Winter's Wrath: Sacrifice (Winter's Saga #3) (41 page)

Vibrations of fury caused the air around the girl being held against the wall to crackle and distort. 

Until that moment,
Meg hadn’t realized she had been living with a tourniquet stifling the flow of her empath gift.  All her attempts at wielding her abilities were stifled by her own fears of failure. 
S
he’d clipped her own wings
—c
ut
off the flow of her ful
l strength because of her own insecurities.  

As the room moved in slow motion, Meg blinked the cloud of atrophy from her heart. 

She realized something in that moment. 

She realized she was more terrified of what was happening to the precious innocence around her than she was of spreading her empath’s wings and leaping into the sky. 

An eruption of
raw
fury burst the
tethers
holding Meg’s
emotional feet to the ground.  The strength in the moment was so
profound;
she even felt her heart lift as if on angel’s wings. 

Her body shuddered with a powerful vibration
that could be felt by everyone in the room.  All heads turned to stare, mouths agape at the small girl still being pressed against the cement wall
by brute force
.  And though no one would admit to it aloud, they all saw the lines of the room distort and shimmy like they were watching the sun on the horizon. 

Crouched behind a bush at the northwest corner of the building he had just rigged, Evan heard everything that happened to his brother and sister through his comm. device.  Terror gripped him when he heard his siblings ordered to drop their weapons, but bile threatened to surge up his throat when he heard the gunshot explode—deafening.  He yanked the earpiece out, instinctively rubbing his ringing ear even as his body shook with panic.

Oh, God, no!
he screamed silently. 

Then he tried to still his breath and worked the comm. into his other ear, desperate to hear what was happening to his family.  Cowering in the darkness, back pressed tightly against the cold, harsh cement of the building where his family was being beaten, the thirteen-year-old littlest brother tried to control his panic.  The harder he pressed his head back against the unforgiving wall to his back, the more anger began to replace terror. 

Damn it!
  This was
his
family and he was sick of the constant terror; sick of feeling like the only good he served everyone was in the operating room.  

The sound of screaming and skin-against-skin smacks electrified Evan. 

He stood and bolted across the courtyard, strategically staying inside shadows until he made his way to the administration building.  He switched his comm. to channel eight listening intently. 

All he heard was silence.  He waited as long as his nonexistent patience would stomach before speaking into the device. 

“Creed, are you there?”  His voice was desperate even to his own ears.

All he heard in return was silence.

“Creed!”
Evan’s breathing was erratic as abject terror shook him by shoulders and flung him against the nearest shadow. 

He heard a muffled sound, some shuffling then a noise he couldn’t distinguish.  Evan pressed the earpiece tighter into place, trying to discern the sound.  He didn’t need to.  Within seconds, the raspy, choppy sound
morphed
into laughter.  Then it wasn’t just laughter, but hysterics.  Evan yanked the earbud out of place and stared at the small device like it contained a piece of the devil
its
elf.

What’s happened?  That had to have been Williams.  Where was Creed? And the others?
Evan shook his head and locked his jaw angrily. 
Stop, Evan.  Your first concern is Meg and Alik.  Always.  Move!

He took a deep breath and raced back to the building where his brother and sister were.  Even as he ran, he switched his comm. device back to channel four to listen.  There was only silence.  He didn’t know what worried him more, the sounds of a fight or silence.  He risked talking into the piece.

“Meg?  Alik?” he whispered softly.

Silence

Desperate for someone to respond, he heard his voice catch as he whispered again.  “Meg?  Alik?  Are you there?  Please be there.”

Silence

The youngest of the Winter children took a slow deep breath, trying to clear his head and think logically.

He switched his comm. device to channel thirteen—the emergency channel.

“Mom, can you hear me?”

“Evan?” Margo’s response was immediate.  She had been waiting to hear from one of the children.

“Mom, something’s gone very wrong.”

Margo’s voice was shaky.  “I’ve been switching channels listening.  Slider was a mole.  He turned on the others.”

“What?” 
Evan
could scarcely believe his ears.  He was desperately trying to maintain his sense of logic.

“Slider.  He was working for Williams the whole time!” Margo’s voice quivered with terror.

Evan closed his eyes and pressed the back of his head against the cold cement begging the stability of the structure to give him some sense of reality.  It wasn’t working.

“Meg trusted him!” he rasped.

“I know, Ev.  I
wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t heard it myself.  Williams planted him among us.  He was…I don’t know,” her voice broke.  “Williams called him ‘Miro.’ He turned against the others.  Where are Alik and Meg?”

Hearing his mother’s voice both empowered and weakened the young metahuman.

“They’ve been captured, mom.”

“Oh, God. No.”

“What should I do?”

“I’m just outside the compound.  Can you make it back to the gates?”

Evan looked around at the dark compound.  There wasn’t a soul in sight.

“I don’t know.”

Creed felt his body hit by a bullet.

He dropped and rolled behind the nearest piece of furniture.  Fortunately, Williams had spared no expense when it came to the thickest, richest pieces.  His soldier’s eye calculated those in the room.  With a deep breath, he pushed the pain of the bullet wound aside, not having the time to deal with what his body was screaming.  He saw Farrow crouched defensively behind the couch to his left.  The look in her eyes was just as angry and stoic as he felt. 

Where was Gavil?

He heard a shuffling and risked a peek around the thick corner of the armchair that was his shield.  He saw Miro shoving Dr. Williams through a previously hidden door in the panel of the wall to the right.  It slid closed behind them, and the room was silent.

“Damn it!”
he mouthed to Farrow who followed his eyes.  She locked her jaw angrily.

Creed stood abruptly and looked around the room for his brother. 

There in the corner, crumpled into a silent pile, was his big brother’s body.  He wasn’t moving.

Creed leaped to his side and knelt next to the only blood family he’d ever known.

“Gavil?” he choked.  His large hands uncurled the body of his brother to assess damages.

Blood was spilling from Gavil’s car
o
tid artery.

Creed pressed his hand against his brother’s neck and cradled him in his lap.

“Gavil, oh God, no!”
he groaned.

Gavil’s nearly colorless blue eyes opened long enough to lock onto his little brother.

“Don’t…” he choked.

“Don’t talk, Gavil.  Let me get you help,” Creed coughed through his emotion.

Gavil shook his head and closed his eyes slowly before breathing a gurgled breath.  His eyes flew open from sheer determination as he locked eyes with his brother
once again
.

“Don’t let him …live.” Gavil’s stare was full of words his voice could no longer express.

“I won’t.  I promise.”

“I’m sorry…”  Gavil’s voice trailed and the light in his eyes glistened one last moment before he gasped his last breath, eyes still
holding
earnestly on
to
his brother.

Then there was silence.

Creed couldn’t stand it.  He screamed in anguish as the blood pulsing through his fingertips slowed to a trickle.  Gavil’s body shuddered once before his heart stopped beating.

Farrow’s strong hands wrapped around Creed’s heaving shoulders and gently pulled.

“We have to go,” she breathed trying to hurry the soldier into action.

Creed didn’t move.  Instead, his yells of anguish echoed off the perfectly polished hardwood panels on the walls around them.

“He killed my brother!” he screamed.

“Yes, he did, and he will kill Meg, Alik and Evan if we don’t move
now
!” she yelled back.

At the sound of Meg’s name, Creed’s back straighted, his breath catching in his throat.

With one last look of anguish, Creed laid his brother’s head gently to the floor closing his dead-blue eyes with his
a
calloused hand and stood.  His muscles twitched and vibrated with a fury previously unknown to man or meta.

Without a word he ran from the room, crashed through the double doors and bolted down the corridor toward the stairs leading to the bottom floor.  Farrow was right at his heels, gun drawn and ready for battle.

The soldiers were dragging
Meg
down a corridor into a room.  She fought all five of them with every breath of her being.

They’d never dealt with a meta as powerful as her and they were struggling.

Even though her hands and ankles were bound, she seemed to exude power.  The air around her vibrated with raw fury.

Beads of sweat were slipping down the temples of the soldier who dared shoot the bed of the baby minutes before.

“Damn it!” that soldier screamed, “she’s just a girl.  Secure her!”

One of the five
who was
holding her by the waist yelled, “She’s already laid out two men. Hell if I know how she did it, but…Laz, she’s one strong bitch!”

Meg’s mind raced. 
Laz, part of her brain processes.  Laz, as in Lazerus?   The man brought back from
the dead
?

She didn’t allow herself a moment’s reprieve.  She focused every ounce of her energies, both physical and emotional into knocking out the men surrounding her.

Her extreme heightened emotions were on the attack and though she didn’t know exactly how she was able to do it, she found if a soldier’s hands touched her bare skin, she could stare into their souls and send them waves of emotion, latched around them one at a time, and fed them the most desperate, heart-wrenching feelings. 

Whatever she was doing, it was working. 

They were reeling from her like she’d struck them with a steel crow bar in the gut. 

She’d never done this before, but the more fury she felt, the more powerful her emotions crashed around those who dared touch her. 

Laz had yet to try to lay a hand on her again since she sent him the first burst of fury coupled with her head-butt, resulting in his broken nose.  He was having his soldiers manhandle her as he walked beside the groaning, grunting mass of soldiers.

Instinctively, she stopped struggling and locked eyes with Laz.  She poured her emotional strength into the connection.  It only took a moment. 

“Stop,” he called to his underlings fighting to maintain hold on the female.

They were breathing hard, and though she knew she could keep picking them off, one-by-one, she had a better idea.

Laz stared at her deep, dark-eyes.  The sheen of sweat forming on her brow was beautiful beneath the wild dark curls of her hair that had escaped her previously tight pony-tail.  The silver duct tape gripped the soft skin around her mouth, but all he could see was her black pools staring into his soul.

Meg stood rock still, as though not bound by anything.  Her chest was heaving causing the pulse in her sweat-sheened throat to thrum hypnotically.  Her small frame commanded the attention of everyone—especially Laz.

The other soldiers loosened their grip slightly as their leader, Laz, approached.  His eyes never left hers.  Blood was still seeping from the broken nose she’d given him minutes before, but he seemed inexplicably mesmerized and oblivious.

The soldiers felt a wave of relief when Laz stood inches from their captive.  Something deep in their skin told them to let go of the girl.  Their need to acquiesce was hypnotically obeyed by all.