Shield of Winter

Chapter 47

LUCAS HUNTER AND Sascha Duncan, as well as Alice Eldridge, were already in the city and in discussion with Jaya and Abbot by the time Ivy and Vasic got back. Leaving the empaths to talk, Vasic decided to take advantage of the relative quiet to have another important meeting. Vasic trusted Abbot to the core, and Lucas looked at Ivy with a protectiveness that likely resulted from the leopard alpha’s love for his own empathic mate.

“Contact me the instant there’s a problem,” he told them both. “I can be back in a heartbeat.”

Getting their agreement, he ’ported to an isolated location in the Sierra Nevada mountains and sent Judd the visual so the SnowDancer lieutenant and fellow Arrow could join him. “Thank you for meeting me,” he said when the other man arrived a minute later.

“No thanks needed.” Running a hand through his hair to dislodge snow that had fallen on him from an overhead branch, Judd fell into step with Vasic.

The snow wasn’t as thick in the trees as it was out in the open areas, their boots more than adequate for the terrain.

Judd gave him a measuring look. “You realize no one knows you have a visual anchor for this area.”

“I never had any intention of using it for an aggressive act. I like the quiet.” It was one of the most remote parts of SnowDancer’s vast territory. He’d found it by accident, the image he’d been given for a transfer matching a particular section here. Such an accidental match was so rare, Vasic had only experienced it twice.

“I like the quiet, too.” Judd’s breath frosted the air as he spoke. “Brenna and I come up here.” His cheeks creased. “We had a snow fight last time.”

Vasic wouldn’t have understood that before Ivy. Now, he found himself wondering if Ivy would enjoy playing in the snow. Rabbit surely would. “I need to ask you some highly personal questions.”

Judd reached down to pack the snow into a ball. “I’ve been hoping for a long time that someone else in the squad would get to the point where a discussion like this would be necessary.” Rising, he threw the snowball with a fast arm. “Ask.”

“How do you control your telekinesis while intimate with your mate?”

“I broke a damn lot of furniture at the start, including two beds.” A curious glance. “What are you doing?”

“Traveling around the world.”

Judd stared, then started laughing, the gold flecks in his eyes vivid against the brown. Vasic couldn’t imagine laughing, but it looked as if Judd did it naturally, so perhaps it was a skill he could learn.

“Sorry,” the other Arrow said when he could speak again. “I just had visions of what Brenna would do to me if I teleported us somewhere public in the middle of intimate skin privileges.” He thrust his hands into the pockets of the jeans he wore below a fine black sweater and black leather-synth jacket. “Your Ivy blister your hide?”

“I’ve managed to keep the locations remote so far,” Vasic said, “but obviously, I can’t leave that to random chance.” He straightened the cuff of his own leather-synth jacket—the style was different from Judd’s, but they were otherwise identically dressed. “Ivy says my civilian clothes are a uniform.”

Judd scowled. “Leather-synth provides excellent protection against knives, and denim is extremely strong.”

“Exactly.” Their civilian clothes made sense. “Krychek is trialing a new bulletproof material that also deflects a certain level of laser fire.” Vasic had already ordered a coat for Ivy of the material, though Krychek’s offer had been made to the squad.

Instead of rejecting the request, the cardinal had ordered the coat be fast-tracked. “You should get it for Brenna.”

Judd nodded. “I might talk to Kaleb about a larger pack-wide order.” Stopping at the edge of a cliff, he looked out over the spread of ruler-straight firs below, their branches heavy with snow. “Like I said, I broke a lot of furniture,” he began, keeping his eyes scrupulously forward. “Then we bought a titanium frame for the bed, and I bent it—though at least I could bend that back until it strained too far. Outside, I took down several trees, cracked a few boulders.”

Vasic hadn’t previously considered the idea of choosing to have sex out of doors. His body decided it liked the idea. “And now?”

“I’ve come up with a few tricks,” Judd told him. “But I learned the thing that works best from another Tk in the 9 range.”

“Who?” As far as Vasic was aware, of the high-Gradient telekinetics in the Net, only Judd and Kaleb had broken conditioning.

“Think about it.”

Vasic knew or knew of every other strong Tk in the world. Considering Judd and Krychek, he realized the unknown Tk had to be isolated in some way, in a situation that encouraged a fracture in his Silence . . . or that conditioning had been problematic from the start.

“Stefan.” The Gradient 9.7 Tk was on permanent duty in the deep sea station Alaris. “He’s been very careful.”

“He’s one of us.”

“Yes.” Stefan had been shifted out of Arrow training as a result of a psychological issue that made him no less valuable as a telekinetic and no less trustworthy. In the past five years, he’d assisted in the defection of a number of Arrows by helping to fake their deaths. “What’s Stefan’s solution to the problem?”

“You have to teach your brain to handle sexual stimuli,” Judd told him. “Under Silence, we were taught to maintain strict discipline even under severe duress, including torture. However, none of us were taught how to handle pleasure, especially the extreme pleasure of true intimate contact.”

“There was no need.” The dissonance would’ve crippled them before it ever got this far.

“Exactly. It means we have a blind spot—it also means we don’t have any bad habits or training to overcome.”

The latter, Vasic realized, was extremely important. “No need to split our attention in order to fight previous programming.”

A nod from Judd. “Right now, in the absence of any other instruction, your mind reverts to the most instinctive aspect of your ability. For most Tks, it’d be random destruction.” The other man shot him a quick, amused glance. “You’re unique, but the same principles apply.”

“I could train my brain to go only to certain locations.” Such as from one bed to another. “It’s not the best solution, but better than ending up on ice or on rocks.”

“There’s another option.” Judd pushed back strands of hair that had fallen across his forehead. “Your core ability is still Tk, so you should be able to teach yourself not to ’port at all in that situation. Neither Stefan nor I,” he continued, “are able to maintain control while sharing skin privileges with our mates. Perhaps if we’d been taught so since childhood—”

“I doubt that would alter the situation,” Vasic interrupted to say. “True intimacy demands we lower our barriers.”

“Yes.” The single word held a staggering depth of emotion. “So, because we can’t curb the surge of telekinetic power,” he said, “we’ve learned to redirect it in a specific way.”

“Into water?” Vasic guessed, seeing where Judd was going.

“Yes. Stefan’s surrounded by the sea and even his strength won’t do more than cause a ripple or two.” The other man paused to watch a pack of wolves lope across the clearing below. “I do the same by filling in the bath with water. It’s steam by the end.” A grin and a shrug. “Not to say I don’t still lose it now and then, but it’s a hell of a lot better than before. I figure the more practice I get”—laughter in his eyes now, at a training regime that was clearly no hardship—“the better I’ll become at handling the energy surge.”

Vasic considered the genius of the idea. “Stefan’s solution utilizes the same training protocols and pathways as Silence, but with positive reinforcement”—sexual pleasure—“instead of negative.” Using what had been forged in pain and torture for a far more beautiful end.

“It does take time, so you might be traveling for some time yet,” Judd added. “And your instinctive ’porting ability may make things more difficult, but I think you have the mental strength and the psychic discipline to be successful.”

Vasic thought it over. “To begin, I’ll set my brain on a loop of isolated locations.” Going bed to bed might be impossible this quickly, and even using one or two of his favorite remote locations would require meticulous care, but Stefan’s inspired plan had given him an idea as to how to do it—not to build something new, but to use what was already there.

“I’ll utilize one of the data memorization techniques we were taught,” he said, thinking it through, “hook it into the same system that allows my senses to continue to function even if I have to sleep in the field.” Both skills were basic building blocks of an Arrow’s training.

Judd nodded slowly. “Yes, that should work. Tell me if it does?”

“Of course.” It might be an option that could assist another Arrow down the line. “Is Stefan safe?” As the most isolated of them all, the other man had little access to help if he needed it quickly.

“Yes, but perhaps you should visit Alaris, speak to him. With the situation in the Net changing as fast as it is, he should know we have his back if something goes wrong.”

“I’ll go after this.” Due to an inexplicable quirk of teleportation, teleporters didn’t suffer any ill-effects from the huge changes in pressure involved in ’porting to the ocean floor and back up.

Shifting on his heel, Judd led them back into the trees. “You said you had more than one question.”

“How did you know what to do?” Vasic had gone on instinct to this point, and Ivy didn’t seem displeased, but he wanted to be certain he was doing everything he could to pleasure her . . . because touching her gave him pleasure so intense, he had no hope of ever describing it.

“I’ll send you my research file,” Judd said, “but you know what I’ve learned? If you listen to her, you’ll be fine.”

Vasic thought of the little noises Ivy made in bed, the way she dug her nails into his back when he touched her just right, and felt his body pulse. “I want this for the others, Judd.” Their brethren deserved the same happiness, the same steep learning curve anchored in pleasure rather than pain.

Judd’s eyes met his. “I never thought you’d make it to this point. I’m fucking glad you have. We’ll get the others here, too—we’re Arrows.”

“We never give up on a target,” Vasic completed, and for the first time since he’d been taught it, the assertion wasn’t one of darkness, but of hope.

IVY and Sascha spent a large chunk of the day visiting and interviewing the nonempathic survivors around the world, thanks to Vasic’s ’porting ability, while Jaya and Alice remained at the apartment and collated the data in a search for patterns.

“The survivors,” Jaya said over a take-out dinner late that night, “all have fractures in their Silence and they accept those fractures, even when the resulting emotions aren’t pretty.”

Ivy threw Abbot another nutrition bar where the blue-eyed Arrow sat with Vasic and Lucas. The three men had ceded the couches to the women, pulling up chairs for themselves. “The woman of darkness that we saw,” she said to Jaya afterward, “she was so sad and so angry.”

“The embodiment of rejection.” Sascha stared at her food without eating. “Silence teaches Psy to stifle all emotion, but at the heart of it, it’s always been about the aggressive, violent, angry emotions—and the PsyNet is impacted by the subconscious as well as the conscious.”

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.