I sat cross-legged on the floor, meditation style, picturing Cindy’s face in my mind. Our adoptive mother took her Guardian call sign, Silver, from the color of her long, straight hair, and I still remembered how it seemed to shine in the moonlight when I first met her one cold night, years ago. I remembered how her calm manner and comforting voice had drawn the fear out of a near-feral child who had been on the run for weeks and might otherwise have kept running until he was caught by the Angels or worse.
Before Terry started living with us, I was Cindy’s designated live-in bodyguard, and as an inactive Guardian Knight, Cindy was still officially my charge too. If the Knights expected Terry and me to stay here in this stuffy vault, they had better do a damn good job of protecting Cindy!
Alia had sat down behind me and was just getting comfortable resting her back against mine when Terry asked, “You want to play a game of nine-ball, Adrian?”
“Sure,” I said, jumping to my feet.
My sister let out a little shriek as her support vanished and she tumbled backwards. “Addy!” she cried aloud, but she was smiling.
I pulled Alia to her feet. Levitating two cue sticks off the rack, I dropped one into my sister’s hands. Alia was horrible at pool, but I couldn’t exactly leave her out of the game. Terry grabbed another stick for herself as I set up the table.
Terry made the break shot by threading her cue stick through the metal hook attached to her left stump. Terry had four attachments for her amputated arm: a lifelike prosthetic hand, a heavy metal bar for pounding, a double-edged knife for stabbing, and the pirate captain’s hook. The hook seemed to suit her best on most missions and at the pool table.
We played three games. Terry, as was often the case, won them all.
Suddenly Terry asked me, “Don’t you miss being a Knight, Adrian?”
Technically, I still was a Knight. I trained regularly with Terry in the subbasement dojo and practiced my pistol work in the shooting range. But I knew what Terry meant.
“No,” I replied flatly, “I don’t.”
“Not even a little?” she asked.
“No.”
Terry threw me an exasperated look. “We’re in here playing games and people are dying out there.”
I shrugged. “It’s not my war.”
“You don’t care in the least?”
I sighed. “Of course I care, Terry,” I said patiently. “People are dying. But I only joined the Guardians because I once thought they would lead me to Cat. I’m only here now because Cindy is here, and she only came to New Haven because her idiot son needed rescuing from an underground research facility and the Guardians were the only ones who could help.”
Terry frowned. “And you don’t think you owe the Guardians anything?”
I shook my head. “We used each other, Terry. We’re even.”
“You are so damn stubborn, Half-head!” Terry spat irately. “Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to my grandfather.”
Ralph P. Henderson, Terry’s late grandfather, was not the kind of man I enjoyed being compared to.
I grinned at Terry. “I didn’t know you ever talked to Ralph.”
Terry let out a loud humph.
Then she narrowed her eyes, asking, “When you say you’re even, does that include us?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Us, Half-head! You and me!” Terry said emphatically. “You save me on that boat, I cure your eyes…”
“Hey! You’re my friend!” I snapped, genuinely insulted. “I never thought of our relationship as a trade!”
“I’m sorry, Adrian,” Terry mumbled embarrassedly. “I’m cranky today, I guess.”
I smiled. “We’re just different people, Terry.”
“Addy,” Alia said in a small voice, “I have to go.”
I was about to ask where but then I saw her shuffling her feet uncomfortably.
“Oh, right,” I said, chuckling at the memory of the last time we had been locked in here. “Let’s see if the coast is clear.”
I pushed the intercom call button and got in touch with NH-1 Security. The voice wasn’t Spider’s, so Terry went through the security code routine again. We were told that NH-1 was still locked down, meaning no entry or exit until the Knights canceled the alert, but we were probably safe on the upper floors.
We were forty floors off the ground, more than four hundred feet in the air, but I remembered a time when an Angel puppeteer had taken control of my body from miles away, forcing me to telekinetically blast Alia so hard that she had nearly died. The puppeteer had also been a finder and he had latched onto my location by sensing my psionic power from afar. Fortunately, that couldn’t happen here because we were protected by Cindy’s massive hiding bubble.
We let Alia out to run to the bathroom, and while waiting for her to return, I asked the Knight on the intercom for more details.
It had been nearly an hour since the Seraphim had first started attacking Guardians inside the New Haven high-rise condominiums. Currently, the fighting was sparse and mostly limited to the NH-2 and NH-4 buildings. In each high-rise, a team of Seraphim had barricaded themselves into a few of the upper floors, and the situation seemed to be turning into a long-term standoff. Local non-Guardian residents had called the police to report hearing gunshots, but Guardian Command had enough connections with the city government to keep police and nosy reporters clear of the New Haven area.
Terry asked into the intercom, “How long is this alert going to last?”
“We’re not sure yet,” answered the Knight. “Hang in there.”
That was when we heard Alia scream.
Terry and I sprinted out of the safe room and toward Alia’s high-pitched cries. I heard my sister’s telepathic voice desperately calling out my name. We found her lying on the living-room floor, her hands on her forehead, writhing about in agony. She couldn’t stop screaming.
Out of the corner of my left eye, I sensed something move.
The sun had set and the overcast sky was dark now, but the light from our living room illuminated a gangly figure levitating just outside, peering in through the window.
Watching us.
Terry shoved me hard from behind. “Damn it, Adrian, no eye contact!”
I had almost felt the controller’s power enter my mind, but Terry’s quick thinking broke the connection. I telekinetically pulled the curtains over the window.
My sister was no longer screaming, but her whole body was convulsing violently. I grabbed the sides of her head and looked into her dilated eyes.
“Look at me, Alia!” I said frantically. “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!”
She was completely gone.
“What the hell was that, Terry?!” I shouted, but even before Terry answered, I knew.
It was a berserker. A flight-capable telekinetic berserker.
Alia stopped shaking, but she was still panting like a dog. I knew from direct experience what was about to happen next.
I telekinetically lifted Alia up into the air as she glared at me and let out a low growl. Under the influence of a psionic berserker, even an undersized ten-year-old girl was a frightening sight. Alia’s growl turned into hissing and spitting, screaming and snarling as her arms and legs thrashed violently about in midair, looking for something, anything, to hurt. Finding nothing, she then turned on herself, pulling at her own hair and beating her head with her fists. I pumped more of my telekinetic power into her, restraining her arms, and Alia roared even louder.
As soon as Terry saw that I had my sister under control, she dashed back to the safe room to report what had just happened.
Watching Alia, I shuddered as I remembered how a berserker had made my father kill my mother. I remembered my father clawing at my bedroom door like a wild animal.
Keeping Alia safely above the furniture, I glanced at the closed curtain.
Ever since the renovations to the penthouse last year, all the windows were reinforced bulletproof glass. There was no
way through, but was the Angel still hovering just behind the curtain?
No. If he was, he could have opened the curtain to look at us again. No doubt his flight up to the fortieth floor and his psionic attack on Alia had used up all his energy, forcing him to make an emergency landing somewhere.
But he could come back.
Alia finally stopped kicking and her whole body went limp. I gently set her down on a sofa as Terry came back into the room.
Terry said angrily, “That curtain was closed when I last saw it.”
“He must have opened it from outside,” I muttered, looking down at Alia’s pale face.
I checked her pulse. It was a little faint, but okay. She was breathing. I pulled open her eyelids and Terry found me a flashlight to check the pupils. Normal responses there.
But I knew from Cindy that many types of psionic mind control carried a high risk of permanent brain damage when used on children, and berserking was particularly dangerous. I had survived two long-range berserker attacks when I was twelve years old, but I sometimes wondered if those attacks might be the reason I often felt so unbalanced and irritable.
Alia was still ten, and the berserker had been right there.
Please let her be okay.
Terry whispered, “I hope her brain isn’t fried.”
“I should have drained her,” I said numbly.
Terry shook her head. “It wouldn’t have helped, Adrian. Her balance is too good.”
A psionic with “bad balance” was someone who, like me, couldn’t stop his psionic power from supporting his physical strength. Metal touching a psionic’s body drained all powers, and consequently for someone who couldn’t balance his power, it drained physical strength and even emotions. When I had been attacked, I had managed to break the berserker’s influence on my mind by touching metal and draining myself. Terry was probably right, though: It wouldn’t have worked for Alia. There were disadvantages to being good at some things.
Alia stirred a bit. I thought I heard a whisper in my mind.
“Alia,” I called, gently shaking her shoulders. “Ali?”
My sister slowly opened her eyes. “Addy?”
“Hey,” I said, smiling as she looked up at us. “Welcome back.”
Alia threw her arms around my neck, her whole body trembling.
“Addy… oh Addy,” she sobbed. “I – I saw everything but I couldn’t stop! I was coming back from the bathroom and something was tapping the window and then the curtain opened and – and he looked at me and…”
“It’s okay, Alia,” I breathed, holding her. “It’s okay now. It’s over.”
Terry brought a glass of red wine to calm Alia’s nerves. My sister shook her head but Terry forced her to take two sips, and I gratefully downed the rest in one gulp. Then I carried Alia back to the safe room as Terry grabbed the blankets from all of our beds and brought them in.
“I closed the curtains in your bedroom, but stay out just in case, okay?” said Terry as she dumped the blankets on the floor.
Terry had also brought Alia’s nightclothes. Alia was totally spent, so Terry and I helped her change into her bright yellow pajamas. As Terry pulled off Alia’s shirt, I caught a glimpse of my sister’s heavily scarred back: the many crisscrossing lines that told of years of ritualistic torture before Alia was abandoned deep in a forest to die. For Alia, that had only been the beginning. Then there was our capture and interrogation by the Wolves, our time at the Psionic Research Center, near-abductions and dreadful battles after coming to New Haven. Alia had been through so much already that it was a wonder she was sane at all.
We folded two blankets to make a mat for Alia to lie down on. My sister was still shivering a bit. I pulled another blanket over her, up around her shoulders.
“You’re going to be okay, Ali,” I said quietly, not quite sure who I was trying to comfort. “Just get some rest. You’ll be okay.”
Alia nodded weakly and closed her eyes.
I kept my hand resting gently on her stomach until she fell asleep.
Terry was sitting with her back against the opposite wall. I noticed her eyes were slightly red as she looked at me and said hoarsely, “Still neutral, Adrian?”
I had no reply to that.
The intercom crackled to life. “NH-1 Security to Gifford residence,” called a Knight’s voice.
Terry stood and pushed the intercom button. “Rabbit here.”
“We haven’t been able to locate your berserker anywhere around NH-1,” said the Knight. “It’s possible that he moved away. We’ll stay on the lookout.”
“Thanks for nothing,” Terry said sourly, and sat down again.
Carefully so as not to wake Alia, I whispered, “He’s still here.”
“Where?” asked Terry.
“Above us. On the roof. He’s resting.”
“How do you know that? You can’t sense him.”
I shrugged. “That’s where I’d be.”
Terry nodded. “You want to kill him?”
I stared back at her for a moment, and then I looked at Alia’s peaceful, sleeping face.
I slowly got to my feet. This wasn’t for the Guardians.
The door to the safe room couldn’t be locked from the outside, but we closed it and Terry quickly returned from her room with a semi-automatic pistol in her right hand.
We exited the penthouse and locked the front door behind us. All of the elevator lights were off, the whole system having been shut down by NH-1 Security, but that didn’t matter. I pulled opened the door to the staircase, and we climbed the last flight of stairs up to the exit that opened onto the roof of New Haven One.
Terry had the key to the roof door in her pocket, but with only one hand, she couldn’t use it and hold her gun at the same time. Terry wasn’t wearing her pistol holster either, so she slid the barrel under her belt and then silently unlocked the door.
If the telekinetic berserker was on the roof, he’d probably be watching this door in case it was opened by a pack of Guardian Knights. There was little chance of surprising him unless he was already hovering at one of our windows, waiting.
Alia was sleeping off her ordeal, and I didn’t want to wake her to heal us if we got injured. It was possible that the Angel was armed, but I doubted it. Flying this high up into the air was no small task even for a powerful telekinetic, and to do that whilst carrying a solid metal gun was really not feasible. No, this man was relying solely on his psionic powers. He had probably been hoping to find either Terry or me behind the living-room curtain, but when he saw Alia, he attacked, knowing that if Alia got away, we’d be warned of his presence anyway.
So he berserked my little sister.
Well, whoever you are, you sick psycho freak, get ready for Terry Henderson and Adrian Howell!
Standing one step behind Terry, I prepared a telekinetic blast in my right hand. In a few seconds, I was ready to fire a single focused shot through my right index finger. I couldn’t fire focused blasts very rapidly, and my range wasn’t all that great either, but my telekinetic accuracy was always spot on. If I could get within twenty yards, all I’d need was one shot.
“He can’t sense you,” whispered Terry. “Remember, no eye contact. Ready?”
I nodded.
Terry pushed open the door. A powerful gust of cool night air hit our faces and I involuntarily squinted as I followed Terry out.
Six rapid gunshots.
I didn’t even see what happened.
“He jumped the moment he saw us,” Terry shouted over the howling wind. Pistol in hand, she was standing at the edge of the roof, leaning over the railing and looking down. “But he’s not going to fly very well with blood pouring out of him.”
I looked over the railing too. “You hit him?”
“At least twice,” confirmed Terry.
The ground was too dark to see where the man had fallen, but I trusted Terry, who was as fast and efficient as ever. The iron in the Angel’s blood would have drained his powe
rs the moment it left his body and touched his skin. Even if the Angel could somehow survive two gunshot wounds, he wouldn’t have survived his high-speed reunion with the ground.
Terry looked at me apologetically. “I would have let you kill him yourself, Adrian, but he was getting away.”
“I don’t care,” I replied, feeling my telekinetic energy slowly reabsorb into my arm. “Just as long as he’s dead.”
Terry grinned. “We’re not all that different.”
Chapter 2: The Second Wave
The security alert continued into the night. Back in the safe room, I silently watched Alia sleep as Terry sat by the intercom, occasionally getting updates from the Knights.
Alia woke at around 11pm.
Yawning loudly, her first telepathic words in my head were, “I’m really thirsty, Addy.”
Once Alia was rehydrated, Terry retrieved one of Alia’s board games from our bedroom. Terry usually didn’t play with us, but this time she joined in. As we sat together on the folded blankets, Alia was soon talking and laughing as if nothing had happened.
It was impossible to tell what long-term damage her run-in with the berserker might have caused, but my sister appeared to be in good spirits, for which I was extremely grateful. Terry and I didn’t tell her what we had done while she slept. Alia was a healer, and she never seemed to understand the concept of revenge anyway. I wished more people were like that.
Midnight.
“NH-1 Security to Gifford residence,” called the intercom.
Terry stood and touched the intercom button. “Rabbit here, go ahead.”
“Rabbit, security code, please.”
Terry glanced at me. NH-1 Security hadn’t asked for Terry’s ID code in a while. Terry read off her code, and the Knight replied with his.
“What’s going on down there?” asked Terry.
“Are your charges locked in the safe room?”
“Yes. What’s going on?”
“We’re not exactly sure yet, but advise you stay there and sleep in shifts tonight.”
I wondered if we would sleep at all. Terry tried to get more information, but the Knight refused.
The Quest (Psionic Pentalogy Book 4) Page 2