25. You’re An Echo
TWENTY-FIVE
YOU’RE AN ECHO
Seven
I pretended I was too busy opening up the belly of the squirrel in front of me to look up as Jack rounded the corner.
His naked body was burned into the insides of my eyelids at this point. Everything about him was muscle and strength. He dwarfed me, and I was not a small female. But he was a good half a foot taller than me, and where I was lean and lithe, he was all definition and bulk.
Even feet away from me, he crowded me. Which wasn’t entirely a bad thing. The feeling of being … close … closed in, was exactly what I needed. The open field behind me, the looming trees in the distance, felt like they were a weight on my back. A pressure in my chest.
His larger-than-life presence was comforting.
“Uh … is that how we’re doing this?” he asked, and I glanced up long enough to see that he was gesturing to my claws, long and razor-sharp, as I sliced through fur and skin and muscle to get to the innards of the creature. The parts that my whisper would happily devour raw … but that my human stomach couldn’t cope with.
I tugged out the intestines, setting them to the side.
He made a retching sound. My lips twitched upwards.
“Squeamish?” I asked, pulling out the lungs and adding them to the pile with the intestines and other inedible organs from the one I’d already prepped for cooking.
“Nope,” he said firmly, but another glance up at him told me otherwise. His tanned skin was unusually pale.
“We should really cook the heart and the liver. They would be very nourishing,” I commented, my stomach flipping just a little when my mouth curved into a smile that I hid by ducking my head.
Was I … teasing him?
He retched again. “Shit … no thanks. I mean, I’ll … I’d happily cook them for you, but I don’t eat the inside shit. That’s …” Another gagging sound.
I took pity on him.
“I think I’ve got this under control here. Why don’t you worry about how we’re going to cook them?”
“Yeah, that’s an idea.” The relief in his voice almost made me giggle.
Giggle? I hadn’t giggled since I’d been a teenager, whispering with Two in our bunk bed back in G Block.
He disappeared around the side of the building … a cabin, I remembered he’d called it when we were in the forest. Well, his Shifter-self had called it that, anyway.
He must be powerful, to be able to resist the merge, the whisper commented. I nodded, finishing cleaning out the cavities on the carcass and starting on skinning the thing.
He’s an Echo. They are powerful.
And rare, the whisper added.
The crunch of gravel and then his boots on the timbers near me. The scent of cut wood mingled with his mouthwatering, earthy, salty scent. I looked up. He was hauling a huge pile of timber into the cabin. When he emerged again, I could feel the heat of his gaze on me.
“I’ve never eaten roast squirrel before,” he said.
I shrugged. “Meat is meat.”
He watched me for a moment longer before he coughed, I thought to cover up his retching, and disappeared again.
We worked in what could possibly have been a companionable silence after that. Him hauling timber and then bringing in bundles of dried leaves and twigs. Me filleting squirrels and possums.
Soon, a smoky smell hit my nostrils, along with his whispered, “Suck it, monster! I win!”
I fought the smirk that tickled my mouth and forced my attention back to the last of the kills we’d made.
So … what is the plan? my whisper asked.
I glanced up, out at the open sky. The trees surrounding this clearing. My stomach swooped.
Too open.
I forced that feeling deep down, resisting the urge to run inside the cabin, back into the corner I’d wedged myself into last night.
Or worse … into a pair of strong arms. He would hold me , I thought, if I asked him to. But I wasn’t sure that would make it better or a thousand times worse.
We eat, I began. Focusing on the basics would help with the fear … and the stupid things it wanted me to do. Then we work out how far we made it from Taiga. Determine if we are safe here, or if we need to move on, put more distance between us.
And then we Join with him , my whisper added.
I shook my head.
No! I will not do that with another male. I will not be touched like that again.
It would not be like that with him, the whisper argued. It will be perfect … it will scrub every bad memory about the act from your mind. And if we Join with him, he will help us to raise a rebellion from out here. And we can get our revenge on Baxter, and Mercer, and every one of them who hurt us.
It doesn’t work like that, I thought with a barely suppressed shudder. One time that is … nice … won’t erase the hundreds of times it was horrific.
I didn’t address her other point. I was hoping I could get him to help me without having to resort to using sex as a bribe.
Nice , she scoffed. Nice is far too tame a word for how he would make us feel.
I don’t care. It will not happen.
But my traitorous memory flung the images of him in the shower, his hand wrapped around himself, losing control, before my eyes. He’d said he wanted to eat me … there.
No. I would not entertain these thoughts. I had a plan. I would get my revenge.
Secure our position here. Ensure we are safe from recapture. Regain strength. Remember how to be who we are.
Come up with a strategy to return to Taiga.
Kill Baxter. Kill Mercer.
Kill all of them who were complicit.
Find Two. Bring her out here, so she can see this with her own eyes. See how much bigger it is than we had ever imagined.
Help Twelve and Nineteen escape, so maybe they can have a life together that isn’t all blood and pain.
And Grace …
That last image of her, as we’d turned to run, suddenly crashed back into my mind. Claws digging into her own flesh.
Her claws.
Had I really seen that right? Had she—an agent—grown claws? How was that possible?
Was she even still alive? Was she … one of us? In disguise? Why had she helped us escape?
And what would she think if she knew I planned to come back … to help the others … to kill the ones who had wronged me—wronged us all?
There was no way to get answers to any of this, not until we got them out. So, I added Grace to my list.
This would be my plan. I would stick to it. There would be no … fraternizing with Jack, the golden boy.
Especially not when I remembered the way Nineteen had begged. The way Twelve had screamed.
If that was my destiny with Jack, then I wanted nothing to do with it.
My whisper’s silence was mutinous.
A lthough I, too, had never eaten squirrel or possum before, they both tasted remarkably like rabbit to me.
I had to force myself to swallow my mouthful after that realization. To distract myself, I focused on how well the meat was cooked, given we had nothing to season it with, just an open flame and a stick to hold it in the fire.
Jack sat on the floor, not quite next to me, holding his skewered meat over the fire. He’d been untalkative as we prepared our food. I watched him through my eyelashes as he turned his skewer, charring it evenly. He seemed so wholly focused on the task. The flames cast a glowing halo around his already golden features. His still-damp jumpsuit sent steam up into the air as it dried.
The heat intensified his scent until I was practically salivating. I bit violently into my skewer in a vain attempt to distract myself from his larger-than-life presence. Meat juices dribbled down my chin. I wiped them crossly with the back of my hand.
My jumpsuit stank. I wished I could wash, but the thought of going anywhere near that shower outside, after what I’d eagerly watched him do there … not possible.
There was a sort of large metal tub inside the cabin, with taps like those at the kitchen sink. I’d never seen its like, and it seemed so out of place in this primitive abode. I wondered what its purpose was. Draining blood from animal carcasses, perhaps?
Torture , the whisper offered. A place to drown, over and over and over again.
I shuddered.
“Are you cold?” Jack asked suddenly, hazel eyes meeting mine for a fleeting second.
I shook my head, wanting to laugh. We were sitting right next to a roaring fire. The barely furnished cabin was surprisingly cozy. And my Shifter blood ran warmer than human blood. There was no way I was cold.
But memories had that effect on me sometimes. And I didn’t want to think about them.
Use him as a distraction … the whisper urged hungrily.
I quite liked that idea. But not in the way she was implying it.
“What was it like?” I blurted. “Growing up … outside?”
Jack watched me. Another point of heat directed at me. I bit into my meat and chewed, pretending the warmth in my chest was because of the roast possum.
“I don’t know what to say,” he eventually replied. He sounded like he was really trying to put thought into how to respond. “I mean, I don’t know much … well, fucking anything really … about what you know about the world outside of that place.”
He finished his last bite of meat, tossing his makeshift skewer twig into the fire. Leaning back on his hands, he looked at me. Properly looked at me.
I froze, prey dazzled by the predator. Stripped naked by his stare.
“I can sit here forever and tell you about school, and football, and how I was headed to college in Louisiana on a sports scholarship before all of this—” he waved at himself vaguely “—went to shit. I can tell you about learning to drive, and my rusty first car that we called Old Geezer, or the first time I kissed a girl, or spending every summer with my best friend on Greenrock Island …”
His words faded away, and he turned, his eyes finding the flames. Something about what he’d just said had stopped him in his tracks. He got to his knees, reaching for another piece of wood to add to the blaze. It didn’t seem to need it. He was just busying himself.
“But how much of it will make any sense to you if you’ve never known any of it?” he finally finished, sitting back on his haunches and sighing.
“Does your best friend know about … what you are?” I asked tentatively, wondering if that was what had set him off.
He ran a hand through that glimmering gold hair. “Oh, she knows. She’s a vampire … sorry, Drinker, or whatever the fuck they call themselves. Well, a half-breed one, like me. We were Baxter’s special ‘homeschooled’ experiments, and neither of us had a fucking clue until a few weeks ago.”
The whisper rumbled a sound of displeasure at the mention that this best friend was a ‘she’. I tried to ignore it, but something turned over in my stomach at the knowledge.
“Vampire?” I asked, changing the subject. I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard that word before. I was, however, certain that I didn’t want to talk more about this Drinker best friend.
Jack snorted. “It’s what humans call Drinkers. There’s a whole history about them—most people think it’s all bullshit, of course—but there are legends and novels … hell, there’s even porn about them.”
He gave me a sidelong look, pink tingeing his cheeks. “Not that I would know … I mean, I don’t … I haven’t …”
I must have looked as mystified as I felt about everything he was saying because he laughed, a sort of sheepish chuckle.
“And you just proved my point. Where the fuck do I start, talking about my world, when it’s completely foreign to you?”
“Novels and porn,” I replied, scratching at my hair. It really needed a wash. “Let’s start with some definitions.”
“Fuck. I really put my foot in it, didn’t I?” Jack muttered. He pinched the bridge of his nose, taking a deep breath.
“So … a novel is like, a make-believe story. Printed into a book … on paper, so you can read it. It might be about real people, except not real … fuck I’m shit at this.”
“So the story exists, but these particular people—the ones in the novel—don’t?” I asked, trying to encourage him to keep speaking. This little window into the outside was fascinating.
“Yes, that’s it. Like, they can be stories that could happen in real life, or they could be something fantastical. Like with demons and fairies and … yeah, you don’t know what either of those things are, do you?”
I shook my head, giving a shrug. “And the purpose of these … like the pictures—the cards, I mean … is for fun?”
Jack nodded, a ghost of that wicked smile flitting across his face. “For fun.”
“Well …” I cleared my throat, willing away the warm feeling in my stomach when he smiled. “Maybe one day I’ll get to read a novel, and then I’ll better understand.”
The thought was sobering. What was the plan if I couldn’t raise enough support to go back to Taiga to get my revenge? Did I just keep running? How long would Baxter pursue me? Or what if I could take that place down? What then? I knew nothing outside of the world Operation Stranger had caged me in. Jack had just proved that to me without a doubt.
Better to focus on the first step, rather than worry about the hundredth, I told myself.
“What is your plan?” I asked him.
He huffed. “I don’t have a fucking clue. Try to work out where the hell we are first, I guess. Until we know that, we’ll have no idea of how to get out of this damn forest. If you have any ideas about how we do that, I’m all ears.”
“You could shift and fly up above the trees, get the lay of the land,” I suggested. His gaze turned sharp, cutting into me.
“You think I should grow those wings I used to get us off the roof? Not sure if you’re aware, but giant, beefy, winged dudes are not an actual species out here in the real world. I’d be pretty conspicuous.”
I looked at him askance. “No. I mean into a bird. Any species. A raven, perhaps?” I swallowed back a lump in my throat. Two’s Shifted-self was a raven. Sleek and black and deadly with her beak.
“What do you know about me?” he asked suddenly. Those full lips pulled together in a tight frown.
I resisted the urge to reach out, part his lips with my thumb … smooth along the curve of his cupid’s bow. My fingers itched with the need. I locked my hands together.
“Only what I witnessed today.”
“And what did you witness?” he pressed.
I chewed on my lip for a brief moment. “That you’re an Echo.”
He blinked at me. “A what now? What does that even mean?”
But before I had a chance to answer, he flinched, his head tilting to the side. “The monster swears he told me this already. But it’s news to me …”
I realized he was referring to his whisper as ‘the monster’. I only just managed to stifle the urge to laugh at that. From my interactions with his Shifted-self so far, he was far from a monster.
“What did he tell you?” I asked, taking another bite of my possum skewer.
“‘We are whatever we want to be’ … or some shit like that,” he grumbled. “Do you have a monster who talks in your head, too?”
I nodded. “I call her my whisper.”
“So,” Jack began, suddenly intent on the floor, tracing circles in the dust there. “Uh … you guys are merged, right?”
I nodded, chewing on my lip as he looked up at me in mildly disturbed confusion.
“So … I’m talking to both of you right now?”
I shook my head. “We only merge when I shift. In my tiger form, we share everything. Right now, she is … inside. She can see and feel what I do, can communicate with me—” I tapped my temple “—in here, but only I control our body in this form.”
“Isn’t that fucked up, though? Knowing you have a whole other being inside of you? Like a disembodied voice in your head? The thought of it totally screws with me …”
I shrugged. “I haven’t known anything else. She’s always been there, even when I was too young to shift.”
Jack’s expression went from morbid curiosity to outright horror so fast it was almost comical. “Are you telling me he’s been there inside me since I was born? Fuck! I always talked to myself as a kid … I thought it was just me answering myself back!”
It is, my whisper agreed.
“It is you,” I repeated aloud for Jack’s sake. “You and your … your monster are one being with two faces. Or, in your case, with many. Echoes can change into anything they can visualize in their mind’s eye. They’re—you’re an anomaly.”
What I didn’t say out loud was that Echoes were so rare that there had been none at Taiga. At least, none in the Guardian program. I wasn’t sure about Experimentation, and in Rape Block, we were so drugged that it was impossible to know the extent of the abilities of the other Shifters there. But we’d been drilled about Echoes since I’d been old enough to learn about Shifter abilities. About how much more powerful … and dangerous … they were.
I wondered if Baxter had known about Jack. I found myself suddenly insatiably curious about how he had come to be. Obviously, he wasn’t born in the Taiga nursery the way I had been.
But Jack looked stricken. “Are you telling me that … that all this time, I’ve been arguing with myself?”
I couldn’t help the smile that curved my lips upwards.
“Yes … and no. The whisper … your monster, they are only the shifted parts of us. Their needs are more animalistic than ours. They care less about human sensibilities than we do.”
Jack breathed out a ragged sigh. “Thank fuck for that. I mean, he’s got some fucking wild ideas … and if it was just me all along—”
“But it is you,” I countered, sitting straighter and tossing my own empty skewer into the fire. “I … it’s difficult to explain. They’re a part of us that doesn’t always have control. But those needs … they are our needs …”
His eyes locked with mine, and I swallowed suddenly, unable to speak. But it was too late. He’d already guessed the rest of it.
That the hungry way I’d stared at him in the shower … that the filthy, exciting things he’d growled at me as he touched himself … those needs didn’t just belong to ‘whispers’ and ‘monsters.’ They were our needs, too.
Needs I didn’t want to have.
Needs I was suddenly dying to know if he wanted to have.
His eyes weren’t shifted, but in the fire, they glowed with an intensity that stunned me. They searched mine, then dropped, his tongue darting out and daubing his bottom lip as his gaze raked my mouth, my neck …
Let this happen … the whisper urged. Enjoy him. Join with him.
I leaped to my feet.
“I think I should wash,” I said, cursing myself that my voice shook. That my legs trembled and my skin felt too hot and too cold all at once. That the fabric of my jumpsuit was suddenly rough against my tight nipples.
Jack stood too, his eyes wide, his mouth open. “I … uh … it’ll be fucking cold under the outdoor shower.”
“I don’t mind,” I replied breathlessly. The possibility of freezing out there was better than this boiling sensation under my skin … the hot ache between my legs.
“I could … that is, there’s a boiler out back. It’s got a gas connection, and the bottle out there is almost full. If I can light it, you might be able to have a hot bath.”
He gestured to the giant metal thing on the far wall.
“To do what?” I asked, staring dubiously at the thing. “Drown myself?”
Jack’s startled bark of laughter had me turning back to him.
“You’ve never had a bath before. That place really was fucked up.” He took a folded piece of cardboard from the little table and slipped it into his pocket, heading for the cabin door. “I’m gonna get the water heater working. After escaping from that hellhole, the least you should get is to experience a warm bath.”
And then he was gone, leaving me standing by the fire, staring after him, locking my knees so I didn’t run after him, pin him to the wall … and taste him. Taste the parts of him I’d watched him working so perfectly with his hand.
What is wrong with me?
Mine , was all the whisper would say.