Shards of Hope

Chapter 56

ANTHONY LISTENED TO what his daughter was telling him and knew he had to act. “How many?”

“At least twenty-five,” Faith responded, her voice high-pitched and her words running together. She’d called him directly after an intense unsolicited vision, was clearly still feeling the aftereffects.

Stopping her when she would’ve spoken again, he said, “Are you alone?” He understood that her bond with her jaguar changeling mate gave her a way to leach off dangerous psychic energy, but foreseers needed someone with them after the most powerful visions. It was one of the reasons why F-Psy had always been and would always be part of a tight clan group.

Even when Anthony had believed Faith had to be isolated for her own good, he’d made sure she always had medical oversight.

“No,” she replied. “I was with Mercy when it happened. She’s here.”

Identifying the named woman as a DarkRiver sentinel, Anthony didn’t reach for his other line to contact Vaughn. He and Faith’s mate had come to an understanding over the two and a half years the couple had been mated and Anthony didn’t have any compunction against making contact should Faith be at risk.

“Father,” Faith said, her voice breaking, “you have to stop him. He’s going to kill them all.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

Considering his options after hanging up, he moved to a screen at one end of the room and called Ming LeBon. The former Councilor’s face filled the screen moments later, the birthmark on the left side of his face a dark red that would’ve drawn the eye if Anthony hadn’t already been familiar with Ming’s pigmentation.

“Anthony,” Ming said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’ve had a disturbing prediction hit my desk.”

“Clearly this prediction involves me.”

“It does.” Anthony put his hands behind his back. “You will apparently kill an entire human family group within the next forty-eight hours, including all the infants.”

“I see. What’s your interest in this family group?”

Anthony didn’t know the family involved—to her panic and horror, Faith hadn’t been able to identify them, her vision focused on Ming. “None,” he said. “My only interest is the fact that you will realize only after the killing is over that your reconnaissance data was wrong—you will make a very dangerous mistake.” He paused to let that sink in.

“According to the F-Psy who had the vision, you will execute the patriarch last, on the theory that watching his family being tortured will cause him to talk.” Stripping the human’s mind would be faster, but that often destroyed parts of the brain—and Ming, Anthony knew, was an expert in torture. “What you discover is that he never had any knowledge of whatever it is you suspect.”

Ming held his gaze without blinking. “I appreciate the call.”

“There’s more,” Anthony continued. “The murders will start a chain reaction that’ll lead to weeks of riots in your region. It appears images of the victims’ bodies will be leaked with your name attached to the violence, calling your leadership of the region into question.”

“I see.”

“Will you be spilling innocent blood, Ming?”

“I’ll make my decision after reviewing all the facts.”

After he signed off, Anthony input all the identifiable elements of Faith’s vision and set his computers to searching on the slight chance that he might trace the family and be able to warn them. If they died, Faith would blame herself. That horrified guilt was the reason so many foreseers had switched voluntarily to business-only predictions at the dawn of Silence. The weight could crush, the pain could devour.

Anthony had never wanted that for his child.

MING rarely second-guessed himself. The last time he’d done so, it had been in his handling of the Arrows. He’d made a serious mistake there. The operation scheduled to take place in another twelve hours, on the other hand, hadn’t raised any red flags. He hadn’t even planned to be there—the fact that Anthony’s foreseer had connected it to him without his physical presence made it near certain the foreseer in question was Faith NightStar.

And Faith NightStar was never wrong.

Accessing the file once more, he checked the data. The patriarch of this family group was maneuvering for political power in Ming’s region, had already made connections with a number of powerful supporters. That wasn’t what made him worth killing—Ming could crush political climbers without bloodshed.

The thing that had pushed Ming to give the interrogation and assassination order was that the patriarch appeared to have access to information that came from inside Ming’s headquarters, which meant Ming had a leak he needed to plug. However, according to Faith NightStar, his people would torture and execute the man’s entire family and still not discover the identity of the leak.

The other possibility was that Anthony was lying and twisting the facts to suit his own agenda—except Anthony had never shown any interest in Ming’s region. The NightStar patriarch was tightly focused on his foreseers, the family empire and reach such that he didn’t need to make land grabs.

Closing the file, he walked out of his office and down to the underground bunker that housed his data analysts. “I want you to mine down for information on Kurevni,” he ordered. “Get me hard links to where and how he gained access to classified data.” The previous run had been thorough as per the standard protocols under his command, and as everything appeared to line up as expected, Ming hadn’t seen the need to go any deeper.

“Yes, sir. How far?”

“Exhaust all possibilities.” He would put the action on hold until he had absolute confirmation. Ignoring a warning from Faith NightStar was not a decision to be made lightly.