Talent to Burn (Hidden Talent #1) (26 page)

I headed down the corridor to the other guestrooms. All of the doors stood open except for one. I knocked on it.

“Eric?”

Justine opened the door. “He’s still asleep.”

“I came up with a plan. We need to get moving.” I filled her in on the Canada story.

She nodded. “It makes sense,” she said. “Mexico is too far away. I tried again last night to convince him he should go back to the Institute, but he’s dead against the idea.”

A pang of guilt tweaked at my heart, but I was comforted by the fact that Justine agreed with me, even if she didn’t know it yet.

“I’ll wake him up. I’ll see you in the dining room in half an hour?”

I headed down for a second attempt at breakfast, but the smell of eggs set out on the sideboard turned my stomach. Opening the French doors, I found an uncomfortable iron chair on the patio and waited. Thirty minutes dragged by before Eric and Justine appeared.

In the garage, I picked out a yellow Chevy to match my cowardice, and while the others loaded their bags, I hit send on the text I’d composed while waiting for them to come down to breakfast. It read simply,
Now.

Wiping the cold sweat out of my eyes with the back of my hand, I climbed into the driver’s seat and headed down the driveway.

I paused at the gate to look both ways. No one in sight. I fiddled with the stereo before looking both ways again.

“There’s nothing coming,” Eric said from beside me.

“I hate this radio station,” I said. “Damn listening to dance music in the morning.” Still nothing. I pulled out, headed in the same direction Ryder had taken yesterday, hoping they’d find us.

Through the quiet streets in this expensive subdivision, it was obvious to me that no one followed. Butterflies danced in my stomach until we pulled onto the beltway, and then the adrenaline began to drain from my system. As I took I-95 north, my hands trembled on the wheel. With each mile that passed my mood lightened. I’d escaped from the weight of what was probably an awful decision. We were going to Canada.

I glanced over at Eric. He stared through the windshield, watching the world go by. He looked less stressed than he had for a few days. Like me, my brother liked having a plan.

A muffled bang broke my train of thought. I swerved uncontrollably across four lanes of traffic, hit the edge of the shoulder, and uncomprehending, watched the world turn over and over and over until I hit my head on the roof of the car and everything went black.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Opening my eyes didn’t change the incredible pounding in my head. My hand went up to my forehead to touch the center of the pain and found a bandage. I lay on something—a bed, by the feel of it—and considered moving my head to see more of the room than the darkened ceiling. It didn’t seem like a good idea right now. The room lurched a little and I closed my eyes again.

Time passed. I dozed on and off. Once I woke up and had to be sick, which I managed to do off the side of the bed rather than on myself. This felt like an achievement.

Later—an hour? A day?—someone turned the light on, making me curl into a fetal ball like a night flower. Hands picked up my wrist, checked my pulse, then moved on to put a cuff on my arm and take my blood pressure. The tight cuff on my arm made me sick again. The hands took my shoulders, rolled me onto my back, and pried one eye and then the other open enough to shine a bright light into each. I moaned.

“You’ll live,” a woman’s voice said brusquely. “Your pupils are the same size, no bleeding inside or out, no broken bones. A minor concussion. You did well.”

“Jamie,” I said.

“I don’t know who that is, but your brother Eric is also fine. He has a broken collarbone. You should rest. You can see him later.”

The light retreated, although she left dim lights on in the room. They didn’t keep me awake.

Later, she was back with Jell-O and a cup of apple juice. I wondered why the kid-meal until I threw it up again. Despite that, I started feeling better and even sat up on my own between naps.

At last, I woke feeling clearer. Like death, but clear. This time I made it to the bathroom in the corner before I threw up.

My surroundings looked more like a Spartan hospital than a prison cell, but the door was locked from the outside. I explored. No windows, no clocks. I didn’t know what time or day it was.

I wore a hospital robe, open in the back, over my underpants. My clothes turned up in a plastic bag in the bottom of the closet, folded carefully. I took them out. Although the cargo pants were fine, the black T-shirt was stiff with dried blood, and my hand went again to the bandage on my head. Bar work taught me facial cuts always bleed like hell and here was personal proof. There were no mirrors in the room to check how gruesome I looked, but I had a feeling the answer was “quite”.

I took my weak pathetic self back to bed, and the next time I woke up, it was because the woman whose voice and hands I already knew was back, this time with sandwiches, which I ate. And felt human.

“Coffee?” I said, my voice cracking.

“Let’s see how you do first. But you seem to be doing a lot better. Are you well enough for a visitor?”

I nodded, hoping for Eric, but it was Ryder. Now I knew for sure where I was. My mind came to life and I was suddenly cold.

“Catrina,” he said, pulling up an uncomfortable-looking visitor chair.

I looked toward the woman but the door clicked shut behind her.

“I’d like to apologize for the method of your arrival,” he said. “We wanted you to get farther away from the mansion so as not to arouse suspicion. We had planned on catching you at your first stop, but one of my men got a little carried away.”

“What happened?”

“He shot out your tire.” Ryder’s jaw pressed closed and something inside it twitched. In another man, I would have said it was a muscle, but in him it could have been titanium gears. “He has been disciplined.”

I wondered what that meant, but I nodded dumbly. The gray matter still wasn’t at a capacity enabling wit.

“Are you up to walking? I’d like to take you to see Eric.”

I swung my legs off the edge of the bed, ignoring the way the room lurched and spun around me. “I need a shirt, but yes.”

Ryder spoke to the nurse and she brought me a scrub top. They waited outside while I dressed myself cautiously, slowly, like an ancient woman. After that, I wanted to lie down again, but I wanted to see Eric more.

For all his cold demeanor, Ryder offered me his arm. I shook my head. It would be a cold day in hell before I accepted his help again, and I didn’t want him touching me. Instead, I shuffled slowly down a maze of gray hallways, a few steps behind him like an oppressed wife in a primitive civilization.

Leaning on the wall made me notice the color-coded strips that ran along it. Medical was red, apparently, as that line led us to the elevator, and other colored strips ran off in different directions.

We got in the elevator and I watched as Ryder swiped a card and pushed a button many levels down. From the outside, the building had only looked to be about five stories high, but there were at least twenty floors on the elevator panel. The car headed deep underground, until at last the doors slid open once again.

The wall stripes down here were dark amorphous gray. Ryder led me through a door, past a desk staffed by a group of people that I couldn’t pigeonhole either as guards or nurses, and stopped at another door. Again, he swiped his card, and swung the door open.

“I’ll come back in a little while,” he said, and I went into the room.

Eric sat at a small steel desk, writing. His left arm was in a sling. Small mercy that it wasn’t his dominant hand. Guilt surged through me. He turned to face me, and gave me a hesitant smile.

“Hi,” I said.

“They told me you were coming. Are you all right?”

“Not much in here to damage, apparently,” I said, touching my head. “Do you mind if I sit?”

“Not at all.” He gestured at the bed.

I sat. “How are you doing?”

He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “I’m not going to kill anyone else. They’ve been feeding me Talent-suppressing drugs. When they want me to do something, I will get the amplifiers, and at the end of the experiment I get the suppressors again.”

“And that’s working?”

He nodded. “I’m in control of my Talent again. It’s not much of a way to live, but I’m fairly sure I won’t accidentally burn anyone to death. Mixed in with all of that, they have me on a good dose of antidepressants, and a nice sedative to sleep. Better living through chemicals.” His mouth formed itself into the shape of a smile.

“At least you’re alive.” I sat back against the wall, and put my knees up in front of me. “How’s your arm?”

“My arm’s fine. My collarbone, on the other hand, hurts like you wouldn’t believe. I can’t take any worthwhile painkillers with all the other drugs, or so they tell me.” He paused, looking at my head. “You look worse off than me.”

“This is nothing,” I said, touching it, hiding my wince.

“Cat,” he said, “you did the right thing, bringing me back here. I’m not mad at you.”

 
I froze. “How did you know it was me?” After all my subterfuge.

He smiled weakly. “I guessed. I know you. Always trying to do the right thing, even after all these years.”

I felt like such a fool. “You forgive me?” My face hurt with the tension in my jaw, and my heart was breaking.

“It’s fine. It’s not as bad as I made it out to be in my head. And this way, no one else has to die.”

I nodded. He was right. I’d done the right thing. So why did I feel like Judas?

“What will you do now? Go back to…where was it you said you were living?”

The world fell away from me as I considered properly for the first time a life without fear of being hunted. A life I’d dreamed of for years. A life alone. I wondered again where the hell Jamie had gone. Had he taken off somewhere, or was he keeping his head down, knowing Dorian wouldn’t be happy with him? The fact that he hadn’t cared enough to call me back, even to yell at me, didn’t exactly inspire me with confidence.

Enough of that. I brought my focus back to Eric.

“Can I come and visit you?” I asked. I couldn’t believe I was considering voluntarily coming back here. But for Eric, anything. We’d been too long apart.

“I’d like that,” he said. “Would you do something else for me?”

“Sure,” I said. “What’s that?”

“Can you ask if Justine will be allowed to visit me? I haven’t seen her yet. They told me she’s fine, but you’re the first visitor I’ve had.”

I nodded. “I’m sure Ryder can tee something up.”

As though his name had summoned him, a knock came at the door and then it opened immediately.

“I’ll have to interrupt you now,” he said. “Eric needs to rest and heal. As do you, Cat.”

“Okay.” I left my brother with a brief hug. I was glad to have him back in my life, even if it was to be in these strange jail cell-style visits.

As I followed Ryder back to the elevator, my mind began spinning with questions coming from what Eric asked me.

“Ryder,” I said, “am I free to go?”

“Soon,” he said. “My boss wants to talk to you first. We’d like for you to get those stitches out before you go. A couple more days, I think.”

So they wouldn’t keep me here against my will. A river of ideas floated through my brain, none of them catching hold. Where would I go next? I literally didn’t know where I would sleep when I left the Institute, or what I would do. Amazing.

I daydreamed all the way through the corridors back to the medical area.

“I’m sorry about the accommodations,” Ryder said. “I’ll see if I can get a real room assigned to you for the remainder of your stay.”

He wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. It was hard to remember the fear I’d felt when he chased us in the casino. I wondered why I’d thought him ruthless and terrifying. His oddly stern appearance had something to do with it, that white-blond hair and the piercing blue eyes, the military posture. Probably my long-held fear of anything authoritarian, and Jamie’s opinion of him hadn’t helped.

Later, an anonymous assistant escorted me to my new quarters. Someone had left me a pile of clothes—more scrubs by the look of it—and a plate of sandwiches. Starvation prevented me from noticing much else until I ate, and then I took in the plain cot, desk, and door to a bathroom. Less like a jail cell and more like a college dorm this time. Everything was depressingly olive drab and regimented. Whatever I did with my new life, it wouldn’t be military—that was for sure.

I slept again, and woke wondering what day or time it was. Not many clocks here, and my phone had vanished sometime between the car accident and waking up in the medical area. After a shower, I felt the closest to normal I had for days, and I began to get restless.

I tried the door and stepped back, surprised, when it opened. There was a swipe card lock on the outside of it like all the others here, but the LED on it lay extinguished.

Sticking my head out, I looked both ways down the hallway. Similar doors to mine lay in both directions and I knew in one direction you turned to get to the elevator. I went the other way, and turned back to pull the door closed behind me. The olive green door held the number 412. Here I was a number, not a name.