Deception (3 page)

I scooted closer so I was sitting right next to her. She lifted her head, her blue eyes twitching ever so slightly with the stress of the last hour. “Sorry about before.”

She shook her head quickly from side to side, trying to get her eyes to focus on me. “I think I’m gonna need some Panadol,” she said pressing her palm against her forehead.

“I’ll just go get you some.” I hopped off the couch and walked briskly into the bathroom. I didn’t think it was wise to give her another show of what I could do. Once in the bathroom, I realised Aiden didn’t have any Panadol, and I doubted he had a single pill in his entire house. After all, why would any of the Scotts need to keep painkillers on hand when they didn’t get sick? And even if they did, their bodies would heal quicker than the time it would take for the Panadol to kick in. I would have to find painkillers for her somewhere else.

I cautiously stuck my head around the corner to make sure Chelsea wasn’t moving from the couch. She had plumped up a pillow behind her head, and both her legs were off the floor. She wasn’t planning on moving until her headache had eased.

I didn’t know of any particular shop in England where I could land myself in a safe place where I wouldn’t be seen, so I opted to head back to my old house in Australia. Mum always kept some in the cupboard there, even though neither she nor I needed them. She was probably just keeping up the façade of us being a normal family. I had often wondered why painkillers worked a little quick on me, but I’d later found out that my body healed itself quicker.

When I landed back in my old bathroom, the dread I’d been feeling the last few times I visited the house was no longer there. I opened the medicine cupboard, grabbed the Panadol, and returned to Aiden’s bathroom, where I could still hear Chelsea groaning on the couch.

“Sorry I took so long. Aiden had put them in the wrong spot,” I said, opening up the mini fridge. I pulled out a bottle of water, handed it to Chelsea along with the pills, then sat down on the far end of the couch, pushing her feet aside.

With closed eyes, she undid the bottle cap and popped the pills into her mouth. A few minutes later, she opened her eyes and stared blankly at the ceiling. She was trying to process what she had seen and was wondering if it had all been a delusion caused by lack of sleep. Slowly turning her head to the side, she took in her unfamiliar surroundings. She closed her eyes again, waiting for her headache to subside.

Ten minutes later, Chelsea sat up slowly. “So, are you going to
tell
me what’s going on?” She swung her legs off the couch. “You know,
tell
me, not
show
me,” she said sarcastically.

I pulled my legs up on to the couch and hugged them against my chest. “Okay, this is really hard for me to explain…” God, I sounded like Aiden when he told me.

“Just hurry up and tell me.”

I took a deep breath and hoped she wouldn’t pass out again. “Just promise me you’ll try to keep an open mind about what I’m going to say.”

“Open mind like how I somehow ended up here with you when I was by my mother’s bedside, and how I saw you disappear before my eyes, then reappear behind me?” She raised her eyebrows.

“Point taken.” Yep, I was doing a worse job than Aiden had. “Okay, well firstly, all of those things you said were real. You’re not delusional, okay?”

She nodded slowly, but didn’t say anything.

“Okay, here it goes.” I took a deep breath before continuing. “You know how we all supposedly evolved from apes?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, let’s just say that I’ve taken the next step in the chain of evolution.” When she looked at me with a dumbfounded expression, I continued in a rant Chelsea would have been proud of under normal circumstances. “I’ve evolved past the normal human abilities. The seven-eighths of the brain that you can’t use—I can. Cars aren’t necessary for me anymore because I can transport myself to wherever I want in the world. I can also bring whoever I want to me. I heal quicker than you would. I will never get fat. I’ll never get sick. I will live forever.”

Her eyes bugged out of their sockets.

“Oh, and we can talk to each other telepathically.”

“Huh,” Chelsea said softly, struggling to comprehend what I’d just said.

“Oh, and I forgot to say that Aiden is also like me, and so are his parents.”

“Huh?” she asked.

“Oh yeah, his parents aren’t really dead. You know Dave and Anna?”

She slowly nodded.

“They’re really his parents.”

“Say what?” That one snapped her out of her stupor.

“Yep, you heard right.”

“They’re his parents?”

“Yep. We don’t die, and we also don’t age past our mid-twenties, apparently.”

She sat there, slowly nodding. Certain she had processed it all correctly, she turned to me. “So you’re all, like, the new breed of humans.” A smile spread across her face. “That is so awesome.”

“Huh?” How could she be so okay with it all so quickly?

“So hearing isn’t one of your abilities?” she asked with a smirk on her face.

I picked up a cushion and threw it at her.

“Hey.” She put up her hands to stop it from hitting her face. “I was just kidding.” She placed the pillow beside her on the couch and looked around the room. “So, where exactly are we?”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “How can you be okay with all this?”

Chelsea shrugged. “I don’t know. I just am.”

Because she didn’t give it any more thought, I wondered if I had somehow
made
her accept it so easily. Well, if I had, I wasn’t complaining.

“So are you going to tell me where I am?” she asked, getting up off the couch.

“Umm…” I twisted around in my seat as I watched her walk towards the bathroom—the very bathroom that had been splattered with what I thought was her dead boyfriend’s blood.

Chelsea stopped in the doorway to the bathroom and turned back to face me. “Umm? Never heard of it,” she said sarcastically.

I looked at her dumbly. I couldn’t think about anything apart from what I’d seen that night in the bathroom.

“Weren’t you just telling me that you’re a genius, and now you can’t put two words together?” She winked at me, then turned around and disappeared into the bathroom.

“Holy crap!” I heard from inside. “What the hell kind of bathroom is this?” She walked back into the bedroom. “Are we in a hotel or something?”

I was finally able to put two words together once she was moving away from the bathroom. “Nope. Bath.” I had to get out of that room and away from all the memories it held.

Chelsea scrunched her eyebrows together in confusion. “What? Why would I want a bath?”

I jumped up off the couch and headed towards the French doors. “Not ‘bath’ as in a bathtub. ‘Bath’ as in England.” I opened the doors and stepped out onto the balcony.

“I’m sorry, did you just say Engla—” She followed me out onto the balcony, where the view rendered her speechless, which was quite a feat for Chelsea.

I stood with my back against the stone balustrade and watched her with amusement as she took in the scenery before her. I wondered if I’d had the same awestruck look on my face that was plastered on hers when I first saw the view from there.

She turned slowly in a circle, and her eyes bulged when she realised she was standing on the balcony of a castle. “Holy shit.” She stopped turning when she was facing me. “How awesome is this!” she squealed, then rushed over to the balustrade, placed both hands on the stone, and hung her head over the edge to get a better look at the manicured lawns below.

When she finally got her head around the fact that she was actually standing in a castle, she began wondering why and how she’d come to be there. Although I wanted to be honest with her, even I wasn’t stupid enough to not have exceptions. I had no plans to tell her it was my fault her boyfriend was dead, but I did think it was necessary to tell her about my father and that he was responsible for her mother being in hospital.

“Where do I start?” I said more to myself than to Chelsea.

“At the beginning is a good place. But if this is going to take long, can we go back inside?”

“No,” I said a little too quickly, which earned a surprised look.

“Well, do you at least have a jacket I can borrow? ’Cause it’s kind of cold out here.” She wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed them to warm herself up. I’d forgotten about the cold.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just that I’ve been cooped up inside all day, and I really need some fresh air,” I lied. “How about we grab some coats, then go down there to talk?” I pointed towards the gazebo on the pier.

Her eyes lit up when she saw it. “Consider my arm twisted.” Her blond hair flipped when she turned around and walked inside.

I rushed into the bedroom after her. “Just stay here while I go get us some coats to wear,” I said, before she got to the bathroom door.

She looked at me, trying to figure out why I was acting so weird.

“I won’t be long.” I transported to the wardrobe before she had a chance to say what was on her mind. I thought it was better for her to think I was crazy than to have her walk though the bathroom that may or may not have been covered in her boyfriend’s blood—even if it was no longer there.

I grabbed two coats off their hangers, then transported back to Chelsea. “Here you go.” I handed her the thicker, white coat.

She put it on and quickly went over to the mirror to inspect herself. “Nice,” she said to herself as she admired the way it hugged her body in all the right places. “I don’t suppose you want this back, do you?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Chelsea, I do want it back.”

“Aww.” She puffed out her lower lip.

“That’s not going to work.”

She sighed. “Well, it was worth a try.”

“Come on, let’s get out of here.”

She started walking towards the bedroom door. “Ahh, no, Chels. We’re not going that way.”

“Huh?” She turned back to me. Her mind clicked over what I’d said, and her eyes gleamed with excitement when she realised what I meant. “We’re not walking down there, are we?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“Oh, my god, this is going to be so awesome.” She rushed over to me. “So how does it work?”

I shrugged “It just does.” I took her hand. “Ready?”

“Uh huh.” She squeezed her eyes shut, and I transported us down to the pier.

When Chelsea’s feet were once again on solid ground, she opened her eyes. “Holy shit!” she said with a laugh. “I can’t believe you can do that. Well, actually I can believe it ’cause I know you’ve done it to me before, but I didn’t realise what was happening at the time. And at the time, it kind of freaked me a little. Well, actually that’s a lie. It freaked me a
lot
. But anyways, that’s not important right now—”

“Chelsea,” I said, interrupting her little rant because I was afraid she was going to go on for the next half hour. “Just chill, would you?”

I sat down on the edge of the pier, dangling my legs over the water, and patted the spot next to me. I had picked this spot because I didn’t want to have to look at her while I only told her half-truths about what had happened over the last couple of months.

“Sorry,” she said, sitting down beside me. “It’s just… I can’t believe you can really do that.”

I turned to her and smiled. “Yeah, it’s kind of freaky, hey?”

“Freaky, no. Awesome, yes. I can’t believe how lucky you are.”

My smile dropped. At first, I’d thought I was lucky, too, but then after everything my father had done, being a next gen was starting to feel more like a curse.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, reacting to my sombre mood.

Chelsea waited while I thought about what I was going to say. I wondered what I should tell her and which parts I should leave out.

“Okay, here it is from the beginning. Stop me if you have any questions along the way.”

“Of course.”

“Remember when I had the accident?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that was the first time I noticed. I woke up in hospital feeling like my head
hadn’t
just gone through the car window. When my mum came to take me home, I went into the bathroom to change and watched in the mirror as the cut on my head healed right before my eyes.”

“Are you friggin’ serious?”

“Yep. Anyway, that night, when Aiden came over, I kind of felt like he knew what had happened to me, but didn’t say anything. The next day was the science lab incident. When I ran out of the class, Aiden was waiting for me in the hall. He wasn’t at all surprised by the lack of burns to my skin, despite having a hole the size of my fist burnt through my uniform.”

“I knew you should have been burnt or something. I mean, I saw the flames, and there was no way you should have been okay, but every time I thought about it, it just made sense.”

“Yep, that was Aiden’s doing.”

“Huh?”

“Aiden’s able to manipulate people’s minds.”

“No way.”

“You’re surprised by that, yet you’re completely okay with transportation?”

Chelsea shrugged. “It doesn’t make that much sense, but I’m not going to start self-analysing when you’re finally explaining things.”

“Moving on. So, after the science lab incident, Aiden took me home, where he and Anna explained what we are. I freaked, then thought it was kind of cool, but then you disappeared.” I left out the part about the visions I’d had of her being abducted. “Somehow, I transported myself into the cage with you while I was sleeping. You were right about the psycho wanting me, not you. And after he shot me with the tranquiliser, I woke up strapped to a bed, wearing only my underwear. The next thing I knew, the asshole was standing over me with a scalpel, saying he wanted to find out what made me so special.”

“Oh, my God.”

“When he started slicing me up, I called out to Aiden, and he somehow appeared and killed him with his mind.” When she opened her mouth, I added, “Don’t ask me how, ’cause we still have no idea.”

“Anyway, long story short, after we came home from the hospital that evening, I walked into my house and found my mother lying in a pool of blood.”