Power (11 page)

With it in his hand, I was at a distinct disadvantage until I could get my pistol aimed at him. In these close quarters, and with the speed he was displaying, I was not certain I’d even be able to do that.

I need some help here!
I shouted in my own mind.

Enjoy the bitter taste of your own blood
, Eve spat helpfully at me.

Aleksandr!
I called in my own mind as I blocked a knife strike, slapping my assailant’s hand down. He altered its momentum by bringing it around in a circular motion that caused him to graze my belly. I felt my shirt rip and a thin slice of pain run across my stomach.
I need fire!

Can’t
, he said.
You won’t be able to control it without practice, and in your present frame of mind you’re more likely to blow up everything in a three-block radius
—

“Not helpful,” I muttered as I slapped away my foe’s gun again and he slapped away mine—with the knife. I felt the point run over my wrist and gritted my teeth rather than allow the scream of outrage and agony escape my lips. I breathed, hard, my fury lost in the searing feeling running down my arm.

I can help
, Bjorn said, and I felt him step to the front of the line. I could see him clearly in my mind’s eye, and something came with him, some power that he held which would allow me to—

Oh, God—

It felt like a river of anger ran through my brain, carried on the flapping of crow’s wings. I could see the darkness it brought, the pain, the rage, and it all carried forward and out of my skull like it was blasting forth from my eyeballs. I knew it was all a construct of my mind, something that was happening in the inches between my ears, but that made it feel no less real.

It was the Odin-type’s War Mind.

I’d been hit with it before, once when I was fighting Bjorn and another time when I’d angered an old woman in a trailer house in northern Minnesota. It was a feeling of leathery wings slipping through your brain, foreign thoughts invading the space of your own—and it was damned distracting.

My opponent flinched under my psychic assault, his arms going slack for just a moment as he mentally batted away the bothersome murder of crows I’d sent swarming at him. He gasped audibly, as though he’d just pulled his head out of the water after a long submergence, his eyes unfocused, staring ten thousand yards past me at enemies I couldn’t see.

Neat.

I kicked him in the chest while he was powerless to block me and he slammed into the metal interior side of the van and bounced off into a waiting right cross from yours truly. It caught him in the—again, defenseless—jaw and I heard a crack. He sagged from the power of my blow even as his body pinwheeled from the force of it. I caught his tactical vest with my left hand and spun him once before throwing him out the open van door.

He didn’t gather his wits in time to even shield his head before slamming into the SUV right alongside, and I heard and felt him go under the back wheel of the van I was in as well as the SUV.
Th—thump!

Victory is mine, asshole.

Reed jerked the SUV to the right, and I could see his head peeking up just enough to see the road in front of him now.

That was going to be fatal to him if the enemy fire continued for much longer.

I took two steps to the back of the van and jumped out the rear doors. Gravity left me once more and I flew like a dart, veering hard to the right, into the side panel of the last van with metahuman force. It rocked to the left as if the driver had jerked the wheel in that direction, even though I knew he had done no such thing. It was all me, baby.

I smiled at the thought of how I was dominating them. This was power. The power to—

The pain hit me in the skull like someone had cracked open my gourd and dropped a nuclear weapon inside before sealing it back up. There was a hiccup in my flight and I felt myself drop a full foot. I caught myself just before smacking into the pavement full force, gasping as if someone had just held me underwater for a minute.

I panicked, grabbing hold of the van’s side door in a frantic gesture. There was an odd quiet in my head, an empty space where the souls that had been aiding me had been only a moment earlier. I could barely feel Gavrikov, like a voice shouting in the distance.

I felt the power of flight start to drain from me, and realized I’d felt this particular sensation before, only days ago, when a telepath named Claire had paralyzed my body.

Now she was cutting me off from my power.

I hung on to the door of the van, my fingers tight around the steel handle, my feet hitting the side of the vehicle and trying, desperately, to find a foothold.

There wasn’t one.

My Sig Sauer fell uselessly from my grasp and I went for the door handle with my right hand as well, trying to cling to it even as the noise of the road and the wind rushing around me nearly deafened me.

I glanced up and saw a face in the rearview mirror of the van. A hearty smile that I’d seen before.

Claire.

She was here.

I saw a glimmer in her eyes, and the smile widened, got crueler. She was trying to kill me.

I barely tightened my hold in time for the next psychic attack. It loosened my grip and my body swayed into the side of the van, hitting the white metal and rattling my teeth. After a moment the pain waned, and I looked up to see her again, the grin all that was visible in the mirror.

Yep. Definitely trying to kill me.

The smell of the tires burning rubber and the thousand tiny pains running across my body came to the fore of my mind as I felt the next attack coming. My fingertips felt attached to the handle only lightly, and as the spear of her attack hit my mind full force, I felt the grip loosen, the last digits falling free of the steel as I dropped toward the freeway–

Without my powers to save me from the painful death that waited below.

Chapter 17

Rome, Roman Empire

280
A.D.

Marius ate with wild abandon, fine foods of a sort he could never have previously imagined arrayed in front of him in amounts that would have seemed absurd to the villagers he’d grown up around. There was cheese and honey and meat—meat!—aplenty, and cooked in succulent ways with spices and flavors the likes of which he’d never even imagined. The smells filled his nose and the heat of them, fresh from the spits and fires and ovens, warmed his hands as he pushed morsel after morsel into his mouth.

“You are hungry, then?” Janus asked, but in a way that left no doubt, even to Marius, that he was not asking. “Have you eaten since you left home?”

“Scarcely,” Marius said, pushing more food into his mouth. The flavors were sumptuous, were incredible, were beyond anything he’d ever even considered before. They tasted like a skin of good goat’s milk on a hot day after tending the animals, sating him in a way that he couldn’t have imagined himself being sated.

“Ah, poor lad,” Janus said, and Marius looked up enough to see him … sympathetic? “Yes,” Janus said, as if answering his thoughts, “I do feel more than a bit sorry for you. You have had a difficult life, I would estimate, what with the … additional company … you have in your mind.”

Marius halted, letting a clump of meat fall from his outstretched hand onto the wooden table. He stopped chewing, swallowing what he’d eaten with great care. “How do you know … about …”

“About the voice in your head?” Janus asked, and he looked like he was surveying Marius. “I am what they call an empath. I can read the emotional states of people—their sorrow, anger, joy, and so on. You … you have not just the emotional weight of a single person hanging about you. You carry an additional burden, one filled with anger and sorrow and no joy, if I may say. Someone furious at being trapped in your body and being subverted to your will.” He looked at Marius carefully. “Who is this person? A brother? Close friend? A girl you knew in your village, perhaps?”

“My mother,” Marius said, not taking his eyes off of Janus. “Or at least she says she is.” He glanced around, waiting to see if anyone sprang from the shadows of the room. It had grown late, and there were flickering candles casting shadows around the manse. It had looked stately indeed when Janus had brought him here. When the woman named Diana had disappeared after their arrival, Marius had half expected Janus to kill him quietly.

“Goodness,” Janus said, stark surprise causing his eyebrows to rise. “And you do not recognize it as the voice of your mother?”

“She died giving birth to me,” Marius said slowly. “I never met her, but all the villagers say it is so. That she died in the last moments of labor. That she died from touching me.” He raised a hand, palm out, in front of him. “Anyone who touches me will die, they say. Two women tried to nurse me and ended up gravely ill before they determined how to feed me milk through a skin.”

“An incubus,” Janus said, leaning forward with interest. “And you manifested at birth, no less.”

“I do not understand what you are saying,” Marius said, leaning back in the chair. He felt the hard wood underneath his back, and realized that he was very tired.

“You are more than human,” Janus said, his face now shrouded. “There are many of us, those who have powers beyond those of normal people. You are one of us. We are comparatively few, and our powers tend to manifest, or appear, at around sixteen or seventeen years of age. Yours, which include the ability to drink the souls of those whom you touch, appear to have originated at your birth.” He leaned back in his chair, his thumb and forefinger stroking his bearded chin. “Unusual, but not unheard of.”

Marius blinked. “But you … you cannot … drain souls? As I can?”

Janus shook his head. “There are many different types of us, with powers of varying kinds. An incubus, as you are, is a fairly unusual power as of now. There are not so many of your kind. They are all of one family, and I can only assume that your father was also an incubus.”

“No one knows who my father is,” Marius said. “My mother never said.”

“It was probably Valerianus,” Janus said with an air of distaste. “He has a tendency to float about the countryside having his way with women and leaving them dead in his wake.” He looked sickened. “Few of his victims survive, I am sad to say.”

“Why would he … do such a thing?” Marius asked, trying to wrap his mind around all he had heard. People with powers, gods walking the countryside? He had had faith, but to hear that it was all true, existing beneath the surface of the cold and cruel world he had witnessed with his own eyes … that was something else entirely.

“Out of desire,” Janus said. He sounded like the villagers when they had discussed a murderer who had been caught and killed. “He lets his primal lusts rule him and woe betide any who get in his way.” Janus leaned on the table, his eyes connecting with Marius. “I must caution you that there are many of our kind who conduct themselves in this way, treating people as objects to be used for whatever purpose or gain they can find. They view humans around them in much the same way that your hometown likely treated you.”

Marius felt a sudden revulsion creep through him. “That is …” He searched for a word.

“Appalling, I know,” Janus said. He eyed Marius warily. “Yet I understand the temptation. You will likely feel it yourself, now that you realize your power over others.”

Marius swallowed, felt the bile burn down his throat. “I don’t … I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Janus watched him then nodded once. “That is an excellent place to start, with that intention in mind.”

Marius leaned back in his chair again, but now he found no comfort in it. A chair was a luxury he’d never imagined in the barn. There was food before him of the like he had never seen. The house that surrounded him was unlike anything in his village. And yet— “What is to become of me?” he asked.

Janus shifted his weight from his elbow and sat up straight in his chair once more. “An excellent question, and one I would have myself were I sitting in your seat. Now, I think we will have the servants bathe you, and show you to a lovely bed not made of straw, and give you a night to rest before we discuss the paths in front of you.” He snapped his fingers and a servant appeared out of the shadows. He gestured for Marius, spreading both arms in such a way as to indicate the nearest door, shadowed under an archway.

Marius drew himself up slowly, his limbs suddenly feeling the weariness of the last few days. He started toward the doorway and halted, looking back at where Janus sat, still deep in thought. “Why are you helping me?” Marius asked.

Janus shifted, turning his head ponderously toward Marius and then smoothing his beard. “Because, my boy, you are, after a fashion, family. And it is good form to take care of one’s family.”

With that, Janus stood and said no more, as he himself exited the dining hall into the shadow of a doorway in the opposite wall. Marius stood there and watched him disappear before following the servant into the darkness himself.

Chapter 18

Sienna

Now

GET OUT.

The voice nearly shouted in my head, overcoming the sound of the freeway and the wind. The feeling of weightlessness that had accompanied my flight was gone, replaced by the heady, stomach-dropping sensation of a fall.

My fingers slid across the smooth surface of the white van I’d been holding onto only moments before, hoping I’d find some place to grab onto. The sweat on my fingertips caused them to slip, and I fell in slow motion as I closed my eyes at the sound of the voice resonating in my head.

GET OUT
, it repeated again, deep and rich and …

… familiar.

The psychic spear that had been causing my brain to scream in pain only a second earlier was gone, I realize dimly as I slipped past the back wheel of the van. It spun so slowly I could see it turn, faint lines of dust coming off it like mist rising off the low fields around the Agency in the mornings.