The Origin (30 page)

It was time.

As soon as they stepped inside the wide elevators that rose to the top of the Chrysler Building, Daniel came to the decision that he could no longer keep his mouth shut. Olivia deserved to know the entire story.

But even as they traveled silently up the elevator to the uppermost floor, his mind still sought other options, clambered for other ways around his problem. Still, as much as he cared for the woman who stood so still beside him, he could not deny the irrefutable fact that he was a risk to all. He was nothing but a walking infectious disease in a densely populated city.

The elevator doors opened and revealed a deck full of warm bodies milling around, posing and taking pictures. His heart sank and he clutched at Olivia’s hand like a lifeline. He had counted on the winter’s chill to keep visitors away from the top of one of Manhattan’s tallest buildings, but he could not have been more wrong.

“Daniel?” Olivia squeezed his hand and pulled him out of the elevator, her limp almost undetectable now. “You doing okay?”

His eyes flew around, assessing each person in the area. “No. I’m just… I can’t be near people.”

“I didn’t know you had agoraphobia.”

He shrugged and tried to look frightened, which he guessed did not look all that different from apprehension. He didn’t care if Olivia thought he had a phobia, as long as it kept her from pulling him into a crowd of people, many of who would certainly get on a plane and fly to all ends of the earth.

“Do you want to leave?” she asked, her eyebrows knitted together.

“No.” He shook his head. If he didn’t tell her now, he may never find the courage again.

Still clinging to her hand, he made a beeline for a secluded corner of the red-bricked deck and, with his heart pounding in his ears, steeled his nerves and faced her.

“
Liv
, I have something to tell you.”

Olivia’s stomach lurched at the weight of his words. The look on Daniel’s face was unsettling; the firm line of his lips a sure sign that his news might not be altogether pleasant.

Still, a girl could hope.

 
“I have one more power that I haven’t told you about,” he said.

Olivia held her breath, hoping that Daniel would reveal that he could fly, and then scoop her up and soar off the edge of the tower, fly past the Chrysler Building and perhaps alight on the uppermost flame of the Statue of Liberty. It wasn’t her most original idea, but sounded exciting nonetheless.

But Daniel’s news was not something she could have even dreamed up. “If I touch someone, I can accidentally infect them with powers, too. I’m contagious,” he said so quickly, the words took a few seconds to coagulate in her mind.

She released her breath in one jolted gasp. “What? How? How do you know?”

“A psychic told me.”

“A psychic?”

“Remember that woman you saw me with at the diner?”

She nodded, remembering the fleeting feeling of familiarity upon seeing her face in the window.

“When I shook her hand, I infected her with the power to read minds.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came forth as she tried to sort through the information he was offering. Daniel had the ability to give powers with his touch. He had touched a psychic’s hand and had inadvertently infected her with the ability to read minds. But what if the contact lasted longer than a handshake?

She opened her mouth to speak, but Daniel beat her to the punch.

“I think I’ve done it to you,” he said, confirming her suspicion. “Unless you’ve always had the ability to make people do what you say?” he added with a hopeful lilt in his voice.

As she shook her head, she thought back to the first time that people complied with whatever she asked, and could go no further than the day she met Daniel at the bank. Before spotting him across the lobby, she had, in fact, just tried to convince the bank manager to allow her access to her mother’s account with no amount of success.

“I think I’ve infected many people.” He stared at her steadily, though his breathing was anything but. “This is serious.”

She said nothing, struck with the horrifying idea that Daniel had only agreed to dinner with her because she had ordered him to, followed by the realization that she had told him to reveal his secret abilities also; he’d said so himself. Of their entire relationship, she’d assumed he was acting on his own free will. Now she was left wondering just how much of his actions could be attributed to genuine feelings, and just how much was the direct result of her silver tongue.

She opened her mouth but couldn’t bring herself to ask, lest she reveal the insecure girl under her veneer of confidence.

“I have to leave New York.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded. So here it was, the answer to her unasked question, the beginning to the inevitable end.

Daniel grasped both of her hands and said the most surprising thing of all: “I want you to come with me.”

Her mouth went dry as she stared. He wanted her to come with him; and she might have said yes had she known unequivocally that his feelings were sincere, that they were truly born of genuine affection and not from some false sense of intimacy.

“But, my life is here.” She offered the weak reason hoping he would find an easy rebuttal.

But Daniel’s face turned stony, and though he held her hands, she felt him pulling away, receding into himself once more.

She shook her head, wishing she could speak her mind without turning her words into a directive. “I can’t leave, Daniel. Not yet.”

I want you to stay.

“And I can’t stay,
Liv
.”

Tell me you love me. I’ll believe you.

But he said nothing of the sort and they stared at each other for a long time, violet eyes on grey. Finally, she said, carefully phrasing it into a question, “Will you stay… for me?”

Daniel’s eyebrows knitted, as if he had expected to hear something different. “I can’t. For a million reasons, one of which is that the police are close on my trail. I
have
to leave the city,
Liv
.”

Her chest hurt. “When?”

“Soon.”

“Where will you go?”

He looked away and she followed his gaze, through the glass wall of the deck, past the cluster of concrete buildings, along the green expanse of Central Park, and beyond the hazy horizon. “Somewhere remote, someplace I don’t have to constantly worry about infecting people,” he said under his breath.

“It’s not an infection, Daniel. It’s a gift,” she said, pulling on his chin so that he once again faced her. “And it saved my life.”

His mouth remained set in a bleak line as he looked at her with scorn. “Then why aren’t you using your
gift
to make me stay?”

Keeping the tears at bay, she said, “I can’t make you stay if you don’t want to.”

Please, just tell me you want to.

“I’m not staying,” he said through gritted teeth. “But I want you to come with me. We can raise the baby together.”

She frowned and gasped. “What… what baby?” His eyes flicked down to her stomach, and she understood. “I’m not going to get pregnant, Daniel. I’m on the pill.”

His shoulders hunched over as he exhaled in visible relief.

“Is that the only reason why you want me to come with you?” she asked, telling herself that it was the cold wind that was stinging her eyes and burning the insides of her lungs.

He straightened as he shook his head. “No.” His hand grasped hers and squeezed. “I care about you.”

“Let’s face it, Daniel, you only care about me because I ordered you to.”

“That’s not true.”

“No?” she challenged. “You didn’t want to have dinner with me, but I made you do it. And afterward, even after you tried to avoid me, I still managed to talk you into seeing me. And you only told me your secret because I made you.” She pulled her hand away as she shook her head. “You’re only here because I took the choice away from you.”

He looked at her for a long while in frustration. Finally, he took a step forward and grasped the sides of her head. “You couldn’t be more wrong. I choose to be here. I choose to be with you. You might have made me approach but it wasn’t your silver tongue that made me stay.”

Her lips trembled into the shape of a smile, wanting to believe Daniel’s impassioned words. She searched his eyes and decided to take a leap of faith. “Then, yes. I’ll come with you.”

A smile spread out over his face and she knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that she had fallen in love. The realization filled her with excitement and despair, her heart palpitating with its swiftness and certainty.

“Okay,” he said, raining kisses on her face at a dizzying speed. Finally, he stopped and wrapped her in his embrace, the warmth of his presence reaching her to the core.

“Where are we going to go?” she said with a nervous laugh.

“Wherever the hell we want!”

She felt lightheaded as a laugh escaped her throat, but the moment was gone too soon.

“Help!” a voice called out.

Olivia turned to the sound, and a moment later, felt the cold air seeping through her coat as Daniel dashed off. She followed and fought through the crowd that had gathered, finding an older lady sitting on the ground, cradling an unconscious boy in her arms.

“My grandson slipped on the ice and hit his head,” she said and, with lips trembling, turned to the child in her arms. “Luke, wake up. Please wake up.”

It was then that Olivia spotted Daniel at the edge of the crowd, his eyebrows furrowed deeply. Their eyes met. “Help them,” she mouthed, but to her surprise, he shook his head. With remorse-filled eyes, he held up his hands covered in worn leather gloves to remind her of his affliction.

Olivia glanced down at the unmoving child and the panic-stricken grandmother. She
had
to do something. She crept closer and dropped to one knee beside them. “Luke,” Olivia said, glancing up at the white-haired woman for approval. She ran a hand through the boy’s light brown hair and bent close to his ear. “Luke, honey, listen to me. You will wake up right now.”

The little boy’s eyes fluttered open, but remained glassy as he looked around.

“Oh, thank God!” the woman exclaimed, grasping the boy closer. She looked up at Olivia with a grateful smile then turned back to the boy.

 
Getting back to her feet, Olivia pulled out her cell phone and dialed 911. When next she looked up, Daniel was gone.

“Detective, I think you need to take a look at this.”

Lingle looked up from his computer as the twenty-something lab tech literally bounded into his office. “Can you make it fast? I’m busy here,” he said warily, wishing he could find a way to siphon just a little of her energy for himself.

“Oh, you’ll have time for this.” Lindsey placed two sheets of paper on his desk with an excited little smile. He raised an eyebrow and waited patiently for the explanation. When none came, he picked up the top sheet and tried to make sense of the tables full of numbers and letters. “DNA results for the blood found for the King Kidnapping case,” he murmured while reading. “It still says
Identity Unknown
.”

“Just look at the next page, will you?”

With an impatient groan, he turned to the next page, then, noticing something strange, flipped back to the first page to confirm. Sure enough, the results on every single allele category were identical to those on the first page. The only difference lay at the top of the sheet where it cited the name of the source. “You found DNA on the mask?” He looked up at Lindsey and swallowed deeply. He studied both pages again, in case his eyes were deceiving him. “No…”

“Yes. There were traces of blood near the mouth area of the mask.” Lindsey nodded excitedly, her heavily-lined eyes practically glowing. “The Black Hero and–”

“The Black Vigilante,” he corrected vaguely out of habit.

She rolled her eyes. “Correction, the Black
Vigilante
and the mystery guy from Olivia King’s kidnapping are one and the same.”

Lingle tried to temper his rising excitement. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I ran the tests three times! I’m so sure, I’d bet on myself if I were a horse.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but she continued: “And, yes, I already ran it through the database.” She made a slashing motion across her neck. “
Nada
.”

“Of course not. That would be too easy,” he said, his chair squeaking in protest as he leaned back. He looked at the papers in his hands one more time and handed them over. “I would normally say, ‘Good work, Lindsey,’ but I’m betting you’ve already told yourself that same thing.”

She grinned and shrugged one shoulder. “More or less.”

“Make me a copy of those, will you?”

“Sure thing.”

He turned back to his computer but was unable to focus on the report he had been working on moments ago. He reached for the Black Vigilante file folder – the one that always taunted him from the top of the case piles – and pulled out the ridiculous police sketch of a man in a black balaclava. He stared a long while at the drawing’s only human feature, those charcoal eyes, and tried to make sense of this new development.