Most of you are probably gonna hate me after this chapter. Please note that I am a fervent lover of CLAMP. If you don't know what that means, you've already been warned!!!
Last time, in Chapter Two, we met Ian McNee, a dangerous young sorcerer with ties to Emil, that put Wong and the Doctor further into suspicion about Strange's new apprentice. So let's see what happens now!
I pushed the short curls out of my face, running my fingers through the short upper layers of my hair. “I didn't mean to run into him,” I defended weakly.
“Didn't mean to?” demanded Strange. “You don't 'accidentally' run into Ian McNee!”
Wong carried hot towels into the room, handing one to Strange and glaring at me. “I say we throw her out.”
“It's not my fault!” I shouted, standing up. Strange looked me right in the eyes, staring down the power I was dangerously close to losing control of. His icy eyes made me shrink right back down to my seat, and I closed my eyes and sighed.
“When I was 12. . . he found me. Met me totally by accident, walking down the street scouting locations for a new shop in Portland. He. . . he did something to me. Touched my hand and muttered something, and then all of a sudden, the windows in the store I had stopped at blasted away. The glass cut three people, and nearly blinded me,” I said, lifting away the hair just behind my ear to show a scar about two inches long. Strange stepped forward to look, tracing the scar with shaking gloved fingertips.
“Then what happened?” he asked.
I looked Strange in the eyes and continued. “He said he could fix me. He said he could make me strong, make me powerful. He showed me tapes of you on the news. He said I could be like you.”
“I earned my power.”
“I was born with mine. I may hate it, but I know that it's better to have my power than let it get into the wrong hands. And I knew McNee's were the wrong ones. He makes me sick. He scares me. he. . . he knows how to get into my head.”
Strange nodded. “McNee is. . . gifted. He's greedy for power, yes, but not inherently --”
“Sir, if I know two things, it's the French language, and that Ian McNee is the most evil man I've ever met. And if you have any idea what he's like, you'll never let me hear you saying that he's not the most vile sonofa b*tch you've ever heard of.”
Wong and the Doctor shared a look, then the Doctor bent down and looked me in the eyes. “What did he do to you?”
“He broke whatever was holding all this in. when I was a little girl, my grandmother, she called me her petite ange, her little angel. I was calm, quiet. Seven years ago, that all changed.”
“Could you feel it, when the barrier broke?”
“Feel it? It literally felt like he'd ripped my heart out of my chest. All he did was say one thing! And then boom! I couldn't even breathe.”
I started to panic just thinking about it, and as I lifted my hand to press it to my chest, it brushed the Doctor's wrist, in the little place between his sleeve and his glove. He gasped, and fell to his back, Wong at his side in an instant. “Doctor!” I cried, but when I bent down to reach for him, Wong pushed me back. “Stephen, are you alright?” he asked.
Strange took a few deep breaths, and nodded. “I'm fine. But. . . well. . . damn,” he gasped. “I've never felt anything like that.”
I stepped back. It was happening again. “Now you see. . . why I need your help.”
The Doctor sat up and raked back the hair around his face so that it went back to it's normal level of messiness. He looked at me with eyes that almost seemed to glow, meant to calm and bewitch. “Relax,” he said, in a soft voice.
“Don't tell me to relax and don't look at me like that,” I snarled. “You can't use your little magic tricks on me.”
Strange stood up and Wong looked ready to hit me if he needed to. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, but like usual, it was going to take me a while to calm down. Strange took a few steps closer, and I looked up at him. “Are you alright, sir?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said gruffly as he pulled off his glove. He grabbed my hand and then jumped a little, but didn't let go. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and he gritted his teeth, then let out a breath, a bead of sweat rolling down the side of his face. Suddenly, a rush of wind caught me and the Doctor in a whirlwind, and there was a glow from irridescent flowers and petals that appeared then disappeared and darted in and out of the whirlwind.
When the wind died down, Strange looked at me, and it was quiet for a minute as his hair settled back down, and he looked at me.
“Alright. . . Alright, your power won't shock me anymore,” he said. “Now,” he said, letting go and turning around.
“Now what?” I asked.
“McNee is after this power, so we must hide it at least. You refuse to have anything to do with magical items, but I believe that draining some of that energy will help you be less. . . noticeable.”
“Well how do we drain it?”
“You have to channel it,” he said, flexing his hand. Looking at me again, he asked, “do you trust me enough to channel your power into me?”
“What do you mean, just hand it over?”
“I can disperse it better than you can. I have to teach you to dissipate the extra energy without releasing it. Until then, we have to find some way to deal with it.”
I looked at him suspiciously. He had no idea what I'd had before, so he couldn't have been planning it. Then again, he was a crafty sort of man, aristocratic looks or not.
“I know you have little reason to trust me, but you've got to trust someone.”
I sighed and nodded. “Let. . . let me think it over.”
“Think it over quickly. It's the best option I can think of at the moment that won't involve magic.”
I looked up at the ugly cream and crimson drapes suspended over the bed from the ceiling. Should I trust him with that? Trusting him to teach me in itself was tricky, since he could easily teach me something to put him at the advantage in terms of where my power was going.
I felt it tingling in my fingertips, and sighed. I was starving, since I had to eat a lot all the time, nearly constantly in fact, and hadn't exactly solved the mystery of how much I should have been eating. 2000 calories may have been the norm, but was I exactly normal?
Problem was, Wong hated me, I didn't want to face Strange, and I didn't feel welcome enough to go into the fridge, or even the kitchen without an invite.
I sat up as there was a light rap on the door, and when the door opened up, Wong stood in the doorway. “The Doctor believes that you might be hungry. He said to come down to the kitchen.”
“Okay,” I said cheerfully. I followed Wong, my neat little heels making muted thumps on the rugs that lined the wood floors. I realized I shouldn't have been so happy and should be trying to be more reserved.
“So, um. . . I'm sorry I never got milk,” I said stupidly. I knew it was just busy work, but I felt like I should have said something.
“It is fine. The more important thing is that you were not hurt. I didn't give you any money anyway.”
“Wait, what?!” I cried. “You. . . were you . . . are you . . . glad I'm alright?”
“Of course,” snapped Wong.
“Did Strange put you up to saying that?”
“No. believe it or not, miss Lockhart, I am concerned for you. But not for the reasons that you think. And while, yes, I have yet to trust you, you have yet to trust Doctor Strange.”
Wong cooked up a sort of stewy meat dish that he poured over rice and handed to me at the breakfast bar. The kitchen was pristine and looked like an ad in a home décor magazine. The tile was perfectly black and white, and shined like a polished mirror. The appliances gleamed silver. It almost didn't look real.
Then again, should I have expected it to?
Sitting next to me, Wong said, “you know how to get to Stephen's office?”
I looked at him and just stared. “He will not take advantage of you, or your power, miss Lockhart. Whether you believe me or not about him, I have served Stephen for many years. He is my best friend, and I believe I have the honor of being his. You must trust that, while he is flawed in his own ways, he is a good man.”
I finished up the meal, which had a good, simple clean taste, then washed my dishes and left them clean on the counter since I didn't want to put them away in the wrong place or open the wrong cabinet.
Making my way down the brightly lit halls and up the stairs to the third floor, I followed my gut to a door that was slightly cracked open. I knocked lightly, but then the door whooshed open. “Good, Wong, I was just – what are you doing in here?”
Strange had his gloves off, and was standing in the middle of a soaked floor. The whole room smelled like black tea, which what must have spilled. I ran into the open bathroom door next to the room and grabbed a few towels, then bent down and started picking up pieces of shattered teacups.
Strange didn't say anything, but when he bent down to soak spilled tea, his hands were shaking hard.
“Sir, your hands,” I said. He must have thought I was referring to his scars, because he narrowed his eyes at me.
“What about them?” he snarled quietly. I looked him in the eyes and rested my knees on the wet floor. “They're shaking, genius,” I said, and I took the towel and held one of his hands in mine. Again, not cold, not even the fingertips.
The longer I held his hand, the less it shook, until his fingers were perfectly still. I could feel the pulse in his palm, but could he really feel my touch? “Sir, what happened to you?” I asked. “Who cut you up like this?”
“They . . . were trying to fix the nerve damage to my hands. Doctors, specialists.”
“Where'd you get the damage?”
“A car accident.”
He seemed a bit reluctant to talk about it, so I didn't ask any more questions. I just smiled and took his other hand, pressed them together in between mine, and said, “I trust you, sir. I think. So. . . so don't mess it up.”
Strange nodded and smiled a kind little half grin. “I won't.”
What's going on here!? Has Emil finally found her place in the Sanctum? Will Wong stop glaring at her? And what about McNee!?
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