Forbidden Stranger Read online

  The lights in this hall flickered and went dark, followed at once by the lighting of the emergency lamps set high along the ceiling. The fire alarms were still going off, but there was still no sign of any fire and no smoke, either. Just the smell. Most of the doors along the hall were open, but other than him and Nina, Ewan saw no-one.

  Nina disappeared around the corner.

  * * *

  Images of the person in front of her had haunted Nina for months, but this was no ghost. He looked more like a monster. Hollowed cheeks. The thin split of a smile, bloodless lips. Despite his emaciated frame, there was no question he was strong.

  “Jordie,” Nina called to him.

  “Nina Bronson.” Jordie inclined his head like they were meeting at a high tea.

  “You’re supposed to be locked up.”

  His laugh was razor-edged. “They let me out. Not for good behavior, no, no, I would not say that. But they let me out. Said I’m sane.”

  “You,” Nina said, “are nowhere near sane.”

  Jordie’s laughter faded. “None of us are sane.”

  “I am.”

  He shook his head. “No. Nope. All of you are like me now. All of you will see what it was like. What they did to me, how it feels . . . all of you are like me, now.”

  Nina hadn’t worn her harness of weapons in a long, long time, but she’d never yearned for it more furiously than she did in this moment. She had her hands, she reminded herself. Feet. Her head was hard and could be used as a battering ram. She had her teeth.

  “What did you do?” she demanded.

  “I always wanted to program the upgrades, you know that. Mr. Donahue, oh, well. He never wanted me to. I understand why, he had his convictions, but the truth is that he was wrong about everything and I was right, I was so, so right. I was right and he was wrong. I know it’s not polite to say so. But it’s true.”

  Jordie took a few mincing steps toward her. He looked like a scarecrow. Dangling arms, disjointed movements. Nina didn’t trust him for a second. He was enhanced, and even if he’d been implanted with substandard tech, he’d still be strong and fast and totally able to take her down if she wasn’t careful.

  Shadows coalesced at the end of the corridor behind him. One. Two. Three. Four. The figures stepped into the pool of light from the emergency lamp. Nina knew them all.

  Anatoly Nguyen still wore his hospital gown, but he gripped a piece of pipe in one fist. Next to him, Chioma Pagani was dressed in a set of scrubs with a bloody handprint on the shirt and across one thigh. She held up an array of hypodermic needles in each fist. Jewel Koolen, tiny and dainty and beautiful as her name described, took a step toward Nina. Her faded jeans dragged on the ground. She wore no shirt or bra, but tubes crisscrossed her bare chest, making a sort of harness into which she’d jammed what looked like a fire hatchet. When she grinned at Nina, blood grimed her teeth. The last familiar face, Haven Benedetti, wore nothing but gauze bandages wrapped around her wrists and throat.

  “Where’s Al?” Nina asked, glad to hear her voice was steady.

  Jordie snorted. “Allegra Chastain didn’t take the original set of upgrades to the tech. So she couldn’t get the new programming.”

  “But she’s here, in the hospital. She agreed to accept the new tech that’s supposed to eliminate the self-termination feature. She’s here,” Nina insisted, although Jordie hadn’t denied it.

  The kid looked angry. “She didn’t get the original upgrades. She refused. She isn’t the same as we are.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question. Where is she now?”

  “She isn’t one of us,” Jordie said in a tone so thick with disdain and disgust it was clear Nina shouldn’t bother to ask again.

  Al could take care of herself. Nina had to hold onto that thought. Because in front of her, shit was going down right here, right now, and she needed to pay attention to that.

  Assess, protect, eliminate. Assess, protect, eliminate. The thoughts pushed through Nina’s mind as her heart tried to pound too hard. She breathed. Getting ready for whatever it was the madman in front of her was going to do.

  “You should all thank me. Really you should. I figured it was a great, grand thing. Enhancement. I wanted it. Oh, Onegod, I wanted it.” Jordie barked out something that had perhaps been meant as a laugh, but sounded more like a cough. He stepped toward Nina. The others followed, each taking a single step forward. He didn’t look at any of them. He kept his attention fully on Nina. “Then I got it. And I knew, then, what hell meant. You all know, don’t you? The true and awful horror of it, of having someone being able to just . . . reach inside . . . and take.”

  Jordie snapped his fingers.

  “Like that,” he said. “Reach inside your mind and take it all away. I thought it was a good thing, I wanted it, but when I got it, oh, no, no, no, no, no!”

  The last “no” became a shriek. Spittle flew from Jordie’s lips. His fingers hooked into claws. He let his head tip back, back, showing the taut cords and tendons in his neck.

  “None of us should have to suffer this!” he screamed and snapped his head up. His voice lowered. “None of us will suffer it any longer. But first, we’re going to make all the rest of them pay, including your precious love, Ewan Donahue.”

  Nina had fought more than one opponent many times, but never one against five and never more than a single other enhanced soldier at a time. Without weapons, not even a pipe or a hatchet or a needle, she was going to have to be fast and strong from the start. She would have to get them down before they could use what they had in their hands. Everything slowed around her as she readied herself. This was going to hurt. She might not, she thought, come out alive.

  But Jordie had other plans for her.

  “S’dacha,” he said. The word rocked her backward, something like a door slamming in her head, but Jordie hadn’t finished. He waved a hand down the hallway. “Now. Go kill him.”

  * * *

  Ewan didn’t need to worry about Nina. She could take care of herself. He searched instead for signs of the nursing staff, the orderlies, the docs who’d been on this floor. Because of the confidential nature of the procedures the remaining six enhanced soldiers had been undergoing, the staff had been restricted. Still, there should be someone, somewhere.

  He found the charge nurse on the floor behind the desk, her arms and legs akimbo. Dark fluid spattered her scrubs. Coffee, he thought. Not blood. She was definitely dead, though, her eyes wide and staring and no pulse when he bent to press his fingertips to her wrist and then her throat.

  Other than the chair that had been knocked over and a folder of papers that had been soaked from the overturned mug on the counter, nothing else was out of place. Ewan went around the desk to the elevators. Both the up and down buttons were lit and the overhead sign showing what floor it was on blinked nothing but a row of X’s, but he wasn’t going to try to take either one. If there really was a fire on this floor, the doors weren’t likely to open anyway.

  On this end of the hall, a glass-fronted door opened to a small lounge. Empty. A set of heavy fire doors just beyond it remained closed. On the other side of the elevator was a janitorial closet. Inside he found the orderly who’d come to warn them. The orderly wasn’t dead, but the blood pouring from the wound on his head meant he might be soon. Ewan could not rouse him and without medical training, he didn’t dare even do more than wrap a towel from one of the “clean” bags on the shelf around the wound. The man on the ground didn’t so much as blink or make a noise.

  There should have been at least two more nurses and possibly a doc or two, but the floor remained empty. Ewan looked down the long corridor to the T junction where Nina had gone. No doors separated it from this hallway. A man’s voice, shouting but incoherent, startled him enough to head that way.

  Before he got halfway down the hall, Nina appeared in the doorway. He shouted out her name, his voice snapping off abruptly at the sight of her companions. All four of the remaining enhanced s
oldiers who’d come here to be fixed, permanently, made a phalanx behind her. Directly beside her, a different form showed itself.

  “Jordie,” Ewan muttered, along with a string of barely intelligible curses under his breath. Louder, he shouted, “Where’s your mother?”

  “Killed her,” Dev said conversationally and gave an exaggerated shrug. “Stabbed that bitch right in the eye. She’d served her purpose. Got me out of prison. Didn’t need her anymore. Anyway, she was a hag who forgot my birthday. And she never, ever bought me that pony!”

  Ewan had been moving toward them but stopped, now. He was a few feet from the puddle of blood left behind from the orderly. “Nina. Come here, baby. Get away from him.”

  “Don’t bother trying to talk to her,” Jordie said. “She’s going to kill you the way I killed good old Katrinka.”

  Ice crystallized in Ewan’s veins. “No.”

  “I’ve already given her the word. S’dacha,” Jordie said. “It means surrender. All those hours of Russian school my mother insisted on me attending paid off, huh? S’dacha, surrender, I gave it to all of them, so they’re all going to do as told, which is to take out anyone who stands in their way. We’re all going out with the biggest bang you can imagine. Think of the publicity, Mr. Donahue. Think of the press. Think of how many people are going to blame my mother for this. Blame you. And they’ll be right, won’t they? Because it’s your fault, in the end, that any of us got our brains fucked with in the beginning. Your fault, and I’m going to really enjoy watching Nina slaughter you. If I were you, Mr. Donahue, I would start running.”

  Ewan didn’t run, not at first. He would not believe Nina would come after him. Certainly, he could not believe she would kill him under Jordie Dev’s insane command. As the entire group stepped toward him in unison, however, he did take a step back.

  “Nina,” he said again. “You don’t have to listen to him. You don’t have to do this.”

  “But she does have to do it, because I made it a part of the code,” Jordie said. “Anyway, even if I hadn’t, I’m not so sure Ms. Bronson couldn’t be convinced. She has to hate you for being such a colossal sphincter to her. I realize you don’t think that’s a swell reason to kill someone, especially yourself. But believe me, Mr. Donahue. It totally is.”

  “You don’t have to listen to him,” Ewan repeated.

  Nina didn’t answer him. Neither did any of the others. Jordie let out a grinding, humorless laugh.

  “Being able to erase someone’s mind is way less useful than being able to implant suggestions into it, huh?”

  Another explosion rocked the building, though it didn’t come from this floor. One of the soldiers stepped out from behind Nina. Ewan recognized the man as Anatoly Nguyen.

  “I spent a couple of years working in demolition. This entire building is going down in about twenty minutes.” He grinned.

  “Just enough time to make a big mess.” Another of the soldiers, a woman naked from the waist up, stepped around Nina. Ewan couldn’t be sure who she was. She pulled the fire ax from her makeshift IV tube harness and slammed it into the wall nearest her. It stuck, but she yanked it out, along with a big portion of the drywall. She hit the wall again, leaving another huge hole. Then again.

  Nina had not taken a single step toward him. “He says you’ve got classified information that you’ve been leaking. He says you need to be taken out. Then me. We all have to end.”

  “It’s not true, Nina.”

  “It is true,” Jordie snapped. “You’re the one who knew all along about the tech, the upgrades, all of it. You held it for years. You’re the one who knows everything about the new tech, too.”

  “It’s not classified.” Ewan kept his voice steady, his gaze never leaving Nina’s face, what he could see of it from this distance. “Yes, I’ve been working on some new tech, but it’s not for military use. It will never be, not so long as I can fight it. It’s never going to be used the way the original enhancements were, Nina. I swear to the Onegod and the universe itself.”

  “Kill him,” Jordie said with a flick of his hand toward Ewan. “He’s nothing but a liar, and you know it.”

  Nina took a reluctant, hesitant step in Ewan’s direction. “You are a liar. I do know it.”

  The rest of the soldiers were all heading down the hall, passing her. Hitting the walls. Knocking things over. Jordie hung back, but Ewan braced himself. If any of them mean to attack him, he was as good as dead even if he fought back, so he kept his attention on Nina.

  “I’m a liar, yes, absolutely,” he agreed. “I’ve lied to you. Kept secrets. I’ve hidden the truth from you. But I am not lying now.”

  She shook her head and took another slow, measured step closer to him. “I have to kill you. I can’t stop myself. I have to do this.”

  Not so long ago, Ewan had thought that if he had to die, facing his demise alongside Nina would be the best way for him to go. If he had to perish under her hand, he thought now, then there could be no better way for his life to end. He said that aloud as she came closer.

  It stopped her. She drew in a shaking breath. Her entire body trembled. The others had left them behind. Ewan heard some screams and shuddered, not wanting to imagine what the soldiers were doing because of Jordie’s influence.

  “Killing me won’t change anything that happened to you, Jordie. It won’t stop what’s going on, it won’t make you better or different,” Ewan said. “It will just prove to everyone that you’re still crazy.”

  “I’m. Not!”

  Jordie slammed a fist into the wall, leaving a dent. The kid had always been twitchy, especially when high on the legal drugs called candy, but this was different. He was not anything close to sane, no matter what his mother or the docs had claimed. He was not rational.

  “It doesn’t matter, Mr. Donahue. It really doesn’t. See, I had to go through all of that to understand what needs to be done. Yeah, that programming messed up my head, got me trying all the time to off myself to satisfy this . . . well, it’s a bone-deep itch. Brain-deep. Soul-deep, I’d say, although I know you’re not a soul-believing sort of bro. Am I right there, Ms. Bronson? You feel it, don’t you? The itch.”

  She nodded. “Yes. Brain-deep.”

  Jordie stretched out his arms, palms up. “Did you ever have an itch like that, Mr. Donahue? The sort you think you’d scratch your own skin off to get rid of? I bet you didn’t. You don’t know what it’s like. You can’t get rid of it. Nothing helps. Nothing makes it go away. No cream, no powder, no prescription for pills, no shot. This isn’t a rash, Mr. Donahue, this is an itch in my mind, it’s an impulse, a desire, it’s a fucking craving, and it’s not like sugar, no, oh, no, no. It’s so, so much worse than that. There’s only one way to relieve it. By ending it. Everything. All of it.”

  “Your mother’s team—” Ewan began, but Jordie cut him off by yelling and slamming his fist into the wall again.

  “My mother’s team was a bunch of rejects who didn’t know a string of code from their own assholes. I’m the one who worked that code. I’m the one who figured it out. I’ve always been the one who could make this happen!”

  Tremors rocked the building again. Another set of alarms began to blare. Nina’s fists clenched. She moved toward Ewan. Slowly, but inevitably.

  She stopped within an arm’s distance of him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  You jumped off the cliffs.

  Nina didn’t remember doing that, but if the impulse then had been anything like the burning fury consuming her, she understood why she’d done it. This was not pain, nothing physical. It was unceasing, unyielding, unending torment. A compulsion. Her fingers itched to jam themselves between her own ribs, to tear herself open and hold out her own beating heart.

  But first, the man in front of her.

  He had information that could not be allowed out into the world. He had knowledge that needed to be kept secret. He had to be prevented from sharing.

  “I have to stop you,”
she said aloud. Each word dropped from her lips like fat, ripe berries dripping with poison instead of juice.

  Even as she spoke, Nina knew this was wrong. Ewan Donahue had lied to her. He had betrayed her. He had broken both her trust and her heart. But he was not a spy, not even of the corporate sort. He’d been a lobbyist, not a politician.

  “You should run, Mr. Donahue. Run fast,” Jordie mocked from behind her.

  Nina twisted to look at him. “It won’t do him any good to run.”

  “And he knows it. Look at him.” Jordie sneered.

  Nina turned back to Ewan. His dark hair, rumpled. Shadows beneath his eyes that had nothing to do with the bad lighting. He’d exhausted himself waiting at her bedside.

  “I’m going to hit you.” Her voice didn’t shake. Neither did her fists when she raised them.

  Ewan widened his stance a bit, but didn’t step away. He didn’t run. He didn’t even get into a defensive pose.

  Nina didn’t pull the punch. It clocked Ewan square in the jaw, sending him backward and against the wall. Blood spattered, and when he turned back to her, crimson had slipped from both nostrils. It painted his lips and dripped along his chin.

  Jordie capered gleefully in the corner of her vision. “Ouch, that had to hurt.”

  Ewan swiped at the blood. “It did.”

  “You’re just going to stand there and let her do it, aren’t you? And I thought I had issues with women,” Jordie said. “I took care of mine, though. Dear old Mom. Came to visit me every day in the joint. Maybe if she’d spent a little more time with me before I had my head ripped open and lost my fucking mind, I wouldn’t have ended up where I was.”

  “It’s easy to blame someone else for the mistakes you chose to make, but it’s a lot harder to accept responsibility for them,” Ewan said to Jordie, but his gaze remained on Nina’s.