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“Holy Sh-” Troy began. “Crap,” he hastily modified. At twenty-three and an owner of a security company, he still respected the man who raised him and always watched his mouth around him. Pops hated cursing. He wasn’t uptight, but he was old-school and believed you could still communicate effectively without the use of profanity.
Everyone looked around to find out what we were looking at, and the expression of surprise and shock was shared by everyone.
Cora, Hazel, and Beth found seats at our table, and we all looked at each other uncertainly. No one seemed to know what to say.
I initially resented my maternal grandmother Hazel. She was the one who had upset the balance of nature and had a trail of broken, innocent people in her wake. She had given hope to people only for them to suffer more painfully later on. She had helped provide children to childless parents just for the parents to stand by helplessly and watch as
that child ended up causing their own demise or the demise of others.
I had learned to slowly forgive her as I realized she had done it all with good intentions. She wasn’t like Horatio, hell-bent on creating a master race. She had thought she was doing good. She had seen her friend suffer when they couldn’t have children, unable to have the large families they had always wanted.
She had her son, but she always dreamed of her large family, and she had already paid the price with the death of her youngest daughter. She had been shunned by her community. She had eventually lost her other children as well. She had suffered for over twenty years in silence. Her gift had punished her enough; locking her up in her own prison where she was unable to communicate with others, not even aware of her surroundings for most of that time.
I grudgingly admired her intelligence and her ability to know what to say and do. She hadn’t pushed her other grandchildren or me, though I saw her longingly watching them at times. I even had a hunch that she was the one to finally get through to Cora.
The moment she came to the facility a little over a week ago, she had jumped in with two feet. She sat with Megan as she explained to her about us building stronger relationships with other communities. She counseled the young teens we had brought back with us on one of our missions; they were beyond damaged now that the proverbial Kool-Aid had begun to fade. In short, she just wanted to help wherever and whenever she could.
“I’m alive,” Cora said dryly at our stunned expression. “Hazel told me we’re looking for Blake’s connection?” She let out a brittle laugh. “And I thought I had it tough sharing my man with Beth.”
“Hey,” Beth said with a wry twist of her lips. “If you remember correctly, I found Steven first when I was barely out of high school.”
“Imagine her surprise when she found out she had to share her connections,” Cora laughed to herself as she pierced a cooked carrot with her fork.
I had heard a little of their story before. Steven Karn had begun working with Will, fresh out of high school. He was young and hungry. He knew little about his gift and how it worked, even though he was dominant. Will had put him to work and trained him in the meantime.
When the institute was created years later, Steven had joined when Will, Greg, and Horatio created it. He thought he could finally give back. He felt his work with the children and helping them understand and develop their gifts would be a great opportunity. He hadn’t realized that things had begun to spiral out of control.
He had met Beth first, and they had started a relationship, and once Horatio decided to begin his own experiments, Cora had been hired roughly two years after they made the connection. Cora had been two years his junior and had been more compatible with Steven’s personality, but they had made it work.
They had tried to have children for years. Beth hadn’t wanted children and was happy to have Cora bear the one or two children they may be blessed with, but it never happened. Beth knew the strain it was having on their collective relationship and decided to finally relent for their family. It was salt in Cora’s wounds when Beth was able to get pregnant two months after she had stopped taking birth control pills.
Beth was content with allowing Cora to be the primary caregiver of Nadia, their daughter. It wasn’t until after we had met them that Beth felt some remorse for her earlier misgivings and decided to give back to the community by fostering gifted children that had no parents or parents that couldn’t understand how their child was gifted. Patrick had been their first foster, and within weeks, they knew that they would adopt him.
Patrick’s parents couldn’t understand that he wasn’t obsessed by death and he wasn’t a future sociopath. His gift allowed him to see the deaths of other people, and in most cases he was able to see things that law enforcement had been unable to see. He had seen the murder-suicide of what others had seen as a loving couple.
We had contacted Judge Myers to reopen the case and were able to find the real killer. It had been a man that had stalked the woman for months. He suffered from delusions and was mentally unstable. He had killed the woman and then her husband. He thought if he couldn’t have her no one could.
“Is it common for connections to have such a large age gap?” Jaxson said, breaking me from my reverie. “Until recently, I had only met couples with minor age gaps.”
I had been so lost in thought, I hadn’t been following the conversation. I assumed Jaxson was questioning the connection between Miranda and Greg.
“That’s something I can’t work my brain around, either,” I added. “I thought we were generally marked between twelve and fifteen years old. Miranda and Greg are connected, but there’s at least a fifteen-year age gap between them.”
“In rare cases, I think our gift re-marks us,” Will explained. “Greg had lost his connection when they were too young to even formalize the union. He was eighteen, and his connection was thirteen. They never got around to forming the connection. For some reason, he never lost his gift, though, and it never waned. When I knew him years ago, he had a mark that looked like a cursive Z. One of his reasons for leaving the institute was the addition of a line connecting the top of the Z to the opposite point of the Z. He had a feeling his connection may be in danger and in turn, himself.”
“I don’t get how that could have happened,” Drake said slowly. “We were all surprised to have been marked years after we thought we should, well, except Jax.”
“I imagine I had upset the normal balance of things,” Hazel stated as she buttered her bread. “I’ve been gathering information lately, and it seems about eighteen years ago several other gifted people started to report other strange occurrences with their gifts or the marks.”
“So roughly when I was born,” I stated bluntly.
Hazel nodded. “Miranda was my first attempt at using several people’s DNA. I had been more…conservative when I helped make our other… children.”
“Then why didn’t these additional gifts manifest in her? Why Blake?” Jace asked as he reached out to link my hand with his own.
I leaned into him, suddenly full as I pushed my tray slightly away.
Hazel shrugged. “We all know the gifts choose who they want to inhabit. Maybe they felt like no one else was worthy of them.”
