Shield of Winter (Nalini Singh) (47 page)

All the dark emotions, the ugliness, Ivy thought, had been shoved aside, buried, and in that festering soup had grown the infection. “That doesn’t give us a cure, though.” She pushed away her meal. “No one can simply embrace the whole gamut of emotion after a lifetime of being trained to do the opposite.”

Vasic’s eyes met hers for a piercing instant.

That wasn’t a complaint,
Ivy said, blowing him a telepathic kiss.

I know
. A caress in the ice of his voice.
It’s an unavoidable fact.

Yes, it was. Her Arrow had opened his heart to her, but he continued to fight a pitched battle against his darker emotions. Anger, rage, loss, it was all trapped inside that great heart, and it made Ivy ache. But she couldn’t force those emotions out into the open. No one could. Only Vasic, when he was ready.

Jaya poked at her noodles. “A violent shift like that could also cause shock, a stroke, an aneurysm.”

“The other thing,” Alice said, leaning forward, “is that I can’t believe there are so few people in the Net who’ve embraced their emotions.”

At that instant, the charismatic intensity of the scientist’s gaze reminded Ivy of Samuel Rain—a spark of genius lived in them both, and both had been wounded in ways that sought to bury that genius.

“According to everything I’ve learned since waking,” Alice continued, “and what Jaya’s shared today, Silence has been fracturing for years.”

The three empaths looked at one another, nodded as a unit. The scientist was right—far more people should be immune to the infection if that was the only prerequisite.

Picking up a datapad, Jaya began to scroll through the information they had on the nonempathic uninfected. “We’re missing something, but I can’t—”

The other empath’s words cut off as a screaming roar of insanity and confusion smashed into the room.

It took Vasic less than seven seconds to teleport Ivy, Lucas, and Sascha to the site two blocks over, then return for Alice, the human scientist having insisted on being present. Abbot took Jaya directly to the end of the worst-affected street, where she’d join the medical units Vasic had called in. Leaving Alice tucked up inside a doorway not far from Jaya, Abbot there to protect the medics, the rest of them waded into the fray.

The street, lined with midrises zoned for mixed commercial/residential use, was also a busy entertainment area and thoroughfare utilized by countless people. Those people were all now fighting desperately for their lives against the infected—who seemed not even to notice their own injuries. Ivy saw a man whose left arm was hanging broken by his side run headlong at a big human male. The infected went down under a single punch but continued to try and get up.

Ivy recoiled as she was hit by a telepathic blow hard enough to make her skull ring. Shaking it off, she concentrated on calming one individual at a time. It worked as it had the last time, but a mere ten minutes in and she could already feel an agonizing pressure building behind her eyelids. It would—

A massive telepathic blow.

Hitting the ground hard enough to graze her cheek and hands as blood vessels burst in her eyes, she realized there had to be a Gradient 8 or higher telepath in the crowd.
Hell.
“I’m fine,” she managed to say to Sascha when the cardinal turned to check on her. “Telepathic strike.”

Sascha wiped a bloody nose on her sleeve, said, “I just felt one, too.” An instant later, she staggered. “That was a telekinetic hit.” Going to her knees in a controlled move, as if to make herself a smaller target, she stared into the carnage. “Lucas is all right,” she said at last. “His natural shields protect him.”

Ivy could see the blue scythe that was the laser built into Vasic’s gauntlet, so she knew he was holding up under the dual physical and psychic attacks. However, there were a significant number of humans and Psy—infected, noninfected, it was hard to tell—spasming on the ground, hands over their ears and screams tearing the air as the minds around them went haywire.

Nonpredatory changelings caught in the chaos tried to fight, but they weren’t aggressive by nature, couldn’t stand against the manic fury incited by the infection. And with the number of residents who lived in the midrises, there were simply too many infected against too few defenders. Even the arrival of the eagles didn’t turn the tide.

Ivy saw victim after victim go down under pummeling fists and clawing hands while still others bled and collapsed from increasingly violent mental strikes.

“Terminal field!” It was a rasping scream.

Turning, Ivy and Sascha stared at Alice as she ran toward them. The scientist staggered halfway, as if hit by a telepathic blow, but didn’t stop. “Terminal field,” she gasped to Sascha after falling to her hands and knees beside them, her body heaving. “You have to initiate a terminal field.”

Sascha, eyes pure black with the agony of the dying who littered the street, cupped Alice’s face in her hands. “Tell me what that is.”

Alice drew in a jagged breath while Ivy continued to do what she could, even as the pressure in her brain built and built to a nauseating pounding behind her eyes.

“Alice.” Sascha fought the urge to shake the other woman, knowing that wouldn’t hurry the retrieval of Alice’s buried memories.
“What is a terminal field?”

Gaze blank, Alice stared at her, but just when Sascha was about to give up and turn back to the chaos, the other woman said, “You can block psychic abilities on a mass scale.”

Sascha’s heart slammed against her ribs. Forcing herself to hold firm against the horror and pain slapping at her senses, she focused on Alice. This was critical, could directly impact the number of fatalities. “How?”

Hands fisted on her thighs and eyes glittering wet, Alice shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t find that piece of memory.”

“Okay, okay.” Sascha touched her fingers to Alice’s cheek before shifting her attention to the fighting. “If I attempt to block everyone,” she said aloud, “it’ll negatively affect the defenders.”

So she’d have to narrow her focus, and do
what
? She wanted to scream at the unfairness of being told she had an ability that could save thousands of lives, then left to flounder without a road map as to how to activate it. Turning to Ivy to see if the younger empath had any ideas, she sucked in a breath, abdomen lurching.

Ivy’s face was a mask of blood.

Chapter 48

“IVY, STOP,” SASCHA
said, using the same tone she used on recalcitrant juveniles in the pack. “Stop right now.” Panic beat in her—the other woman could easily stroke out, causing irrevocable damage to her brain.
“Ivy.”

“There are too many, Sascha.” It came out thready. “I can’t stop, or they’ll swarm the defenders.”

Sascha grabbed Ivy’s shoulder, forced her physically around. “You stop right now, or I will telepath Vasic.”

“Not fair.” It came out mumbled, sluggish.

“Yes, well, you’re not exactly acting rationally.” She looked to Alice. “Can you get her to the medics?”

Nodding, the anthropologist rose to her feet with one of Ivy’s arms over her shoulders, her own around the empath’s waist, and staggered away. They were protected by Abbot and the Enforcement officers holding the line so the maddened couldn’t escape this pocket of insanity. Sascha watched long enough to make sure the two women were safe before returning to her task, automatically scanning for Lucas as she did so.

Her mate—claws out—was fighting beside a number of cops, taking out the more aggressive infected so the officers could get the uninfected and injured out. Vasic wasn’t visible, but since Ivy hadn’t raised the alarm, the teleporter must be safe.

“Terminal field,” she said to herself. “Terminal field. Figure it out.”

She tried every tactic in her arsenal, but all it got her was another bloody nose and a pounding in her ears that told her she’d soon be as bad as Ivy. “I am
not
giving up.” She refused to consign her daughter, any child, to a world overrun with vicious insanity.

That was when the Tk she’d chosen to focus on—on the theory his belligerence would make it easier to tell if what she was doing was working—looked straight at her . . . and teleported. Sascha hadn’t thought he was that strong, and maybe he wasn’t, but she was only twenty feet away and in plain sight. He was in front of her a second later, his hands shoving out as if to make her fly through the air to slam into the heavy- duty Enforcement combat vehicles. The impact would snap her spine.

Adrenaline took over.
“Stop!”
she yelled on the physical and psychic levels both.
“You can’t do this!”

Blinking, he pushed out with his hands. Nothing. Staggered at her success, she almost fell victim to the meaty fist he swung at her face—except her mate was already there. Lucas took her would-be-assailant out with a clean punch to the jaw that left the Tk unconscious but alive.

“Kitten?”

“I’m fine.” Still on her knees, her heart a drum, she touched his calf. “Go, help the others.”

As Lucas returned to the fight, Sascha began to concentrate the terminal field on small, tight areas that didn’t weaken the defenders but eliminated the worst psychic threats. What she’d understood in that split second was that it wasn’t simply about telling an individual he couldn’t do something—it was about hitting his hidden emotional core to convince him he was
incapable
of the action.

Her nose didn’t bleed now, the pressure easing in her frontal lobe. This,
this
was what she was meant to be doing, the act as natural and as simple as breathing. And she understood why the post-Silence Council had wanted to eliminate empaths from the gene pool. Not simply because they were the personification of emotion, but because an E could strip power from Councilor and beggar alike.

•   •   •

IVY
sat with nerves raw and teeth gritted in the back of an ambulance and listened to the fighting while an M-Psy told her that a blood vessel in her brain was critically close to rupture. “Whatever you were doing, stop it,” he said. “Or the next time, yours will be one of the corpses we body bag off the streets.”

Leaving her with those blunt words, as well as an order that she utilize pain-control mechanisms to ameliorate the agony in her skull, he went to deal with other injuries. Her psychic strain would heal on its own—all it would take was time. Time the world didn’t have, she thought, edging out of the ambulance . . . to see Vasic disable a man who’d been beating another to death with a broken chair leg.

Her throat filled with a raging scream she couldn’t allow herself to utter. He was so strong, so honorable, and he deserved happiness and peace, not this endless ugliness.
Enough,
she wanted to cry,
he’s done enough! Let this gladiator rest.
If only she could figure out the cure—

“You! This is your fault!”

Jerking around at the vituperative cry, she found herself facing a young woman on the other side of the secondary Enforcement barricade. She wore ordinary clothes but had a black band around her wrist. As did the man next to her . . . and the man beside
him
.

All three were staring at her.

A vicious telepathic punch.

Agony searing down her spine, she reacted in pure self-defense to suck out the cold rage that drove them. It poured into her, but she knew it wasn’t hers, that she could filter it to inertness. And though her vision was blurred from the assault, she nonetheless saw her attackers look at one another in confusion before melting into the crowd.

Worried they’d done further damage to her already traumatized brain, she went to find a medic when her mind shut down with icy finality.

•   •   •

THREE
hours after the outbreak began and ten minutes after the street was stabilized, Vasic placed an unconscious Ivy in her bed. An M-Psy had confirmed she’d suffered no permanent injury, and Vasic had no intention of permitting that to change. “Stay with her, Rabbit.”

He petted the worried dog, then tugging a blanket over pet and mistress both, stepped out into the living area to speak to the others. “She isn’t going to do any more.” If he had to teleport her to a desert during the next attack, he would, regardless of her fury. “This is killing her.”

Sascha nodded where she sat on the sofa with her mate beside her. The DarkRiver alpha pair had both showered and were now eating. Sascha had expended so much psychic energy that she’d lost physical weight, her cheekbones slicing against her skin, while Lucas Hunter had fought with hot changeling energy side by side with Vasic.

Alice Eldridge lay curled up asleep on the other sofa. The scientist’s physical stamina was still low as a result of her time in stasis, but no one could say she hadn’t pulled her weight today.

Vasic grabbed a chair and sat down. He had no desire to eat, but he consumed nutrition bar after nutrition bar with methodical precision—he’d be useless to Ivy otherwise.

“I thought I’d discovered a solution to the pressure on the brain,” Sascha said, face drawn, “but the method I use to create a terminal field doesn’t work to encourage calm.” She thrust a hand through her hair. “There’s
so
much
we just don’t know, don’t understand.” Eating the bite of pizza her mate held up to her lips, she chewed and swallowed. “I’ll stay, help. I couldn’t bear to go home knowing—”