by Jade Kerrion
The vehicle sank, both of them still trapped in it. Danyael unbuckled his seat belt and pushed his weight against the car door, but water pressure held the door in.
Thin streaks raced through the water toward them.
Bullets. The Sicarii assassins were firing at the car. Two bullets smashed against the windshield. On land, the bullets would have penetrated them. In water, their deadly momentum slowed, they only cracked the glass.
But it was enough.
Danyael kicked out at the glass with his good leg. It shattered, the pieces drifting in the water—a jagged, barely visible barrier.
Water engulfed the car.
Panic consumed him. His emotions screamed. His body recoiled from imaginary pain.
The terror was so overwhelming it almost crushed him.
It would have if not for the presence of the woman he loved.
Zara… Danyael’s mind clung on to fragile threads of rationality. He had to get Zara to safety.
Willpower shoved panic into the background. His exquisite training clamped down on the fear. Danyael pulled Zara out of the car and swam away from the bullets slicing through the water. His lungs burned, his body faltering from the effort of swimming—something he could hardly do even on his best day—and pulling Zara along. Pain suddenly cut through him. He twisted around. Blood floated, a wisp of red trailing from his right thigh. Shafts of agony pierced along the length of his spine when he tried to move the leaden weight of his legs.
Out of chances…but he could still get Zara out. He poured his healing powers into her, giving her everything he could. Danyael closed his mouth over Zara’s, breathing the last of his air into her lungs. With a final surge of strength, he pushed her away from him, her face turned to the surface.
He turned in the direction of the bullets piercing the water. He had to try to reach the surface, but not anywhere near Zara. If he could create enough of a distraction and keep the attention focused on him, no one would look farther downstream for her.
And when he died, the water and his distance from others would contain the empathic backlash.
Perhaps no one else had to die.
He could still deny John that final victory.
Something hit the water high above his head. Danyael stared at it, his fading vision struggling to make it out. A man’s prone body leaked blood from its chest like a deflating balloon.
Danyael’s lungs burned, out of air. His vision frayed into gray. With his remaining good arm, he tried to pull himself through the water, back to the surface, but his body no longer cooperated. The gray faded to black as a slender shadow snaked through the water toward him.
A massive weight pressed down on his chest. Danyael spluttered, awareness jarring through him. He twisted to his side and coughed out water. Only then was he aware of the pain ripping through his lower back.
“Don’t move.” Zara pressed her hand to his shoulder. “You’re hurt.” Her violet eyes narrowed. Fury emanated from her in visible waves. “Are you mad? You could have swum away without me. I told you to get out! Why didn’t you listen?”
Didn’t she know? He could never have left her.
Her attention snapped up and focused on something across from him. He could not make it out through his exhausted haze. “This doesn’t make us even,” Zara said.
“I didn’t expect it to.” The answer was quietly given. The voice familiar.
Maya?
Danyael tried to raise his head, but shafts of pain shot up his spine. His vision flashed to white.
“I said don’t move. Help’s on the way.” Zara’s voice faded, the sound thinning into nothing.
12
It was that dream—that same one every night.
A battlefield. Bodies torn, stomped, riddled with bullets. Blood stamped like a crimson seal on the once-pristine grass of Theodore Roosevelt Island.
But the battlefield still belonged to the living. Five hundred members of Sakti surrounded Danyael. Two of them had stripped his body armor from him. His crutch lay somewhere—probably broken, lost. The two terrorists held him up as Thomas Maddox, the leader of Sakti, stalked toward him.
Danyael clenched his teeth. The pain in his chest radiated across his shoulders, numbing his muscles. He looked at Thomas, the motion swirling dizziness through him. “Look around you. Is this what your father wanted?”
Thomas turned his head, seeing, perhaps for the first time, what Danyael saw. Broken bodies, lives—young and promising—destroyed in their prime. “You did this!”
“No, you did this.” Danyael pitched his voice low to conceal his pain and exhaustion. “Your envy, your jealousy, drove you to it. Was it worth it? Was I worth your fall from grace?”
“I did this for a better country, for a country free from the tyranny of a government that abuses genetic derivatives. I am changing the future for all of us.”
“You are destroying it.”
Thomas’s eyes widened. “Are you defending a government that has persecuted you and others like you?”
“No, but you’re no better than the government you’re trying to destroy.” A chill settled deep in the pit of Danyael’s stomach and crept outward; its unstoppable cold heralded death. He spared a glance at Jessica, a teenaged alpha telepath and telekinetic, planted within Sakti by the Mutant Affairs Council. She was his only ally and the key to saving the city from Sakti.
The teenager had been wounded by a stray bullet, but Danyael, through a telepathic link, had healed her. She slumped on the ground. Her hand was still pressed against the crimson stain, but it no longer trembled visibly. Almost there… Danyael refocused on Thomas. “You considered yourself a patriot. You wanted to be a hero, but when you attacked people in their homes, you became just something else for them to be afraid of. You cannot change the world for the better through terror.”
Thomas sneered. “You know what I see when I look at you? A bitch for the government that betrayed you once and will betray you again, given half a chance. They treat you like dirt, and still, you return to them, begging them to fuck you again.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Give me a knife.”
Someone put a blade in his hand.
Thomas’s lips curled into a thin smile. “Hold his head still.”
Fingers curled into Danyael’s hair and yanked his head back. An arm wrapped around his throat, cutting off most of his air. Hard hands pressed down on both sides of his forehead, immobilizing him. Danyael stared unflinchingly into Thomas’s brown eyes as the man closed the distance, twirling the blade in his hand.
“The world is going to know what you are, and when I’m done with you, when we’re all done with you, we’ll just leave you here and let the government pick up the pieces. They’ll send you back to prison, right back where we found you. And this time, Danyael, no one is going to save you.”
The tip of the blade, razor sharp, parted the skin on Danyael’s forehead. The pain, at first sharply localized, blended and merged with the raw agony pulsing through him. Danyael closed his eyes as blood trickled down his forehead. The blade moved slowly and carefully, mercilessly carving a path on his skin.
He choked back the gasp of pain.
Jessica spoke directly into his mind, her young voice strong, determined. Do it, now.
Danyael’s eyes opened. Rivulets of blood flowed down his face, over his eyelashes, and along the slash of his cheekbones.
Thomas stepped back and lowered the knife. His smile became a grin and his eyes glittered. Danyael recoiled from the malice and hatred coiling through the hard flash of Thomas’s emotions. Thomas patted Danyael’s cheek lightly with the flat of the blade. “Before we’re finished, you will wish we’d left you to rot in prison.”
Behind Thomas, Jessica pushed to her feet.
Danyael met Thomas’s gaze steadily. “You will wish you left me there too.” With a final, desperate surge of strength, he pulled free from the grip of those holding him, lunged forward, and slammed the heel of his hand into Thomas’s j
aw, snapping Thomas’s head back.
Empathy, churning with anguish, transferred through physical contact. Thomas’s eyes flared wide as suicidal madness took hold, leeching into his mind, consuming his heart.
Jessica threw her head back, her blue eyes sparkling as the combined telepathic energy of the council’s enforcers poured into her. She threw her hands up, and her power punched out a psi-blast so powerful that even Danyael’s psychic shields trembled in its wake. As one, members of Sakti screamed as their psychic shields shattered, fragile as glass.
Jessica spread her hands out, lowering them in a graceful motion. The sky shimmered, wavering in and out of focus as a telekinetic dome took shape. Large and flawless, it enclosed all the Sakti forces, trapping them in with Danyael. The young girl looked at Danyael, her smile serene, and she nodded.
Danyael stared down at his hands.
It came down to this moment. Jessica was the key to saving Washington, D.C.—the key to life.
He was the key to death.
It always came down to this moment.
Life or death.
His answer quavered. Every night, it quavered until he saw the faces of his friends—Zara, Lucien, Miriya…friends he would give his life, his everything, to save.
I choose death.
His answer did not change. It never changed.
That, perhaps, more than anything else made him a monster in his own eyes.
Danyael flung his psychic shields aside. Death, like a demon released, slithered out. The alpha empath dropped to his knees as emotional agony clawed through him, tearing through wounds that had never fully healed. Everything he had once had and had hoped to have again, he sacrificed to protect the people he loved and defend a government that despised him. He paid more than he could afford and gave more than he possessed. He knew he could never get it back.
He screamed, coiling over his stomach to contain the rending pain. Others echoed, their screams resonating with insanity. When Danyael sobbed, brokenhearted, others wept with the passion of madness. Danyael had known suicidal despair all his life. When it sang to him in the night, he listened but was not lured by its seductive melody. No one else possessed the strength of Danyael’s emotional defenses, and when the song, fueled by the unchecked power of an alpha empath, whispered through their unshielded minds, they listened and obeyed.
The dying began.
Thomas was the first to die. He slashed his wrists and his jugular with the knife that he had used to disfigure Danyael and then plunged the blade repeatedly into his own heart until his hands fell lifelessly from its hilt. Thomas’s body hit the ground.
It’s done.
Danyael’s empathic powers soared, its song reaching a dazzling climax. All around him, the screams of the dying played in perfect counterpoint.
The aftermath of the battle offered perfect stillness. It seemed as if even the birds had fallen silent and the wind stopped moving. His mind screamed at him, trying to remind him that Jessica had been there, huddled beside him, alive, her mind protected from his empathic death song by the combined powers of the council’s telepaths. In his memories, death had been contained within the telekinetic dome, limited to the five hundred or more members of Sakti. Beyond the dome, the Mutant Affairs Council and the government security forces were already moving on the island, toward the dome, toward him. Coming for him.
But in his nightmares, nothing moved.
In his nightmares, the telekinetic dome failed and death surged out, far beyond Theodore Roosevelt Island. As unstoppable as the tides, as high as the incoming waters on a full moon, death swept across Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia.
Everyone died. Including Zara and Laura Itani.
“Danyael!” Zara’s voice called. “Wake up, damn it!” Her voice was shredded by tears.
His chest heaving, Danyael shoved through the net of memories and nightmares, too tightly wound together to untangle. His eyes flashed open, but precious moments passed before he managed to focus on Zara. Her emotions trembled with all-consuming despair—the kind so absolute that suicide was a heartbeat away. Her fingernails dug like claws into his arm. “Raise your shields, Danyael. Now!”
What… He blinked, suddenly aware that his external psychic shields were down. He yanked them up, the effort punching against the base of his spine. He gritted his teeth until the weight settled around his mind.
Zara’s shoulders sagged. The thin lines of tension smoothed out from her brow as she inhaled deeply, as if finally breathing clean air.
Anger was a perfect cover for the sly lick of panic in the pit of his stomach. “You shouldn’t have been in here. I told you never to enter a room if I was asleep or unconscious.”
“Don’t be a prick.” She glanced at the monitoring equipment in the room. “Your blood pressure and heart rate were off the charts. One of the nurses is a telepath, and she tried to come in to wake you. She lasted two seconds. She’s now a blubbering mess working through her third box of tissues. She didn’t have strong enough psychic shields.”
“And you did?” He shook his head. “You don’t have psychic shields.”
Zara rolled her eyes. “The problem with you mutants is that you think there’s only one way to deal with something—and that is through your psychic powers. The rest of us normal people make do with our five senses, common sense, and will power.”
“But—”
“But your nightmares can drive people to tears? To madness? Of course they can, but I’ve been working up my resistance to them.”
Incredulity stole his voice. “You…what? When?”
“That night, when we met in New York, after you lost your memories. You slept in the bathroom because there was no other enclosed space in your apartment that would keep me safe from you.”
He remembered it clearly, despite having been pushed nearly past physical endurance. It was his first memory of meeting Zara—of coming across the most dazzling person he had ever seen in his life. There was still no one like her, no one who radiated all emotions across all color spectrums—living art who breathed energy into every moment.
Sometimes, he suspected that he went along with the chaos she created just to see what she would do. Just to see how beautiful she could be.
He could never tire of watching her.
And at that moment, her eyes were moist. His damned powers— He had done that to her. Danyael reached up and brushed away the tears from her cheek.
She blinked, startled, and stepped back immediately.
Danyael managed a rueful smile. It was good to know that some things did not change. Zara was still wary, rightly so, of an empath. No one as strong-willed, as independent as Zara would have tolerated having her emotions manipulated.
She glared at him. She was lovely when she was annoyed; most beautiful when she was furious, her violet eyes betraying every razor edge of her dancing, flickering emotions. Her chin lifted. “I can handle you, Danyael. That night, in New York, I opened the bathroom door.”
His jaw dropped. “You what?”
She shrugged, the motion as graceful as it was indifferent. “The first time I managed to hold it open for a second. Maybe less.”
“But—”
Her violet eyes sharpened on him. “I thought your emotions would kill me, Danyael. I hurt in places I didn’t even know I had. But the next time, I managed longer than a second, and even longer after that.” She bared her teeth in a smile without humor. “I had to take a break while you were in prison, and with the Mutant Assault Group, but I picked up again after that.”
His mind blanked for an instant. “What?”
“You really didn’t think that you were alone in your apartment each night, did you?”
“I…” The implications staggered him. “I did…actually.”
“I visit every night I’m in town. You don’t sleep well, Danyael, but at some point, the exhaustion is too much for even you. You hit a REM cycle, typically between one thirty and three a.m. I’m
there for most of it, sitting outside your open bedroom door.”
He fumbled for words. “But…why?”
“Because I need to know that I can handle you in almost any situation.” Zara shrugged again. “I have no illusions about surviving the emotions you can release when your internal and external shields drop—no one can live through that short of possessing ridiculously powerful psychic shields, which I don’t—but your run-of-the-mill nightmare? It’s nothing. I’ve got you.” Her violet eyes darkened to indigo. “But this wasn’t quite run-of-the-mill, was it?”
He shook his head.
“Sakti?”
He inhaled sharply.
“Again?” Exasperation laced her voice.
“I killed them, Zara.”
“You saved Washington, D.C.”
He shook his head. “Jessica and the combined powers of the Mutant Affairs Council enforcers saved Washington, D.C. They contained my empathic powers within the telepathic dome.”
“But only you could have taken out Sakti. You pulled them out of their murderous rampage of the city. They came for you.” She shrugged. “Moths to the flame.”
“And I turned on the flame. I had a choice between life and death. And I chose death.”
“You chose life. For me, for Laura, for Miriya, for Lucien, for the hundreds of thousands of people in Washington, D.C., you chose life.”
“You have no idea how badly it could have gone. If the telepathic dome had faltered—”
“Oh, I’m sure the council still has nightmares about contingency planning around you. They haven’t figured it out, Danyael, and I doubt they ever will. They really have only one plan—you.”
He stared at her.
“You are their master plan, their only plan. Your training. Your inherent goodness. Your commitment to saving lives, even if it means giving up your own. When you chose death that day at Theodore Roosevelt Island, you did not choose Sakti’s death. You chose your death. You knew the council would send you back to ADX. You begged me to kill you before they could do so. And still, you made that choice—you chose your death to save countless lives.” She shrugged. “Sakti? They were dead, one way or another. They made that choice when they attacked Washington, D.C. Someone had to take on the burden of ending their threat and killing them. I’m sorry it had to be you.” Zara smiled thinly. “I know you, Danyael. Nothing I say will convince you that you didn’t make that choice for Sakti, but no one holds you responsible for what happened on July 4th.”