Through the Static

by Jeanette Grey

  Aurelia didn’t, though the bubble of anxious excitement in her chest was threatening to burst. Isabel struggled to rise to her feet without the use of her arms, but once she was up, she crossed the distance over to Cepheus without hesitation or eagerness. Her entire being radiated calm. Cepheus untied her wrists with one hand, the other still clenched tight around the handle of his weapon, the muzzle trained on Aurelia, just in case it wasn’t clear which one of them he believed to be the threat. Just like they wanted it.

  His eyes darting back and forth between the two of them, he gestured with his gun hand toward the lab area. “Go on, then.”

  Isabel cast one look back at Aurelia before heading toward the scattered array of vials and syringes and wires spread out across the table. After swallowing hard, Aurelia started giving her superfluous instructions, explaining the procedures Isabel herself had taught her. Isabel went about the work methodically, her hands always in plain view. The entire time, Aurelia was watching carefully, looking for the slightest hint of the signal she was waiting for.

  When it came, she was ready.

  Isabel dropped a pen. Before it hit the ground, Aurelia had her shields cranked up to high, and she watched without breathing as Isabel took her locket between her forefinger and thumb. Squeezed.

  And nothing happened.

  Isabel blinked, and Aurelia stared, uncertain what was wrong. She hadn’t been ready for this. But then Isabel was in motion, her hand closing around the base of the clunky, ancient microscope on the edge of the lab table. At the same moment, Aurelia laughed out loud, unable to contain her shock. Cepheus’s gaze whipped to hers, and Isabel took one lunging step forward before heaving the microscope at his head, connecting with the back of his skull with a thunk that reverberated through the room.

  Cepheus’s knees crunched on the concrete, and Aurelia remembered herself. Reached out. Exploiting the moment of vulnerability, she raced the man’s rising tide of unconsciousness, followed one circuit pathway after another into the heart of his mind where she set up a temporary outpost. A ghost in the darkness making the shell look occupied. It wouldn’t fool the members of his Three for long, but it would buy them time. Time to get upstairs and get to Jinx. To save him. And to maybe save themselves.

  But then Aurelia looked up through Cepheus’s eyes to see Isabel standing over him, a scalpel in hand and murder in her eyes. Aurelia barely had to time to anchor the base she’d made inside his matrix before she was back in her own mind, screaming, “No!”

  Isabel paused, scalpel pressing to the man’s throat. “You know it better than I do. Take out one and we take out the Three.”

  “No,” Aurelia gasped. It was irrational how the very idea of it made her skin crawl. “We can’t.”

  “They have my boy.”

  The words clawed at Aurelia’s throat, and her eyes stung as she looked at Cepheus’s form, laid out and helpless on the floor. He was a person. A man. “What if that was your boy?”

  Isabel froze. “He’s not.”

  “But he’s someone’s. All the stories we were told about who they were…they were lies. He was someone’s someone.” The emotion rose even hotter in her chest. Just a few days ago, she would have killed him without hesitation. She would have killed Jinx. “We can’t. Not unless it’s a last resort.”

  Narrowing her gaze, Isabel lifted the blade, putting an inch between steel and skin. “What do you propose?”

  With her knees creaking, the world spinning as the blood rushed to her head, Aurelia pushed herself to stand. She staggered her way over to the lab bench and spotted the vials she’d been looking for. Wrenching her bound hands around to her side, she pointed at them.

  “A better way.”

  For the third time, Aurelia tapped into the house’s security system. Just like the first two times, all the heat signatures in the building were clustered in the main room. No one was standing guard outside their door. She shook her head. Overconfident to the end in the power of their link.

  She popped the door. In spite of the damage it had suffered when Curse and Charm had burst in, it moved smoothly on its hinges, yielding without a sound. Holding it open just a fraction of an inch, she peeked out through the gap. Sure enough, the hall was empty.

  Letting it fall closed again, she looked back at Isabel. “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  It was the moment of truth, but she faltered. Kept her hand on the latch as she took one deep breath and then another.

  God, this could be such a disaster. So much uncertain and so much left up to chance. They had no idea what they were walking into—just a sketchy one of how they hoped to walk away from it.

  Reiterating their basic operating principles, she outlined what passed for a plan again. “We go in. We look for our chance.”

  “And I pull the trigger the instant I see my opening. You just have to get his defenses down for a second.”

  Doubt chilled Aurelia to her core. “You really think you can do this?”

  “You really sure you’re okay with what it means?”

  She swallowed hard. That was the only thing she didn’t doubt. “Absolutely.”

  Isabel nodded. It was all the further confirmation Aurelia would get.

  After giving the security grid just one last check, she nudged open the trap door. This time, after seeing the coast was clear, she pushed past her fear. Pushed the door the rest of the way and lowered the stairs, then charged right up them with Cepheus’s gun held out in front of her. She didn’t want to shoot any member of any Three, but if she had to, she would. Pressing her spine flush against the wall, she covered the end of the hall that led toward the room where everyone was gathered. A few seconds passed before Isabel’s head rose above the level of the floor. Aurelia passed her the gun. With her hands free, she dug into her pocket to grip one of the capped syringes she’d placed there, then reached out with her mind.

  It took all of her concentration, but just as they’d practiced, the lines of muscle and sinew adhered themselves to her thoughts. She lifted one heavy boot and then the other.

  His steps were less than silent, but they were as quiet as she could have hoped. Fully under her command, Cepheus rose out of the basement to stand in the middle of the hall. His body was eerily still, the very serenity of its posture and the blankness of his eyes belying a war. She had power over him, for now. But beneath it, he was stirring, his mind working in counterpoint to hers. He was recovering from the blow with shocking speed.

  They had to move fast.

  She shot a glance at Isabel, caught her nod and then faced forward. Her chest to his spine, she wrapped her arms around Cepheus’s torso, then took a deep breath and stepped the both of them away from the wall. With one hand, she bared the needle of the syringe over his heart, and as one, the three of them marched forward. Her breath rose, her nerves flaring as Cepheus’s fight for control over his own body reached a pinnacle. Just a few more steps. A few more—

  They rounded the corner, and she placed her thumb over the plunger of the syringe.

  Before she saw anything, though, before she could take in a single thing about the scene before her, she heard a voice. Her name.

  She knew that voice.

  “Aurelia. Sweetheart.” A thin mouth leered at her. “So we meet again.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Invasion. Penetration and wrongness and…Jinx fought back the sick as the probing drove deeper. He was so exposed, so naked and vulnerable and…

  He kept himself still even through the shudder.

  In all the years he’d been working for the man, Jinx had only met Spellcaster in the flesh a half-dozen times. The number of times he’d had the man’s hands inside his mind was even fewer, and it was all wrong. All pressure inside his cranium, feelings that made his skin crawl and his stomach churn. Violation and the sense of being changed against his will.r />
  It was nothing like when she’d been in his mind.

  He clamped down tight on the errant thought. Trouble. All that new voice in his head seemed to be was trouble. And it was getting stronger all the time.

  With a lash of anger, Spellcaster withdrew, stepping back out of Jinx’s thoughts and out of his space. Jinx shuddered as his lungs sucked up a deep gulp of air. As his mind closed back up around the holes the master left whenever he meddled inside there.

  And the ordeal wasn’t over yet.

  As soon as they’d emerged from the basement, he’d been railroaded into a cavernous front room, pushed down by Curse’s command and by his hands. On his knees, Jinx had been brought face-to-face with the man who controlled their lives. Their breaths and thoughts and their fates. And suddenly, he’d wondered if he’d made a terrible, terrible mistake.

  Sharp pain burst across his skull. He couldn’t think of that. He couldn’t—

  Just as quickly as the pain had come, it was gone. Reeling, Jinx sat back farther, but he couldn’t relax. He was still too exposed. In his peripheral vision, he watched Spellcaster pace. The glowing earpiece attached to the side of his head signaled that he was communicating across the wires. Good. That was good. It would keep him out of Jinx’s head, at least for a little while.

  Spellcaster barked a terse greeting, then launched into a tirade.

  “How the fuck did this happen? Her fingerprints were all over his matrix…” Spellcaster swore and spat. Paced back and forth. “Bullshit. You know I can’t dissolve this one… Whatever you have to do to keep them running. Gotta show the suits that we can keep a Three functional long-term… Well, they’re the oldest set we’ve got left, damn it… No, we got her… Agreed. She’s too much of a liability. Can’t have this getting out now.” His gaze shifted to Jinx, a dark cast to his eyes. “You might have a point.”

  Without the other half of the communication, Jinx could only guess at the meaning of the words. There was good news there amidst the vitriol—his Three wasn’t in jeopardy. But there had been a fuck-up of some sort. A big one. One that revolved around him.

  A murmur of unease passed through his link. Curse and Charm concurred with that assessment, at least.

  If his arms and legs didn’t still feel like jelly, he would have smacked himself. If only he could remember…

  You found yourself. You found yourself with her.

  He laughed, a chilling sound in the back of his throat. There was nothing to find. Nothing.

  There was nothing left of him.

  He sank deeper onto his heels, like his very bones had lost their will to hold him up. There was a sense of loss, swirling somewhere deep. But he didn’t even know what he hadn’t gotten to keep.

  “Stop it, Goddamn it.” Charm’s voice in Jinx’s head wasn’t as powerful as the new one, but the hiss of electricity she sent down his spine was potent anyway. “You want to get us all lobotomized?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Just stop. Stop all of it. Everything you’re thinking and what you did and…” Her thoughts rose, circling higher and higher toward hysteria. Betrayal lay hot beneath them, an anger he’d always sensed in her but which had never been loosed on him before.

  God. The only people in the world he’d had all these years and he’d…he’d betrayed them.

  Curse’s thoughts twisted, turning sour and heavy with an amorphous guilt. Jinx didn’t understand. He straightened, but he didn’t— He didn’t know anything.

  Not a single thing except the sound of footfalls on wood at the edge of the room, a tremor running through the floor and through his link. The instinctive, defensive reaction of his Three rounding against danger, the cocking back of weapons as they were raised. His own hands going for the sidearm at his waist. Spellcaster turning.

  And laughing.

  “Aurelia. Sweetheart,” Spellcaster said. “So we meet again.”

  Jinx whirled, spinning on his heels, and his gaze landed on her. On Aurelia. She was standing there, looking so brave and so scared. Like an image in a dream. Did he know how to dream?

  If he did, it wouldn’t have been of this—not of this violence. She had her arm over the throat of the third member of the other Three, a syringe clasped tightly in her hand, tip aimed at the man’s heart. And beside her was another dream. A woman whose face should be dissolving into static, but which was real and hard and disappointed. Always so much disappointment.

  But she wasn’t disappointed. Aurelia wasn’t. She was furious.

  “Peter.” She spat the name like it was poison, and the nerves in the back of Jinx’s skull glowed red. He wasn’t supposed to know his master’s name.

  Spellcaster, for his part, was unperturbed. “Oh, please. Don’t look so happy to see me.”

  “You.” She shook, nostrils flared and eyes narrowed. “You were behind this the whole time. The attack on me. Stealing all my files.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  Her voice hitched. “Why? You hadn’t taken enough?”

  Spellcaster’s eyes drifted up and down her body, and something in the pit of Jinx’s stomach turned. There was a memory of sex in that gaze.

  There was a memory of sex somewhere deep in Jinx’s skin.

  “I take what suits me and what serves me. Surely you know that.”

  “You take what isn’t yours.”

  “Oh, but it is mine. Now.” Spellcaster took a single step forward. “And you have been meddling with things that no longer belong to you.”

  “You can’t stop the truth from getting out. You’re killing these people. Slowly but surely, the link is killing them.”

  For the first time, a shadow passed over Spellcaster’s face. “They aren’t your concern.”

  “They are.” Her eyes darted to Jinx’s, her face a mask of longing and…hurt?

  Spellcaster tipped his head back, the barking sound of his laughter harsh in the hollow space. “And you accuse me of taking things that belong to you.” His voice grew colder. “He’s mine.”

  “He was mine.” The other woman—the one who should have receded into the static—stepped forward, gun pointed straight at the spot between Spellcaster’s eyes.

  “Ah, Isabel. So lovely to see you again, too. Did you ever find your boy? I know you were so bereft at his loss.”

  Isabel’s face went red, and Jinx’s head pounded, his pulse a roar inside his ears as his vision narrowed.

  He was nothing. A soldier. No one’s. Not even his own.

  You are. The whispers in his mind grew louder, forcing their way through the crush of competing words and thoughts. You are what you choose to become.

  His gaze swung wildly from Isabel’s face to Aurelia’s and back again. You were hers. And hers.

  You are.

  You are.

  You are.

  An angry sob broke the silence, tore through the noise in Jinx’s mind, and he was staring into hazel eyes he knew. Staring at Aurelia as she tightened her grip around the throat of a vacant shell of a man. She gazed straight ahead, at Spellcaster, and with her eyes burning, she spoke. “We were victims back then, Peter. You made us victims.” She shifted her grip on the syringe. “But we’re not victims anymore.”

  And then she stabbed the needle down, through chest and between bones, into beating tissue, thumb squeezing.

  Chaos erupted as the man in her arms collapsed into a writhing mass. All around them, it was the same, the other two from Cepheus’s Three dropping like so much dead weight, their weapons clattering to the ground. Commands echoed through Jinx’s cerebral cortex, and his arms lifted his gun to eye level. His hands pointed it at Aurelia.

  But his mind screamed.

  Curse and Charm were in motion. Curse had Isabel’s weapon in his hand, his arms binding Isabel’s tight behind her back, and Charm had Aurelia held just as tightly
.

  Spellcaster laughed and laughed and laughed.

  “You sad, pathetic little girl.” He flicked a hand, and Jinx took an automatic, staggering step forward as his thumb unlocked the safety on his gun. “I should have ended you back then.” The corner of his lip twitched. “But then I wouldn’t have gotten to watch this. Jinx?”

  The man held a knife toward Jinx, and he took it in exchange for his gun.

  “Her throat,” Spellcaster spoke into his mind. “Slit her throat and feel her life run down your hands.”

  Jinx tried to resist, to slow things down just long enough to think, but words kept cycling through his brain.

  One mission. One mind.

  He didn’t know his own mind.

  He blinked, and then his fist was at her collarbone, his blade pressed tight against that pulsing cord of cream-white flesh. Everything was silence and breath. A last breath.

  And another. And another.

  “Jinx.” Her whole body trembled, the motion placing that tender skin even closer, flush with steel. “Jinx.” She swallowed. “Jack?”

  “End her. Now.”

  And then that other voice, loud and desperate in his skull. You are. You are you are you are.

  Frozen in space and time, Jinx lifted his gaze from the press of blade to throat and stared up into soft, wet eyes, the very depths of them pleading with him. Pleading for something he didn’t know how to give.

  “Jinx, don’t do this. Please. Please, Jinx.” Aurelia blinked, opened her eyes and glanced to the side. But when she looked at him again, it was with an expression that took his breath away.

  He saw it all. His body over hers, her hands in his. His body inside her. Her mouth, her touch, her kiss, her words. Her quiet. And her mind.

  He touched it, and she touched him.

  “I love you, Jinx.”

  Love.

  Love.

  Love.

  You love. You are loved.

  You are.

  Everything stopped, and his grip slipped, the blade and the world all falling away with his defenses. This wasn’t his mission. This wasn’t his mind.