Talent to Burn (Hidden Talent #1) (18 page)

“I’m Darla,” said a short, round woman with witch-wild gray hair. “I’m Miller’s wife. And this is our daughter, Tiffany.”

Tiffany, somewhere between fourteen and seventeen, I would guess, slouched against a wall in the corner, chewing gum and picking at her fingernails. She’d offset her plaid flannel shirt with about half a pound of eyeliner. Maybe Justine had given her lessons. “Pleeztameetcha.”

“Where’s Eric?” I said without preamble. We’d had to go through enough hoops to get here.

Justine said, “Out in the woods.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“He comes, he goes. Not really.”

“What’s he doing out there?”

She gave me a look I couldn’t work out. “Hiking. Climbing trees. Thinking.”

On that anticlimactic note, I didn’t know what to do with myself.

“Do y’all want something to eat?” Darla said.

We agreed, but my enthusiasm waned when it turned out to be a thin, gray-ish stew. I don’t know what the meat in it claimed to be, but I hoped it was more squirrel and less opossum.

I pushed the stew around on the tin plate with my fork. The whole weird family sat and watched me, while Justine stared into space and Jamie wolfed the stew down as if it were the first meal he’d had in a week.

“Are you going to eat that?” he asked. I pushed my plate over and watched him gulp the meal down. I had no appetite.

The door creaked open, and I swung around to see my brother, or what remained of him, standing in the doorway.

Chapter Eighteen

Fourteen years since I’d seen Eric. He had been a boy then, and now he was a man. As a man, he was thinner than he had been in childhood: much, much, thinner. I couldn’t believe how drawn and gaunt his face had become. His cheeks sank in beneath his cheekbones.

His skin was yellow with the remnants of a fading tan, and cast with gray hollows under his eyes and through the shadow of stubble on his jaw. He’d buzzed his hair, showing off too clearly the shape of his skull. In my dreams, he’d had long hair. I wondered at the difference.

Finally, my gaze came to rest on his eyes. They were blank holes in his face, like footprints in snow.

This wasn’t the Eric I’d known before. This was a dead man walking.

I stood and walked over to him. We had never been a demonstrative family, but I felt as though I should hug him, or something. I must have twitched my intent, because he took a step back.

“Hey, sis,” he said, his voice more casual than I’d expected. “I guess you made it here. Welcome.”

“Can we take a walk?” I snuck a glance over my shoulder. I didn’t want to have this conversation in front of strangers. Especially weird ones.

He shrugged. “Sure, why not.” Turning, he held the door open for me and we went out. He paused in the clearing.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, working hard to keep my voice calm.

“Trying to work out where to go from here.” Eric took a deep breath, sucking in the scent of pine needles that surrounded us. “Miller is trying to help me.”

“Who is he, anyway?” I bit my tongue on all the comments I wanted to make about the oddness of Miller and family, and why Jamie and I had to go through such extreme measures to get here.

“Miller was CIA in the Cold War. He trained remote viewers. His specialty was teaching people to control their Talents. He worked at the Institute for a while, but he quit.”

“How did you find him? Are you sure you can trust him?”

Eric laughed, a dry, hollow sound. “Justine found him. And no, I don’t know if I can trust him, but I don’t have a lot of choices at the moment.”

“Eric, what happened?” I stopped walking and looked at him. “Why did you leave the Institute? What happened in Vegas? Why do they want you to come back?”

“That’s a lot of questions, Cat.” Eric kept walking, but turned over his shoulder to call out, “Come on. I’ll be happier if we keep moving.”

I jogged to catch up. The sky darkened by the minute, and I didn’t want to lose him in the woods.

He started to talk as he strode along. “As you know, I used to love it at the Institute. I loved being special. I even loved their idea that I could be some kind of super soldier in the war on terror. One of the founding members of the Talented Corps. Eric, the ultra-patriot. Eric, serving his country. Eric, the powerful Talent. Except that I wasn’t Talented enough for what they really wanted.” His voice was bland, as if he was talking about the weather, but his walking pace increased. I struggled to keep up.

“As you may be aware, they spend a lot of time trying to turn people with a little Talent into people with a lot of Talent through training and various other techniques.”

I shuddered. Oh yes, I was familiar with their methods. I’d spent years blocking out memories of the stress training—the idea being if you put someone under enough stress, they would produce sufficient cortisol and adrenaline to unlock their latent Talents. It had never worked on me.

“They hired a new researcher, a Dr. Jenn. Her team developed a new drug, codenamed Nova-22. It was supposed to be a Talent amplifier—you’d take it, and it would turn off the inhibitions that had been holding back your Talent. Kind of like LSD for psychic powers.”

I didn’t know whether to be frightened or excited about what that might mean for me. “Does it work?”

Eric sighed. He glanced at me and slowed his steps. At last, I could keep up.

“I took the drug. At first, it worked great, especially on the pyrokinetic powers. Before that, I could start a fire in something flammable—great for campfires, vandalism, not much of a weapon. With the drug, I turned into a human flamethrower.

“The drug has some side effects. It’s an upper. I felt like Superman, and the creepy thing was that although the effects of the drug wore off, the superhero thing didn’t. What did it matter that I needed a drug to have superpowers? They were still mine, the power was mine.” His eyes had taken on a glassy look, and his mouth twisted itself into something of a sneer.

He didn’t look like himself. Had I been wrong about him? Had he killed those people deliberately? “Eric, you’re frightening me.”

He gave himself a little shake, like a wet dog, and looked more human. “I still have the echo of that feeling. I don’t like it.”

My tension level ratcheted down a notch. “I can see why.” I didn’t like it either.

He went on. “In the experiments, I set things on fire. We started with targets—here’s a sack of potatoes! A terrorist doublewide! There were animals too.”

My stomach rolled. “You set fire to live animals?”

“Dead ones. But, as you know, I’ve done worse things than that. And some of them you don’t know about yet.”

I worked hard at keeping my face calm, at not showing him how I felt: scared and sick at the same time. Now we were getting to the heart of it, and I didn’t want to do anything to stop him from telling the story. “What happened?”

“We were also working on remote fires—I would look at a picture of something, and try to set it on fire. I was starting to get the hang of that, but fires at a distance were smaller, weaker, like the ones I could set without the drug. They started to increase my doses, kept me on a maintenance dose so I was up all the time.”

I might not be a scientist, but it sounded like a terrible idea to me. Wasn’t it obvious to them how it would end? “Had they even tested that?”

“Oh, I was a guinea pig, and a totally willing one. Until one day, when they gave me a picture of a building, somewhere in a dusty desert. When I closed my eyes, I could see myself outside the building. I stretched out my hands to start the fire, and a little girl came running out. She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old. Then others came out behind her. Catrina, it was a school, and they wanted me to burn those children.”

“Oh my God.” I could barely believe it. My stomach turned, sick with horror.

“I didn’t do it. I came back to myself, I told them I’d been there in my mind, and it wasn’t a military target. They didn’t believe me, insisted their intelligence proved it was an artillery installation. That was the day I quit.”

“I’m glad you did.” I reached out toward him then dropped my hand, remembering how he’d flinched earlier at my touch. If he wouldn’t do that, then I was sure he could be saved. There was still a moral code in him. “I can’t believe they let you go.”

“I didn’t tell them. I just told Justine I wanted to go, and we took off. I still had that Superman thing happening, and I didn’t believe they’d be able to catch me.”

He thought he was invulnerable, while I’d been living in fear all these years. We were so different in so many ways. But I needed to focus. “She’s from the Institute?”

“She was. She has a strong Talent, and it was incredibly useful to us.”

Interesting that he didn’t mention his emotional attachment to her. “What does she do?”

“She can disappear in plain sight. She doesn’t even leave a psychic stain.”

I thought back, and realized I’d never even noticed her aura. Pure Teflon. “Wow. Even Ryder can’t follow her?”

“That’s right.”

“What happened in Vegas?”

Eric stopped walking, and sat down at the foot of a tree. “We went there first, after we left. I had a bunch of money saved up—when the Institute feeds you and clothes you, you don’t need much—and I wanted to live large, take my mind off what I’d experienced. I blew a bunch of money on the tables, drinks and cocaine. It wasn’t the Nova-22, but it wasn’t bad either.

“Justine started to ask me what was next, what my plans were. I had no plan. I lived each day as it came.

“That night in the bar I was high as a kite, and she started hassling me about it again. I lost my temper, threw my hands up at her, and suddenly the whole place went up in flames. Because I couldn’t control my temper, my Talent, people died.”

I watched him as his story of horrors and darkness ran out of him, wondering if he’d told anyone else this tale. Hubris had gotten him at last. I wanted to reach out and give him a hug, but he wasn’t done.

“We ran, moved to a different hotel. I got paranoid, closed all the shades and wouldn’t leave the room for days and days. I hid in the bathroom and took more drugs, Valium, Xanax, sleeping pills. I hoped they’d dampen my Talent. Justine started searching for somewhere we could go. She went back and got our stuff from the other hotel room, found out what the police were doing, and she found Miller. I drove halfway across the country to get here, almost without stopping, wired out of my brain on drugs to keep me awake. It was only when I got here that I started to be able to think again.”

I rocked back and forth on my feet, trying to grasp the whole of the story he’d told me, and fill in the details with what Jamie and I had seen.

I had one question: “What are you going to do?”

He put his head down on his knees. “I thought about turning myself in. But I’m worried about killing more people by accident. Right now I think I have to get my Talent back under control. If I can’t…” My brother seemed to shrink, sitting there in the late twilight semi-darkness.

“If you can’t, then what?”

He raised his head. His eyes were blank with fear. “You’d shoot a rabid dog, wouldn’t you?”

When we got back to camp it was full dark. I couldn’t think of how to explain this to Jamie. In a couple of weeks, the stakes of my life had gone from trying to pay the electric bill to working out how to save my brother’s life while avoiding the deaths of any more innocent bystanders.

Miller came over to Eric when we walked in, and put his hand on his shoulder. “Everything okay, son?”

Eric shrugged.

I noted he didn’t flinch away from Miller.

“No better, no worse.”

“Ready for another training session in the morning?”

“Sure.”

“Can I watch?” I asked, curious about what the training involved. I also needed to know how well it was going, if it had any chance of working. If not, we’d need to come up with another plan.

“If your brother doesn’t mind, I’m fine with it.”

“She came to help,” Eric said. “Maybe she can. I’m turning in.” He gave me a half wave, and headed back out the door. Justine followed him, quietly and instantly.

“He didn’t eat any dinner,” Darla said.

“Guess he wasn’t hungry,” Miller replied.

I thought of the way Eric’s skin stretched over his skeletal head, and wondered how many meals he’d missed lately. A diet of booze, uppers and downers didn’t exactly lead to good health.

“I think I’ll turn in as well,” I said. “Thanks for dinner.” Jamie followed behind me as I exited the Quonset hut and headed for our cabin.

Once inside I collapsed on the couch and threw an arm over my eyes.

“Did he tell you what’s been going on?”

I sighed. “Yeah. God, I don’t want to have to think about this.”

The couch sagged as Jamie sat down beside me. “You can tell me another time, or not at all.”

“No, it’s okay.” I filled him in, glossing over some of the details.

“Hmm.” He sounded thoughtful rather than horrified.