Lead Heart (Seraph Black Book 3) (30 page)

“This isn’t you,” I told him. “You’re just afraid. It’s the power. You know what it does to you. You’ll regret this tomorrow. You’ll cry and tell me you’re sorry. Danny… please…”

He swung around at the last second and caught Eva on the face as she tried to creep up behind him.

“Sleep,” he told her, and she crumpled to the ground. He looked at her, and then at the waterlogged room. He shook his head and held up his hands. I wondered why he hadn’t killed her as he had the others.

“Okay,” he said to the other people, his voice oddly calm. “Okay, I did a bad thing. I won’t do any more, I promise.” He walked toward the door and they jumped out of his way, not wanting to brush up against him. He moved into the hallway and then stiffened. “Wait, I forgot…” he said, turning back.

The people who had jumped out of the way before now did the same again, except they retreated
into
the room to get away from him. It looked familiar to me, and I remembered seeing a similar thing on television, of a clever dog herding frightened sheep. The clever dog had herded them right to the edge of a cliff, and the sheep had all jumped off, only to fall to their death on the rocks below. Danny closed the door as he re-entered the room, and the remaining upright bodies all crowded around me in the corner, realising that they had been tricked.

I couldn’t do anything to stop him, and with the water dripping from the walls and slicking over the floor, I couldn’t even use my valcrick to disable him without electrocuting everyone in the room.

He was too far gone; too lost to the dark power that called for death inside his veins.

“Danny.” I called over the noise of the others, all now pleading the same things as I had been pleading before. “Danny… I’ll do what you want. I’ll help you.”

“I know you will,” he replied, touching the legs of the people that tried to run past him, not even blinking an eye as they fell to the wet ground around him. He brushed their fallen faces, their chests, the backs of their heads, and they twitched and writhed before falling still. Eventually, it was only me and him, and I knew that he would force me to kill him, or he would kill me, because that was all that was left inside him.

I pulled Eva into my lap, trying to keep her limbs away from the wet floor as I raised a hand and called on the valcrick, feeling the need to vomit as it exploded into the room. Danny convulsed, flapping around on the ground and making wet sounds as his limbs slapped against the wet skin of other fallen people. In truth, I had no idea what the valcrick was doing. I wanted him to both live and die in equal measure. I wanted him to stop, but I wanted him to heal. I was desperate for both.

When he grew still, I laid Eva down and hurried over to him, staring down into his unblinking grey eyes. I held my breath, still hesitant to touch him, and jerked back a step when he heaved in a choking breath and surged upright, clutching at his chest.

“It worked,” he gasped, a laugh gurgling from his straining chest.

“It worked?” I repeated, my limbs numb as I stumbled back a step. I didn’t recognise the look in his eye, and it frightened me more than anything else that I had witnessed.

“Yes.” He laughed again. “I can’t die, because I
am
death.”

The door burst open behind us, and suddenly Danny was on his knees. “Help!” he cried out, as two more Klovoda agents rushed into the room.

“Danny?” One of them helped him up, casting horrified eyes over the room. “Are you okay? What happened?” Danny must have turned his ability off, because the agent wasn’t falling. Danny started sobbing, pointing a shaking finger toward Eva’s inert form.

“S-she…” he began to sob so hard that words seemed to become impossible, and my confusion became so great that I couldn’t do more than stand there and tremble.

One of the agents scraped his fingers against the wall and took a trembling step back, shaking the water off as he stared at Eva. “She drowned them all.” He sounded terrified. “We need to sedate her. Get a team in here!” he shouted to someone still out in the hallway.

He grabbed me and pulled me out into the hallway. Danny was suddenly beside me, his hand threading into mine, holding too tightly.

“Say anything and I kill them all,” he whispered to me. “Me and you, Lela… we have to stick together. It’s just me and you now.”

My lips were too numb to speak, and I tried to pull away from him. He shook his head, his nails digging into my skin.

“You were dead,” I finally stuttered, as a team of armed guards spilled into the room.

“There was a boy inside me. I suppose he’s dead now. Thank you for helping me, Lela. You’re the only one who will ever help me. I know why, it’s because you love me, and I love you. It’s just us. I won’t forget. Even when they take you away… I won’t forget.”

He squeezed my hand even harder and my chest grew cold as blood welled from the indents he had made with his nails, dripping down over our joined fingers.

I was lying on a couch in Quillan’s office, my unblinking stare fixed to the roof as images and words ran rampant inside my head, seemingly without order or meaning. I had recounted my entire vision to Quillan—who had, in turn, recounted it to Noah and Cabe, but although I was able to dispassionately narrate the scenes of my memory to them, I hadn’t yet fully come to terms with the blinding pain that was ripping through my chest, breaking my heart all over again.

I mourned the loss of a twin I had never known—while holding onto the knowledge that he had brushed past me in corridors and stalked me relentlessly for years. Noah and Cabe were eager to hunt Danny down and tear into him with everything that they had, but I forced them to stay in the office with me, the vision of Danny disabling agent after agent with only the brush of his fingers warning me to keep my pairs away from him.

“Seph.” Quillan pushed a glass of water into my hands and kneeled beside the couch. “Will you talk to me, please? Say something.”

“I think I’m in shock,” I mumbled. “I feel like I’ve just lived through everything for the first time, I’m still trying to compute it all. I want to go and see Eva. I want to talk to Jayden.”

“We’ll do all of that,” he promised, “but right now I have a lecture to give, and Danny will be there. If I don’t turn up, it might spark his interest. We don’t want him to get suspicious yet, do we?”

“No.” I vehemently shook my head. “Not yet. I need to talk to Jayden first. I need to find out why he’s so scared of Danny. I think I know why… I mean, it’s
obvious
… but I need to be sure. And then I’m going to confront him.
Alone
.”

Quillan’s frown appeared, but he quickly smoothed it away. “We’ll go over the plan later. You two, don’t leave her alone.” He turned to Noah and Cabe, who weren’t as successful at hiding their frowns as he had been. “I’ll deliver my lecture and be back in an hour. Nobody leaves this room, understood?”

He extracted a grunt out of Noah before grabbing his briefcase and storming out of the room, his shoulders tight with anxiety.

“I always hated that guy,” Cabe admitted, picking up my legs so that he could sit beside me on the couch. “Never liked him for a second.”

“Not helping.” I scrubbed a hand over my face.

The chill of premonition still sat on my shoulders. I couldn’t seem to shake it off. I felt the need to turn for a paper and pencil again, but I wasn’t sure how much more I could handle. I no longer wanted to know about the messenger, about Danny. My eyes kept straying to the notepad on Quillan’s desk anyway, and eventually Noah picked it up, snagged a pen, and handed it to me.

I took the items from him silently, touching pen to paper almost unwillingly. As much as my mind rebelled against the task, my fingers automatically moved into motion, outlining another desk. I almost pulled back from the vision, but something about the desk was familiar, and so I kept drawing. A sense of urgency settled over me as I looked up from the page to Quillan’s desk, which was turned diagonally so that the back was facing the window and the front was facing the door. It was the exact angle of the desk I had just drawn. The urgent feeling swelled, building inside me until I was propelled to stand and move toward the piece of furniture. I wasn’t sure why, but I felt a sudden and overwhelming impulse to duck beneath the desk.

I crouched down, warring with my instincts even as I pushed the chair away. Eventually, it became too difficult to fight, and I checked the empty space beneath the desk before crawling in and sitting down, the notebook tucked into my lap. Noah and Cabe came around to stand beside me, and I could tell from the looks on their faces that they were suddenly worrying for my sanity. I put a finger to my lips, still unable to shake the premonition that rode me, and pulled them down to my level.

Cabe was the first to join me, hunching beneath the desk to face me, his legs stretched out on either side of mine. Noah crawled in behind me, needing to sit me on his lap so that we could all fit inside the cramped space with our legs tangling in the middle. I held my finger to my lips again and only a second later, the door to the office burst open. I heard the gentle thud of booted feet walking over the carpet before the person paused. The static sound of a radio-transceiver filled the room.

“Top floor of faculty offices have been cleared,” a male voice declared.

“Received,” came the reply. “Faculty hostages have been moved to the common area of the administration building and all phones have been confiscated. Close off entries and exits.”

“Consider it done,” the man said, striding back to the hallway and closing the door behind him.

Cabe mouthed, “
What the hell
?”

I didn’t know how to reply. I had no idea what was going on, so I only shrugged at him, wide-eyed. Noah pulled his phone out and I saw him call Quillan. It didn’t even ring—his screen flashed, saying that the number was busy. I no longer felt the burning need to hide beneath the desk, but that might have simply been because the odd forecasting had run its course.

I placed the notebook aside and whispered, “Did he say hostages?”

“That’s what I heard.” Noah’s voice was low against my neck. “Do we need to stay in here?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we should, just in case.”

Cabe shifted so that his legs were turned out, giving Noah room to partially untangle himself as I sat between his thighs, my feet notched in Cabe’s lap. Noah scrolled through his phone again, selecting Silas’s contact this time.

“Hey,” he whispered. “Something’s happening at the college. I don’t know. Something about hostages and confiscating phones. We’re hiding under the desk in Miro’s office.” He paused, and I heard Silas’s muted voice on the other end before Cabe started talking again. “Because Seph went all vacant-eyed like she does when she has her visions and just crawled under, so we went with her. Right. Okay. Sure.”

He hung up, turning the phone to silent and laying it on the ground where he would be able to see the screen light up. I checked my phone to make sure that it was on silent as well, and then decided to try and call Poison and Clarin while I was at it. Neither of their phones rang. Cabe turned his own phone to silent and we waited there nervously until Noah’s phone vibrated.

He picked it up. “What’s up. What? Are you serious?” He listened for a second, and then groaned quietly. “No… they said admin building. That’s where we are. Yeah, okay. Give them Cabe’s number, he’s better at talking to people. Okay. Bye.”

He hung up and I twisted to look at him, my eyebrows arching.

“Well?” Cabe prompted.

“It’s a human.” Noah sounded shocked. “Some guy who applied to the college and got rejected. He’s got a machine gun and a few of his friends backing him up. They’ve managed to round up almost three-hundred people on the ground floor of this building and they’ve barricaded themselves in.”

“Ahh…” Cabe’s forehead pulled into a frown. “What the—
Why
?”

“Apparently…” Noah swallowed, seemingly unsure of his next words. “Apparently he released a statement to the human press that he was going to eradicate Maple Falls of
mutants
. I’m guessing we’re the mutants. Nobody knows how he found out about us, but Silas is already inside his hard-drive and he has
a lot
of information that he shouldn’t have.”

“
What
?” Cabe and I both choked out at the same time.

“That doesn’t even… how can…” I struggled to articulate myself. “Shouldn’t there be an insane level of security around here or something, like the high school? Where are Andrei and Hans? I haven’t seen them since I had my vision.”

“Keep quiet,” Noah cautioned in a whisper. “They were supposed to be waiting at the end of the walkway so that they couldn’t overhear what we were talking about in here. I’m guessing they got herded downstairs with everyone else.”