Born to Darkness (2 page)

“Go. We’re go,” Diaz told Mac, adding, “Incoming,” as Dr. Bach chimed in.

Stop
.

He wasn’t talking to Mac and his voice wasn’t coming through her earpiece. It was inside of her head, and definitely in the joker’s head, too. Reverberating, it echoed and permeated, and even though she’d shielded against it, she felt it all the way through her skull and down her spine. It was scary as shit—or it would’ve been, had she not been on Bach’s team.

“I’m gonna fucking
kill
you, you lying
bitch
!” Their joker was back on his feet and threatening his wife sooner than Mac had expected, which was way not good.

STOP
.

Bach got louder and stronger, and this time there was no warning from Diaz—only a sharp crackle of static. And Mac thought she was fully prepped and shielded, but she must not have been, because the force of the word hit her, too. It lifted her up off her feet and she hung there for a moment with her brain on fire.

Scrambled
and on fire, so that when Bach finally let go, she couldn’t snap back quickly enough to keep herself from tumbling down the stairs. She should have tucked and rolled. Instead she
flailed her legs like a cartoon character building up speed to run away from an anvil dropping on her head. She felt something in her ankle give as she landed wrong on the edge of one of the stairs.

The pain was hot and fierce and after that first jolt she guarded, so that she wouldn’t project it—not just for Diaz’s protection, but because it never paid to let a jokering villain know that you had been weakened in any way.

She tumbled and bounced all the way to the bottom, landing with a thud, flat on her back with enough force to knock the air out of her lungs. Still, she managed to keep her guard up and solid.

Never let ’em see you cry
. It was her mantra, her mission statement, even back before she’d known she was special.

Besides, this was completely her fault. She should have stayed ready. She should have expected Bach to hit even harder.

On the other hand, the noise she’d made as she’d fallen had drawn tonight’s vill away from his defenseless family, and he limped into the hall where he spotted her as she scrambled to her feet.

“
What
did you
do
to me?
Who
the hell are you?” he shouted, and even though he was more than ten feet away, it was as if he’d hit her full in the face, with a right hook hard enough to knock her down and make her see stars, and then another and another and another.

And oh,
this
was a new one in the craziest-fucking-shit-she’d-ever-seen category. His words packed a punch—literally.

“
Answer
me!” Boom. He’d made her nose bleed with that one.

But here came Bach and Diaz, thundering up the stairs.

And this time Diaz’s voice came through Mac’s headset over the static, even as she saw his mouth move. “Again.”

She braced for Bach to blast the son of a bitch, to knock him senseless and pin him into place with an
ENOUGH
.

Even with her mental shield firmly in place, Mac knew that her brain was going to sizzle at this proximity, but it did way more than that. It was another full-on deep-fry, and in that fraction of a second before she lost her ability to reason, she realized that their
bad guy wasn’t just a bullet-bender, he was a
force
-bender. He had the power to reflect the mental attacks that were thrown at him, and to blast whatever he received back at the sender—which resulted in anyone around said sender receiving a double dose of that very same force.

Even Diaz lost his footing at that one. Bach, however, didn’t falter.

As Mac’s vision returned, she saw him realize that they were going to have to take Nathan down the old-fashioned way. With good old physical might.

Bach threw himself forward into a roundhouse kick that would have knocked out a normal man, but their joker barely even staggered.

It was clear he felt no pain—another common side effect of the drug. But that didn’t mean that the man wouldn’t eventually shut down and out—if Bach just kept on delivering blow after blow after punishing blow. He would. It was just going to take a while to drop him.

But he started in on his questioning barrage, even as Bach hit him again.

“Get
out
of my
house
! You
think
you can
stop me
?”

With the addict’s words directed at Bach, Mac felt only a series of glancing blows. She also felt genuine surprise and even a burst of pain from Bach, which, in turn, surprised the shit out of
her
.

In all of the years she’d known Dr. Joseph Bach—over a dozen of ’em now—Mac had never,
ever
felt him let down his guard. Not like this.

And for the first time in a long time, Mac felt a sliver of fear. The idea that this untrained drug user, this joker, this lowlife unskilled addict, had achieved power that even Bach—a true master and the most powerful Greater-Than in the country—couldn’t shield himself against …?

It was pretty damn terrifying.

And even though Diaz didn’t have Mac’s advanced empathy, she could see that he’d picked up on Bach’s surprise, too, because
he tried to throw himself on the figurative grenade—springing up and grabbing hold of the bad guy. No doubt he was testing a theory that this type of power-bender might be more vulnerable to something like his own carefully controlled direct-contact electrical shock.

It had taken Mac years to learn to shield herself against this particular power that Diaz brought to the hand-to-hand-combat table. She knew from countless sparring sessions that the greater the amount of body contact and the tighter the bear hug, the higher the voltage of juice Diaz could deliver.

It felt like being tasered.

Here and now, Diaz had scored a direct hit on Nathan and even managed to tackle him to the ground, but his theory was proven dead wrong as he himself jumped and jolted when his own electric current was thrown back at him. To his credit, D hung on, even though the addict was trying to push him away, and even though without that physical contact, the electrical circuit would have been broken.

The bad guy was shouting, too. It was just mindless screaming, but he was making it rhythmic—
“Arhh! Arhh! Arhh …!”
—and Mac knew that not only was Diaz taking all that electrical energy, he was also absorbing the joker’s vocal punches.

She wanted to help but she didn’t know how, until Bach spoke. But her ears were ringing from that latest mental blast. The air around Diaz was crackling, too, and she couldn’t make out his words.

So Dr. Bach gained entry into her mind the way he always did, provided he was at a close enough range. He gave a little push asking permission, which Mac granted immediately by lowering her defenses.

And then she felt the warmth and calm that meant Bach was inside of her head. He didn’t so much speak as guide her thoughts.

What did you do to me?
The addict had asked that when he’d first come out into the hall.

But Mac didn’t know what the man had meant—except then,
suddenly, she
did
know. The joker had been favoring the very same foot that she’d injured, the same ankle she’d trashed when she’d fallen down the stairs. He’d been
limping
.

Maybe there were some powers that Nathan couldn’t deflect. Maybe …

She scrambled to her feet and instead of compartmentalizing and hiding the pain she felt when she put any weight on her left foot, she disintegrated her carefully constructed guard. And she didn’t just step onto her injured foot, she jumped onto it. Pain rocketed through her and she heard herself scream.

Nathan screamed, too.

Bingo.

Mac felt Bach pull out of her head, and she knew he must’ve then paid a visit to Diaz’s mind, letting
him
know about the joker’s weakness, because Diaz, too, dropped his guard and let out a blast of everything that he was feeling. And to Mac’s surprise, that included not just the pain from the mentally looped electrical current, but anger and frustration, and—holy shit—an aircraft-carrier-load of pent-up sexual energy.

Considering he was the Prince of Celibacy,
that
was a stunner.

But that wasn’t the biggest shocker of the evening. The fact that Diaz walked around suppressing a forty-thousand-ton urge to screw everyone in sight was nothing compared to the wall of pain that Bach set free.

Unlike Mac’s and Diaz’s mostly physical suffering, what Bach let loose was a blast of emotional hurt that knocked Mac to her knees.

It was indescribable—the grief, the loss, the regret, the sheer sorrow.…

It was too much to bear—not just for Mac, but for Nathan, too.

“He’s out, I think that did it, I think he stroked out,” she heard Diaz gasp.

Bach agreed with an urgency in his voice that she rarely ever heard. “Nathan’s out—and we need the medical team in here,
now
! Let’s not lose this one!”

And there was the great irony of what they did. Risk their lives to subdue the joker, but then, when he was subdued? Rush his bad-guy ass to the special hospital unit over at the Obermeyer Institute and work their medical team around the clock to attempt to detox him—to try to keep him from dying.

As the OI med team poured into the house, Mac pulled out of the fetal position she’d curled herself into.

Dr. Bach came over and gave her a hand up. “You should get that ankle checked at the clinic,” he told her.

“
I’m
fine,” she said, her subtext clear. Yes, she’d been injured, but
he
was the one who needed about a decade of grief counseling. Not that she’d ever dare to say something like that to his face. Still, he was Bach, so he surely knew what she was thinking. “My ankle’s not that bad—I can heal it overnight. I’ll be back to speed in the morning.”

Bach nodded, his brown eyes somber. “Do whatever you have to do. I’ll see you back there.”

He vanished down the hall, no doubt going to find the former Nathan Hempford’s wife and children, to let them know the ordeal was over and that they were safe, to explain what had happened, and what was likely to happen next.

He wouldn’t go so far as to tell them that Hempford was guaranteed to die, or that the authorities were already in the process of covering up what had happened here tonight. The official report would no doubt include a home invasion by a fictional meth- or heroin-addled intruder, with the entire family—including Hempford—taken hostage. His obit would read that he’d died trying to save his family from an unidentified man who’d also killed two police officers. And the public would continue to remain blissfully unaware of this new, dangerous drug called Destiny,
and
the existence of Dr. Bach’s psychically powerful team from OI.

Not that any of them wanted or needed a ticker-tape parade.

In fact, their very anonymity and lack of recognition helped keep them safe.

But still …

Mac blocked her pain and hobbled her way down the stairs
and out of the house, catching up to Diaz out on the driveway, where he’d helped the med team load an unconscious Nathan into the ambulance.

“You okay?” she asked, and Diaz nodded.

“Someone’s got a secret,” she said, unable to keep her smartass in check, even though he was looking considerably worse for the wear.

She wasn’t all that clean and shiny herself—her nose was still bleeding a bit and her lip was definitely split, although it was already starting to heal. Another fifteen minutes, and her face would be as good as new. Her ankle, however, was going to require some significant attention and focus.

Diaz gave her his handkerchief. Who the hell still carried handkerchiefs?

“It’s not a secret,” he said evenly. “It’s just … irrelevant.” And then he said what he said after every takedown, even though by all rights they should have been rivals, vying to be Bach’s official second-in-command. “Good job tonight, Michelle.”

So Mac gave him her standard reply. “You, too, D.”

“See you back there,” he said, and vanished into the night.

The police station had seen better days. It was grimy and stale-smelling, poorly lit and barely heated, and definitely understaffed.

Anna Taylor had had to wait for two long anxiety-filled hours before the desk sergeant called her number, before she could so much as report the reason why she was there.

“My sister is missing. She didn’t come home from school today,” she said, working hard to keep her frustration from her voice. This had rapidly turned into a nightmare. But she’d sat, waiting, when what she’d wanted to do was keep searching for Nika, returning to all of her little sister’s favorite haunts. Not that there were many of them—they’d only lived in the Boston area for a few months, and were both still feeling their way in terms of making new friends.

Anna hadn’t even met their neighbors in their apartment building until this afternoon, when she’d knocked on their doors to see if they’d seen Nika.

No one had.

The heavyset sergeant didn’t even look up from his computer. “I can’t help you. Until she’s been missing for seventy-two hours—”

“Seventy-two?” she repeated, unable to hide her disbelief. “I’m sorry. Maybe I wasn’t clear. My sister’s a child. She’s only thirteen years old.”

He looked up at her then, his faded blue eyes vaguely embarrassed,
but mostly dull. Time and this job had sucked the life out of him. “Services had to be cut somewhere. Most missing people—including children—turn up on their own within that seventy-two-hour time period. Or they never turn up. Either way, it’s a waste of resources.”

Anna was staring at him with her mouth open, but she knew it wasn’t his fault that cutbacks and layoffs had crippled the entire department. All of Boston’s first responders had been decimated. Just last week, while on the bus, she’d seen a building that was on fire. It was just burning unchecked as the tenants of the neighboring triple-decker used garden hoses to keep their own homes from igniting.

Now, she closed her mouth, gathered her frustration-tattered civility, and managed to ask, “So if it’s a waste of resources either way, what exactly happens when I come back here in seventy-two hours to report that she’s missing?”