Blaze of Memory

by Nalini Singh

Page 4

 

  Seeing Glen exiting a room, he waved the doctor down. The other man hurried over, dark circles under his eyes.

  Dev took in his friend's wrinkled clothes, the way his ginger hair stuck up in untidy tufts. "I thought you were off shift. "

  Glen thrust a hand through his hair, further electrifying the strands. "I wanted to be here in case our guest woke. Caught some sleep in the break room. "

  Introductions took only a couple of seconds, and then they were walking into Ekaterina's room. To Dev's surprise, she was awake and sitting up, sipping something out of a small cup. He glanced at Glen.

  "Just ten minutes ago," the doctor murmured.

  Ekaterina looked straight at Dev, her eyes skating off Ashaya as if her former colleague didn't exist. "The cobwebs are starting to part. " Her voice was husky, as if it hadn't been used for a long time. . . or as if it had been broken in the most brutal way.

  Walking to her side, Dev took the cup she held out, caught by the shadows that swirled in the green-gold depths of her eyes. "How much do you remember?"

  She swallowed but didn't break eye contact. "I don't know who I am. " It was a plea, though her voice didn't shake, her eyes didn't glisten. Yet Dev heard the scream - a thin, piercing cry that stabbed him right in the heart.

  Part of him, a small, barely salvageable part, wanted to offer comfort, but this woman, simply by existing, was a danger to his people. She was Psy. And Psy connected to the Net could not be trusted. No matter that she acted more human than her brethren, he had to treat her as a weapon, carrying within her the seeds of Shine's destruction. And if she proved to be that, he'd have to make the most lethal of decisions . . . even if it killed the last bit of humanity left in him.

  "Ekaterina. " Ashaya's voice, gentle, coaxing.

  The woman on the bed blinked, shook her head. "No. "

  "That's your name," Dev said, refusing to let her look away.

  Those changeable hazel eyes flickered and went out, a flame dying. "Ekaterina's dead," she said with absolute calm. "Everything is dead. There's nothing lef - " Her teeth snapped together as her body convulsed with vicious strength.

  "Glen!" Catching her before she twisted off the bed, Dev tried to keep her from hurting herself, her bones startlingly fragile under his hands.

  "Say it. "

  She kept her lips closed.

  "Say it. "

  No. No. No.

  "Say it. "

  He didn't tire, didn't stop, didn't shove into her mind. The horror of waiting for the pain, the terror, was somehow worse than the violation itself.

  "Say it. "

  She held on to her sanity through the first days, the first weeks.

  But still he wouldn't relent.

  Her tongue felt so thick, so dry. Her stomach hurt. But she held on.

  "Say it. "

  It took three months, but she did. She said it.

  "Ekaterina is dead. "

  "She's unconscious. " Glen shined a light into Ekaterina's eyes as she lay slumped on the pillows. "Could be the residue of the drugs in her system, but I think the trigger was her name - some kind of a psychic grenade. "

  "More likely a combination," Ashaya said, then reeled off the chemical compounds of the sleeping pills Glen had noted on the chart. "Some of these agents cause memory loss in Psy. "

  The doctor's eyes brightened at having found a colleague. "Yes. There's a possibility some of the drugs were used sparingly in conjunction with other methods to psychologically break her. "

  Dev stared down at Ekaterina Haas's scratched and bruised face, wondering what she'd given up to come out of the torture alive. . . what she'd let her captors put in her. His hands fisted inside the pockets of his pants - whatever bargain she'd made, it hadn't saved her. "What you said when you first arrived," he murmured to Dorian while the doctor and Ashaya were distracted, "it can't happen. "

  "Shaya wants her close. " Dorian folded his arms, eyes on his mate. "It devastated her when she thought Ekaterina died. "

  "Whatever happened to her," Dev said, unable to take his own eyes off the thin figure in the bed, "whatever was done to her, she's not the woman your mate knew. We're far more capable of monitoring her. "

  "And if she proves a threat?"

  Dev met the other man's gaze. "You know the answer to that. " Dorian was a DarkRiver sentinel. And the leopard pack hadn't reached its current status as one of the most dominant changeling groups in the country by being weak . . . or easily forgiving.

  Blowing out a soft breath, Dorian returned his attention to his mate. "You make that decision, you bring me in. You let me prepare her. " His voice was a harsh, low order.

  Dev was more used to giving orders than taking them, but Ashaya had saved the lives of Forgotten children at risk to her own. Then she'd blown the Council's secret perversions wide open. She'd earned his respect. "Fair enough. " However, as he watched Ekaterina's chest rise and fall in what seemed to him to be a dangerously shallow rhythm, he wondered once again if he'd be able to do the deed if it came down to it. Could he break that body that had already been broken so badly?

  The answer came from a part of him that had been honed in blood and pain. Yes.

  Because when you fought monsters, sometimes, you had to become a monster.

  PETROKOV FAMILY ARCHIVES

  Letter dated May 24, 1969

  My dear Matthew,

  Your father says that one day you'll laugh at these letters I write to you, to the son who is, at the moment, trying to suck both thumbs at once. "Zarina," David said this afternoon, "what kind of a mother writes political treatises to her seven-month-old son? "

  Do you know what I told him?

  "A mother who is certain her child will grow up to be a genius. "

  Oh, how you make me smile. I wonder, even as I write this, if I'll ever let you read these letters. I suppose they've become a kind of journal for me, but since I'm far too sensible to write "Dear Diary," instead I write to the man you'll one day become.

  That man, I hope, will grow up in a time of far less turmoil. The psychologists' theories notwithstanding, early indications are that it'll prove almost impossible to condition rage out of our young.

  But that isn't what worries me - I've heard disturbing rumors that the Council is looking more and more to Mercury, Catherine and Arif Adelaja's secretive group. If those rumors prove true, we may be in far more trouble than I believed.

  It's not that I have anything against Catherine and Arif. Indeed, I once considered them friends and have only admiration for their courage in surviving the worst tragedy that can befall a parent. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that they are two of the most extraordinary minds of our generation. And, having spent considerable time with both of them, I know one thing with categorical certainty - they want only the best for our race.

  But sometimes, that depth of need - to save, to protect - can become a blinding fervor, one that destroys the very thing it thinks to safeguard.

  I can only hope the Council sees that, too.

  Love,

  Mom

  Chapter 5

  Two days later, the woman everyone called Ekaterina stared at the stranger in the mirror and tried to see what they saw. "It's not me. "

  "Still no memory?"

  She swiveled to find the man who'd introduced himself as Devraj Santos standing in the bathroom doorway. Dark hair, dark eyes . . . and a way of moving that reminded her of some unnamed predator, sleek, watchful, dangerous beyond compare.

  This predator wore a perfect, charcoal-colored suit.

  Camouflage, she thought, her most basic, most animal instincts whispering that he was anything but safe. "No. That name . . . it's not mine. " She couldn't quite explain what she wanted to say, the words locked behind a wall she couldn't break through. "Not now. "

  She expected him to brush off her statement, but instead he leaned on
e shoulder against the doorjamb, hands in the pockets of his suit pants, and said, "Do you have another preference?"

  A choice?

  No one had given her a choice for. . . a long time. She knew that. But when she tried to reach for details, they whispered out of her grasp, as insubstantial as the mist she'd felt on her face as a child.

  She grabbed onto the fragment of memory, desperate for even a glimmer of who she'd been, who she was, her psychic fingers curling almost into claws as she tried to rip away the veil.

  Nothing. Only blankness.

  "No," she said. "Just not that name. " The shadow-man had used it. His voice haunted her. Saying that name over and over and over. And when he said it, pain followed. So much pain. Until the phantom memories made her jerk awake, certain he'd found her, put her back into that hole, that nothing place.

  "How about Trina?" Dev's voice snapped her back to the present, to the awareness that she was with a man she didn't truly know, a man who might be another shadow. "It's close enough to jog your memory. "

  The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. "Too close. "

  "Kate?"

  She paused, considered it. Hesitated.

  "Katya?"

  Somehow she knew no one had ever before called her that. It felt new. Fresh. Alive. Ekaterina was dead. Katya lived. "Yes. "

  As Dev walked farther into the room, she realized for the first time how big he was. He moved with such lethal grace, it was easy to overlook the fact that he was over six feet three, with solid shoulders that held his suit jacket with effortless confidence. There was considerable muscle on that tall frame - enough to snap her in half without effort.

  She should have been afraid, but Devraj Santos had a heat to him, a reality that compelled her to move closer. He was no shadow, she thought. If this man decided to kill her, he'd do so with blunt pragmatism. He wouldn't torture, wouldn't torment. So she let him get close, let him lift a hand to her hair and rub the strands between his fingertips, the scent of his aftershave soaking into her skin until the fresh bite of it was all she could smell.