by Jade Kerrion
The bullet froze in mid-air inches from Andrea’s heart. John closed his fist, and the barrel of Galahad’s handgun crumpled. As if on cue, the hovering bullet dropped to the ground. John swung his arm as if brushing off an annoying insect. His formidable telekinetic powers mirrored his action, lifting Galahad off the ground and flinging him through the air.
Andrea smirked. “Let him go, John. No need to be too gentle.”
Galahad screamed, plunging into the icy river.
“We have to leave,” Andrea said. “The Mutant Assault Group and the Mutant Affairs Council are converging on us. Danyael, come with us. Wed your future to ours.”
Down in the water, the splashing continued. Damn it, Galahad can’t swim! Danyael rushed to the railing. Below the bridge, Galahad struggled to keep his head above water.
“Galahad will live or die by his own strength,” Andrea said, answering Danyael’s unvoiced plea. “We see little in him worth saving.”
Danyael’s heart and mind churned with turmoil. Could he risk his freedom, his future, for Galahad? More importantly, could he live with himself if he walked away and left Galahad to drown?
My powers. My life. Not a curse, a blessing.
He clenched his teeth, inhaled deeply, and then relaxed. His agonized indecision transformed into weary acceptance. When he looked up, his dark eyes were finally at peace.
Danyael climbed up on the rail and paused, restrained by Erin’s insistent grip. “This can’t be your choice, Danyael,” she said. “Don’t do this. Why are you risking your life to save him?”
He saw tears spring into her green eyes. “This isn’t about Galahad. It’s about my path in life. If I let him die, I am not the man I have tried so hard to become.”
“Danyael, if you turn your back on us by choosing this path, we won’t stand between you and the council,” Andrea warned.
“I know, but I can’t be what you want me to be. I’m sorry.” He dove off the bridge and sliced into the water like a knife.
The cold pierced him, the impact stunning. Danyael broke the surface, gasping for air, and searched the water. He caught a glimpse of dark hair. Five strong strokes brought him alongside Galahad. “I’ve got you. Here, hold on to me.” Danyael wrapped an arm around Galahad and held him up to breathe. He infused calm to take the edge off Galahad’s terror. Galahad’s panicked actions subsided, but the shivering from hypothermia did not.
Danyael had to get Galahad out of the water.
Treading water was difficult. His left leg was useless, the muscles too damaged to propel him through the water. Swimming with Galahad’s additional weight would be impossible. “I need your help. I’ll keep your head above the water and steer us in the right direction. You have to kick.”
Galahad nodded. His legs moved weakly.
Grimly, Danyael set his chattering teeth and moved through the water with his heavy burden. The swift current carried them downstream, but by swimming at an angle to the current, they made slow progress. Too slow, Danyael realized. His strength faded, sapped by the cold, his movements sluggish. Several times he slipped under the surface too, before coming up choking and coughing.
It would be ironic if they both died, he thought. The cruelty of that cosmic joke gave him the strength to keep going. Just one more stroke. One more kick. Get through one second. And then the next.
The riverbank taunted him, so close. He reached for solid ground, but the current dragged him out before he caught on. Almost. “We’re nearly there, Galahad. I’ll get you out.” The words were unintelligible—he shivered too hard—but he was an alpha empath. He did not need words to project calm confidence or inspire hope. Empathic powers surged, entwining their spirits.
Beside him, Galahad kicked with renewed effort. The riverbank drifted closer. Danyael reached out and grabbed an overhanging root. Relief washed through him. He heard running feet and looked up, dazed, as strong hands grabbed Galahad, hauling him out of the cold water.
Jacob then reached for him too. How many times can you save the same boy from the same river, Danyael wondered as he reached for Jacob’s hand.
A single shot rang out. Danyael watched in disbelief as a blossom of red spread over Jacob’s sweatshirt.
Jacob’s sharp gasp of pain ended in breathless silence. He toppled over Danyael and into the water.
No! Danyael pushed away from the riverbank and struck out with desperation-fueled strength to reach Jacob.
Dimly he was aware of a flurry of activity along the riverbank. People ran alongside, shouting frantic instructions. If those instructions were intended for him, he heard none of them. He caught Jacob; the older man was alive, but fading fast. Danyael did not hesitate. His healing powers surged, churning through Jacob’s body.
He had never healed another while struggling to stay afloat, but there had to be a first time for everything. The effort drained him, sapping mental and physical energy as the injury—a bullet wound through the right lung—transferred. Through eyes glazed with cold and a body filled with fresh agony, Danyael looked toward the riverbank. So close, one more stroke, one more kick, just one more.
He felt ground beneath his feet. Danyael murmured a rare prayer of thanks and stumbled through the water up the sloping riverbank. As he dragged the older man onto dry ground, Jacob stirred. Another sweep of Danyael’s empathic powers through Jacob tugged the worst effects of hypothermia away. Only then did Danyael collapse, struggling to breathe through wracking shudders.
Jacob sat up and patted his shirt, stained pink, in astonishment. He looked at Danyael. His eyes widened. “Your eyes…” he breathed. “I know your eyes.”
You saved me. Thank you. Danyael’s lips shaped the words, but no sound emerged.
Hands seized him. Rough hands dragged him to his knees, wrapped hard fingers around his hair, and yanked his head back. Cold steel locked around his throat. He heard Alex’s voice shout a warning. “No, don’t turn on that electric collar. He’s soaking wet. It’ll electrocute him.”
Pain, white and brutal, ripped him apart. His muscles jerked spasmodically before collapsing beneath his weight. Unbearable agony blasted through his mind and shattered his psychic shields.
As darkness claimed him, he heard Alex’s quiet voice speak directly to his mind. Forgive me, Danyael. I trust you. You must trust yourself. Trust your heart.
~*~
Zara and Miriya both arrived too late to do anything except watch from the sidelines. The outcome, Zara knew, was inevitable. Danyael was too exhausted to win a fight without dropping his internal psychic shields, without killing everyone in sight. The council had bound his hands and limited his choices by surrounding him with people he cared for.
Danyael made his choice; he chose not to kill.
Mutant Assault Group storm troopers locked the collar around Danyael’s wet neck, and General Howard activated the collar.
Zara’s breath caught in her throat. Her mind blanked. Instinct threw her forward, but Galahad restrained her before she could reach Danyael’s side. He wrapped his arms around her and refused to let her go even though she fought him like a wildcat. He held her until they took Danyael away in a containment vehicle flanked by a convoy of military APCs.
It was over. It was done.
The dull ache in her chest defied explanation. Her gaze followed the departing vehicles. Her racing heartbeat gradually slowed, and she released her breath in a soundless sigh. Only then did Galahad release her.
With a shrug of her shoulders, Zara shook him off and strode away, wrapping her arms around herself to ward off the chill of the overcast day. Silently, she watched as Andrea and John walked toward Alex Saunders. Erin intercepted them. The alpha pre-cognitive shook her head slowly. “Danyael made his choice. We’re done here.”
“Did he make the right choice?” Andrea asked.
Erin’s gaze traveled over the large team of enforcers who accompanied Alex Saunders and flickered over the departing stream of military vehicles. She closed her eyes and
inhaled deeply, perhaps tapping into her pre-cognitive visions. After a moment, surprised pleasure flashed through her smile. “Yes, he did.” Her green eyes opened, and she met Andrea’s skeptical gaze. Erin sounded confused, but relieved. “The path he chose offers life, still.”
“How can that be?”
“He will find a way. He always does.”
Andrea’s chin tilted up as she studied the director general of the Mutant Affairs Council. “Maybe so, but it should never have come to this. You betrayed Danyael. You changed his threat classification from three to five. Why?”
Alex flinched.
A cold fist closed around Zara’s heart. “Class five? They’ll put him in a super-max, no trial, for life!” She seized Alex’s jacket and held a dagger to his throat. She did not even consciously recall unsheathing her blade. “Why?”
“This is a matter of national security. That’s all you need to know.”
“Bullshit. You convinced us Danyael would be found innocent in a trial; otherwise we never would have—”
“Never would have what? Sold him out?” Erin completed the sentence. She displayed no anger. Her voice was disturbingly matter of fact as she turned to Miriya. “Danyael will never see you alive again.”
Miriya bit down on quivering lips.
Andrea’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t just lose Danyael today, Alex. You lost all of us.” She did not wait for a reply. She turned and walked away. John and Erin followed her. They too offered no farewell.
Alex sighed, his shoulders drooping like those of a much older man. He looked at Galahad. “Thank you. Your assistance was invaluable today.”
Galahad inclined his head. He said nothing.
The human Danyael had healed and saved from the river stood on unsteady legs. “Who…who was that?” he asked, his voice trembling.
Zara glanced toward the road. It was empty. The vehicles had vanished around a corner. “Danyael Sabre.”
“He…he….” The man plucked at his shirt, at a loss for words.
She could see the hole where the bullet had exited. “He’s an alpha empath and a healer.”
The man’s reaction was atypical. No fear. No revulsion. Instead, he nodded and smiled. “Danyael…” he said quietly, breathing the name like a prayer.
Zara watched him for a long, silent moment and wondered what inspired the hope in his eyes. She wished she had it, for Danyael, and most of all, for herself.
EPILOGUE
Zara stood by the bay windows in Lucien’s study. An early spring thaw had coaxed flowers into bloom, filling Lucien’s gardens with a profusion of color. She typically enjoyed spring, but that year, the change of seasons could not soothe the restlessness that had plagued her for months. She turned away from the window to observe Lucien and Galahad. The two men sat across from each other. Galahad had abandoned his disguise and reverted to his original appearance—pale blond hair, dark eyes. He seemed more like Danyael than ever before, especially in light of his growing friendship with Lucien.
Zara’s violet eyes narrowed as she listened to their easy conversation. They discussed the yet-unknown identities of Galahad’s other templates. Galahad wanted to find them. Why exactly, she did not know. Maybe he wanted to wreck their lives too. The flash of anger she had felt for Galahad at the banks of Mill Run River had since grown into steady resentment. Neither emotion had an easy explanation. True to form, she did not bother justifying either.
If she tried, she might find Danyael at the heart of her discontent, which would never do. Danyael was out of the picture forever. It would be stupid, utterly ridiculous, to wreck her affair with the perfect human being over a flawed alpha empath who was as good as dead.
“He’s not dead,” Miriya said pensively, in response to Zara’s unvoiced thoughts. Next to Zara, the telepath sipped from a mug of hot apple cider. Miriya had lost much of her natural sparkle. “I still have the hook in his mind.”
Zara arched an eyebrow. “Really?” She bit back the flurry of questions, but Miriya heard them anyway.
Miriya replied, “He’s semi-conscious most of the time, which is a mercy. They keep him in a great deal of pain to prevent him from forming his psychic shields.”
“Does he know you’re there?”
Miriya shrugged. “I talk to him when he’s conscious—tell him to hang in there, that there are people who care for him, but I don’t know how much he hears. When he’s conscious, he’s often delirious. For all I know, he may dismiss my voice as one of many voices in his head.”
“Can we get him out of ADX Florence?”
“A jailbreak from a super-max? The two of us? No. Not even with Xin’s help. She’s still not talking to you, is she?”
“No,” Zara said shortly. The loss of her top hacker, her friend, still rankled Zara deeply months later.
“Lucien could have brought enough influence to bear,” Miriya said, following Zara’s gaze, “But he has Galahad now. Danyael’s nothing to him.”
Zara frowned. “Sixteen years of friendship wiped out, just like that.” The raw injustice gnawed at her, but words alone could not move Lucien. She had tried and gotten nowhere. Idly, Zara reached for a cookie, nibbled around the edges, and set it down, disinterested. It did not taste as good as it usually did. Even wine had lost much of its allure.
“A truly cynical person might say that life has reached equilibrium. Two people are content, even happy.” Miriya nodded at Lucien and Galahad. “And two are discontented.” She tipped her mug to Zara. “In theory, they balance out and life goes on.”
Zara’s chuckle carried a distinctly cynical tone. “Not when the discontented ones are female.”
Miriya followed her gaze. Galahad. “Perfection not good enough for you?” she asked, her voice carefully lowered.
Zara sighed, the motion scarcely more than a release of breath. Perfection should have been good enough. She and Galahad were natural companions in every sense of the word. Sex was fantastic, and he could keep up with her physically. His mind was incisive, his charm compelling. Most importantly, he wanted her.
Months before, she thought she knew what she wanted; after all, didn’t everyone crave perfection? Why, then, wasn’t he enough for her? “I think I need something different.” Perhaps she had always needed something different, except she had never realized it before.
Miriya’s mind brushed against hers gently. Like an alpha empath?
Perhaps like an alpha empath. Zara smiled faintly. Coming up with an escape plan from ADX Florence would be an interesting project to fill her time in between client assignments. Someday, Danyael, when I break you out of ADX, I might just give us another chance.
PERFECT WEAPON
Don't fear the army of genetically engineered perfect killers. Fear the cripple who leads them.
An alpha empath, Danyael Sabre is powerful, rare, and coveted, even among the alpha mutants who dominate the Genetic Revolution. Betrayed by his friends and abandoned to a life sentence in a maximum-security prison, Danyael receives freedom and sanctuary from an unlikely quarter--the Mutant Assault Group, an elite mutant task force within the US military. Physically crippled and emotionally vulnerable, Danyael succumbs to the warmth of friendships and the promise of love he finds within their ranks.
Friendship and love, however, demand his loyalty, and Danyael rises to the challenge of training and leading the assault group's genetically modified super soldier army. The super soldiers are faster and stronger than the military's human soldiers; their animal instincts spur ferocity and fearlessness in battle. Who is the perfect weapon, though, the super soldiers or Danyael, the alpha empath, who can, with a touch, heal or kill?
Adversaries swarm like vultures around carrion; the pawn is once again in play. The threads of betrayal that sent Danyael to prison spin into a web, ensnaring him. When a terrorist group strikes Washington, D.C., how far will Danyael go to defend a government that sent him to prison to die?
CHAPTER ONE
Fifty-five, fift
y-six, fifty-seven.
Talons of pain tore down Danyael Sabre’s spine. The man arched, convulsing, when shards of agony pierced his mind. He had missed the last count by three seconds. His chest heaved in jagged bursts as he inhaled through the aftershocks of pain. He started counting again. One. Two. Three.
Life was measured in sixty-second increments. He spent the hours of every day counting the seconds between each shock that surged from the electric collar around his neck. On a scale of one to ten, the last surge was a six. He needed at least a nine to overwhelm his exhausted body and mind and stun him into unconsciousness for several minutes or hours. The irony did not escape him. He had been reduced to desiring pain if only because it offered blessed oblivion, however brief, from his unending hell.
Seven, eight, nine.
The door of his cell opened. He raised his head from the cold floor, squinting against the glare of spotlights. Two guards, tall and brawny in their olive green uniforms, strode in. One he recognized as a frequent tormentor. The other was a new face.
Danyael clung to the wall for support and dragged himself to his feet. Vertigo spun his world, but willpower kept him upright.
“It’s time for your shots.” The first guard passed a small syringe-filled tray to his companion and rolled up his sleeves. “It looks like I missed the window of opportunity.” He looked at the new prison guard; his tone was conversational, a discussion between teacher and student. “If you time it right, he’ll still be woozy from the effects of the last dose, and you can shoot him up without worrying about his empathic powers.”
The second guard snorted. “Hah. He’s just an empath.”
“Tell that to Clark. He made the mistake of allowing Danyael to touch him.” The guard’s upper lip curled into a sneer. His glare raked over Danyael. “You didn’t manage to kill him, you bastard. He’s alive. He’s going to make it.”
The new guard stared down at the tray of syringes and frowned. “So how do we get these into him if we can’t touch him?”
