Trance (40 page)

A frustrated scream lodged in my throat. “So what happens now? You’ve told me your dastardly plan. You’re holding my boyfriend’s body hostage, and my friends are all tied up. You’re either going to kill me now, or make me watch you kill my friends first. Why keep stalling?”

“I like this body, so young and vibrant, and so in love. I wish you could feel it for yourself.”

“Why don’t you memorize it?” I said, dripping with sweet sarcasm. “Then go back to your real body and jerk off for a while. Maybe you’ll feel a little bit less like a murderous psychopath. Or do you like jumping into the body of a healthy, thirty-year-old because you can’t get it up for a woman in real life?”

I saw the blow coming and ducked. His fist sailed over my shoulder, putting him off balance. I brought my knee up into his stomach, hard, right into Gage’s existing bruise. He doubled over and hit the floor. I drove my left elbow into the center of his back. He grunted, dropping like a stone. I turned and lobbed a concentrated orb ten feet toward the center of the balance beam holding Flex hostage. It shattered. Ropes broke. She tumbled to the floor, shrieking as her tortured arms and legs retracted to their normal size.

Something caught my ankle and pulled. I couldn’t compensate and toppled forward, smashing my cast-covered arm into the floor. White-hot agony killed my screams. I couldn’t breathe. I waited for it. The last strike, be it from a gun or a blow to the head.

Nothing.

I rolled onto my back. The shrieking pain reduced itself
to a dull roar and settled behind my temples. Still no killing blow. I sat up with some effort. My head spun in counterclockwise circles. I closed my eyes until it passed. The room came into focus. My heart pounded. The sight didn’t shock me like it should have—just created a sense of utter failure.

Doppelganger-Gage stood by the rear wall a few paces from the exit, out of immediate reach, watching me intently. He held a knife to his throat, just below his left ear. The blade pressed hard into the skin and had already drawn a thin line of blood. His expression warred with itself, wavering between frustration and anger.

“I’ll kill him, you know I will. Are you going to settle down?”

“No, I won’t.”

He blinked. “You won’t?”

“No.” Rage burned from my very core, tingling every nerve ending, blinding my other emotions. I was sick of being manipulated by this monster, and I was ending this one way or another. I just hoped Gage could forgive me. One day I might forgive myself.

“Not even if I kill one of your friends? Flex, perhaps? Or your new pal Psystorm? I know you’d hate to be responsible for making that sweet little boy of his an orphan.”

More fuel to the fire. My hands clenched. I saw purple, and this time, it wasn’t filter overload. Just rage. “
You’d
make him an orphan, you unforgivable bastard. You’re going to kill them all anyway, so nothing you do in this room is my fault. You made me kill for you three times too many. I killed Frost for you. I won’t kill for you again.” My left hand came up to
shoulder height, and an orb the size of a grapefruit coalesced above my palm. “I won’t let you kill anyone else, either.”

His eyes narrowed. “I haven’t killed, Trance. There is no blood on my hands.”

“You set the fire that destroyed the Warden. You manipulated their deaths. You possessed people and put them in harm’s way. Their blood is on your hands as surely as if you’d stabbed them in the heart yourself. “

“Semantics, Trance, but if it’s literal blood on my hands you want …” He pulled the knife’s blade across Gage’s throat, from ear to Adam’s apple. Blood spurted. The yellow glow bled from his eyes as the doppelganger released him. Gage hit the floor hard.

Screams filled my ears as I bolted to his side. I pressed my left hand against the wound, trying to stanch the steady flow of blood. I couldn’t tell if he’d hit the artery. I didn’t want to know. I just held on.

“Dr. Seward,” I shouted. “Agent McNally, anyone! Please, wake up!”

Renee stirred. Not helpful. I couldn’t move without letting go, couldn’t use orbs to free the others without letting go. I just pressed down, Gage’s blood so hot against my skin it seemed to burn. I pressed and watched, expecting one of my friends to wake up suddenly, their eyes yellow and their body possessed. Any one of them could be the doppelganger.

“Hello?”

My hand jerked, startled by the voice. I held my breath, wondering if I’d imagined it. A few seconds later, the call repeated
itself. I knew his voice—my number one suspect. Fear and hope collided. I had to bank on hope, for Gage’s sake.

“In here! Please, I’m here!”

Alexander Grayson burst into the room at a dead run. A short, frumpy man whom I disliked on principle, and here he was, saving my ass with dirt on his rumpled suit, a bruise on his cheekbone, and a distant look in his eyes. Eyes I instinctively studied—no yellow glow. Maybe he really had been stuffed in a trunk. But by whom? My entire list of suspects was tied up, injured or both.

“What the hell’s happening, Trance? The Medical Center is—” He surveyed the room. Sweat glistened on his forehead, and his eyes seemed to grow impossibly wider when he saw me. Really saw me. “Holy Mother of—”

“Is the fire department here yet?” I asked.

“I don’t think they’re inside, no.” He took a few steps closer, his attention fixed on the slowly spreading pool of blood beneath Gage. “My God, what happened? I’d just parked my car when—”

“It’s Specter, really long story. Please, just put your hand here and hold pressure on Gage’s throat. We need to get the others loose and call an ambulance.”

Grayson took my place, his hand pressing down hard where mine had been a moment ago. Gage was pale, but breathing steadily. The blood loss horrified me. If God existed and liked me even a little bit—highly debatable—then the doppelganger had missed the artery and just done scary, reparable damage.

I skipped past my bound friends and ran to the wall of
windows, lobbed an orb at the glass, and watched it shatter outward.

The roar of the nearby fire and scream of alarms became louder, and the acrid scent of smoke filtered inside. The open window presented me with a clear view of the decimated Medical Center, burning out of control. An empty scene of destruction. The loss of a hundred years of Meta history. Red lights twirled and spun on the other side of the main gate, which stood closed. Locked. Could I break it down from here? Probably not.

I bolted for the door.

“Trance?” Grayson asked.

“I need to get closer to the gate to let them—”

“Trance!”

“What?” I turned, annoyance turning to shock as a bullet struck Grayson in the center of his forehead. The sound of the shot followed, an echo my brain was too slow to catalogue. Blood, matter and bone sprayed on the wall. Grayson fell to the floor next to Gage, who was still slowly bleeding to death.

Fear rooted me. I didn’t dare look. My legs tingled. I had made a deadly tactical error.

“I truly hated that man. No need pretending anymore, Trance. Turn around.”

I did so, slowly. Insides twisting. Desperate for my eyes to find fault with what my ears heard. Dr. Angus Seward stood halfway across the room, a still-bound McNally at his feet, a revolver raised and pointed. Plain brown eyes gazed at me with keen interest from beneath bushy white eyebrows. As
I watched him, his eyes began to glow yellow-orange. The glow lasted only a moment, before fading back to brown. A chill clawed its way from the top of my neck to the tips of my toes.

“Not quite what I had in mind,” Seward said. “Happy now? We both have the blood of others on our hands.”

The hard edge in his voice cut like an invisible blade. Warmth and compassion—two things I had always associated with Angus Seward—were gone. Erased. Replaced by cold calculation and tinged with anguish.

Fury continued to boil just beneath the surface, fueled by betrayal and loss. And foolishness. How had we been so blind? Not seen it? We were the perfect fools, about to die senseless, avoidable deaths. He had the upper hand now, just has he’d had it all week. Playing us like a guitar, knowing every chord to strum and sweet spot to pick.

“I knew it,” I said, even though I knew nothing.

He cocked his head. “Knew what, my dear?”

“That whoever was playing as Specter had a dick the size of a walnut.”

His warning shot hit the wall inches from my fractured right hand. I didn’t jump. Wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. It seemed to impress him.

“You know, Trance, I briefly considered trying to make a deal with you.”

“Oh?” My gaze flickered toward Gage. Time was not on my side here.

“You and I are unlike any other Metas, Trance. We received powers we were not born with, something never
before seen in Meta history. Your transformation fascinated the scientist in me, as did my own. I shouldn’t have delayed your deaths, but I had to know more. I had to understand why.”

Little things started clicking into place. I felt sick. And used—well and truly used. Bastard. “You set the fire. You destroyed the Warden and released our powers.”

“Yes.”

“Why? The fail-safe?”

“Yes.”

“You did all this just to ensure the Banes were wiped out.”

“We’ve already discussed this.”

“No, we haven’t. Why do you hate them so much that you’d sacrifice so many lives just to see the Banes dead?”

His hand trembled, altering the aim of the gun. Several times his mouth opened and closed as thoughts started and never finished. He swallowed hard, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Fear.”

“Fear of what?”

“Of what would happen when the Warden failed and the powers came back. Fear of how twelve angry, mismatched young adults would handle six times their numbers in vengeful enemies. Fear that those lines of division the MHC created between Rangers and Banes would once again consume the world.”

While his fears weren’t unfounded, the logic wasn’t there. “How did you find out about the Warden?”

“That’s a long story.”

“Summarize it.”

He was stuck in that strange place between not wanting to justify his horrible actions, and wanting to finally tell someone and ease a hefty burden. I wasn’t there to absolve him of his sins, but I wanted to know why, dammit.

“You were wrong, Trance,” he finally said. “I was a Meta before all of this.”

I couldn’t have heard that right and stared at him, too stunned to say a word.

“Weren’t expecting that, I see.” His shoulders sagged a bit. “I had no idea. Not until we all lost our powers. Whatever mine were, they were so weak I never knew I had them until they were ripped away. The experience was exactly as you children described it.”

“How could no one know?” I managed to ask.

“I don’t honestly know the answer to that, and it’s possible there are more like me, who never knew they were Metas. It’s not as though being Meta is detectable in a blood test.”

Good point. But still!

“My mother’s family had no history of Meta powers, and I’d never known my own father. So I spent the next few years obsessed with finding him. With the country in so much turmoil, it was difficult to get the records I needed. My marriage suffered tremendously.

“I’d spent twenty years in service to the Rangers and MHC, and just when I thought I could retire and spend the rest of my life with my wife and our girls, I drew further away. And I was too scared to tell her why.”

The heartbreak in his words dug deep. I had to fight against their impact, to keep my anger up. I couldn’t feel sorry
for him. It was a betrayal to my friends, both alive and dead. “Was your father a Meta?”

“Not just a Meta,” he said. “He was a Bane.”

“Holy shit.”

“Indeed. His name was Shade. I’d already worked five years for the MHC when he was killed, and in researching Shade I made a connection no one ever had before—officially, at least. I discovered Shade had a son. I had a half brother.”

Only one answer, horrifying as it was, made any kind of sense. “Specter.”

“Tragically, yes.” Even now, years after discovering the fact, he looked pissed. “My inevitable inquiries at the prison came to the attention of Agent Garth Anders.”

“McNally’s partner?”

“Correct. Anders knew almost since the end of the War that Marcus Spence wasn’t on the Island. The MHC found out too late and didn’t want a public panic, or to admit to missing a Bane. Anders was assigned to seek him out—off the record. When he found him, Spence had already had one stroke. Anders never considered a feeble, wheelchair-bound man to be a risk, so he didn’t tell anyone he found Spence.”

“Why did he tell you?”

“Well, at this point in the story, Anders had just been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. We’d worked together years before. He may have been clearing his conscience.”

“Anders told you about the Warden?”

“Yes. He knew the Warden was a temporary fix. The technology would break down, or one of the Metas powering
it would die. If that happened, then the fail-safe collars were the only thing that would protect us. I was inclined to agree. Our country was barely surviving the destruction of one Meta War. We’d never survive another.

“After Anders passed, I went to see Spence. I needed to look my half brother in the eye and see the monster who’d murdered so many. But he wasn’t Specter anymore. He was a wasted shell of a man, and part of me understood why Anders couldn’t turn him in.”

Just as I’d felt sorry for the broken old man I’d found at the Blue Tower. None of us was immune to pity, it seemed. “But why destroy the Warden?” I asked. “Why kill
us
?”

“Destroying the Warden was simply to help along the inevitable. I looked up you twelve, you know. You were all unsettled, disillusioned, unsuccessful in so many ways, and I believed you would never step up and be heroes. But killing you before you repowered would look suspicious and could be traced back to me.”

The clinical way he spoke about our intended murders compounded my hatred of the man I’d once considered a friend. “So you … what? Asked Spence to do it remotely after he got his Specter powers back?”

“I did. He agreed.”