Shield of Winter (Psy-Changeling 13)

“We have injured,” a young male told him, his voice shaking. “Is it safe to take them out?”

Seeing the extent of one woman’s injuries when the youth opened the door fully, the wounded woman’s hands pressed over her blood-soaked sweatshirt, Vasic said, “I’ll ’port her out. Carry the others out quietly down the corridor and through the stairwell.”

His team also found a scattering of uninfected Psy—people who had just moved into the area, guests from out of town, a university student who’d had to barricade herself in the bathroom when her study partner came after her with a broken glass bottle. As with the humans, Vasic ’ported out the most injured, while human neighbors helped the walking wounded out through cleared exit routes.

It was on the third floor of the final building that Vasic heard something from inside an apartment with an ominously open door. Warning the others to be on standby, he moved quietly down the corridor. The door bore a single bloody handprint, the body of a middle-aged brunette lying just inside—it appeared she’d been bashed over the head with a vase that was now in splinters around her.

A small barren table by the door bore the faint mark of a water ring that told Vasic the vase had been sitting there before it was turned into a weapon.

Vasic checked the victim’s pulse, found her skin cold. Her heart had stopped pumping blood long ago; if he had to guess, he’d say at the start of the outbreak. She’d opened the door to a knock and found herself face-to-face with death. Noting the location of the body to pass on to the local authorities, he checked the other rooms. Bathroom, kitchen, first bedroom, they were all empty.

Looking into the final room, its walls pale yellow with a white trim, he saw a curtain waving in the breeze and disengaged the alert, guessing the fabric must’ve dislodged something from a nearby shelf. He’d just cleared the tall cupboard to the left when he heard wordless murmuring coming from the other side of the room.

There was only one thing there: a crib.

Muscles tensed against the horror he might discover, he crossed the cream-colored carpet . . . to find himself the cynosure of big brown eyes in a round-cheeked face. The baby’s face broke out into a smile at the sight of him. Babbling incoherently, it kicked up its feet, grabbed its toes in tiny hands, then held out its arms.

Vasic had never been around anything this small and weak, but he couldn’t bring himself to simply ’port the child into a waiting ambulance. That would scare her, and the child who’d surely just lost its custodial parent—a parent who had dressed her carefully in soft pink pants and a matching sweater emblazoned with the words “Girls rule” on the front—didn’t need more pain. Her face scrunched up when he didn’t move in fast enough, her lower lip quivering.

“Your Silence is terrible, little one,” he said gently, lifting her from her crib to cradle her against his chest.

One tiny hand, her skin close to the color of fresh-fallen snow, spread open on his combat uniform, her good humor restored now that she was in his arms. He could feel her mind batting curiously against his as her hands patted at his chest—it appeared she’d had no training under the Protocol at all. Her parent or parents had either been bad at teaching her, or they’d read the currents of the Net right and realized their child didn’t have to grow up Silent, or . . .

The abrasion against his mind was faint but familiar.

He was holding an empath.

Picking up the yellow blanket in her crib, he bundled her into it, then accessed property records to identify who paid the rent on this apartment. Cross-checking that against birth records gave him the name of the baby’s mother, the custodial parent. He telepathically requested an updated list of the dead and the infected from the medical team, scanned it as he stepped outside.

The baby’s mother wasn’t on the list, but that meant nothing since not all of the dead had been identified as yet. Ten minutes later, just after an M-Psy confirmed she showed no signs of infection, the child in Vasic’s arms began to burble happily, forgetting the tension that had made her hide her face against his chest during the M-Psy’s examination

Turning carefully, Vasic watched the baby’s face light up at the sight of the crowd behind the barricade. Vasic had already accessed the image of the mother on his gauntlet so he could identify her body. It didn’t take him long to locate the distraught woman—tall, with bone-white skin strained over slashing cheekbones, she’d shoved through the crowd and was attempting to climb over the barricade.

She broke down in tears when she saw him walking toward her.

Placing the baby in her arms, he said, “Your child shows no signs of any trauma.”

Frantically checking her child with gentle hands, the woman shuddered and cuddled her close. “My cousin, Miki?” Her voice shook. “She watches Marchelline while I’m at work.”

“Brunette, small half-moon scar on her right hand?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, she’s gone.” It was pure luck the infected who’d attacked Miki hadn’t found the baby—Vasic’s gut roiled at the thought of what might have happened had the child cried out at the wrong instant.

In front of him, the woman’s face almost crumpled again before she got it under control. “W-will you report us?” Terror in the big brown eyes that shouted her familial link to the child she held so protectively.

“No. Silence has fallen.” And he’d just found a third empath, a third survivor.

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