Miss Parker

For the second time in a week my hands were literally tied. My feet, too, but at least my brother’d had the courtesy not to gag me. That circumstance left me free to haul insults at him every other minute which I gave up soon due to the amused smile that tugged at the corners of his mouth.

But only when a dark silence became almost tangible in the car and the snow started to pile up on the windshield, I allowed my mind to go back to Broots’ slumped figure in the snow, blood seeping into the white and forming a bizarre and deadly pattern.

I had tried to sweettalk Lyle into going back or at least having the decency to call an ambulance for him, but he had just smirked dismissingly and had replied something the likes of “Never thought you’d care about him dying”.

That very moment I wasn’t too happy about the fact that I had regained possession of the insight into my brother’s twisted mind that told me that he would not be inclined to take part in Broots’ fate.

I felt the shock grip my heart now that I was no longer able to come up with anything that might convince him. Hot tears began to burn inside my eyes and I closed them and drew a deep but silent breath. He would not see me cry. I’d rather stick my head in a bear trap… or his, for that matter.

My hand gripping Gates’ neck I shoved his head down on the hood of his car.

“Now tell me exactly what the Centre is up to this time!” I told him politely, but his muffled laugh had me change my attitude considerably.

I lay some of my weight onto his back, pressing his arms down onto the metal, which caused a groan to escape his mouth.

“Give me a reason why I shouldn’t kill you after what you have done to the woman I love,” I hissed at him, the words sounding trashy but the way I said them seeming to be taken straight from an action movie. Gates coughed, then groaned again.

“Damnit, Jarod. We used to get along just fine.”

I didn’t grace that with an answer, but simply waited until he came around himself.

“Fine, fine! They weren’t too happy with her losing the baby because I staged my death, okay? Made a housecall, had me beat up and forced me to go back and talk her into going along with that plan to have your baby. Decided that it would be better to have her be the Centre player instead of trying to do it behind her back again.”

His words caused me to shudder inwardly.

“So why are you back?”

“Well, I didn’t manage to convince her, did I? I was told that she’d run off and got herself amnesia. Tough cookies for the Centre so I decided that I should get her back. Got your cellphone number and arranged this. It was about money, okay? I never meant to hurt her.”

“Sure.” I replied evenly. “So you thought that returning her to the Centre wouldn’t hurt her?”

I kicked him in the shin but before I could decided whether to exert some more senseless violence or to sensibly restrain myself, my cellphone blasted the tune of Brisco County Jr. once again. Ignoring Gates’ stupid smile that revealed a missing front tooth that I strongly suspected to be Parker’s handywork, I flipped it open with my free hand.

“Jarod, this is Sydney. Lyle has Parker.”

The snow fell in cascades and obscured the view out of the hospital window I was pacing in front of. Just having ended the call to Jarod, I was now left to do nothing but wait nervously for the doctors.

I had been tailing Lyle for hours, with it being the only thing I had come up with to finding the others. I had always considered him the person the most immediate danger came from and once again I had been right in my assessment. I had eavesdropped on Lyle’s inquisition of a guard who had told him that Gates' car was still in the parking lot while he had seen him accompanied by Broots and getting in the car with him. So Lyle had pulled the good old GPS card. The Centre, of course, was paranoid when it came to pretty much everything. In consequence they had taken the liberty to install a tailing system into each and every employee’s car. And Broots’ wasn’t an exception. So all Lyle’d had to do was follow.

Naturally I had been a little bit behind, especially in the snow so I had walked into a horrible scene, car crashed into the crash barrier, smoke coming from the hood and curling into the sky menancingly. But the most horrible sight of it all had been Broots with blood scattered all around him, facedown in the snow. The bullet, it seemed, had hit him right below the right ribcage. It had missed his heart but only by inches.

He must have lost consciousness right away with the sudden bloodloss causing blood pressure to collaps entirely.

Now I was here in the nearest hospital, worried for Miss Parker and her unborn baby, worried what Jarod would do, but most of all, frightened out of my mind what would happen to Broots. There was no distraction here. The outside view was completely obscured by a mass of swirling snowflakes while the walls were cold and naked, white as well. I listened to my footssteps on the floor, counted them and counted them again, but nothing could disctract me from the horror that was going on.

Catherine Parker is sitting on a table, her hands in front of her, her eyes half closed, sitting upright but looking dazed, even in a trance. A hand reaches out for hers and carefully taps it.

“Catherine, are you with me?” It is Raines voice. Less choked and lighter with youth, but it is clearly him.

“Yeah.” She sounds dreamy, as if far away in her own world. Her eyes fall shut for a second, then she opens them again. Their greyish blue seems much darker with the strong dilation of her pupils.

“What do you see?”

Raines’ voice is oddly soft, as if talking to a small child, but still there is a definite edge he cannot quite conceal.

“A boy…” Catherine whispers. “An extraordinary boy.”
Raines is leaning forward now and as the perspective of the camera changes, the gleam in his eyes is like a blade flashing in the sunlight.

“Where?” he asks.

“I… I don’t see…” Suddenly Catherine snaps awake. She blinks her eyes and shakes her head as if trying to chase the drowsiness away.

Raines leans back against his chair, clearly exasperated.

“Concentrate,” he says neutrally.

“What do you want from that boy?” Catherine asks, vigilance lighting up her eyes that gradually return to their usual color. “I am not sure I am doing the right thing.”

It shows that Raines is not one to reassure people of their moral values, so he simply holds up both hands. “Concentrate on the boy, Catherine. What’s his name?”

“Jarod,” she says without hesitating for even a second.

“You know?” he asks. “What else do you know?”

“I am tired,” she almost pleads, then slowly gets up to her feet. It is now visible that she is pregnant.

“Well, enough for now.” It is obvious that Raines is everything but satisfied, but knows that he will have to be patient. “See you tomorrow.”

Sis is not too impressed when Raines shows her what inspired Project Cassandra before she was even born.

“So what?” she asks, folding her arms in front of her chest and giving me a dark look. “She’s had extraordinary abilities. I did know that. And you used her for your causes. Bugger. I did know before that you are a bastard. No need to prove that fact.”

Raines’ eyes are bulging out of his face again and I find myself shudder with disgust once again. Ugly, ugly guy.

“Don’t you understand the significance of that?”

Wow, I wasn’t aware of the fact that he could say a sentence that long without wheezing in between. Instead he coughs afterwards. Fair enough.

“No, I don’t,” Parker spats. “All I see is that you are probably even more dellusional than I thought.”

I would have cracked her give a damn- attitude in mere seconds by simply heating her up a little, but it is much more fun watching Raines fail, so I remain propped against the wall, watching my private little sitcom.

“Her abilities came out strongest…. when she was pregnant!” Raines says, having returned to drawing in breaths in the middle of sentences. Too bad, I would have loved to see him die from oxygen deprivation.

Realization is dawning on my sister’s face and she gives him a predatory grin.

“That’s the key to this whole stupid game? You wanted me pregnant to be some sort of medium so that I could do whatever to help the Centre land another jackpot like Jarod?” The laughter that follows is hollow. “God, that’s far fetched. How desperate are you, Raines?”

As different as we may be, there is one thing that both we Parker twins really have a knack for. Provocation. She’s good because Raines explodes in front of her eyes.

“What about… loyalty?” he yells. I didn’t know that he could come up with enough air to yell in the first place. Impressive!

“You have grown up in this place! You should willingly go along and help reinstate it to its former glory.”
She laughs again, obviously delighted with the fact that Raines has lost it.

“Nobody expected me to, did they? Because in that case I would have been asked before you sent some guy after me or blackmailed me into doing it, huh?”

Raines is too busy catching his breath to come up with an answer, which convinces me that this is the point where I come in.

“Sis,” I say, stepping out of the shadows. “You can stop your little tantrum now. “

She turns her head in my direction and a sneer forms around her full lips.

“Lyle, so you believe that humbug, too? You shouldn’t have watched all those X-Files episodes.”

I slowly approach the table and Raines moves over willingly as I sit down opposite her.

“You’re not crying,” I state and for a split second I can see confusion in her eyes, but then she has herself firmly under control once again. She leans forward until her nose nearly touches mine.

“And why would I be?” Her voice is so low now that it resembles the dangerous growl of an aggressive animal.

I lean back, opening my palms towards her in a pacifying gesture that I know to fuel her fury considerably.

“Broots,” I say simply. “He’s somewhere out in the snow, bleeding to death and you are not worried. You have stopped begging me to send him help. Why would that be?”

She stares at me and I can see that she suddenly understands. She doesn’t like it at all, but she does know that I am right.

For the first time I actually listened to that strange turmoil inside me. It’d been plaguing me like dizziness that I had had to work very hard to block out of my consciousness despite it getting stronger every day.

Now that I allowed it for the first time, it felt as if everything was suddenly clicking into place. I wasn’t worried for Broots anymore. Not because I didn’t care, but because I knew that he was fine. I had no idea where that had come from, but I could very faintly feel pain just beneath my heart- his pain. I felt Sydney’s presence looming over me- over him when I concentrated on it. I couldn’t make out the words on Sydney’s lips but I knew that things were going to be okay.

Very suddenly snapping out of my reverie, I looked up into Lyle’s eyes.

“I called the nearest hospital, Parker. Somebody’s found him and brought him in. You knew that, didn’t you?”

I remained motionless, simply trying to control the trembling that had begun to seize my body.

Raines had approached the table once again and now leaned on it with one hand.

“Do you see it now?” he rasps. “Just like Catherine, you know things when you concentrate hard enough.”

“There is so much you could do for the Centre,” Lyle added with a vicious grin. “You can find out what other people think or feel, you can work yourself into their strategies, you can find young Pretenders like your mother did...”

I swallowed hard, my mother’s voice whispering “A boy… An extraordinary boy...” inside my mind. Although I hadn’t wanted to believe it at first, it now made perfect sense.

Everything- how I had never been afraid of Jarod as he had kidnapped me, how in the fight with Thomas I had known what he would do next, how without it being medically confirmed, I undoubtly knew that my baby was a girl.

“You have some sort of psychic abilities which you have inherited from your mother. They are usually hidden under the surface and only show in some improved intuition as for what other people feel, but with pregnancy…” Lyle’s eyes radiated a manical gleam and now that I had opened my mind for what surrounded me, I could feel his evil determination burn like a fire.

“… all your senses are…. sharpened. And that one, too,” Raines added. What came from him was different than what I felt from Lyle. While Lyle was determined and heated, Raines was shockingly cold.

“I won’t do it,” I whispered. “I will not use my abilities to help the Centre.”

“Your mother did,” Raines delivered the first blow to my resistance. “And she found Jarod.”

“Give us what we want and you are free to walk away with it as soon as your baby is born.”

“How daft do you think I am?” I snapped at him. “Since when does the Centre keep its promises?”

Raines eyes were burning now. For the first time a little bit of passion showed on his face. The Centre had always been his life and he would do anything to save it. It was almost tragic how he clung to what had to be his last hope.

“The authorities are closing in on us, Michelle,” he said and I couldn’t determine whether he paused to catch his breath or rather for effect after using my first name.

“And the Triumvirate… isn’t going to watch… it any longer… Project Cassandra… is the last chance we… have!” The intervals between his wheezing had become shorter with desperation and I could feel the fear that radiated from him.

“Project Cassandra,” I snarled, fully aware of the impact my harsh tones had on him. I had never seen William Raines so close to losing his composure and I was quite determined to push him over the edge. “It has a nice ring to it, indeed.”

I leaned back in my seat, mimicking Lyle’s actions from before and gave them a wide smile. “Well, there is no way I will ever participate in this and you don’t need an inner sense to be sure of that.”

I could see that Lyle wanted to kill me on the spot and I didn’t have any doubts that he would go through with it, but Raines hadn’t given up yet.

He grabbed Lyle’s arm as firmly as his feeble strength allowed him and I was almost delighted with the look of disgust on my brother’s face as he was led out of the room.

I sighed and although I knew that the surveillance cameras were watching me, buried my face in my hands.

I really had to find a way out of here or at least buy some time until Jarod was inclined to turn up and get me out of this mess.

The cold winter sunshine did nothing to help Broots’ shocking palour as I stood over him and tried to convince myself that he would be fine. The doctors were positive that he would make a full recovery but that was difficult to imagine.

He was still under and although I really wanted to be there when he woke up, I knew that I had other priorities. I squeezed his arm carefully, then turned around and walked towards the door.

The guilt weighed heavily on me as I walked to my car. Instead of trying hard to built up hatred against Miss Parker for allegedly selling her baby to the Centre, I should have considered the other option.

Had they revived Project Cassandra despite everything that had happened? I did not dare to think about the consequences that would have for all of us…