Before I could say anything, Janie answered for both of us.
“We’ll be there!” I looked at her with a face that said what the hell, but she hit the end button and reached over to buckle her seat belt.
I sat there, trying to decide if I should drive us to the restaurant a few blocks over from here, or should I send Janie on her way and go back to just doing my job without messing with the Hero Society.
They did know who held me captive, so maybe this was my shot to talk to them about it without a proposal of joining them. I could maybe get an idea of what they are about, too. Something in me wanted to protect this girl, and that was also keeping me from ditching her to go about my own business.
“Fine. I’ll go with, but if I say we leave, then we leave right then and there, okay?” I was serious as I looked her in the eyes, and she nodded as her answer. I sighed and sped off toward the restaurant. My Camaro purred as we pulled up to the curb. I looked around for anything suspicious and didn’t see anything. So, I got out first, putting my gun in the holster and covering it up with my jacket.
I walked into the restaurant with Janie behind me, and spotted Phillip sitting at a table by himself sipping on his drink. His eyes lit up when he saw us.
“I ordered drinks for you ladies. Lemonade for you.” He pointed to Janie and she smiled.
“And a water for you.” He gestured to me. Water was my beverage of choice, lucky guess.
We sat down next to each other, across from him.
“Right. I’m Phillip Griffin, head of Griffin Enterprises and part of the Hero Society. Which you both know. My gift is I can see futures, but they are not set in stone so it’s more like percentages or odds. And before you ask, I don’t know which way this conversation is going to go, but I did know that having it in person was the best way.” He smiled, the movement lighting up his face. He was nice looking: blond, hazel eyes, regal looking, but he had a nerdy edge to him. There was some muscle underneath his sweater, but nothing that showed he worked out a lot.
“I’m Janie, and I’m like you guys. My power, um, came to me when I turned sixteen. Not sure why, but anything I look at, even in passing, I remember. I remember everything. A week ago, a woman came in to the library with a box of books. Her dad had died, and she was donating them. Most were nothing important, but one book was hand-written, like a journal. I scanned through it, so of course I remember everything, but when I came back from my lunch break it was gone.” Janie took a sip of her drink as soon as the waiter dropped it off, and then we ordered our food.
“The men who took me wanted to know what I knew. I’ve heard about you guys and knew I needed to be here. And I know those people still want me, so I need a place to stay. You said on TV after that fire that you could provide safety for people like us.” Janie looked around as if the men who took her were going to jump through the glass wall and grab her. A growl stirred in my chest. One of my animals did not like that look of fear in her eyes.
“Of course. I have an apartment ready for you. And whenever you are ready, we can talk more about the book.” His face was gentle as he spoke to her, but I recognized the protective instincts in him, too. Just seeing that made me believe that he was a good man.
“What do you know of my captors?” I asked, ready to get down to business and clear the air, truly figure shit out.
“A man named Emanuel was trying to create an army of people like us. They were doing experiments on people, attempting to steal their powers and then killing them. He was on the island when it blew up—which we didn’t do, by the way. That was all him, but he didn’t make it out. We thought it was over, but apparently, he was just working for someone, and we don’t know who yet. So, we train, keep trying to help mankind the best we can, and when the time comes, we will fight against the darkness.” Phillip just laid it all out there. I digested it and felt his energy out, trying to determine if he was lying. All my instincts inside told me he wasn’t. They really were just trying to help make the world a better place and give people like us a fighting chance.
“We also know so much more about our kind of people with powers. Why we have them, how we got them. If you’d like, we could talk about it at HQ.”
That was something I wasn’t expecting. They knew about why we had our powers? That was something I had always wondered but never had means to know. Had my parents had them, and it was passed down, or did something happen to me, and I didn’t remember it? I looked at Janie and saw what I would imagine was the same expression I was wearing. We needed to know why we were the way we were. Why us? Taking the initiative, it was my turn to speak for the both of us.
“Let’s go to your HQ, and then you can tell us everything.”
Chapter Seven
Asher
“Got about ten minutes before I’m closing up for the night,” I told the only person in the bar, who was drinking her sadness away with some good old-fashioned Irish whiskey.
She looked at me with those tear-stained cheeks and gave me a pitiful smile. Many different mental states came in here, and it wasn’t my job to be a therapist to them all. But when they did try starting conversations with me about their issues, I would listen, and then give them advice. Which was usually not what they wanted to hear. The truth is hard to handle sometimes.
I walked into the back room to my office for a few minutes, knowing that the woman was just going to drink as much from her glass as she could until I had to kick her out. I checked to make sure everything was ready for me to start shutting down the system, then grabbed some cleaner before heading back out to the bar top.
“All right, time to start heading out.” I looked up from my boots as I was walking to give the poor woman a warm smile, but she wasn’t there anymore. Interesting. I honestly thought I was going to have to call the woman a cab and walk her out. Definitely would have preferred that rather than her face the city alone in her mental and physical state. Walking behind the long wooden bar, I double-checked to make sure nothing was taken, even though I’d spelled my liquor to only be touched by certain people. If she’d tried, she would have felt like she was trying to lift a car instead of a bottle.
Seemed like everything was in order; she just ran out. I looked along the bar top and saw some cash. Well, at least she didn’t skip out on paying for the drink. I grabbed the cash and realized the glass she was nursing was missing. Maybe she knocked it off the bar on her way out, or even took it with her. People have done stranger things.
I walked around the corner to see if her glass was on the floor when my whole body froze.
The woman was there, on the ground, and she was bleeding out onto my wood floors. Shit.
In just three steps I was at her body. She was still breathing but barely. Little cuts had been made all over her body, and her shirt was completely torn in the back, exposing her skin that was marred by two slits that had been made in between her shoulder blades. Blood was gushing out from those marks.
Her watery eyes were looking at me as best as she could, and I knew she was dying. Without thinking, I placed my hands on her skin and chanted a spell to seal the wounds that had been inflicted on her. Whispering it over and over until the magic began suturing every slice, one by one.
The energy to heal her cuts had been taken from the earth, below the foundation, rising from the core, where energy is infinite. The magic merged with her own earth essence to heal her body.
She was weak when the magic had done its job—too much blood had been lost. Calling the authorities could ruin the bar’s reputation, but I needed help with this.