Chapter 8: Intel is a Stupid Word
Helena led us off campus without saying anything else. It made me a little nervous and I was suddenly glad Cyric hadn't let me go alone. This was beginning to get massively sketchy.
Eventually, we reached a little side road. Parked under the shade of a few trees was a non-descript silver car. My stomach felt queasy and I wondered if I was nervous or sick. Helena crossed the street to get to the car.
"We're going to my home. there's rooms for you to stay in tonight, I'm not sure how long it'll take. If you'd rather go to a motel, knock yourself out. I plan to tell you what you need to know, and yes Rosalyn, I'll answer a couple questions about your mother since I know you're curious. Now please, get in the car." She said, she sounded almost bored. She fished keys out of her purse and unlocked the car before sliding into the driver's seat. I was nervous, the plan sounded kind of ominous and unsafe, but we were here now, and I was curious.
"You sure you want to do this?" Cyric asked me. I knew he still thought this was a bad idea but I didn't care.
"Yup." I replied, and I went around to the other side of the car, slipping into the passenger's seat while Cyric got in the back. Helena didn't ask if we had seat belts on or anything like that, she just started driving, and I hoped I made the right decision getting into this car.
~*~
I felt steadily sicker as we drove. I'd never been prone to carsickness before, and having just driven for nearly three days straight with Cyric without getting carsick, I couldn't put it down to whatever had given me all aspects of the Hidden's powers. I hoped my body wasn't getting ready to have me vomit up my blood again, and if it was, I hoped it wouldn't happen in the car.
I didn't watch where we were going, I let my head rest against the headrest and closed my eyes, taking deep breaths in the hope that maybe I could ward off whatever was making me feel ill.
There was no conversation in the car for the first couple of minutes, and then Cyric spoke, directing the conversation towards Helena. "How did you find that number to call Rosalyn?" He asked. Helena rolled her eyes, keeping her gaze on the road ahead of us.
"Really boy? My husband was an H.O. agent with your parents, I found that number in his old address book, listed under the name 'Dextri home' and it wasn't hard to figure out that you'd go back to where you once lived." She replied. I was pretty sure this agitated him, how easily she found us.
"On a completely different topic, I have a name, you seem to know it, why do you refuse to call me by it?" He asked. I opened my eyes at this, to glance at Helena. Cyric couldn't see her expression, but I could. There was something a lot like fear in her eyes, and her shoulders were tense, her face betrayed both her annoyance and her anxiety.
"Be careful. You're only here because of Rosalyn and I have no qualms about getting rid of you if I decide you've become especially bothersome with your questions and such." Helena told him coldly. I frowned, feeling deeply unsettled. I couldn't pinpoint who Helena was. She'd seemed caring back in the hospital all that time ago, rushing, and nervous and maybe even annoyed, but definitely kind. Now, she seemed a lot colder, more detached, and I wondered if she'd been acting back then, or if something had happened to change her in the months since I'd last seen her. Anyways, her threat seemed to quiet Cyric, and the car slipped into silence until I couldn't help it anymore.
~*~
I'm pretty sure the car ride lasted about an hour and a half, but I'm not sure, I may've drifted off at one point.
Eventually, we arrived at the bottom of the hill. Looking up, I could see huge, black, wrought iron gates, and then a barrier of trees. Helena drove up and stopped at the gates, she pulled a little grey remote out of her pocket and pressed a button, the gates slid open and she drove in. They shut soundlessly behind us. We drove through the trees for a minute or two before they thinned, revealing a beautiful old, manor.
"Wow," I breathed, my stomach ache momentarily forgotten as I took in the sight. It was magnificent, with pillars in the front, but mostly Victorian-style architecture. It was about three floors high, with a sort of tower coming out of the side that had a fourth floor, long windows with curtains drawn across them, and Gothic trim decorating the bottom of the roof. Helena pulled up to the front, where there was a single, wide door, carved with a pattern I couldn't see from here. "You live here?" I asked Helena. She kept her face blank.
"Currently." She quipped. She put the car in park and then turned it off, pulling out the keys and gracefully exiting the car. Cyric and I followed her lead and got out as well, bringing our backpacks with us. Helena led us to the front door where she slipped a rusted key into the lock and jiggled it about for a second before it fit properly and the door unlocked. None of Helena's movements were without purpose. Fluidly, and elegantly, she pulled the key out of the lock and ushered us inside the house, flicking on the light switch and closing the door.
The insides had been slightly modernized, but for the most part the house seemed to be in it's original state. All the floors were dark wood, and with the curtains closed, the house did seem a little creepy.
"Follow me," Helena said, walking down one hallway, Cyric and I followed her wordlessly, although we did share a mutual look of uncertainty before he gestured me forwards, reminding me this was my idea, whether or not that was his intent.
After a few twists and turns, we came to a very modern-looking, smooth wood door with a shiny metal handle. Helena opened it and it was like walking into a completely different building. It was a modern conference room with a large, polished, oval table, surrounded by chairs, seven on each side, and two at either end of the table. In one corner was a desk with a laptop charging on it, and a neat stack of files. Behind the head of the table was a screen, and even the windows here were modern, complete with pull-down blinds. The only indication that it was still part of the old manor home, was the unchanged dark-wood floor boards.
"Sit down, c'mon kids, we've got a lot to get through." Helena said, tapping her foot on the floor. Cyric pressed his hand to the small of my back and used it to propel me forward with him. Helena closed the door behind us again, although she didn't lock us in. She moved to the head of the table, the one directly in front of the screen, and elegantly sat down. Slowly, I lowered myself into the chair directly to her left, and Cyric sat next to me. Helena laced her fingers together on the table.
"I know that you two both have questions, and of course Rosalyn you're curious about your mother, so I think we should start with that, and then I'll explain what Rosalyn needs to know, and why." She said. I glanced at Cyric who shrugged.
"How'd you know my mom?" I asked, deciding to start simple. All my life I'd been mildly curious about my birth mother, but up until recently, I hadn't felt I really needed to know about her. And now all I could think was that she had somehow been instrumental in this, and because of that, I was what I am.
"I met her at University, we had rooms across the hall from one another and we wound up close friends." Helena replied calmly, devoid of emotion. The story made complete sense and I didn't doubt the truth, but I still frowned.
"Why were you there the day of the car crash?" I asked, because it had been eating at me. It seemed too coincidental that the day of an accident, the day I met Cyric, Helena was also there. I glanced at Cyric then. He was frowning at Helena.
"In complete honesty, I was looking for you, Rosalyn. Your mother knew about all this, and when we discovered what you were, she asked me to explain the Hidden and whatnot to you when you were old enough. I never meant to wait this long but after she died I barely spoke to your father, and I became intent with my other work, and after my husband died I became obsessed with the idea of bringing Hidden Operations to a grinding halt." She told us, she didn't seemed ashamed of what she'd done.
"Did my dad know?" I asked. I'd forgotten about him again, my mother had known, but had my dad? The question gave Helena pause.
"No." She admitted. She looked mildly uncomfortable. "Your mother, well you know she never exactly intended to become involved with your father. They were young, and he was looking for work, and trying to figure out how to be a father, she didn't think it'd be right to tell him that childhood stories and certain supernatural things existed, much less that his daughter was an anomaly among them." An anomaly among them. It didn't seem like a particularly offensive sentence. And yet, it reminded me that even among a bunch of oddities, I was a freak. Compellers, the rarity in and of itself, and then the whole third compeller crap, which no one would explain to me. Why was that so weird? So important? Cyric looked uncomfortable too and it occurred to me that these questions I was posing were kind of personal, and he didn't know whether or not it was okay for him to hear them. I bit my lip. I wanted answers.
"How'd my mom die?" I asked. It was my last personal question, I decided.
"She refused to give you up to H.O., and Agent Markov, along with two others, one of whom was a healer, took drastic measures. They upended the house, and from what I understand, the healer sent a fast-acting disease through her, combined with multiple lacerations, she lost a lot of blood. She died a day or so later." Helena said. Why hadn't my mother given me up? I wondered. She could've saved herself from death. "I told her not to." Helena said and I realized I'd been mumbling my thoughts to myself. I frowned at Helena.
"Why would you tell her not to?" I asked.
"Because you were, you are, the third compeller." She said.
"What does that even mean?" I demanded.
"I'm getting to that. Do you have any other questions?" She asked. I shook my head no and looked at Cyric.
"I have a couple," He admitted. Helena nodded stiffly. "First of all, where are we?" He asked.
"Woodly House. We're on the cliff bordering Lac de Vide, which is French for Lake of Nothing." Helena said. I wondered if she was joking, but then decided she wasn't, she seemed to stiff to joke, at least right then. Cyric nodded like he knew where this was, but I didn't.
"And my second question is; since you're a healer, why didn't you help Rosalyn's mom?" Cyric asked, looking suspicious. I couldn't decide if I was glad he'd asked, or mortified, I'd forgotten she was a healer, they both were. Helena's eyes flared and she looked extremely offended.
"You don't think I tried?" She hissed. "Of course I tried! But I knew almost nothing of what I was or how it worked, the bare minimum, and whoever implanted that disease was skilled, they knew what they were doing. Even if it happened today I'm not sure I could save her." Helena said, her cheeks had turned pink. I bit my tongue, I was a little scared of her. She came off as cool, collected, calm. possibly even emotionless, but definitely not crazy like that, or prone to outbursts. She took a deep breath and smoothed down her skirt, although I was pretty sure it wasn't wrinkled."Are we done with questions?" She asked, she seemed calmer again.
"Yup," I said, answering for Cyric and I. I wasn't sure whether or not he had more questions, but it seemed unwise to let him ask them.
"Good." Helena stood up and walked over to the computer, turning it on. The screen flicked on too. I could see the files as Helena pulled them up on the laptop screen, most of them were combination of letter and numbers and they switched places on me until I gave up, frustrated that they wouldn't stay in one place or with one shape. It wasn't Helena's program, it was my dyslexia. I doubted that real words were hidden in there anyways. She selected one of the files and opened it.
From what I could tell it was a research file. It took me a second to realize that the name at the top was mine.
Rosalia Terracott.
I'd never really been Rosalia, always Rosalyn, and since I'd been lied to and drugged into believing I was someone else, someone who went by the name Rosalia, it bothered me to be called that.
"Why do you have a file on Rosalyn?" Cyric asked. I glanced at him, now he was leaning over the table, one hand on the surface like he was about to stand up. He was angry, and the his expression was thunderous.
"I thought we were done with the questions." Helena quipped. Cyric kept glaring. "I will explain as we go. Besides, you should recognize this, I believe you helped gather the most recent information for it." Cyric seemed to recognize the file and he shut up, but his expression was still murderous as he leaned back in his chair.
I knew Cyric had been assigned to me, for lack of a better term, and his sole goal had been to get me to trust him, so that he could betray me. Of course he'd been gathering intellect, I just wasn't sure I wanted to know what he'd recorded. Helena sat down, holding a remote she must've taken off the desk. When she spoke, she addressed me.
"H.O. has been looking into you since you were born. I don't know how they found out about your birth, I suspect it had something to do with the people around you. Regardless, when they discovered that you were a compeller, they were intrigued. By this point Markov's daughter, the other compeller, had been born. And Yvonne had been with them for a couple years as well. They knew you were the third compeller. By the time you were three, they'd realized you'd started to use your power, they just weren't sure if you were aware of it. The plan formed was to get you out of the care of your parents, so that you'd grow up at H.O., where you could be subject to study." Helena said. She used the remote to scroll down the pages. I was looking at her, ignoring whatever was on the screen. "They had hoped to get your mother to give up the baby. They hadn't realized she'd known about them, that they'd come. She knew that there was a chance her own life was on the line. She hid you in the trapdoor beneath the kitchen table. Three agents came. Agent Markov, who you've met, the healer who killed your mother, I'm not sure of his name but I believe he's dead now, and a woman who happened to be living there with her son at the time, gathering intel, I don't believe she had any special powers, her given name was Jane Mercury, although, she was better known as Regina Dextri."
Dextri. Dextri was Cyric's last name. It wasn't a particularly common last name, as far as I knew. And both his parents had been H.O. agents. I looked at him. He was already looking at me, guiltily. It was his mother who'd killed mine. He knew. He knew and he hadn't told me. It shouldn't have felt like a betrayal, but it did.
I turned away from him, to face Helena. She had a carefully blank expression on her face. I got the feeling she wanted Cyric and I to fight but I couldn't think of a single reason why so I let it go, for now.
"And what happened next?" I asked, trying not to lt either one see what I felt. Helena kept going.
"Well, after your mother's death, your father became edgy and H.O. realized they'd lost their chance. So they bided their time, waiting until you would be vulnerable again. I think you know what I'm referring to." Helena said, I swallowed. I did, I'd only felt truly and completely vulnerable to the point of falling apart twice. And the second time had happened much more recently. The first time had to have been Olin's death. "Your younger half-brother, his murder was used to get to you. It was led by... Oh, I can't remember her name. But you acted in a way they weren't expecting." She said.
My heart hurt. I clenched and unclenched my hands into fists under the table. Olin had died because of me. I knew it, I'd already been told, but it still felt awful. Cyric's hand slipped over my fist, out of Helena's view, beneath the tabletop. Gently, He pried my fist open and slid his fingers between mine, interlacing them. I wanted to pull away, partly because I was still upset about him withholding information, partly because there was a part of me that didn't want to need him. But he was reassuring, and I felt better with his fingers through mine.
"Can we move on from my brother's death? I know, I was there." I said quietly, as calmly as I could manage, and Helena nodded, her face carefully empty. Once again I wondered if she was trying to upset me.
"Well, H.O. most recently decided that they needed to get someone your age close to you. They'd considered this before, but you seemed to be pushing people away, anyone who wasn't close with you before your brother died, you didn't seem to react to. Until you met that boy you did the project with. Oh the one who looks like the guy from... I don't know, the one you dated. Well, they thought you may've grown out of whatever it was you were playing at earlier. That's when they decided to send someone in to befriend you. You know what happened there, more or less, I assume. He collected intel and learned about you until you trusted him, at which point he pulled the rug out from under you feet, sort to speak, and brought you to H.O., unfortunately I don't have those files because they're kept on a remote server that I can't reach." Helena said. Cyric squeezed my hand and I wasn't sure whether it was to reassure me in some way, or if it was to try to make me believe that that wasn't all it was. I didn't know what I believed, except that I really didn't like the word 'intel'.
"Now that you've given us a proper history lesson, can we please move on to the whole third-compeller thing?" I asked. Helena pursed her lips.
"I'm not sure I can do that properly without explaining to you the genetic anomalies of the Hidden, the compellers in particular." She said.
~*~
"Do you understand?" Helena asked me.
I think she must've talked for a full five hours about the Hidden, pulling up documents and slides that I'm sure would've helped anyone else. Halfway through we got up, Cyric and my hands fell away from each other and we followed her to a kitchen where she handed us sandwiches and water and we ate in the conference room as she went on in her lengthy explanations. Helena didn't eat anything.
I'm sure this would've been helpful had I understood what she'd said. But most of her talking about stem-cells and brain neurons and physically, mental, or genetic oddities and who knows what else was lost on me.
I tried to do the math, if we met Helena around say, eleven o'clock, then we spent an hour and a half on the road, that gets us to 12:30, round about. Add a half hour for our little questions and history lesson taking us to one o'clock, and we might as well include the trip to the kitchen and back in that time frame. Add five hours is six. It was probably around six o'clock and I still didn't know who I what I was.
"More or less." I told Helena in response. I was kind of bored. I had no patience for genetic weirdness or whatever it was. She nodded, pleased, apparently unaware that the last five hours were pretty much wasted time to me. I had no idea you could talk that long about something like that.
"I'm glad, it's hard to be so concise with information like that, sometimes you just skip over the important parts." She said. I tried not to gape at her. That was the concise version? I had a headache pounding in the back of my head. I was kind of hungry, and really tired. I imagined Cyric was too. But at the same time I wanted to know more.
"Third compeller?" I asked again, trying not to sound too impatient. Helena checked her watch and frowned.
"Tomorrow. You're probably tired, I can't imagine you've slept that well since you got away from H.O.. Tomorrow I'll tell you about being the third compeller, and about... Well, everything else, okay? Um, would you like something to eat?" She asked. I'd noticed how she phrased every question like she was only talking to one person, and they were all directed at me. It was like she refused to acknowledge Cyric. I glanced at him. He smiled and shrugged which I took to mean it was up to me.
I half wanted to scream at Helena for pushing back the third compeller thing, but at the same time, I was tired and I wasn't sure I would've retained it if she'd told me then.
"I'm hungry." I said. Helena shut off her laptop and left it in there. We followed her back into the kitchen and she pulled out some pre-made microwave pizza. She didn't eat with Cyric and I, who sat in an awkward silence with our slightly-off tasting I-don't-want-to-know-what's-in-it, off-brand microwave pizza. She came back right as we finished, holding a stack of clothing. I thought it was creepy. She didn't give us a tour of the house, instead taking us straight to our temporary rooms.
Mine was in the third floor of the four-floor tower, it was large, taking up the entire third floor of the tower, Cyric's was right below mine. Helena left him with a small stack of clothing and told him she hoped it'd fit, then she gave me the other small stack and told me it was my mother's clothing, before promptly turning and running away.
Of my mother's clothing, Helena had given me a sun dress, a fresh, pale blue, button-down blouse, an oversize t-shirt I with the words "KASARONE ATHLETICS" printed across the chest, a pair of jeans, and a plain, grey zip-up hoodie. I wasn't quite sure why Helena had my mother's clothing, probably because they'd been close friends or something like that, but I was glad I wasn't given Helena's old clothing or something.
My temporary room was painted all white and was pretty much completely plain, and surprisingly modern-looking, compared to the rest of the house. There was a double bed in the corner with white sheets, with a bed-side table. A dresser was pushed against the opposite wall. Looking out of the tower was a huge, picture window, with a ledge that extended outwards a few inches. There was an adjoined bathroom with a shower that had a bar of soap in it, as well as a sink and a toilet.
I took a shower, put on the over-sized t-shirt, and went to bed, hoping beyond hope that I wouldn't dream.
N/A
Next chapter will hopefully be up by like next week. And it'll be more interesting, I assure you, I kinda just had to get all that stuff out of the way.
Please comment and vote, thanks for reading!
-Jodi