Athena Force 8: Contact (16 page)

Faith shook her head, unsure what to even ask next. “Why?”

Lynn said, “You’ll probably have to ask her.”

“And your mothers?”

Again, her sisters exchanged telling glances.

“You’re the only one of us who got to have that,” admitted Lynn. “Dawn’s surrogate mother died in childbirth. She was young, a waitress who wanted the money to get her brother out of foster care.”

“Justin Cohen,” said Dawn. “He’s an FBI agent now. He’s one of the people who tracked me down.”

“Mine originally did it for the fifty thou,” admitted Lynn, “But…well, her story’s complicated. And our biological mother, the egg donor, never even knew about us…she only started to figure things out last year.”

“And then,” announced Dawn, grim, “they killed her.”

The rest of the story became something of a blur for Faith. It was almost too incredible to be believed. Almost, but not quite. Not after everything Faith had seen in herself. Not after what she’d sensed from these…

From her sisters.

It all traced back to the Athena Academy for the Advancement of Women, the most elite college-prep school for women in the United States. Founded almost a quarter of a century earlier, the school counted among its graduates some of the most successful women in government.

It also, against the best wishes of its founders, harbored an ugly secret.

“The name sounds familiar…wasn’t it in the news, last year?” asked Faith.

“We need to start a lot earlier than that,” said Dawn. “With Lab 33. It’s government sponsored and top-secret. When the school was created, about twenty-three years ago, its scientists fixed on the academy’s students as perfect egg donors for their experiments in genetic enhancement. The problem was how to get any of these students, who were underage and weren’t fools, to make a donation.”

“The lab planted two employees at the school, and chose a donor. They gave her something to cause symptoms of appendicitis. And on the way to the hospital…”

Faith listened in fascinated horror as the story unfolded. Eggs had been harvested from one of the Athena Academy’s best and brightest students, thirteen-year-old Lorraine Miller, under the guise of an appendectomy. Lab 33 then fertilized the eggs with sperm stolen from a clinic. The lab team ended up with nine viable embryos to implant into three surrogate mothers.

“They wanted disposable women,” said Dawn, a trace of bitterness under her matter-of-fact presentation. “Women who wouldn’t be missed if they were killed after giving birth.”

“So my mom…” Faith hesitated, but what else was she going to call Tamara Hallwell Corbett? The woman had given birth to her, had raised her. Tamara had kissed Faith’s boo-boos and braided her hair and told her about the birds and the bees. She was more her mother than this faceless Lorraine Miller person…wasn’t she? “My mom’s been on the run ever since, afraid Lab 33 would find out that she really did give birth.”

“Apparently,” agreed Dawn. “The scientists didn’t know you existed. A man named Jonas White kidnapped Lynn when she was born and raised her on his own, leaving her surrogate mother for dead. That left Lab 33 with me.”

Lynn’s face had darkened at the mention of Jonas White. The name sounded familiar to Faith, but she wasn’t sure why. She kept her attention on Dawn.

“You were raised by scientists?” Faith couldn’t begin to imagine it.

“Not completely.” Dawn held her gaze. “I had my Uncle Lee.” She said the name darkly.

“And,” said Lynn quickly, “she got to spend a year at the Athena Academy. Everything leads back to the Athenas.”

The previous year, Lorraine Miller Carrington had called an emergency meeting of her old Athena Academy friends. Keeping a sacred promise made during their school years, the women had heeded her call. But Lorraine, or Rainy, as her friends called her, never made the meeting.

“She was in a car accident,” explained Dawn, who seemed to know more of the story than Lynn did. “A
rigged
car accident. A special device made her fall asleep at the wheel, and her seat belt was rigged to fail. Once the Cassandras began to investigate—”

Faith raised her hand, momentarily silencing her sister. She could hardly breathe. “The
who?
”

“The Cassandras.” Dawn shrugged, seeing she would have to explain. “Every year the school takes in about thirty new students. They’re divided into five teams of six each, and they have friendly competitions against each other.”

“Like at Hogwarts,” supplied Lynn. “Slytherin versus Gryffindor.”

“But at Athena, each team picks a name from Greek mythology. Rainy Miller’s group chose Cassandra. Anyway…”

She continued her narrative, but Faith heard less of it than before. She caught the pertinent pieces. Rainy, an attorney who had struggled with infertility throughout her marriage, had realized that she was the victim of egg mining. An assassin had killed her before she could tell the others.

But they hadn’t counted on the determination of the Cassandras.

“One of them took down the assassin,” said Dawn, clearly conflicted. “But they still don’t know exactly who hired him. And they’ve been looking for us, for Rainy’s daughters, the whole time. At first they thought I was the only one who’d survived. But then I found Lynn, and we realized you might be alive and tracked you down. It wasn’t easy. Thank goodness Lynn’s a computer whiz.”

Lynn downplayed her role. “We can search records online that would have been impossible to access ten years ago. It helps that your mother kept her first name—and that it was an unusual one.”

“So you’ve been following me since yesterday,” said Faith softly.

“We had to be sure it was you,” explained Lynn. “We tried e-mailing, on a fictitious reason of course, through your mom, but she never responded. This isn’t the kind of news we’d want to give the wrong person, by accident.”

“I guess not.” Faith shook her head. “‘Hi. We’re the sisters you never knew. And you…’”

One of the points they’d skimmed past loomed into precedence now.
Experiments in genetic enhancement.

Why else would they have needed stolen eggs? Stolen sperm? Disposable surrogate mothers?

Experiments.

Faith finished, “‘And you are a mutant freak.’”

“‘M
utant freak’ might be a bit extreme,” said Dawn dryly. “I prefer ‘lab rat.’”

“Give her a break, Dawn.” Lynn reached out to pat Faith’s hand again, then caught her own hand back. She learned fast. “You’ve known your whole life that you had special abilities. You were trained in them. Even my godfath—I mean, even Jonas White knew I’d been enhanced, so he made sure I grew into my potential. But this has got to be a complete shock for Faith.”

“Special…” Faith shook her head, trying to digest it all. “What kind of special abilities do you have?”

“The scientists had nine embryos,” explained Dawn, like a soldier making a report. “They altered them so that three would have extra healing abilities, three would have super strength and agility, and three would have super intelligence. And they kept each set of three together. Since none of the surrogate mothers had multiple births, the experiments resulted in one of each. My ability is that I heal fast.
Really
fast.”

“You’ll have to see her do it sometime,” agreed Lynn. “It’s amazing.”

“And you?” asked Faith, of Lynn.

“Strength and agility.”

“White put that to good use, too,” said Dawn. Her tone left no confusion about her opinion of Jonas White.

That left Faith with…“But I’m not super intelligent. I mean, my grades have always been good, but I still had to study. I’m a college dropout. Something must have gone wrong with me.”

So she wasn’t just an experiment—she was a
failed
experiment?

“You mean you’ve never noticed anything that you’re especially good at?” challenged Dawn. “Just because you aren’t book-smart doesn’t mean the alterations didn’t take. Maybe you’re smart with money. Or languages.”

Faith shrugged. “No more than the next person.”

“Computers?” suggested Lynn, and Faith shook her head. “People?”

“I’m terrible with people! Mom never wanted me getting too close, because…” She hated to mention this part. It was probably related, probably a side effect of the failed experiments, which made her abilities even more embarrassing. Still, if she couldn’t tell these women…

“Because I read them,” Faith admitted.

Dawn said, “Come again?”

“My programming must not have taken correctly. I’m…hyperaware. I can hear your heartbeats, right now, and your breathing, and I can smell what you had not just for lunch but breakfast, and what kind of soap you used. And when I touch someone, I get weird flashes of information about them.”

“That might be exactly what they meant to accomplish,” Lynn assured her. “I have some similar abilities—really good eyesight and hearing. It sounds as if your senses are just as acute, but focused differently. Focused on people.”

“But how’s that make me intelligent?”

“The scientists can explain it better than me,” said Dawn. “But hello, which organ processes all those nerve responses?”

Faith studied the tablecloth, scowling. “My friends keep saying I’m psychic. I was beginning to think maybe…”

But there was no reason to go into the crazy notions she’d begun to entertain.

“Does it matter what you call it?” asked Lynn. “At least now you know it’s real. Now you know where it comes from.”

“Yeah,” muttered Faith. “A test tube.”

“And Lorraine Miller Carrington,” Dawn reminded her.

Faith nodded. Somehow, one little detail—trivial to her two sisters—struck her as the strangest part.
How had she known?

“One of the Cassandras,” she said.

Once Faith reached her mother’s home, she couldn’t sit, couldn’t rest. It was just too much to take.

And yet she had to take it, didn’t she?

“You
stole
me?”

Her mother, hands clasped tightly in her lap as she sat on the designer sofa, did not deny it. She simply looked up at Faith with those remarkably pale-blue eyes, and she looked…broken. “I should have known you’d find out. Especially once I saw that you were…”

Her voice trailed off, and her eyes filled with tears.

“That I was a
freak?
” supplied Faith. Or, to use Dawn’s term, “A lab rat?”

“Don’t call yourself that. You’re different, yes. You’re special.”

“As in special education classes.”

“As in a beautiful, unique, talented woman who deserves to be cherished for exactly who she is. The way I’ve cherished you.”

Faith shook her head, still pacing. She’d come here as soon as she left her sisters at their hotel, with promises to get together the next day. She was afraid to stop moving. She was afraid of what her new knowledge would do to her head once she slowed down enough to process it all.

“You haven’t been cherishing me,” she argued. “You’ve been manipulating me by withholding the truth. You knew I was an experiment from the start. You
knew
it!”

“No! I knew something shady was going on. I knew you were a test-tube baby. But genetically engineered? How could I guess that? Those awful people didn’t tell us anything.”

“So you knew there were others?” Sisters.
She had sisters!

“When I went in for my pregnancy test, I saw another woman leaving. An African-American. She was older than me, tall and very beautiful, and the way she looked at me…It’s hard to explain, but we had a moment of connection. I had to wonder…”

But Tamara didn’t tell Faith what she had to wonder. She just lowered her gaze to her hands and looked miserable. She’d been looking miserable since Faith had arrived with her accusations.

But she hadn’t once looked shocked.

Faith scrubbed a hand through her hair—and wondered if she’d inherited her hair from her dead mother or her nameless father. She needed to understand this. When in doubt, gather evidence. “How did you fake the pregnancy test?”

“I paid a woman for her urine,” Tamara confessed. “I put it in a test tube, like a tampon, so that it would stay warm until I substituted it for my sample. That was the early 80s. Labs weren’t as suspicious then as they are now. I told them I’d gotten my period, that I was sure I wasn’t pregnant. They told me to stay in town anyway, just in case, but I knew our only hope was to run. So I ran.”

“And left behind fifty-thousand dollars?”

“I hadn’t done it for the money! Baby, you have to believe that. I’d been alone for so long. I wanted a baby so badly.”

“Then why not do it the old-fashioned way?” A brief image of Roy Chopin flashed across Faith’s conflicted thoughts—Roy, and what they’d done together. She could tell that for him sex was definitely about recreation, not procreation. But surely it wouldn’t be that hard to trick a man, even someone as sharp as him. Provide her own condoms. Poke a few holes in them….

“I was so confused,” moaned Tamara. “There were no men in my life, and I doubted finding one would make things any easier. I’ll admit, when I first answered the ad, I wasn’t sure what I would decide. But as soon as I began to feel my body changing, as soon as I knew you were alive, inside me…”

Faith’s step slowed. She wanted to believe the yearning she heard in her mother’s voice.
Her mother.
At least Faith hadn’t been raised as some kind of killing machine in a laboratory, like Dawn had. At least she hadn’t been used by some master criminal under the guise of her supposed protector, like Lynn.

You’re the only one of us who got to have that,
Lynn had said.

But how could that make up for all the secrets her so-called mother had kept from her?

The ache threatened to overwhelm her. She started pacing again.

“I suspected those doctors were up to no good,” said Tamara. “I was afraid they were dangerous. But the alternative would have been to let them have you, to let them have my baby.”

“Not your baby. Lorraine Miller’s baby. Some man’s…” Her sisters hadn’t mentioned if they knew whose sperm had been stolen to create them. “Someone else’s egg, someone else’s sperm.”

“My blood. My breath. My body to protect you. You became my baby even before your heart began to beat, and I decided right then, I wouldn’t let them have you.” Tamara’s chin came up. “And I don’t care who they send to turn you against me. I still won’t let them.”

“It’s not your choice anymore,” Faith reminded her.

“But it is still my business. You’re my business. You’re my
daughter.
It doesn’t matter what you inherited from those strangers. I raised you. I taught you.”

“To lie,” Faith challenged. And look where that handy habit had gotten her…her and Madame Cassandra. “To lie, and to hide. Thanks a lot.”

“It kept you safe.” Tamara was squeezing her hands, her eyes brimming with desperation.

Faith turned toward the door, unable to take more of this. Not yet. Not now. “It kept me leashed.”

Tamara took a deep breath. “You know where to find me, baby.”

But Faith, her throat tightening with emotion, pushed back out into the humid Louisiana night.

He didn’t like where she lived.

He let Himself back into the shadowy courtyard—He could do that, after all. He could come and go like a ghost. He could do things that no one knew about. He was so powerful now, He even crept up the stone steps to the front door, to look in.

But even though He was powerful, this was an apartment full of magic users themselves. So this time, after He peeked through the old-fashioned keyhole and didn’t see the one He was after, He crept back down again. Just in case.

The Master had found Madame Cassandra. The Master wanted Him to take care of this one, before she destroyed him. And He wanted to do it, too. He thought He was powerful enough to take her, now.

But that didn’t mean He must do it on her terms. Hers, or the Master’s.

He would do it in His own time. In His own way.

And once He’d stolen the life out of the greatest psychic in all the French Quarter—then not even the Master would be able to control Him.

After that, anything He did for the Master would be a favor.

Faith awoke and sat up in bed before she even understood why. For a moment, she felt only confusion. A few magazines, which she’d checked out from the library on her way home, slid off her sheets and onto the floor. They reminded her of what she’d learned, how much she still had to learn.

Lorraine Miller Carrington.
Scandal at Athena Academy.

Had she really managed to sleep? She guessed the kind of day she’d had took its toll on a person’s strength. Even a genetically engineered superbeing.

And it’s not as if she’d slept well. Waking dreams had tormented her, dreams of gang ambushes and secret laboratories and serial killers with red cords and distinctive heartbeats.

But what had woken her now?

Her bare feet hit the marble floor as soon as she recognized the footsteps climbing the stone stairway outside. She was down the hallway and across the dark den even before she heard the knock, uncharacteristically soft, on the front door.

He only had to knock once before she had the door unlocked and open.

Detective Roy Chopin’s eyes widened at her quick response. Other than that, he looked wholly contained. Competent. Ready.

She could feel his exhaustion and his frustration with however his night had gone. She could also feel, as his gaze took in her boxers and camisole—and the legs and arms left bare—how quickly his exhaustion made way for a different kind of energy. He didn’t bother asking if she really meant her invitation to come by after shift. He didn’t explain how far after shift this was. He didn’t seem worried that he might appear too eager. He was just…here.

For her. One way or another.

One thing on their minds,
she thought, relief making her giddy.
Thank God.

“So,” he said, lowering his voice for the sake of her roommates as he came in, closed the door and locked all three locks behind him. “The night’s crap. A domestic call that went bad. A mugging that went worse. No more frigging leads on who did Butch than we had yesterday, and every twenty-four hours they get colder. You know your gate was unlocked?”

“No it wasn’t.” She grabbed his tie and tugged him in the direction of her bedroom. She walked backward. She wanted to watch him. He looked amused as he followed.

“What, I’m not standing here? Start locking the damned gate.”

“So what else was crap about the night?” It wasn’t that she wanted him to have had a bad night. But the sheer normalcy of it, contrasted against her last twenty-four hours, made for a welcome distraction.

Almost as welcome as the heat of him, the presence of him, the scent of him trailing her across the den.

“I’ve got a new partner, transferred in from Baton Rouge. Name’s Max. He doesn’t suck, but he’s not Butch, you know? What are you, Lucy Ricardo?” Now he was looking at the two twin beds while she shut her bedroom door behind them. “The innocence thing is refreshing, but damn.”

Then she turned back, wrapped her arms up over his shoulders and stretched up on her toes in hopes of a kiss. “Want to shock the censors and push them together?”

“That might be helpful, yeah.” Catching her against him, he covered her mouth with his. Along with his blunt scent and coffee taste and sexual energy, images flowed across her, more like a homecoming than an invasion.
Domestic call. Mugging-turned-homicide. New partner
—she loved that he was that straightforward.
Exhaustion, rapidly fading to arousal. Concern for her. Suspicions about…

Then she’d made it past the flash of impressions and into the zone. The intensity of his breath scorched her. The wet demand of his lips engulfed her. His grip on her—weaving into her hair, sliding up her spine under her camisole—electrified almost every nerve ending in her. She pressed, hard, against his heartbeat and the sound of his breathing and the solidity of his body. She wanted him surrounding her, touching her, outside of her, inside of her, everywhere.

She wanted him to make her forget.