Through the Static

by Jeanette Grey

  “I—” he started.

  And then a burst of light exploded behind his eyes.

  It was what they’d been waiting for.

  Aurelia saw the gap in Jinx’s armor at the exact same moment Isabel had, and suddenly there was fire.

  Too fast for her to do anything but hold on, Aurelia’s mind expanded, the circuits and neurons all unfurling as one, and she let them go. Let the wires run adrift, open like her hands. And when Jinx’s thoughts were placed flush to hers, she grasped onto them with everything she was worth.

  The fire of connection spread as Isabel tore him loose and soldered all his nerves to hers, forging an unbreakable bond deep in the tissues and wires of their minds. Aurelia heard him, felt him, touched him. He opened his eyes and stared into hers. And she was home.

  She was home.

  “Aurelia.”

  All at once, the hands on her shoulders released, and she staggered. She snapped her head around to see Charm stumbling backward, the back of her wrist pressed to her brow and her eyes closed. Isabel sank as she was released, Curse stepping forward on shaky legs to catch Charm, his mouth tight, lines etched deep into his face.

  And then Jinx was pulling at Aurelia’s shoulders, clasping her to his chest, and the only thing in the world was him. As one, they collapsed into each other and into the earth, and she welcomed him with open arms, holding him in her thoughts and in her heart. When she felt his voice flooding through her synapses, it seemed like a song she’d been meant to sing for all her life.

  “Jinx.” She clutched him closer, quenched the newly forged connections and made them steel.

  His thoughts were a tidal wave of relief and need, remorse and something glowing. Something too perfect to believe. “I love you. I got so lost.” He shook his head, eyes glossy as he gripped her shoulders. “I love you.” And then he held her tighter, voice aching even in her mind. “I almost hurt you. They almost made me—”

  And then he was pulling away, one hand on her arm to keep her behind him as he whipped around, glancing at Isabel before focusing on Peter. He picked the knife up off the ground.

  She heard his thoughts, heard the same murderous rage that had almost ended him when she’d yanked him from his Three the first time. Only that time, he hadn’t been able to follow through.

  Facing Peter, Jinx spoke words so cold and so detached. “You made me hurt them.” His tone dropped an octave, the ice crackling and making the revulsion dripping from his words slick. “You made me forget them.”

  “Jinx.” Peter’s face barely masked his panic as he backed away. “Let’s be reasonable.”

  “You never were.” Jinx’s memories were a surge of pain, a longing so intense Aurelia wondered how he’d survived it. In his thoughts, she saw the way his life had been ripped away from him. Saw the punishments and the suppression. The loss as he’d forgotten what he’d loved. As he’d been forced to do terrible things. “You’ll never stop,” he said, voice flat. “I know you. I know your mind. You’ll never, ever stop.”

  She couldn’t prevent it. Didn’t even know if she would. Jinx was free now—really and truly free. There were no lingering connections, no risk if his master or his Three was felled. No pause as his hand drew back. Hovered.

  In the instant that Jinx hesitated, Peter raised his gun and smirked.

  The big body seemed to come out of nowhere. Curse collided with Peter in a rush, and Charm was right behind him, her own gun trained on Peter’s head. And how was that possible?

  Aurelia hurtled forward into the network of thoughts and brain waves in the room, searching for the loose ends of Curse and Charm’s connection, only to come up with live wires. They’d torn themselves free, were free.

  Peter flailed wildly as Curse reared back, connected fist with jaw, and then Peter’s gun was coming down on Curse’s head. Curse grunted but didn’t relent.

  Black flooded Peter’s pupils.

  All at once, Curse let go, hands reaching for his head, and Aurelia screamed at the sudden pressure inside her mind. He was trying to, he was— Deep within the pathways and circuitry, Peter tore at the wires holding Jinx to her and her to Jinx, a touch like fire, like the rending of limb from limb. The breath was ripped from her lungs.

  She clutched at Jinx with all she was worth, fighting to keep the link intact. To keep him close and hers and sane when every neuron in her cortex lit up with pain.

  “No.” The word bled from Jinx’s lungs like a wound.

  Through the agony, he turned to her, eyes connecting with hers for the briefest instant. In them was clarity. Purpose.

  “Forgive me,” Jinx whispered in her brain as he pulled his arm back and released.

  The blade whirled through the air in a spinning, shining spiral, bright as a star. Through the tearing pressure in her skull, Aurelia thought to herself how it resembled the marks on the necks of the men she’d floored.

  Just like those tattoos, the blade found Peter’s throat.

  The pain stopped.

  And Spellcaster fell, lifeless, to the floor.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Rage. Rage and hate and anger, pain in his skull and neurons and wires tearing. Blood. And then a hand. Gentle. Soft. Aurelia’s hand. Aurelia’s skin on his.

  All at once, the shattered pieces of Jinx’s sanity snapped into place, the raw edges binding over.

  “Aurelia.”

  He refocused all of his attention on her, steadying his gaze on her face and his mind on the warmth of her thoughts as they surrounded him. Right. This was right. This was where he was meant to be. Who he was meant to be.

  “Jinx. Jinx, come back to me.”

  “I am,” he thought, and he was. Christ, he was. Rather than the tenuous link they’d shared before, this new one felt as solid as his own flesh—like he was part of her and she a part of him. The best part.

  How long had he lingered in the darkness without her? How long had he not been?

  Eyes misty but grip strong, she pulled his hand toward her lips, pressing soft kisses to his knuckles. “Not long. But I thought… For a minute there, I thought…”

  The violence in his own shaky limbs assaulted him, a rush of images of her eyes staring back at him—of what he had looked like to her with his knife pressed to her throat. He flexed the muscles in his hand. The warm metal of the handle was burned into his fingers.

  He’d thrown…

  He tore his gaze from her to survey the carnage around him. His insides clenched, stomach roiling and throat threatening to open. All around him were bodies. Spellcaster’s and those of the other Three. Isabel was bent over Spellcaster, ear at his chest, listening for something he already knew she wouldn’t find.

  Behind her stood the remnants of his Three.

  Only, they…weren’t. They weren’t the soldiers he’d fought beside, weren’t the hard-eyed killers who had commanded him and punished him.

  Curse and Charm stood there, breathing ragged, cleaving to each other in a way he’d never seen before, softness holding to the edges of their mouths and eyes. They were…human. Just like him.

  He was human. A man. His own man.

  Just the idea of it, after all those years, made him ache.

  Charm stared at him, fist pressed to her mouth, the other arm around Curse. “Oh, God. Jinx.”

  “I’m not sorry.” He should be. He’d killed a man. Just like he’d killed so many men before.

  He shook his head, closing his eyes against those memories. This had been different. In those last moments, when his knife had been balanced between his fingertips, he’d felt that cold pressure against the edges of his mind, those shadowy hands seeking purchase inside him. And he’d just gotten himself back.

  “We know,” Curse said, voice quiet in a way Jinx had never heard before.

  Aurelia squeezed his hand, turning her attention
to the two of them. Addressing Curse, she asked, “When we got Jinx free, how did you…?”

  “I didn’t want to be a slave either, you know,” Curse said. His gaze was directed levelly at Jinx. “Back at the barracks, when you left and linked yourself to her, something got loose in my head.” He gestured with his free hand at his temple. “I had my own thoughts. Just for a little while.” Kissing the top of Charm’s brow, he shivered. “Until Spellcaster came for us. But I used every second of the time before he found us figuring out what you had done to get free. Learning how to do it for myself. When it happened again this time, I grabbed Charm and I cut us both loose. Tied myself to her.” He gripped her tighter and looked to the pool of blood on the floor. “We were clear before he went down.”

  Charm spoke up. “I’m sorry I was so angry. I was just so scared. After you left… You don’t know what it was like when he found us.”

  Jinx could imagine. And that…that was something he could apologize for. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” Curse straightened his shoulders, his expression grim until he gazed back down at Charm. Everything in his face went soft. “We’re free now. We’re free.”

  Which raised the unavoidable question of those who were not.

  Jinx shifted his gaze to the man Aurelia had walked into the room with. “Is he—”

  “No.” Aurelia leaned in and pressed her lips against Jinx’s temple, then let go of his hand as she rose. The instant her skin lost contact with his, he felt a fraction of the same scatteredness and unease that had plagued him with their earlier link. It was easier to manage now, though—easier to touch her mind and feel like he was touching her hand.

  As she knelt beside the man, a note of tension worked its way up Jinx’s spine. She brushed the backs of her knuckles over the man’s forehead in a touch that was almost affectionate. Jinx burned.

  Instinctively guarding his thoughts the way he’d done back when he was trapped inside his Three, he sat back, bracing himself with his arm. She’d touched him and said she loved him. Held him tight and bound her mind and body to his own. But she hadn’t wanted to. Right before it all had happened, right before Isabel’s revelation and the darkness…she hadn’t.

  She’d wanted to let him go.

  Her head jerked up, her hand pulling away from the other man’s skin as her gaze darted to Jinx. In her mind, he heard the tenor of his own thoughts reflected back at him, the cadence of them but not the matter. All around them was a question.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fine.”

  If the furrow in her brow was any indication, she didn’t believe him. The way she looked at him broke his heart all over again.

  “Later,” he promised. He didn’t have words for the doubt inside him. Not right now.

  Her expression didn’t relax, nor did the concern radiating through their link, but he forced a thin smile. She held his gaze for a moment, then returned her attention to the man on the ground beneath her.

  “He’s fine,” she said, and she breathed out slow. “Just waiting.”

  Withdrawing a second syringe from her pocket, she focused in on the center of the man’s unmoving chest. “The first dose was a neuro-interrupter. Like what we gave to Jinx earlier, but ten times more powerful. It broke the circuit of their link.”

  “Like he was mentally dead,” Isabel said.

  Aurelia nodded. “Take down one…”

  It was the only weakness of a Three. Death for one was death for all of them. And a nerve death—no matter how temporary—was just the same.

  Aurelia met Jinx’s gaze again. “I could never have killed him.”

  Just as Jinx’s chest began to ache again, her lip quivered.

  “All I could think of when Isabel said we should kill him was that he could be you.”

  With that, she raised the syringe. Brought it stabbing down into the man’s heart.

  As one, the three bodies on the floor spasmed, writhing to life. Curse and Charm sprang apart, hands on their weapons, each covering a body, as if ready for an attack. Only it never came.

  Three pairs of lungs heaved and sucked in breath. Six eyes snapped open.

  Through Aurelia’s thoughts, Jinx watched the man beneath her focus his gaze. Watched life return to wide, green eyes. They were not the same eyes that had stared at them over the barrel of a gun.

  “Thank you,” he gasped.

  Aurelia withdrew the needle and cast it aside, then took his hand in hers. “You’re welcome, Cepheus.”

  Jinx blew out an exhale along with every other chest inside the room. He felt the sweetness of Aurelia’s relief. Another Three was free. For every single man among them, she saw a future. A life. A chance for love.

  She saw Jinx. And she saw him as so much more than he had been before. She saw him as the person he wanted to be.

  A tentative touch on his elbow drew his attention from the sight of the woman who had made him a man, and brought him back to the woman who had brought him into the world. Isabel, his mother, stood before him, her gaze searching, her posture unsure.

  That lost version of himself had pushed her to the ground. Pinned her and turned her over to the enemy. Jinx felt sick. “I’m so sorry—” he began, but she shook her head.

  “It’s all right.” She pulled her hand back and crossed her arms. “You remember? Now?”

  “Who you are? Yes. But not the rest of it. Everything from before they took me…it’s all still dark.”

  “I know. We have a lot to talk about. If you…if you want that?”

  “I do.”

  He turned to her, feeling like he owed her so much more than an apology. He wanted… It was so hard to connect the things he wanted in his head. He lifted his arms from his sides, then dropped them again before his hand twitched toward her. “Can I?”

  He wasn’t sure what he was asking for, but she answered all the same, her eyes glassy and her voice wavering. “Of course.”

  He reached out and she did too, uncurling, crossing the space between them. God, but he didn’t know how to do this. How to touch or show affection. Aurelia had taught him how, but… But then Isabel was there, putting her arms around him without fear, pushing right past who he’d been and what he’d done. She showed him what to do. Just like a mother should.

  The embrace was awkward and strange and yet so familiar, evoking a memory hovering just beyond his reach. He held her and she held him, and he felt like he should be smaller. He felt right. Safe and loved.

  Isabel broke the hug first, stepping back and wiping her eyes before giving off a quiet, uncomfortable laugh. She touched the side of his face. “I never thought I’d get you back.”

  “I never thought there was anything to get back.” He swallowed, pressing her hand to his cheek, before letting her go. “I’m glad there is, though.”

  “We’ll figure it out.” She said it with a conviction that echoed in his heart, and he nodded.

  A feeling bubbled up from someplace deep. He felt…hope.

  Isabel dropped her hand and smiled. “For now, though, there are a lot of people who are going to need help finding their lives.” She nodded at the assemblage of people in the room, at Curse and Charm, who were standing so close to each other they could be mistaken for one person. At the star-marked Three who were on their feet again but keeping each other all at arm’s length, looking bewildered and tense. “Besides,” she continued, her grin shifting to a smirk. “There’s someone who needs you even more.”

  Jinx darted his eyes to Aurelia to find her staring right back at him. The hopeful feeling in his chest magnified, became something so warm and so tender. But he pushed it back down. There was still too much to be decided. Too much they needed to figure out.

  She stood at the center of the motley crew, hands on her hips and jaw set, speaking with authority. Beneath it all, though,
deep in the hidden part of her mind that only he could see, she was exhausted to the bone, the days of running and fighting and loss weighing on her. He wanted to take that from her. To take care of her.

  Something in her seemed to ease as she addressed the group. “We’ll get each of you checked out more thoroughly, but your matrices all seem clean. With Peter gone, you’re free men.” She glanced at Charm. “And women.”

  “But free to do what?” Charm asked.

  “To figure out whatever it is you want to do.” Aurelia looked around. “We’ve helped people like you in the past. You’re welcome to stay here until you get your bearings. And we’ll help you. I promise.”

  Charm didn’t look convinced. Jinx had lived in her mind for years; she wasn’t quick to forgive and had never been able to imagine it in others. “Even after everything?”

  “Even after everything.”

  Cepheus shifted forward. “And what about the other Threes he made?”

  “I don’t know. It probably depends on whether or not he transferred mastery to others. But we’ll fight to track them down and help them, too. And if there are more like you, more that were released when he died, we’ll find them. I promise you.”

  The man’s face was a mask. Jinx empathized. The onslaught of emotion right after the disconnection was overwhelming.

  It was amazing.

  Cepheus nodded, his voice strangled. “I see why Jinx asked you to free him and to tie yourself to him.”

  Aurelia blushed and half turned. In her mind, she was hot with embarrassment and unable to face the man’s stare. “You’ll all have to stay bound to each other for now. You can stay that way forever, if you want. But the link’s really not meant for more than two. We can rewire the connections so they’re less intrusive and have lower risk for long-term damage. The ideal scenario would be finding other people to tie you to.”

  Her gaze flitted to Jinx’s as she considered what a challenge that would be—finding three minds willing to be yoked to minds like these. Damaged minds.