Ancient Evil (The First Genocide Book 1) Read Free Page B

and
then I saw you over here and was curious.”
    “About the scars?”
    Lightning flashed.
    “No, just about what you were thinking. I
didn’t see the scars until you turned to speak. You seemed sad.” Thunder
rumbled. She reached out and gently touched his face. He felt a tingle where
her fingers brushed the scar tissue.
    “You did well not to flinch,” he said. He
felt the bile of shame in his throat as he said this and felt control of his emotions
slip a little.
    He watched her closely. She did not respond
verbally, but her pupils seemed to swell even more. The green of her irises
were almost completely eclipsed by her black cavernous pupils, possibly just
the aftereffect of the darkness following the lightning but possibly not.
    He pulled out his phone and looked at its
glowing face. “I should get back; it was nice to meet you. Sorry, I missed your
name.”
    “No you didn’t, I didn’t tell you.” She
just looked at him, waiting for him to ask. The silence of a few expectant
seconds felt like hours. She relented, “It’s Charlie.”
    “As I was saying, Charlie, it was nice, no,
a pleasure to meet you. Maybe I will see you here some other time?”
    “Maybe. Maybe next time we could go for a
drink.”
    “Maybe.” He turned to go.
    “And you? What’s your name?”
    He hesitated a second and said, “John, you
can call me John.”
    He tried not to let his excitement show as
he slowly made his way home. He would need to prep Lab B. It would need to be
ready for use again soon.
     
    Charlie watched him hobble down the road,
then closed her eyes and leaned on her hands on the wall that jutted from the
edge of the cliff. Her legs were trembling. She could barely restrain herself
from reaching between her legs. Anticipation was the best aphrodisiac.
    She took a deep breath.
    Her mark was on him now. The others would
be jealous, but they would leave him to her.
    “John, my darling we will definitely meet
again,” she whispered under her breath with a half-smile. “I wonder why he lied
about his name,” she thought. A good liar could smell a lie and she was one of
the best.
     

St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
     
    Jonni
Brown woke up as his head bounced off the surface of the desk.
    He coughed self-consciously into his hand
and looked over at Finn to see if he noticed. Finn hadn’t; he was focused on
the experiment that was playing out on the monitors in front of them. Jonni and
Finn were sitting on a couple of plastic chairs in front of a steel desk that
held two black and white monitors. Behind Jonni and Finn was a heavy steel door
that sealed them off from the outside world. When engaged in winkling out the
mysteries of the human mind the outside world represented potential corruption
of experimental results.
    The monitors on the desk showed two other
people, a man and a woman, sitting by themselves in rooms that were very
similar to their own. Instead of the monitors, they each had a set of cards in
front of them. Every thirty seconds the man would select a card and hold it up
to the camera so that Finn and Jonni could see the design on it. Fifteen
seconds later the woman in the other room would select a card from her deck and
hold it up for the camera in her room, allowing Finn and Jonni to see her card
and record the results of the trial.
    Jonni had been looking forward to the
trials today. Subject N, also known as Babs, had performed phenomenally on the
cards the last time she had participated in the trial. She had matched all but
one of the cards selected by the target subject, demonstrating a massive, statistically
significant psi effect. Today was different, or it had been before he drifted
off.
    He looked over at his friend again. Finn’s
shoulders were rigid and he was peering at the screen with the woman. She had
just selected a card and was lifting it towards the camera. Finn was moving his
head to the side, as if that would let him see the card more quickly. She
turned the card to face the