by Jade Kerrion
She pressed her other hand to her chest, where Zara’s bullet had pierced less than thirty hours earlier. Clearly, she had been attended to by a psychic healer since. “Surely you didn’t think I’d make it easy for them to arrest me.”
“How are you feeling?”
Her smile was cold, her laughter mirthless. “I am well, now. More than a match for you and Zara Itani.” Her pasted-on smile faded. “How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“I saw the photographs they had taken when they found the bodies. They labeled the remains with specimen numbers. I…” Her voice faltered, the catch scarcely noticeable. “My donor was located right there, where you’re standing.”
“I feel something here.”
Maya stiffened. “That’s impossible.”
“As impossible as my occasionally sensing your emotions?”
“I’m a psychic ghost.”
Danyael shook his head. “Not entirely.”
“I have no soul.”
“Is that what you were told?”
Her eyebrows drew together. “I am the last Sicarii—the one tasked with completing our God-sent mission.” Her upper lip curled into a sneer. “When everyone was dead, I killed myself and damned my soul.”
“Do you have memories of that life?”
“Memories? I have evidence right in front of me,” Maya snarled. “I have no soul!”
Danyael shook his head. “You have a scarcely perceptible psychic presence, but it doesn’t imply the absence of a soul.”
“Of course it does. I am the only one of the cloned Sicarii without a psychic presence. And you say you sense something…here…where I died.” She stared at him. “What is it? Fragments of my soul?”
“I don’t know.”
Her grip tightened on her gun. “You are a liar, like all of them. A master manipulator.”
“All of them?”
Her expression twisted into a knot of grief and guilt. “Eleazar ben Ya’ir.” She spat the name out like a curse.
Danyael drew upon his sketchy memories of Jewish history. “The siege of Masada.”
“We followed him.” Maya’s glare shrieked of defiance—centuries too late. “We believed him. When he said that it was God’s will for us all to die, we did. We killed each other. He was like you—an alpha empath—and with nothing more than his word and his will, he killed. Hundreds…nearly a thousand people died.” She shook her head. Bitterness infused her voice. “He was right. Alpha empaths are a blight—a curse.”
He? Surely not Eleazar. “Who’s he? What’s his name?”
“A survivor. Someone who understands. He sent me to purge the world of empaths.” Maya raised her gun and aimed it at Danyael’s chest.
“Don’t do this, Maya,” Danyael said. “Don’t allow ancient hate to define you or drive you.”
“It’s not ancient. What you did on July 4th is not ancient history.”
“And you think those deaths don’t wake me up every night? I made a choice, Maya. I chose to kill, because I knew my decision would save lives.”
She sneered. “And that makes you a hero?”
“No. I’m just a man who could do something, and chose to do something. That’s all.”
“Hundreds of people died! You killed them with nothing more than your unleashed emotions. You didn’t just kill them. You drove them to suicide. What happened to their souls? Were they fragmented? Damned to an eternity without solace?”
Danyael drew a deep, unsteady breath. “I don’t know.”
Her upper lip curled. “And you own nothing. You take no responsibility.”
Footsteps echoed off the steps leading into the underground chamber. A man called out, “She’s dead.”
Maya’s eyes narrowed. Her gun remained trained on Danyael. “Are you certain?” She tossed the question over her shoulder without turning around.
“She took out David and Joel, but we caught her in a three-way crossfire.”
“Did you see her body? Did you confirm the kill?”
“No.” A man emerged from the darkness. The deference in his tone belied his grizzled appearance in his dust-stained black combat fatigues. Two other men appeared behind him. All of them toted machine guns with the ease of trained warriors. “She fell off the cliff.”
Danyael’s heart thudded, each beat like a separate kick against his chest. No. Not Zara…
Maya smiled, but the automatic plasticity of her smile did not match the puzzled conflict in her eyes. “Zara Itani is dead.” Her steady tone revealed none of her mental indecision. “Take him up.”
They weren’t going to kill him? Danyael’s thoughts reeled. Maya had attempted to kill him multiple times. Why not now? Why not here?
Two men grabbed his arms and half-dragged, half-carried him toward the steps. He struggled but could not break free. He twisted to look at Maya coming up behind up. “Where are you taking me?”
“To your execution.”
The cold blast of night air hit his face the same instant terror clenched a fist around his heart. “No, not out here.”
“Look around, Danyael.” Maya waved her hand at the distant, peaceful flickers of light surrounding Masada. Towns. Homes. People—utterly unaware that an alpha empath stood within destructive range. “This is the world we are saving from you and your kind.”
“No. If you kill me out here, they could die. There are no walls to contain my powers—”
“He said you would say that.” Maya sneered. “He told us you would lie to save your life. Murder is intentional, Danyael. Empaths kill intentionally. The only powerless empath is a dead empath.”
“Was that what he told you before you killed Cortez and Faraji?” Danyael scarcely felt the shafts of pain shooting down his spine. “Were you already turning, running, when the people started dying around them?”
She blinked at him. “What are you—No!” She backhanded him. “You’re lying.”
The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth. Danyael squeezed his eyes shut to counter the lights bursting in his brain. He opened his eyes to see Maya’s face directly in front of his, so close he could feel her breath against his cheek.
Her words were like the caress of a steel blade. “He said killing you out in the open was the only way to ensure your powers dissipate widely, instead of clustering to twist another person into an alpha empath.”
“He’s lying to you. Alpha empaths are born. They’re not created out of the remnants of another empath.”
“Psychic energies linger. You said so yourself, Danyael.” She shook her head. “Your death will end the threat you pose to the world.”
Danyael threw a quick glance over his shoulder, at the steps that led back down into the underground chamber, vanishing into pitch blackness. To another person, it might have seemed like the gateway to hell.
But to Danyael, the steep stairway down into the earth held the promise of hope. Salvation. Not for him, but for the people around him.
Maya stepped away from Danyael and raised her handgun.
Something primal within him screamed in horror, in denial, but training overrode his survival instinct.
Danyael flung himself backward. The unexpected motion ripped him from the grip of the two Sicarii assassins. He brought up his arms to shield his head and neck as he tumbled down the steep steps into the underground chamber. His vision blurred into spinning motion. His senses churned. No sense of which way was up, which way forward.
The impact jarred his body. Pain ripped through him.
He heard bones snap, the sound rushing through his skull like the roar of a tidal wave.
When the world stopped twisting and turning, he could hear nothing but the erratic, stuttering beat of his heart.
Still alive—but he could not move. Every breath set his lungs ablaze. His doctor’s mind, still reeling, worked through the symptoms. Broken ribs. He could feel his feet, leaden and immobile with wracking agony. No spinal damage, shattered femur.
&
nbsp; He managed to twitch his fingers, but the ripples of intense pain confirmed he had broken several bones in both arms. Sounds pounded through his skull. Racing feet, slipping and sliding down stone steps. Motion flicked in and out of his peripheral vision. Sicarii surrounded him.
Someone pressed his hand against the fluttering pulse in Danyael’s jugular and pointed a flashlight into his eyes. “He’s still alive.” The man’s gruff voice quavered. “Only God knows how. What now, Maya? Do we finish it here?”
“And allow his empathic powers to linger in this enclosed place, waiting for another carrier? No. Take him out into the open and shoot him.”
Danyael’s mind reeled.
Kill the Sicarii here, in this enclosed space, or be killed in the open. Kill four or kill countless.
There was no choice.
Danyael dropped his psychic shields, and death unfurled as it always did, like a whisper, almost soundless, like the first and last breath of an infant doomed to die outside the womb. Wistful. Aching.
The whisper grew louder, not insidiously, like a lover calling with lowered voices. It roared with the ferocity of a caged animal, finally set free.
Screaming with pain, anguish, and loss, Danyael’s empathic powers seized the Sicarii and forced them to endure his every wrenching moment—decades of loneliness, years of abuse, months of torture—condensed into the space of a single heartbeat.
The dying began.
How could it not?
One of the men screamed, his anguish ricocheting off the stone walls. He shot to his feet, his eyes wide with horror, ablaze with guilt and grief. He swung his machine gun around.
Maya leaped toward the man. “No!”
But the soldier was trapped in the grip of shattering emotional turmoil, beyond the reach of logic or reason. The man pointed the muzzle up; it sank into the tender flesh beneath his chin. His finger squeezed gently, almost lovingly on the trigger. His face erupted into bloody flesh, unrecognizable in death.
The other two men dropped to their knees, blood pouring out of bullet holes they had drilled through their own skulls.
Maya stood amid the carnage, untouched by Danyael’s empathic powers. The horror and grief on her face, however, confirmed that she had not been untouched by watching her friends commit suicide. Something flared in Maya’s eyes, far more complex than fury or sorrow. The narrowing of her gaze was far more nuanced than hate.
Conviction.
Danyael’s half-breath wheezed out of his punctured lungs.
There was so much more to Maya’s compulsion to kill alpha empaths. If only he understood why…if only he had time to figure it out—
Maya raised her handgun and aimed it at Danyael’s head. “Your curse ends here—”
A familiar presence flickered against his consciousness.
Zara.
Relief and joy anesthetized him against the pain. Zara’s emotions—her cold fury fueling murderous rage—was like a shot of adrenaline. Danyael gritted his teeth against the endless waves of pain and the encroaching tide of blackness. He could not die.
If he did, the empathic backlash would kill her.
A popping sound whooshed over his head. Maya staggered, the gun tumbling from her hand. The shadows around Danyael’s fading peripheral vision shifted, tugging back as Zara strode out of the darkness. Dirt streaked her face, and she sported a few fresh scratches on her cheek. Her violet eyes were ice-cold shards, her voice a seductive purr, as she aimed her handgun at Maya. “It’s over.” Her finger tightened on the trigger.
Danyael forced his breath out in a broken whisper. “Zara. Stop.”
9
I am surrounded by fools!
Doctors and nurses skittered out of Zara’s way as she strode down the corridors toward the private hospital wing intended for patients with special, urgent needs. Danyael rested within one of those rooms, attended to by the top psychic healers in Israel.
Maya, Zara knew, was in another, under armed guard.
Fury, scarcely checked, curled Zara’s fingers into fists. The tips of her jagged fingernails only spiked Zara’s irritation further. Climbing up the vertical cliff after the near-assassination attempt from the Sicarii had ruined her manicure. It was the last straw on what could have been the worst day of her life.
She had almost lost Danyael.
The only person standing amid the death that infused the underground chamber, Zara had called a man who had, on several occasions, hired her: Simon Lieberman, Israel’s Minster of Defense. The man, known by allies and enemies alike as the Tiger of Golan Heights, who calmly stared down the daily possibility of war on multiple fronts, panicked at the probability of an alpha empath dying within the borders of his country. He scrambled the Sayeret Matkal. The IDF special forces unit arrived at Masada within minutes. Beneath the pulsing glare of helicopter spotlights, Danyael and Maya were evacuated from the ruins and rushed to a hospital.
Alpha telepaths secured Danyael’s mind while psychic healers scrambled to save his life. Xin, who remotely monitored the situation within the operating room, assured Zara that Danyael’s continued existence was a testament to outstanding international cooperation.
Zara, however, saw only the idiocy that almost got Danyael killed.
That he had regained consciousness and had asked for her did nothing to stem her anger. She did not bother to hide it, not that she could. The tension lined her jaw, so packed in that it hurt.
Danyael glanced up as she entered the hospital room and extended his hand to her. A smile touched his lips. “We need to stop meeting like this.”
She took his hand before she realized what he had done.
Danyael had initiated contact, and he never did that unless—
Her shoulders relaxed, the tightness smoothing out more easily than any expert masseur could have accomplished. Her heartbeat slowed and steadied. Zara’s eyes narrowed, and she yanked her hand out of his, but the peace he had compelled upon her was not as easily dispelled. “Stop that. Stop twisting my emotions.”
“I want to get past fighting just on principle. We don’t have time.”
Danyael was right, but she glared at him anyway, just on principle. “How do you feel?”
“I’ll be all right.”
She rolled her eyes. The healers had set multiple broken bones and repaired internal organs. The only injury they had not been able to affect was the one inflicted by Lucien. Scar tissue laced through Danyael’s left hip, thigh, and knee, rendering psychic healing impossible. Danyael looked pale, his eyes bruised by exhaustion and lack of sleep, but he was alive.
Zara stifled a bemused smile. With Danyael, sometimes, you just had to settle for the baseline—being alive enough to go on. “What the hell happened?”
“Someone’s misled Maya.”
“Misled? She unleashed all that havoc on a wrong assumption?”
“She has reasons of her own to hate alpha empaths, but killing them out in the open—someone told her to do that, and that person apparently survived an alpha empath’s attack.”
Zara shook her head. “No one survived what you did to Sakti.”
“But there has been one other alpha empath attack—a major one. Fredrik Virtanen.”
“It doesn’t ring a bell.”
“The Finnish government covered it up. About twenty-five years ago, Virtanen died, and took out an entire village.”
“Everyone committed suicide?”
“Yes.”
“Even those indoors?”
Danyael nodded. “Virtanen was an attack-class alpha empath. Walls couldn’t stop him.”
“And now you’re saying not everyone died.”
“Maya referred to him as a survivor. Virtanen’s death was the only notable event involving an alpha empath—apart from Sakti.”
Zara gritted her teeth. “Twenty-five years is ancient history. If anyone can dig it up, it’ll be Xin, but I doubt it’ll be fast or easy.”
“That’s why I have to talk to Maya.”
“No.”
“Zara—”
“I’ve lost count of the times she’s tried to kill you. At some point, she might even get lucky. Alex is lining up his legal team to demand her extradition. She’s going to pay—not just for the empaths she killed, but for all the people who died as a result of it.”
“Maya’s just a fraction of the problem. Only an exceptionally powerful psychic could have survived an attack-class alpha empath’s death throes.”
“And now he’s out there with an ax to grind?”
“Zara, in two days, it’ll be the twenty-fifth anniversary of Virtanen’s death.”
Coldness clenched around her heart.
Danyael continued, his calm tone contrasting sharply with the near-panic his words inspired. “We have forty-eight hours to stop hell from breaking loose.”
Danyael knocked on the door and waited until Maya’s surprised voice invited him to enter. Her hospital room was much like his, except for the two armed IDF soldiers standing guard, one at the room’s only window and the other at the room’s only door.
A private conversation was not an option. He had been warned not to even request it. Keeping Zara out of the room had already demanded reserves of energy he could hardly afford to spare.
His grip tightened around a borrowed crutch as he hobbled into her room. “Maya.”
Her cheek twitched. Her lips moved, as if she could not decide upon her words. “Why?” She glanced down at the bedsheets, crumbled beneath her fists, before raising her gaze to his. “Why did you spare Aaron and Levi at the warehouse, only to kill them later at Masada? And not just kill—you drove them to suicide. You drove Ben to suicide. After everything you know about what suicide does to a soul…”
Danyael clenched his teeth against the rawness of the pain in his chest. The guilt had been most intense after July 4th, but over time, it had blended into something almost tolerable that only yanked him awake, drenched in cold sweat, several times a week.
Not anymore.
If Maya was right, if she lacked a psychic presence because she lacked a soul, how many souls had he ripped apart? How many people had he driven to suicide? Five hundred, at least. Perhaps more.