“What’s your name?” I tried again, in the kindest, calmest voice I could muster.
Nothing.
I took a centring breath this time, and refused to let my annoyance rise. “Do you know what day it is?”
He didn’t smile. He didn’t frown. He didn’t move at all, except for slow, even breathing. I kept trying not to appraise him like a piece of art, but I did it anyway. I couldn’t stop myself. He was absolutely riveting.
“Do you know where you are?” I asked, my voice cracking as I stumbled through the last of my standard orientation questions. When John Doe didn’t respond to that either, I shifted gears. “Why did you cut yourself?”
At this, John Doe glanced at his chest, then at me, snagging me once again with the power of his stare, of his presence. I left off the bigger questions about his wounds. Why did you cut yourself like that? Why did you choose exactly that design? But the brightness in his green eyes made me wonder if he didn’t hear my unspoken words.
Long, heated seconds later, John Doe glanced at my office window and cocked his head, like he was listening to something other than me. His expression darkened, and his muscles bunched as he clenched his fists.
My chest tightened even as my heart sank, and my hand crept towards the phone on my desk.
Damn it, but this guy was probably hallucinating.
What was I thinking, bringing him back here alone?
Then, as I watched, John Doe’s jeans just . . . changed.
I froze. Outwardly. Inwardly, I was falling back down that rabbit hole. My lips moved, but I didn’t say anything. My pulse pounded so hard I could hear it in both ears.
Not my imagination. No.
One second those jeans were filthy and tattered.
The next, they were normal, clean and whole jeans.
John Doe was still barefoot and half-naked, but his chest — the phoenix wound — was healing before my eyes.
“What the—?”
It was all I had time to say before he vanished. More like moved so fast I couldn’t really perceive it. I caught the flash of something silver, an image like a bird with bright wings outstretched. Then he was standing on my other side, by the door. The scent of cinnamon and cloves washed through my senses.
John Doe opened his perfect mouth and growled as he took hold of my arm, a grip as firm as a vice. He pulled me away from the window, almost against his hard, tanned chest.
I didn’t fight.
Couldn’t.
Thoughts barely formed in what was left of my mind, but I realized he was pushing me away from him now, away from the window and towards the office door.
At that moment, John Doe finally spoke, and his voice rumbled deep and low. Mountains might have mustered that resonance, if stone could find its own voice.
What he said was: “Run.”
Three
Every nerve in my body fired, propelling me out of my office door into the admissions hallway.
For a split second my mind jerked back in time, to Armenia, to that awful sunlit day when I found my mother’s body. I had run like this, crazy and unbalanced, into the streets, down the road until I made it to my father’s base.
The memory made me stumble.
Fall to one knee.
A bolt of pain fractured the past and brought me back to the present.