Winter's Wrath: Sacrifice (Winter's Saga #3) (23 page)

Strawberries. 

Her dark hair smelled of ripe, deep-red strawberries.  Her dark eyes were beyond beautiful.   They were perfectly formed, large for her small angled face and shaped with a hint of the exotic.   The dark lashes framing them only added to the effect, causing Creed to hold his breath at the sheer beauty.  He reached out to touch her face and gasped when she leaned her cheek into his hand, closing her eyes responding with what could only be an expression of trust and love.  He tried to speak, but no sound came.  Her eyes smiled as she reached up with the most delicate hand and gently touched his forehead where his migraine pain originated. 

Her smile changed to a look of worry, beautifully arched brows furrowed as she used her hand to rub a small circle in his skin, and with each evolution of her thumb, he felt the pain lessen, until it was
completely
gone. 

The mysterious girl with the beautiful eyes and healing touch smiled widely before taking her hand away from Creed.  Then she reached to her side for something.  In her hands was what looked to be a soft, white blanket—pleasantly iridescent
and strawberry scented
.  With the gracefulness of a dancer, she opened the blanket with a flourish and covered Creed with it.  He was lying down now, watching her intoxicating eyes vanish behind the blanket’s billowing form before it floated over his tired body instantly filling him with the same white iridescent light of which it was made. 

He moaned joyfully, feeling peace he had never known.  Her warmth and scent enveloped his pain, soothed him, and left him feeling a gentle vibration deep inside.  He never wanted to leave. 

He watched her eyes watching him and quietly begged
Please don’t ever leave me.  Please.  Please. 

When he woke, tears were pooling down the bridge of his nose and into the Facility
-
issued, wool blanket wrapped snuggly around his head.  He pulled the scratchy cloth off himself and gingerly wiped the wetness off his face with the back of his hand.  His head felt sore, but the migraine was gone.  What wasn’t gone was the echo of the vivid dream he just experienced. 

The strawberry scent

The wide, dark eyes

Her soft, healing touch

And her pure, white glowing blanket. 

He lay on the hard
linoleum
floor of his room trying desperately to hold on to the last wisps of her memory and wishing more than anything that she w
as
real.

“Sir, request permission to leave the building to go for a run,” Creed stood at attention, chin up, chest out, shoulders back, stomach in.  His dark-blue eyes stared straight ahead, unmoving.  Though his facial expression was perfectly blank, inside his emotions were a storm.

Dr. Chaunders had been updating his report for Dr. Williams’ review.  It was oh-six-hundred hours and Creed wasn’t needed until oh-eight-hundred when a meeting had been called to discuss the soldier’s future.  After watching Creed through his smudged glasses longer
than
what would seem necessary, the sniveling scientist waved at the soldier.  “Fine.  Go, but talk with no one and be back cleaned up and ready for our meeting in two hours.”

“Sir, yes sir,” Creed barked, spun in his black military boots and marched out of Dr. Chaunders’ office.  Inwardly, he was breathing a sigh of relief.  He had to get out of this building before his feigned composure completely cracked, and he needed all the poker-face he could muster to handle the meeting with Williams.

After changing into his running clothes, he hit the track that doubled as a road encircling the large campus.  So content was he to breathe the crisp morning air, he didn’t notice the recognition on the face of one particular soldier busying himself with pushups just outside the doors to the Research Hospital.  Nor did he take notice of the snicker as the soldier abruptly stood and jogged toward the men’s barracks.

Creed had some thinking to do and he always thought well when he ran.  The girl in his dream was the first thing he wanted to allow himself to think about.  He frowned slightly as he tried to place her face, to no avail.  He was sure he would remember those eyes if he ever met her.  The image of her beautiful dark pools slipped across his mind and he forced his legs to lift even higher, his stride longer as though he was chasing her echo. 

Having taken a counter-clockwise direction around the long road, he was just passing the mess house/commissary when he noticed this part of the road had recently received a new layer of asphalt causing the chemical tar smell to assault his nose. 

Ordinarily, Creed was absolutely attuned to the world around him, but with the image of the dark-eyed beauty intoxicating his emotions and the arid scent of new asphalt blinding his sense of smell, he was caught completely unawares when jumped by six metas.

No words were exchanged; the fight was its own colloquy.

Two of them had thick wooden baseball bats.

Four flashed razor sharp, nine-inch blades.

Creed caught a glimpse of the pale
-
blue eyes of his brother smirking twenty yards away as he watched.

A sickening whoosh sounded as one of the bat-wielding metahumans swung
,
hoping to make contact with Creed’s left knee.  Rage exploded in Creed as his brutally fast hand grabbed the bat in midswing and used its momentum to smack the blade from the grip of the meta behind him.  The same breath brought the glint of another knife flying end over end toward Creed’s chest.  His anger gave him a searing calm so it felt as if he had plenty of time to swing away with the bat, changing the blade’s direction in flight.  The projectile embedded itself neatly in another meta’s shoulder, but Creed hadn’t stopped to watch
the impact.  His assailants, on the other hand were mesmerized by the gore.
 

Instead, he used that second of distraction to aim at the side of another knife wielding attacker, and didn’t even flinch when he heard the sickening wet
thwump
as
that
body collapsed.  Creed didn’t watch him twitch on the ground like another of the attackers staring in abject horror, his bat poised useless
ly
over his shoulder.  Creed’s muscles sang with adrenaline as he sliced the legs right out from under the guy, dislocating both kneecaps—
the
attacker’s
baseball bat cracking stupidly on the ground. 

Four down,
Creed thought with iced fury.

His brother wasn’t laughing anymore. 

The remaining two attackers exchanged panicked looks before dropping their knives and stepping back—palms up in surrender.

“What the hell are you doing?” Gavil screamed at the two retreating soldiers.

“Listen, Gavil.  This is your fight,” one of them barked back.

“You want his ass kicked so bad, you do it!”  The two turned and jogged back toward the mess hall. 

The brothers stood staring at one another.  The four metas injured in the battle, forgotten.  They may as well have been alone—squared off against one another, just like old times.

“Yeah, Gavil.  Are you too coward
ly
to fight your own battles?” Creed asked voice calm. 

Gavil’s eyes narrowed.  “How’s your head?”

Creed had been closing the distance between himself and his brother but stopped dead in his tracks at this question.

“What?”

“Your head?  How’s it feeling these days?” The older brother crossed his arms and looked expectantly at his brother.  “Oh, and speaking of ‘these days’ do you know today’s date?”

“What the hell are you talking about, Gavil?” Creed watched his brother warily.  He scanned the area, wondering if this was an attempt at distraction before another attack. 

“You know, I saw her first.  We had quite a memorable exchange,” Gavil smirked at the confusion etched across his brother’s face.

“If we’re done here, Gavil, I have to be somewhere.”  Creed scowled, angry at his brother’s words, but absolutely confused by their meaning.  He started cautiously backing away from the wicked grin on his big brother’s face, not wanting to turn his back on him.

“You really don’t remember, do you?”

Creed stopped.

“I thought you were faking—you know, to save your ass, but it’s pretty obvious, you have no memory of the last six months.”

Doubt clouded Creed’s peripheral vision.

“Look around you, idiot.  What season is it?  What’s today’s date?  And once you figure out the answer to those two questions,
ask yourself, what happened during the past six months.” Gavil laughed at the confusion on his brother’s face.  “Or don’t.  I’m sick of your good versus evil shit. 
Damn
loser.” 

Gavil turned to saunter away—arrogance
and hatred
dripping off him with every step.  “Oh hey,” he called and turned once more to look at his brother standing, wooden bat still hanging at his side, “And just as a bonus question, after you figure out what happened over the last six month
s
, ask yourself why Williams’ kept you alive.  You may hate me.  Hell, I hate you, but in the end, who the
hell
is our real enemy?  Some pretty deep shit there, little brother.  And about this,” he waved his hand to the bodies lying around, “consider this my way of offering you a wakeup call.”  He jerked his head back tauntingly before turning and walking away, whistling an unrecognizable tune. 

As Creed watched him disappear behind a grove of trees, he couldn’t stop himself from replaying his brother’s words.  He couldn’t even remember the last time his brother just talked with him.

And there it was: he couldn’t remember.

Itching for answers, he angrily chunked the bat as hard as he could.  It flew propeller-like north across the stream and over the electric fence.  He watched mesmerized as it landed in a pile of green grass beneath a large English Oak tree, heavy with dark-green leaves. 

Why hadn’t I noticed this before
?
H
e asked himself. 
What happened to
autumn
?
 

Creed spun, looking at the scenery as though for the first time.  Everything was green.  Not one tree was turning colors and the temperature was mild instead of the crisp chill it should be.

What the hell is going on?

A frown creased his forehead as he started running the short distance to the
Research
Hospital
. 

He had to find Sloan.

Realizing he only had forty-five minutes before he was expected in the conference room on the second floor, he dove into the shower and hurriedly cleaned before beginning his search for the child prodigy, Dr. Sloan
Mor.
 

It didn’t take long to locate her.  She was nose first in a high-powered electric microscope inside a sterilized laboratory completely encased in windowed walls.  Too anxious to wait and running out of time, he knocked on the glass trying to get her attention.  She didn’t move.  Creed knocked harder.

The girl spun in her stool and peered at Creed over a sterile mask.  Her brows furrowed for a moment before she slid down from her perch and walked toward the sliding doors that led to the scrub room.  She was carefully removing her gloves, turning them inside out and inside one another when she motioned for Creed to join her in the room. 

“Dr. Mor,” Creed whispered, continually looking around for prying eyes.

“Mr. Young,” she looked worried as she studied his face making Creed appreciate what it would be like to be the thing at the end of her microscope. 

“I have a lot of questions, and I didn’t know who else to trust,” Creed blurted, feeling stupid even as the words tumbled
from
of his mouth.

She turned toward one of the many sinks and grabbed a disposable cloth, turned and handed it to the soldier standing before her, then lowered her mask. 

He outweighed her by at least one-hundred-fifty pounds and stood more than a foot taller than her.  He almost seemed like a different species, she thought.   Her mind started to wander down calculations of possible events that may have occurred during Creed’s transition to metahuman to have caused his physique to have hyperdeveloped the way it did.  Then she stopped herself. 

One of the challenges she faced daily was being able to think on multiple plains of thought.  Not everyone appreciated holding a conversation with someone who blurted quadratic equations and theoretical physiological metahuman calculations, algorithms and such. Not everyone thought like her. 

Hum,
she mused. 
As different as Creed is physically from me, I am different from others.  Maybe
I’m
the different species.

“You’re still wet, presumably from a shower, Mr. Young.”  The doctor motioned to his still-dripping face and neck.

Creed frowned at the towel in his hand before absently rubbing it over the stubble on his closely buzzed head.  “Ma’am?  What’s today’s date?”