A Perfect Darkness (14 page)

Not knowing what Lucas knew, he had to stick as close to the truth as possible.

“The two officers who went after Amy thought she was someone else.”

“Petra? I don't want her hurt either. She's as innocent as Amy.”

Tough thing, human emotion. It always got in the way, made one vulnerable. “Eric is the only one I have a problem with.”

Lucas started to say something but stopped himself.

“You and I both know he's not innocent, don't we? I'm not going to protect him. He's interfering with my plans. He's already killed two of my men. That makes me very unhappy.”

That shocked Lucas, or he pretended it did. “Killed them?”

“Set them on fire.”

Robbins's eyes bulged at that. But that shouldn't have surprised him. He knew what Eric's mother was capable of.

Lucas cringed but said nothing in defense of the man he'd grown up with.

“Did you know Eric could set fires psychically?”

“No.”

“Come on, all the fires that sprang up in your neighborhood, and the deadly one that destroyed your home, your stepmother…that's how he set those fires when he wasn't in the vicinity. We found Gladstone. Fried to a crisp.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Sure you do.”

“We left that man alive.”

“Maybe you did, but Eric went back and killed him.” He could see that Lucas's disbelief was genuine. “Eric's always been trouble for you, hasn't he? Once he's out of the picture, the girls won't be snooping around anymore.”

Even with their history, Lucas still looked pained at Eric's demise. “Look—”

“No more bargains, Lucas. If you want Amy and Petra kept safe, you'll do your part. We'll get back to where we were in an hour.”

Robbins followed him, and when they were out of the guard's earshot, said, “Two men? On fire?”

Another of Robbins's weaknesses was his fear. It would eventually destroy him.

“Do you see why we have to find them? They're not only a danger to our program—they're a danger to us.”

And now
they
would be dangerous to the Rogues.

A
my used the drive to collect her scrambled thoughts and put her emotions into a box to deal with later. She recognized the neighborhood as the one where Lucas's gallery was located. They passed that and turned down a gravel lane that went between the commercial and residential areas. Eric cut the lights and pulled into the driveway of an old house. Petra jumped out and hoisted the garage door, then Eric drove inside and she closed the door behind them, dousing them in darkness.

They slipped out the side door and through the backyard to a vine-covered shed at the back edge of the property. This is their hiding place? Amy thought as she followed them through the silvery night. Eric reached beneath the vines, unlocked a dead bolt, and opened the door, nodding for the two women to precede him. They ducked beneath the vines to enter. When they were inside, he pulled the chain, and a dim bulb lit the cramped space, which she saw was filled with rusted junk. The three of them could barely fit inside.

Eric turned to her with a hard look on his face. They were mere inches apart. “You're one of us now. Not exactly by our choice, I might add. But you have nowhere to go now.”

She caught herself about to apologize. She wasn't sorry, not half the time she felt compelled to say it. “Is that supposed to make me feel warm and fuzzy?”

He laughed despite himself. “You might have noticed I don't do warm and fuzzy.”

That brought back the scene at the park. “No, just pyro tricks with a dash of psychopath.”

Petra looked confused by the comment.

“We'll talk about that later,” he said, his expression serious again. “You can stay in our hideout, but don't do anything stupid to give it away to our enemies. It's all we've got.”

“Yes, sir.”

If he was expecting blathering gratitude, he would have to wait awhile. He moved a derelict lawn mower aside and pulled up a piece of the rotted wooden floor, revealing a hole about four feet wide. Petra went down first, then Eric nodded for her to go next. She did, thinking again, Down the rabbit hole I go.

She climbed down for several minutes in darkness, feeling her way down, understanding why Petra had said
tomb
. Eric's footsteps echoed above her, Petra's below. With every foot they descended it grew colder. The first stirrings of claustrophobia tingled inside her, and she took a deep breath. She heard Petra's feet land on a solid surface, then a dim light was snapped on, lighting a vertical tunnel.

Petra waited while she and Eric joined her, then he took the lead down the tunnel. He flicked a switch
and several more small lights lit the rest of the way. They walked for a few minutes, their shoes scraping on rough concrete and echoing along the walls. At the end of the tunnel stood an enormous steel door. Eric blocked her view as he punched a code into a keypad. The entire door slid to the right. She followed Petra into a huge room—a room she recognized. Except, on the wall where Betty Boop once hung, she now saw a sailing regatta painting.

“This is where you took me when you kidnapped me.”

“Now you understand why we couldn't tell you where you were,” Petra said.

The door slid closed, looking now like a wall.

Amy took in her surroundings. “What is this place? Wait a minute. It's a bomb shelter, isn't it?”

Eric came up behind her. “Smart girl. Back in the fifties three families in the neighborhood went in together to build this thing. At least that's what we surmised, given the access from three different houses. Lucas found it a couple of years ago when he was renovating the first floor of his house into the gallery.”

Petra added, “The house where we parked the car is vacant. We're renting it from a woman who now lives with her son in Alabama. Under another name, of course.”

“What about the third house?” Amy asked.

“Obsolete,” Eric said. “Years ago the owners, probably unaware of the shelter, tore down the shed and built a garage over the entrance. The access from Lucas's house enters into his bedroom.”

“No one knows about this place?” Amy asked.

“It wasn't exactly publicized. They didn't want the whole neighborhood crowding in during an emergency.”

Petra walked into the kitchen, nodding for Amy to follow. “They set it up for three families to stay here as long as necessary for the radiation to clear.” She opened a pantry door, revealing a room with stacks of white buckets and several cabinets. “These are filled with nitrogen-sealed food. There's a generator and all of the communication equipment we need, and down one level, more rooms, a water tank, and a gym.”

“Wouldn't we be trapped if they discovered us?” Amy asked.

“They wouldn't take us alive,” Eric said, his mouth in a firm line. “The doors are one-ton blast capable. We have weapons if we need them, but I doubt they'd be able to get in.”

So they'd eventually run out of food, Amy thought.

“It's home away from home,” Petra said in a cheery voice that didn't match her expression.

“You called it the tomb.”

“Okay, tomb away from home,” she replied, letting her real disdain show.

Eric said, “That's why we get beat over the head with color.”

“I couldn't stand the bland walls. I need color. Scenery.”

“Change,” Eric added. “She changes the paintings every other day.”

Petra looked at the sepia-toned painting of the woman and man. “These are from Lucas's personal collection. Sometimes I sneak upstairs and change them.”

Amy noticed Lucas's taste in artwork was bent toward the sensual. Like in the dreams. Like the man himself. She caught herself sighing and coughed instead. “You'd think it would smell musty.”

“It has ventilation units and pumps for sewage,” Eric said. “The walls keep the place sixty degrees all year 'round, and one little space heater keeps each level livable.”

She remembered how they'd chloroformed her and interrogated her and then disposed of her before she could ask any questions. That made her all the more pissed off now, knowing they hadn't been straight with her.

“Tell us what you were doing meeting Cyrus,” Eric said.

She walked up to one of the paintings, an alley in an Italian village painted in odd angles and too-bright colors. She made Eric wait several long seconds before turning to him with her arms crossed on her chest. “He called, said he had something important to tell me. He told me it was too late to turn back, that I had to go on the run. And…he told me what it means to be an Offspring.”

That got their attention. They waited for her to continue. Eric became impatient when she didn't. “What did he say?”

“Uh-uh. I'm not telling you anything until you tell me what you know. I've answered all your questions honestly, but you've answered very few of mine, and even then, I'm not sure how honest you were.”

Eric narrowed his icy blue eyes. “Don't play games with us.”

“I won't if you won't. We're a team, like it or not.
You said so yourself. That means I know everything you know and everything about you. Frankly, what you did back there freaked the hell out of me. You're not like any firebug I've ever heard about.”

Petra asked him, “What did you do?”

He started to move toward Amy, and she stiffened her shoulders and met his angry gaze with one of her own. Yes, she was afraid of Eric. She couldn't forget Cyrus's warning:
You can't trust them. Eric, in particular, is very dangerous.
What if he set her on fire, too? He'd killed two men that she knew of, and he was potentially unstable. But right now she was valuable to him, so she stood her ground.

Petra said, “Eric.”

He tried to stare Amy down for a few more seconds, and she was proud that she didn't wither. Finally he released a breath. His muscles relaxed, and so did hers.

“We don't know all that much,” he said. “One of the things we suspect the Offspring have in common is some kind of bioenergetic ability.”

“Bioenergetic?”

“Energy transformation. Psychic. Since we were kids, Lucas had these weird episodes where he woke up at night and drew prescient sketches. He has no memory of doing it.”

“Like these?” Amy said, walking over to the one on the easel that showed someone lying dead on the ground. His warning. She sucked in a breath.

“What?” Petra asked, coming up beside her.

“He said I would be betrayed and someone would die because of that. He thought it would be me.” She turned to them. “Cyrus did betray me, in a way, but he was the one who died. Lucas was right.”

“He's usually right,” Eric said. “When he gets the same sketch four nights in a row, what he draws always happens on the fifth day.”

Amy flipped past the one on top to his previous sketches and stopped at one that depicted a woman getting slashed with a knife. She flipped to the next sketch and was about to turn away when she saw it was of a woman who looked a lot like her, with frizzy, thick hair and a boyish-straight body. A man had grabbed her, a knife to her throat.

Her hand went to her mouth. The man who intercepted, who stepped in to save her…

Lucas.

“The guy was pretty pissed that Lucas got in the way,” Eric said beside her.

“He got twenty-six stitches,” Petra added in a voice that indicated she wasn't pleased that he'd sacrificed himself. With her finger, she drew a long line across her stomach.

Amy felt that knife in her gut now and even bent forward in pain. “The blood on the pier. I never…I didn't know…”

Eric stared at the sketch. “It was the first time he'd had one of his premonitions about you. I could tell it wigged him out. It was also the first time he got enough information to prevent what he drew. You were a strong incentive.”

Petra turned away, and her gaze went to the painting from Amy's dream. “Lucas obviously can get into dreams, or at least yours. I didn't realize the man in his paintings was him.” Raw jealousy colored her expression, and she started cracking her knuckles.

“He kept his face in shadow to me, too.” Amy turned to Eric. “And you…you can set people on fire. Is that some trick or is it…what did you call it? Bioenergetic?”

“I got that word from a book about the Soviet psychic programs. Yes, I change the energy and create fire. It's called pyrokinesis.”

Petra just stared at him. “Since when?”

“As far back as I can remember.”

“All those fires…” Her face paled. “Not our house?”

He turned away. “No. Some of the fires I started. Abandoned buildings and, yes, the one I was brought in for. Bastards deserved it. No one was hurt.”

Petra said, “Amy said you set a man on fire back at the park.”

“Out of necessity. They had us at gunpoint.”

Petra's hand went to her mouth. “I can't believe you burned a man to death. You murdered someone.”

“He also deserved it.” Eric walked over and dropped down on the couch. “Enough about the fires. I can also remote view.”

Amy followed him, perching on the coffee table across from him. “Psychic spying. Cyrus mentioned that.”

“What else did he say?”

“Uh-uh, not yet. What about you, Petra?”

She looked down. “I don't have any ability.”

“Yes, you do,” Eric said, surprising Petra. “Your superior hearing.”

“I thought that was just good hearing.”

He propped his feet up on the table next to Amy. “I think it's more than that.”

Petra's shoulders stiffened. “Why didn't you ever say anything?”

“I didn't want you to get too full of yourself.”

While she grappled with that, Amy wondered about their dynamic. Very interesting, and Eric's need for control and superiority very telling.

Be careful of him,
her instincts warned.

Amy took off Cyrus's coat and hugged it to her chest. “What about the CIA officer you killed? Glad-something-or-other?”

Again Petra's eyes widened in surprise. She hadn't known, which hopefully meant that Lucas hadn't known either and therefore had nothing to do with it. She didn't realize she'd been wondering about that.

“Eric!” Petra said. “You killed Gladstone?”

Again he didn't look the least bit chagrined. “I killed him before he killed me. Lucas drew four sketches of me dying. In the last one we saw the man's face.” He looked at Petra. “It was Gladstone, wasn't it?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Probably.”

“Did you burn him, too?” Amy asked, not sure she wanted to know.

He couldn't hide the trace of a smile. “Yes.”

Amy said, “
You
were angry about Lucas coming to me, yet you killed a man without their knowledge.”

“That guy was an enemy. Lucas got himself caught by warning you.”

Stubborn son of a bitch.

“We also suspect that whoever these people are, they're trying to recruit us for our bioenergetic abilities. When Gladstone cut into my arson interrogation, he asked if I'd be interested in using my fire-setting
skills for the government. He didn't say ‘your pyrokinesis skills,' but I now know that's what he meant. That's why he was casing Lucas and Petra, too, trying to determine their skills.”

“Cyrus was, too,” Amy said in a quiet voice. “On the profile pages, there was a link called ‘Skills.' I wish I'd had time to look at them.”

“What are they after?” Eric asked her. “Why are they interested in us?”

Amy wagged her finger at him.
Not yet.
She had to admit, it was damned nice to have the power for a change. “When Lucas broke in, he said my dad's
supposed
suicide. Why?”

Eric put his arms behind his head, looking like he didn't care about the power shift. But by the twitch in his jaw, she knew better. “Our mothers, your dad, and Hammond's dad all died either by accident or suicide. Something's not right there, but we don't know what.”