Shield of Winter (Nalini Singh) (26 page)

No answer.

Collapsing to her knees in front of him, she sucked in a breath. No iris, no pupil, his gaze was the pure black that denoted a massive use of power. A vein pulsed dangerously on his temple, drops of perspiration rolled down to his jaw, his breath ragged but present. When she touched her fingers to his wrist, she found his pulse was running so fast, she couldn’t count the separate beats.

Dawning horror in her veins.

The incident, whatever it was, wasn’t yet over. Vasic was holding the shield that had protected her and the other Es.

Jaya, have you found Abbot?
she asked, telling herself she could give in to the clawing panic inside her after Vasic was safe.
Is he conscious?

Yes, but I can’t reach him
, Jaya replied, her mental voice shaky.
Isaiah’s Arrow was with Abbot, and he just lost consciousness. Isaiah’s checking his vital signs.

One hand on Vasic’s rigid leg, his muscles strained to the breaking point, she touched base with the others. The news was not good.
Six Arrows are down,
she telepathed to the group once she’d heard back from everyone.
That leaves only Vasic, Abbot, and Mariko to hold the shield. I know Vasic told us to stay out of the Net, but we need to help them.

Unanimous agreement.

Already on the PsyNet, Ivy ignored the ferocious turbulence beyond the transparent black of the Arrow shield, forced thoughts of her parents aside, and talked the others through how to merge shields. The resulting creation was ragged but effective.

It was also . . . different.

Where the Arrow shield was a hard dome, the one below it rippled with the kind of hazy color seen in a bubble of sunlit water, and appeared as thin and as fragile. Yet when part of the Arrow shield cracked, Abbot losing his battle with unconsciousness, the empathic shield didn’t collapse under the strain. It simply flowed with the storm surge until there were no more waves, the PsyNet quiet.

And still Vasic’s jaw remained clenched, his blood crimson against the gold of his skin.

•   •   •

VASIC
telepathed Judd the instant the shock wave stopped pummeling their shield.
I need your pack and DarkRiver to make sure the empaths come to no harm. There’s an emergency in the Net.

The fallen Arrow responded at once.
We’ll take care of it.

Vasic was conscious of Ivy’s worried voice, her touch—so soft against his jaw—but he couldn’t sink into it, couldn’t reassure her. Shooting through the disordered skies of the PsyNet, he came to a section of Alaska that had collapsed into gaping nothingness.

The PsyNet no longer existed beyond the point where he stood.

On the ground, there’d be carnage, people falling where they stood as their biofeedback link was severed, resulting in death—an agony that would be over in seconds for most. The toughest might last a minute. Unless . . . Vasic quickly married up this section of the Net with the physical region and realized it was centered on the abandoned Sunshine Station. Not only was the station uninhabited, there were no other outposts for miles in any direction.

That didn’t mean there’d be no casualties—the psychic shock wave had been brutal.

He saw Kaleb and Aden working together to seal the breach before it could widen and swallow up further sections of the Net. Aden was being careful not to overtly showcase his strength, but anyone who thought about it afterward would realize he shouldn’t have been able to work side by side with a cardinal without flagging.

Vasic had no doubt Krychek had the brute strength to stop the damage from spreading, but he couldn’t do that and seal it up at the same time. Not with a wound this large.
Aden.

Infection caused the sector to collapse,
his partner replied.
Entire region is riddled with it.

Vasic was almost expecting the news. Sunshine Station was the known site zero for the infection. What was surprising was that no one had spotted the virulence of the infection here, given that the region was under heavy watch. Krychek, the squad, Ming, all had placed observers here.

Vasic.
Krychek’s obsidian voice.
You need to head to Anchorage.
Images he could use for a teleport lock poured into his mind.
It’s not in the collapse zone, but I’m picking up reports of sudden, inexplicable violence alongside the expected shock wave injuries. It may be an outbreak.

Vasic opened his eyes to see Ivy in front of him, her hand holding a bloody towel she must’ve used to clean up his face. “I have to go,” was all he had time to say before he left, taking with him the remembered sensation of Ivy’s fingertips just brushing his own as he ’ported into carnage.

During the cleanup in Sunshine, he’d seen corpses with their brains bashed in, others who’d been stabbed over and over, still others who’d been beaten with whatever was nearby. So he wasn’t surprised to find himself in the middle of a dead-end street overrun with the violent mad. He saw two other Arrows, both at the open end of the affected street. A Tk and a telepath, they were managing to stop the swarm from escaping to spread out over the rest of the city, but the tide was rising.

There was also a changeling—a predator—who must’ve been on the street when the world went insane in the space of a few seconds. He was protecting a group of roughly fifteen human and changeling schoolchildren behind him, his claws slicing at the mad as the terrified children huddled against the wall.

Another man, a human, was bleeding badly from a gut wound but trying to calm the children. A teacher, Vasic surmised.

Several bodies littered the street that had obviously been cleared of snow only a short time before.

Taking it all in a single glance, he began to telekinetically pick up and slam the crazed against the walls of the buildings around them, hard enough to slam them into unconsciousness. He tried not to use fatal force, but his priority had to be the children and the other noninfected he could see fighting off those who’d been driven insane by the disease.

He knew full well he might only be delaying the inevitable.

No one from Sunshine had been able to be saved.

“Behind you!”

Turning at the shouted cry from the injured teacher, he smashed back a middle-aged woman who’d been about to sink a butcher knife into his back. The knife flew out of her hand to land on the street with a thick clump, her neck snapping to loll her head forward as she hit the wall at the wrong angle. Then there was no more time to think.

Chapter 26

*Breaking News*
Catastrophic damage across the Net as result of a recent unexplained shock wave. Casualties estimated to be in the tens of thousands. This feed will be updated as further news becomes available.
PsyNet Beacon
BY THE TIME
it was all over, the street was littered with bodies, but the schoolchildren were safe, and Vasic had managed to disable but not kill most of the infected. A few had landed wrong the same way as the knife-wielding woman, and two others he’d immobilized had been set upon by other infected, but the majority were breathing. A number of noninfected had also lost their lives or been badly injured, the majority prior to his arrival.

Looking at the changeling male, his claws now bloodied and his eyes glowing a pale feline yellow that said he was probably a snow leopard, given the region, Vasic nodded toward the children.

The injured teacher—slumped on the ground—said, “Go” when his students hesitated at the changeling male’s order to leave.

“Help is coming,” Vasic said, the sirens filling the air getting louder by the second.

The changeling knelt by the teacher. “I’ll make sure they get home safe,” he said, his voice holding a growl, then he shepherded the children away.

Certain the children were in hands that would protect not harm, Vasic met up with the two other Arrows on the scene. Younger and less experienced, they looked to him for direction. “Separate the injured noninfected from the infected,” he ordered. “The latter will need to be restrained if they don’t slip into comas.”

“Sir, triage?” the female Arrow asked.

“The noninfected are to be treated first.” It was a ruthless but practical decision. “The infected rate of survival is currently zero, regardless of their physical health.”

That done, he started to go over the scene. He tagged the dead so the medics wouldn’t have to waste time searching through the bodies themselves, then he shifted the corpses to the back of the street. Behind him, the medics worked at rapid speed to assist the wounded.

Judging the situation was now under control, with the local authorities out in force, he was about to begin clearing the low-rise apartment buildings that dominated the street when he passed a narrow space between two street-facing buildings and heard a stifled sob. Pausing, he waited for his eyes to adapt to the darkness within. The boy huddled inside the snow that had collected there couldn’t have been more than thirteen.

It’s safe,
he telepathed, instinct whispering the juvenile was Psy.

The boy’s head jerked up, fear on every inch of his face.

Vasic crouched down to make himself appear less of a threat. “You’re not in trouble.”

“I cried,” the boy whispered, knuckling away the tears that ran over his wide-cheeked face, his uptilted eyes swollen and red.

“Silence has fallen,” Vasic said, and because he knew many people didn’t yet believe the fall was real, added, “It was a traumatic and unusual situation. No one will remember your reaction in light of the other events that took place here today.” The Net was in too much chaos to notice the fractured Silence of a child. “What’s your name?”

Wiping his face on the sleeve of his winter jacket, the boy said, “Eben.” Then it was as if he couldn’t stop speaking, his words tumbling over one another. “I was walking to catch the jet-train to school. We had a late start today because the teachers had a meeting, and I passed the trippers—”

“Trippers?”

“The elementary school children,” he said. “There’s a museum that backs onto this street at the cul-de-sac end, and the school transports usually stop here, and then the trippers use a public pathway to get to the museum. It’s faster than going all the way around, and one of the museum staff usually shovels away any snow in the morning.”

Vasic had allowed the boy to ramble to ease his nerves, but now nudged his recollection back on track, “Go on. You’d passed the children.”

“I was thinking of my science homework”—Eben swallowed—“and about a girl at school.” His brown eyes, the pupils dilated, met Vasic’s. “I was a few meters past the elementary school kids when they started screaming, and I turned to run back. I thought maybe there’d been an accident. I’ve had first aid training at school.”

“Breathe.” Vasic used the same tone he used on Arrow trainees who began to panic during simulations. “You did the right thing.”

“I couldn’t get to them.” The boy’s entire body shook, shivers wracking his gangly frame even as perspiration broke out over the pale brown of his skin. “There were people pouring out of the apartments on either side and coming at me with knives and other things.” He began to rock back and forth. “I didn’t want to, but I had to.”

Vasic realized Eben was holding something by his side. “Give it to me.”

Shaking, trembling, the teenager lifted a baseball bat wet with blood but couldn’t seem to pass it across. “I have baseball practice today.”

Vasic ’ported the bat away, so it wouldn’t be in Eben’s line of sight as the teen continued to speak.

“I didn’t want to, but they wouldn’t stop and I had to. The little kids were screaming and I couldn’t help. I
tried
. I tried so hard!”

“You did everything you could.” He considered how to handle the clearly traumatized child. “How far is your home?”

“Four buildings down.”

Vasic froze . . . and that was when he became aware he was experiencing a dull version of the abrasive sensation he felt near all empaths but Ivy. From a Psy who lived in the center of the zone of infection and should, therefore, have gone insane along with his neighbors. “Were your parents home?” Their current location didn’t matter, of course. Anyone resident on this street would’ve been anchored in the infected part of the PsyNet and would’ve gone insane the instant the infection reached critical mass. Considering the time of day, a large number would’ve been at work.

Eben looked at him blankly.

Standing up, Vasic walked to an ambulance and grabbed a thermal blanket. When he returned, he stepped into the space too narrow to be called an alley and wrapped the blanket around Eben before picking the child up in his arms, and at this moment, the boy
was
very much a child, despite his age. With no information on Eben’s parents or next of kin, Vasic made the decision to bring the boy directly to Ivy’s cabin.

Rabbit barked, scrabbling into the room from the porch. Ivy followed on his heels. One look at the boy in Vasic’s arms, and she didn’t ask questions, simply took control. Eben was tucked up in her bed with Rabbit sitting sentinel next to him within minutes. “I’ll take care of him,” she said when Vasic indicated he had to leave.

“I’m certain he’s an E, so he shouldn’t be violent”—the only reason Vasic was leaving the boy with her—“but be careful. I’ve alerted Judd and the conscious members of my unit to his presence.”