Winter's Scars: The Forsaken (Winter's Saga 5) (32 page)

“And the accommodations?  Were they to your liking?”  he asked, his coffee cup and saucer clanking softly as he set them down above his plate.

“The room is just fine,” Meg glanced to her right where she saw a perfectly presentable Gideon slip into the room and stand with his hands folded behind his back in the standard soldier at-rest stance.  His honey yellow eyes stared straight ahead, but Meg knew he saw everything.

Arkdone didn’t miss Meg’s observations.

“According to Mr. Niche’s report, you took some convincing before agreeing to this visit, but once your initial concerns were addressed, you came willingly.”

“That’s an interesting way of putting it.”  Meg reached for her glass of orange juice and took a sip, inwardly cringing at the bitter combination of it and the toothpaste that still clung minty on her tongue.

Eloise took this interest at the items on the table as her cue to come start to serve food.  Scrambled eggs, French toast, fruit-covered crepes, fat muffins, bacon and sausage quickly filled her plate and the smaller plates around her.  Meg held her hand up and stopped the edible onslaught refusing Eloise’s advances with another serving dish. 

As the maid served, Arkdone spoke.  “You have to understand my curiosity.  Why would you willingly come back to me?”

Meg’s eyes dropped as she picked up a fork, put a small bite of crepe on her tongue and chewed thoughtfully before she answered. “I don’t belong with the Winter family anymore.”

Her simple sentence seemed to surprise the Senator. 

“What makes you say that?” He talked casually
, as though a friend just showing concern for her problems over a cup of coffee.

Meg sighed deeply, pursing her lips together and gathering her words.  “They fear me.”

“Afraid of you?  But why?”  The Senator’s handsome brows lifted in surprise.

“They think I’ve become too powerful,” Meg shrugged and lifted a forkful of eggs to her mouth, chewing quickly.  The more food she put into her stomach, the hungrier she felt. 

Watching her closely and taking a few bites of toast himself, the Senator allowed her words to linger in the air while she ate.  When her fork slowed minutes later, Arkdone pressed on.

“Do you think you’re too powerful?” he asked.

“Not at all,” she answered without hesitation.

“Are they afraid you will hurt them?”

“I think they fear what they don’t understand.”

“Most people
do.  Do you understand the gift I gave you?”

“You erased my memory.”

“Yes?”

“Would you feel gifted if someone erased your memory?” Meg posed.

“Yes, in fact, I would.”  The Senator sat back in his plush seat, coffee steaming in hand. “I was just telling Michelle the other day how much I would appreciate not having my memories hold me back.”

Meg watched the Senator’s eyes and tried to read his sincerity.  “You’re serious.”

“Of course, I am.  I don’t want to lie to you, Meg.”

“Will you let me read your intentions?”

“If you let me read yours.”

“You’re a psychic, too?”

“Not exactly like you, but I can hold my own.”

“What can you do?”

“Are we laying our cards out on the table?”

“Some of them,” Meg agreed.

“I can shield my thoughts from other psychics.”

“That must be convenient—especially around me.”

“I knew what I was getting into, befriending an empath.”

“Is that what we are?  Friends?”

Arkdone shrugged and took a slow sip of his coffee.  “You tell me.”

“Are you capable of reading my intentions if I let you?”

“Yes, but you have to open yourself to it.”

“How is this possible?” Meg asked, frowning deeply.

“What’s that?”

Meg narrowed her eyes.  “Are you human?”

“You are as brilliant as you are gifted, my dear,” the Senator complimented.

“You’re not human,” Meg answered her own question
, eyes wide with surprise at the conclusion she came to.

“Mr. Niche,” the senator called, “and Eloise, would you please excuse us?”  The senator’s gaze left neither questioning what he wanted.  Eloise curtsied and backed out of the room as though Arkdone were royalty.  Gideon moved catlike toward the door but projected his thoughts directly to her.

I’m right outside these doors, if you need me.

Once the doors were closed, the Senator stood and walked toward the giant fireplace where he leaned back and crossed his arms casually.  “I am a metahuman like you.”

“How?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.  From what I learned from the Winter family, Alik, Evan and I were the first three survivors.”

“That’s true.”

“But how can you be a metahuman and be—however old you are?”

“Well, now that’s an interesting story.”

“I’d like to hear it,” Meg stood from her seat, walked toward an ornate settee and leaned against it, arms crossed.  The sweater dress was soft against her skin, but in that moment, Meg would have done anything to be wearing a pair of jeans and boots.

The Senator narrowed his eyes at Meg for a moment.  “I’ll tell you what.  Let’s play a game.  I’ll answer your question if you’ll answer mine.  We’ll continue until we run out of questions,” he glanced at his wristwatch, “or time.  Whichever comes first.”

“All right,” Meg shrugged.  “You first.”

“Right round the time you were born, I was living in Southern California finishing my residenc
y at a psychiatric ward.  One of my old fraternity brothers from my time at Oxford happened to get a job in the area.  We went out for drinks and the topic of what he was working on came up.  He said he was working on a secret project that was showing promise.”  Arkdone moved with grace and athleticism toward the lounge across from where Meg stood still absorbing his story. 

“After a few more drinks, I got it out of him that he was consulting a lead doctor on the cutting edge of experimentation at his laboratory, the Institute for Neurobiological Studies.  My friend was just an ER resident at the time so he didn’t have much spare time to help at the Institute, but he did have access to this breakthrough serum of which they had just
concluded some successful human trials.”  Arkdone crossed his legs so the ankle of one leg rested on the knee of the other before he continued.

“My inebriated friend had a very loose tongue that night at the club.  I wanted to know more, so I played on his ego.  I tricked him into proving his access to such a discovery.  I drove us to the Institute and stayed in the car while he ran inside to get the proof.”  Arkdone shook his head and smiled at the memory.

“When he came back out he had a small black case with him.  In the case was a vial labeled with a simple infinite symbol and a series of numbers.  ‘How is this proof’?” I asked him.

“
‘What do you want me to do to prove it?  Inject you?’ and he laughed at his idea until we got back to my small flat.  I was going to have him sleep it off on my sofa since he’d passed out anyway.  Once I got him situated, I found myself staring at the vial and thinking.”

“You injected yourself?” Meg asked, completely engrossed in his story.

“That I did.  Best impulsive decision I’ve ever made.  ‘Course at the time, I thought I’d just killed myself with the agony I felt for several days.  My buddy took care of me and swore me to secrecy.  You know, he still works at that same ER in Upland, California, after all these years.”  Arkdone shook his head, lost in his thoughts for a moment before adding, “You wouldn’t remember this, Meg, but you’ve met him and he knows Margo, too.  He was the doctor who worked on all of you after the explosion at the Institute a year ago.”

Meg shook her head.  “You’re right, I don’t remember.”

Arkdone shrugged.  “No matter, really.  He’s my fraternity brother, but if he weren’t, I probably wouldn’t have remembered him either.”

“So you chose to become a metahuman?”

“Yes.”

Meg nodded slowly, thinking.

“My turn,” the Senator said with a wide grin.

“Go ahead,” Meg lifted her chin as though readying herself for a punch to the jaw and not a question.

Chapter 59 Flawed Gifts

“He’s right.  I can’t stop wondering why he didn’t tell us sooner,” Alik held his pounding head.  The vein in his forehead was standing out prominently making him look as angry as he felt. 

“Maybe it took him this long to cook up that lame-ass story,” Cole’s head hung in his hands.

“Where did he go, do you think?” Farrow was staring out the window at the predawn sky.  Though everyone was exhausted, again they were too wired to sleep.  The metahumans had stayed up all night talking.

Theo had taken one very angry and hurt Margo to bed an hour before.  Danny and Maze hadn’t made a peep since they first crashed in Danny’s toddler bed.

“He’s been spending a lot of time at the lab up at the teaching hospital.”  Sloan stood and stretched the litheness back into her body.

“What’s he doing up there?” Creed asked the room.

“He hasn’t said.  The guy hasn’t been the most forthcoming with information all these months.” Cole pursed his lips together thinking back over the past months replaying some moments and feeling guilty about others.   “Maybe I should have reached out to him more, but he was so distant since we got here.”

“Don’t do that to yourself, Cole Andrews.”  Sloan scowled as though she had been thinking the same thing of herself.  “We both tried to include him, but he just pulled further and further away from everyone.”  She sighed deeply and slumped back into her same spot on the sofa.

“Has he really been like this the entire time?”

“Yeah, he has,” Cole raised his brows at Alik.  Sloan nodded in agreement.  “It took a
while for him to heal up after the burns, but even after he did, his personality never bounced back.  It’s like the fire burned the goodness right out of his heart.”

“It just never occurred to me that we could come out of the evolution changed for the worse,” Alik frowned.  “I mean, Meg was really sick when she was going through her evolution and she came out okay.”

“We don’t know that,” Creed said.

“What do you mean?” Sloan asked him pointedly.

“I mean, we don’t know what her gift would have been like had she never suffered the malarial exposure.  I’m not the doctor here, but it makes sense,” Creed shrugged.

“Creed, you may be onto something.” Sloan’s steel-gray eyes glistened with intensity. “Alik, when you went through your transition, there were no interruptions, right?”

“None remotely like with Evan and Meg,” Farrow answered for him.  “I took care of him the whole time myself.”

“She’s right.  I was in a good place physically for those few days,” Alik nodded.

“Your gift—the retro-cognition and adrenaline-based physical growth—they are the authentic results of your uninterrupted metamorphosis,” Sloan thought aloud.  “Meg has always had problems controlling her evolved gift.  They give her migraines—weaken her.”

Creed was watching Sloan closely, hanging on every word.  “Yes, she learned how to tap into the emotional connection she felt with me and could ‘refuel’ her energies, but before that using her gift completely drained her.”

“I remember,” Farrow said, nodding.

“So you think that her evolution was affected by the malarial virus leaving her with a flawed gift?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I think,” Sloan was out of her seat pacing the room.

“Oh, shit,” Alik moaned.

“What?” All eyes turned to look at him.

“You remember Cole?  Her bloody nose?”

“Yeah, I do remember her getting a bloody nose,” he shook his head confused.  “So?”

“So she had just leveled a dozen SWAT guys using her gift—the most powerful mind-meld we had ever seen her do.”

“And the worst thing that happens to her is she gets a nose bleed.” Cole was catching on.

“Before, just working with one person—touching them would knock her out,” Creed was shaking his head.

“How did we never think of this before?”

“It’s not like there are a bunch of metahumans like us walking around for us to compare,” Alik chewed his lip.

“I just didn’t think of it at the time.”  Cole shook his head as though scolding himself for missing the obvious.

“So, if Meg’s gift was flawed before, how—?” Farrow frowned.

“What changed?” Alik nodded his head.

Everyone watched Alik’s sharp blue eyes glisten bloodshot and teary.  “Arkdone’s perfect concussion.”

“Hmm, that’s an interesting theory,” Sloan nodded.

“That procedure somehow straightened the wrinkles in her psychic abilities.  It’s like it rebooted her.  She was finally able to function optimally.”

“Shoot, if that machine can fix ‘em, let’s strap Evan’s scrawny ass into it!” Cole rubbed his eyes tiredly.