Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1) (23 page)

The older man started to argue back, saying, “We’re a defense contractor. We can’t turn our servers over to an enemy of the United States. It’s treason for Christ sake!”

“The penalty for treason,” Ivy instructed, “is far more desirable than the penalty you’ll get from us.”

“I see,” the CEO said. “It seems as though you have this all figured out, Miss Cavatica.” He looked around at the various members of his board and told them to leave him alone with Ivy. After they left, he looked her over as though she didn’t inspire any fear in him whatsoever.

“I don’t like the way you’re looking at me,” Ivy told him.

“Harkenrider will never turn those recipes over,” the CEO said. He stood up from behind the conference table. “We’ve suspected for some time that he’s been holding back technology from the corporation but what can we do about it? There is no understanding that man but I’ve known him long enough to know that he isn’t going to turn over his life’s work to us. He hates us with such a passion.”

“You’re all cowards,” said Ivy.

“We have to be careful with him. Harkenrider has been connected to the disappearances of several members of the board and at least two military officials.”

Ivy slowly circled the CEO. Her scowl was drenched in purpose and her eyes locked on the CEO like a missile. Without pausing her stroll around the perimeter of the room, she said, “Harkenrider is just a little boy. You should stop being so afraid of him.”

“I think some fear of that man is appropriate. After all, it did take half a platoon of soldiers to remove his hands from your beloved Bernard’s throat.” He added, “Next time I’m not going to order it stopped.”

“You should be careful how you speak about my master.”

“I’m getting a little sick of the threats,” he said, looking her squarely in the face. He reached under the desk and tapped some kind of switch. Two hidden doors opened up in the conference room walls and armed soldiers started to file in. “Harkenrider and the old man may be able to do whatever suits their whim, but I’m not sure I’m going to listen to your crap too.”

Ivy was surprised at the businessman’s lack of fear and took a step back from the table. More than fifteen soldiers filled the conference room around them. “What is this?” She asked him.

“Oh, this. I would call it leadership training. You’re going to learn who the leader of this damned corporation is.”

Ivy backed up some more. “I don’t know what you’re doing,” she said, “but Bernard’s not going to like it. He’s going to rip you to pieces.”

“Who do you think told me to do this?”

The soldiers circled in closer on Ivy. Her heart leapt into a frenzy and she tried to teleport. Instead of sending herself across the room to the door, the panic sent her body only a few inches away. She was disoriented and still flashing like a strobe light. She tried again but the panic and disorientation kept her stranded in her spot.

The soldiers moved in and began to shock her with their cattle prods. She cried out in pain and squirmed on the floor. “Please stop!” she shouted. “Please stop! Please make ALL this stop!” With the soldiers still prodding her, she began to cry.

“Give her more!” ordered the CEO.

Her old scars started to reappear on her cheeks. Then they started to bleed as though Bernard had just made the wound. She cried harder. “Please stop!”

“Bernard Mengel and his creations,” the CEO grumbled. While she cried on the floor, he added, “It’s just a matter of time before we figure you freaks out.”

Ivy was crying so hard and her face was so contorted in pain that the soldiers started to back away from her. She looked up at the CEO with the slashes on her face bleeding like they were fresh.

He tapped a button on his desk and asked for more soldiers through the intercom. These men came in with tranquilizer darts and more electric cattle prods. They all hit her as hard as they could, making her bawl with such intensity that her face hurt.

Even the CEO himself donned a cattle prod and sunk the sparkling rod in between her tiny shoulder blades. He laughed and twirled the thing over his head like he was doing a rain dance.

Ivy was and bloody and nearly unconscious but nothing was broken. The kevlar-cladded men hoisted her limp body over their heads and dragged her out of the conference room. They brought her right past her old cubicle where one of her old coworkers saw what was happening. When they dumped her on the concrete outside, he went to her.

“What happened, Ivy?” Her old friend, Freddy, asked her. “Let me help you.” He reached for her hand and she ripped it away.

“Leave me alone!” she shouted through her tears. “No one is going to help me. That’s the point! Don’t you see!” She hissed at him with the volume turned up to jet engine level.

He leapt back and ran away.

...

After limping back to her car and driving home, Ivy found Bernard Mengel waiting for her in her condo. He was sitting on the couch, paging through one of her investment magazines. When he saw her bloodied face and hobbled condition, he looked at her like she had just appeared in a prom dress. His DeathStalker was looking at him from the next couch cushion.

“Oh my goodness, look at you,” he said, standing up, with his arms forward for a hug. “I have a feeling I know what happened.” He warmly embraced her nearly lifeless torso and held on for what seemed like more than a moment too long. “My dear, Ivy. Learning is such a treacherous path. I must say I don’t know how to feel right now.”

“How could you do that to me?” She whispered into his ear. Her body was wavering and it seemed as though she might fall down. “You sent me in there and you knew that would happen.”

“What can I say?” Bernard said as he stood back and started laughing. His chortling was so intense that it got the DeathStalker to raise up and start scanning him with its red laser. “Look at this thing,” he said as he started a sort of two step dance with the thing. Its motors hummed and its capacitors made a siren sound as the drone prepared to strike. “I should be careful,” he said, “Dade’s little toy can pack quite a wallop.”

“Why did you do this to me?” She asked him.

He took her by the shoulders and gently set her down on the couch. He unbuttoned the top three buttons on her blouse. “There, there,” he said before he stuck his middle and index fingers deep into his mouth. He used them to rub the blood off of her right cheek. “The scars have started to heal. They’ll go away in a few hours. “You’ll find,” he went on, “that if you control your emotions, you can keep those pesky little scars from popping up.”

“Why did you do this to me?”

Bernard’s eyes became cross and he looked at her like he might bash her head in. “You’re asking me why I did this to you?” He threw his hands up in the air in obvious frustration. He started to yell. “You should be asking how you could have done this to me!”

“I don’t,” she was about to say, understand.

“How dare you? You’re my apprentice and you let some puny little nothing, a common garden variety little psychopath embarrass us!”

“I got scared and I forgot how to teleport. I got overwhelmed.”

“You’re a disgrace. You got scared because you are weak. That psychopath dressed up as a common businessman showed you who was boss. This is unacceptable.” He immediately changed his demeanor and his face took on warm quality. His palm rested softly on her cheek. “If you can’t handle the likes of a little psychopath, you will never be ready for someone like Dade Harkenrider.”

“Make me stronger.”

“The first thing you have to understand,” Bernard told her, “is that a psychopath is the most common of...” He began to search his mind for the right term. “The endowed so to speak,” he said. “However, I think describing them that way is being overly kind. They’re a half-breed. Half human. Half something useful or awful, depending on your perspective. I find them about as charming as pubic lice. The situation is very interesting though. Humans are destroyed by them regularly yet still seem oddly enamored with them. It’s quite odd if you ask me.”

“What can I do?”

“You kill them of course,” he said. “Humans haven’t learned to accept that and they continue to let their entire world burn rather than admit there are real monsters. The trouble is,” he went on, “that some of them like that pesky CEO, Philip Handley, tend to intertwine themselves so that they aren’t easily gotten to.” Bernard pinched open another one of the buttons on her shirt.

Then he started to unbutton his own.

The old man began to strip off his clothes, revealing his distorted and alien body. Bernard’s shoulders were rail thin and his shirts seemed to be designed to buff him up. He had not one strand of hair below his neck. His skin looked like it had been ripped from an infant. His arms and legs were thin and insect-like. They seemed disproportionally long for his body like he was some kind of mantis.

“Psychopaths have had many names over the years,” he instructed. “They’ve been around a long time but they haven’t always been the problem they are today.” He lightly wrapped his hands around her neck in a loose stranglehold. He sat his naked body next to her. “We’re the predators, Ivy. Us. You’re my apprentice. These silly little animals need to be put in their place. The very worst mistake you can make is let his attack go unanswered.”

“I’m not ready,” she said looking vaguely frightened at Bernard’s grip around her neck.

“Of course you’re not ready,” he said as his face melted to a scowl. “Not yet anyway. I’m convinced you need further training.”

“I want to be powerful. I want to fight.”

“Oh, you’ll be powerful, my dearest Ivy. You can’t even know how powerful you’re going to be. If you could even conceive of it now, it would terrify you. I’ve had one apprentice fail me but I know you won’t. I have faith.”

“Thank you, Bernard.”

He let go his grip from around her neck. Then he laid both his hands on her chest right over her heart. The old man pressed down and forced out some of the air in Ivy’s lungs. He slid himself over her.

“Psychopaths have an emptiness in them,” he told her. “A vacuum. It’s much worse with them than it is with the saddest, most desperate human. It’s really pathetic. This vacuum they have is their great vulnerability. If one is properly guided, one can fill it with whatever he or she likes. You can get inside them.”

“How?”

Bernard pulled his hands back from her chest until they were hovering a few inches above. Gradually, a warm red glow appeared underneath her skin. The light flickered with her heart beat and danced around inside her chest.

“Inside you,” he told her, “is a fire.”

At that moment, a torrent of black smoke started to come out of the old man’s hands. It flew out of his palms with the force of a hurricane toward the light in Ivy’s chest. When it penetrated, the smoke looked like storm clouds in front of the glowing sun of her heart.

“I’m going to help your fire along,” he said. “I’m going to give it new life. The next time you see our friend, Philip the CEO, you’re going to feel something other than fear. Next time you see that little imp, you’re going to take what’s yours. You’re going to take your rightful place in my corporation, my Asylum. It’s It’s going to be wonderful.”

...

After most of the corporation had left for the day, Ivy pushed her way through the frosted glass doors to the CEO’s office. She had the cold look of an assassin. Philip Handley was all alone at his desk when he looked up to see two invading dark eyes.

“Results?” She asked as she pressed her palms against the edge of his big granite desk. Ivy looked as though she was about to propel herself through the air at him. Her chest rose and fell like a lion after a chase. She seemed to be holding herself back from an attack.

The CEO sat transfixed, captured by the intensity and cold, sinister beauty. While Ivy eyed him like something she wanted to rip to pieces, the man couldn’t hold back a peculiar instinct to want just that. His frozen expression started to soften like a bit of wax in her fingers.

He started to let himself gaze at her. “I’m happy you brought that up,” he said as he started to sound almost cocky. “I have really been looking forward to our next meeting.” He added, “I see you didn’t bring your emissary.” He continued to stare at her until it seemed like ogling, the way he might act when he chats up a cocktail waitress.

“Don’t you dare look at me like that,” said Ivy with her voice low and nearly snarling. She slowly raised her right hand from the desk and drew in her fingers one at a time, until they formed a tight, pale fist. Then she clenched them so tightly that she winced and her lip started to curl.

Suddenly the CEO was in paralyzing agony. He bellowed out a scream that sounded like it could have split his vocal cords. He raised up from his chair, reaching for his abdomen like he expected to find an impaled chainsaw.

“I’m inside you,” Ivy told him as her fist trembled in the air. “I’m touching your guts. Isn’t it wonderful?” she asked him scowling. “Do you feel close to me now?”

The CEO fell out of his chair and started to squirm on the floor. His voice was beginning to sound hoarse from screaming.

Ivy let go of whatever spell she seemed to cast. The CEO started to pant to catch his breath from all the screaming. Then he pulled himself back up in his leather chair. He didn’t look at her, instead keeping his eyes on his granite desk.

“I believe your vice president,” she said very businesslike, “has inquired about the results of a certain computer investigation.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said, still trying to catch his breath. “We tried everything. The Chinese got in but they didn’t find anything. Harkenrider is hiding the valuable stuff some other way.”

“What other way?” Ivy asked. She sat down in one of the chairs in front of his desk. “These chemicals are complicated. He has to have notes of some kind. There have to be records of his laboratory orders. There has to be something,” she told him like it was a command.

“Listen,” he said. “Dade Harkenrider has made what you’re suggesting impossible. Since Bernard ripped him off years ago, he’s gotten smart and he’s not going to let anything out of that lab that he doesn’t want out of that lab. All the encryption he put in the system was just a smokescreen. There was nothing there. He was just fucking with us.”