One Wrong Move by Shannon McKenna Read Free Book Online Page B

the girl was the only person she could think of that had enough intrinsic control of her psi to handle the effects of the drug, even if she had never recognized her abilities for what they were. Helga wished she’d been able to explain, but after four days, the A dose of the Psi-Max 48 had disintegrated the language center in her brain.
    Everything broken down, mixed up. It was up to Nina to figure it out for herself. God help her. And help Lara. Please.
    She’d been watching Nina since she was a child. Lovely girl.
    So gifted and kind. Lara had always been so happy when Nina had come to sit for her, on those evenings when Helga had needed to go out.
    Nina had deserved better than that hellhole she’d been forced to exist in, but Helga had never succeeded in convincing Helen, Nina’s mother, to leave Nina’s stepfather. That bastard pervert Stan had destroyed his wife, but Nina seemed to have come through the fire intact. Subdued, but whole. The stress of her family life had caused the child’s talents to develop naturally, in sheer self-defense. As a result of that, the Psi-Max 48 would not crush her. Or so Helga fervently hoped. Assuming the girl got the B dose in time. Oh, please, God. Please. Not another death on her hands.
    She pushed away the guilt. Any woman would be driven to desperation by what she had been through. They had faked her death, enslaved her, forced her to do cruel, unspeakable things.
    Things that made her hate herself. And they had done it so easily. By constantly reminding her of what they would do to Lara if she did not comply.
    She should have known from the start. The research that led her to psi-max, upon which all her work had been based, was tainted by horror and cruelty. She’d distanced herself from the madman Osterman years ago, and his twisted applications of the formula. She had tried to create something good. Something pure from what was once evil.
    She might have known such a thing would be impossible.
    She’d tried to escape four months ago, but her shield had not been strong enough. Anabel had caught a tail, followed it back.
    Busted. The American slang term drifted up from the garbage heap of her brain. Before she’d been injected, she had been flu-ent in eight languages. They were a jumbled mess, databases dissolved. All that was left was the dialect of Ukrainian she’d spoken in her infancy, and that was slipping, too. A dose of Psi-Max 48 dissolved barriers. All barriers. Even blood vessels, in the end. Unless the B dose was injected in time.
    They had taken Lara to punish her. Mounted a video camera in Lara’s cell so that Helga could watch her daughter’s captivity, minute by minute. It had driven her mad, shaken her down into her composite pieces, to watch her daughter sleep, stare into space, weep. Exercise, meditate. Eat the small, bland meals they gave her. Vomit them up, more often than not. Week after week.
    Thinner and paler every day. Enduring it, completely alone, never even knowing why. Lara thought her mother had died in that research facility fire three years ago.
    Then Helga caught the frequency, the way one caught a bad smell. Anabel’s bright, toxic mental sparkle. She was sending out questing tendrils to the limits of her range, about twenty feet.
    Anabel was enhanced, at peak dose. There was no evading her.
    And Helga could not move anyway. She heard footsteps. Smelled Anabel’s perfume, sensed her body heat. Helga forced her eyes to open. The lids were so heavy, like lead. Her own frail body barely made a bump in the sheet.
    Anabel was dressed like a health care professional. White coat, ID badge. Hair swirled in a neat updo. Smiling, pleased with herself.
    “Helga,” Anabel murmured. “At last. We missed you.”
    “Go to hell,” she whispered, in Ukrainian, but with a telepath, it hardly mattered.
    Helga gathered thoughts, feelings, with their vaporous dangling tails. Stuffed them into that still, calm place inside where no air moved.
    “You