The Gifted

13 | Folie à deux

Suddenly Anna regretted not hitting him with the vase a third time.

The room was shrunk back to its original size, and Anna fell onto her knees from the lurch forward. Though Jack winced from the exertion, the distance stretched out again when Anna lunged for him.

"Is that all you can do?" she derided, running at him. "Push me away?"

He smiled. "No."

As soon as her fingers closed around his throat, but right before she could begin taking his Gift, something grabbed Anna's ankles. Her nails tore down Jack's neck as she fell. Her body was dragged backwards, but when she whipped her head around, she saw nothing. Invisible talons were gripping her legs, and she pulled out her gun and shot at nothing. The bullets buried into the walls, and when her legs were free, she turned around and aimed right at Jack's face.

"Stop it," she snarled. "Now."

"You're out of bullets," he said calmly. Blood was trickling out of the scratches she left on him.

All it takes is a touch, she recalled bitterly. A millisecond more, and her touch would've paralyzed him, but in the impossibly short time between contact and devouring, he'd set an invisible monster after her. Fine. He wouldn't be able to pull that off again.

But...her gun did feel suspiciously light, even though she should have exactly six bullets left. She had ten bullets in her clip when she set out, and she fired it four times...wait, why were there seven holes in the walls then?

"You're playing tricks on me," she said bluntly.

He shrugged. "Maybe. But don't you think I'd rather get shot than be devoured by a parasite like you? Shouldn't I be egging you on instead of trying to convince you it's empty?"

Shooting him in the face would kill him and render her entire hunt pointless. Anna's eye twitched, but she lowered her gun's aim to his knee. Pain and wounds lessened the intensity of a soon-to-be-devoured Gift, but Jack was so powerful, the difference in quality would be negligible.

She pulled the trigger.

The bullet tore through his knee, spraying blood all over the floor, and Jack screamed, bent forward as far as he could go with the ropes holding him back. Anna smiled and took her sweet time approaching, but then the agonized screaming turned into laughter, and she froze.

Jack looked up at her with a teary-eyed smile. "I don't know why you people call yourself the Enhanced," he said. "Your senses are shit."

He, along with the chair, disappeared, and the part of the room she was looking at started warping and became the other side of the room. Anna turned in a half circle and saw Jack, sitting there in his chair, with scratches on his neck but a healthy knee.

The one she shot was an illusion.

And unlike the illusion, the real Jack wasn't smiling.

She noticed that the wallpaper was peeling. The mirror was cracked. Her resolve started to melt, and in its place was an emotion she hadn't ever felt toward someone who was supposed to be her prey.

Fear.

"Get out," Jack said.

There was a missile-like whistling in her ears. Smoke curled out of the unlit fireplace. Shadows of invisible apparitions slid along the peeling wallpaper, and Anna's heart began to pound. For the first time today, she took a step back.

"Get out!" Jack repeated.

A sourceless wind blew her hair back and forced her eyes closed. When she opened them, the shadows were spinning around the room, and furniture inched this way and that, nudged around by things she couldn't see.