Shield of Winter

Chapter 14

Empaths can endure a lack of tactile contact, but those of designation E find such a lack difficult at best. When asked to describe the sensation, most simply said that it “hurt.” What is impossible to put into words is the profound pain embodied in that single word.

Excerpted from The Mysterious E Designation: Empathic Gifts & Shadows by Alice Eldridge

DINNER WAS A quiet affair for Ivy, she and the other Es having decided they needed space to consider everything that had been discussed. First, she spoke to her parents on the comm; she’d messaged them after her arrival at the compound, and now she reiterated that she was safe and excited about this new phase in her life.

Then, ignoring the nutrition bars and drinks in the pantry, she put together a simple meal, akin to what she’d have at home. That, of course, was only possible because of the fresh ingredients stocked in the kitchen.

Would you like to have dinner? she asked the man who’d no doubt arranged the supplies. The quiet, intense compulsion he aroused within her continued to grow unabated. She’d watched him organize his unit with military efficiency in the past hours, deal undaunted with the most lethal predator in the Net, handle multiple questions from the Arrows and empaths both. Through it all, he’d been a solid wall.

No, she frowned, that was the wrong analogy. Vasic was stable, but in the way the sea was stable on a day without a breeze, his depths hidden beneath a reflective surface that was an impenetrable shield.

His voice slid into her mind like ice-kissed water on the heels of that thought. Almost too cold . . . and yet delicious to a parched throat. She shivered, her nipples tightening in a confusing physical response that left her breathless.

I’ve had the nutrition bars I need.

His response was a jolting reminder that her awareness of him was most-assuredly one-sided. To Vasic, she was simply a task, his job to keep her alive for the duration of this experiment. It might be that the winter-frost eyes in which she saw haunting mysteries, were instead nothing but remote gray: flat and without depth.

Disturbed at the idea, she took the salad she’d prepared and—leaving the fish to grill—went to sit on the edge of her little porch, her booted feet on the hard-packed snow below. When Rabbit ran out to join her with a reproachful look, she got up with a laugh and carried out his food and water bowls so he could eat with her under the night sky. She could’ve turned on the porch light, but she liked the silver caress of the moon, the way the glow from the cabin windows around her painted the air in hazy warmth.

Two seconds later, the hairs rose on the back of her neck and Rabbit growled.

“Is there a problem with your cabin?” Vasic asked.

Stomach clenching, she looked up at where he stood silhouetted against the night, tall and distant and every inch a soldier. “I just wanted to sit out here.” Her breath was puffs of white, her pulse a rapid flutter in her throat

“The temperature is continuing to drop.”

“I’m wearing warm clothes, and it’s nowhere near as cold as the orchard.” She ate a little of her salad in an effort to ease the sudden nervous tension that had her muscles taut, and decided to follow instinct. “Why don’t you sit?” If he’d wanted solitude, he could’ve left as soon as she’d confirmed she was happy out here. “Keep me company.”

When he took a seat on the porch, a foot of distance between them, she had to bite back an exhilarated cry. No, Vasic was no flat mirage. Never would be. He was an intelligent, complex, fascinating male who made her body and mind respond in a way with which she had no experience . . . but she knew she didn’t want it to stop. “Are you sure you don’t want anything?” she asked, feeling a deep need to give him something. “A drink?”

“No.” Forearms braced on his thighs, he stared out into the darkness, his profile ascetic in its purity and his shoulders broad. “What are your views on the other Es?”

“Why?” Teeth sinking into her lower lip, Ivy fought the urge to trace the clean lines of him. “Are you making a report?”

No movement; even his breathing was strictly controlled. “If you’d rather I didn’t utilize your answers in any official report, I won’t.”

“I’d rather.” Forcing her eyes off the stark, dangerous beauty of him, she ate another bite of salad.

Vasic didn’t rush her, just waited. He was, she realized, comfortable with quiet in a way very few people ever became. Again, she thought of a warrior-priest, relentless and devoted . . . but she no longer liked the idea of a man dedicated to an ideal. A warrior-priest was untouchable, and Ivy was beginning to understand that she very much wanted to touch Vasic.

All her life, she’d made physical contact with her parents. As a child, it had been instinct. As she grew older, she’d realized how lucky she was that they never rejected her touch as other Silent parents might. Tactile contact, she’d long ago comprehended, helped her feel centered . . . happy, but not just anyone would do. Aside from her parents, she’d exchanged hugs with only two others in the settlement, both close women friends.

Her pulse rocketed at the idea of such intimacy with the deadly male who sat beside her. Self-protective instincts should’ve shut that thought down before it took form, but it continued to grow in her abdomen, a tight ball of warmth and nerves and foolishness. Because Vasic hadn’t given her a single sign that he’d welcome any physical contact. He was an Arrow, as inaccessible as the cold splendor of the stars.

Unfortunately, Ivy’s body and mind refused to listen to reason.

“I talk a lot,” she said, keeping a firm hold on her bowl and fork so she wouldn’t yield to the compulsion to run her fingertips over his skin. “To Rabbit mostly, but I’ll probably talk to you too if you’re around.” It came out too fast, his proximity continuing to do strange things to her. “Do you mind?”

Vasic’s lashes, straight and dark, came down, lifted again. “No.”

Deciding to take the one-syllable answer at face value, she hauled her wandering thoughts back in line with teeth-gritted concentration. “I like the majority of the other empaths,” she said in answer to his original question. “A couple get on my nerves, and I think I’ll become good friends with Jaya.” The two of them had clicked at once. “All pretty normal.”

“Yet you sound . . . disappointed.” The last word was chosen with care, as if he’d taken in her words, considered her tone of voice, then run it against a mental database of emotional expressions.

Wondering if he’d tell her, she said, “How did you judge my emotional response? Do you have a specific process?”

“Yes,” Vasic said, turning to look at the copper-eyed woman who didn’t seem to comprehend that he was a monster. “Does the analysis have less value for being done consciously?” It was a serious question, her answer important to him in a way he couldn’t articulate.

“No,” she said at once. “People who live with emotion do it instinctively, but the process is the same.”

It affected him to realize she saw him as a man, not as something lesser, but he couldn’t permit her to believe a lie. “The empathic connection is missing.” He didn’t feel an echo of her emotions or think back to a time when he’d felt the same. “It’s a wholly remote calculation.”

Her fork making a clinking noise against the bowl as she abandoned her salad to one side, Ivy braced one hand against the wood of the porch and angled herself to face him. “I’ve never been truly Silent,” she admitted as her pet wriggled under her arm to sit tucked up against her. “Not even when I thought I was.” A sudden tightness to her jaw, her lips pressed to a thin line, and her spine rigid.

“Once, when I was fourteen,” she said as he recognized the signs of cold fury, “I saw an older Psy boy using a sharp branch to stab at a cat trapped in a culvert. I told him to stop, and he said he was running an experiment.”

Vasic went motionless. “That wasn’t Silence.” He knew because he’d seen men and women like that boy too many times—and a large number were in positions of power in the PsyNet. “It was a sign of the psychopathy Silence makes it easy to hide.”

“Yes.” Ivy shifted to run her hand over Rabbit’s back, petting the dog to heavy-eyed somnolence. “But back then I couldn’t think that clearly. I was so angry at him that I found another stick and began to poke him in the neck and the face until he lost his balance and fell.” A tremor shook her frame, and her hand fisted on Rabbit’s coat.

The memory, Vasic understood, still incited the same rage.

“He said I was being irrational and he’d report me”—the copper of her eyes glittered—“and I said go ahead.”

Vasic catalogued the expression in a private mental folder in which he’d begun to collect even the tiniest details about Ivy. It was a small madness, and one of which no one need be aware. “He didn’t, did he?” Cowards who attacked the defenseless and the vulnerable did not last long against Ivy’s kind of honest strength.

“No,” she confirmed, her voice steeped in disgust. “He knew what he was doing was wrong, and I knew never to be caught alone with him.” Cuddling Rabbit, she shot Vasic a fierce grin. “The cat was fine—and it scratched him hard across the cheek before it ran off.”

Vasic watched the vivid play of emotions on her face in a vain attempt to know every nuance of her. When color touched her cheekbones, her lashes coming down to veil her eyes, he realized he’d stared for too long, but he didn’t shift his gaze. “Why are you disappointed with your reactions to the other empaths?”

“It’s just . . . I don’t know.” Her shoulders slumped beneath the autumn orange of her cardigan. “I guess I thought there’d be an instant connection between us all.”

“Telepaths, telekinetics, none of us feel any kind of an immediate connection with one another.” Vasic handled a telepathic security check- in by his sentries even as he spoke. “Why should it be different for empaths?”

She made a face, brow heavy. “I didn’t say it was logical,” she muttered, as her pet jumped off the porch to walk to the center of the snowy clearing.

A small beep came from inside the cabin a second later to indicate the cooking cycle was complete on whatever meal Ivy was making, the machine now in the process of turning itself off. Ignoring it, she said, “You know something else?”

Adding another mental image to his private file of Ivy, who he did not understand and whose actions he couldn’t predict, he said, “What?”

“I made a decision to go forward, to not be chained by the past.” Her shoulders grew stiff. “A sensible choice, good for my mental health.”

“And now you find you feel anger.” There was no way to mistake the violence of emotion that was white lines around her mouth, rigid tendons on her neck, a barely controlled vibration in her voice.

“Rage,” Ivy said, “that’s what I feel when I think of what they did to me in that reconditioning room.” Jaw clenched so tight that Ivy could hear her bones grinding against one another, she spoke through the brutal roar in her ears. “They hurt me. Not the pain, though that was bad, but what they did to who I was. I’ll never again be the same Ivy who walked into that torture chamber.”

Vasic’s gaze—intense, unwavering, opaque—continued to hold hers. “You were once a girl who fought off a bully with a branch. Now you’re a woman about to fight for the survival of your race. What did you lose?”

Ivy stared at him. Then, picking up some salad in her hand, she threw it at his head. It froze in midair to float gently back into her bowl. His control further infuriated her. “What did I lose?” she said through gritted teeth. “I used to be happy, to see the world as a good place. I lost that innocence.”

Vasic took his time answering. “An innocent could not be here, could not attempt to do what you must. For this, the Net needs a warrior.”

Her pulsing anger didn’t lessen, too huge and too old a thing. It needed a target, but the people who’d hurt her weren’t here and this infuriating Arrow had just called her a warrior by implication. “I don’t understand you,” she said an instant before hot pokers lanced through her brain.

“There’s noth—” Vasic’s head snapped up at the tiny cry of pain that escaped her lips. “Ivy, what is it?” Ivy.

Vision blurring, she gripped the sides of her viciously pounding head. Something’s wrong. Her mouth couldn’t shape the words, her tongue thick and her heart a freight train. I can’t . . .

Vasic scented iron, rich and wet, before he saw the crimson-black droplets roll down Ivy’s neck. She was bleeding from one ear. Drop your shields. Blood began to trickle like tears over her cheeks. I need to see what’s happening.

No argument, her shields going down in an act of trust so staggering, Vasic couldn’t think about it if he was to function. Having already thrown his own shields around her, he scanned the surface of her mind to see countless ruptures, the mental landscape akin to a landmass ravaged by a major quake. “I’ll be back in seconds,” he said to her, so she’d know he wasn’t abandoning her, then made himself go.

Ivy was hunched over shaking when he returned with Aden. Rabbit, having run back to the porch, nudged at her with his nose, a low whine escaping the dog’s throat. “I need entry,” Aden said to Vasic, after evaluating the situation in a single glance.

Vasic slid open the shield he’d slammed around Ivy’s otherwise naked mind only long enough for Aden to slip in, then crouched down in front of her. Though physical contact wasn’t something with which he was comfortable, he gripped her chin, forcing her to meet his gaze. So close, he couldn’t miss that her eyes were bloodshot, her pupils hugely dilated.

Aden is the medic I told you about, he telepathed. The lock placed on you during the reconditioning has collapsed. Aden is removing the broken shards. Those shards were shoving into her brain itself, could cause irreversible damage if not extracted at once—and with extreme care.

Uncontrolled. It was a faint telepathic sound as her bloody tears dripped to the fists she’d braced on her thighs.

Yes. Ivy’s scheduled operation had been meant to head off exactly this type of vicious, unpredictable fragmentation. Don’t be concerned. Aden is gifted at such delicate work.

Ivy’s hand closed around his wrist, slippery with blood. I’m scared.

Vasic hadn’t experienced fear since he was a child, the emotional resonance long since faded. Now, however, he could physically sense Ivy’s fear in the stutter of her pulse, the shallowness of her breath, the shaken tone of her mental voice, and it tore at things long dead inside him. Aden will cause you no harm.

An instant of startling clarity in the crimson copper. He’s your brother.

Not genetically, but yes.

Her head dropped, her hand spasming to fall off his wrist.

Having caught her instinctively with his telekinesis so she wouldn’t wrench her neck, he shifted close enough that her cheek could rest against his shoulder. Aden. The speed with which she’d lost consciousness was not a good sign.

There are multiple fine shards already embedded in her brain.