Heroines and Hellions: a Limited Edition Urban Fantasy Collection

by Margo Bond Collins

  “Can you?”

  “My empathic powers can calm them, but I can’t heal them. Anything I do is temporal. The cure—if there is any—is medical.”

  “Can you find it?”

  “If there’s one, I will find it.”

  Xin drew a deep, shuddering breath. Danyael’s responses, moving quickly past the personal and into the practical, gave her hope, not necessarily for their friendship, but for the solution to the immediate problem. She should have expected as much from Danyael. He had been too perfectly trained not to react to abuse—physical, mental, or emotional; an alpha empath with the power to kill everyone in his vicinity simply because he was having a bad day could not afford to take insults personally.

  It did not make him fair game, though, Xin reminded herself. Danyael deserved gentleness, if only because he had received so little compassion from others his entire life. Be kind, she coached herself. It’s all he needs from others.

  It’s all Zara would have wanted for him.

  She glanced over her shoulder at Yu Long. “Any injured?”

  “Six of my men were killed.” His voice was flat. “We killed ten jiangshi. Pathetic ratio, considering we had guns and they had…teeth and fingernails.”

  “Is anyone wounded? Cuts? Gashes?”

  The remaining soldiers patted themselves down. All shook their heads.

  “Fine. Let’s get out of here,” Xin ordered.

  The men hauled their dead buddies over their shoulders.

  “The jiangshi too,” Xin said.

  The men stared at her, their mute objection screaming through sullen gazes.

  “They were human, and they have families. Take them back to the surface.”

  Their jaws tensed, muscles clenching, but moments later, their shoulders sagged in compliance, and the slaughtered jiangshi were carried from the tunnels, their bodies bundled in plastic body bags.

  Xin fell in beside Danyael as they followed the band of soldiers out. She shot him a sideway glance. “Did you get hurt in the fighting?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Not a scratch. I need to know how infectious they are. I want to do an autopsy.”

  “I know. That’s why I had the soldiers bring the bodies.”

  Danyael shook his head. “Of course.” His words were tinged with weary bitterness.

  Xin stifled a sigh. Of course Danyael would think that her orders to the soldiers were simply an emotional manipulation to cover her real intent—the practical, soulless autopsy. Why couldn’t she have two intents, both equally served by one action? Why did others only see straight roads instead of forking paths headed in the same direction?

  Dr. Shen was waiting at the laboratory. Her face paled when the bodies of both soldiers and jiangshi were carted past her and placed on morgue drawers.

  The soldiers, their job done, shuffled back and lined the walls of the morgue, their gazes darting uneasily toward Xin. Yu Long, however, moved systematically among the bodies, taking photographs, presumably for identification.

  Dr. Shen jolted out of her shocked state when Danyael asked quietly, “Do you have all the equipment I need here for an autopsy?”

  She nodded.

  Xin watched in silence as Danyael walked over to the sink and turned on the faucet. For several moments, he stared at the water pouring out of the tap. He inhaled sharply, his shoulders tense, and he braced himself before sliding his hands under the water and scrubbing them with soap.

  Xin swallowed hard through the lump in her throat. Danyael’s psychological evaluation over the past two and a half years had been consistent on one point—he was afraid of water. It had been used to escalate the pain of the electric shocks ripping through his body, stunning his mind into submission. Fear of pain—fear of water—had scalded into his psyche, indelibly stamped into his unconscious mind, even though he no longer wore an electric collar.

  Logic could not defend against instinct. Danyael would likely wrestle with his fear of water for the rest of his life.

  I’m so sorry, Danyael. I did what I had to do, but I never imagined how badly you would be affected, and for how long.

  Yu Long walked up to her as Danyael and Dr. Shen began work on one of the jiangshi. “Well?”

  She sucked in a deep breath and prayed her voice would not shake. “Your men can go. As for the deceased, tell their families we should be able to release the bodies back to them within twenty-four hours.”

  “It’s the fifteenth.”

  “What?”

  “The fifteenth day of the seventh month. The night of the Hungry Ghost—the peak of the month’s festivities.”

  Xin frowned. “What does that mean? Is it or isn’t it an auspicious day to bury the dead?”

  “No one killed today is getting buried today; Chinese funeral ceremonies last for days.” His tone was mild, but Xin could hear the gentle rebuke in his voice. She was Chinese, after all. Wasn’t she supposed to know her own customs? Yu Long shook his head. “It’s just…not a great day for bad news.”

  “There isn’t a great day anywhere in the year for news like this.”

  Yu Long nodded. “You’re right, of course.” He sighed, his shoulders drooping. “I’ll take care of it.” He gestured to his men, and they followed him from the morgue.

  Xin waited until the sound of their footsteps disappeared before she ventured from the morgue to take refuge in the network operations room. Surrounded by servers—inanimate cases of steel and wires protecting millions of gigabytes of data—she was in her element. Frustration knotted in the middle of her chest. Data—simplified into expressions of zeros and ones—was as clean and simple as black and white. People, emotions were murky, nasty shades of gray, and none worse, really, than an alpha empath. Everything about Danyael was emotion. For God’s sake, he controlled emotions.

  Even leaving aside the fact that she had used and manipulated him, and that she was personally responsible for the fourteen months of torture he suffered in a super-maximum security prison, she had been crazy to imagine that she and Danyael could have ever been friends, that their opposing world views would not set them inexorably against each other all the time.

  Resting her weight against the wall, she slid down to the floor and leaned her head back. A quick glance at her watch told it was past three in the morning—far too early for a call to her mother.

  A call for what? The silent question taunted her with its challenging, grumpy tone.

  I don’t know, another part of her mind responded. She winced at the plaintive pitch she heard in her head. Maybe I just want to talk to someone I know understands me.

  She set the phone aside and hooked her tablet back up to the servers. Within moments, she had launched the data search and watched as the supercomputers back at Fort Meade churned through the millions of lines of code on her tablet screen.

  Now, she simply had to get through the hardest part.

  Waiting.

  And doing nothing.

  “Xin.” Danyael’s voice jerked her awake. Moments later, his footsteps sounded in the corridor, and he looked in through the open door of the network operations room. A faint smile tugged at his lips. “I knew I’d find you in a place like this.”

  Naturally. Surrounded by inanimate objects instead of people.

  His smile transformed into an equally faint frown. “Xin? You’re not all right.”

  “I have psychic shields. How would you know?”

  “Some base emotions leak past psychic shields.” He crossed the room to sit next to her. Their shoulders brushed, and his body heat warmed her. “What did I do?”

  Her voice snapped with annoyance. “Why do you always assume it’s something you did?”

  Danyael shook his head; his soft chuckle was rueful. “It’s a bad habit—one I’m trying to break. The Mutant Affairs Council taught me to take responsibility for my emotions, but it’s not always easy to separate my emotions, or someone’s emotions toward me, from the events triggering those emotions.” He
paused for a beat. “What happened?”

  “That’s better.”

  “But you’re still not going to tell me what happened?”

  “It’s not you.”

  “All right.” He drew a deep breath. “What can I do?”

  “You can absorb it all, right? Make me feel better?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you can’t actually change anything.”

  “Emotional changes ungrounded by reality won’t last.”

  “I know.” She fixed her gaze on the far wall because it was easier than looking at him. “I feel like…I should like people more.”

  “Why? Sometimes, people aren’t likeable.”

  Her jaw dropped. It had been the last thing she had expected Danyael, the alpha empath, the man who had exuded compassion with his every breath, to say.

  He glanced at her. “Not what you expected from me?”

  She shook her head.

  He looked away. “You surround yourself with electronics. I surround myself with psychic walls so thick, so high, so impenetrable, to keep people at arm’s length.”

  “But you treat everyone with such patience, such kindness.” Even the jiangshi.

  “Everyone deserves kindness, but kindness doesn’t equal liking someone, and it definitely doesn’t equal friendship.” He turned his face away to cough into his fist. Several moments passed before he continued speaking. “I have few friends, Xin. I can probably count them on one hand. Sometimes, like you, I think that if I could like people more, I might have more friends.”

  “So why don’t you? You’re an empath. If you wanted people to like you, or even love you, nothing could be easier than making them feel the emotion you want them to feel. Why do you push them away?”

  “I’m not interested in building friendship on false foundations, and I’m tired of being used and betrayed. It just seems safer to keep people away than to keep picking up the pieces.” He shook his head. “The broken fragments keep getting smaller, and I worry I might miss something each time I put myself back together. I just want to get through the rest of life without making any more waves, or being jostled by them, but I suppose it’s too much to expect.”

  “For an alpha empath, yes.”

  He shrugged. “It’s better now, though, with Zara and Laura.”

  Xin smiled. Of course, Danyael, that’s just you. Always hopeful. Somehow finding the pinprick of light in the all-encompassing darkness. “Even without Lucien?”

  Danyael’s breath caught at the mention of his former best friend’s name. “Yes, even without Lucien.”

  “Could you ever be friends again?”

  He shook his head. “The psychic blocks the alpha telepaths embedded into his mind are too deep-set. Trying to undo them could shatter his mind and kill him. He won’t take that risk.”

  “You do know that he wanted to take that risk. He would have if Miriya hadn’t been killed—”

  “Saving my life.” The twist of Danyael’s smile was ironic and self-mocking. “It doesn’t matter now. No one but Miriya would have attempted it.”

  “And there’s no other way to bring down those psychic blocks?”

  “Death would shatter them, but then Lucien wouldn’t be in any condition to appreciate it.” Danyael’s shoulders rose and fell on a silent sigh. “Life takes away, but it also gives.”

  “It’s not particularly evenhanded.”

  He laughed. “No, but where would be the fun in it if it were?”

  Xin chuckled. “It’s good to hear you say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “Fun.” She drew a deep breath. The glimmers of humor and optimism in Danyael gave her hope that the damage wrought on him while he was in prison wasn’t permanent. She pushed away the discomfort of the personal and took shelter once more in the professional. “Did you finish the autopsy?”

  “Yes.” Something shifted in Danyael’s tone as he too moved away from dangerous personal topics. She could almost feel him relax; cool professional distance was their comfortable common ground. “I think we may have figured out why and how they’re transforming. The cells in our bodies are getting replaced, although different cells in different organs have different replacement rates. One of the fastest replacement rates is that of neutrophils—the most abundant type of white blood cells in the body. They turnover every one to five days. What the serum does—because it was derived from blood—is target the recipient’s neutrophils. It wipes them out and then takes over, generating its own brand of neutrophils. Those neutrophils have different protein markers, and they lock on to sensory cells, amplifying their effect.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s enough. Instead of normal colors, the world turns psychedelic. Whispers become screams. Each smell, each scent fills your lungs entirely, choking you.”

  “All right, I get it, but why does the serum only target the neutrophils of mutants?”

  Danyael’s jaw tightened. “The mutants are not the only ones transforming.”

  Xin stared at him. She could have sworn her brain stuttered to a stop. “Then normal people—”

  “The serum transformed them, too, but their minds weren’t as sensitive as those of psychics. The enhanced sensations didn’t shred their sanity. No one’s noticed or cared because they didn’t pose any threat to anyone, but everyone’s who’s ever had shuang kuangxi is infected and infectious.”

  “Dr. Shen said that their blood is infectious.”

  “Not just blood. Any bodily fluids, although the active ingredient degenerates quickly upon contact with air, rendering it impotent within minutes.”

  The second part was good news—the soldiers had been able to remove their dead companions and the jiangshi without being infected—but her mind fixed on the first part. “Any bodily fluids?” Xin’s eyes widened. The chill creeping through her body locked around her mouth, making it almost impossible to get the words out. “We’re looking at the start of a pandemic…”

  Danyael’s dark eyes were bleak as he nodded. “Yes.”

  16

  Even to Xin’s ears, her voice trembled. “What is the antidote? The cure?”

  “We don’t know yet.” Danyael shook his head. “Research takes time. The only reason we’ve been able to move as fast as we have in diagnosing what shuang kuangxi does is because it was designed here, at Excelsior. Dr. Shen knows what she did to create the serum from my blood; we know its chemical structure. The fix is going to take a little longer.”

  “We don’t have time. It could be a goddamned pandemic.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s already started.”

  “I know.” Danyael dragged a hand across his face. “But the jiangshi are only part of the problem.”

  Xin nodded. “The formula is already out on the streets. The antidote won’t do much good if every kitchen is spewing out fresh vials of shuang kuangxi. You won’t be able to get ahead of the pandemic.”

  “Exactly.” He blinked, the deliberate motion slow and tired. “I have to get back to the lab. We’ll have to develop a chemical that will interact with the infected cells and neutralize them.”

  “Neutralize?”

  Danyael shook his head. “Sorry. That’s a word ripe with potential for misunderstanding.”

  “Only because you’re married to an assassin.”

  He chuckled. “I meant neutralize as in counteract, not kill. There are many ways to approach it; we’ll have to find a balance between a fast answer and the best answer, and be comfortable with a lot of uncertainty.”

  “I don’t like uncertainty.”

  “We don’t have any way of running a randomized controlled trial. Even if we wanted to, I doubt we’d find volunteers,” he said.

  “We’ll have to tackle this crisis from both ends. You find the antidote. I’ll reel the formula in.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  Dread dug icy claws into her chest, and she struggled to draw a deep breath. “I don
’t know yet, but I’ll figure it out.”

  He pushed to his feet. “When do we tell the IGEC? Right now, when we fix it, or when it goes completely to hell?”

  Xin sighed and dragged her fingers through her hair. “How about right now, just in case it goes to hell?”

  “Yeah, I thought so too. I’ll give them a call, and leave it to them to decide when to hit the panic button.”

  “They’re hard to panic.”

  Danyael sighed. “I’m hard to panic, and I’m panicking right now.”

  Xin arched an eyebrow. Danyael hadn’t so much as raised his voice. The calmest person she knew—other than Danyael—would have been spitting curse words by this point. Heck, she was mentally running through her vast vocabulary of Russian and German curse words. “You’re panicking?”

  “It doesn’t look good. There are no easy solutions, and I’m afraid.”

  “Of what?” she asked when he fell silent.

  “Of what it’s going to cost.”

  Danyael remained at Excelsior to work with Dr. Shen on an antidote for shuang kuangxi, but Xin had the chauffer take her back to the villa. Theoretically, with her secure satellite access to the NSA supercomputers, she could work from anywhere. In practice, her study on the top floor of the pagoda was far more comfortable than the thinly carpeted concrete floor in the server room.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, and allowed the air-conditioned leather interior of the car to envelope her in comfort and safety. It felt artificial—a thin veneer of normality over the disaster she knew bubbled beneath the surface. How many people driving along the roads, standing at crosswalks, riding public transportation, and heading about their business were already affected by shuang kuangxi?

  Could a pandemic even be stopped? Had she finally come face-to-face with the enemy she could not defeat?

  The car glided to a stop in the driveway. To her surprise, Ching Shih was standing at the main entrance of the complex. The anxious glitter in Ching Shih’s eyes cooled into shards of ice. “You tell me not to leave the villa, not to travel alone, yet you are out all night.”