Ghost Heart

  But what if half of what Dr. Fineman had told me was true? What if they still had Danielle and Marcus didn’t know it? They could have tricked him into believing she was dead. Or maybe, by some miracle of her power to heal, she’d survived extraction, just like he had. What if she’d woken up to find Marcus gone, escaped away without her? What would she have done to survive? Dr. Fineman had implied that he and Mike Palmer had recovered from their injuries thanks to Danielle’s power. Was she working with them, or for them, or was she just trying to stay alive like I was?

  I glanced down at the hole again, light and motion catching my eye.

  And then her finger came through, but not her normal finger, not a flesh finger.

  I stared down at the delicate fingertip of PSS jutting through the wall, and then her entire hand came through up to the wrist. As I stared down, mesmerized, she turned her PSS hand, palm-up, and held it out for me the way someone offers you their hand to hold, an intimate gesture.

  Take my hand. Trust me.

  I reached out my ghost hand and took hers.

  I had only touched someone else’s PSS once before. Marcus and I had shared that—my fingers brushing against his chest. This was just as sensuous. It was like hearing Samantha play, the knowing, the being, and the wonder. Sensations rushed over me: well-being, trust, peace, safety, rest. Suddenly, all my aches and pains were gone. I wasn’t hungry anymore. I wasn’t tired anymore. I wasn’t afraid anymore.

  Holy crap.

  I yanked my hand out of hers.

  It was overwhelming, that feeling. It had been wonderful and too much, all at once, like I might implode from the goodness of it.

  Her hand was disappearing back through the wall.

  “Don’t leave,” I called. “Are you Danielle?” But it wasn’t really a question anymore. “I know your brother. I know Mar—David. Do you know a way out of here?”

  There was no answer except the sound of her moving away. Of course she didn’t know a way out, or she wouldn’t still be here. And yet, she’d somehow managed to get the key to the handcuffs, which meant she wasn’t quite as limited in her freedom as we were. Danielle had been here for eight months. She must know this place backwards and forwards by now. If she could help us, we might all get out of this hell hole together. I could be the one to reunite Marcus and his sister, the sister he believed was dead.

  I could save her.

  We could save each other.

  The cell door banged open and Anthony charged in.

  I’d been so focused on the Danielle thing, I hadn’t even heard them coming.

  Them. Plural. Because Anthony was not alone. He’d brought a whole platoon of armed CAMFers.

  A couple of them grabbed Grant, shaking him out of a dead sleep. He struggled a little at first until one of them backhanded him across the face.

  Anthony grabbed me, yanking me up.

  I let the note drop from my hands behind me, hoping he wouldn’t see it.

  They yelled at us, shoving us toward the door. If they noticed we didn’t have our handcuffs on or that Grant was unshackled, they didn’t seem to care.

  I should have known then something was terribly wrong. I should have known by the triumphantly smug look on Anthony’s face. But I was still in a daze from finding Danielle and whatever she’d done to me. It was hard to feel fear. It was hard to feel anything except the euphoria welling up into my body from my hand.

  They took us up the elevator, down the hall, and shoved us through Dr. Fineman’s darkened lab into the interrogation room. The lights were off in there too, but Anthony flicked them on and ordered four of the guys to stand guard outside. “No one comes in,” he told them. “No one.”

  They nodded and left the room, shutting and locking the door behind them, leaving Anthony and four more guards inside, two each holding Grant and me.

  Alarm bells were going off in my head by then. Who would Anthony need to keep out? And why?

  I looked around the room and over at the two-way mirror.

  Dr. Fineman wasn’t here.

  I couldn’t sense his ever-watching presence.

  As far as I could tell, it was the middle of the night.

  And that was when I realized Anthony had brought us there on his own. He was acting without Dr. Fineman’s knowledge or permission. There was a mutiny among the CAMFers, and I was its focal point. Palmer’s words to Anthony from days ago echoed in my head. Something needs to be done. He had meant something had to be done about me and my hand, and I had a terrible feeling I was about to find out what that “something” was. Suddenly, the spell woven over me by Danielle began to wear off. Grant and I were in trouble. Serious trouble.

  I looked over at him, trying to warn him with my eyes, but he was staring at Anthony who had crossed to the table in the middle of the room. There was a metal case there and Anthony opened it, pulling something out. It was metal too, and long, and looked like a cross between an electric carving knife and a minus meter.

  “Bring her over here,” he said, gesturing at the chair, and the two CAMFers holding me propelled me toward him.

  “What are you doing?” Grant demanded, struggling against the men holding him. “Leave her alone. We’ll cooperate. Just don’t—” One of the guard’s fists came down on the back of Grant’s neck, knocking him to his knees, turning his protests to moans of pain.

  “Leave him alone,” I yelled, trying to dig my bare feet into the smooth floor, trying to stop my forward momentum toward Anthony, and the table, and the device in his hands, but it was no use. There were two of them, and they were huge, and I was nothing. They shoved me forward, one pinning me against the edge of the table, the other grabbing my arm and holding it out across the tabletop, my ghost hand right in front of Anthony.

  “Oh, we’re going to leave him alone,” Anthony said, shoving his ugly face into mine. “But I’m afraid you’re not so lucky. You see this?” He held the device up. “Do you know what this is?”

  I shook my head, staring at it, almost transfixed by its horrid beauty.

  “It’s a special kind of minus meter,” he said. “See, the original ones Dr. Fineman made were kind of glitchy. They would drain the PSS out of you minus cunts, which was good, but then you’d just keep leaking it out until you died a slow, agonizing death. Now, some of us thought that was just fine, didn’t we, Max?” he asked the man holding my arm.

  “Yes sir, only good minus cunt is a dead minus cunt,” the man said.

  “But the good doctor doesn’t agree with us. We don’t see eye to eye. He wanted to come up with a way to extract PSS without killing the subject. Sadly, he just didn’t have the right ingredients to create such a thing, until he stumbled upon some unique blades in a small town in Illinois.”

  I stared at the thing Anthony was holding. Now I could see that each notch in the blade’s serration was a small, sharp, individual piece of metal, all of them carefully welded together to make a whole. Marcus had made something new out of our Passion’s blade, something to protect me. Dr. Fineman, sick fuck that he was, had made this.

  “How’s that for irony?” Anthony said, flipping a small switch on the handle of Dr. Fineman’s new invention.

  The device began to hum and something red flashed across my vision, a line of light running from the inside of the handle to the tip of the gently curved blade.

  “That’s the self-cauterizing laser,” Anthony said with a grin. “The blades sever the PSS clean through and the beam closes the ethereal wound right up. I mean, it’s not just any laser. The doc had to make it special just for this. Of course, we haven’t had a chance to test it fully until now.”

  “He didn’t tell you to do this.” I locked eyes with Anthony, ignoring the cold fear eating at my guts. “He wants me to put the cube back in him. He wants me to pull other things—”

  “No!” Anthony slammed one fist down on the table, waving the machine around wildly in his other hand. “You’re too dangerous. He’s blinded by his science, but he’ll
thank me for this in the end. What you do with that hand—it’s an abomination. And there’s only one way to make sure you never do it again.”

  There was no more warning than that.

  He lowered the blade to my wrist, exactly where my PSS met my flesh.

  I have felt pain before. The room with the blades under Palmer’s house had been very bad. I thought I’d lost my ghost hand then. That’s what it had felt like. But this was a hundred times worse.

  I remember hearing Grant screaming, or maybe it was me. I remember bucking against the men who held me, the sensation of the table digging into my chest. I remember seeing the red light and the blade cutting through my PSS like butter. And as it was severed, it wisped away, sucked into a small port at the base of the oversized knife handle.

  At some point, the lights in the room flashed in and out and I was racing down a narrow tunnel toward darkness and peace, only to find myself suddenly standing in a golden cornfield with Marcus, the breeze ruffling his hair, an achingly-blue autumn sky hanging over us.

  “What’s the matter?” he said, tugging me by the hand. He was holding my hand.

  “I—Is this heaven?” I asked, totally confused. Since when had I believed in heaven?

  “Nooo—this isn’t heaven,” he said, grinning. “It’s a cornfield.”

  “But how did I—never mind—I need to tell you something.” I moved closer to him, slipping my arm around his waist the way he liked me to.

  His eyes went wide in surprise. “What do you need to tell me?” he asked, his voice both skeptical and hopeful all at once.

  I fixed my eyes on his lips, moving in to kiss him the way I had that first time in his tent.

  I could feel his hesitation at first, his body tense, but then he relaxed into it, his lips opening to mine, our tongues touching, his arms pulling me against him.

  I pulled away and looked up into those smoldering brown eyes. “I love you,” I said.

  “Passion, whoa,” he said, dumping me out of his arms, and backing into the corn a little. “Listen, I appreciate the sentiment but—”

  I didn’t hear the rest of what he said. I looked down at my hands. Neither one PSS. They weren’t my hands. This wasn’t my place. Marcus had just called me Passion and Anthony had been cutting off my ghost hand with Passion’s blades.

  The cornfield and Marcus flew up into the sky and away as I was sucked down into the dark earth, the cold earth, the dead earth.

  Later, someone was carrying me, but it was nothing like when Marcus had carried me and called me babe.

  And when I woke, lying on the slab of cement in my cell alone, the bulb in the ceiling had come back on and I could clearly see that the end of my right arm now ended in nothing but a fleshy stump.

  I was alone. What had they done with Grant? Had they killed him? I tried to muster up the will to care, but I couldn’t.

  I didn’t want Grant.

  I wanted Marcus and the cornfield.

  I would give anything to have it back.

  Even my hand.

  20

  MARCUS

  I‘ll admit, when Passion slipped her arms around me and kissed me, I wasn’t expecting it. I mean, I hadn’t gotten that vibe from her, and it wasn’t like girls threw themselves at me in general. Danielle had once told me I was too guarded, that I never let anyone in, but she also knew why. When you grow up in foster care, affection is like a dangerous, secret code. You might be reading the signals right. Or returning a hug from your new sister might result in you getting the shit beaten out of you by your new dad. So, yeah, I wasn’t a touchy-feely kind of guy.

  But I was still a guy.

  I was also totally caught off guard.

  One minute Passion was fuming at Jason as we fled through a cornfield, the next minute she’d stopped, stock-still, and her expression had completely changed to this adorable, awestruck look. Then, she’d asked me if we were in heaven, and her eyes zoned in on my lips, her hands going around my waist—for a split second, she’d looked like someone else, someone completely different.

  So, yeah, I didn’t fight it. Why would I?

  Until she dropped the love bomb completely out of nowhere.

  “Passion, whoa.” I pulled out of her embrace and backed up a little. “Listen, I appreciate the sentiment but—”

  “Oh, no,” she put her fingers to her lips, blinking up at me like I was a bright light. “I’m so sorry. That wasn’t—I don’t love you. I mean, I like you, but not in that way. You’re a nice guy and everything but—no.”

  “Then what the hell was that? You just kissed me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I know. I did, but I didn’t.”

  What was that supposed to mean? Was she crazy? Was she using me to get back at Jason? “Oh, well, I’m glad we cleared that up,” I snapped.

  “No, I mean it wasn’t me,” she said, catching my eyes, trying to communicate some wordless cryptic message. “I don’t like guys,” she said finally, looking embarrassed. “Samantha and I—we were together before the Eidolon.”

  “You and Samantha?” I blurted. “But she isn’t—”

  “Yes, she is,” she assured me. “She likes both. But I said something about her father she didn’t like, and now she’ll barely talk to me.”

  Sam, my little cousin, was bi? Actually, I wasn’t that surprised. Sam had always been enthusiastic about all human beings. She loved people. Period. As closed off as I was, she was the polar opposite. She was also totally blind to my uncle’s flaws, which apparently now included having her shot.

  But that still didn’t explain the whole kiss-you, love-you, now-I’m-suddenly-gay thing Passion was pulling.

  “I’m still confused,” I said, brushing a hand though my hair. “If you like girls, then why kiss me? You keep saying it wasn’t you. So what? You were suddenly demonically possessed by a straight person and they lunged for my lips?”

  “Pretty much,” she said, giving me that look again, like she expected me to read her mind.

  “That doesn’t even—” I started to say, and then it all clicked into place. The way she’d spoken and acted and even looked different. The sudden confusion on her face when she’d asked where we were. The familiar way she’d touched me. “It was her,” I said. “That girl you can feel through the tags.”

  “That girl?” She was back to being angry Passion again. “She’s not that girl. Her name is Olivia, and you know it.”

  “Right. Whatever,” I said. “So, she was into me?” I tried to keep the amusement out of my voice, but it wasn’t easy. It seemed I’d been a very busy boy over the last eight months. Not only had I been to this Eidolon thing, I’d also collected a bunch of groupies, a barn full of camping gear, and an admirer I didn’t even remember.

  It was kind of funny.

  Except Passion wasn’t laughing.

  “She wasn’t into you,” she said. “You were into each other. You were in love. You are in love.”

  “No way,” I said, the humor suddenly gone out of me. “Not possible. I don’t do that.”

  “Don’t do what? Love people?”

  “Love them. Trust them. It’s kind of a policy I have.”

  “Well, she broke your policy,” Passion insisted. “Olivia isn’t exactly a hopeless romantic either, but you both softened around each other, like all your hard edges had been rounded. And if telling you causes your brain to explode, it’s exactly what you deserve.” She crossed her arms over her chest.

  I knew there was no way I’d loved this girl, but obviously I’d convinced Passion I had, and probably the girl as well. What had I been doing?

  “And don’t tell me you don’t love anyone.” Passion said. “What about your sister?”

  “Yeah, I love my sister, but that’s different.” Now she was just being annoying. “We only have each other. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Wouldn’t I?” she shot back. If looks could kill, I would’ve
had to reboot again. “What do you even know about me?”

  “Nothing,” I said. What did she want from me? To confess my undying love for a girl I didn’t even know. “I don’t remember anything, remember?” I began to pace up and down the narrow corn row. “That’s kind of the whole point. I don’t remember Olivia. At all. So don’t fucking tell me I love her, okay? Because I don’t.”

  “But you did,” she said, her nostrils flaring. “And she loves you. You think it sucks to forget? Try being one of us for a day. We’ve lost things too. You were our friend. You were our leader. You saved our lives. You knew what the hell was going on with the CAMFers and The Hold, and you had a plan. You always had a plan. At least, we thought you did. We trusted that you did, and you NEVER trusted us, and you led us straight to the Eidolon. Two of my friends died there. Two of your friends. And you don’t even remember them. And now what? You sit around like a lump for days feeling sorry for yourself, pining after your sister. I lost my sister too, okay? She died. She drowned when we were twelve. So, don’t you dare tell me I don’t understand.” She stormed off down the row and she was crying. I’d made her cry.

  I followed her, feeling like a complete dick. She was right about some things. Yeah, I’d been wallowing in self-pity and been consumed with worry about Danielle. Danielle and I—I had been the only one to ever truly protect her. You think foster care was difficult for me? That was nothing compared to what it was for Danielle. She’d always been a beautiful, delicate girl. And she’d been a healer, willing to take on other people’s pain, and guilt, and darkness, always seeing the good in them, even when there wasn’t any. Even when they were hurting her. Or abusing her. While I raged against our fate with violence and stubbornness, she suffered quietly, sometimes even keeping things from me so I wouldn’t get in trouble trying to help her.

  And now she was gone, and I didn’t know where, and I couldn’t protect her. It was tearing me up inside, and it made it hard to remember that all the people around me were missing something too. They were missing me. Or their friends who had been taken. Or both.