Page 27 of Awakened Gifts
That issue will have to wait, because my fiancé is close to tearing apart our only hope for the emergent children. So my attention is once again devoted to James Fricks as he idly drinks the packets of blood, his body already mostly healed.
Slowly, he climbs up from the floor, his eyes warily moving from Jase to Mom, and then he sits down at the chair behind the steel table. This interrogation room is too small for all of us. But there’s no way Jase or Mom plan to leave me alone with the man who has put them through hell for over two weeks.
With a resigned sigh, I try to figure out how to get this next part out without watching the two of them blow up.
No way. Not going to happen.
“His blood can save the emergent children.”
Mom and Jase both stare in surprise, and then Jase pushes off from the side of the wall. “How?”
Fricks stares at me, and then he takes an easy breath as his body finishes healing. “You need to be focused on Alice. She’ll be coming for you,” he growls. “She’ll be unstoppable now. She’ll destroy everything and everyone.”
“Alice is the name of the emergent we faced?” Mom asks, now that I’ve filled her in on some of the basics. I’m waiting to tell her about the fact that Alice is her mother. Not exactly sure they have a how-to on that conversation.
“How do we beat her?” I ask, letting him run the topic.
“You can’t, Aria. Not now. Your blood was all she needed to become invincible.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Jase hisses.
Fricks glares at him momentarily, before returning his attention to me. “There was only that one window of opportunity, but now it’s gone. Someone should have pursued her.”
“We were in the middle of falling apart, thanks to your fucking kidnapping,” Mom says, venom resting on the edges of her words.
I need Mom and Jase to both quit interrogating so that I can get useful information.
“Explain why she’ll be invincible,” I say before Captain Fricks shuts down and stops talking altogether.
His eyes meet mine once again, and he seems to drift off into his filed-away memories.
“Centuries ago, I rescued Alice from the ashes for my research. But the Scorpions seized her for their own projects after I gathered my samples. She was still unconscious while I was there—very barely surviving death. But her cells were regenerating very rapidly without blood.
“They’d dealt with emergents in the past, and they knew they had a limited time before they had to kill her. Otherwise she’d be unstoppable. But she was so brutally injured, that they decided to try something.
“There was a procedure, one that required a lot of uranium, numerous surgeries within hours of each other, and a new bone.”
“New bone?” Mom asks, narrowing her eyes.
“Yes. A full blood bone—just one. Too many would cause the body to react poorly, and it would attack itself. But a bone such as a rib bone is ideal. Her body was still fragile enough to break off one of her rib bones and replace it with one from a full blood. The bone was infused with liquid uranium, and since it was dead bone—”
“It didn’t heal, and it weakened the surrounding tissue,” Mom says through a sigh. “Which gives her a weakness.”
“They kept her pinned to the table by injecting her through that surrounding tissue. They kept her veins loaded with a lethal amount of uranium for centuries. My research had proved fruitless with her blood, but it was close. So, so close.
“I worked with the Scorpions, managing to escape their tattoo requirement due to my affiliation with the United. But nothing worked on Penelope. One day there was an issue with our security system—it surged, and the next thing I knew, Alice was tearing the place apart.
“She found her way home to the Fire Hawks, but by then, I had already infiltrated their operation, hoping to further my research. Unfortunately, she realized the same thing she needed to repair the damage done to her is the one thing I needed to cure my wife. She only assumed I was searching for the same thing as she was for reasons that only stem from the scientific curiosity. She’s unaware of Penelope’s existence.”
Jase runs a hand through his hair, his body shaking as he fights to restrain his fury. “You mean Aria’s blood,” he growls.
Fricks doesn’t look away from me. “The blood of a true-born emergent hybrid—one with limitless power and self-healing qualities like no other. Only Aria’s blood can transform the bone within her that we replaced, and turn it as invincible as the rest of her body. Because that bone can’t be removed now that it has fused to her skeletal system. Her change wasn’t complete when they made the swap. She still had some human-like structures. Only Aria’s blood can cure the incurable. Which is why I did what I had to.”
I’ve never seen such a monster be so apologetic. As much as I’d love to hate him, I sympathize. I’m not sure I could watch Jase be alive and dead in the same place for centuries.
“It doesn’t make what he did acceptable,” Jase says to me, but his eyes stay on Fricks. “That’s why you keep your mind a madhouse around me, isn’t it?”
Fricks slowly nods his head. “I do my best not to think about anything other than things you can know when I’m in your presence. I learned about your gift years ago. Hale Banner suspected it when you would answer questions no one thought to even ask. He confided in me, and then he approached you about your hybrid roots.”