Shield of Winter

Chapter 34

“IT’S A DEATH sentence at present,” he said when she began to argue.

Confirming it when she could offer no cure, Ivy realized, would do nothing but rob the woman of hope. And hope, cried Ivy’s own bruised heart, was everything.

Tears in her throat, she turned back to continue walking and almost ran into an overalled man bearing the badge of a major comm company on his front pocket. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

A curt nod at her apology and he was gone, the infection in him, too. Again and again and again, she tasted the fetid miasma of it, until her stomach began to churn. Yet when she glanced into the PsyNet, she saw nothing . . . nothing but Vasic right beside her. Oh God. Understanding crashed into her with the force of a freight train.

“You and Abbot”—she half turned into Vasic’s body—“you’re no longer safe.” Arrows had been protected by default at the compound, the infection leery about approaching the heavy knot of high-Gradient empathic minds. Now, Vasic was open on multiple sides.

“Our shields are extensive. The infection has shown no signs of penetrating them.”

Ivy shook her head, her hand on his gauntlet. “What about the microscopic filaments? We can’t even see them!” It was horrifying to know that that ugliness could invade his brain, destroy what made him Vasic. “I need to tie my shields to yours.”

We’ll talk about this back at the apartment.

She brought up the subject again as soon as they walked out of the elevator door onto their floor. “You know I’m right.” Having already unclipped Rabbit’s leash, she dropped it onto the hallway table after Vasic entered the apartment first in order to clear it of threats.

“How can shields protect me if the infection comes in through the biofeedback link?” he asked.

She stared at his back, wide and strong. “You knew.”

“The infection is in the Net,” he said, striding over to check her bedroom, Rabbit trotting at his side. “That means we’re all vulnerable to breathing in the poison if we come too close to it.”

Yet he—the other Arrows—had all agreed to walk into an infection zone. And these men and women saw nothing heroic about themselves. “I can’t tell you how I know,” she whispered after he’d cleared his own bedroom, too, “but I know that linking my shield to yours will extend my immunity to you.” The knowledge was a rapid stream of visuals in her head, as if she was being sent a message by a mind at once innocent and vast.

It should’ve scared her, but there was absolutely no harm in the sender. No, it felt like the touch of a child . . . an oddly wise one. “Vasic,” she said when he didn’t respond. “Let me do this.” Protect you this much at least, she thought through the rain of tears inside her soul.

“My task is to shield you.” He folded his arms. “Not the other way around.”

Ivy wanted to shake him. Striding over until they stood toe-to-toe, she held the winter-frost gaze that had become the center of her existence. “You won’t be able to protect me if the infection burrows into your cerebral cortex and turns you into a madman.”

Vasic didn’t want Ivy near his mind, didn’t want to risk tainting her with the darkness that lived in him. However, he couldn’t refute her point—should he become infected, he could turn on her, snuff out the luminous candle of her life. “The others should also connect to their Es.” They might be separated, but he remained the leader of this unit.

“I’ve already telepathed Jaya.” Ivy stroked her hands down the sides of his jacket.

He hadn’t ever been touched as much. Raising one hand, he closed his fingers over the fragile bones of her wrist, holding her to him.

Not disputing his right to the contact, Ivy said, “We’ll talk to everyone else the instant the merge is complete.”

She closed her eyes, and ten heartbeats later, the flat black of his shielding became interwoven with the translucent color of hers. The increased visibility was anathema to an Arrow. Vasic would deal with it because hiding Ivy was impossible—and shouldn’t be done. Any attempt to suffocate the wild beauty of an E, of his E, was a crime he’d punish with lethal efficiency.

He’d been handling the curious and dangerous attention she drew since the instant they relocated. He hadn’t had to execute anyone yet, but he would the instant any individual posed a threat. He wasn’t a good man, but she was something exceptional. He would protect her . . . till the day he died.

Unacceptable, said the grimly resolute core of him, his eyes on the gauntlet.

“Vasic?” Ivy’s fingers curled into her palm. “I can feel you.”

He could sense her as well, in a way that meant he’d be able to tell if she was hurt or in pain. “Good,” he said, and used the technology that was killing him to send out a message to the unit about merging shields, while Ivy got on the comm and did the same with the Es.

She’d just finished the final call when he remembered something she’d seen in a shop window just before an elderly woman had stopped to admire Rabbit. “We forgot to buy the pastries you wanted to try.”

Ivy blinked, laughed. “Next time.”

And he wanted there to be a next and a next and a next. Cupping her face, he kissed her smile into his mouth. Her gasp was startled, her nails digging into his chest through his T-shirt a tiny bite of sensation.

Ivy’s body rubbed against the hard ridge of his erection as she tried to become taller. It was, he thought with a surge of emotion in his heart that he couldn’t categorize, an impossible task. She was small and perfectly formed, her curves made for his hands. When she broke the kiss to go down flat on her feet, he waited to see what she’d do.

This was an operation for which he had no training. The boundaries were unclear.

“If we keep doing that,” she said a little breathlessly, “you’ll get an awful crick in your neck.”

“My neck isn’t the part of my body that has my attention at this point.”

Ivy’s cheeks went bright red, her eyes dipping to his groin, then flying back up in a flustered flick. It was as if she’d gripped him in her hand, squeezed. He tightened his abdominal muscles, dead certain he was nowhere near ready to handle the feel of her slender fingers imprisoning his erection. “Should I not have said that?”

A shy look, her hands petting his chest in a way that was already familiar. “I think we should say whatever we want,” she whispered, skin glowing gold as her blush faded.

Vasic decided to take her up on that. “I wasn’t finished kissing you.”

Her skin heated up again. “There.” She pushed him gently back with her fingertips. “Sit in that armchair.”

Vasic allowed himself to be nudged down and had his cooperation rewarded by Ivy’s soft weight on him as she took off her coat and straddled his thighs, her knees on either side. “See?” It was a whisper.

“Very practical,” he said, and slid one hand under her curls to her nape. He liked the delicate warmth of her skin there, liked how she always gave a little shiver when he surrendered to the urge to touch. But most of all he liked that the hold was perfect for gauging her reaction to his kiss.

Her pulse thudded hard and fast against his fingertips when he opened his mouth on hers, spiked when he played his tongue against hers. Vasic took note, repeated the act. Making small, impatient, feminine sounds, Ivy wrapped her arms around his neck and licked her tongue along the roof of his mouth.

Vasic’s free hand clenched on her hip, his fingers brushing the curve of her backside. Firm and yielding both, it made him want to explore. He shifted his hand down, cupped one cheek, squeezed.

“Vasic.” Shuddering, Ivy’s head fell back, her pulse visible beneath her skin.

He put his mouth on it, sucked . . . just as something smashed to the floor. Telepathic senses having been set to an automatic security sweep, he moved with ruthless speed to lift Ivy off and shove her into the armchair out of harm’s way as he stood in front of her.

There was no intruder.

There was, however, a mountain of fine sand on the carpet.

Ivy hooked her fingers into his waistband as she sat up on her knees behind him on the armchair and looked around his body. “There goes the security deposit.”

He turned at the solemn statement to see her eyes sparkling. Shoulders shaking, she fell back into the armchair. Laughter escaped her in giggling bursts. Bright and beautiful and sexually addicting and his. No way in hell was he leaving her. No other man would ever have the right to touch Ivy Jane.

ZIE Zen was reading an old and faded note when he received a comm call from the son of his heart.

“Grandfather,” Vasic said, his eyes steady and his voice calm, “I need your help.”

Then, as Zie Zen listened, Vasic told him about the malfunctioning gauntlet and the death sentence he’d been given. “Amputation won’t solve the problem,” his great-grandson told him. “The most critical malfunctioning component is directly integrated into my brain stem.”

Zie Zen thought of Vasic as he’d become in the past decade, remote and increasingly distant, as if he was already walking in the twilight lands. Zie Zen had tried to hold his great-grandson to the world and knew he had failed. Now, however, he saw that someone else had succeeded. “You fight to live,” he said, something breaking inside the heart he’d walled up behind titanium shields an eon ago.

“Yes, Grandfather.” Ice gray eyes met his. “I cannot leave my Ivy to the care of any other on this planet, not even Aden.”

Zie Zen’s hand clenched on the top of his cane, his thoughts suddenly full of a girl with sunshine in her smile who had teased him and laughed with him and left him notes all over the house.

Z2—Eat this sandwich. I made it especially for you. xoxo Sunny

Dear Z2, I hope you like the roses. I think men should get roses, too, don’t you? Love you, Sunny

Z2—Gone out to party till I drop with the bride. I promise not to run away with a stripper. Love, Sunny

p.s. I wouldn’t say no to a private show from my man ;-)

Zie Zen, how dare you?! Samantha

That last was the note he held in his hand today. She’d been so angry that day, his magnificent Sunny. “Send me the complete file,” he said to his great-grandson now. “I will find a solution for you. It is not your time to die.”

His own death, he thought after the conversation ended, was coming. But not yet. Not until he’d seen this through. Then, he could finally close his eyes and see his Sunny again. She’d be angry with him for taking so long . . . and for many of the decisions he’d made, but she would love him. Always, she would love him.

As Vasic’s Ivy would love his great-grandson. All Zie Zen had to do was unearth the answer to a seemingly impossible problem.

THREE hours after his conversation with his great-grandfather, Vasic was on night shift while Abbot caught some sleep, when his mind alerted him to a threat. As there were no intruders in the apartment, he checked the PsyNet.

There.

Vasic didn’t warn the mind that was attempting to hack Ivy’s open with brute force. He simply reached out with his own and crushed the attempt, tearing open the other man’s shields in the process. Abbot, he said at the same time, wake up and take over.

I’m up, the other Arrow answered almost immediately.

Having gleaned the attacker’s physical location by slamming in through his torn shields, Vasic used the image coming in through the man’s visual cortex to teleport to a utilitarian room with brown carpeting. The attacker lay convulsing on the floor. Vasic came down on one knee beside the thin man in his forties and waited until he’d stopped convulsing to speak.

“Why did you attack?”

“She’s an abomination.” Zeal in his blue eyes, fanatical and furious, his ears and nose dripping blood. “Tainting the purity of the Net with her strange mind, like the others. They must all be destroy—” He began to convulse again, his teeth slamming together over his tongue.

Vasic used his Tk to stabilize the attacker’s head as blood pulsed from the self-inflicted wound and his back arched, fists and feet pounding the carpet. When it stopped, he was dead.

Vasic contacted Aden using the mobile comm built into his gauntlet. “I shouldn’t have hit his shields that hard,” he said, after giving his partner the rundown on the situation. Vasic’s control was legendary in the squad, but the dead male had been a threat to Ivy, Vasic’s reaction arising from a primal instinct that awoke only for her. “We need to find out if he was part of a larger cell—I’ll check his apartment for any physical indicators.”

“I’ll get our people to go through his life, track down his associates,” Aden replied. “He might simply have been working on his own—we’re seeing more and more incidents of people unable to cope with the fall of Silence. The Es are an easy, visible target.”

“Tell me if they find anything pertinent.” With that, Vasic began a meticulous and detailed search of the apartment. He discovered nothing obvious but dropped off several datapads at Central Command for further investigation before returning to New York. I’ll take over now, he told Abbot. Rest the full six hours. You need to recharge.

Yes, sir.

The next voice he heard was softer, feminine . . . and one he did not want to hear while his hands were stained with death. “Vasic?”