Untouched The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,77
hell that I had, but with even larger consequences. “But...” her voice trembled. “...you...” she looked to Scott, then back to me, “you’ll be there? I won’t have to go alone?”
I squeezed her hand in mine, felt the depth of her plea all the way through me, tingling my emotions and bringing me back to a morning in the basement of my house where I was forced to confront all my fears. Alone. “We’ll be with you every bit of the way.”
She looked ghostly, but her eyes came back to life and she stared back at me. “Okay.” Her voice gained strength. “All right.”
Byerly gestured toward the door as he swiped the card I’d handed him from the guard and it slid open. He and I led the way after giving Kat a minute to change into something more protective than a tank top. She came out wearing a black turtleneck, black leather gloves, jeans and a black wool coat that looked terribly familiar. I frowned at my “twin” and she shrugged. “They brought me here and didn’t bring any clothes. This was all that was left in the closet.” She looked down at her pants. “The jeans are kinda loose on me, though. And short.”
Instead of smacking her, I started toward the stairs, the two of them in tow. I rounded a corner and a guard stood in front of me. I chopped him with a hand to his throat, causing him to gag, then slammed him in the side of the head with a punch that put out his lights. I turned to tell them to watch out for any other guards, but I found Scott letting loose of a guard of his own and Kat pummeling another with a flurry of punches that sent the man reeling, finishing him with a reverse side kick that caused him to ricochet off a wall. When she caught my surprised gaze, she smiled. “What? Everyone always thinks I’m so delicate because my powers are healing. I’m a meta; I’ve got strength too.”
“And moves,” I said. “Where’d you learn those?”
She shook her head as we started toward the lobby doors. “I don’t know. My memory is pretty fuzzy before Arizona. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Persephone-types have limits on our powers. We can only heal—”
“Until you run out of strength, then it starts leeching your memory. So you don’t remember anything?”
“I still have skills, abilities,” she said as we brushed out of the double doors, Scott looking skittish as he trailed behind us. “I can understand other languages, I can fight some.” She frowned. “I can farm. Don’t remember how I learned that.”
“Memory loss isn’t cool,” I said, “but every time I kill someone with my power, I absorb their personality into mine.”
“Eep!” She blanched. “So does that mean that the psycho you killed...” She paled.
“Yep,” I said, pointing to my skull. “I’ve got Cujo panting in my brain. The good news is Doc Zollers seems to have found a way to keep him under wraps.” I yawned. “Unfortunately, there do seem to be some adverse effects.”
We ran to the garage, which was unlocked. Scott grabbed keys from a box that held a bunch of them, and I knocked out the guy in charge of watching them and stuffed him under the desk he sat behind. We made our way through the garage as Scott pressed the button on the key fob until he found the right car, a nice little SUV. I sat up front with him and Kat took the back seat. She looked nervous as we pulled out and headed for the front gate. Scott pushed a remote on the visor and the gate opened, fast.
We shot out and took a quick turn, zipping down the road at about sixty. “I’m not exactly an experienced driver,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure there are speed limits.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, mumbling.
The night was black, and up ahead there was a van pulled off to the side of the road. Scott slowed as we drove by and I caught a glimpse of the logo—a local telecommunications company—and saw, very briefly, the worker jump out of the way for us as Scott screamed by. “You know, saving the city isn’t going to do us a ton of good if we end up killing a hundred people on the drive there.”
He rolled his eyes, but I saw him slow the car a little. We passed