by Jade Kerrion
She couldn’t match the firepower of a helicopter-mounted chain gun, but if she were lucky, she could take out the pilot and—
Danyael gripped her wrist. “You can’t drop a helicopter down on the city. Keep its attention here. We can’t let it tear up the rest of the hospital.”
Often, Zara did not think Danyael was fully attuned to reality. Sometimes, at moments such as these, she was convinced he did not have even the faintest grasp of it. His utter inability to evaluate risk was proof of it. “If you die, no one will be alive to notice the helicopter crushing the city block.” The rattle of the chain gun fell silent. She pushed him toward the emergency exit. “Go up, not down.”
The door slammed behind him an instant before the hailstorm of bullets began anew.
At least her biggest problem—Danyael—was out of the way. Now, to deal with the next biggest problem—a Black Hawk helicopter spewing bullets.
Zara darted into the next room, which was unscathed but for peripheral damage to the adjoining walls. The Sicarii had known exactly where Danyael was. Someone had betrayed his location. Zara’s grip tightened on her Glock. She hated informants, unless of course, they were working for her. She pressed against the wall and inched forward, peering out of the broken glass in time to see at least six men, clad in black military fatigues and with ropes secured to their belt loops, leap the short distance from the helicopter to Danyael’s room.
Enjoy the ride down, boys. Zara stepped out of concealment and fired two bullets from her gun. The first struck the Black Hawk’s pilot squarely in the forehead. The second smashed into the copilot’s chest. The helicopter bucked like a wounded animal, reeling sideways, yanking down on the ropes that had been secured to it.
The helicopter careened into the hospital, its propeller blades shattering glass as it plunged toward the ground. The ropes tightened, then a man screamed, yanked from the hospital room, still attached to the rope on the Black Hawk. One of his buddies, similarly attached, flailed as he fell through the air. The helicopter ripped up the side of the hospital all the way down before combusting in flames on the driveway.
And that’s why you run up, not down.
It wasn’t over. At least four men had been fast enough to unhook themselves from the doomed helicopter—just enough Sicarii to make her hunt challenging.
She had not yet forgiven them for screwing up her manicure.
Zara lowered herself silently to the floor. The tiles were smooth and cool beneath her back. Footsteps crunched toward her. Shadows paused outside the door. A sideways glance confirmed two pairs of boots.
Boots did not come with any distinguishing features, but considering these had walked through the glass shards in Danyael’s hospital room, Zara was willing to take a chance that they were Sicarii.
If they were from the IDF, she’d have to apologize later.
Zara pushed away from the wall, slid across the tiles, firing.
The two men in the doorway staggered backward, their chests jerking as bullets pounded into them. Zara shot to her feet and leaped over the two bodies and the slowly expanding pools of blood beneath them. She slammed a fresh clip into her Glock.
At the other end of the corridor, Maya’s hospital room door was open. Gunfire rattled through that room. Zara sprinted toward the door and dropped into a roll before the threshold, coming up in a battle crouch. Bullets whizzed over her head, but her bullets hit their mark, sinking into the two Sicarii assassins standing beside Maya’s bed. Zara’s gun hand remained trained on Maya. A single sweeping glance across the room confirmed the IDF soldiers were dead, as were the two Sicarii.
No witnesses. Plenty of other people to blame
How convenient.
Zara’s finger tightened on the trigger; the muzzle focused dead center on Maya’s forehead.
Danyael had saved Maya’s life twice.
Twice was plenty, and more than anyone deserved.
If Zara had anything to say about it, he would not save Maya’s life the third time.
But Maya was not looking at Zara. Instead, she stared at one of the dead assassins. “He tried to kill me.” Shock whispered through the words she breathed quietly.
Zara’s eyes narrowed.
“But why?” Maya shook her head and blinked hard several times. When her gaze refocused on Zara, they were cold and hard. The moisture lining them was scarcely noticeable. “Kivisuo, Finland. Where Virtanen died. John is back where it all began.”
Zara’s fingers wrapped snugly around the grip of her handgun, and she pushed Maya ahead of her, out of the hospital room. It would be a cold day in hell before she ever allowed Maya to walk behind her.
Her thoughts flicked to Danyael. He probably wouldn’t even have considered the logic or danger of walking in front or behind, yet she could not shake the feeling that whenever she was grinding her teeth at his apparent naiveté, he was chuckling at her.
Zara paused at the stairway, but only for an instant, before heading down instead of up. She suppressed a snarl when she found Danyael on one of the lower floors, assisting the doctors with the triage and care of injured patients. “I told you to go up.”
Danyael shrugged. He did not go through the motions of an apology or explanation, and Zara immediately realized it wasn’t because he was deliberately trying to be offensive. He looked like hell—ashen and almost staggering on his crutch. The patient behind him pressed her hands to her face, as if trying to find the bleeding wounds that marred her mere moments earlier. Her skin, however, was smooth and flawless.
Zara scowled. Danyael had ignored her orders to run up instead of down, and then he had healed the people injured in the window-shattering, fragment-spraying passage of the helicopter as it raked the building all the way to the ground. Why had she expected any differently from him? Had he even considered the fact that he was still recovering from wounds that had nearly killed him?
Apparently he hadn’t. Zara ground her teeth; there was no one more infuriating than Danyael.
Then their eyes met, and the hard knot of anger in her stomach relaxed. Tension eased out of her shoulder muscles. She glowered at him. He was doing that magical thing with his empathic powers that made her almost forget how angry she was with him.
Why couldn’t she have fallen in love with someone less infuriating?
Probably because infuriating and compelling went hand-in-hand, and to her, there was no one more compelling than Danyael Sabre.
Like the way he always checked on her, keeping her not just alive but in perfect health—whatever the state of his own. He brushed his fingers against the smear of blood on Zara’s cheek to confirm it was not a cut, then turned his attention to Maya.
When Danyael touched Maya, the other woman flinched—not in pain, but in surprise. Her startled expression betrayed her. She had clearly not expected Danyael’s concern.
Zara rolled her eyes. Obviously, Maya did not know Danyael well enough. Three rounds of attempted assassination would not be enough to deter his natural compassion for his wannabe assassin.
Apparently satisfied that neither Zara nor Maya was hurt, Danyael refocused his attention on Zara. “Everything all right up there?”
“The IDF has it under control, for now. Someone’s head is going to roll. Israeli airspace is one of the most tightly controlled in the world. A rogue helicopter, even if it was going after an American citizen, should never even have made it within two inches of Jerusalem, let alone within shooting distance of the military hospital.”
“The Sicarii were…are…Israelis.” Danyael leaned his weight against the wall. He spoke with difficulty, his breath coming in slow, pained heaves. “Perhaps they have more ties to the government than it cares to admit.”
“John’s in Kivisuo,” Zara said.
Danyael frowned. “Where Virtanen died? Why would he go back there?”
“Possibly the same reason Maya went back to Masada. To look for answers.” Zara slanted Maya a narrow-eyed glance.
“How qu
ickly can we get to Kivisuo?” Danyael asked.
“Quickly enough, but there’s nothing up there,” Zara said. “Kivisuo was abandoned. The closest town is some ten miles away.”
“It’s perfect, then.” Danyael managed a wry half-smile. “If something goes wrong, there’s nothing left to break.”
Zara scowled at him. “You don’t have a plan, do you?”
“I don’t think any of our plans have actually ever worked. I have to find John Halla.”
“And then what?”
Danyael inhaled deeply. “Talk to him.”
Zara’s jaw dropped. “Talk to him? You have forty hours to prevent what could be an international disaster, and your plan is to talk to him?”
“If he’s an alpha empath, any plan that involves killing him is going to risk innocent lives.”
“Which makes Kivisuo perfect for a showdown,” Zara said. “There’s nothing innocent left out there.”
Danyael shook his head sharply. “We don’t know if he’s an attack- or defense-class mutant. We don’t know how powerful he is. And most importantly, we don’t know what he wants. We’ve never spoken to him. We’ve never asked him.”
Zara would have smacked Danyael on the side of his head if she thought it would knock some sense into him. “The fact that he’s sent a psychic ghost to kill alpha empaths out in the open isn’t speaking loudly enough to you?”
“John deserves to be heard, and I might understand. I know I’m on the other side—like Virtanen—but perhaps what John needs is a glimpse of the other side.” A muscle twitched in his cheek. “We’re going to Kivisuo. To talk.”
Zara’s eyes narrowed. She was going into Kivisuo armed, and with her fingers on both triggers.
11
Early spring in Finland dripped incessant rain from steel gray skies. Green blades of grass spread like thin fuzz on the ground, and the trees sprouted early blooms. Light fragrance wafted through the air, a glimpse of the abundance of summer.
The promise of renewed life stopped at the boundaries of the abandoned village. The streets of Kivisuo had crumbled into broken chunks of asphalt. Dust and grime layered over the glass-covered storefronts, and the sidewalks were overgrown with grass sprouting from cracks in the concrete. Some cars remained where they had been abandoned, steel crumpled by vicious, deliberate attempts to ram into buildings.
Wipe away the ravages of time, and they could have been walking through the streets of Kivisuo in the immediate aftermath of Virtanen’s suicide.
Danyael did not have to imagine the bodies on the streets, mutilated by death. The psychic scarring of the mass suicide screamed at him, more real than the chilly wind whistling through broken glass windows and around crumbling buildings.
He hobbled around a corner. Maya walked ahead of him; Zara behind him. She had come to Kivisuo armed to the teeth. He would have expected no less from her. If Maya twitched in a way Zara did not approve of, weapons would probably come into play.
He suddenly felt Zara’s warm presence beside him. Her arm snaked around the back of his waist, steadying him.
Only then did he realize he had been reeling.
“How bad is it?” she asked quietly.
“I can’t tell how much of it is the echo of Virtanen’s emotions, and how much of it came from the people who committed suicide. It blends together in a multilayered scream. Too many voices to pick one out of the crowd.”
He suddenly stopped. It was almost like stepping into a vacuum. The empathic wail faded into silence. Where it had been cold, the air suddenly seemed warmer. “Here,” he murmured.
Zara glanced around as Maya returned to them. “It’s the spot from the video recording. This is where John stood when his parents started dying.”
“He’s an alpha empath. No question,” Danyael confirmed. “And strong. Even untrained, his empathic powers, fueled by his happy childhood, countered Virtanen’s death throes, and kept him alive.”
“Defense- or attack-class?”
“No way to tell.”
“Is he here right now? Is anyone else here right now?”
“I don’t think so, but I don’t know for certain. There’s too much…psychic noise from twenty-five years ago.” He shook his head. A quarter of a century had passed, yet the scar was so deep, the psychic wound it ripped into the planet hadn’t healed.
What would he find when he returned to Theodore Roosevelt Island, to the site of the Sakti slaughter? Would he hear hundreds of empathic echoes screaming out with despair and hate? Did he damn five hundred souls?
Did he even believe in souls?
Maya did.
Zara didn’t. Considering the amount of havoc she was wreaking, she was probably counting on not having to answer for her deeds in the afterlife.
Danyael wasn’t sure where he stood.
He counted on so little in life. It was hard to count on something after life.
Maya turned down a side road, and Zara followed. For a moment, he contemplated following them, but he needed a break. Zara’s hyperactive vigilance exhausted him. He continued alone through Kivisuo. The village, with two hundred and sixty residents at its peak, was surrounded by hills and pastures, scarcely ten miles from Leivonmäki, a town of nearly three thousand people. Its isolation had called to Virtanen, and when he died, Kivisuo’s isolation had saved Leivonmäki.
The mild warmth of the afternoon faded into dusk. Thin threads of fog rose off the ground. The empathic echo tugged at Danyael, sometimes blending in with the wind. At other times, the wail sounded almost distinctly human.
Something flickered at the edge of his senses.
Not a wail.
Something sharper, more distinct.
He walked down a side street. Shops gave way to homes in various stages of dilapidation. Broken shutters swung from windows. Paint flaked off exterior walls, creating an impression of tears running from hollowed eyes. The clouds moved across the sun, sinking the neighborhood into shadow. In summer, the area, filled with green trees, might have possessed a look of charming decay, but in early spring, with the trees mostly barren, the only mood was one of despair.
No, not just despair…
Danyael’s attention flashed to one of the houses lining the street. The door was ajar.
Something in that house reeked with pain.
Tendrils of fog entwined and thickened around his legs. He pushed aside the once-white gate and hobbled up the grass-covered path to the door. Enough light entered through the windows to dispel shadows from the dust-covered interior.
It was a step back in time.
The dining room had not been cleared after its last meal. Plates lay on the table. Cobwebs lined a delicate path from the tops of cups to the utensils. Danyael picked up a framed photograph from the sideboard and brushed away its thick cover of dust.
A boy, flanked by a man and woman, smiled out at him.
Johannes Halla.
“We’d just finished dinner. I wanted ice cream, so we headed to the ice cream parlor in town.”
Danyael jolted at the man’s words. His empathic senses had given him no warning. He turned toward the voice. A man stood by the doorway, his face and body partially shrouded in shadows.
“I realize, of course, that staying home would not have kept my parents any safer from Virtanen’s suicide, but if I had been older, if I’d known what I could do as an alpha empath, I could have saved them.” John stepped forward.
Danyael knew John was only about three years older than he was, but the man’s face was weathered and deeply tanned. His shaggy, disheveled hair was more gray than black.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
John chuckled, the sound roughened by nicotine. “There was only one person who could have prevented it. Me.” He walked into the room. His fingertips dragged trails through the dust on the table. “It was twenty-five years ago.” For an instant, pain glazed his eyes. “It still echoes.” John raised his head, the motion a sharp snap. “But it does not scream
as loudly as Theodore Roosevelt Island. You haven’t been there, have you? Not since the Sakti massacre.”
Danyael shook his head.
“Did you think there would be no repercussions?”
Danyael’s jaw tightened. Of course he had expected repercussions. He had expected to be sent back to ADX Florence. He had braced himself for life imprisonment in a maximum-security prison—although with the brutality of torture and mind-dampening drugs, he had not expected his stay to be a long one.
But when the moment came, when he could have held back his powers and not struck out, he had not hesitated.
He had killed to save lives.
And if he had to make that decision again, fully aware that five hundred or more lives would leave their tormented psychic imprint on Theodore Roosevelt Island for decades, he would have made that same decision.
And lived with the consequences and repercussions.
“You do not regret.” John’s voice bore a thin edge of surprise.
“I do, but I would not have chosen differently.”
“Do you sleep the sleep of the just? Of the righteous?”
“No.” Danyael shook his head. “I have nightmares.”
“I do, too. Every night, for twenty-five years. Do you know what it’s like to live through one moment over and over again? In my dreams, I see myself reaching out, trying to save my mother, my father. Some nights, I don’t reach them in time. Other nights, I reach them but nothing happens. My empathic powers are too unformed to save anyone but myself.”
“I can help you.”
John laughed. “You? Do you know that I met Virtanen? I was drawn to him. We—all the children—were. He made chocolates and gave them out for free to the children. We flocked to his little house at the edge of village, from dawn to dusk, and he would come out with chocolate—not broken bits of large bars, but rich, delicious milk and dark chocolate in shapes of animals. The details were so precise, so delicate that I once swore I could see the rabbit’s whiskers quivering.”