Unforgettable (Talented Saga #6) (7 page)

“
What?” she asked,
self-consciously smoothing her silky blue tank-top.

“
Nothing. Just thinking
about how much better that outfit would look strewn over the
bedroom floor.”

My comment was met with a dramatic
roll of her velvety purple eyes.

“
Has that line every worked
for you? Seriously, has a girl ever stripped after hearing those
words?”

“
Too many to count, Tals.
Too many to count.”

“
Why does that not surprise
me?” she asked with a laugh. “Well, Mr. Kelley, maybe if you’re
lucky, you can add me to your list. You know, after Victoria bites
our heads off.”

“
How many times do I have
to tell you? I’m very,
very
lucky.”

Blood rushed to her cheeks, the true
meaning of my statement not lost on her. I loved when she blushed.
It made me think of things that were inappropriate considering we
were late for a serious, likely somber, meeting with our
boss.

I took the black suit jacket Talia had
resting over one arm and held it open for her to put her arms
through the sleeves. My fingertips brushed the warm, lavender
scented skin on the side of her neck as I smoothed the collar into
place. Her pulse quickened, a fact I both heard and felt. Of all
the abilities the Creation Drug had given me, morphing was my
favorite because with it gave me heightened senses. Seeing my
girlfriend in sharper focus, smelling the soap on her skin from
across the room, hearing her heartbeat increase whenever I was in
sight—those were all that kept me going some days. Damn I loved
her. More than I’d ever realized was possible.

As I held the door to our apartment
open, she ducked under my arm and brushed past me with an impish
grin that made me groan again. Once we were in the hallway, I
threaded my fingers through Talia’s, settling for handholding in
lieu of the more interesting activities playing in my mind.
Hopefully she didn’t have any plans for later.

Penny was waiting for us outside the
door to her suite. One thin shoulder rested against the wall, a
bemused smile toying with the corners of her mouth as she typed
furiously on her communicator.

“
Tell Brand I said ‘hi’,” I
called in greeting, recognizing that look girls get when a guy
they’re in to is comm’ing them.

Penny fumbled with the communicator, a
crimson flush staining her cheeks the same color as
Talia’s.

“
Tell him yourself,” she
called back. “He’ll be here later tonight.”

“
Really?” Talia asked.
“Why?”

Never good at hiding her feelings, my
girlfriend’s disdain for Penny’s boyfriend, or whatever he was, was
evident in her tone. Since Brand was only able to get away from his
liaison duties once a week, and he’d been here just the other day,
I was actually curious about the answer to Talia’s question. And,
unlike Talia, I liked Brand Meadows. He was generally a standup
guy. Though I wasn’t crazy about his attitude towards Talia, I made
an effort to keep it light for Penny’s sake.

In a way, I guess the animosity
between Brand and my girlfriend was understandable. Talia hated
Brand for being such a jackass to her. And Brand was a jackass to
Talia because he blamed her for Penny being caught and imprisoned.
It wasn’t fair to put that on Talia, when it absolutely wasn’t her
fault.

But I did understand his anger. We
were all angry, for things that had been completely outside of our
control.

I’d never pointed it out, I didn’t
want to make the situation any worse, but by his logic, Penny’s
actions had resulted in Talia becoming Director McDonough’s guinea
pig. After all, Penny was the one to inform the Coalition of
Talia’s mission to Nevada, the same mission that left her almost
fatally wounded and in need of a blood transfusion. That
transfusion was how Talia had been infected with the Creation drug.
But I didn’t blame Penny, because it wasn’t really Penny’s fault.
She had no way to know Talia would be shot on that mission, or that
Donavon McDonough would go all white-knight and insist on giving
her his tainted blood when the good, uninfected stuff ran
out.

When it came down to it, neither of
them was to blame for any of it. None of us were. It all went back
to Danbury McDonough. He was a manipulative, destructive narcissist
who’d played us all like pawns. And I’d made him pay for
that.

Thankfully, it seemed like Brand was
finally grasping the reality of the situation. The barbs he threw
at Talia were no longer tipped with poison and wrapped in loathing.
Secretly, I thought they’d both sort of gotten over their
differences in the last few weeks, but persisted with the feud
because they some got perverse satisfaction out of the continued
bickering. My girl was nothing if not stubborn as all
hell.

Penny’s voice pulled me out of my dark
thoughts and back to reality.

“
Not sure, honestly. But I
think it might have something to do with why Victoria is
here.”

It was startling to realize my mental
tangent had only taken the moments between Talia asking a question
and Penny’s reply. Having the ability to reason out the problems of
the world in nanoseconds still freaked me out. I was a damn
Brain.

“
Interesting,” Talia
commented, sounding bored with the conversation already, even
though she’d been the one to ask about the reason for Brand’s
visit.

For some reason, we were still just
standing in the hallway. Penny was looking at her communicator and
Talia was looking at Penny.

“
So, as much as I enjoy the
company of my two favorite girls, Victoria’s gonna freak out if we
don’t get up there,” I reminded them, mollifying Talia with a kiss
on the cheek.

She let out a sigh and reluctantly
headed towards the elevator, with Penny and me following closely
behind.

Instead of a conference room, Victoria
was holding the briefing in a theater on sublevel one where films
were screened. The wallscreen in the front spanned the entire width
of the room. A sprinkling of comfy two-seater couches, beanbag
chairs, and small tables provided seating areas for movie-goers.
The size of the room and the ginormous wallscreen made it ideal for
these depressing, supposedly-motivational gatherings. It was also
the only room large enough to accommodate Victoria’s entourage
along with the twenty UNITED agents stationed on Eden.

Not surprisingly, between the time
Talia had taken to change her clothes three times and tame her
curls, my reluctance to leave the apartment and end our quality
time together, and dilly dallying in the hallway, we were the last
to arrive. Henri Reich, my closest friend other than Talia, and his
boyfriend, Frederick, were sitting on a loveseat near the back,
laughing like hyenas. Janelle Longpre, a Coalition soldier who’d
taken a temporary position with UNITED to help round up the
Created, was at a table with two veteran agents. One was a dour
woman from the Philippines named Gina, the other a quiet girl from
Yugoslavia named Ronnie. If I remembered correctly, Gina and
Janelle were suitemates here on Eden.

The rest of the taskforce had claimed
the beanbag chairs and appeared to have mastered the art of
sleeping with their eyes open. Given the early hour, I couldn’t
blame them. Victoria stood in the front of the room, head bent over
a table as she typed angrily on her electronic tablet. Her head
snapped up as Talia, Penny, and I entered.

“
Good of you three to join
us,” she said with a frosty smile.

I was in an unusually good mood, a
rarity lately, so her bitchy attitude rolled right off of me.
Talia, on the other hand, wasn’t feeling so generous. I squeezed
her hand in warning, but that didn’t stop her retort.

“
Maybe if you’d given us a
little more notice, we’d have been on time,
Councilwoman.”

Victoria’s eyes were chips of gold
ice, her bright red lips curled into a snarl.

“
I apologize, Victoria,
it’s entirely my fault that we’re late,” I said calmly, offering
Victoria one of my winning smiles. Like always, she ate it up. Her
expression instantly morphed into a sheepish grin.

“
That’s quite alright,
Erik. If you three could take your seats?”

Without looking, I knew that Talia was
rolling her eyes. My girlfriend was too stubborn to admit it, but
she welcomed the verbal sparring matches with Victoria. They
allowed her to blow off steam. Steam that really should’ve been
directed at me.

Admittedly, I was having a
hard time. Any natural reaction or emotion that I felt had been
multiplied by a million because of the Creation drug. It was a
nasty side effect of the unperfected formula they’d injected me
with. My temper would flare over the most innocuous things, and I
couldn’t stop it from overtaking me. Because of that, the second
the slow boil began, I’d walk away from Talia, sequestering myself
somewhere private before the anger bubbled over. Primal urges to
lash out at anyone or anything in the vicinity swept through me,
and I became blind with rage. The last thing I wanted to do was
direct any of that at Talia, so I would just leave. Which was
probably just as bad for her. But I didn’t know how else to handle
it. When it came to the wild sensations that assailed me in an
instant, I felt helpless. I
was
helpless.

Which was also amplified to
a terrifying degree because of the damned drug. There were times
when my mood dipped so far below the equator, I prayed for the
earth to open up and swallow me whole. The hardest part was the
nightmares. Not just at night, but also when I was fully awake. The
panic attacks left me sweaty and trembling, with a racing heart and
wobbly knees. And then the rage would come again, in a vicious
cycle. Fury tinged my thoughts red, fury directed at myself for
being too weak to control it all. I hated feeling weak.
Being
weak. I just
wanted to be myself again.

Of course, putting physical distance
between Talia and me when my control began to slip was creating an
emotional distance as well. I wanted to tell her everything, wanted
to draw on her strength and have her comfort me. But I couldn’t.
Her own wounds were still too raw. For me to dump my problems on
her now would be unfair. She deserved better than that. She
deserved someone who was strong enough to handle their inner
demons, with enough strength left over to help her combat hers,
too. I needed to be that man again. If only sheer will was
enough.

All of these thoughts flew through my
mind while Victoria waited for us to settle at a table. Trying to
shake it off, I plopped into one of the three chairs.

“
Let’s get started,” the
councilwoman loudly proclaimed.

This jostled the half asleep agents,
one of whom lost his balance and rolled off his beanbag chair.
Several of us snickered. Victoria ignored the spectacle and plunged
ahead.

Using a remote control, she turned on
the wallscreen. The channel was already set to World Broadcast
Frequency, the world’s foremost authority for international news.
Dana Duval, the infamous field reporter, was front and center, as
usual. Rain poured overhead and a flame flickered behind her. There
was no sound and lip reading wasn’t my thing, but I had a bad
feeling about what we were seeing. A moment later the camera panned
out, providing a wide-angle view of the scene behind the
reporter.

Large black objects flew over the Arno
River in Tuscany, passing over bridges that had stood for centuries
and causing them to erupt like volcanoes spewing sparks of
electricity. Next, the Eiffel Tower came into view, where people
clung like monkeys to the outside rungs as a dust storm whirled
around them. Finally, the scene cut to the famous thrill park in
Amsterdam, where the Eye Ferris Wheel—a modern reproduction of the
one that used to be in London—was spinning faster and faster. Cars
dangled by their hinges, before shooting free like debris evicted
from a funnel cloud.

Beside me Talia swore. Penny gasped, a
hand flying to cover her parted lips. I reached for Talia,
threading our fingers together with a reassuring squeeze. Pained
purple eyes glanced up at me, unable to watch the
destruction.

“
This all happened in the
last twenty-four hours. Forty-three people are confirmed dead thus
far,” Victoria announced somberly. “The Created must be stopped. I
cannot stress this enough.”

She pounded her fist on the table in a
rare loss of control before continuing.

“
Their antics are becoming
bolder and more lethal by the day. UNITED is losing support from
many of the nations we have previously called allies. And the
timing could not be worse.”

She paused to take a breath and
regroup.

One of the UNITED agents took the
opportunity to ask a question.

“
Why are they acting out
like this? We have three Created talents in this room right now.
None of them are blowing things up. So what’s wrong with the rest
of them?”

The question-asker was tall with
disproportionately large ears and a comically large nose. I was
pretty sure his name was Ryke.

Though I hadn’t gotten to know many of
the others on the taskforce, Talia had, and she kept me filled in
on who they were. She liked the guy well enough, so I supposed I
did, too. However, the open hostility in his narrowed gaze,
directed at us, was making me reevaluate my position. It was as if
he thought we were the ones responsible for the destruction of
those landmarks. As if the chaos in the world was directly
attributable to the three of us. I wanted to punch that look off
his face, break his ridiculous nose. But that wouldn’t exactly help
our position.