“Is the rain getting the mud off of me?”
She tilted her head. A hint of laughter crept into her eyes. “Actually it’s running down your face in a rather dramatic fashion. I think you’d even manage to scare an alligator.”
“Before you start laughing at me, you might take a look at yourself.” Nicolas made the mistake of reaching out to brush at a streak of mud on her face. At once her amusement vanished and she moved her head to escape his touch. His hand dropped to his side.
“Were you one of those children Whitney took out of the orphanage?” She met his gaze, a dark, almost belligerent challenge.
Nicolas stepped into the water. It was deeper than he thought. He reached back and shackled Dahlia’s wrist, not giving her time to pull away from the contact. She initially resisted, a slight instinctive pull away from him, but he saw her set her jaw and step into the black water right beside him. “I came much later,” he answered matter-of-factly, pretending not to notice her aversion to being touched. The water was over her br**sts, nearly to her shoulders.
“What did he do?”
“He had an idea that he could enhance psychic abilities. He thought if he could find children with some signs of talent, he could boost their capabilities and improve on their ability to serve their country. He took the children to his laboratory, hired nurses for them, and conducted his experiments.”
“What exactly did he do to us?”
“Do you remember Lily?” He stopped walking to look down at her.
Her breath caught in her throat. “I didn’t think she was real.”
“She’s very real. Whitney kept her when he got rid of all the others. He told her she was his biological daughter and raised her as such. She had no knowledge of the enhancements, only that she was different and couldn’t be around people for very long. She lived a fairly solitary life. When some of the men in my unit were killed and Whitney suspected murder, he brought her in on the project to try to help him figure out what was happening to us. Peter Whitney was murdered before he could tell her anything. Lily figured it out and helped us all. She’s been looking for all the other girls he brought over from the orphanages ever since. That’s how she discovered the sanitarium and you.”
Dahlia rubbed her temple. “I actually feel sick for her. It must have been a terrible blow to find out the truth about Whitney. I remember her as being so nice. I always felt better if I was with her.”
“She’s an anchor. Like I am. We trap emotions, and to some extent energy, away from the others so they can function better. Is Jesse an anchor?” He slipped the question in deliberately as he turned away from her, tugging her through the water with him.
“I don’t know. He must have been. It was easier to be in his presence. I never really questioned why. I felt calmer and more in control when he was around.”
Nicolas felt a strange burning in the region of his belly. His chest grew tight. “Were you and Jesse close?” His tone was strictly neutral.
She glanced at him, suddenly nervous and not knowing why. “I guess we were. Closer than I am to most people. I don’t know many people. I counted Jesse as family, the same way I did Milly and Bernadette.”
There was honesty in her voice. Innocence. He let his breath escape slowly, not liking himself very much in that moment. He was learning things about himself he had never considered a part of his character before. It wasn’t pleasant. “I’m sorry about the two women, Dahlia. They were already dead when I got there. I managed to take out the man who shot Jesse, but then things got a bit hot.”
“I know you would have saved them if you could have.” And she did know. “Tell me more about Whitney. What did he do to us?” Just the dreaded name conjured up memories she had worked to suppress.
“Lily can give you all the technical data if you want it. I listened to it and understood about a third of what she was saying. But basically, he removed all the filters in our brains. We’re always on sensory overload. Of course he went a bit further and used electric pulses and designer drugs, but you get the idea. We feel things and hear things and can do things most people can’t, but the cost is enormous. At least I volunteered. You had no choice. Whitney has a lot to answer for.”
“Yes he does.” Dahlia closed her eyes against the flood of bleak memories. Sounds of crying children. Pain that raged in her head night and day. The shadowy figure always watching, never smiling, never pleased. Not human. She thought of him that way. A tormenter, devoid of all feeling. He was a monster from her nightmares, something she pushed far away and tried never to think about.
“Dahlia?” Nicolas drew her under his shoulder. It was a measure of her distress that she didn’t notice. She had such an aversion to physical contact, yet she remained close to his body. He could feel her shivering right through the soaked clothes. “I don’t want to upset you. You’ve had a rough day. We can have this conversation another time.”
Dahlia looked up at the rain, nearly stumbled in the water. The night sky was dark and cloudy and felt very much like her weeping heart. “I have to be careful.” She tried to keep her voice as expressionless as his. “If I feel too much of anything, bad things can happen.” She looked up at his face. In the night he looked made of granite, not flesh, a beautiful stone carving with amazing eyes. “Did he do that to me?”
“Yes.” There was no reason to deny it. Peter Whitney was dead, murdered by a man far more unscrupulous and far more lethal than Peter had ever been. “I’m sorry. I wish I could say we’ve found a cure, but we haven’t. We’ve found a way to make it easier to live among other people, but so far, there is no way to reverse the process.”
The water was becoming shallow. Dahlia waited until they were back on solid ground before looking around to try to get her bearings. “It’s over there, just through that grove of trees. The cabin is small and doesn’t have hot water, but we can improvise. It sits right on the bank of a canal that runs like a ribbon through the island. Very few locals come out here because accessing it so difficult. A few of the older trappers come once in a while.” She talked fast, trying to keep his words from sinking in. She hadn’t realized until that moment, until he said there was no way to reverse the process, how she’d hoped he’d tell her they had a miraculous cure for her.
She forced herself to shrug. “I’m alive. Did I thank you for that? I doubt I would have made it away safely by myself. I would have tried to rescue Jesse right then, with all of them there. Do you think they tortured him to get him to tell them where I was?”