Shield of Winter (Psy-Changeling 13)

Shifting on his heel, Judd led them back into the trees. “You said you had more than one question.”

“How did you know what to do?” Vasic had gone on instinct to this point, and Ivy didn’t seem displeased, but he wanted to be certain he was doing everything he could to pleasure her . . . because touching her gave him pleasure so intense, he had no hope of ever describing it.

“I’ll send you my research file,” Judd said, “but you know what I’ve learned? If you listen to her, you’ll be fine.”

Vasic thought of the little noises Ivy made in bed, the way she dug her nails into his back when he touched her just right, and felt his body pulse. “I want this for the others, Judd.” Their brethren deserved the same happiness, the same steep learning curve anchored in pleasure rather than pain.

Judd’s eyes met his. “I never thought you’d make it to this point. I’m f**king glad you have. We’ll get the others here, too—we’re Arrows.”

“We never give up on a target,” Vasic completed, and for the first time since he’d been taught it, the assertion wasn’t one of darkness, but of hope.

• • •

IVY and Sascha spent a large chunk of the day visiting and interviewing the nonempathic survivors around the world, thanks to Vasic’s ’porting ability, while Jaya and Alice remained at the apartment and collated the data in a search for patterns.

“The survivors,” Jaya said over a take-out dinner late that night, “all have fractures in their Silence and they accept those fractures, even when the resulting emotions aren’t pretty.”

Ivy threw Abbot another nutrition bar where the blue-eyed Arrow sat with Vasic and Lucas. The three men had ceded the couches to the women, pulling up chairs for themselves. “The woman of darkness that we saw,” she said to Jaya afterward, “she was so sad and so angry.”

“The embodiment of rejection.” Sascha stared at her food without eating. “Silence teaches Psy to stifle all emotion, but at the heart of it, it’s always been about the aggressive, violent, angry emotions—and the PsyNet is impacted by the subconscious as well as the conscious.”

All the dark emotions, the ugliness, Ivy thought, had been shoved aside, buried, and in that festering soup had grown the infection. “That doesn’t give us a cure, though.” She pushed away her meal. “No one can simply embrace the whole gamut of emotion after a lifetime of being trained to do the opposite.”

Vasic’s eyes met hers for a piercing instant.

That wasn’t a complaint, Ivy said, blowing him a telepathic kiss.

I know. A caress in the ice of his voice. It’s an unavoidable fact.

Yes, it was. Her Arrow had opened his heart to her, but he continued to fight a pitched battle against his darker emotions. Anger, rage, loss, it was all trapped inside that great heart, and it made Ivy ache. But she couldn’t force those emotions out into the open. No one could. Only Vasic, when he was ready.

Jaya poked at her noodles. “A violent shift like that could also cause shock, a stroke, an aneurysm.”

“The other thing,” Alice said, leaning forward, “is that I can’t believe there are so few people in the Net who’ve embraced their emotions.”

At that instant, the charismatic intensity of the scientist’s gaze reminded Ivy of Samuel Rain—a spark of genius lived in them both, and both had been wounded in ways that sought to bury that genius.

“According to everything I’ve learned since waking,” Alice continued, “and what Jaya’s shared today, Silence has been fracturing for years.”

The three empaths looked at one another, nodded as a unit. The scientist was right—far more people should be immune to the infection if that was the only prerequisite.

Picking up a datapad, Jaya began to scroll through the information they had on the nonempathic uninfected. “We’re missing something, but I can’t—”

The other empath’s words cut off as a screaming roar of insanity and confusion smashed into the room.

It took Vasic less than seven seconds to teleport Ivy, Lucas, and Sascha to the site two blocks over, then return for Alice, the human scientist having insisted on being present. Abbot took Jaya directly to the end of the worst-affected street, where she’d join the medical units Vasic had called in. Leaving Alice tucked up inside a doorway not far from Jaya, Abbot there to protect the medics, the rest of them waded into the fray.

The street, lined with midrises zoned for mixed commercial/residential use, was also a busy entertainment area and thoroughfare utilized by countless people. Those people were all now fighting desperately for their lives against the infected—who seemed not even to notice their own injuries. Ivy saw a man whose left arm was hanging broken by his side run headlong at a big human male. The infected went down under a single punch but continued to try and get up.

Ivy recoiled as she was hit by a telepathic blow hard enough to make her skull ring. Shaking it off, she concentrated on calming one individual at a time. It worked as it had the last time, but a mere ten minutes in and she could already feel an agonizing pressure building behind her eyelids. It would—

A massive telepathic blow.

Hitting the ground hard enough to graze her cheek and hands as blood vessels burst in her eyes, she realized there had to be a Gradient 8 or higher telepath in the crowd. Hell. “I’m fine,” she managed to say to Sascha when the cardinal turned to check on her. “Telepathic strike.”

Sascha wiped a bloody nose on her sleeve, said, “I just felt one, too.” An instant later, she staggered. “That was a telekinetic hit.” Going to her knees in a controlled move, as if to make herself a smaller target, she stared into the carnage. “Lucas is all right,” she said at last. “His natural shields protect him.”