Her arms hung useless at her sides, her breathing slowed as she stared at the man about to take her away from her family and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

“You may not know me, but I kno
w all about you, Naya Arkdone.”

Chapter 31 Home is Where the Children Are

Instead of feeling relief as the taxi turned down the gravel road leading to their sprawling Texas ranch, Margo felt restless.  The new sensations she could feel from the waist down were now more like pins and needle-like aches after the physically demanding day she’d been through.  But it wasn’t just her body aching.  The worst thing was her mind.  All the racing thoughts—her adrenaline-based, fear-laced thoughts had worn her nerves raw.

She didn’t feel as if she was coming home.  She watched as the familiar clay-colored brick rolled into view through the windshield and stifled a groan of misery.  As happy as she was to be back, this wasn’t home.  It couldn’t be home.  Her family was what made this place home.  Without them, it was just an empty dwelling with the haunting echoes of times gone by.  Home is an amalgamation of the souls who lived there. 

The older Hispanic cab driver insisted on helping her to the front door and waited until she’d opened it before he dropped her bag just inside, shuffled away, waved and drove off. 

She stayed for a moment at the entryway of the home she’d shared with her Theo and their children (and any wayward metahuman who’d come their way) and reminded herself to be thankful for their blessings. 

The home had been locked
, and though Margo knew she was supposed to be exceedingly cautious about everything she did, she was feeling a streak of defiance wider than the Red River her plane had just flown over.  She went around the rooms and opened all the windows, leaving the screens to filter the fresh Texas summer’s night air.  It smelled sweet with the scent of freshly grown wild grass and rich soil. 

After a half hour of working to set the ranch home right for her family, she felt the pain in her legs and back too much to do anything but transfer carefully onto the sofa.  In one hand, she had a glass of ice water.  In the other, she held her newly recharged cell phone.  She’d waited as long as she could stand it.  Now it was time to call her family and check on everyone.

She decided it best to call Theo, but when she did, Alik answered on the first ring.

“Mom, are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine.  I just got back to the ranch a few minutes ago.  Is Theo okay?  Why do you have his phone?” 

“Yeah, I can’t find my phone but Theo’s fine.  He’s in the other room.”

“Okay.  How’s Evan?”

“He’s still sick, Mom, but I think it’s pretty clear he’s going through his evolution now.  I’m really worried about him though.  His fever is much higher than it was with Meg or me and he’s suffered a lot of burns.”

“The fever may be normal for him.  As for the burns, they’re going to take time.  Before you get back on the road tomorrow, you need to give him another cool water bath,” Margo advised.

“Yes ma’am.”

“I was worried the police would come and talk to you back at the hospital.  Maybe keep you from leaving.”

“Arkdone’s too smart for that.  He’s playing the media card.  How would it look if he detained a distinguished military veteran—a female in a wheelchair no less?  No, he wasn’t going to come after me.  He wants Meg and he learned from Williams’ mistakes.”

“What do you mean?”

“He knows not to anger her.  If he comes after me, she’ll go on a rampage.  He wants her to come to him willingly.  He’s playing mind games, Alik.  It’s his MO.”

Alik moved the curtain to try to see more clearly down the path his sister took, then leaned his head against the cool glass, holding the phone tightly to his ear, but unable to say anything more.

He offered the kind of silence in which a mother could sense a loud cry for help. 

“What is it, Ali?”

“Well, it’s Meg.  She’s just gotten so powerful, Mom.” Alik spoke in hushed tones.  Though he was supposed to be watching over Evan, he’d been holding Theo’s cell
, willing it to ring for the past hour.  He knew his mother would have landed and was desperate to talk to her about his worries for Meg. 

He just couldn’t stop replaying the scene they showed on the news. 
Even though he was there, he couldn’t decide which was scarier: watching it on TV from an outsider’s perspective or having watched her do it in person. 

“I’ve seen the footage.” Margo reached into her bag hanging on the back of her wheelchair and pulled out her tablet.  “It’s all over world news.” A push of a button and she was waiting for it to boot up, biting her already gnawed on nails impatiently. 

Within seconds, she was watching the clips of the battle right in the middle of downtown Flagstaff.  From some angles shown, she could even make out the hospital in which she had been waiting patiently for her family.  She remembered hearing the sirens, but assumed it was an accident with victims coming to the hospital.  After all her years around hospitals, the sound of sirens was barely noticeable to her now.   

“Did she really ‘will’ them all to drop their weapons?”

“Yes.  All of them.  At least a dozen of Arkdone’s soldiers obeyed her orders, simultaneously.”

“She used to have to be touching someone to make the connection, and they had to be weak-minded or under duress…and, it was only one person at a time.” 

“I know Mom.”

“She didn’t do what that Senator said, right?  I mean, Meggie didn’t cause all those soldiers to have heart attacks, right?”

“She swears she didn’t.  Cole says they even talked about that right after it happened while the rest of us were lying in the bed of a truck Meg was driving, so I didn’t hear the conversation myself.  But she said she had thought about doing something fatal to them, and could have done it, but resisted the urge.”

“Oh, Ali.”  Margo felt a wave of terror for her oldest child.  “She always struggled to follow the rules if they went against her gut.  That’s even how we got Maze, remember?”

“I remember, Mom.”  Alik was peering out the motel window watching for Meg’s return.  She’d been running for at least ten minutes now and Alik had no idea how long she’d be.  He didn’t want to be caught talking about her to their mother.  Meg might not take that well.