The Cure (15 page)

Jace grinned. “Did Ritter find you? He was looking for you earlier.”

Without replying, I turned and went to find a shower. The hot water felt good on my skin, and I stood under it taking inventory. My ribs were good, my ankle fine, I still had a bruise the size of a fist between my breasts, but it was fading fast. The only real problem was the headache that always plagued me after I used my ability. Ava told me the pain wouldn’t come as often as time went on, and my head did hurt less now when I was doing ordinary kinds of mental drills. But today had been so far from ordinary that my brain had every right to protest.

The hot water made me sleepy, and it took great effort to turn it off and step out into the comparatively frigid air. I grabbed a blue towel from the rack and began drying myself before dressing in my black stretch uniform. This one had short sleeves, though there was a matching jacket if I needed more coverage. Two pistols, three knives of various sizes, and a two-way radio went into the hidden pockets. Over this I dragged a larger pair of jeans and a camouflage jacket. I was as ready as I’d ever get.

I’d started down the hall when a gravelly voice called out. I hesitated at a partially open door, pushing it open. It was the master bedroom, the one Stella shared with Bronson—or had before his illness made the nurse’s constant presence necessary. Bronson was struggling to sit up in the huge bed. Martha lay on a little cot tucked into a corner of the room, sound asleep.

I approached the bed, and Bronson stopped struggling as he recognized me. “Do you need something?” I asked, wondering if he’d awakened because of all the commotion.

He nodded and lifted a pale hand in the direction of the nightstand. “Water, please. If you would. Don’t want to wake Martha, but I can’t quite . . .” He trailed off, and it was easy to sense his frustration. Unlike the others, he didn’t try to block his mind. Not anymore.

I helped him drink, one hand on the tall glass, the other behind his head. Bronson was one of those rare men whose aging made him more elegant and, well, beautiful. Once he’d been an electrician, his hands sure and steady, his body unfailing. When I’d first met him, his smile, his bearing, his zest for life, and especially his adoration of Stella had made me aware of how lucky she was to have shared the past twenty-four years of her life with such a partner. That had been on a good day, during the time when he still got around on his own. Now, only months later, the illness had robbed him of his strength, aging him and deepening the divide between them. His skin stretched tight over his skull, his eyes were sunken, and his pain required medication for large parts of the day that dulled his mind and stole his wit. Yet, there was still something shining and refined about him.

He drank slowly, one determined swallow after the next. At last he began to draw away, and I laid his head back on the pillow, replacing the water on the nightstand. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“You’re welcome.” How did he endure this half life? His mind was still active but his body had completely failed him. No wonder he was frustrated.

I looked up from the glass to find Bronson watching me, more alert than I’d seen him in weeks—which probably meant he was in a lot of pain and needed more medication. “Is she working?” he asked, giving me a little smile. “She works too hard, but I’m glad. It’s difficult having her see me this way. Hard to believe I once carried her over the threshold.”

I laughed because I knew he was trying to be amusing. “You still will.”

He sobered immediately. “I’m not sure about that. Look, I know you two have become close, and I know I don’t have to ask you to take care of her because all you Renegades take care of each other, but my Stella, my star, is made for loving, despite her obsession with her computers. She will love our baby and that’s going to help when I’m gone, but it’s not enough. Or someday if she learns the child isn’t Unbounded . . .” He trailed off.

“I’ll take care of her.”

“I want her to love and be loved. By a man. She deserves that. I wish I could spend the next thousand years with her but I don’t . . .” A tear escaped the corner of his eye. “What a cruel life this is. Sometimes, I’m glad to be leaving.”

He didn’t really mean it, but I understood. I wanted to reach out and touch his hand, but that would bring his emotions even more clearly into focus for me, and I couldn’t risk that. Not now when my own emotions were so volatile.

“I’ll take care of her,” I repeated. “Sleep now. She’ll be in to see you tomorrow.” I hoped.

Meanwhile, I’d go to Mexico and find that cure and give Stella back Bronson, for however many years he’d have left. Maybe they would have a child after all.

I checked on Stella next and found my older brother standing over her. Chris was blond like Jace and me, only darker, and he shared my gray eyes. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” He glanced down at the sleeping woman. She looked a lot better now than when I’d put her into bed, though her face still showed several large bruises and quickly sealing cuts. She looked fragile and beautiful.

“She protected my kids.” Chris shook his head. “I should have been there.”

“You probably would have been killed.”

His head jerked toward me. “Why? Because I’m not Unbounded? I’ve been training as hard as the rest of you.”

“If she’d been mortal, she’d be dead,” I retorted, “and so would Oliver and most of the rest of us. Gaven
is
dead, and you know how good he was. Chris, can’t you see that this is no life for children? They should be as far away from us as you can take them.”

Tears filled his eyes and for a moment he couldn’t speak. I couldn’t tell what he was feeling, though, because I had slammed my own barriers over my mind the minute I’d seen him in the room. I knew how he was beginning to feel about Stella, even if he didn’t admit to it himself.

“No,” he said at last, his voice so soft I had to strain to hear. “No.” His voice grew stronger. “Do we need a better stronghold? Yes. Do we need more protection? Backups? Yes. Yes, to all of it. But the kids need the knowledge and truth. They need to understand what we work for so they can be a part of fixing what’s wrong with the world. But that’s not all, Erin. Renegades
need
the kids. We need the kids to remind us we aren’t like the Emporium. We don’t abandon our children, taking them back only if it turns out they have the active gene. We don’t treat mortals like second-class citizens when they work with us. We don’t prolong human suffering for profit. We keep the kids with us so we can remember why we fight. We keep them so you Unbounded will remain human.”

I closed my burning eyes for a long minute. Struggling. Struggling because I wanted what he said to be true. “Okay. Okay. But never again like this. They stay with Mom and Dad until we build this place of yours—or ten of them if that’s what it takes to keep them safe. If you don’t want to leave them with Mom and Dad, then you take them somewhere until it’s built. They deserve some kind of childhood. They don’t deserve nightmares like tonight.”

He hugged me tightly. “Okay.”

I felt like a cheat. As if part of me gave in because of my need to be with the children, to drink in their innocence and believe that someday everything would be right with the world. Because maybe if having them with us was right, bringing my own child into existence one day wouldn’t be such a selfish and terrible thing.

Chris left and I was alone with the unconscious Stella. “I’ll bring back what they have for Bronson,” I told her. “I’m so sorry about your baby.”

Was it terrible of me to be the tiniest bit glad that I had to leave so I wouldn’t be around when she learned what had happened? She’d given her baby’s life for Chris’s children and for Oliver. How can you repay something like that?

Out in the living room, the preparations were winding down. Crates, boxes, and mounds of loose items rescued from the palace filled every available spot, but we’d had to leave so much more behind. Tears choked my throat until I spied the small potted plant from the conference room.
Really? The plant?
Yet I somehow felt much better. I knew who’d rescued it.

I started for the door, but to my surprise, Mari had awakened and arose from the couch to follow me. “No, you stay here,” I told her.

She stopped moving, her small face averted, but when I opened the door, she followed me outside and down the stairs. The others were gathered near the vehicles, talking so quietly I was sure the neighbors hadn’t been disturbed. It was dark enough that it was hard to see, but the sky to the east was marginally lighter, signaling the approach of morning.

Ava turned from the others, meeting me at the bottom of the stairs. “Where’s Chris?”

“Inside. I think he’s saying goodbye to the kids.” From the corner of my eye, I saw Mari sit on the bottom step, still staring into nothingness.

“I’m dropping them at your parents’ tomorrow and sending them all on a trip to Disneyland,” Ava said. “They’ve been studying hard and need a break.”

The children’s home schooling regime was varied and odd, though advanced, with each Unbounded tutoring them in their specialty and Chris taking whatever subjects were left. Since most of us would be gone, a vacation was exactly what they needed. Maybe it would help them forget. And heal.

I took a step in the direction of the vehicles, but my step faltered as I turned back to face Ava. “Before I leave, there’s something I want to know.” My voice was scarcely a whisper.

“Oh?” Ava cocked her head, waiting.

“Who is my father?” A lousy time to bring it up, but after the night we’d had I didn’t want to wake up and realize one day that I’d waited one day too long. If there was one thing I’d learned about life as Unbounded it was that everything frequently changed in an instant. Stella was a prime example.

A swift intake of air told me my question had taken her by surprise. “I thought you knew.”

I glanced at the cars, making sure the others were still busy and far enough away not to overhear. “You mean Stefan Carrington? I know he’s not my father.” I let anger show in the words. Even after two months, neither she nor Dimitri had hinted at the truth of my own conception. Instead, they’d continued to allow me to believe that I was the biological daughter of an Emporium Triad leader. What I wanted now was the truth. A woman deserved to know who her father was. “When I was held at the Emporium headquarters, Laurence said you didn’t use Stefan’s genetically enhanced sperm that you stole from the Emporium. It arrived too late when my mother was at the fertility clinic. Stefan can’t be my father.”

I also knew the man I grew up believing to be my father no longer had viable sperm, so they hadn’t used his that day as my mother believed. Laurence had lied about a lot of things and had betrayed us all, an act that even his final sacrifice hadn’t erased, but he hadn’t lied about this. I’d seen the truth in his mind. When he’d told me who my real father was, I’d been violently glad I wasn’t the biological daughter of one of the Emporium’s Triad, although lately I’d begun to worry on an entirely new level about what had actually become of Stefan’s genetic material.

Ava sighed, the weight of all her three hundred years in the sound. “Stefan isn’t your father. But if you know that, you must already know who your real father is, and you should be talking to him, not to me.”

“Why hasn’t Dimitri told me himself?”

The fatigue in her face vanished. “Oh, Erin, he’s wanted to. But he’s been concerned with how you’d take it. He worries that you’ll think he considered it a duty.”

“Wasn’t it?” I felt like exploding.

“Talk to him.”

I held Ava’s gaze for a long minute, but hers didn’t waver and in the end it was me who looked away first. Defeat notwithstanding, I wasn’t finished yet. “So what did you do with Stefan’s sperm?”

She didn’t respond for the space of several heartbeats. “We kept it until it was needed.”

Exactly what I’d feared. “For Jace,” I said. My brother, in his euphoria at his Change, hadn’t thought to question where he’d gotten his ability—or his blue eyes. We had an ancestor who’d been gifted in combat, but the genes were twelve generations removed, and though that didn’t bother Jace, it didn’t seem likely to me. Maybe because I knew his birth had been engineered like mine.

Jace’s parentage also explained why Stefan Carrington had looked familiar to me when I’d met him. The recognition hadn’t been on a primitive level, or because of some Unbounded link. It was because in him I’d seen my little brother’s features. “Oh, Ava, what have you done?” They’d be looking for him once they knew.

Her lips tightened. “I did what we had to in order to survive. They were further ahead in their genetics. It was simple mathematics.”

“We have to tell him.”

“Does it really matter? Wasn’t it better when you didn’t know?”

“Yes.” Heaven help me, she was right. I told myself that not telling Jace meant I was protecting him, but keeping the secret probably meant I was a liar like everyone else. What I didn’t want was his relationship with the man we called our father to change . . . like mine had. Even so, I wouldn’t relinquish the knowledge of my own parentage. It added to who I was and what I was becoming.

Pushing these thoughts away for later, I indicated Mari, who still sat on the steps. “She seems to think she’s going with me.”

Ava went to Mari, helped her rise, and put an arm around her. “Come back to the apartment with me, dear. Stella’s going to need you when she wakes. You’ll need each other. We should also change your clothes. How does that sound?” Mari said nothing but didn’t resist as Ava guided her up the stairs.

“Oh, and Erin,” Ava said from the second stair. “Ritter will be in charge once Dimitri fills you all in there, but . . .” She hesitated, glancing beyond me at the others, now climbing into two different vehicles. “But speak up if you sense something that doesn’t feel quite right. Genuine threats aren’t always obvious, and neither is the way we sense them.”

I knew she regretted not being able to go, but as our leader, she had to take care of all of us. Leaving behind our two newest Unbounded with an unconscious Stella wasn’t an option, and she was the only one skilled enough in medicine to care for them properly.