Shield of Winter (Nalini Singh) (37 page)

“Ivy!” Jaya ran in through the door short seconds later, and Ivy knew Vasic must’ve ’pathed her. Ducking into Ivy’s bedroom, the younger woman returned with a small box of tissues and knelt down beside her. “What did you do?” Wonder in her intense, dark eyes. “It worked!”

Coughing, her chest filled with crushed rocks, Ivy leaned back against the wall and used the tissues to clean herself up. “Abbot?” It came out gritty, as if she’d been screaming.

“He’s helping Vasic, can be back here in a heartbeat if we need him.” Jaya stroked back Ivy’s hair. “It was perfect, Ivy, your peace.” Her eyes sheened wet. “I wanted to wrap it around myself like a blanket and just sleep, content and happy.”

Glass shattered outside, a car alarm went off. Rabbit barked and ran to jump up on the wide windowsill at agitated speed. He wanted to be out there, wanted to be with Vasic. So did Ivy, but right now she was a liability. Vasic couldn’t help the uninfected if he was concentrating on shielding her.

Curling her hand into a fist, Ivy focused on Jaya. “It was too short.” Disappointment was a leaden weight in her gut, though Sascha, too, had reported being unable to “control” her volunteer crowd for anything beyond a highly limited period.

“It’s a start.” Jaya sat back on her heels, her twin braids lying neat and tidy on her heavy green sweater. “Show me what you did. Maybe I can give Vasic and Abbot a little help.”

The other woman walked to look out the window after Ivy shared her process. Placing her hand on Rabbit’s neck, Jaya stroked him gently as she spoke. “It’s bad. Abbot says he and Vasic have managed to get most of the uninfected out,” she said, her lilting accent intensified by the stress of the situation, “but the infected are turning on one another.”

Ivy’s stomach knotted.

“Oh, my God.” Jaya pressed her face to the glass. “There’s a child wandering in the street! I don’t think anyone’s seen her!”

Now, Jaya,
Ivy said urgently, alerting Vasic to the presence of the child at the same time
.

Both hands dropping to grip the window ledge, Jaya stared down at the street. The peace lasted three short seconds, but it was enough to save the child’s life.

I have her, Ivy.

Crawling over to Jaya’s crumpled form as Vasic’s voice touched her mind, Ivy checked the younger woman’s pulse. It was thready but present beneath the clammy stickiness of her skin.
Jaya?
Using fresh tissues to soak up the blood trickling out of one of her friend’s ears, she continued to try to wake her, deeply worried by the abruptness of her collapse.
Jaya, sweetheart, wake up.

It took over five minutes for the other empath to rouse, her eyes cloudy with pain when she did so. “Why did I collapse so fast?” were the first words she spoke.

“I don’t know.” The Gradient difference between them was a mere .5, Jaya at 8.8. “Did you feel anything before you collapsed?”

“It was like my mind just shut down,” she said, as Ivy pulled herself to the window. However, when she tried to assist Vasic with a particularly virulent knot of fighting, she couldn’t even muster a single pulse of empathic power. Her mind was fried.

Jaya hauled herself up beside Ivy. “My God, Ivy.” The helpless horror in the other empath’s whispered exclamation echoed Ivy’s own feelings.

Sirens pierced the air now, shots were fired. One woman fell the second after she sank her teeth into another woman’s jugular, blood painting her face in a macabre red mask.

Ivy knew from Vasic that Kaleb Krychek’s office had sent out instructions to all first responders on how best to deal with an outbreak should there be no or limited psychic assistance available, but the responders had clearly had no time to internalize those processes.

It was . . . bad.

By the time it ended, seventy-five people lay dead on the street, with fifty-one others critically injured. One hundred had been or would soon be placed into induced comas from which they would never awaken, the infection eating away at their brain. Allowing them to remain conscious was not an option—not only were the infected viciously violent, hurting themselves and others, the infection progressed at an accelerated pace in those who were awake and aware. A coma, at least, gave them a slightly higher chance of surviving long enough for a cure to be discovered.

Deciding to leave Rabbit safe in the apartment, Ivy and a still-hurting Jaya went down to sit on the top step of their apartment building, the street littered with blood and debris in front of them. Numb, her psychic senses dulled to fog, Ivy stared. The authorities had cordoned off the area, but it was simply too big to keep that way for long, and already some of the yellow caution tape was flapping in the wind.

“I thought I was ready but this . . .” Jaya hugged her arms around her knees. “Are we fooling ourselves that we have the ability to halt this?”

Ivy didn’t have an answer, all her hopes of helping to save her people in ashes at her feet. Vasic, Abbot, the cops, and firemen, even the strangers who’d stopped to assist the vulnerable, they’d done
something
. While Ivy had collapsed after ten seconds. Incredible as those ten seconds had been, they would never win this gruesome war.

Unable to comprehend the scale of the death in front of her, she watched Vasic walk through the street to another Arrow. With his razor-straight black hair, slanted eyes, angular bone structure, and a more slender but still muscular build, she recognized Aden at once. He was a medic, she remembered. Of course he’d be here. Right now, he was using a handheld scanner to examine one of the dead.

Vasic crouched down beside his friend.

And she remembered how long Vasic had been fighting, how long he’d been walking in the darkness. “We should go check the bodies.” Giving up was simply not an option, even if she felt bruised black-and-blue by her spectacular failure, her faith in her ability a hollow shell. If she did quit, then Vasic would have to do this over and over and over.

No,
she thought,
just no.

Her Arrow had earned a life that wasn’t drenched always in blood and death, and if she had to try and try and try again until she figured out how to fix this so he wouldn’t have to step back into the shadows, that was what she’d do.

When Jaya didn’t rise with her, she reached down to squeeze her friend’s shoulder. “There might be something we sense that they can’t.”

“What’s the point?” Jaya’s tone was flat, her face drawn. “They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

“Hey”—Ivy changed position to stroke sweat-damp tendrils of hair off the other woman’s elegant, lovely face—“you said it yourself; we did help, even if it was only a little.” The reminder was as much for herself as for Jaya. “It’s a start.”

The younger empath didn’t respond but followed when Ivy headed down the steps. A uniformed member of Enforcement would’ve stopped them from crossing the yellow tape, but Aden waved them in.

Skirting the blood that splattered the road, Ivy went to where Vasic and Aden hunkered beside the body. “Why this one?” she asked, not ready to look at the victim.

Aden was the one who responded, though Vasic curled his hand around her calf in an unexpected and welcome expression of support. A single contact, and already she felt more steady, despite the continued opacity of the fog in her brain.

“Her skull is still whole.” It was a statement pitiless in its practicality. “She was stabbed through the gut and collapsed slowly rather than falling, so her brain wasn’t damaged by a blunt-force collision with the ground. An examination of the tissue may give us more detailed answers as to the progression of the disease.”

“I-I ca—” Sobbing into her hand, Jaya ran back the way they’d come, Abbot heading after her.

Ivy wanted to escape the carnage, too, but she focused on Vasic’s touch, tensed her stomach muscles, and forced her eyes to what remained of a woman who appeared to have been in her early sixties. Her black winter coat was open, revealing a dress of simple blue wool over tights. It was rucked up around her knees and bloody and torn at her abdomen; the skin of her face was marked by deep gouges that said someone had come at her with their bare hands.

“Are you sure she was one of the infected?”

Vasic squeezed her calf. “Yes. I saw her while she was alive.”
You’re feeling better?

It was all she could do not to throw herself in his arms and burrow into his strength.
Yes. Jaya had a much more debilitating response—I think she’s still in quite severe pain.
Crouching down between the two men, she touched her fingers to either side of the woman’s head, though she didn’t hold much hope of sensing anything.

The dead, after all, didn’t feel.

And yet . . . “I can
almost
sense something,” she said, trying to push through the blank wall of nothingness.

Strong hands clamping on her wrists, jerking her away without warning. “You’re bleeding again,” Vasic said, touching the pad of one thumb to below her ear. It came away dark red.

A rustle sounded from behind Ivy at the same instant.

“Sorry for before.” Jaya came down beside her on that husky whisper, her blue-eyed Arrow standing watch at her back. “I felt her death agonies, her confusion and shock, and it was like I was dying.”

Biting back her questions, Ivy shifted to create some space, Aden steadying her with a hand on her back when she might’ve become unbalanced.

Beside her, Jaya tugged down the woman’s dress with gentle hands, tears rolling down her cheeks. “She suffered terribly at the end.” A statement so hoarse, it was barely recognizable as Jaya’s voice. “The echoes of it are trapped in her brain, and the pain, it wasn’t just from the stab wound, but from the horror inside her mind.”

Ivy held her breath, unwilling to break the other empath’s concentration.

“The darkness was trying to become part of her,” the younger woman said. “But it didn’t fit. There was no place for it, so it stole space, and it broke her.” She fell back into a sitting position in a jerky move, sobbing into her hands. “It hurts to die from the infection. It
hurts
so much.”

Chapter 37

My dear, gorgeous, scary smart Z
²
—I love you and will into eternity. I know you know that, but I wanted to write it down. Things . . . they’re changing so much, and I never ever want you to wonder. Silence might quiet the whole world, but it will never quiet this heart that beats only for you.And Z, promise me this—even if something bad happens, even if we’re separated for some reason, you’ll continue to fight for our people. We are better than this fearful cowardice, and I know you have the courage to show others that truth.I’m sorry for sounding so melodramatic, but I just have a bad feeling deep inside me. It’s so cold, my love.You’ll probably find this in the morning and tease me mercilessly for my theatrics, but for now, I’m going back to bed and to your arms. I intend to think up some brilliant rejoinders to the inevitable teasing as I warm myself against you. Perhaps I’ll be terrible and wake you for a kiss, though I know you’re tired, my strong, fearless Z.I could watch you forever as you sleep, your lashes shadowing your cheekbones (it really is unfair that you have such beautiful ones you know), and your lips relaxed as they never are in life. I am definitely going to wake you.—Your Sunny
ZIE ZEN HAD
lived a long lifetime, and in that lifetime, he’d met countless people. Many of those people owed him favors. Some he’d never collect, his actions not undertaken for any personal gain, but because those actions spoke to the part of him that was and would always belong to Sunny.

Ashaya Aleine was one of the people he’d helped in Sunny’s name. The gifted neuroscientist was also a trusted friend, despite the wide difference in their ages, and so he’d spoken to her about his great-grandson. “Can you or Amara do anything about the gauntlet?” he asked her over the comm now. Ashaya’s twin was a true sociopath but for one thing—she loved Ashaya. For Ashaya alone, Amara would put her brilliant, broken mind to work on this complex problem.

Ashaya went as if to thrust a hand through her hair, then seemed to realize the electric mass was in a neat knot at the nape of her neck. She dropped the hand to her side, her forehead lined in thought and her distinctive blue-gray eyes striking against the deep brown of her skin. She’d never been so expressive when he’d known her in the Net.

“We’ve done a detailed first pass through the data you sent us last night,” she said. “The technology is highly experimental.” Folding her arms across a cardigan of pale gray, she shook her head. “It’s a stunning construct on one level but lethal on another—even Amara admits we’ll certainly kill Vasic if we attempt to remove it, and you know the razor-thin safety margins within which she operates.”

Zie Zen heard pained frustration in her tone. “Every fragment of data will assist,” he told this woman who had no genetic connection to him, but who he trusted more than any of his blood aside from Vasic. “Send through any and all information or theories you collect as you continue to explore possibilities.”

Ashaya didn’t argue with his request. “You’re worried you’ll need to move in an emergency situation.”

“It’s a ticking time bomb.” Fused to the body of a son who should’ve had a century more of life to live.

“I’ll forward you everything we have to this point and set up an automatic forward for any new material,” Ashaya said, open compassion in her gaze. “I’m sorry. I never realized how much he meant to you.”