by Jade Kerrion
An ironic smile curved his lips. Getting off on a rotten start with someone he found compelling was unfortunate. She was beautiful. Long, dark hair framed large violet eyes, a slender nose, and sultry mouth. Her skin was the color of a golden dusk and smooth as silk. Physical beauty was incidental, though. He was personally acquainted with the curse of abundant physical beauty and knew not to place any weight on the appearance of the fragile mortal shell.
Instead, he studied her through the eyes of an alpha empath. His breath caught in his throat. Zara was more than beautiful. She was dazzling. Her emotional spectrum danced in a rainbow of cascading sparkles. Complex patterns swirled light with darkness to create art, both subtle and bold. He could never tire of looking at Zara.
“What do you remember?” she asked again.
“Nothing.”
“You must remember something.”
“I don’t. And I don’t want to.” He looked away. That was the right answer, the safe answer, until he figured out what was going on.
“Don’t want to?” Her fingernails tapped an impatient rhythm on the table.
“My memories were taken for a reason. I don’t want them back.”
“That’s it? Someone rips out your memories, steals days from your life, and you just shrug and walk away?”
A muscle twitched in his smooth cheek. If only she knew how accurately she had described it. Ripping was an accurate—albeit tame—way of categorizing the gut-wrenching agony of losing memories. He could not remember what he had lost, but he could remember the process of losing them. That particular memory expelled a sly lick of nausea that coated his throat and made it hard to breathe.
Two days. What could have happened in those two days? He had enjoyed the benevolent protection of the Mutant Affairs Council for sixteen years. Would he challenge their decision now? Did he dare? “I trust the council,” he said simply.
“I thought you were stupid. Now I know you’re also incredibly naïve. You trust the council?”
Did he? Danyael could not meet her penetrating gaze. Was he denying the truth or bracing for a lie? He was not certain. “I—”
“Stupid, naïve and scared.”
His eyes narrowed. Her emotions seemed rooted in more than just the repulsive effect of his psychic shields. “Where does this blanket hatred of me come from?”
“From those memories you’re running away from,” she responded sweetly.
He dragged his left hand through his hair. The conversation was pointless. “I need to rest.”
“Go for it.” She did not move from the chair.
“I need privacy. I can find you a hotel room in Manhattan.”
She shook her head. “It’s not happening.”
“I need to rest, and to do that, I need to be alone.”
“You need to be alive.” Zara pushed away from the chair and strode toward him. Her deadly lope reminded him of a stalking tiger. “You have no memories, so trust me on this one. You’re in deep shit, and no amount of posturing or saying that you remember nothing is going to get you out of it.”
Her words chilled him. She hated him, but equally—and oddly—he sensed her genuine commitment to keeping him alive. In spite of how rough the past few hours had been, he was not ready to give up on life yet.
Trust. If he could not trust his instincts, what could he trust?
Danyael stepped out in faith. He met her gaze and released his breath unsteadily. “Fine,” he said. “Do you need to use the restroom?”
Confusion replaced the cold fire in her gaze. “No.”
“All right. If you need it, knock and wait for me to respond before you come in.”
“You’re going to sleep in the bathroom?”
He threw a quick glance around the small studio apartment. “There’s nowhere else private here.” He shrugged helplessly. There was no way to explain without giving himself away. “I need to be alone.”
“I know you’re a mutant.”
At least her answer explained some of her feelings toward him. “Thank you for saving me the trouble of explaining.”
He stepped into the bathroom, closed the door behind him, and shrugged out of his jacket. The leather was old and soft; he could use it as a pillow. The bathroom floor was not long enough for him to stretch out, but he was tired enough that it would not matter. He lay down, inhaled deeply, and carefully lowered his psychic shields as he breathed out.
The tightness in his jaw relaxed slightly. The tension around his neck and shoulders eased subtly. So many questions were left unanswered, but none mattered then. His eyes fluttered closed as fatigue dragged him down to sleep.
CHAPTER TWO
Danyael did not know how long it had taken his sleep-fogged brain to separate the pounding on the door from the pounding inside his skull. He rolled to one side and pushed up on an elbow, his aching muscles protesting in spite of slow, careful motions.
A jagged edge of pain ripped through the sleepy haze. He swallowed a soft gasp. His dark eyes flashed wide, unseeing. Emotions, mercifully muted in sleep, abruptly awoke and clawed at him with vicious talons, determined to tear him apart from the inside out..
He curled into a fetal ball to contain the raw physical expression of emotional ruin. He could not make any sense his emotions. He could not remember. Panic sharpened into focus for one brief moment before his training, so intensive as to be instinctive, kicked in.
Breathe. He inhaled shakily. Let go. He stared at his clenched fists, tried to will them open. Let go. They did not move. They could not. There was too much inside. He would shatter if he released his emotions.
Build. Deliberately slowing his breathing, he felt his heartbeat respond in kind. The panic briefly held at bay, he reached out. No mutant powers here, just willpower. No quick movements, just deliberate patience as he eased a gossamer layer of control over rampaging emotions. It was akin to building a wall in the face of a whirling sandstorm, zero visibility with nothing but instinct to guild the careful placement of each section of the wall. Build.
Cultivated psychic shields slid slowly into place. The screaming storm of emotions was no less violent, but they pounded ineffectually against his shields, contained for the time being. His efforts were ultimately as pointless as putting a Band-Aid over a slashed jugular vein, but it bought him time. It pushed back the gut-wrenching physical pain and allowed him to function.
“Danyael!” an impatient female voice called out sharply.
A hazy image of a dark-haired young woman, wavering somewhere between a vision and a dream, flickered through his exhausted mind. He groped for her name, but nothing came to mind.
“I need a minute,” he said, his voice a croak.
How long had he been out? Without a clock, there was no way to tell, but it seemed that the answer was “not nearly long enough.” He leaned on the wall, using it for support as the bathroom spun dizzily around him. He was accustomed to not being in prime health, but it had been a long time since he had been this sick.
He reached for the door, but flinched and looked away when he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror.
“Damn,” Danyael cursed softly when he realized what he had done. Not again.
Many years ago, Lucien had told him that his eyes were the mirrors into his soul. Nowhere was the message more effectively nailed home than right there. He could not even look at himself. The emotions he could not explain—emotions seared with self-hatred—made it impossible.
He could fix it, though. He had done it before. Lucien had taught him how. Look up. Count to ten.
It was not simple. His gaze locked unseeingly on an invisible spot on the bathroom counter. He breathed deeply a few times. His jaw tensed, and a muscle in his smooth cheek twitched with amusement at the inanity of the situation. Why did he have to brace himself to look up?
He lifted his gaze hesitantly. One. No, not quite an entire second. The long eyelashes closed quickly over the dark orbs, and he turned his face away.
&n
bsp; Several moments passed before he was able to try again. One and a little bit.
Getting past three seconds was the major hurdle, but each time, his gaze was steadier, more certain, and fractions of a second longer.
“Danyael! I’m breaking the door down in three seconds.”
If she did so, he would not have a place to sleep. Stumbling to the door, he unlocked it to meet a pair of annoyed eyes. He clamped down on the desperate need to shy away from the scathing gaze. One…two…three…Just long enough for it not to be obvious to anyone else that he was struggling to function on the most basic emotional level.
Her lips curled into an ironic smile. “If you were hoping that I was a figment of your imagination, you’re out of luck.”
Zara. He tuned out the maddened chaos of emotions rampaging beneath his psychic shields. “Are you sure you’re not a telepath?”
Her smile widened slightly. “You look terrible. Do you spend your energy making weak jokes when you can barely stand?”
He cleared his throat. At least his voice no longer sounded rusty from disuse. “How long was I asleep?”
“About eight hours. It’s two in the afternoon. You have a visitor.” She nodded toward the door. “He’s very insistent. I was tempted to call 911, but if he’s who he says he is, I think you’d rather do without the publicity.”
He looked through the peephole. Recognition and relief eased the tension out of his shoulders as he opened the door. “Seth,” he acknowledged quietly, a faint sheen of respect in his voice. He mentally counted to three before looking away.
The older man outside the door smiled warmly. “May I come in?”
“Of course.” Danyael stepped aside. He shut the door behind his guest. “Seth, this is Zara Itani. Zara, Dr. Seth Copper is the senior physician at the Mutant Affairs Council. What brings you to New York?”
“You,” Seth said. “Alex Saunders sent me to make sure you’re all right. Sit down. If I had my way, you wouldn’t be permitted out of bed for about a week.”
As a general rule, Danyael hated physical exams, but he was too sick to object, so he sat and submitted to the examination.
Seth Copper removed several portable medical devices from his bag and worked through the basics: temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate. “On a scale from one to ten, one for perfect health, five for your standard physical state after working at the clinic each day, and ten for dead, how would you rate how you’re feeling right now?”
“Seven,” Danyael ventured. “Six,” he amended carefully, after exasperation flashed across Seth’s face.
“Danyael, you are a trained doctor. You know that an inability to objectively assess your own physical condition is not, under any circumstances, a virtue. It couldn’t possibly be seven. And it’s definitely not six. I know you don’t remember this, but less than forty-eight hours ago you were shot. You would have died, but the council healers got to you in time.”
He inhaled sharply. “I was shot?”
“That’s right.” Seth Copper wore a pained expression. “You might want to think about it and nudge that number a bit higher.”
“Who shot me?”
Seth frowned. The light in his eyes gentled. “I’ve been instructed not to fill in the blanks beyond what you need to know, to properly care for your own emotional and physical health. That wasn’t my decision, but I’m told it’s for your own safety.”
“My own safety?” Shock conceded to anger. “For decades, I’ve lived by their rules. I know how to play the game the way they want it played. There was no reason to take my memories.”
“You think the council took your memories? Is that what they told you?”
“They said…” Danyael shook his head as he sorted through the blur of confused images and sounds, the first memories emerging out of the fathomless void. “I don’t know. I don’t remember what they said. There was…”
“I know.” Seth set the stethoscope down and reached out to Danyael, but Danyael pulled away. “It’s all right; don’t push it. The pain and disorientation make the early memories hazy. Alex said explicitly not to fill in the memories you lost, but this isn’t filling in. It’s correcting misperceptions in the memories that you do have. The council didn’t take your memories. They didn’t even have a say in the matter. It was the Mutant Assault Group.”
“The military? Why?”
Seth’s mouth tightened into a straight line. “We’re getting to some of those questions I can’t answer for you, Danyael. I’m sorry.”
“How could they do that to me without authorization from the council?”
“The Mutant Affairs Council isn’t all-powerful. With the right paperwork, the government can override the jurisdiction of the council.”
Danyael’s anger flared again. The sense of betrayal was cold and dark. His psychic shields strained to contain the unfamiliar emotions. “It would have been nice to have known in advance. If the council wasn’t going to fight for me, I could have fought for myself instead.”
“What would you have done?” Seth sighed. “The Mutant Assault Group is composed of mutants, and they’re perfectly capable of taking down other mutants. You could have turned them back, but not without hurting a lot of innocent people in the process. And even if you had it in you, would you have gambled the council’s goodwill on it?”
Danyael slammed his hand on the table. “What has the council’s goodwill done for me? What about the support, protection, and privacy I was promised for playing nicely by their rules?”
“Why do you think I’m here?” Seth asked quietly. “Look, let’s just keep the conversation focused on your health. You could use another blood transfusion. Let’s head over to the council office in Manhattan, and we can take care of it there.”
“No.” Danyael shook his head. “I’m not going into the council office.”
Seth held up his hands. “I understand that you’re upset—”
Danyael’s anger was far stronger than his self-hatred and infused him with the strength to meet Seth’s gaze. “Upset doesn’t come close to describing it.” The fury racing through his eyes contrasted with the ice of his voice. He channeled every shred of willpower into not striking out at something. Anything. “I am drowning in emotions I can’t understand because I don’t remember. I was prepared to accept them and work through them, because I thought it was the council’s decision. Now you tell me the military did this to me and that the council did nothing. They stood back and let the military crush my memories into dust.”
“It’s not that simple. There is more at stake here.”
“There is always more at stake than me.” Danyael’s lips twisted into a self-mocking half-smile. “I wasn’t asking for any special favors from the council. I just wanted to be left alone.”
Seth sighed. “All right, I get that. There are times when I get tired of the council myself. Let’s talk about what we need to do to get you better. Good nutrition. Lots of rest. Don’t even think about using your healing powers for a week or longer. I recommend you take a leave of absence from your job.”
“Did I miss work?”
“What?” Seth asked.
“I know I’ve lost forty hours of memories, starting late Friday night. Did I miss work?”
“Of course not. It’s Monday today. It’s Christmas. Everything happened over the weekend.”
He chuckled bitterly at Seth’s naiveté. “I haven’t had the luxury of a five-day workweek in a long time. I work all day Saturday and a half day Sunday.”
“Yes, I guess you’ve missed two days of work.”
Danyael’s sigh was quiet, but heavy. “A leave of absence isn’t an option. I’m already in enough trouble as it is for missing work.”
“It wasn’t a suggestion. Alex has already called the Department of Public Health and informed the free clinic director that you need some time off.”
“What?” Danyael’s eyes widened. “The council won’t protect me when I’m mind-raped by an alpha telep
ath, but then calls my employer and tells him I’m taking a break?”
“It’s a temporary break. Don’t force Alex to make it a permanent one.”
“Damn it, I need the job. I need the money. Do you think this is free?” He waved his hand to encompass the entirety of his studio apartment.
“The council will take care of you.”
“Like it did when the Mutant Assault Group showed up? I don’t want the council’s money or its obviously selective interventions in my life.” Danyael glanced at Zara who was standing silently by, listening to the conversation. He heard an uncharacteristically resentful edge in his own voice. “I guess you were right. I was both stupid and naïve to trust the council.”
“What does she know?” Seth asked.
“I know enough.” Zara smirked at him. “You might almost say I started it.”
Alarm pierced Seth’s composure. “You know too much.”
She shook her head. “I’d say Danyael knows too little.”
“The council’s decision is that Danyael cannot be told.”
“Considering how much power he has at his disposal—when he chooses in rare instances to extend them—the information will keep him from making bad decisions entirely by accident.”
“Not when the alternative is having him make bad decisions deliberately. I’m going to block your memories. We can’t have you circumventing the council’s decisions.”
Zara pushed away from the kitchen counter, her eyes glittering. Her slim body uncoiled, a predator preparing to kill.
“You won’t touch her,” Danyael said quietly, intervening before Zara precipitated a confrontation she could not win. He shut out the distraction of his rioting emotions as he focused his empathic powers to channel calm. Unshielded, Zara was easy to redirect, especially with her hatred of him temporarily subservient to her deadly intent against Seth Copper. Danyael’s powers, as gentle and subtle as the whisper of an evening breeze, sang to her, lulling her. He sensed when the heated edge of Zara’s temper cooled, enough to check her attack, enough to buy him a few precious seconds to save her memories and perhaps her life. “She’s my guest and under my protection,” he said.
