Chapter 2

There was no worry of not being able to breathe under the raging waters of my mind. This was my quiet place. This was my escape from the guards and doctors. From the reality that was not real.

With the constant cameras on me and the fingers of my handler palpating my mind, this disappearing act of turning inward kept me from losing my fucking mind. Visiting this deep, quiet place gave me a chance to let my mind rest from the constant barrage of think nothing, do as they want, you believe them, you trust them, this is where you need to be, think nothing, do as they want, you believe them, you trust them, this is where you need to be.

I knew my body sat on the small bed in the small room, but another part of me stood amidst the frothing mouth of the river as it kissed the sea, then the water turned into an insubstantial gray fog I could walk through as if it were mist.

Here, my hair was black as night, not the dyed blond they told me was my natural color. I pulled the braid over my shoulder, like an anchor.

A scream cut through the dark of the fog, and I spun in shock.

This was a first. I'd wandered this strange darkness alone day after day, trying to figure shit out and memorize every possible detail about the facility. No one from the outside had ever shown up, which wasn't a surprise since the only other person I knew who could find me here was someone I would never, ever summon. My son . . . I would never risk him by trying to reach him from here. While I'd tried to find other prisoners who could meet me, it had never worked before. I wasn't sure the others could do it, for one, and it wasn't the sort of thing you could explain in a word or two.

A stolen word or two was all I ever got.

I knew my handler had his eyes on me.

I knew that I was watched more than any other inmate. They were waiting for me to make a mistake, or to give them something they could use. They were waiting for me to flex my proverbial muscles.

I'd seen how the other abnormals were killed, seen their lifeless bodies dragged out of their rooms after going to sleep. The handlers were the key. I was sure of it.

But I'd passed lie detector tests in my previous life, and I continued to do it now, though it was harder to fool the handlers.

Another bellow echoed through the dark space, and it deepened into a slurry of creative cursing that made me grin.

"You look like a fucking pig in a sausage skin three sizes too goddamn small!"

There was really no question about what I was doing. I sprinted in the direction of the thundering voice that belonged to the kid I'd just settled in his room. A shadowy figure lay on the floor, his cowboy boot kicking out at someone I couldn't see.

I watched until he went still, until he stopped yelling. He wasn't all the way here, though; the details of his body and clothes were blurred. Maybe it was a sort of semi-comatose state of mind.

Between us was another layer of fog, like a thin veil of material, gossamer and transparent enough that I was tempted.

Could I reach through it? What if I could bring him in here, with me, all the way?

Only thing I could do was try.

"Cowboy?" I called the moniker I'd given him to see if he could hear me.

His head turned, slowly, as if he couldn't believe what his ears were telling him.

Now or never.

I reached through that thin veil of fog and grabbed his hand. There was a moment where I thought my fingers would slide through his, that I would be the ghost to his reality. But then his body stiffened and his palm was hot against mine—skin to skin—and in that instant, I yanked him into the darkness with me. How the hell was this possible? What was different about him and me?

"Holy fucking prairie dogs." He stumbled onto his feet and into me as if I'd dragged him up out of a reverse limbo. His eyes were on mine, but they slid downward and then shot right back to my face.

I braced my arms against him and looked down, realizing the spectral version of me was still buck-naked.

"Get over it, kid. We have more problems than you getting a raging boner."

"I—" he stammered, his eyes closing and then opening but locking onto my face.

"Listen to me: I don't know how long we have here, or if it will ever happen again, so I need you to listen, hear me, and do exactly what the fuck I say."

I kept my hands on his forearms. "Out there, you will call me Fiona. Here, you can call me by my real name. I am the Phoenix."

God, to say that out loud gave me a shiver. I was the Phoenix. I was the killer that every abnormal knew and feared. But in the facility, I was the good girl, the one who conformed more than anyone else. Because I knew that they knew who I was, and if I gave them one iota of a reason, they'd kill me.

And I wasn't ready to die.

He swallowed hard, and I tightened my hold on him.

"This place is designed to break you. They can see inside your head, so you have to do more than just say you believe them. You have to separate yourself from it. Give them what they want but hold a piece of yourself tight. Don't let them see it."

He stared into my eyes, blood trickling from his nose and mouth. "How?"

"If you're here, I'm guessing you have the same ability as I do on some level. Meditate. Find a way to be yourself here. I see a river, and I dive through the calm they see into the current below. That angry current is the real me." God, that sounded fucking hokey, but he nodded and didn't laugh.

"I can do that. Visualization. My mentor taught me that."

I didn't let go of him. "No one else in the facility has done this that I know of. Not even the people I knew from before."

"That was Easter, wasn't it?" he asked softly, and I nodded. He blinked. "I'm sure I saw Snake too. He grew up not far from me." He frowned and shook his head. "How can this be happening?"

I didn't answer his question. "They are going to change your name. They call Easter Esther now, as if that would make her ‘normal.'" I blew a breath out. "I don't know how to help them, Cowboy. But if you're here, then . . ."

"Then we aren't on our own." A light sparked in his blue eyes. "There could be others locked up in other places around the world."

My fingers convulsed, his words sending that current inside me into a maelstrom, even though I didn't move. "What did you say?"

He winced. "Well, I would think there are other places like this one. I mean . . . they've been gathering up abnormals at a pace that . . . it hasn't left many on the outside, and unless you've got several thousand abnormals here, this can't be all of us. I've been hiding the last ten months or so, picking up information where I could, but it was sketchy at best. What I heard made me stay put."

"Sweet Jesus," I whispered, slumping to my knees. He followed me to what made up ground in this place. "Are you sure?"

He nodded. "About six months ago there was another big purge after the first, a new law passed that abnormals are an abomination. They say we're causing humans to develop cancer, amongst a few other diseases."

I wasn't really surprised about that. The laws had been shifting for the last ten years, pushing abnormals into slums, out of the cities, out of schools and hospitals. What the normals—humans—didn't understand was that they were being controlled by the very ones they feared. I knew of at least three senators who were abnormals. One was in the running for the presidency by the way the polls had been a year before.

"I was taken before any law was put into play," I said. "Almost a year ago."

Looking at it through the lens of a war, I knew exactly what they'd done. A pre-purge of the strongest abnormals to stop us from banding together. We must have been watched for a long time before this happened. Years before, which made my skin crawl.

"Fuck, every gang in the world is headed by abnormals of fearsome power. None of them would go down easy," I said.

"They didn't go down easy," he said, closing his eyes. "They fought, but . . . they all fell."

Chills slid over my skin, raising it into bumps as I thought about those I loved outside of these walls. All of them abnormals. All of them powerhouses.

I forced out the next question, fearing and wanting the answer in equal parts. "What about the Irish mafia? They were centered in New York."

"Gone," he whispered. "The big hitters were the first to go, before the purge six months ago, and the rest of us lost what little protection we got from them."

I bowed my head, my heart thumping as I heard his voice in my head, the Irish brogue soft and rolling through me. Not real, but my memories made it so in that moment, and I clung to it with everything I had in me so I didn't break and scatter to the four winds.

"Don't give up, lass. I won't be dead till you see me body."

Slowing my breathing, my mind picked up pace as I worked through what had to happen if we were to get out of here. All along I'd been thinking I just needed to hang on, that Killian would come for me if he could. With each day that passed, I knew the chances were slimming, but I'd not had an opportunity to make a breakout here. Until now.

I lifted my head and his eyes snapped upward, caught red-handed as it were. "What are your abilities?"

He swallowed hard. "Power surges, like an EMP pulse, but they leave me drained, and I have a knack with animals. That one I can do in my sleep, it never leaves me," he said.

Decent enough abilities, and the fact that I couldn't smell him like I could smell an abnormal of a weaker ability was enough to recommend him to me. He was strong, even if he was young and inexperienced.

"They're going to put a blocker on you, something that stops you from using your abilities, and a tracer." I could feel him sliding out from under my hands, his body no doubt being prodded awake. It had happened to me more than once, yanked out of this place of safety before I was ready.

"We're going to break out, aren't we?" he whispered.

I gave him a quick nod. "Yes. But don't do anything until I say so. I'm going to try to get through to someone else." Someone I'd been working on for a long time. Someone who couldn't be taken down like most abnormals.

I let him go and he slid away from me, but his eyes dipped as he was wrenched out of the mist. A slow grin slid over his mouth. "You look good, Phoenix. Better than I'd ever thought a boogeyman could look."

Before I could tell him to keep his fucking eyes to himself, he was gone, back to his body, and that left me alone with my thoughts, the water swirling around me.

Back on my feet, not remembering standing, I paced the darkness and fog.

More facilities? How many? Cowboy was right about our numbers, far larger than the normal population would ever really know. So caging us all wasn't going to work. They would kill off the weaker ones, keep the ones they could use somehow. Especially if they were operating legally. The three abnormals in the Senate were influential and well-liked, which meant they were either dead or they'd failed to block this law. That was the only way this made sense.

"It can't be. I'm missing something."

I'd been in the facility a long time, almost a year, and I still didn't really understand what they wanted from us. There had been a few blood tests, some psych tests, and the constant probing of our minds, but no training. No cutting into our bodies.

Were we going to be killed off? That was possible. But if that were the case, why hadn't they done it yet? We were sitting ducks, and while a few of our kind had been killed, they'd kept the rest of us in stasis.

Were we going to be turned into some sort of abnormal army, weaponized to fight the normals' wars?

Also possible.

But neither option felt quite right.

There was something under it all, like the currents I saw in my mind and they slid through my fingers just the same as the fog.

"Who the fuck is behind this all?" My voice echoed into the nothingness around me.

No one offered any answers, not that I'd expected one.

Although my father had been an enemy to other abnormals, that had been a power play to keep his side of the mob intact. And he was dead, gone.

According to what the kid had said, all the other big players in the underworld of our society were gone too. I would have no idea where to start on the outside, once I was out. Because I had to believe I would get out, or I'd lose what was left of my goddamn mind.

The faces I loved came to me, one, two, three, and I pushed them away, terrified that I wasn't completely safe, even in this place, and they'd be found because of me. I was almost certain that was how this was happening. That the handlers could see our very thoughts, and I suspected they were using them to track down our loved ones that were also abnormals.

I didn't think any of the other abnormals could feel the handlers, the fingers in their minds, the thoughts in someone else's voice, but I didn't dare ask. My son's face surfaced in my thoughts again, though, insistent, and this time I couldn't deny the pull to him. Dark hair and eyes like mine, his face was starting to look more and more like my brother and my father. Handsome, but it was hard to see those genetics become dominant. Not that he was anything like them. Or really even like me. Which was good. I blinked and . . .

Bear was right in front of me, on his knees, his hands on his face. Shoulders shaking, he sobbed, rocking in place. I'd seen him before in this place. Always in flashes. Laughing, smiling. Safe. And I'd always pushed him away to keep him safe. But never had I seen him like this. Not an extended vision of him.

It took everything I had to hold my tongue. I didn't know how safe this was, if he could be found this way. I dropped to my knees beside him. His clothing was torn, and blood trickled down one arm.

Someone had hurt him.