Shield of Winter

Chapter 36

To be an empath is to understand pain in all its myriad facets.

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

IVY WATCHED THE final part of the protest from the sidewalk outside the apartment, surprised it had been permitted to take place. She heard the same hushed astonishment from the others around her. Everyone—human, changeling, and Psy—had expected Kaleb Krychek to ruthlessly crush any hint of rebellion.

There had been so much fear in the protestors that Ivy’s nerve endings were raw from sensing it, yet they’d exposed themselves with a courage she had to admire, even if their objective was at odds with her very existence.

“Do you think Kaleb will quietly execute them now that he knows who they are?” she asked Vasic.

Her Arrow, steely eyes continuing to scan the street as the crowd began to thin, took time to answer. “Krychek is no longer predictable in any sense because we can’t predict Sahara Kyriakus. Her motives and views remain unknown.”

“Have you seen their bond?” Ivy hadn’t dared go close to it yet, but she’d heard the rumors, had trouble believing the deadly man she’d met would ever willingly tie himself to another: love, after all, was a soul-deep vulnerability.

“Yes. It’s . . .” A shake of his head, the silken black strands of his hair gleaming in the midmorning sunlight. “You’ll have to see it for yourself.” He touched her lower back when a passing male smiled at her. “I’ll take you to it.”

Delighted by his touch, by the quiet but unmistakable display of possessiveness, she said, “He doesn’t shield it from view?”

“No, though getting close isn’t recommended.” A speaking glance. “Especially for too-curious empaths.”

Ivy felt her stomach somersault, her breath catch. He kept doing that to her. Right when she thought she was used to the sheer potent masculinity of him, he’d look at her with those eyes of stunning winter frost, and she’d remember the things they’d done together, the things they planned to do.

Ivy. It was a gentle admonishment, the ice of his voice a shivering caress inside her. You can’t look at me like that on a public street.

Flushing, she ducked her head. “I can’t help it. You’re—” Ivy froze, every tiny hair on her body rising to prickling alarm.

She turned on her heel, stared down the street.

“What do you sense?” Vasic asked, his jacked-up vigilance intense.

“It’s happening.” Her voice shook, blood curdling at the shriek of violent insanity surging to the surface about ten feet away. It was as if a line had been drawn in the sand. Those anchored beyond the line would go viciously insane, those on this side would be fine.

Ivy!

She jerked at the telepathic cry. Jaya, where are you?

In the apartment. I can feel it, Ivy, feel their twisted confusion, their compulsion to bludgeon and murder.

Ivy heard the first scream on the heels of Jaya’s words, and all at once, a panicked horde ran wild-eyed in their direction. Bags were dropped, datapads abandoned, designer heels left on the tarmac. Ivy knew what she’d find behind the living mass of terror, but it was still a kick to the gut to see the infected armed with knives, blunt weapons, hands fashioned into claws. Blood rushed to burn Ivy’s skin, her own terror visceral . . . but this was the battle for which she’d been born.

She didn’t shrink from it, didn’t run.

Vasic took position in front of her and slightly to her right. Can you see? he asked as he began to shove back the insane so the uninfected could escape.

Yes. Chaos continued to reign around them, but what Ivy saw within it gave her hope even in this darkness.

Screaming, crying children were scooped up by strangers when they stumbled, a frail older man was lifted up in the arms of a burly construction worker, two teenagers—a boy and a girl—stopped to haul a businessman to his feet when he fell, while a third grabbed the hand of a woman who’d gone motionless in shock and hauled her forward out of danger.

The teen looked at Ivy as he ran past, the whites of his eyes showing. “Run, lady! Those people are fucking out of it!”

“I’m fine!” Ivy cried out. “Go!” She took hold of the back of Vasic’s leather-synth jacket with one hand to make sure they wouldn’t be separated as more and more people streamed past.

Blocking out the hysteria using the shielding techniques Sascha had taught her, though she couldn’t do the same with the chilling screams that filled the air, Ivy took a deep breath and reached out with her mind. But when she attempted to grab hold of the infected so she could calm them, her ability simply slid off, like water off slick plas. Jaya, can you reach them?

No, but I’ll keep trying.

Ivy did the same, but as horrific violence broke out on the street, a number of uninfected caught in the midst of the carnage, she knew neither one of them was having any effect. “Go.” She pushed at Vasic’s back. “Go, help! You’re more use than I am!”

He didn’t budge an inch. “I won’t leave you unprotected.”

“I’ll go inside that shop,” she said, the grocer wide-eyed beyond the window. The elderly man, his hair snow-white against his mahogany skin, had locked the door, but when Ivy caught his attention, he motioned for her to come inside. “I’ll be safe.” While others died around her.

The bitter knowledge of her uselessness was bile in Ivy’s throat.

“I thought you said never to give up.”

Vasic’s words might as well have been bullets, they wounded so much. “I don’t know what to do!” All her plans, her ideas, and she had no practical knowledge of how to put them into effect. “There’s no manual, no training! Even Sascha—” Her mind cleared for a single, piercing instant. “Wait, wait.”

Shuddering, she thought of the chapter in the Eldridge book that spoke of empaths controlling crowds, of the experiments Sascha had done with volunteers from her pack. Ivy had nowhere near the cardinal E’s level of expertise, but what did she have to lose? She used Vasic as a focus and visualized the apple orchard in spring behind her closed eyelids, the bright green trees, the endless sky, the crisp, clean air.

Her mind rippled, settled, a tranquil sea.

Exhaling, she sent that feeling outward, as if she was snapping out a sheet to dry. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t what she saw in front of her. The infected looked up at the sky, and then, one by one, began to sit down.

It was beautiful and perfect, her body and mind flawlessly integrated into the empath she’d been born to be . . . for the ten seconds it lasted.

Ivy cried out as a vicious blade of pain rent the peace, sending blood dripping out of her nose and her body to her knees.

Screams filled the air once again, followed by the dull, wet thud of weapons and fists meeting unprotected flesh. Her vision blurred from the pulsing agony in her frontal lobe, Ivy tried to push up off the sidewalk so she could try again, but she was in the living room of their apartment the next instant, Rabbit beside her.

Vasic was gone almost before she realized what he’d done.

“Ivy!” Jaya ran in through the door short seconds later, and Ivy knew Vasic must’ve ’pathed her. Ducking into Ivy’s bedroom, the younger woman returned with a small box of tissues and knelt down beside her. “What did you do?” Wonder in her intense, dark eyes. “It worked!”

Coughing, her chest filled with crushed rocks, Ivy leaned back against the wall and used the tissues to clean herself up. “Abbot?” It came out gritty, as if she’d been screaming.

“He’s helping Vasic, can be back here in a heartbeat if we need him.” Jaya stroked back Ivy’s hair. “It was perfect, Ivy, your peace.” Her eyes sheened wet. “I wanted to wrap it around myself like a blanket and just sleep, content and happy.”

Glass shattered outside, a car alarm went off. Rabbit barked and ran to jump up on the wide windowsill at agitated speed. He wanted to be out there, wanted to be with Vasic. So did Ivy, but right now she was a liability. Vasic couldn’t help the uninfected if he was concentrating on shielding her.

Curling her hand into a fist, Ivy focused on Jaya. “It was too short.” Disappointment was a leaden weight in her gut, though Sascha, too, had reported being unable to “control” her volunteer crowd for anything beyond a highly limited period.

“It’s a start.” Jaya sat back on her heels, her twin braids lying neat and tidy on her heavy green sweater. “Show me what you did. Maybe I can give Vasic and Abbot a little help.”

The other woman walked to look out the window after Ivy shared her process. Placing her hand on Rabbit’s neck, Jaya stroked him gently as she spoke. “It’s bad. Abbot says he and Vasic have managed to get most of the uninfected out,” she said, her lilting accent intensified by the stress of the situation, “but the infected are turning on one another.”

Ivy’s stomach knotted.

“Oh, my God.” Jaya pressed her face to the glass. “There’s a child wandering in the street! I don’t think anyone’s seen her!”

Now, Jaya, Ivy said urgently, alerting Vasic to the presence of the child at the same time.

Both hands dropping to grip the window ledge, Jaya stared down at the street. The peace lasted three short seconds, but it was enough to save the child’s life.

I have her, Ivy.

Crawling over to Jaya’s crumpled form as Vasic’s voice touched her mind, Ivy checked the younger woman’s pulse. It was thready but present beneath the clammy stickiness of her skin. Jaya? Using fresh tissues to soak up the blood trickling out of one of her friend’s ears, she continued to try to wake her, deeply worried by the abruptness of her collapse. Jaya, sweetheart, wake up.

It took over five minutes for the other empath to rouse, her eyes cloudy with pain when she did so. “Why did I collapse so fast?” were the first words she spoke.

“I don’t know.” The Gradient difference between them was a mere .5, Jaya at 8.8. “Did you feel anything before you collapsed?”

“It was like my mind just shut down,” she said, as Ivy pulled herself to the window. However, when she tried to assist Vasic with a particularly virulent knot of fighting, she couldn’t even muster a single pulse of empathic power. Her mind was fried.

Jaya hauled herself up beside Ivy. “My God, Ivy.” The helpless horror in the other empath’s whispered exclamation echoed Ivy’s own feelings.

Sirens pierced the air now, shots were fired. One woman fell the second after she sank her teeth into another woman’s jugular, blood painting her face in a macabre red mask.

Ivy knew from Vasic that Kaleb Krychek’s office had sent out instructions to all first responders on how best to deal with an outbreak should there be no or limited psychic assistance available, but the responders had clearly had no time to internalize those processes.

It was . . . bad.

By the time it ended, seventy-five people lay dead on the street, with fifty-one others critically injured. One hundred had been or would soon be placed into induced comas from which they would never awaken, the infection eating away at their brain. Allowing them to remain conscious was not an option—not only were the infected viciously violent, hurting themselves and others, the infection progressed at an accelerated pace in those who were awake and aware. A coma, at least, gave them a slightly higher chance of surviving long enough for a cure to be discovered.

Deciding to leave Rabbit safe in the apartment, Ivy and a still-hurting Jaya went down to sit on the top step of their apartment building, the street littered with blood and debris in front of them. Numb, her psychic senses dulled to fog, Ivy stared. The authorities had cordoned off the area, but it was simply too big to keep that way for long, and already some of the yellow caution tape was flapping in the wind.

“I thought I was ready but this . . .” Jaya hugged her arms around her knees. “Are we fooling ourselves that we have the ability to halt this?”

Ivy didn’t have an answer, all her hopes of helping to save her people in ashes at her feet. Vasic, Abbot, the cops, and firemen, even the strangers who’d stopped to assist the vulnerable, they’d done something. While Ivy had collapsed after ten seconds. Incredible as those ten seconds had been, they would never win this gruesome war.

Unable to comprehend the scale of the death in front of her, she watched Vasic walk through the street to another Arrow. With his razor-straight black hair, slanted eyes, angular bone structure, and a more slender but still muscular build, she recognized Aden at once. He was a medic, she remembered. Of course he’d be here. Right now, he was using a handheld scanner to examine one of the dead.

Vasic crouched down beside his friend.

And she remembered how long Vasic had been fighting, how long he’d been walking in the darkness. “We should go check the bodies.” Giving up was simply not an option, even if she felt bruised black-and-blue by her spectacular failure, her faith in her ability a hollow shell. If she did quit, then Vasic would have to do this over and over and over.

No, she thought, just no.

Her Arrow had earned a life that wasn’t drenched always in blood and death, and if she had to try and try and try again until she figured out how to fix this so he wouldn’t have to step back into the shadows, that was what she’d do.

When Jaya didn’t rise with her, she reached down to squeeze her friend’s shoulder. “There might be something we sense that they can’t.”

“What’s the point?” Jaya’s tone was flat, her face drawn. “They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

“Hey”—Ivy changed position to stroke sweat-damp tendrils of hair off the other woman’s elegant, lovely face—“you said it yourself; we did help, even if it was only a little.” The reminder was as much for herself as for Jaya. “It’s a start.”

The younger empath didn’t respond but followed when Ivy headed down the steps. A uniformed member of Enforcement would’ve stopped them from crossing the yellow tape, but Aden waved them in.

Skirting the blood that splattered the road, Ivy went to where Vasic and Aden hunkered beside the body. “Why this one?” she asked, not ready to look at the victim.

Aden was the one who responded, though Vasic curled his hand around her calf in an unexpected and welcome expression of support. A single contact, and already she felt more steady, despite the continued opacity of the fog in her brain.

“Her skull is still whole.” It was a statement pitiless in its practicality. “She was stabbed through the gut and collapsed slowly rather than falling, so her brain wasn’t damaged by a blunt-force collision with the ground. An examination of the tissue may give us more detailed answers as to the progression of the disease.”

“I-I ca—” Sobbing into her hand, Jaya ran back the way they’d come, Abbot heading after her.

Ivy wanted to escape the carnage, too, but she focused on Vasic’s touch, tensed her stomach muscles, and forced her eyes to what remained of a woman who appeared to have been in her early sixties. Her black winter coat was open, revealing a dress of simple blue wool over tights. It was rucked up around her knees and bloody and torn at her abdomen; the skin of her face was marked by deep gouges that said someone had come at her with their bare hands.

“Are you sure she was one of the infected?”

Vasic squeezed her calf. “Yes. I saw her while she was alive.” You’re feeling better?

It was all she could do not to throw herself in his arms and burrow into his strength. Yes. Jaya had a much more debilitating response—I think she’s still in quite severe pain. Crouching down between the two men, she touched her fingers to either side of the woman’s head, though she didn’t hold much hope of sensing anything.

The dead, after all, didn’t feel.

And yet . . . “I can almost sense something,” she said, trying to push through the blank wall of nothingness.

Strong hands clamping on her wrists, jerking her away without warning. “You’re bleeding again,” Vasic said, touching the pad of one thumb to below her ear. It came away dark red.

A rustle sounded from behind Ivy at the same instant.

“Sorry for before.” Jaya came down beside her on that husky whisper, her blue-eyed Arrow standing watch at her back. “I felt her death agonies, her confusion and shock, and it was like I was dying.”

Biting back her questions, Ivy shifted to create some space, Aden steadying her with a hand on her back when she might’ve become unbalanced.

Beside her, Jaya tugged down the woman’s dress with gentle hands, tears rolling down her cheeks. “She suffered terribly at the end.” A statement so hoarse, it was barely recognizable as Jaya’s voice. “The echoes of it are trapped in her brain, and the pain, it wasn’t just from the stab wound, but from the horror inside her mind.”

Ivy held her breath, unwilling to break the other empath’s concentration.

“The darkness was trying to become part of her,” the younger woman said. “But it didn’t fit. There was no place for it, so it stole space, and it broke her.” She fell back into a sitting position in a jerky move, sobbing into her hands. “It hurts to die from the infection. It hurts so much.”