Talent to Burn (Hidden Talent #1) (21 page)

“What happened here?” Eric asked.

“We were inside and the roof burst into flames,” I said.

“When?” he demanded.

“About an hour ago.”

His face paled. “That’s about when I was putting the fire out. What does this mean?” he said, turning to Miller.

Miller drew in a long breath. “I can think of a number of explanations. Let’s go inside and talk.”

We trailed into the Quonset hut, and seated ourselves along the long table. Miller began to lay out the options that I’d considered earlier.

“The fire could have started for some unrelated reason. If it was a sudden fire, then the cabin could have been struck by lightning.”

Jamie shook his head. “The lightning and thunder had finished by then.”

“Second, Eric started the fire without meaning to. Maybe when he extinguished the fire at the training ground, that fire had to go somewhere, and in this case, that was the cabin.”

“Why the cabin?” my brother asked.

“I don’t know. Eric, were you thinking about your sister?”

“Possibly. I don’t remember. I’ve been thinking about her since she arrived.”

I didn’t know how to feel about that, so I pushed my feelings down into a box inside, the same place I had jammed my feelings about Jamie and the day’s events for the moment. Now I was hollow, empty, and could listen to what I knew Miller would say next.

“Third, someone else started the fire.” Miller turned to look at Jamie and me, where we sat side by side, not touching and a self-conscious couple of feet apart. “Is that possible? What were you doing when the fire started?”

Jamie said, “Nothing,” and I said, “Relaxing,” at the same time.

Miller nodded. “Catrina, your Talent isn’t starting fires?”

I couldn’t help it. I groaned. “I’ve never manifested a Talent. Have I been tested? Yes. A thousand times. I don’t have any Talent that they could measure or provoke.”

“There is a strong genetic component to Talent,” Miller said, smiling. “Jamie, you?”

Jamie shrugged and rolled his head from side to side on his shoulders. “I have some Talent”—
hah!
I thought—“but starting fires has never been part of it. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t anything to do with me.”

Miller turned back to me. “Tell me more about you, Catrina. You have the aura of Talent, so I find it hard to believe there isn’t something there. You say you were tested. Did they see anything—overt, latent, anything at all?”

“I’ve had dreams for a long time. They never have any correlation to reality. They don’t predict anything. They don’t show anything in detail.”

“What do you dream of?”

I looked up at the ceiling and wished the ground would open up and swallow me whole. “I dream of fire. Almost always of fire.”

“Ah.”

Jamie said, “Are you going to tell them about Herb?”

I hadn’t been, and I was instantly furious at his betrayal, however minor.

“Who’s Herb?” Eric said.

“He’s clairvoyant,” said Jamie. “He reads objects, and to a lesser extent, people.”

I sighed. “We went to see him with your medal, Eric.”

Eric stood up. “You have my St. Jude medal?”

Hooking my finger into the change pocket of my jeans, I dug out the medal and offered it to him. Eric reached for it eagerly, kissed it, and tucked it in his pocket.

“When did you get so religious?” I said, surprised.

“Just because you don’t believe in anything, including yourself, doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t,” Eric said, and he flushed dark red.

“What did Herb tell you?” Miller said, his voice mild and quiet.

“He said I had a Talent. He didn’t say what it was.” I stared off into the middle distance, not wanting to look at anyone in the room. I didn’t want to talk about this, but I had no choice.

“Did he give you any hint as to what it might be?”

“No.”

“I think we must face the inevitable conclusion that, like your brother, you have a Talent for fire.”

Shit. I closed my mind down, refusing to think about what it might mean, for me, for my future. “If that’s the case…it looks like I have as much control over it as he does.”

“I welcome you to join our training sessions.”

I nodded, tightly, my jaw locked.

“Right now, why don’t we get something to eat? I think we all need to wind down a little.”

The others moved around me, making preparations, going in and out of the kitchen.

I stared down at the rutted wood of the table. “LB luvs AJ 4eva” was centered between my hands, and after a while I began to run my fingers over it mindlessly. The world retreated while my mind ran a thousand miles an hour, going over what might happen next, what I could do to control it. How to get my life back in order.

A brown beer bottle, cold with sweat, appeared between my hands with a clunk as it hit the table. I looked up as Jamie swung a long leg over the chair across from me.

“Everybody’s cooking,” he said. “Are you doing okay?”

I studied his face, his expression open and concerned. I could still feel where the stubble on his jaw had rubbed against my neck, and a twinge of desire echoed between my legs. I wanted him again. Over and over again.

“Not really.”

I watched his lips move as he said, “All those years when you wanted a Talent…it wasn’t like this, was it?”

“I don’t want to kill anyone.” As if the floodgates opened, I began to sob, awful wrenching sounds that seemed to come from some other person. Not again.

In moments he was beside me and I was in his arms, weeping—and not the romantic kind, but the sweaty, heaving, gasping kind. I burrowed my face into his neck, smelling his sweat and sex, still on us both.

“I don’t want a Talent,” I babbled into his skin.

“Ah, but you did, didn’t you? All those years of claiming you wanted a nice calm life and a white picket fence. What you wanted was a huge Talent, a Talent for making, a Talent for healing.” His voice was kind, and he patted my hair as he spoke.

“Not a Talent for burning, for destroying, for setting the world on fire.” My tears dried up, leaving me damp, cold and empty.

“Oh, baby.” He rocked me, back and forth. “Fire is light, and warmth, and survival. Control it, and you’ll be a miracle bringer.”

I buried my face again, breathing him in, comforting myself with his scent. With a final hiccup, I sat back, scrubbing at my face with my sleeve.

“Better?”

I nodded, gulping. “There’s no going back.”

“That’s right. But somewhere, a door is opening…” He smiled at me, and it lit up his whole face from within. “Come on, darlin’. Talents need fuel. Let’s get some gruel into you.”

I laughed despite myself, and followed him into the kitchen.

Crying had unlocked something in me, and I found myself chatting away at dinner, in between stuffing my face, suddenly starving.

I sat next to Jamie, which was part of the reason for the warm sense of belonging I felt. He ate one handed, and the other squeezed my thigh under the table. To begin with it lent comfort and moral support. After we ate and talked with the others for a while, he started kneading my inner thigh gently, sending reminders of earlier in the day through my mind and lower body.

“I’ve never asked,” Miller said, “but how did you end up at the Institute? Eric, Catrina?”

Eric’s hand tightened on his fork, and Justine, who had been quiet this whole time, put hers on his arm.

“Mom died,” he said. “God knows what Dad was doing.”

I bit my tongue, because I wanted to hear his version of the story, despite the urge to defend my dad—the only family I’d known for most of my life.

“They split up when Catrina was born. Mom had been working at the Institute as a remote viewer. She got sick when I was eight. Catrina was only little.”

“I don’t remember her at all,” I said. It had haunted me for years, especially after Dad died, too.
 

“They had a school at the Institute, for Talented kids, kids without families. They took us in, raised us, gave us everything, trained us.” His eyes got a faraway look. “I loved it there. The program brought out the best in me.”

“What about you, Cat?” Miller said. “Obviously you left a bit earlier than your brother.”

I took over the tale. “One night, when I was eleven and Eric was thirteen, a man came into my room. He climbed in the window. It was our dad. He’d come for us. I left with him.”

Eric’s face showed the flicker of a sneer. “I didn’t. Why would I? He left us behind. He didn’t care about us.”

“Dad didn’t know Mom had died, but as soon as he found out, he came to get us.”

“Oh yeah? Where was he, all those years?”

“He was in the services, fighting in the Middle East. He didn’t leave us deliberately. Mom didn’t like him being in the military. She moved while he was posted overseas and never told him where we were.”

“How do you know that’s true?”

I shrugged, helplessly. “That’s what he told me, like Mom told you what she told you.”

“The truth is probably somewhere in between,” Jamie said, from the sidelines.

My tale continued. “He was in the military for years, in Special Ops. When he got out, he heard from a friend that Mom had died. It took him some time to track us down, and when he did, he didn’t like what he found out.”

“We were in a good place. She made sure we were looked after.”

I could not stop the involuntary shudder that rolled over me.

“What, Catrina?” Miller said.

“It wasn’t a good place for me.”

“What did they do to you?”

“Nothing much.” I kept my voice deliberately neutral. Kids’ memories were often distorted. It was a long time ago. “They tested me a lot. I never fit in with the other kids, because I didn’t have a Talent. I was happier when Dad came and got me.”

“I know nothing about your life after that,” Eric said.

Words came spilling out, the things I’d never discussed with anyone all these years. “The Institute was my legal guardian, and I was kidnapped by my own father. We spent my entire childhood on the run. I still don’t even know my own social security number. We never stayed in one place for long. Dad took whatever jobs he could—farm work, tending bar, working on the road—and schooled me himself.

“Dad was convinced that the Institute was evil, and that they were coming after us. He taught me how to run, how to hide in plain sight. How to live undocumented. How to hunt, and fish, and shoot, and fight. How to shoot every kind of gun he could lay his hands on. How to make IEDs—improvised explosive devices. How to kill a man in his sleep without flinching.”

The room went very quiet, and everyone stared at me.

Chapter Twenty-One

I turned my head to assess Jamie’s reaction. Amazingly, he was grinning from ear to ear, his eyes shining.

“I never knew you were such a troublemaker,” he said. It was not the reaction I had expected. I should have known he’d be delighted that I, too, knew how to walk on the wrong side of the law. Perhaps one day he’d understand that was exactly why I wanted nothing to do with any of it.

I continued, “When I was seventeen, Dad started coughing. He’d never been a smoker, but God knows what he was exposed to in the Middle East, or at any one of the shitty jobs he worked at all those years. He faded away before my eyes.”

“You were seventeen?” Darla said. “Imagine that, Tiffany, being all on your own at seventeen.” The girl did not respond with more than an eye roll.

“What did you do then?” Eric asked.

I shrugged. “The same as before. After a while, without Dad there to talk about the evils of government and the Institute, I started to think about settling down. They’d never come after us. Why would they? I had nothing they wanted. When I was eighteen, I got my GED. I discovered it’s not easy to make a life for yourself when you’ve always been undocumented. I’m like an illegal immigrant. I don’t have a birth certificate.”

“They must have it at the Institute, somewhere.”

I didn’t want to think about some piece of myself still inside that place. “Probably. Anyway, I started feeling a little safer. I stopped having nightmares every night about the Institute coming after me. What could they do to me, now I was an adult, after all? And then one night I came home and they had been there…I went with Jamie, and the rest is history.”

The temperature had plummeted in here while I talked. I folded my arms around myself, shivering.

“Why didn’t your dad trust the government?” Jamie asked.

“He fought in wars that he believed were about politics and not morality. Dad was a black and white kind of guy. He spent his life killing people for a cause he didn’t believe in, and he couldn’t stand his own hypocrisy. After that he hated the government, the military, and most of all, himself.”

“Sounds like a hard upbringing.”

I shook my head. “He was a good parent. Paranoid, yes, but I never wanted for anything: food, a roof over my head, someone to look after me.”