"Sure?"

"Yes," I said after a moment. "I'm okay. Let's go." With that said, I hooked the toe of my boot into a link in the fence and began to climb. I reached the top, flinging myself over without a thought towards broken bones. I hit the ground easily, a bit cat like, and scanned the base. Jonas. .h.i.t the ground beside me, and I nodded to him. He followed in my wake, putting every ounce of trust he had into me. For him, this was a distraction from the events that proceeded. For me, it was a way to find answers.

Getting inside was easy. Finding the file room proved to be harder than it looked. The hallways were dim and dank. The lighting overhead wasn't much; just enough to see by- yeah, if you were a bat. I found my way around mostly by touch and by telepathy. Jonas looked in a few other doors, expecting me to keep him invisible and safe, but he spoke of nothing he'd seen. I wasn't interested in anything save the files. Nothing interested me except answers.

We pa.s.sed metal door after metal door. What we didn't pa.s.s were people. I kept waiting and waiting for the moment we would be discovered, when someone would open one of those doors and pounce on us. That moment didn't come. Then we reached the door I sought.

I didn't warn Jonas when I opened the door. I didn't warn him about what we'd be stepping into. Back at Holt's base in California, I'd seen things like this. My memories of them are very vague, but vague is good enough. Bodies lying on metal tables. Lined up one after the other, filling the room from wall to wall. Some had monitors taking vitals, reading brain waves, whatever the scientists desired from that particular experiment. Many had wires all over their bodies running to those machines. Some had no wires at all. Each was lit by a light overhead, some on and some off, so, when a scientist came to work on that particular person, he or she could have better lighting to work by.

I didn't bother to look at most of them. I simply steeled myself and walked past them. Jonas, however, stopped past the door.

"Shut the door, love," I said in a raised whisper.

Jonas, shocked into silence, reached behind him and silently closed the door. He looked around the room, his eyes wide and his mouth agape. Jonas remembered being an experiment. His life was not like this. He was not a silent body on a cold, steel slab. A plaything for the soldiers, Jonas had been tortured and tormented by men and women who used him as a household slave. They had whipped and beaten him. He had been branded by the b.u.t.t of a cigarette on his neck, just below his right ear. He was five-years-old when he got away. He'd lived through five years of horrible cruelty. Never had he seen anything like this during his time in the lab.

"What is this place?" he asked after he got over his silence.

In the middle of the room, I examined the face of a particularly beautiful young woman deep in a comatose state. The girl had been like this all her life, was never allowed to wake to experience life. A monitor above her head played out images from her mind, images I did not fully understand. I realized the Technicolor images of random patterns were probably her dreams, and no real world images were on the screen because the girl had never seen the real world. Standing over her, I could do nothing but bow my head and take a deep breath. Jonas's voice saying my name pulled me out of it.

"This is where they house experiments," I said. "Each one is a different twist on the normal human being. Each one is being used in a different way."

"Are they alive?" he asked, slowly beginning to walk towards me.

"They're alive," I said. "To various degrees."

"Why would anyone do this?" he asked me.

I looked down into the face of another experiment, this one with its eyes wide open, and I say "its" because the bald head and facial features gave off no indication of s.e.x. "Because they can," I told him. I faced Jonas and said, "Because eventually, by accident mostly, they make something like me."

Jonas eyed me for a moment then moved to my side protectively. "What are we looking for?"

"Here." I headed off to the lone door at the far end of the room. The door had a small window in it at just above my eye level so I stood on my tiptoes to look in. The room was empty, as I knew it would be, but there was a camera in one corner. "Stay here for a sec."

Jonas obeyed my request and simply watched as I went into the long file room. I locked my mind onto the man watching the camera monitors, somewhere in another corner of this vast building, and erased his memory of seeing me on the monitor ever so briefly. I ignored the rows and rows of metal cabinets for a moment. When I got below the camera, I climbed onto the nearest filing cabinet and yanked it out of the wall. Before doing that, I made him indifferent to the fact that one of his monitors now only showed snow. I stored him in the back of my mind as I gestured for Jonas to join me. I didn't want the soldier to realize something was wrong, nor did I want some random person to walk in and surprise him. By keeping a little bit of control over him, I kept Jonas and myself safe.

"Where do we start?" Jonas asked, whispering for no reason other than his desire to not wake the undead lying outside the door.

"Anywhere," I said, whispering back. I pulled open a file cabinet drawer marked with a *Y' and began rifling through it. Each file was labeled with the letter and a string of numbers. Each file contained an experiment. I couldn't figure out the system of letters and numbers but it didn't seem to matter. The experiments mattered.

Jonas flipped through files in another cabinet, but I paid him little attention. I moved from the *Y's and went around him to the *A's. I hoped to find Alendra, but I remembered Alendra was just a name she picked out. Sighing, I flipped through them anyway.

It took hours before I found anything of use. Since the files had no names, I resorted to pulling out each one and looking at pictures. Each file contained a photo, of the subject. Of the experiment. The first photo I recognized was of Peter.

"Jonas," I said, handing him the file.

"I know," he said quietly. "I found a few myself."

I hadn't been paying attention to him. Beside his leg, Jonas stacked about five or six brown files. He was moving faster than I was and already moved on to the next cabinet in line. He took the file on Pete and placed it on top of his stack.

"How long do we have before someone finds us?" he asked, his eyes on the files.

"I don't know," I said. "People are awake. The guard watching the cameras is still the same one, so we're safe in that aspect. Eventually someone is going to come into that room out there."

As if on cue, I suddenly heard the door to the other room open and slam shut. Jonas and I both jumped. He got to his feet and peered out the small window in the file room door. I didn't need to look out the window. I only needed to touch a mind.

My heart sank into the pits of my stomach as I discovered who was out there. I pushed Jonas out of the way and opened the door.

"Chris, what are you doing?" he yelled. He got no farther than the doorway.

I swung the file room door shut in his face, knocking him senseless. I did it on purpose. I couldn't let him discover what I now knew. I stormed into the hall of experiments, as I had begun to think of it, to face down the person who just entered it.

She had seen me, had obviously seen me. She leaned over a body, having just made a Y incision and had blood on her hands. I saw she held a scalpel. Not that she needed a weapon. She had weapons of her own.

"Hermione," I said, "I never thought I'd see you again."

"And I figured you'd be dead by now," she said.

Getting past my shock took effort, but I walked over to her and stopped about ten feet away. I had no weapons but my hands and my brain. She had her scalpel and her horns. I knew she was dangerous.

"They've tried to kill me," I told her, "and they have yet to succeed."

She stood her ground as I advanced another step. Her head lowered, her horns more than obvious upon her head. She blinked her intelligent brown eyes, thinking. She wasn't quite sure whether she wanted to bring me in alive or kill me right there.

"You killed them," I said. Advancing yet another step, I kept my chin up and my eyes on hers. "You murdered them all."

"Not me personally," she said. "But yes, in a way, I did."

"How could you?" I asked her.

She only smiled, and her wicked grin set my heart aflame.

I remembered something, something that drifted from my mind as I drifted into unconsciousness only a month prior. "You poisoned Jonas."

"Yes," she said. She shifted her position only slightly so that the hand holding the scalpel was pointed directly at me. "I had to be sure of who you were. When I discovered your feelings for Jonas, well, it was only obvious of how I should proceed."

"Why?"

Like a villain in a film, she explained. "They lost you, you know. After you woke from your coma. They'd taken what they needed from you and left you for dead. They never thought you'd wake up. But you did and they weren't watching, and you escaped. Your story was well-known in my sector. Everyone was looking for you. I found you first. No one knew if you still retained your power after the accident. They killed those men who hit you, you know? Executed them for botching the job. Well, I knew you wouldn't heal just anyone. You were keeping your powers a secret from us, but I saw your pictures. It just took me a while to figure out how to draw you out. Oh, you wouldn't have healed Peter or Patty. You wouldn't have healed Alendra. But Jonas, I knew the moment I saw the two of you holding hands out in the desert, I knew. I knew you would do it for him. The little girl was just the icing on the cake."

I felt my lower lip begin to tremble in complete rage. Her next words caused me to snap.

"They shot Cadence first." She made her free hand into a gun; two fingers pointed at my head, and said, "Pow! She pleaded with them. They all pleaded."

I rushed her, my head down to avoid her horns. I struck her in her stomach with everything I had in my body, knocking the air from her and sending the scalpel clattering to the floor. I was flooded with anger as I pinned her to the ground, leaning back to avoid the reach of her horns. She could have gutted me, had she been able to reach me. Of that I have no doubt.

She threw all her weight upwards, and I flew off her, my body striking the leg of one of the metal tables. The table didn't fall over, but I took a moment getting to my feet. She came at me, her head lowered, too. She wanted to get at me with her horns. I dodged her, but one horn caught my right shoulder and took a big chunk out of it. I cried out in pain and clapped a hand to the now gushing spot. I healed it right quick and stood to face her.

She stood in front of me, one horn dripping with my own blood. She was breathing hard, her tail swishing just slightly behind her.

"Tell me why, Hermione," I said, breathing hard myself. "I was gone. Why didn't they leave them be?"

Hermione smiled, her eyes full of hatred and fire. "They knew you were gone. They killed them anyway."

That was all I needed to hear to know how this would end, but I wasn't the only one who heard it.

"Hermione?"

Jonas, who recovered from being smacked in the head by a heavy metal door, stood behind me, his huge bulk towering over Hermione and myself.

Hermione took advantage of my distraction and leaped over to where her scalpel had fallen. She took it up in her fingers and faced me once more. Unafraid of the damage the scalpel could do, I advanced on her once more. She lunged, took me to the ground and drove the point of the tool into my already once wounded shoulder. I stifled a cry and grabbed the hand holding the weapon and wrenched it free of my body.

Then Jonas was there to take over. For him, it was easy. He grabbed her from behind and lifted her off of me, tossing her back like a rag doll onto the floor. She fell in a heap, her horns making a clattering noise on the floor. She tried to rise in an instant. Jonas strode over to her and knelt, planting his knees on her shoulders, pinning her to the ground. She tried to move beneath his weight, but she was stuck.

"Why did you do it?" he asked her, having caught the very tail end of our conversation.

"Because I could," she said, growling through her teeth.

That was enough. I went and grabbed the scalpel, prying it loose from her stubby fingers. All I said was, "Jonas, let up." He moved down so he sat on her stomach, his knees on her arms so she couldn't move. I went around to her head.

Her eyes were wide with terror. She knew she was not going to live through this. I wanted to see her fear, for her to feel what they felt before they died, before they were murdered. I didn't say another word to her. There was nothing more to say.

I was in her mind in a second as I knelt down beside her head. She moved her head from side to side, trying to get at me with her horns, but she could not reach. I didn't care what she was trying to do to me. I just wanted her to see what I had seen.

Inside her mind, there was nothing, only evil.

I just added to it.

I showed her what I saw. The charred bodies and smoldering ruins of what had once been our home. I showed her the hole I'd seen in the skull, the bullet wound that took a person's life. Whoever it had been, that body had been a friend, a member of my family. A member of her family. Those people loved her. They loved me. She took that from me, from Jonas. She helped to destroy so many lives, including her own brother's.

I also sent her my grief. I filled her with the extreme sadness that filled me. I let her feel what I felt, see what I'd seen. I let her know what she had done. Then I pulled out of her head and looked down into her eyes once more.

Out of her left eye, a single, lonely tear formed and trailed down the side of her face. Her eyes were no longer pleading. She wasn't afraid. She understood.

I can call myself a warm and pa.s.sionate lover. I love deeply, and I love well. I have been accused of loving too quickly and too much. There is no mercy in me for those who wronged me. I have no qualms against being a cold-hearted killer. It is part of who I am.

I raised the scalpel to the level of my shoulder and plunged it into her right eye. I heard it pop, can still hear that pop to this very day. Using the strength in my arm, I leaned on the handle of the weapon and sent it deep into her brain. She twitched and writhed beneath Jonas, but he never moved. He just held her down as she died. Warm blood spewed once from the hole in her face and drenched my hand. Still I put my weight on the scalpel. I pushed it deeper and deeper until only a bare inch showed from the socket of her skull. I kept my weight there until she stilled.

Jonas never looked away.

I rose. The scalpel lodged in its final resting place. Jonas rose with me. I used her smock to wipe the blood from my hands. Our altercation had to have alerted someone and, during the fight, I'd lost my link with the sentry in charge of the camera. People were coming. Once my hands were clean, I held one out to Jonas. He reached out, took it, and we ran. We ran down hallways, past doorways, leaving Hermione's still and silent body amongst so many other still and silent bodies. We ran and only the powers within my mind saved us from being noticed.

Chapter Thirty-Six.

Jonas surprised me. He drove us far away from the AFB, going for at least an hour before he stopped. Parked in a grocery store lot, beneath the shade of a mighty oak- which was really just a small cherry tree that barely provided shadeaJonas pulled out a file from the back of his pants. He'd folded it and stashed it there upon regaining his senses after being hit by the door.

"Sorry about that," I told him after he showed me the file.

"It's okay," he said. "I have a b.i.t.c.h of a headache, but I think I understand why you did it."

"I was only trying to protect you," I said.

"It's okay," he said. "You don't have to explain."

I smiled gently at him, wanting to heal the lump on his head, but knew he wouldn't let me. So I just opened the file.

Now, I'd been told what the results of the accident that wasn't were. I knew what happened to me though I'd never seen it. Michael Daniels, the good doctor, wouldn't let me see the ER or the crime scene photos. I gasped when saw.

The scene of the accident was horrific. The truck we'd hit was a burned out hulk, barely recognizable as a truck at all. Christian's Mustang had been totaled from the front end to just about the back seat. The engine was pushed nearly all the way into the front seat. The front end was charred black. It had been burned in the fire that started in the truck. In the picture, both wrecks still smoldered, and I saw a fire engine, and men standing by just in case.

I flipped past those photos and found the ones from the ER. How anyone outside of the hospital got these, I did not know. That only told me there was someone working for Holt on the inside. I did not consider this long because I became too lost in the damage to my body.

My head had been smashed in. I knew that. I must have turned my head upon impact because it was only the right side. From my forehead, above my right eye to about six inches of my scalp, my head was concave. My face was black with bruising and there were gashes all over. The only part of the right side of my face that even looked like a face was my chin, almost untouched except for a small cut on the right side. The rest of my face was a ma.s.s of swollen flesh.

A shot of the naked upper half of my body showed where a chunk of metal entered my chest, below my right breast. I thought it might be a piece of the door, and it protruded about five inches. My chest was battered and burned but the piece of metal was the worst. Well, except for maybe the protruding piece of broken bone sticking out of my right arm, which snapped in more than a couple of places.

I didn't realize I was crying until I felt a tear hit my arm. Even then, I looked at the small wet spot in awe, unsure of what it was. More droplets fell. I dropped the file and it fell to the floorboards of the truck. I put my hands to my face, my somewhat pretty, unharmed face, and sobbed.

Jonas, who already looked through the pictures, gathered me into his arms and let me cry.

There was no information at all concerning what happened to Christian or why the gov hadn't taken me then and there. Then again, I should have been dead. I looked like I was dead in those pictures.

Jonas still said nothing once I'd stopped crying. He wiped away the stray tears, put the truck in gear and drove us to the first motel he saw. He paid for the room in cash and led me to it. He locked the door behind us and sat down on the bed. I watched him run his hand over his bald head, and I saw both his hands shook.

"Jonas," I said from where I stood by the door. "Are you okay?"

"I don't know," he said honestly. "I just...feel a little sick."

I went to him, stood before him, and drew his head against my chest. He put his arms around my waist, and I could really feel him shaking. I wanted to get into his head to see if he shook because of what I'd done to Hermione or what he'd seen in the lab room. I didn't want to go into his head, but I did. I was a little surprised at what I found.

He was shaking because of what he'd seen in the file, because of what happened to me.

"Jonas," I whispered, putting my cheek against his head. I moved my hands and held onto the sides of his head, bringing his eyes up to meet mine. I kissed the center of his forehead, feeling those d.a.m.ned tears welling in my eyes again.

It took a minute for his disbelief at the damage done to my body to disappear and his rage to take over again. Sixty seconds after our tender moment, Jonas was pacing the room, and I sat on the bed watching him.

His mind returned to Hermione. "What happened out there?" he asked, now over by the door then moving to the other side of the room then back again. "What was she doing out there?"

I chose my words very carefully. "She was their servant. She was spying for them, probably all along. Through her, they kept tabs on the Commune, on the people living there. Then I came along." I bit into my lip, actually drawing blood, but I healed it. "She poisoned you to make me reveal myself. She tried to kill you, Jonas. And through her...." I suddenly couldn't say another word. I sunk my teeth once again into my bottom lip and ran my hands through my hair. I could feel a stray pounding beginning behind my eyes. I squeezed the bridge of my nose, feeling nothing but irritation.

"Well," Jonas said, back over by the doorway, "she's gone now."

I didn't answer. Yes, she was gone. Yes, I'd killed her. Yet I could not just call her another notch on my club. She had been highly intelligent, unique in every way. I'd killed one of us. One of the greatest creations I'd ever known was gone because of me. A brilliant, beautiful creature, had her mind been in the right place, she could have made a huge difference in the world. Instead, she was dead, and she took many with her.