Courage (Mark of Nexus) (10 page)

The Scion Slice was packed. I stood close to the entrance, thankful to stretch my legs after the long drive, and waited for Grandma. She promised Henry would come when we spoke on the phone, but I wasn't confident he'd show. Faye had him by the balls, and he was paranoid as hell about it.

A redheaded waitress slipped between me and the families in line to be seated, holding a tray over her head. Spicy aromas trailed the air behind her, and I almost followed. When was the last time I'd eaten? Sometime before Gail hijacked my body to—

“Oh, sweetie, there you are.”

I glanced over my shoulder, surprised to find Grandma so close without me noticing. “Sorry, I was…”

“Thinking about Rena?” she offered with a grin. “That's quite all right.”

If only.

We moved up in line without need for conversation. I'd been brief on the phone, but she'd had her own suspicions regarding the situation. Henry wouldn't return to Ohio without a reason, especially with Grandpa Edwin in tow. Faye had to have a hand in this. We just didn't know how.

Once we made it to the hostess' podium, a wave of anxiety crept into my consciousness. It spilled into guilt and spiked in urgency as the seconds ticked by. I barely had a chance to register the emotions before someone wrenched the door open behind us.
Henry
.

Grandma dipped her head and touched my arm. She'd felt it, too.

Edwin banged over the threshold in his walker, muttering something about parking jobs as Henry limped in behind him. One second, they were both faceless silhouettes in the doorway—the next, they were here. In person. Staring us down with expectation in their eyes.

“Hey, guys,” a pretty brunette in a green polo called, ducking down to fish out four menus. “How are we doing tonight?”

“What?” Grandpa Edwin asked in his familiar, obnoxious decibel.

She started to repeat herself, but Grandma waved her off. “We're just fine, honey. Thank you.”

The girl smiled. She couldn't have been older than sixteen. “Would you prefer a booth or a table?”

“A booth in the corner, please,” Henry said, stepping forward. “And if we could draw the shades, that would be great.”

She faltered, confusion masking the eagerness she'd held before, but she gave him a quick smile. “Uh, sure. Just a second.”

With that, she spun on her heel and went to scan the dining room. Her ponytail swished back and forth, and I tried my best to keep my expression neutral. Drawn shades? Was Henry that nervous?

When she came back, it didn't take long for us to be seated and give our orders. The place might've been busy, but it was efficient. There was a reason it had been in business for over forty years.

“How are those injections working out for you, Wallace?” Henry asked, attempting to make small talk—not that neurology could be considered small. He'd written me a new prescription over winter break, and after years of trial and error, we'd finally started using denser injection needles to break my skin. It worked, for the most part.

“I can knock out a couple of clusters a week,” I told him. “Maybe we can up the supply next time.”

“We'll look into it.”

We, I assumed, meant his former partner—the girlfriend he'd left in Virginia. Actually, that was a point. “Why didn't Jaya come up here with you?”

He bristled and looked down to trace the table scratches with his forefinger. “The move was unexpected.”

Grandpa Edwin snorted and turned to study the heavy shades blocking the window.

“Why?” I asked. “Did someone force you to come back here?”

“Define force.”

“Henry,” Grandma cut in, leaning across the table. “Let's just get down to brass tacks here. What is your involvement in our sister's affairs?”

“I'm…” He opened his mouth, shut it, and retrieved the handkerchief from his pocket. After two quick swipes, he folded it back into a rectangle and opened his mouth again. “I'm…”

Nervous. Worried. Hiding something…

He met my eyes and swallowed. “First, I should apologize for your visit last week. You kids showed up at a difficult time, and I…I wasn't prepared to answer your questions.”

“Are you prepared now?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

It felt weird to be sitting here, practically interrogating my great-uncle. Despite being well into my twenties, I still felt like I didn't belong at the adult table.

“Somewhat,” he answered.

“Good.”

Henry picked up a shaker full of weird, unidentifiable flakes and twisted it in his hands. “She contacted me in January. I assume it was after your incident in the forest.”

She, being Faye. Did he think the place was bugged or something? “In regards to what?”

He nodded toward the Mark of Nexus on my forearm and shifted his gaze back toward his father. “She assumed I—well,
we
—would have the answers she needed.”

Grandpa Edwin's brow furrowed, and he turned to scowl at the shades. He was giving off the guilt vibe, too, but it was buried under a slew of other things.
Resentment, bitterness, detachment…

“Is there something I'm missing here?” Grandma asked.

Noise continued to buzz around us, making it impossible to distinguish one conversation from the other. Henry leaned in and gave her a reluctant gist of his findings. The Dynari, Augari, and Nullari—how they relate to one another and what we knew about them. When he mentioned the Nexus, the color drained from her face.

“Then, Rena is…”

“An Augari,” I answered with a nod. “You were right when you thought something felt off about her. She was augmenting your power.”

“But, how do we know all of this now?”

No one said anything. I didn't think it was my place to explain, and apparently, Henry was having a hard time with it.

“My mother bore the mark,” Edwin wheezed in irritation. “She'd bonded with some Augari boy named Luke, who didn't have a hold on his ability. One night, after too many drinks, he got into a fight with her brother—ended up surging more power into him than his body could handle. Killed him instantly.

“Mother couldn't look at Luke the same after that. They parted ways, and the families all came to an understanding. Knowledge of each other's existence was dangerous. Intermingling was too much of a risk. So, they did everything in their power to bury the knowledge with their generation. I wouldn't have—”

He paused and coughed so hard it rattled in his chest. “I wouldn't have known a thing if it weren't for her journal, so I kept her wishes. I didn't tell any of my children, either. And if this one”—he cast a weary glance in Henry's direction—”hadn't put me in a home for a few months, he would've never found it in my things.”

“You know my career kept me too busy to look after you at first,” Henry said. “And it wasn't like Clara had the means to keep you.”

“Keep me.” Edwin snorted. “I'm not a dog.”

“I offered,” Grandma told Henry, her jaw tight. “You said he wouldn't be comfortable here. You said you were taking care of it. You never mentioned putting him in another home.”

“It was only until I got the practice going. We ended up hiring a live-in healthcare worker.”

“As opposed to family,” Grandma huffed.

I tuned them out. The conversation had gotten off track, and we'd overlooked a very important piece of information. An Augari
killed
a Dynari. I didn't remember reading that. Then again, we never made it through the whole journal. I just assumed we saw the pertinent information.

Though, Rena
did
tell me to read the journal. Did she see it?
Is that what's getting to her?

“—called and wanted two things,” Henry droned on. “Information and cooperation. I told her what I could remember about the Nexus, but it wasn't enough. She seemed so interested, so focused. I was having a hard enough time believing she'd come back from the dead. Now, all of a sudden, I was supposed to be an expert on something I'd never even seen with my own eyes. I told her I'd look for the journal again.”

Faye…

I clenched my hands to keep from gripping anything that might break. “Didn't you think to ask her what she was going to do with this information?”

Henry shook his head. “Clara had told me about you and Rena. I just assumed Fa—I mean,
she—
was interested in the phenomenon. It wasn't until a few weeks later, when her offers turned to demands, that I questioned her motives.

“She wanted me to move back to Ohio with Dad. She said she regretted the years she’d missed with her family and wanted my help with some big research endeavor. The offer was nice, but I wasn't about to uproot my life just to toil away at some project she wouldn't explain. I turned her down, and…she resorted to threats.”

His words sank in as the waitress brought our drinks. Faye had tried to lure him here under the pretense of goodwill, when what she really wanted was to exploit his knowledge and abilities. No shocker there.

Grandma leaned in again, once the coast was clear. “So, she used that to bring you back here. What've you done since then?”

Henry was quiet for a moment, tendrils of shame twisting between us. “We've been working on somatically advanced genetic experiments—SAGES, as she calls them. At first, we went over the ethical and legal consequences of gene therapy versus enhancement, how to approach trial participants, ways to transfer the genetic material with minimal risk, et cetera. Then we considered supplemental measures, how we would arrange follow-ups, ways we would re-educate the—”

My brain reached overload. “Are you serious?”

“I didn't have a choice,” he insisted, lowering his voice. “If I didn't help her, she'd go after Jaya.”

I ran my hands through my hair in an attempt to stay calm. “Why did you wait this long to tell us? If you were under duress, you should've asked for help.”

His pupils turned to pinpricks, shifting back and forth. “There's nothing more dangerous than someone fighting for what they believe in, Wallace. And Faye thinks she's fighting for the peace of all mankind. She would've hurt you—all of you. She's not the same woman she used to be. “

“So don't help her,” I said. “Sabotage the whole thing.”

He shook his head. “The project had too much momentum by the time I got involved. We're talking decades of work, here. At least with me there, we know what we're up against.”

“What we're up against?” Grandpa Edwin interrupted, lifting his brows in disbelief. “You mean you or
that woman
?”

Grandma frowned. “Dad, she's still your daughter.”

He stiffened. “My daughter is dead—been dead twenty-some years now.”

Two realizations struck me at that moment. One, Grandpa Edwin wasn't as decrepit and senile as he'd always let on. And two, serious lines were being drawn here.

“Regardless,” Henry continued, addressing me, “I'm here now, so let's figure out what we're going to do about this. You, Rena, and Cole are prophesized to ruin their plans, right? How?”

Like I knew.

“Well, we have the obvious,” Grandma cut in. “Among the three of them, there's augmented strength, speed, empathy, and healing abilities. That's not something to take lightly.”

I nodded and added, “Plus, Rena can pull my power sometimes.”

“True,” Henry acknowledged. “But is that cause for Faye to take so many precautions? She doesn't know the Augari can overpower us. After she revealed her plans, I claimed to have lost the journal. My memory's not what it used to be, you know? I misplaced it, and the details are sketchy…”

“One good thing ya did,” Edwin grunted.

Henry paused and hefted his shoulders in a sigh. “You'll have to excuse our father. He's angry with me for getting him involved in this.”

“How is he involved?” I asked. “Other than having been forced to move.”

“Power sensing.” Edwin sneered. “He let her drug me, let her monitor my sleep with those whatchamathingies in her lab, and then he let her use that connection to field the ribbons.”

“Ribbons?”

Grandma leaned over and lowered her voice. “Dad's power is unique in that it's active while he's asleep, almost as if his subconscious is transported to another plane. There, he sees ribbons wherever he looks. Silver for humans; blue for Dynari…”

“Red for Nullari, and gold for Augari,” Edwin added. “I just never told you about 'em.”

She frowned. “I see. Well, anyway, if his mind can get a grasp on one of those ribbons, it follows it. As far as necessary—through buildings, across rivers—until his soul mingles with that of the individual. So, not only can he identify someone, he can almost pinpoint their location.”

My brows knit. “Then, that's how they—”

“Found the girl,” he finished. “Yeah. Against my will.”

“My sister said she wanted to visit her father,” Henry insisted. “Who was I to deny her that?”

Silence.

“Anyway.” He dabbed his forehead. “She has three Dynari at her disposal, including herself. That gives them searing and rejuvenating smoke, visions, mental manipulation, microscopic modification, and some kind of health immunity. So, why are they worried?”

I took a swig of water. “Because of whatever Gail saw in the vision, I'm guessing.”