Blaze of Memory

CHAPTER 4

Six hours after their early morning call, Dev found himself leading Ashaya Aleine down to the medical floor. Her mate, Dorian, walked by her side, his mouth grim. “If Ekaterina was taken from the lab when it was destroyed, she’s likely been in Council hands for over five months.”

Ashaya uttered a choked-off sound of pain, making Dorian swear under his breath. Dragging his mate to his side, he nuzzled the electric curls of her hair. “Sorry, Shaya.”

“No.” She sucked in a breath. “You’re right.”

“And if that’s true,” Dev said, “they now know everything she did.”

Ashaya nodded. “Ming LeBon would’ve torn her mind open. He was behind the destruction of the lab—it had to be him that took her.”

The mental violation, Dev thought with a burst of cold anger, would’ve been all consuming. A psychic assault left the victim with not even the slimmest avenue of escape, no place where she could even pretend that everything was okay.

“Why leave her on your doorstep?” Ashaya said, voice shaken. “A warning?”

“A taunt, more like it.” Dev had made it his business to study the enemy. “Psychological warfare.”

Dorian nodded. “Could be Ming wants to spook you into doing something rash.”

“All the Shine kids are safe and accounted for,” Dev said, having spent the past few hours verifying that. “Unfortunately, we’ve still got the gray area where we’ve tracked them down, but they haven’t yet agreed to accept our help.” The last Council mole had taken advantage of that gray area, fingering children for experimentation after they came into the field offices but before they’d been brought safely under the Shine umbrella.

Every single death haunted Dev. Because Shine was about safety, about locating those Forgotten who’d been lost, cut off from the group when the Council first began hunting their ancestors. But instead of safe harbor, it was only death the children had found . . . while the old Shine board sat by, their heads in the sand.

Dev had been ready to kill them for their blindness, their refusal to see that the culling had begun again—and according to some, he’d almost succeeded. One board member had had a heart attack after Dev threw pictures of the children’s broken bodies in front of him. Several others had come close to nervous breakdowns.

But no one had stopped him when he took over, when he went after the mole with single-minded focus. “This way,” he said, leading them down a silent corridor.

“Tally said you shut down the recruitment process last time.” Dorian looked over, his eyes a brilliant blue even more vivid against his distinctive white-blond hair. “You going to do that this time, too?”

“They need a mole to find those kids,” Dev said, his tone flat. “And the mole is dead.”

Ashaya blinked, glancing from him to Dorian, but didn’t say a word. Her mate nodded. “Good.”

Dev used his palm print to scan them in through a security door. “I can’t justify shutting down the program again so soon without solid proof of trouble—we spend so much time and effort on finding descendants of the original rebels for a reason. There are kids out there going insane because they think they’re human.”

After a hundred years of Silence, of the Psy remaining locked within their own culture, no one bothered to test for psychic abilities. No one realized that some of those crazy kids actually were hearing voices in their heads. Some were latent telepaths whose gifts had broken through during puberty. Some were weak empaths, overwhelmed by the emotions of others. And some. . . some were secret treasures, gifts rising up out of a century of genetic drift.

Seeing Glen exiting a room, he waved the doctor down. The other man hurried over, dark circles under his eyes.

Dev took in his friend’s wrinkled clothes, the way his ginger hair stuck up in untidy tufts. “I thought you were off shift.”

Glen thrust a hand through his hair, further electrifying the strands. “I wanted to be here in case our guest woke. Caught some sleep in the break room.”

Introductions took only a couple of seconds, and then they were walking into Ekaterina’s room. To Dev’s surprise, she was awake and sitting up, sipping something out of a small cup. He glanced at Glen.

“Just ten minutes ago,” the doctor murmured.

Ekaterina looked straight at Dev, her eyes skating off Ashaya as if her former colleague didn’t exist. “The cobwebs are starting to part.” Her voice was husky, as if it hadn’t been used for a long time. . . or as if it had been broken in the most brutal way.

Walking to her side, Dev took the cup she held out, caught by the shadows that swirled in the green-gold depths of her eyes. “How much do you remember?”

She swallowed but didn’t break eye contact. “I don’t know who I am.” It was a plea, though her voice didn’t shake, her eyes didn’t glisten. Yet Dev heard the scream—a thin, piercing cry that stabbed him right in the heart.

Part of him, a small, barely salvageable part, wanted to offer comfort, but this woman, simply by existing, was a danger to his people. She was Psy. And Psy connected to the Net could not be trusted. No matter that she acted more human than her brethren, he had to treat her as a weapon, carrying within her the seeds of Shine’s destruction. And if she proved to be that, he’d have to make the most lethal of decisions . . . even if it killed the last bit of humanity left in him.

“Ekaterina.” Ashaya’s voice, gentle, coaxing.

The woman on the bed blinked, shook her head. “No.”

“That’s your name,” Dev said, refusing to let her look away.

Those changeable hazel eyes flickered and went out, a flame dying. “Ekaterina’s dead,” she said with absolute calm. “Everything is dead. There’s nothing lef—” Her teeth snapped together as her body convulsed with vicious strength.

“Glen!” Catching her before she twisted off the bed, Dev tried to keep her from hurting herself, her bones startlingly fragile under his hands.

“Say it.”

She kept her lips closed.

“Say it.”

No. No. No.

“Say it.”

He didn’t tire, didn’t stop, didn’t shove into her mind. The horror of waiting for the pain, the terror, was somehow worse than the violation itself.

“Say it.”

She held on to her sanity through the first days, the first weeks.

But still he wouldn’t relent.

Her tongue felt so thick, so dry. Her stomach hurt. But she held on.

“Say it.”

It took three months, but she did. She said it.

“Ekaterina is dead.”

“She’s unconscious.” Glen shined a light into Ekaterina’s eyes as she lay slumped on the pillows. “Could be the residue of the drugs in her system, but I think the trigger was her name—some kind of a psychic grenade.”

“More likely a combination,” Ashaya said, then reeled off the chemical compounds of the sleeping pills Glen had noted on the chart. “Some of these agents cause memory loss in Psy.”

The doctor’s eyes brightened at having found a colleague. “Yes. There’s a possibility some of the drugs were used sparingly in conjunction with other methods to psychologically break her.”

Dev stared down at Ekaterina Haas’s scratched and bruised face, wondering what she’d given up to come out of the torture alive. . . what she’d let her captors put in her. His hands fisted inside the pockets of his pants—whatever bargain she’d made, it hadn’t saved her. “What you said when you first arrived,” he murmured to Dorian while the doctor and Ashaya were distracted, “it can’t happen.”

“Shaya wants her close.” Dorian folded his arms, eyes on his mate. “It devastated her when she thought Ekaterina died.”

“Whatever happened to her,” Dev said, unable to take his own eyes off the thin figure in the bed, “whatever was done to her, she’s not the woman your mate knew. We’re far more capable of monitoring her.”

“And if she proves a threat?”

Dev met the other man’s gaze. “You know the answer to that.” Dorian was a DarkRiver sentinel. And the leopard pack hadn’t reached its current status as one of the most dominant changeling groups in the country by being weak . . . or easily forgiving.

Blowing out a soft breath, Dorian returned his attention to his mate. “You make that decision, you bring me in. You let me prepare her.” His voice was a harsh, low order.

Dev was more used to giving orders than taking them, but Ashaya had saved the lives of Forgotten children at risk to her own. Then she’d blown the Council’s secret perversions wide open. She’d earned his respect. “Fair enough.” However, as he watched Ekaterina’s chest rise and fall in what seemed to him to be a dangerously shallow rhythm, he wondered once again if he’d be able to do the deed if it came down to it. Could he break that body that had already been broken so badly?

The answer came from a part of him that had been honed in blood and pain. Yes.

Because when you fought monsters, sometimes, you had to become a monster.

Letter dated May 24, 1969

My dear Matthew,

Your father says that one day you’ll laugh at these letters I write to you, to the son who is, at the moment, trying to suck both thumbs at once. “Zarina,” David said this afternoon, “what kind of a mother writes political treatises to her seven-month-old son? ”

Do you know what I told him?

“A mother who is certain her child will grow up to be a genius.”

Oh, how you make me smile. I wonder, even as I write this, if I’ll ever let you read these letters. I suppose they’ve become a kind of journal for me, but since I’m far too sensible to write “Dear Diary,” instead I write to the man you’ll one day become.

That man, I hope, will grow up in a time of far less turmoil. The psychologists’ theories notwithstanding, early indications are that it’ll prove almost impossible to condition rage out of our young.

But that isn’t what worries me—I’ve heard disturbing rumors that the Council is looking more and more to Mercury, Catherine and Arif Adelaja’s secretive group. If those rumors prove true, we may be in far more trouble than I believed.

It’s not that I have anything against Catherine and Arif. Indeed, I once considered them friends and have only admiration for their courage in surviving the worst tragedy that can befall a parent. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that they are two of the most extraordinary minds of our generation. And, having spent considerable time with both of them, I know one thing with categorical certainty—they want only the best for our race.

But sometimes, that depth of need—to save, to protect—can become a blinding fervor, one that destroys the very thing it thinks to safeguard.

I can only hope the Council sees that, too.

Love,

Mom