Through the Static

by Jeanette Grey

  His frown deepened. “Maybe an hour for them to regroup. Maybe more.” His voice faltered. “I hurt Charm. Bad.”

  “The female?”

  He nodded. “Curse didn’t look good either.”

  The depth of his conflict bled into his thoughts and across the tendrils of their link. He’d wanted so badly to be free of them, had begged her to set him loose in those frantic, terrifying moments. But then he’d turned so violent on them.

  All the while, he’d been screaming at them for hurting her. He’d done so much of it to protect her. But remorse was setting in, hard.

  “They’ll be all right.”

  He let out a shaky exhale before seeming to regain control. “They’ll track the transport. They don’t have another one, so it’ll take them time to catch up once they do. I’m scrambling our signal, but we’ll still need to change vehicles.”

  “Agreed.”

  How were they going to get another one? And once they had it, where would they go?

  For a second, she considered trying to contact Isabel, but instantly discarded the idea. It was too dangerous, for everyone.

  Taking care to shield her thoughts, she tried to come up with places to retreat to, but every one of them was complicated by Jinx’s presence. No one would trust her, hauling in a stray member of an active Three who she’d cut loose so clumsily. Communication with his partners had been upset, all right, but the others might still have a way to trace him. Might be able to follow him wherever they went, bringing all manner of trouble she didn’t need.

  Leading their boss straight to her.

  God, she still didn’t even know who Jinx worked for.

  Finally, her mind settled on the safe house she and Isabel and Stan had set up outside of town. While she was hesitant to expose its location, she didn’t know what other choice she had. The laboratory setup there was rudimentary, but she’d have most of the equipment she would need to at least try to fix the frayed edges of Jinx’s mind. She could probably tap into her network drive and download the portion of their research they stored online. It wouldn’t be as good as having their original notes, but it might be enough.

  Speaking to the glass of the window, she mused aloud, “I wish we could go back to my lab. If I just had all Stan’s notebooks…”

  Jinx’s hand tensed where it rested against the back of her neck. “It wouldn’t help if we could.”

  Uneasiness filled her. A hint of something he had yet to reveal. Something she didn’t want to believe. “What do you mean?”

  But she knew. From the images filtering across the link, she knew. Images of glass neatly shattering, of file boxes being gathered up and loaded. But she was unwilling to believe.

  Even though it physically pained her, she pulled away from his touch. The lack of contact crackled through her overburdened nervous system, doubling the weight of his psychic presence in her mind. He shuddered, too. She pushed past her discomfort and his, sitting up straight, her whole body angled toward his.

  “What. Do. You. Mean.”

  He kept his gaze on the road, his grip on the wheel steady, but his voice was choked, the thoughts edging across their link frantic.

  “All your things,” he said, jaw locked. “They’re back at our barracks. We raided your offices last night.”

  Chapter Six

  Everything was happening too fast.

  For years, Jinx had had three sets of senses, three pairs of eyes and ears and the collective wisdom of three minds. He’d had a voice, always telling him what to do in a crisis. He might not have always liked it, might have sometimes hated it, but he’d had it.

  Now there was just himself and what little of Aurelia she chose to let him see and hear and feel. He didn’t understand the silence or the shakiness or the places where his mind just stopped. He didn’t know the edges of his own thoughts or the subtle flavor of hers.

  All he knew was that she was screaming.

  “Stop the car!”

  She’d asked him quietly once already, several terrifying seconds after he’d confessed to what his Three had done the night before.

  Fuck. What they’d done the night before.

  The familiar haze of guilt rose over him, and at the borders of his vision, he saw that same wavering face amidst the static. Those same doleful eyes.

  A rough shove against his shoulder pushed the electrical hum aside, pushed his arm back into his space and away from the sanctum of her skin. She’d already pulled away from him the instant he’d hinted at what they’d done to her files, but this was even worse. The steering wheel jerked beneath his hand as he whipped his head around, hurt and ungrounded all at the same time. He glared at Aurelia as he forced the car back into the right lane. “What do you think you’re—”

  She sat there, spine wedged against the door, safety belt unfastened. Her arms were braced in front of her. And there was a weapon in her hands.

  “I told you to stop the car.”

  At that, his instincts finally kicked in. “Absolutely not.”

  She had no intention of using the gun. He knew that, could feel it through their link and in the tenor of the fear and anger she was pushing into the air. She just needed control over this situation. Control over herself and over him and what was happening between them.

  But he couldn’t give it to her. The protective instincts driving him told him to keep the car moving, to get them closer to safety and as far from his Three as possible. He had to keep her safe.

  And he had to know what she was thinking.

  He pointed his gaze straight ahead as he floored the accelerator, pretending to pay her no attention even though every fiber of his being was bent toward her. With his mind, he probed the exposed edges of hers, and in his peripheral vision, he studied her stance.

  Everything in the space between them was colored by a rage so hot, a betrayal too fresh to be tamed, and he cursed himself. He’d sworn he’d never let anyone hurt her, and here he’d gone and done it himself.

  The instant Curse and Charm had ID’ed the blood on the gloves he’d disposed of—the instant they’d spoken her name into his mind—he’d known he was fucked, but things had been moving too fast then, too. He’d gone straight into crisis mode, all his energy focused on keeping his Three from doing the terrible things they planned to. The terrible things they planned to make him do.

  But he’d known. Right then, he’d known she wouldn’t be able to forgive him for who he’d been before she met him. Before she’d given him his first breath of air that was his own.

  Still, he tried to explain. Tried to make himself redeemable in her eyes. Pushing images into her mind, he swore, “I didn’t know. All we had was an address, and it wasn’t until this morning, when Curse and Charm figured out who you were—”

  Cold metal pressed against his temple. She didn’t want explanations. Not right now.

  “Stop. This. Car.”

  Her need warred with his own. This time, hers won. She needed stillness. Space. He pressed his foot to the brake.

  The car had barely come to a stop at the side of the road before she was flinging the door open and hurling herself out of it. He followed her in her mind, watching the unguarded images of trees and brush giving way beneath her. God, she was hurting so badly and in so many ways.

  He couldn’t let her get far, but he had the presence of mind and the advantage of speed. He’d be able to catch up to her. He took the extra few seconds to drive the car into cover and to hack into its computer. With a few quick strokes, he fully disabled it and wiped its records. They’d find another method of transport from here. They’d have to.

  After grabbing the emergency supplies from the compartment in the dash, he opened the door and planted his boots down on solid earth. A wave of dizziness rocked him, and he swayed but then righted himself again. Grounding himself with one palm trailing alon
g the metal body of the car, he walked around it to the passenger’s side door. Her scent still lingered there.

  The vertigo was less about his frayed neural network and more about what they’d done, right here against this open door. About the way she’d pulled him to her, the images she’d shown him of her body. The press of skin and lips.

  He closed his eyes and leaned heavily against the frame of the car, resting there for just a second before dragging himself away. And then he was tearing off into the woods after a woman. After a literal part of himself.

  After a dream.

  It didn’t take him long to catch her scent. From everything he was getting from her across the link, she was running for her life, but she was injured and frightened. She wasn’t getting very far very fast. Within minutes, he sensed her close. He approached her as carefully as he could, moving in slowly and trying to make sure she knew it was only him behind her. That, for now at least, they were safe.

  Only she felt anything but safe.

  She was guarding her thoughts, but the link was alive with panic, flashes of terror and an echoing, pounding heartbeat. His first sure sign that he was closing on her was the way her feelings multiplied. There were images of underbrush and forest, some lit by the brightness of the midday sun while others were shrouded in darkness and the unmistakable haze of memory.

  When those monsters had chased her down last night, it must have felt like this.

  Did she even know it was him? That he would never…

  He cursed and spat at the ground, then reached out with every fiber of his will.

  “I’ll never hurt you.” He spoke the words into the air and into her thoughts, unsure if she was hearing any of it but increasingly desperate to make himself known. He repeated it again and again, and in the background hum of their connection, he felt an anguish bloom. One that ran deeper than this handful of hours he had known her. Someone had made her promises before.

  “I’ll never hurt you,” he swore.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He froze, scanning his surroundings and her mind. Before him was a clearing, a rough circle of mossy earth and grass and flowers, and at the opposite edge of it was a woman dressed in his clothes, pale skin awash in black, copper curls tumbling wild and free. Her jaw was set, her posture menacing, and she still had that damn gun she’d picked off Charm pointed straight at him. But for all of that, her eyes were scared and pleading. Across the link, there was a tremor of desperation.

  She wanted to believe him, to be safe and to have somebody to lean on. For once, she wanted to trust someone.

  In that moment, he wished an awful lot of things. He wished he knew who’d put that look in her eyes, wished he could turn that person into dust. He wished he could comfort her.

  And in his heart of hearts, buried deep beneath everything else, he wished she had someone better to depend on than him.

  Though the ache to touch her was even stronger now that he was within sight of her again, he raised his hands in front of himself in a gesture of supplication. Disarmed in every way, he took but two steps forward, into the clearing and into the light.

  The instant he made a move toward her, her arms lifted, her hands tensing around the handle of the weapon. A crackle of need hissed through their link, and his eyes zeroed in on those hands. He could feel the longing in them and in his own, and his bones flashed hot with the restraint it took not to close the distance—to take her in his arms and to feel her face between his palms. To capture that soft, red mouth.

  “Look at me.”

  His gaze darted up to meet hers, and thoughts of soothing the ache with his touch faded away. She was still so skittery and angry and wanting for a reason to trust.

  They needed a different kind of congress entirely. For now.

  Her voice shook as she stared him down. “Who do you work for?”

  This was so against protocol. Every instinct told him to stop, but he wouldn’t lie or evade. Not to her. Not now. “I don’t know. We have one contact. Codename Spellcaster.”

  If she knew the name, she didn’t show it. “Who are you?”

  It was the same question he’d asked her the night before. She’d never given him a satisfactory answer, but she hadn’t had to, then, had she? Now she was asking it of him after giving him his freedom—after taking away everything he knew in one fell swoop. And all he could give her was himself.

  “They call me Jinx.”

  “Is that your name?”

  His chest swelled with a depth of emotion he didn’t remember ever feeling before. In all this time, no one had ever asked him his name.

  Truthfully, he answered, “I don’t know.”

  The barrel of her gun lowered by a fraction of an inch, and his breath deepened by the same increment. “What do you know?”

  God, but it was a loaded question. Still floored by her question about his name, his thoughts dwelled in the past, and the past, murky as it was, threatened to consume him. Unbidden memories rose to the surface, disjointed flashes from those first few painful, terrifying days after he’d awoken to a world of blinding white, his head full of two new voices and his own mind not entirely his own. He hadn’t remembered anything. Not at the time.

  “Not much,” he confessed, taking no pains to hide his recollections from her. She grimaced against the onslaught but stayed firm, her jaw strong. “At least not at first.”

  She raised a single eyebrow, an invitation to talk. He hadn’t realized until that second how his silence had been weighing on him.

  Words began to pour out of him, things he’d kept buried inside for so long, and with each one, the pressure on his ribs seemed to lift. “All I knew back then was what they told me. That I’d been alone, unhappy. Without prospects. That I’d sold myself into this life. I’d probably been a criminal, or…worse.” His gaze darted to hers, and even as the burden of the last seven years left him, he felt other parts of himself locking down.

  Like the hope that she would want to stay with him, after this.

  He clenched his jaw and forced himself to keep going. “Memories started to come back to me, though. As the link degraded, I got more and more, and I…I don’t think I was alone. Before.”

  “No?” Her breath hitched and there was an anticipation of pain somewhere just beneath her thoughts.

  “No. There was a woman. I see her sometimes. Just a wisp in the static. But she…” He refocused his crossing eyes and looked into Aurelia’s to find them hard. The implication was clear, and it was so, so wrong. He had to set her straight.

  His voice went contrarily soft as he confessed a truth he’d never given breath to before. “She has my eyes. And she looks so disappointed in me. In the things I’ve done.”

  Aurelia let out a rough sigh, and a shiver racked her frame. “Your eyes?”

  “The very same.”

  “You think she was family?”

  The admission made this throat rough. “Yes.”

  She lowered the gun completely, even though her grip didn’t ease at all. Instead of disgusted, her eyes shone with a compassion he didn’t deserve and that made him ache. “What have you done?”

  He had just enough control over himself not to let her see the images that whipped past him. “Terrible things.”

  “And you regret them.”

  There was more than personal interest in her voice as it rose. There was a thirst for knowledge there, a glimpse of the scientist whose reputation had preceded her, written large across those briefing files he’d read, back before he’d known the color of her eyes or the taste of her mouth.

  “I do.”

  So much of the remaining tension in her posture bled from her body, and she shifted the gun to hold it in her good hand, then sank to sit amongst the grasses. Half laughing, she pushed her hair back from her face and stared up at the sky. “You regained
your humanity.”

  He didn’t need to confirm it. Her face was lit from within, the edges of it crackling with a joy he could never understand—not when it was over something that had caused him so much anguish as it emerged. With his humanity, he’d also regained the capacity for pain. The knowledge that, even in the crowded confines of his mind, he was alone. That his will was not entirely his own.

  But if she thought it was a good thing, then it was. It was the best thing in the world.

  “Sit,” she finally said, gesturing to the grass before him. She wasn’t inviting him closer, but she was inviting him to share this space with her, not as a prisoner but as an equal. She gazed at him and smiled. “Sit down and tell me everything.”

  Chapter Seven

  Aurelia sat because she couldn’t stand, and she couldn’t stand because it was all too much. All too wonderfully, frighteningly much.

  Her entire adult life, she’d been conducting research into cybernetic links. It had begun with the tiniest of tethers, ones that made use of the existing wiring people had been implanting into their minds to interact with media and the Internet for years. She’d helped develop the chip that allowed a person to open a channel into another’s mind and push a few quick words across. From there, it had bloomed into much more aggressive connections, ones even stronger than the link she was currently sharing with Jinx to help keep him afloat. The one that made her feel like she was awash in presence and heat.

  God, how she wanted to touch him.

  She kept her hands to herself, though, as she melted into the long grass. She still held her weapon at the ready, but she no longer had any sense she was going to need it.

  She’d never really thought she was going to need it.

  Jinx followed her down to the ground but maintained the distance between their bodies. Thank goodness, because she wasn’t sure she had the will to do so anymore. They were in such peril, with pursuers on their heels, only hours away, and yet she felt more at ease than she had in…she didn’t even know how long. Probably years.