Kiss of Snow

Chapter 49

JUDD RETURNED FROM checking out a warehouse the novices had fingered in the city to find Walker waiting for him. His brother had wanted to tell him the news about Sienna in person, and now they leaned against one of the huge glacial rocks that littered this region, their backs warm, their blood chilled.

“Hawke’s with her,” Judd said, and it wasn’t a question.

“Has your contact found anything?” Walker asked in a tone so devoid of emotion, it would’ve been easy to believe he cared nothing for Sienna.

The same man, Judd thought, had taken a near-broken teenage boy into his arms and told him he would always, always be family. The fierceness of that quiet declaration had given Judd an anchor in the midst of utter darkness, given him the will to survive. “I have a meeting with him tonight.”

“What are the chances?”

“I don’t know.”

Three hours later, in the otherwise empty nave of an old, abandoned church he got his answer. It was a devastating one.

“There is no second manuscript,” the Ghost told him.

A bleak gray invaded his mind. “Are you certain?”

“Yes. Alice Eldridge had an eidetic memory. According to the records I was able to unearth, she burned her research notes on the X designation when it became clear that Silence was inevitable. The implication is that she did so in an effort to stop the Council using her research in ways it was never meant to be used.”

Judd didn’t need the other man to spell it out. “The only remaining record was in Eldridge’s head.”

“Yes.”

It was the final staggering hit. “We’re going to lose Sienna.” A cold, hard rock in his chest, the knowledge that he wouldn’t be able to keep the promise he’d made to Kristine, wouldn’t be able to keep her daughter safe. “There’s no way to halt the buildup of cold fire once an X reaches this level.”

The Ghost considered this, considered, too, what would happen if Sienna Lauren did survive. An X was power. A cardinal X was power without limit. She was a wildcard he couldn’t control, one that might disrupt all his meticulously laid plans.

Then he looked at Judd, at the fallen Arrow who had walked with him even knowing what and who he was, who had kept his secrets. The Ghost knew nothing of friendship, but he understood loyalty and fidelity. He also understood that sometimes, plans needed to change—and that change could be used to a smart man’s advantage.

“Come,” he said to Judd. “I have something to show you.”

Judd followed him down into the crypt, keeping enough of a distance between them that he was never in any danger of seeing the Ghost’s face.

“Why do you do that?” the Ghost asked. “You know who I am.” Perhaps the only one who did. Even Father Xavier Perez, the third part of their curious triumvirate, had never made the connection.

“If I am ever taken,” Judd said, his words those of a man who knew danger could come as a silent shadow in the dark, “my mind is set with triggers that’ll erase your name from my memory banks at a single mental command. Images are more difficult to remove.”

So he’d made sure he didn’t have any images to erase. “You could’ve ruled.” For all of Judd’s power, the Ghost had never before considered that possibility.

“It would have killed what remained of my soul.”

The Ghost couldn’t recall ever having had a soul, didn’t know if he even understood what it was. “There,” he said, pointing to a shadowy corner of the old and musty crypt.

Judd went motionless as his telepathic senses registered an unknown mind. “Who?” And what had the Ghost done?

The rebel leaned against the crumbling brick wall. “I don’t think you’ll believe me if I tell you.”

Unable to detect any movement from the corner, Judd retrieved a slender penlight from his pocket and walked over to find a dust-coated glass box sitting neatly in the corner. It was about six feet long, a couple of feet deep if that, had fixtures that denoted a number of missing cables. Noticing someone had wiped away the sticky coating of dust near the top, creating a tiny window of clarity, he angled the cutting brightness of the light toward it.

A face looked out at him from within.

It was that of a small, fine-boned woman of mixed ethnicity. Her skin was a pallid brown, her eyes tilted up at the corners even in sleep, her skull smooth. Her hair had been shaved off, he realized, though there was no evidence of any electrodes ever having been attached to her skull. “Who?” he asked the Ghost once more.

“There is no second manuscript,” the Ghost said, walking to stand beside him, “but you have no need of it. I’ve brought you Alice Eldridge.”

HAWKE had made Sienna promise to stay in place when he left to get supplies. She’d broken that promise. But since he’d found her again before he got too grumpy and hungry, he didn’t snarl as he said, “Put up the tent,” and rolled the compact package to where she lay flat on her back, staring at the soft gray of the evening sky. “It’s your punishment.”

Clearly exhausted, she glared at him. “Do you never run out of energy?”

He pushed up the sleeves of his sweatshirt. “I’m alpha. Right now, I’m a hungry alpha who wants to take a bite out of you for making me run the extra miles. Put up the tent.”

She sat up but didn’t touch the tent. “Go bite yourself.”

So, she was feeling pissy. That was fine with him. He liked it much better than the defeated pain he sensed had come close to breaking her earlier today. “Actually, I’d prefer to use my teeth on softer flesh.” He was reaching out to snag her when flames erupted along her back, in her hair. “Sienna!”

She slapped up her hands. “I’m fine, I’m fine. Don’t touch.”

It was sheer hell to obey the order. He hauled her into his arms the instant the lick of red and yellow disappeared. “How bad?” he asked, seeing the pain at the corners of her eyes, knowing of the second layer of dissonance now.

“Bad. But not the dissonance. As soon as the power builds to a certain level, the dissonance either disengages or somehow short-circuits.” Her throat moved as she swallowed. “And it’s building faster and faster—I earthed after you left.”

He felt a lingering sense of ice—cold enough to burn—against his palm as he ran it over the silk of her hair. “Sienna, can the X-fire burn you?” His wolf wasn’t pacing anymore, its focus, the same focus that had helped a fifteen-year-old boy hold together a shattered pack, acute.

“That’s how Xs usually die, and if it reaches that point, then there’s no predicting how far the resulting explosion will spread.” Her smile was tight, painful. “It’s why we’re considered the most perfect weapon on the planet. An X can ‘scorch the earth,’ eradicating all that came before, but the damage to the environment is minimal. Much like after a real fire, the earth bounces back stronger and healthier—and the aggressors have a clean slate on which to build their own empire.”

He saw through the rational speech. “What aren’t you saying?”

“Ming had a theory—that if I could somehow purge my power on a level I can’t achieve with the earthing, I could initiate a restricted burst from the nascent buildup that would consume only me.” Her eyes met his. “If the flames ever turn blue . . . it means he was right. Promise me that you won’t come near me if that happens.”

“Come on,” he said instead of giving her a promise he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep. “Change of location.”

“Where are we going?” She grabbed the tent.

“Nearer a lake I know of up here. If all else fails, I’m throwing you in there.”

“I don’t know if that’ll work—X-fire isn’t like normal fire.”

“Better than turning into a human torch, don’t you think?” Turning, he went to touch his fingers to her jaw, felt his heart stop when she met his gaze.

Her eyes, those startling cardinal eyes, were drowning in shimmering, lethal gold kissed with crimson, and in them, he saw time running out at an inexorable pace.

JUDD didn’t know who was more surprised, him or Lara, when he teleported into the infirmary with Alice Eldridge’s frail body in his arms. But she threw off the shock to run to him at once, grabbing a scanner off a counter as she did so. “What do I need to know?” she asked as he placed the scientist’s naked form on the nearest bed.

“Cryonic suspension,” he said, head still ringing in disbelief.

“Impossible.” Lara put down the scanner, picked up a pressure injector, and pressed it to Alice’s neck. “No one has ever been brought back from suspension with their mind intact. Even the Psy made it illegal over a half century ago.”

“She was suspended before that, when the experimentation was at its peak.” It had been a time of chaos and change when Alice Eldridge had been taken—probably on the orders of a schemer in the Council superstructure who’d had some vague idea of waking her up later when things had calmed down and she could be properly debriefed.

But no one had ever come to wake her, her existence submerged by the wave of Silence that had swept across the Net. Perhaps the architect of her abduction had been killed, perhaps he’d simply forgotten her, but whatever the cause, the result was that Alice had slept undisturbed for over a hundred years in a small facility deep in the Balkans. A facility that ran on solar power, but that had had no gatekeepers or personnel for decades, was listed as a storage warehouse. One so small and unimportant that it was continually pushed down the list when it came time for inspections and renovations.

Judd had asked the Ghost how he’d found it.

The other man had looked at him with those eyes that held nothing of humanity. “I found it because I go where no one goes. There are places in the Net that belong only to me.”

Now, Judd shook off his tiredness over the dual teleport and told Lara everything he knew. “She was found in an experimental chamber created by a scientist who was considered to be on the verge of unlocking the secret of cryonics.”

“If he had, it wouldn’t be illegal now,” Lara muttered as she fitted a tissue-thin computronic skullcap over Alice’s head and walked around to the control pad at the end of the bed to scan the readout.

For the hundredth time, Judd tried to sense if Alice’s mind was active and came up against the same unexpected shield that had obstructed his earlier attempts. “He was a telepath, had a psychotic breakdown in which he destroyed his lab and all associated records before killing himself and his family.” Perhaps that was the reason her abductors had abandoned Alice Eldridge—no one knew what chemicals the scientist had used to induce suspension, much less how to reverse the state.

Lara slammed a fist down on the control panel. “Shit,” she muttered, staring at the woman who lay so lifeless on the bed, “just, shit.”

Judd had never seen that expression on the healer’s face. “How bad?”

“That’s the thing—I don’t know. It’s not like they teach us this at medical school.” She leaned forward, hands clamped around the edges of the panel. “I need Tammy and Ashaya.”

“Who first?” He could do one more dual teleport.

A moment’s pause. “Ashaya. She’s not a medic as such, but she’s a scientist—and she can discuss the situation with Amara.”

Ashaya’s twin, Judd knew, was insane. No one trusted her, and she couldn’t be allowed in the den, but there was no discounting her brilliance. “I’ll get Ashaya,” he said. “You call Tammy, have her drive up.” The teleport to Dorian and Ashaya’s house wasn’t difficult, since he’d been to the location before. He had enough energy to bring the M-Psy back before he slid down the wall and to the floor of the infirmary.

The two women ignored him as they worked over Alice, with Tamsyn arriving seventy minutes later. Sometime in between, Brenna found him, just like he’d known she would.

“Sweetheart,” she said, kneeling down beside him. “You’re about to flame out.”

He gave a slight shake of his head. “Not over the threshold.” But he was slurring his words, so he leaned against her when she sat down beside him . . . and then he was stretched out with his head in her lap.

The last thing he remembered saying was, “Walker, find him.” His older brother had a way of seeing to the heart of things, would know whether or not they should tell Sienna what had happened when there was a good chance Alice Eldridge would never wake. Even if she did, there was no guarantee she’d be able to tell them anything—the Ghost had found data that suggested she may have asked an E to wipe that part of her memory clean.

SIENNA scraped a kick by Hawke’s ear as the stars turned into glittering beacons overhead. “You can’t stay up here,” she said as he made a fluid move to avoid the blow. “You know that.” No matter how well prepared his people, how well drilled, they were changeling, were wolf—without their alpha, the pack would be lost, rootless. More, she understood his wolf needed to stand in the line of fire, to be SnowDancer’s first line of defense.

He danced out of the way of her strike. “You can do better than that, baby.” Blocking her next kick with his hand, he pushed up until she had no choice but to flip and come down hard on her feet. “I won’t leave you up here alone.”

When he’d suggested a bout of hand-to-hand sparring, she’d figured she might as well accept since she wasn’t going to sleep. Now she knew his cunning plan—to exhaust the argument right out of her. But they both knew she was right. “I’ll be fine,” she said after her teeth stopped vibrating. “I have supplies.” Taking a moment to catch her breath, she decided it was unfair he had that lickable upper body on display. “Put your sweatshirt back on.”

His eyes gleamed wolf-blue in the night. “Come closer and make me.”

Her lips twitched, though she’d thought the cold fire had seared the laughter right out of her heart. “Maybe I should take off my own top.”

A smile full of teeth. “Maybe you should.”

Laughing, she set her feet for another attempt at taking him down. “Talk me through the pack’s defensive plans.” If she managed to hold off synergy, then she might yet be able to assist SnowDancer.

Moving with lethal grace around her, Hawke spoke, listened when she asked questions or made suggestions. There was a perfection to the moment that made Sienna think: Yes, this is it. This is who we’re meant to be together.

If she could have, she would’ve frozen time at that instant, but second by second, minute by minute, the stars would dim, the sky would lighten—until dawn streaked a brilliant explosion of color across the Sierra. As brilliant as the cold fire inside of her, voracious and violent.

“Sienna, your eyes.”

“I know.” Stepping a small distance away, she let the flames pour out of her and into the earth in a storm of wildfire that was an impenetrable wall between her and her wolf.