Chimera

Eight The Bet

While 95 was still one of the major thoroughfares in New Jersey, it was far less traveled than it used to be. The devastation of the War in and around New York City bled over into New Jersey, ruining most of the once-popular shoreline and making travel north into NYC all but nonexistent. All of the rest areas along the interstate had closed down, leaving behind empty buildings and weedy parking lots—tiny little ghost towns still advertising gasoline and cheap fast food.

Our rest area was a mediumish tan building with faded trim the color of dying moss. Most of the glass surfaces had shattered, and someone had painted a spectacular mural of graffiti along one wall. The twisted shapes and symbols made no real sense to me, but the loops and bends felt familiar. Almost comforting—odd reflections of shapes my own body had once been able to re-create.

The grass between the road and the parking lot was hip-high and created a kind of wall between us and the rest of the world. I drove over the cracked pavement and stopped right in the middle of everything. I didn’t want surprises, didn’t want a blind spot for anyone to sneak up on us.

I looked across the seat at Thatcher, who was watching me intently. He didn’t reach for the door or make a move to get out. He was taking his cues from me, even though he was the one Landon wanted.

We are really screwed when I’m the one in charge.

“How long do you think they’ll make us wait?” I asked.

“Long enough to be certain we’re alone, I’d guess,” Thatcher replied. “He’s smart, but he also seems impulsive. He won’t wait longer than he has to.”

I didn’t know Thatcher well, but I noted the tight lines around his mouth, the tic in his jaw, and the way his fingers dug into the legs of his pants. He was anxious about this meeting, about seeing his son alive after more than fifteen years. A son who was now a thief and a criminal and wanted in several states—and I’d never asked Thatcher how he felt about those things.

The fact that I wanted to know how he felt didn’t surprise me like it should have. It needed to surprise me, damn it.

Sitting in the Sport felt too claustrophobic, so I turned off the engine and climbed out. The warm, humid air reeked of motor oil and exhaust, with a lingering odor of waste. Everything in New Jersey seemed to smell the same lately. It made me miss Los Angeles.

I leaned against the driver’s-side door, anxious to get this over with. The anticipation of a confrontation always had me in knots (no pun intended), and I had to force myself to stay still and not pace. If Thatcher was taking his cues from me, I needed to keep the crazy in check.

Thatcher joined me, standing near a clump of grass that had sprouted from a crack in the unpatched parking lot. He scuffed at the grass with his sneaker, but his attention shifted from place to place, taking it all in. He was always attentive to his surroundings, always watching his flanks, observing.

The occasional car rumbled past on the interstate, and each new sound drew our attention. Nothing slowed down, though, until a new noise cut through—louder, more defined. A motorcycle of some kind, and it slowed down. The driver was slim, wore jeans, a gray T-shirt, and a black helmet, and he pulled to a stop a few feet from the Sport. Thatcher took a step to his left, putting himself between me and the motorcycle. My fingers twitched, wanting to feel the grip of my Coltson, needing that sense of security when facing an unknown enemy. I kept still.

The driver turned off his bike and swung one leg over to stand up straight. He faced us for a moment, then took off the helmet with a melodramatic flourish. Landon Cunningham placed the helmet on the seat of the motorcycle without ever turning his back on us. Thatcher’s entire body tensed, coiling up tight. I couldn’t see his face, but I imagined he was working hard to keep a neutral expression.

Landon gave me a dismissive glance before turning the whole of his attention onto Thatcher. He took a few steps forward, stopping with a good two-arm’s reach between them. Up close, I saw the resemblance between father and son as clear as glass—the dark hair and gray eyes, the long nose, the square jaw. Landon had his father’s height, but he hadn’t quite filled out yet so didn’t have Thatcher’s solid build.

“They told me you were dead,” Thatcher said.

Landon narrowed his eyes, his mouth thinning. “At least you’re both good at following directions,” he said, ignoring Thatcher’s comment. “Find the place okay?”

“Where’s Ethan?” I asked.

“In a safe place. Since you weren’t interested in a trade, I didn’t see the need to bring him along.”

I tamped down a flare of worry. “I want to speak with him.”

“No.”

“Look, we’re cooperating here, but I will only continue to do so if I have proof that Ethan is alive and unharmed.”

Landon scowled, then pulled out a cell phone. He circled Thatcher and moved closer to me while he dialed. “Put him on,” he said to whoever was on the other end of the line. Probably Bethany. He put the phone on speaker.

“What?” Ethan said, the tartness in his voice beautiful to hear.

“It’s Renee,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“So far. Their hospitality is a little lacking, though. How’s Aaron?”

“He’s fine. Pissed and worried.”

“That makes two of us.”

“I’d say it makes about forty of us.”

Landon cut off the call without so much as a warning. “That’s enough of that.” He put the phone away. “Satisfied?”

“For now.”

“Why are we here, Landon?” Thatcher asked.

“Whatever happened to a friendly chat among fellow Metas?” Landon replied. “Isn’t that the big party line right now? Unite all Metas so that humans stop fearing us? Stop murdering us?”

“That’s the plan, yes.”

“So what are you going to do with the Metas who don’t want to be on the cheerleading team?”

“It’s a choice, not a requirement.”

“Some choice, when the alternative is being hunted.”

“You’re only being hunted because you’re a thief,” I said. “You’ve broken into a dozen warehouses and stolen goods that don’t belong to you. Meta or not, that’s a crime.”

Landon rolled his eyes. “Blah, blah, thief, blah, blah, crime. You have no idea why we do what we do.”

“So explain it to me. I am all ears.”

His gaze flickered down to my breasts. “I’d say you’re all—”

“Watch it, junior.”

“All talk.” Landon blinked innocently. “I hear your powers are on the fritz. That why you carry a gun?”

“Partly.” I put my hands on my hips. “I also really like having something long and hard in my hands.”

His eyes widened briefly. He didn’t move, but he mentally backed down. Landon was obviously used to being the big dog on campus, unchallenged. I may have lost my sex appeal when I lost a good amount of my skin, but my sharp tongue hadn’t gone anywhere. Some men were so easy to take down a few pegs.

Thatcher, for his part, looked momentarily impressed. “Leaving you and your mother was the hardest decision I ever had to make,” he said to Landon. Bless him for getting the conversation back on track. “The War was coming to a head. I thought distancing myself was the best way to protect you both from my enemies.”

“From the Rangers, you mean,” Landon said.

“Them, and the human police, the National Guard, everyone who was fighting us. And from Specter.” He swallowed hard. “When they told me you’d both died . . . it almost killed me, Landon, thinking I’d failed you both.”

“You failed us when you left us behind to go murder children.”

My entire body jerked at that cold accusation.

Thatcher flinched. “We never wanted to hurt those kids. We didn’t have a choice. Specter could have killed any one of us with a thought, at any time, if we disobeyed him. All I wanted was to survive and come home to you and your mother.”

Landon took a step toward Thatcher, one hand clenched into a fist, lips curled back in a sneer. “Could you really have come home and given me a hug, knowing you’d murdered someone else’s child in order to be there?”

“I’d have held you tighter because of it. I have spent every single day these last fifteen years regretting every life I took, every person I hurt. I can’t take any of it back, Landon, but I can try to be a better man.”

“A better man? Being a better man is trying to put your son in prison?” This time Landon’s glare landed on me.

“I’m not helping them arrest you,” Thatcher said. “But you sent me a personal invitation to this little party, so here I am.”

“I wish I could say the vintage Father’s Day card was my idea. It did get your attention, though.”

“It got the attention of the whole prison.”

“Look,” I said. “Landon, you said I have no idea why you do what you do. Why don’t you explain it to me? That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Besides giving your father a verbal ass-kicking for everything you think he’s done wrong?”

Landon gave me a poisonous look that I met with my own hard stare. “Equal distribution of goods,” he said.

“You’re going to have to explain that one.”

“Come on, Flex, you’ve been around. You see how bad things are in the rural areas. One chain controls over eighty percent of the manufactured food distribution in this country, and that food goes only where the company’s shareholders say it goes. Independent grocers are struggling to feed their communities at insanely jacked-up prices. We’re keeping people from starving.”

Well, this was certainly new. “So you’re, what? Modern-day Robin Hoods? Robbing from the rich grocers and giving to the poor ones?”

Landon smiled. “Something like that. We’re heroes to the people we feed.”

“Robin Hood was a hero, too, but he was still hunted by the authorities.”

“We aren’t the bad guys.”

“Then who are you? Because you sure as hell aren’t the good guys. Breaking-and-entering, destruction of property, theft, not to mention you’ve recently added assault and kidnapping to your growing list of crimes.”

“Your friend is fine.”

“Oh, he’s fine, so that makes it okay?” This kid was tweaking my last nerve, so absolutely positive that his actions were justified no matter who got hurt along the way.

“You couldn’t possibly understand.”

“Junior, the depth of what I know that you couldn’t possibly understand would have you curled in a fetal position for a month.”

Landon’s hand moved like he wanted to take a swing at me. Thatcher took a step sideways toward us, raising both his hands in a gesture of peace. “Look,” he said, “this kind of arguing is pointless. Landon, I have to ask you something.”

“She’s dead,” Landon said.

Thatcher blinked. “How—”

“Oh, come on. You’ve wanted to ask since the moment I got here. Sorry, Dad, but Mom died in that fire for real.”

“Why?”

“Why didn’t the people who took me save her, too? She was human.”

Thatcher looked sick. “They killed her. And they stole you.”

“They freed me.”

“From your mother?”

“From an ordinary life. From being shunned and hated if anyone ever found out who my father was, or that I was a Meta, too.”

“Who took you?” I asked.

Landon paused, considering his words. “We knew him as Uncle.”

“We?”

“Bethany and me. Uncle raised us together. He educated us, trained us to survive, gave us the skills we needed to help others.”

“He made you both professional thieves.”

Landon shrugged. “Call it what you want.”

“Were you trained in a facility?”

“No, we moved every couple of months. It wasn’t safe to get attached to one place, or for people to remember us.”

“Did this Uncle train any other kids?”

“No idea. We left his care when we turned eighteen, and we’ve only had occasional phone contact for the last eight months or so.”

Since all of our powers returned.

“And you can save your breath asking,” Landon added. “I won’t give you a description or help you find Uncle. I’d never betray him, and neither will Bethany.”

Challenge accepted.

“What happens now?” Thatcher asked.

“To be honest, I’d entertained ideas of killing you in this parking lot and ridding the world of one more child killer.”

My fingers twitched as my heart rate sped up. I mentally calculated the time it would take to reach into my coat, grab my Coltson, and shoot.

Thatcher, on the other hand, looked perfectly at ease. “And now?”

Landon cocked his head to the side, considering. “I may be a lot of things, but I’m not a killer.”

“I’m glad.”

“That doesn’t solve our dilemma, though,” he said to me. “I still have your friend, and you want to arrest me.”

“I’m not the police, Landon,” I said. “And so far, the police don’t have your or Bethany’s name. Our investigation is completely internal.”

Landon stared. “Why?”

“Because Trance, my boss, isn’t fond of outing Metas to local authorities. Until we understood what was going on, the investigation was need-to-know.”

“Was?”

“One of ours was kidnapped. It’s hard to tell if she’s changed her mind yet.”

He looked pained. “These communities really do depend on us to survive. If we stop delivering food, they’ll starve.” He spoke with absolute conviction, and with a hint of fear. “They need us. I’ll give Ethan back if you promise to stop looking for us.”

“I can’t promise that, Landon.”

“What if I show you?”

“Show me?”

“I’ll take you both to one of the towns that I feed. You can see the people for yourself, see the difference we make to them. And you can see for yourself that Ethan is okay.”

Landon had just said the magic words. I couldn’t promise him that seeing this town would make us not report him and Bethany, but I could promise to look. To see his version of Sherwood Forest and pass along what I knew to Teresa. Landon and Bethany would probably still be hunted for their crimes, but I could play along for a while. And I knew Thatcher wouldn’t give up the chance to spend more time with his son.

“All right,” I said. “We’ll go.”

“I have two conditions,” Landon said.

“Name them.”

“First, you’ll be blindfolded for the trip. I can’t have you taking others back to the location.”

I glanced at Thatcher, who nodded. “Okay, agreed. The other?”

“You’ll have to leave your phones and coms here.”

That condition I didn’t like as much. “I can agree to leave our communication devices behind if I can send one message first.”

“What kind of message?”

“I want to tell Trance to not worry or look for us, and that I’ll be in contact when I can.”

Landon considered the request with a sour expression. “Fine. But I want to read the text before you send it.”

“Okay.”

I took out my phone and typed the message just as I’d said it, then showed the phone to Landon. After he hit send, he gave the phone a mighty toss toward the road. It cracked when it hit the ground. Our coms followed. Landon sent a haze of static electricity over each of us, probably checking for any other kind of trackers on our persons. He took my gun, too. He electrified the Sport and destroyed the tracker he found under the fender.

The kid’s too smart for his own good.

From the rear compartment of the Sport, he produced a spare blanket and used his telekinesis to tear it into wide strips, which he folded twice. Blindfolds. He had four strips, though, which meant—

“You aren’t tying us up,” I said with a fierceness that startled Landon. “No arm restraints. Blindfolds only.”

He opened his mouth as if to protest, then shut it. Nodded. Good, because if he’d insisted, I would have called the whole damned thing off. No one tied me up, not ever again. The pretzel job that Specter had done on me back in January had taken nearly a month to heal, and those long nights hopped up on muscle relaxants had brought back old nightmares. Nightmares of being tied up and tortured by people who were supposed to love me.

Never again, goddammit.

I ignored Thatcher’s speculative look as we both climbed into the backseat. Since Landon seemed to have no qualms about leaving his motorcycle behind, I assumed it was stolen, too, and I added motorcycle thief to his list of crimes. The kid was certainly filling out his rap sheet. And he seemed to like showing off, because instead of just using his hands, he used his powers to tie on Thatcher’s blindfold.

My stomach flipped when the swatch of fabric hovered toward my own eyes. I didn’t like this, being driven blindly to an unknown destination by someone whose mental state I didn’t quite trust. Landon said he wasn’t a killer, but his actions at the warehouse early Saturday morning said he wasn’t above getting violent.

I didn’t have a choice.

The gray cotton descended over my eyes. Phantom fingers cinched it tight and tied a knot, casting the world into darkness.