Thirteen: Ransom Tanager
1250 Words
Thirteen:
Ransom Tanager
I took her home.
I had to knock her out to do it. I hoped that she would. I knocked out the girl with the wings too. That had been difficult. She’d kicked and scratched, rightfully so, and I had a deep cut right across my cheek from the talons she was able to pull out. The poor girl had been created into something that she was never supposed to be. Against her will. By my father’s own company.
I had to make things right with her. Piper supposedly had the power to take other powers away. But I didn’t think that the wings were a power, in the traditional sense of the word. Also, I didn’t want to tell Piper about the EVOS. Not until I absolutely had to. Fortunately, the serum I’d created to knock them out was strong enough that if I was lucky Piper wouldn’t remember anything that happened.
I could lie to her.
The winged girl, however, was going to be harder to deal with. I’d put her in The West Wing and left her with Kathleen Kore watching her. That half of the house was locked. Only Mr. Leech and I had the keys. The windows were all sealed shut, and the doors had been all blocked with brick. There was no way in, no way out except for the way from which I came and went. It was probably wrong, leaving her with a woman like Doctor Kore.
I’d put Piper in my room. I could have put her in hers, but the bed she had was the same one from when she was a teenager. It was too small. I wanted her to have room so that she could rest and heal properly. She’d been knocked out twice. I’d checked her body over to see if she had wounds and changed her into her pajamas.
I waited for her to wake up, sitting in a chair that I’d pulled into the room. “Please wake up,” I whispered, “please, wake up.” I had just gotten her back in my life. I couldn’t lose her like this. Not before I had a chance to make things right with her.
I had an ice pack on the cut that the girl with the wings had scratched across my face. I’d have to come up with some kind of lie so that Piper wouldn’t know that I was Bombtastic. So far, I’d been able to do my business without creating waves.
Piper’s breathing was even, but her color hadn’t returned. She was deathly pale. I reached out and stroked her cheek. We’d always had a hate filled relationship. I’d done everything in my power to keep my father from entertaining ideas of her being my future wife. But I wanted her. I’d always wanted her, and I was tired of denying it.
I’d hoped that her working with me would bring us closer together. But the thing was, that I had to help the EVOS. In whatever way I could. If I was doing that though, I would be putting her in danger. I didn’t know if I would be able to be with her at the same time that I was hunting these things down.
Piper stirred in her sleep. She seemed to wake, and she slowly took in her surroundings. A scream escaped her. “Oh my god. Oh my god. What happened? You drugged me. You drugged me, and you---” she stared at me in horror. “Oh god. What happened?”
“You got drunk, and we slept together,” I said, feigning seriousness.
She made a face. “No, we did not. Why do you have a scratch on your face?”
“It’s nothing. I got into a fight at a bar over a girl,” I lied.
Piper stared at me. “I know you know that I was with Oliver. And that we were at my parent’s storage shed. What happened?”
“I didn’t know that,” I lied, “I heard that Oliver was taken to the hospital, and you were brought home to me by the police. There was some kind of thing in the storage shed, I guess. Something that attacked you.”
She looked sick. “Ransom, what were my parents doing for your family’s company?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”
“Because,” she said, “there was….an experiment in there. Something awful. They took a human and put wings on her. A girl. I thought my parents were making things for the military, not…not acting out their Doctor Moreau fantasies.”
“My father had a lot of experiments going on,” I confessed, “I don’t know what all of them were. But my father was a complicated man. Your parents were complicated. But they wanted to take the world to the next level.”
“They were monsters,” she snarled, “they were monsters, and the girl…. the girl with the wings…. she said something that I don’t know what to make of it. Something that’s impossible. It has to be impossible.”
“What’s impossible?” I asked, my heart racing against my chest. “What did she say?”
Piper stared right at me. “She said that my mother was alive. That she was the one that was the one that had kidnapped her and turned her into…. into whatever it was that she was supposed to be. Half human, half bird.”
I shook my head. “Piper, that’s impossible. There was no way that anyone could have survived that explosion.”
“We did,” she reminded me.
“That was…that was different.”
“Thirteen people were saved that night,” she said, “someone else could have survived without us knowing. My mother could have survived. But….”
“Pip, if she survived don’t you think that she would have come back for you?”
“Not if she thought that someone was trying to kill her,” said Piper, “not if she thought that there was someone that wanted her to die because of the things that she was doing. If she’s alive, she’s hurting people, and she needs to be stopped. My mother….”
“She’s not alive,” I said, “Piper, I swear to you, whatever that girl said…. she’s not alive.”
Piper sat up, and she grabbed hold of me, pulling me close. I wrapped her tightly in my arms, and Piper sobbed into my shoulder. All I could do was let her. Everything that happened was insane. There was no way that Lydia Powell had survived that explosion. I was certain of it. If she was…that changed absolutely everything. And it meant that she might have been the one to cause the explosion in the first place.
- Writer
