Shield of Winter (Nalini Singh) (36 page)

“Vasic,” she whispered again, her kiss damp this time, the sensation going straight to his rock-hard erection. “My Vasic.”

No one had ever claimed him so completely. Enslaved, he wanted to bend his mouth to her skin, lick her up as she was doing him. But this . . . being adored by her, it was an addiction that kept him in place. “Stop,” he forced himself to say, when he wanted the opposite. “I’m on watch. I can’t be distracted.” And he hadn’t yet worked out how to control his teleporting when she put her hands on him.

A last, lingering kiss. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

Her lips curved. “You have to let me out.”

He didn’t move. “Don’t go,” he said, and it was the first time since his father had abandoned him that he’d asked anyone to stay with him.

Ivy’s smile lit up the room. “Why don’t I make us some coffee, and you can teach me how to keep watch like an Arrow?”

Shifting one hand down to the thin strap of her top, he tugged it, only his nail brushing her skin. “Did you get this in the township by the orchard?” It was delicate and lacy and not the least bit sensible.

“I ordered it from a catalogue,” she whispered, as if confessing a secret. “I have a very bad habit of buying impractical items simply for the sensual pleasure of it.” Nuzzling him, she said, “My favorite texture is that of your hand against my skin.”

He closed his fingers around her nape, squeezed in a silent reprimand that had her laughing, the sound a quiet intimacy as she slid her arms around his waist and pressed a kiss to his chest. It was a perfect moment, one he wished he could encapsulate and live in forever. But time, he thought, his eyes landing on the gauntlet, continued its relentless march forward. It wouldn’t stop for a disintegrating PsyNet, nor would it halt for an Arrow who had finally found a beautiful reason to live.

•   •   •

THE
first major wave of protest marches took place in New York, Shanghai, and Jakarta, with more scheduled in Berlin and other world cities in the coming days.

Kaleb watched the news feeds from all three cities in his home study, taking in the banners that advocated a return to Silence, each emblazoned with the logo of Silent Voices. Unlike the small knot of placard-waving malcontents outside his Moscow office, hundreds marched in these groups, professional signs strung out between them.

His first instinct remained to crush and eliminate what he saw as a threat, but Sahara, her hand on his shoulder as she leaned over his chair to look at the feeds, had a different view. “Under eight hundred people,” she said, her breath soft against his temple. “And that’s across three huge cities. Their numbers are minuscule, but it’s good the dissent is out in the open. Our people have festered in the darkness too long.”

“Silent Voices isn’t dissent—it’s a symptom of the mind-set that paralyzes so many in the populace,” he said, the truth a pitiless one.

“You’re right.” She wriggled into his lap, her legs hanging over the arm of his executive chair. “But we’re attempting to change the course of an entire race. It’s going to be chaotic and messy, and people will make mistakes.”

Kaleb ran one hand down her thigh, his other arm around her waist. On the feeds, the protestors continued to chant, continued to irritate, but he ignored that to focus on the people on the sidewalks where the marches were taking place. Humans and changelings looked on curiously, but he also picked up faces that were clearly Psy. No one was joining in.

That would alter, he thought, as fear crippled more and more. But change had begun, and it was inevitable, as evidenced by the color-washed minds that had begun to appear in the Net. Silent Voices might want to erase that color, but many others looked on with wonder, astonished that such beauty could be born in the stark cold that had always been the psychic plane.

Kaleb fell into neither category. He was interested only in what the empaths could do to curb the infection—if those of the E designation could do anything at all. “I can only give the Es another two weeks at most.” Then he’d have to begin to carve the Net into countless pieces.

Sahara’s exhale was shaky. “There’s still no way to detect the fine tendrils of infection?”

“No.”

“But,” Sahara said, her mind seeing what his already had, “if the Net is in pieces, there’s a higher chance at least some parts of it will stay clean, survive.” Where now the infection could crawl unchecked across every inch of the psychic fabric that connected their race.

“Have you considered a mass defection from the PsyNet?” Sahara asked, playing with the lapis lazuli pebble he’d had on his desk. “Everyone could drop out, create a new network, start fresh.”

“We’d take the infection with us.” A large number of people already carried the disease in their brain cells. “A small group, however, one made up of those immune to the infection and those who share their immunity, could work.”

Sahara sucked in a breath. “Arrows and empaths,” she said, the dark blue of her eyes vivid with realization. “Have you told them?”

“No. Everything I’ve observed about designation E tells me they won’t go voluntarily. I’ll tell the Arrows when necessary, and they’ll force the Es out.” Kaleb had noticed how protective the squad had become of the empaths, and it was a relationship he’d use without compunction to get what he wanted.

Sahara’s fingers wove through his hair, her smile lopsided. “And will you do the same to me, Kaleb?”

“No—I’ll make sure we’re in the piece of the Net that holds your father.” Parental love was a concept with which Kaleb had no personal experience, but he had no doubt that Leon Kyriakus loved his only daughter.

Never, not once in seven long years, had the older man given up hope of his lost daughter’s return. For that, he had Kaleb’s respect. “I will do everything in my power to keep him safe.” Because Sahara’s heart would shatter if her father died, and Kaleb would never permit that to happen.

Eyes wet, the woman who was Kaleb’s own heart locked her arms around his neck and held on tight. “I hope,” she whispered a long time later, as she lay curled up against him, “it doesn’t come to that. I hope the Es find their wings and fly.”

Chapter 36

To be an empath is to understand pain in all its myriad facets.Excerpted from
The Mysterious E Designation: Empathic Gifts & Shadows
by Alice Eldridge
IVY WATCHED THE
final part of the protest from the sidewalk outside the apartment, surprised it had been permitted to take place. She heard the same hushed astonishment from the others around her. Everyone—human, changeling, and Psy—had expected Kaleb Krychek to ruthlessly crush any hint of rebellion.

There had been so much fear in the protestors that Ivy’s nerve endings were raw from sensing it, yet they’d exposed themselves with a courage she had to admire, even if their objective was at odds with her very existence.

“Do you think Kaleb will quietly execute them now that he knows who they are?” she asked Vasic.

Her Arrow, steely eyes continuing to scan the street as the crowd began to thin, took time to answer. “Krychek is no longer predictable in any sense because we can’t predict Sahara Kyriakus. Her motives and views remain unknown.”

“Have you seen their bond?” Ivy hadn’t dared go close to it yet, but she’d heard the rumors, had trouble believing the deadly man she’d met would ever willingly tie himself to another: love, after all, was a soul-deep vulnerability.

“Yes. It’s . . .” A shake of his head, the silken black strands of his hair gleaming in the midmorning sunlight. “You’ll have to see it for yourself.” He touched her lower back when a passing male smiled at her. “I’ll take you to it.”

Delighted by his touch, by the quiet but unmistakable display of possessiveness, she said, “He doesn’t shield it from view?”

“No, though getting close isn’t recommended.” A speaking glance. “Especially for too-curious empaths.”

Ivy felt her stomach somersault, her breath catch. He kept doing that to her. Right when she thought she was used to the sheer potent masculinity of him, he’d look at her with those eyes of stunning winter frost, and she’d remember the things they’d done together, the things they planned to do.

Ivy.
It was a gentle admonishment, the ice of his voice a shivering caress inside her.
You can’t look at me like that on a public street.

Flushing, she ducked her head. “I can’t help it. You’re—” Ivy froze, every tiny hair on her body rising to prickling alarm.

She turned on her heel, stared down the street.

“What do you sense?” Vasic asked, his jacked-up vigilance intense.

“It’s happening.” Her voice shook, blood curdling at the shriek of violent insanity surging to the surface about ten feet away. It was as if a line had been drawn in the sand. Those anchored beyond the line would go viciously insane, those on this side would be fine.

Ivy!

She jerked at the telepathic cry.
Jaya, where are you?

In the apartment. I can feel it, Ivy, feel their twisted confusion, their compulsion to bludgeon and murder.

Ivy heard the first scream on the heels of Jaya’s words, and all at once, a panicked horde ran wild-eyed in their direction. Bags were dropped, datapads abandoned, designer heels left on the tarmac. Ivy knew what she’d find behind the living mass of terror, but it was still a kick to the gut to see the infected armed with knives, blunt weapons, hands fashioned into claws. Blood rushed to burn Ivy’s skin, her own terror visceral . . . but this was the battle for which she’d been born.

She didn’t shrink from it, didn’t run.

Vasic took position in front of her and slightly to her right.
Can you see?
he asked as he began to shove back the insane so the uninfected could escape.

Yes.
Chaos continued to reign around them, but what Ivy saw within it gave her hope even in this darkness.

Screaming, crying children were scooped up by strangers when they stumbled, a frail older man was lifted up in the arms of a burly construction worker, two teenagers—a boy and a girl—stopped to haul a businessman to his feet when he fell, while a third grabbed the hand of a woman who’d gone motionless in shock and hauled her forward out of danger.

The teen looked at Ivy as he ran past, the whites of his eyes showing. “Run, lady! Those people are fucking out of it!”

“I’m fine!” Ivy cried out. “Go!” She took hold of the back of Vasic’s leather-synth jacket with one hand to make sure they wouldn’t be separated as more and more people streamed past.

Blocking out the hysteria using the shielding techniques Sascha had taught her, though she couldn’t do the same with the chilling screams that filled the air, Ivy took a deep breath and reached out with her mind. But when she attempted to grab hold of the infected so she could calm them, her ability simply slid off, like water off slick plas.
Jaya, can you reach them?

No, but I’ll keep trying.

Ivy did the same, but as horrific violence broke out on the street, a number of uninfected caught in the midst of the carnage, she knew neither one of them was having any effect. “Go.” She pushed at Vasic’s back. “Go, help! You’re more use than I am!”

He didn’t budge an inch. “I won’t leave you unprotected.”

“I’ll go inside that shop,” she said, the grocer wide-eyed beyond the window. The elderly man, his hair snow-white against his mahogany skin, had locked the door, but when Ivy caught his attention, he motioned for her to come inside. “I’ll be safe.” While others died around her.

The bitter knowledge of her uselessness was bile in Ivy’s throat.

“I thought you said never to give up.”

Vasic’s words might as well have been bullets, they wounded so much. “I don’t know
what to do
!” All her plans, her ideas, and she had no practical knowledge of how to put them into effect. “There’s no manual, no training! Even Sascha—” Her mind cleared for a single, piercing instant. “Wait, wait.”

Shuddering, she thought of the chapter in the Eldridge book that spoke of empaths controlling crowds, of the experiments Sascha had done with volunteers from her pack. Ivy had nowhere near the cardinal E’s level of expertise, but what did she have to lose? She used Vasic as a focus and visualized the apple orchard in spring behind her closed eyelids, the bright green trees, the endless sky, the crisp, clean air.

Her mind rippled, settled, a tranquil sea.

Exhaling, she sent that feeling outward, as if she was snapping out a sheet to dry. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t what she saw in front of her. The infected looked up at the sky, and then, one by one, began to sit down.

It was beautiful and perfect, her body and mind flawlessly integrated into the empath she’d been born to be . . . for the ten seconds it lasted.

Ivy cried out as a vicious blade of pain rent the peace, sending blood dripping out of her nose and her body to her knees.

Screams filled the air once again, followed by the dull, wet thud of weapons and fists meeting unprotected flesh. Her vision blurred from the pulsing agony in her frontal lobe, Ivy tried to push up off the sidewalk so she could try again, but she was in the living room of their apartment the next instant, Rabbit beside her.

Vasic was gone almost before she realized what he’d done.