Talent to Burn (Hidden Talent #1) (17 page)

As I started to drift back off to sleep, a cheery electronic tune broke the silence. I fumbled for my phone. “Yes?”

“Cat.” Although I hadn’t heard it for years, the voice was an echo of my dream.

I sat up. “Eric.”

Chapter Seventeen

The light came back on behind me.

“I heard you were looking for me. I wasn’t going to call you but I had the strangest dream that you were here.”

I didn’t want to think about why that had happened or what the implications might be. I was happy to hear the sound of his voice, older and deeper, but unmistakably Eric’s. “I’m glad.”

“What do you want? Justine didn’t explain it to me.”

“I want to help you.”

Eric laughed. The sound of it rolling down the wires was hollow. “I’m beyond your help.”

“I want to try.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing you one more time.”

A million questions filled my head. Was he hurt? Dying? I swallowed them. “Where? When?”

“I’ll send Justine to pick you up. Be on the curb outside Southwest arrivals at BWI airport at 11:00 a.m.”

“All right.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, sister.” The line went dead.

I turned to Jamie. “We’re meeting him tomorrow.”

“Interesting. I could hear some of that. He dreamed of you too, huh.”

“I guess he visited me in my sleep.”

“Perhaps that’s it, or perhaps you managed to relax enough to let some of that Talent out.”

“I doubt that,” I said sharply.

“It doesn’t matter now,” he said. “Let’s go back to sleep. I have a feeling that we’ll need all of our energies in the morning.”

We left the bike in the hourly lot, and waited on the pavement at the appointed hour. With no idea what kind of car Justine would be driving, I was constantly craning my neck at cars as they passed. Jamie leaned against a pillar, one knee cocked and his boot resting against the wall.

“Can you help?” I said.

He laughed. “Help what? She’ll see us.”

I shot him a look and therefore missed an old brown van pulling up in front of us. It was one of those seventies Mystery Machine-style ones with the enclosed back.

“Get in the back,” Justine said.

I opened the side door and climbed in, feeling like I’d stepped into a hippie movie. We seated ourselves on one of the torn vinyl benches. There were no seat belts, and our view of the world was what we could see over the back of the front seat.

We drove out of the airport from one anonymous freeway to another. After a short while, Justine pulled onto a highway, then into a services park where she parked the van outside a fast food restaurant.

She turned to us. “I need to make sure neither of you knows where we’re going.”

Insulted, I snapped, “You think I’d lead Ryder to my own brother?”

She twisted her mouth, paused, and then spoke. “Maybe not deliberately.” After rummaging in the depths of her purse, she pulled out a vial of pills. “I want you each to take one of these.”

Jamie began to laugh. “You’ve got to be joking. What is this,
The Vanishing
? Am I going to wake up buried alive? I don’t think so.”

“It’s your decision. You can take the pill and see Eric. Or not. It’s just a sleeping pill.”

“I don’t understand,” I said carefully. “Can’t you blindfold us or something?”

Justine shook her head, and for a moment I thought I saw regret in her eyes. “We need to get rid of your psychic scent, so Ryder can’t follow you. If you’re unconscious, you won’t leave a trail.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t leave a trail. It’s part of my Talent.”

I remembered the way she had vanished outside the café in Georgetown. Interesting. I nodded. “How do we know we can trust you?”

“Eric trusts me. You can make up your own mind.”

Jamie was still shaking his head. “Count me out.” He opened the door and got out of the van. He walked over to a meager square of dead grass next to the restaurant, and began kicking a tire that was half-buried in the ground, some kind of cheap-ass playground equipment.

She watched him through the windshield. “Are you in or out?”

“Let me talk to him.” I climbed out of the back of the van. A cold wind scattered burger wrappers across the parking lot. Jamie wasn’t even looking in my direction—in fact, he seemed to be talking to himself while he continued to kick the tire.

“Hey,” I said, my voice sounding pretty calm, I thought.

“You’re not seriously planning on trying to talk me into this.”

“I came over to see what you were thinking.”

“I’m thinking this is insane.” He stopped kicking the tire and turned to look at me. “We’ll find him some other way.”

“You said yourself we’re out of leads.” I couldn’t stop thinking about Eric’s voice on the phone. I needed to see him. “I’m going to do it.”

That got Jamie’s attention. He grabbed me by both upper arms. “Don’t do this.”

Shrugging my shoulders, I tried to appear more casual than I felt. “It’s no big deal. She’s Eric’s girlfriend. He trusts her.”

“You’re going to take an unknown pill from a virtual stranger. You have no idea if she’s really his girlfriend.”

“Who else would she be?”

“Maybe she has him brainwashed.”

Now I laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

His hands tightened on my arms. “Cat, you can’t trust anyone. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, that’s it. Don’t put your life in her hands.”

“You’re overstating it. It’s not that big a deal.”

He released me. “If that’s what you think, then I’ll drop it.”

“Are you going to come?”

“No.”

I bit my lip. It was one thing to be brave with Jamie at my side. Going alone was a different story. Still, I couldn’t get past Eric’s voice on the phone.

“I have to go.”

“Why?”

I crossed my arms. “Something is wrong with Eric, and I need to help him.”

“What do you mean?” Jamie looked into my eyes. The skin on his jaw was tight, his face pallid and gray.

“He said he’d like to see me one last time. I don’t know if he’s injured or what, but it sounded to me like he might be dying. I have to go. There is no other choice for me.”

“Christ.” Jamie raked one hand through his hair. “This is insane.”

“You don’t have to come,” I said, taking a step toward the van.

He grabbed me from behind and held me close. His voice was gruff in my ear. “I thought I could change your mind, but…you’re not going alone. If you’re going to do something stupid, we’re going to do it together.” Slowly, he released me, and I turned to him. “Cat, are you one hundred percent sure you want to do this?”

I nodded, and he sighed.

“Right. Let’s go.”

Back in the van, I held my palm out to Justine. “Give me the pills.” I took mine, and Jamie followed suit.

“You’d better get comfortable,” she said, and started the engine.

I stared through the windscreen and hoped I was doing the right thing. As I started to doze off Jamie’s fingers threaded themselves through mine.

The room lay quiet and twilight dark, although there were no curtains on the cracked window. Birdsong echoed in the distance, but I didn’t recognize the bird.

I moved my head to get a better idea of my surroundings, and regretted it immediately. Still woozy, I guessed, as the room shift-tilted around me. I closed my eyes again. I’d survived the pill and the journey, and my hands weren’t tied or anything crazy like that.

After a few minutes lying still and breathing deeply, I ventured to open my eyes again, and cautiously turned my head. I appeared to be lying on an animal skin rug on the floor of a wooden cabin. Jamie lay next to me, still sleeping.

I wondered how Justine had gotten us inside. She was much smaller than either of us. Someone must have helped her—Eric? Or were there other people here? And where was “here”, exactly?

Sitting up carefully, I looked around. There was a doorway leading to a bedroom. Perhaps it was ungrateful but I wished whoever had dumped us had dumped us on a bed. My body ached from an unknown amount of time spent on the floor.

Another door presumably led outside. This room looked to be a living area. I confirmed that I was, in fact, sitting on a cow skin rug. From the deer head on the walls that had seen better days to the old brown couch covered in a Labrador retriever throw, everything said hunting lodge.

We must be somewhere fairly rural. I didn’t know how long we’d been asleep. We could be anywhere within a few hundred miles of the airport.

I stood up, provoking a moment of vertigo, and steadied myself before walking over to the window. The lodge looked out over a clearing in the woods, surrounded by other small cabins, with a larger Quonset hut over to one side.

There were a few cars scattered about, including the trusty brown van, but no people in view. Looking at the sky, I guessed it was approaching dusk rather than breaking dawn. We’d been out for six or seven hours then, which meant we could be an hour out of Baltimore, or as far away as North Carolina, New York State, or maybe even Kentucky.

 
A shuffling sound came from behind me and I turned to see Jamie stretching out his arms and legs. In one fluid movement, he rose to his feet. Again, I was surprised by the amount of grace he had for such a big guy.

“Get your beauty sleep?”

“I did.” I briefly filled him in on my observations.

“Let’s go find your brother.”

“Should we work out how we’re going to do this?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know what there is to plan. You want to see him, we both want to help him, let’s go tell him.”

“There’s more than one car out there. Who do you think the other people are?”

Pausing in his journey to the front door, he scratched at his stubble. “That’s a pretty good question.” He counted off the possibilities on his fingers. “One, he’s being held against his will. Justine’s his girlfriend, so that seems unlikely. Two, he’s made some new friends while on the run. That’s a hard time to meet people, because you don’t want to trust anyone. Look at what we had to go through to get here.”

“Three?” I prompted.

“Three, he’s met up with some old friends.”

“I don’t know that he has any friends outside the Institute.”

“Could be other ex-Institute people like yourself and Eric, or they could be friends of Justine’s.”

“Okay. Four?”

“I don’t think I have a four.”

I blew my breath out, realizing that I had been holding it. “I kind of hope they are her friends. I can’t imagine any ex-Institute people that would be…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Normal. It’s a strange place.”

“You haven’t talked about it much.”

I nodded. “Let’s go talk to Eric.”

“Don’t want to talk about it now either, huh?”

I looked at those dark eyes that knew too much about me, by far. How dare he read what was inside my soul? Talents. They were all the same. “I want to see Eric.”

Brushing past him, I headed for the door, but he caught my shoulder in one hand.

“Cat,” he said, “we’re on the same side. Remember? I wouldn’t have taken that pill otherwise.”

“Fine,” I said. “Now, can we please go find Eric?” His hand slipped from my shoulder and I felt both irritated at him and guilty for being sharp. “I’m sorry.”

His face was neutral. “Let’s go.”

We headed out into the clearing, and I made for the Quonset hut. It looked like the only game in town. As we got closer, I noted that it had seen better days, with broken windows and patches of rust adorning the semi-circular building. This whole place had an air of decay, as though it had been unmaintained for a while. In woods like this, it probably wasn’t even that long. Nature has a way of re-assimilating civilization.

There was a peeling door in the center of the short end of the hut, closest to us. I took a deep breath and put my hand on the handle. It turned under my fingers, and the door opened inward.

The man who stood in the doorway wasn’t Eric. He was middle-aged and grizzled looking, and although he hadn’t shaved lately, his hair was buzzed. His hooded eyes sunk deep into his face under craggy eyebrows. He was surrounded by a thick, foggy aura, like his own personal storm cloud.

“Good evening,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

The grizzled man turned out to be named Miller. I thought he looked familiar, suggesting Jamie’s theory about ex-Institute people might have some merit.

Four people waited for us in the Quonset hut, but Eric was missing. One of the four was Justine, who looked out of place in her high-heeled boots and tight satin shirt. The others were all dressed in what I can best describe as mountain man couture. The last few years in the Pacific Northwest had left me intimately familiar with this style, having a wardrobe derivative of it myself. Jamie stood out almost as much as Justine in his leather jacket and huge black boots.