Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [35]
“All right, I’m trying to follow you.”
“Good.” He nodded. “So first I knew about the tides changing, and before long I could tell things about the weather, too. I could smell rain, and dampness. I knew when it was storming, and when it was about to storm. Write it off to barometric pressure if you like, but I could feel the air above and the water outside, working together, pushing against each other. Let me ask you something, Ms. Pendle.”
“Go for it,” I urged. I seriously had no clue where he was going with this, but I was willing to grasp at whatever straws he offered.
“When you were still alive,” he broached, “did you ever have migraines?”
“Migraines? I don’t know. I had headaches sometimes, sure. It’s been a long time.”
“I’m not speaking of ordinary headaches. Migraines are different, from a neurological standpoint, or so I have been told. I had them, and I sought treatment for them for years before I was turned. And I can only compare my new forms of awareness to the sensation of having a migraine. There was pressure across my forehead, and a light, tingling feeling at the base of my skull, where it meets my neck. I saw lights, too—bright swirls that dipped and rolled across my right eye’s field of vision. These things, these sensations. My knowledge of the weather and the water … it came from the same place.”
“So … having a built-in meteorologist is kind of like a really bad headache?”
He appeared to struggle with his words—wanting at first to argue, then changing his mind. “It is not altogether different. But it’s as if the pull goes both ways. I …” He untucked his hands from each other and used them to gesture again, drawing the words in the air in front of him—trying to force this odd communication. “I could feel the ocean and the clouds pulling at me. And one day, it occurred to me that I might be able to pull … back.”
I frowned without meaning to. “Are you trying to tell me you can control the weather?”
He unleashed a nervous laugh and said, “No, no. Nothing like that. Not anything as huge as the weather … but perhaps something that drives the weather. Pressure changes, electromagnetic fields, the earth’s rotation, the persistent motion of gravity … I don’t know. Something, though. Something large called to me, and I called in return.”
Pausing then, he reached out for the glass of wine he’d nearly forgotten. He tapped it gently with the back of his knuckles to locate it. Another swallow or two, and he was ready to continue talking.
“I experimented at first, and in the process I wondered if I hadn’t completely gone crazy. But I used my mind to pull it, to nudge it. To push it around. And in the beginning, I couldn’t tell if it was working or not. It was a process, you understand—learning my way around this new thing. We were so far underground, after all—”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “You said ‘we.’ How many people were down there by the time you left?”
“Oh, let me see.” He narrowed his eyes from some long-ago habit of thoughtfulness and then, after a few seconds, said, “Not many. Of the half dozen or so cells … only mine and two others remained occupied. One was a young man, another vampire who sounded like he might’ve been from Texas. The other was something else, a were … wolf or something else. She was female, at any rate. I could smell that much. And she never made a sound.”
“But there’d been others, like us, in the cells before?”
“Several. They came and went. But something was changing down there; people were packing up equipment and moving it out, and moving in larger pieces. The personnel shifted. Two men left, and were replaced by a different man and a woman. The routine of the place had been disrupted, and it worried me—for all that I sometimes thought I had nothing left to worry about anymore. After all, it seemed like the worst had happened, hadn’t it? How much worse could it get? But I didn’t want to find out.”
I sat back in the chair, both chilled and intrigued. “Can’t say as I blame you. So you started playing with this new … power? Whatever it was?”
“You could call