Yet.
He unlocked the big plate glass door and pushed the door aside, then stepped out and walked with a leisurely pace toward the car. As he walked, he turned his head, checking every direction for anyone lingering, watching them, or other suspicious changes in the environment since he’d last scanned the area.
It looked clear. He reached the car and turned around to face the building, giving that direction, which had been behind him, a thorough examination. Then he waved toward the three figures he could see standing patiently in the foyer. The early morning sunlight was bouncing off the windows of the building, dazzling anyone who looked up. The additional glare made it hard to see more than silhouettes behind the glass.
They weren’t moving.
Kieren frowned and waved again, but Demyan waved back with a ‘come here’ motion that was clear enough despite the glare.
What the hell? Kieren wondered.
* * * * *
When Kieren reached the car, he turned and faced the building.
Deonne could see he was scanning the front of the building, which he hadn’t been able to do while he was walking toward the car. Kieren was completely thorough, even pedantic about following protocol, but Justin had learned from Brendan that Kieren was one of the highest ranked Wardens in the world. He had earned his reputation through hard-won experience.
It made Deonne feel much safer, even though she fidgeted at the delay.
Kieren waved toward them. It was clear.
“Finally,” Justin muttered. He strode forward and pushed the door open with one hand, holding it open for Demyan and Deonne.
The three of them moved out onto the footpath. Justin and Demyan had managed to arrange it so that Deonne was walking between the two of them. Demyan dug out the control card for the car from an inner pocket of his green coat….
….and a cuckoo was making his charming little warble in the trees overhead. The air was crisp and smelled of snow, even though the grass at her feet was ankle high. There were huge, jagged snow-peaked mountains all around and from behind the bank of trees just ahead of her, there was the sound of a tumbling, roaring waterfall.
Switzerland, Deonne marveled. This was one of the few pockets of untouched nature preserve still left in Europe. From the length of the grass, the sun’s position and the chill in the air, Deonne judged it to be early summer.
With growing wonder, she made a half turn, studying the peaks and crags. She knew this glen. It was a good day’s hike away from the little village and her father’s house. She had been here before.
But how did I get here now?
The transition had felt a lot like a time jump, with the momentary deprivation of all sensations, even the ability to breathe. Yet Justin and Demyan were not here with her. So who had bought her here?
There was a rustle in the trees ahead. Someone or something broke twigs and crunched leaves as they moved through the undergrowth. The direction they were taking seemed to be toward the waterfall.
At the thought of all that pure mountain water cascading onto the flat rocks below, Deonne’s mouth seemed to instantly turn dry and her throat parched. A drink would be perfect. She could find out who was in the trees, too. Perhaps it was Demyan. Justin would not bring her here. He knew, after last night, that Switzerland was the last place she wanted to be right now. Justin rarely jumped…and he never time jumped. Ever.
So it was probably Demyan striding through the trees.
Why? was going to be the first question she asked him. She hurried forward, and plunged into the cooler shadows beneath the giant firs, shivering as the dampness registered on her skin. The muffled quietness of forest closed in around her as she picked out a faint path in the trees. That would lead to the waterfall, most likely.
She stepped over the leaf litter and onto the path, then hurried after Demyan. The path twisted and turned sharply, bending around trees and climbing up and down over fallen logs and other impediments. Her breath was shortening thanks to the altitude but she pushed on, anxious to catch up with Demyan and find out why he had pulled her here.
The trees abruptly halted, like a wall of vegetation and Deonne stepped out into the rocky, spray and rainbow filled gully. The waterfall thundered to her left, barely twenty yards away, throwing up a permanent fine mist as the water barreled onto the rocks from twenty meters above.
There was a flat rock just to her right, smooth and warmed by the sun, that edged out into the swiftly roiling water. The view from there would be spectacular. Deonne hurried over to the rock and stepped up onto it. She turned to face the waterfall, to gaze at the endlessly falling water and breathe in the perfect mountain air.
* * * * *
“Kieren! Snap out of it!”
A heavy hand slapped his face, not lightly. The impact rocked him backwards, making him take a step to recover his balance.
Kieren blinked. Justin stood in front of him. So did Demyan.
He frowned. They had been standing in the foyer, telling him to come to them. “Why are you here?” he asked. “Did you teleport?”
Justin looked offended. “I don’t do that shit,” he said shortly.
Demyan grabbed Kieran’s arm and he could feel the discipline behind the grip. Demyan, like all vampires, had strength to spare and constantly controlled it, or else they would crush everything they gripped. “I think there are psi in the area. I think we were just…brainwashed or something.”
“Where is Deonne?” Kieren demanded.
“I watched her walk away from us,” Justin said, pointing across the road toward a footpath that snaked between two buildings in an undulating curve. “I watched her walk through there and I couldn’t do a fucking thing to stop her. I couldn’t move.” He glared at Kieren. “You were standing like a statue, too. You didn’t even blink when she walked straight past you.”
“I didn’t see her. I was…” Kieren licked his lips. “I was watching the three of you standing in the foyer, trying to figure out why you wouldn’t come to the car. I saw you there.”
“Neural overlay,” Demyan said shortly, looking at Justin. “He’s human. They can fuck with him all they like.”
“So is Deonne, for Christ’s sake!” Justin whirled toward the path.
Kieren shot out his hand. He knew exactly what Justin was going to do. “Let me come with you,” he said. “Let me keep pace. You don’t know what you’re going to find at the other end.”
Justin drew in a slow, deep breath. Then he nodded. “Demyan, rouse the agency people still in the city. We’ll need them.”
Kieren wondered how Demyan would do that without a communications device of some sort, but dismissed the question as unimportant. The vampires had ways and secrets he was still uncovering, months after he would have completely profiled and got bored with any normal client.
Right now, Deonne was his priority. He took off running, heading for the path between the houses. Justin kept up with him easily.
The path, like so many public facilities in the city, had been glorified with flowers and plantings along its edges. No litter dared spoil the view. The residents of the neighborhood would see to that.
They sprinted down the path, heading for the street at the other end that Kieren could just spot between the vegetation and fencing on either side. They burst out onto the street and Kieren stopped, scanning the area, looking for Deonne. The street they were on was a narrow, ancient suburban lane. Small houses, very close together, lined the side of the street where they had emerged from the footpath. Despite their small size and the age of the street itself, all the houses were tidy and well maintained. Their gardens were tended and just now starting to show the blooms of early summer.
It was quiet, with the odd person walking along the narrow sidewalk in front of the houses. It was so quiet that Kieren had no trouble hearing soft alarms bells. He turned toward them.
The other side of the street was taken up by a very modern g-train station that nevertheless had been made to blend into
the streetscape. It looked old and settled and reminded Kieren of the train stations of a couple of centuries before. Most of the pedestrians were heading toward the entrances of the station.
Kieren let his gaze slide along the track that emerged from the station and found Deonne.
His heart squeezed. There was a pedestrian crossing thirty meters from the end of the station, for travelers to cross the track in order to access the right platform. The gates guarding the crossing were down. Lights were flashing and the alarms were ringing, alerting any sane human to stay clear. The g-trains reached speeds of four hundred kilometers an hour and didn’t stop for anyone. In the city, so close to a station, they would be slower, but no one survived an impact with a g-train. No one ever had.
Deonne stood in the middle of the track. She must have been standing there for some time for the gates had come down on either side of her. She was reaching out with her arm, turning her hand over and back. It made Kieren think of children playing with running water.
He could hear the thunder and vibrations that heralded an oncoming train. Fear washed through him and he grabbed Justin’s sleeve. “I won’t reach her in time. Go!”
Justin moved.
Kieren had seen vampires in overdrive before, but it never failed to impress him. This time he felt a brief, fierce satisfaction, knowing that Justin’s abilities would help save Deonne.
Justin was sprinting, heading for the gates.
Then Kieren spotted the train, approaching along the big, wide curve that straightened up just where the pedestrian crossing began. The pilots wouldn’t see Deonne until they were almost on top of her, and even if they spotted her now, they wouldn’t be able to stop the train in time.
Justin wasn’t going to reach her in time.
Horror swept through Kieren and it was a thick, hot and sour soup that halted his thoughts and speared his chest. Kieren threw his hand up in a useless gesture, willing Justin to move even faster, to reach Deonne and snatch or push her out of the way. He leaned forward with the motion of his hand, a cry erupting from his throat.
And he felt something leave him. It ripped out of his head and his torso with the velocity of the wind in the heart of a tornado, a force that moves everything in its path out of the way.
Deonne didn’t stagger. She leapt for the far-side gate…but she didn’t leap, either. It was as if an invisible, giant hand had shoved her off her feet and sideways, through twelve feet of air, to slam against the iron glass gate.
Kieren saw her begin to crumple toward the ground, then the train bulleted through, blocking his view of her.
Justin gripped the top of the gate on this side of the train, watching the elongated and articulated vehicle rocket past him. The wind from its passage was lifting his hair, because he stood so close.
There was a high shrieking noise as the train reversed its engines and applied the compression brakes, to bring it to a halt at the platform. The passing carriages slowed.
Kieren ran toward Justin and the gate. He didn’t dare hope that what he thought he had seen actually had happened. It could have been a vision his mind had produced.
He reached Justin as the last two carriages blew past. Justin was staring ahead, waiting. His knuckles on the top of the gate were white with pressure, something only a recently fed vampire could do.
“Did you see what happened to her?” Justin said, lifting his voice over the gusty rattle of the train as it swept past.
“Happened?” Kieren repeated. Had Justin seen what he had seen?
“She moved out of the way.”
Then he hadn’t imagined it. Kieren swallowed as his throat seemed to close down on him. “I don’t know what I saw,” he said.
Justin looked at him sharply, his pale eyes narrowed.
Then end of the train slipped past them, and the gate was clear. On the other side of the track, Deonne lay in a huddled heap up against the opposing gate.
Justin didn’t wait for the electronics to pull the gate up. He wrenched at the top of it, shoving it up and out of his way. There was a crunching noise from the articulated hinge.
He ducked under the bottom of the gate and rushed across the tracks.
Deonne made a small, feeble movement with her hands as Justin lifted her up. Her head dropped against his shoulder.
She was alive.
Kieren gripped the gatepost, relief circling through him, until Justin turned to look at him, Deonne in his arms. His eyes were still narrowed. His voice carried across the track easily. “What did you do just then?” he demanded.
Chapter Eleven
Stockholm, Sweden, 2264 A.D.: Deonne struggled to orient herself, but nothing was making much sense. There was a high-pitch buzzing in her head, muffling her thinking.
All she knew was that she was in Justin’s arms and it felt incredibly safe there. She gripped his shirt in her fingers.
Justin was walking. She could feel the rhythmic motion transmitted through his chest. He was striding somewhere and talking at the same time. Deonne tried to focus her vision as she listened to him.
“You were a hundred meters behind me and I certainly didn’t push her out of the way. I wasn’t close enough.”
“It had to have been you.” That was Kieran’s voice. “Your kind can pick up psi tricks easily enough.”
Justin stopped and turned. To face Kieren, she guessed. She cranked her eyes open with heroic efforts. Kieren was turning back to face Justin and his face was a mask. He was holding something in.
“I don’t even like being vampire, Kieren. What the fuck makes you think I’d voluntarily accept a psi into my mind to learn how to do something like that? The last thing on this earth I could possibly want is to resemble psi-filers.” His tone was rich with disgust and dismay.
Kieran’s gaze skittered away. “Someone pushed her out of the way…and not physically.”
“Out of the way?” Deonne asked.
Kieren blinked, looking at her. “You’re conscious,” he remarked.
“Out of the way of what?” Deonne repeated.
Justin’s arms tightened around her, just a little. “You were standing on the tracks, right in the path of a g-train. Don’t you remember?”
Deonne thought backwards in her memory, but nothing about trains would come. “I was just standing there?” she asked, fear blooming in her chest.
“You had your hand out,” Kieren told her, lifting his own in demonstration.
The waterfall. Fright tore through her. “I imagined it all?” she breathed.
“Imagined what?” Justin prompted.
She looked up at him. “I was in Switzerland, up in the mountains near where my father lives. I was…” She took a breath that seemed to sear on the way down, so tightly was her chest clamped. “I had my hand in the water.”
“You didn’t leave here,” Kieren said flatly. “It was in your mind.”
Demyan hurried up to them, barely stopping to check for traffic as he crossed the road. “She’s alright?”
“For now,” Kieren told him. “But I want to get her somewhere shielded and protected as soon as possible. The psi targeted her.”
“They fucked with all of us,” Justin growled.
Demyan nodded. “I reached out for Nayara and told her what was happening. She has returned to the branch. She’s waiting for us now. We’re to jump there. The chamber is waiting.”
* * * * *
Justin lowered her onto one of the sofas in the green room. “Relax. You’re safe here,” he told her.
“Am I?” Deonne asked him. “What’s to stop them from making me think I’m in Switzerland again? Or Timbuktu?”
“We’re pretty sure the psi have to be close to you to achieve that sort of neural blanket,” Brenden growled. “We’re five floors below ground, here, and guarded by Wardens.”
“I walked right by Kieren,” Deonne pointed out. “They made him think I was still in the apartment building.”
Brenden cleared his throat and glance
d at Nayara, who gave her small smile. “There are nearly one hundred vampires on the premises. They are invulnerable to psi tampering. They won’t allow entry to anyone they don’t know.”
Deonne pursed her lips. “They made Justin and Demyan just stand there, helpless. Vampires are not that invulnerable.”
“That was a physical hold. They can’t screw with our minds. They didn’t. We watched it all,” Demyan replied. “We just couldn’t do anything about it.”
“The effect isn’t powerful,” Justin said, sitting on the edge of the sofa next to her and looking at the others in the room. “As soon as I realized something was amiss, I was able to move again. But I had to figure out there was a problem before I could raise the will to break it.”
“It was like being mildly drunk,” Demyan said. “That place where you’re feeling no pain, and nothing seems very important. You can watch a murder go down in that state, and it’s not until you process what murder means that you can stir yourself to care or move.”
Nayara turned to look at Kieren. The warden sat on the arm of another sofa, on the other side of the room. Distancing himself, Deonne suspected. He was steadily plucking at a loose thread of sofa fabric, between his knees.
“You are not psi, Kieren,” Nayara said. Her voice was melodious, but firm. She was making a statement.
“Ma’am?” Kieren responded, looking up.
“You are too old to be a psi. Yet you pushed Deonne out of the way.”
He licked his lips. “With all due respect, ma’am, I was across the road when De—…when Ms. Rinaldi leapt to safety.” He stood up. “Under the circumstances, I think it would be best if I recuse myself from this assignment. I’ll find a replacement who can step in immediately. You won’t notice any dip in efficiency.”
“Sit down, laddy,” Brenden rumbled. “You’re not going anywhere.”
There was a tap on the door – a light knocking.
Kieren turned to face Brenden and Deonne wondered if his hand resting on his hip, a short drop away from his weapon, was a coincidence. Kieren was feeling pressured. “I will speak to Assemblyman Stelios,” he said as Demyan opened the door. “He arranged this assignment originally and is paying all fees. The matter is in his hands. I know he will agree with me on this.”
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