Shield of Winter

Chapter 12

AN HOUR AFTER she’d met Chang by the stream, Ivy found herself seated on one of the large rocks at the open end of the clearing, the sun having warmed the stone. Around her sat the other empaths, the ten of them having gravitated toward one another.

Three men and six women, they ranged in age and geographic localities. Chang had come in from a research station in Kenya, while the blonde woman who wasn’t comfortable with Rabbit—Concetta—helped run a family business in Paraguay. Petite Lianne hailed from Kuala Lumpur, Teri from Houston, and Jaya from an atoll in the Maldives. Tibet born and raised Dechen sat next to Scottish Penn, the two of them across from Brigitte, a German based in Amsterdam. The final male, Isaiah, was from the tiny island nation of Niue.

Chang and Brigitte, both on the cusp of forty, were the oldest. “Apparently,” Chang had said to Ivy as they walked back from the stream, “anyone older is apt to find it more difficult to become active within the necessarily truncated timeline.”

That made sense to Ivy, as did the fact that there was no one younger than Jaya at twenty-one. A younger empath could well be too erratic—because while Silence was a terrible cage, it also taught strict mental discipline. Ivy’s conditioning might not have held, but she’d used the skills she’d learned under Silence to shield herself and to exert control in situations where betraying a fracture could’ve led to dangerous consequences.

“Woof!”

Glancing down at Rabbit, Ivy said, “Shh,” but his excitement made her smile. Her pet had investigated every corner of the compound by now, sniffed at everyone—even the Arrows—but remained full of energy.

“Your conditioning”—Isaiah’s dark eyes zeroed in on her smile—“it’s totally fragmented?”

Ivy was trying very hard not to dislike the male near her own age, but there was just something so smugly superior about him that it was near impossible. Now his question sounded like an accusation—but Ivy wasn’t about to apologize for who she was. “Yes.” It was true enough, given that the malfunctioning lock on her abilities, the source of her nosebleeds, was scheduled to be removed tomorrow.

It would leave her free of mental restraint for the first time in her life.

“My Silence, too,” Jaya said softly, her dark brown skin glowing in the sunlight, “is close to complete failure.” The pretty young woman, tall and with a quiet elegance that belied her years, petted Rabbit when he wandered over. “I was certain I’d be forced into a deep reconditioning . . . then Councilor Krychek mandated the fall of Silence.”

“I’m here because I’m being paid to be here.” Isaiah stared at the Arrows visible on the other side of the clearing, his hands clasped loosely between his knees. “I don’t believe in a hidden E designation. It seems pointless.”

Ivy couldn’t understand his attitude. “Did you talk to Sascha Duncan?”

“No.” Muscles worked in his jaw. “Councilor Duncan’s daughter has deluded herself into thinking she has some kind of an ability when she’s nothing but a flawed cardinal.”

Since Isaiah’s Silence was cracking like an eggshell to anyone who had eyes, Ivy decided to leave him to his theories and directed her words to the rest of the group. “I believe.” She spread the fingers of one hand over her heart, thinking of how she’d never, not once questioned her parents’ love or commitment, not even during her early childhood—when Gwen and Carter had adhered more strictly to the tenets of Silence. “Looking back, I know I’ve sensed emotion my entire life.”

Big-boned, her hair a tumble of dark blonde, and her skin pale cream, gorgeous Brigitte spoke with a distinctive, raspy voice. “Two months before I was contacted for this,” she said now, her accent that of a woman who’d lived all over Europe, “I witnessed a car accident. It was on a largely untraveled road through the Pyrénées, and I was the only one nearby to offer assistance.”

No one spoke when she paused, her throat moving.

“After calling the authorities”—she tugged her white shawl snug around her shoulders—“I ran down the bank to where the car had come to a violent stop against a large tree, and managed to open the driver’s-side door. The man inside was covered in blood and trapped by the way the car had crumpled around him.” A long, deep breath, air releasing softly from her nostrils.

“He was human, and he was so scared that it felt like nails being driven into my flesh.” Vivid, brutal, the image hit hard. “When he grabbed my hand, I didn’t retract it, and I thought that if only he wasn’t so afraid, his heart rate would calm, his breathing would even, and he’d have a higher chance of survival.”

“What happened?” Ivy whispered when the other woman stopped to stare at the ground, as if once more alone with a dying man on a lonely mountain road.

Cornflower blue eyes met Ivy’s. “The terror, his terror . . . it drained away . . . then it was inside me, choking me with a panic that blinded.” She shook her head. “I excused the experience as being brought on by the stress of the situation. But a week after the accident, the hospital forwarded me a note from the injured man.” She twisted her interlinked hands. “He thanked me for being there, for taking his fear.”

A whispering quiet, the trees waving in the breeze.

Bearded Penn was the one who broke it, his big body throwing a shadow across the ground. “I haven’t had a comparable experience, but the idea of a mind healer makes rational sense to me. We’re a race defined by our minds—it would be illogical not to have a designation focused on psychic injuries.”

Isaiah’s biceps bulged beneath the thin fabric of his thermal pullover as he gripped his left wrist with his right hand, but even he had no words to refute Penn’s statement.

“I’ve felt the darkness,” Concetta blurted into the quiet. “The rot in the Net.”

Everyone focused on the amber-eyed woman.

Her skin flushed. Ducking her head, she whispered, “It’s licking at the Net not far from the town where my family makes its home. I didn’t go near it, but it ‘tasted’ malignant even from a distance.” Fingers trembling, she picked at the fabric of her black pants. “How does anyone expect us to deal with such malevolence?” she asked, voice cracking on the last word. “What gives Kaleb Krychek and his pet assassins the right to force us into this?”

Ivy bristled at the derogatory description of Vasic and the rest of the squad. “Were you coerced?”

“I may as well have been.” Lip thrust forward in a pout that made the twenty-five-year-old appear younger than Jaya, Concetta wrapped her arms around herself. “The head of my family unit ordered me to accept—the contract fee, he said, was too generous to reject.”

Ivy kept her silence during the ensuing discussion, but she was disturbed by the realization that the other Es weren’t all a hundred percent committed to the success of this project.

Her nails dug into her palm.

Whatever Concetta and her ilk did or did not do, Ivy intended to see this through to the end. Her choice was both selfish and not—she wanted to help the innocents in the Net, but she also wanted to be more than the glued-together shards of the broken teenage girl who’d come out of the reconditioning chamber. She wanted to be the promise that had been stifled inside her for a lifetime. Good or bad, weak or strong, resilient or fragile, she needed to know who Ivy Jane was beyond the cage of Silence.

She found herself searching for Vasic on the heels of that passionate thought.

Four years old.

His life must’ve been brutally regimented, countless choices taken from him, his cage a punishing Arrow black. Would he ever choose to step out of the dark, or would he always stand as a lethal sentinel on the border? Protecting, shielding . . . but never being part of the world.

THE secondary security sweep complete, Vasic looked to where Ivy sat with the other Es. She appeared involved in an intense discussion with Jaya, while Rabbit drowsed at her feet.

“An idyllic image,” said the man who’d just ’ported in a short distance from Vasic, his black on black suit a stark contrast to the combat uniforms worn by the squad. “If we don’t consider the deadly infection they’ve been brought here to combat.”

Vasic had known Krychek would appear sooner or later. “Have you channeled the infection to this part of the Net?”

“I was able to nudge it in this direction.” Krychek’s cardinal gaze lingered on the empaths. “At its current rate of spread, it’ll take approximately twenty-four hours to intrude on this location.

“Will we be surrounded?” He had to make certain their exit strategy remained viable.

“No. Indications are it’ll come in from one side in a creeping wave, then extrude tendrils inward.”

A safer state of affairs, relatively speaking.

Krychek slid his hands into the pockets of his suit pants. “Are there any obvious problems?”

“It’s highly likely that Concetta Galeano’s family coerced her into accepting the contract.” The Arrow in charge of the female E had reported his reading of the situation to Vasic an hour ago.

“Suggested course of action?”

“Give her another twenty-four hours,” Vasic said, noting that Ivy’s hair was beginning to come loose from her ponytail. “If Ms. Galeano’s mind doesn’t reanchor to this region”—thus proving the depth of her reluctance—“I’ll return her to her family.”

“Should that happen, I’ll pay her a quiet visit to reiterate the importance of the confidentiality clause.”

Vasic was unsurprised by the decision. The last thing Krychek wanted, or the Net needed, was a leak about this experiment. Pure Psy might be in pieces, but as evidenced by the attack on Ivy, even if the fanatical group no longer posed a threat to the Net as a whole, the last remaining Pure Psy faithful were still dangerous on an individual level.

The more problematic and potentially lethal threat, however, came from those in the general population who were having difficulty adapting to a life beyond Silence—to them the empaths would be the enemy, a direct risk to the way of life they sought to cling to with increasing desperation.

“Anything else I should know?”

“No.” Vasic saw Ivy glance toward him, see Kaleb Krychek at his side. Shoulders going stiff, her copper-colored gaze swung back to him. It was odd, but he could almost imagine she was concerned about him.

Impossible.

Then he felt her mind brush his, her telepathic touch so gentle it was unlike any he’d ever before experienced. Vasic, be careful.

He thought he should tell her he was as capable of deadly force as Krychek, that they’d been formed in, if not the same, then analogous bloody crucibles. But now that he’d tasted Ivy’s smile, now that he’d felt her psychic touch, he didn’t want to see fear chill her skin again when she looked at him.

So all he said was, I am safe, Ivy.

And he thought perhaps if he had met her a lifetime ago, he would’ve been better than he was . . . but he hadn’t. Now it was too late, his soul pitted and shredded, his hands instruments of death. Still, he could do one thing, he thought, his eyes dropping to the gauntlet that was an outward reminder of his inhumanity.

He could protect her to the last beat of his heart.