The living room was free of the clutter that wrecked the kitchen and the hallway, and so Anna chose it as the destination of their confrontation. Now, she sat in a chair, sipping grape juice from a wine glass. Across the room from her, slumped in the matching chair, was Jack Parker. He was tied up and, unfortunately, still unconscious.

When four minutes had passed since she hit him with the vase, Anna began to worry that she'd given him irreparable brain damage. She would get to kill him whether he woke up or not, as Death was no longer here to interfere, but she was still holding out hope that they would get a chance to talk.

She froze when he suddenly bolted upright as if he'd been electrocuted. He was squinting at her now, face screwed up in pain, dried blood on the side of his head. She saw the exact moment his vision unblurred, the exact moment he realized he was tied up, and his face twisted even more.

But he didn't say a word. Didn't struggle against the rope. Didn't even look the least bit scared.

"Doesn't it frighten you?" Anna asked. "That I haven't killed you yet?"

Jack was unamused. It irked her, and she tried not to show it as she leaned back in her chair. The true emotion that stood out on his face was not pain or hatred. It was hollowness. It might be because she hit him with a vase, twice, and he wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders. And maybe...he had no clue that she murdered his friend and sent the other running off into the night. Anna hadn't gloated, and he must be assuming that they made it out fine.

The arrogance.

"Why are you stalling?" he asked finally, but even that sounded like it was out of exhaustion rather than fear.

Anna leaned forward. "Because you're Jack Parker!" She gave his name the emphasis worthy of a celebrity. "I can't just kill you, after all the trouble I went through to find you. We should talk first!"

He only blinked.

"I suppose I should introduce myself. I'm—"

"Anna van Danne," he said. "Twenty-nine years old, and the second-youngest direct descendant of the original Enhanced. The youngest is your twin. You spent the last few years in a mansion in Ohio instead of hunting, but it wasn't because you grew a conscience." He smiled; there was blood on his teeth. "It was because you were jealous and bored. And the second you had the chance to do something special, something worthy of your egotistical self, you jumped at the chance."

Anna's hands tightened on the armrests. "I don't appreciate you digging through my head."

"And I don't appreciate being tied to this chair," he snapped. "I guess we're both out of luck."

She tried to look neutral. She wanted him to fight back a little, but not like this. Not at the expense of exposing her feelings. "Where's Death?"

The question took him by surprise. He winced, and Anna snapped to keep him alert.

"Why would she tell the Enhanced about you but warn me not to go after you?" she asked. "Why would she give me your location and then protect you from me? And why did she leave you to die?"

Jack returned to being silent. Anna sighed, growing impatient, but she was hopeful. Even through his hollowness and the concussion-induced confusion, and the way he kept blinking and wincing, she was starting to read the questions on his face. And eventually, he asked again.

"What are you waiting for?" When Anna didn't answer, he kept going. "You got me. You succeeded. So—"

"You're right," Anna confessed, standing up. "I got you." She slowly walked toward him and circled his chair. "Killing you would certainly be a success as well as a great source of pride. And all it would take..."

She put her hands on his shoulders.

"Is a single touch."

Jack tensed under her grip. Anna smiled and squeezed, just a little, but she didn't take his Gift. She was behind him, so she couldn't see the face he made, but she didn't need to. Imagining it was pleasure enough. She made a gracious move of sliding her hands off his shoulders and returned to her chair.

"But Death said something interesting," she continued, sitting down and draping one leg over the other. "She said envy is more powerful than admiration. It makes me wonder if I've gone about this the wrong way. A selfish way. It makes me wonder if I should go back to that old childhood adage—what was it? Sharing is caring?"

It took Jack a minute to understand what she was getting at, and when he did, he looked more disgusted than afraid. It was kind of funny. He wasn't at all what she was expecting, but if she'd wanted him whole, she shouldn't have smashed a vase into his head. Twice. She wished she could talk to the man in the mirror, the one who swung an ax at her neck and told her to get lost. This guy was too tired. Too ready to give in. She may as well have killed him while he was unconscious if he was going to be this indifferent toward his imminent death.

Anna wagged her foot a bit, eyes narrowing slowly in consideration of the aforementioned adage. But ultimately, she shook her head.

"No." Anna stood. "You're mine."

And at the same moment she took her first step forward, the lights flickered. Anna froze, watching as the mirror on the wall swayed a bit on its support hooks.

"What was that?" she asked.

Jack looked sour. "Goddamn survival instinct," he muttered, and he looked up at her. "You talk too much, you know that? You're so fucking arrogant."

Anna blinked. "Well, yeah. But I think it's well-deserved, considering you're about to get murdered."

"I was ready to give in," he ranted. "Sure, you had help, but you got me. I was willing to accept that you would kill me. And I was tired. And delirious. I still am. But you talked too long, gave me too much time to get angry and come to my senses."

Anna raised an eyebrow. What good were his senses when he was tied up and probably concussed beyond sobriety? She only shrugged and stepped forward again, but the distance between them suddenly stretched out. What was once a few yards turned into a few dozen of them, and Anna almost fell backward from the momentum of the impossible movement.

"Play all the mind games you want," she said, steadying herself. "You're only delaying the inevitable."

"What," he said quietly, "makes you think this is only in your head?"

Suddenly Anna regretted not hitting him with the vase a third time.

The room was shrunk back to its original size, and Anna fell onto her knees from the lurch forward. Though Jack winced from the exertion, the distance stretched out again when Anna lunged for him.

"Is that all you can do?" she derided, running at him. "Push me away?"

He smiled. "No."

As soon as her fingers closed around his throat, but right before she could begin taking his Gift, something grabbed Anna's ankles. Her nails tore down Jack's neck as she fell. Her body was dragged backwards, but when she whipped her head around, she saw nothing. Invisible talons were gripping her legs, and she pulled out her gun and shot at nothing. The bullets buried into the walls, and when her legs were free, she turned around and aimed right at Jack's face.

"Stop it," she snarled. "Now."

"You're out of bullets," he said calmly. Blood was trickling out of the scratches she left on him.

All it takes is a touch, she recalled bitterly. A millisecond more, and her touch would've paralyzed him, but in the impossibly short time between contact and devouring, he'd set an invisible monster after her. Fine. He wouldn't be able to pull that off again.

But...her gun did feel suspiciously light, even though she should have exactly six bullets left. She had ten bullets in her clip when she set out, and she fired it four times...wait, why were there seven holes in the walls then?

"You're playing tricks on me," she said bluntly.

He shrugged. "Maybe. But don't you think I'd rather get shot than be devoured by a parasite like you? Shouldn't I be egging you on instead of trying to convince you it's empty?"

Shooting him in the face would kill him and render her entire hunt pointless. Anna's eye twitched, but she lowered her gun's aim to his knee. Pain and wounds lessened the intensity of a soon-to-be-devoured Gift, but Jack was so powerful, the difference in quality would be negligible.

She pulled the trigger.

The bullet tore through his knee, spraying blood all over the floor, and Jack screamed, bent forward as far as he could go with the ropes holding him back. Anna smiled and took her sweet time approaching, but then the agonized screaming turned into laughter, and she froze.

Jack looked up at her with a teary-eyed smile. "I don't know why you people call yourself the Enhanced," he said. "Your senses are shit."

He, along with the chair, disappeared, and the part of the room she was looking at started warping and became the other side of the room. Anna turned in a half circle and saw Jack, sitting there in his chair, with scratches on his neck but a healthy knee.

The one she shot was an illusion.

And unlike the illusion, the real Jack wasn't smiling.

She noticed that the wallpaper was peeling. The mirror was cracked. Her resolve started to melt, and in its place was an emotion she hadn't ever felt toward someone who was supposed to be her prey.

Fear.

"Get out," Jack said.

There was a missile-like whistling in her ears. Smoke curled out of the unlit fireplace. Shadows of invisible apparitions slid along the peeling wallpaper, and Anna's heart began to pound. For the first time today, she took a step back.

"Get out!" Jack repeated.

A sourceless wind blew her hair back and forced her eyes closed. When she opened them, the shadows were spinning around the room, and furniture inched this way and that, nudged around by things she couldn't see.

"GET OUT!"

Anna ran into the hallway. She tripped over the dead woman's body on her way out the door and fell down the porch steps, getting dirt on her hands and knees. The house was flooding with light behind her, but she didn't look back.

She kept running until her legs gave out, and by that time, she was deep into the Louisiana back roads, the echoes of his screams finally dissipating in her head.

Anna collapsed, gasping for breath. She'd gone numb with terror and embarrassment and a complete lack of ideas on what to do next. Crickets chirped from the shallow wetlands she'd almost ran right into, and every gleeful harmony of the bugs sent her jumping out of her skin.

She messed up. Badly.

Her phone had fallen out of her pocket and was lying face-up on the ground. Before thinking it through, she grabbed it and dialed a number she hadn't touched in years. It went straight to voicemail.

When the message tone beeped, she sucked it up, took a deep breath, and quietly began, "Hello, Frank..."

__________________________

Jack wanted to throw up. He wanted to simply cease to exist. When Anna was gone, he stopped the freakshow and pushed all of his Gift aside, and he squeezed his eyes shut from the nausea and hyperventilation and fear that consumed him afterward.

This was why his power was a double-edged sword. If he stopped suppressing it and actually used it, he would be able to hone his skills to the point where he could function despite the unwanted bombardment. But to get to that point of expertise, he would have to suffer through situations like this: he used his powers liberally to get rid of Anna, and now he was suffering and panicking and struggling to close his mind off. What would be the point of being good at using his Gift if he had to drive himself crazy to get there?

Anna got a red balloon for her thirteenth birthday.

It was the only thing, the only thing, going through his head right now. The scratches on his neck burned as if her nails had been polished with poison. An apparition was knocking on the mirror from the other side, and Jack looked away. The knocking grew louder and louder, and the ropes seemed to tighten around him, and he only squeezed his eyes further shut, praying that everything would stop.

It took a few minutes.

Jack opened his eyes and finally relaxed. He was exhausted. He shapeshifted into someone smaller to slip out of the ropes, and then he changed back, rubbing his sore skin. His legs felt like jelly.

"Jemma?" he called out, surprised by how hoarse his voice sounded. "Maya?"

There was no response. He tried to sense their presence but was met with a head-splitting pain, so he stopped. They must've heard his warning and escaped before Anna got to him. Good.

Jack slowly walked into the hallway, dragging his feet as he did so. He was ready to collapse and sleep or even die, but then he noticed the corpse by the door.

It was Jemma.

He blinked, rubbed his eyes, blinked again. It was undoubtedly Jemma. There was blood and skin under her fingernails, and a faraway look to her eyes.

Anna had killed her.

Jack made an involuntary noise and started running around the house, screaming. "Maya? Maya! Are you there?"

Please don't be dead, he begged. Please please please don't be dead.

He didn't find another corpse, so he ran out of the house, took a deep breath, and tried to sense her again.

Maya Park was going home.

Jack doubled over onto the grass, dry heaving. Nothing came out, but it felt like bugs were crawling up his throat, trying to break free. In spite of it, he dug through her head a little more.

Maya was on her way home. Their connection was dead, and she thought he was also dead.

Jack let her go and touched his forehead to the ground, the dew cooling his skin. He walked back into the house and knelt so he could look right into Jemma's lifeless eyes as his own filled with tears. It was his fault. All of it. Jemma used her dying breath to do what he asked of her. Anna was his problem, and if he'd just left Maya at the diner, if he'd just realized the vase omen sooner, if...

If he had just done anything differently...

"I'm sorry," he choked out, gently lowering her eyelids. "I'm so sorry."

____________________

Nick threw the files into his suitcase, locked the case, realized he forgot something, and unlocked it. He did this a few more times before deciding he'd packed enough of the investigation research to seem prepared, but not too much so that anyone would comment on the waste of paper.

His desk phone rang, and the receptionist said, "I have a caller for you."

"I'm about to leave, my flight's in two hours," Nick replied, locking his drawers. "Tell him to call someone else if it's important, or wait until I'm back. Should be a week or so."

"He says he's your brother."

Nick froze. The world seemed to stop spinning, and he stared at the phone. It's a prank call, he told himself. But it would be a very specific, very personal prank call, and who in their right mind would prank call the FBI?

Nick swallowed. "Patch him through."

"Will do."

There was a beep, and the receptionist's line gave way to the caller. Only silence came through the speaker, and Nick held his breath, waiting.

Finally, after a painstaking lifetime, a familiar voice that he hadn't heard in years softly said, "I know you're listening."

Nick's hands clenched, and he glared at the phone with a frustrating mix of anger and desperation. He should hang up. That would be best.

Instead, he stiffly asked, "What do you want, Jack?"

"To talk."

Nick clenched his hands even tighter. The drawer key was still in his grip, and its grooves bit into his palm. "I'm on a case," he said quietly. "For the next week or so, in Oklahoma."

He didn't offer to talk after the case, but he wasn't saying no, either. There was another minute of silence.

"Okay," Jack said. "I'll...see you after?"

Nick took a deep breath, wanting to scream. Instead he just let out a barely audible, mm hmm, and Jack responded with an equally inaudible confirmation, and then he hung up.

Nick dropped the key and smoothed out the indents on his palm. Realizing he was edging on being late to the airport, he packed up his things, turned off the light, and locked his office door behind him. All the while, he was scowling at nothing, mad at himself for not hanging up right away. There was no way Jack meant it.

Forget it, he thought.

He had work to do.

End of Part I