He didn’t gather his wits in time to even shield his head before slamming into the SUV right alongside, and I heard and felt him go under the back wheel of the van I was in as well as the SUV. Th—thump!
Victory is mine, asshole.
Reed jerked the SUV to the right, and I could see his head peeking up just enough to see the road in front of him now.
That was going to be fatal to him if the enemy fire continued for much longer.
I took two steps to the back of the van and jumped out the rear doors. Gravity left me once more and I flew like a dart, veering hard to the right, into the side panel of the last van with metahuman force. It rocked to the left as if the driver had jerked the wheel in that direction, even though I knew he had done no such thing. It was all me, baby.
I smiled at the thought of how I was dominating them. This was power. The power to—
The pain hit me in the skull like someone had cracked open my gourd and dropped a nuclear weapon inside before sealing it back up. There was a hiccup in my flight and I felt myself drop a full foot. I caught myself just before smacking into the pavement full force, gasping as if someone had just held me underwater for a minute.
I panicked, grabbing hold of the van’s side door in a frantic gesture. There was an odd quiet in my head, an empty space where the souls that had been aiding me had been only a moment earlier. I could barely feel Gavrikov, like a voice shouting in the distance.
I felt the power of flight start to drain from me, and realized I’d felt this particular sensation before, only days ago, when a telepath named Claire had paralyzed my body.
Now she was cutting me off from my power.
I hung on to the door of the van, my fingers tight around the steel handle, my feet hitting the side of the vehicle and trying, desperately, to find a foothold.
There wasn’t one.
My Sig Sauer fell uselessly from my grasp and I went for the door handle with my right hand as well, trying to cling to it even as the noise of the road and the wind rushing around me nearly deafened me.
I glanced up and saw a face in the rearview mirror of the van. A hearty smile that I’d seen before.
Claire.
She was here.
I saw a glimmer in her eyes, and the smile widened, got crueler. She was trying to kill me.
I barely tightened my hold in time for the next psychic attack. It loosened my grip and my body swayed into the side of the van, hitting the white metal and rattling my teeth. After a moment the pain waned, and I looked up to see her again, the grin all that was visible in the mirror.
Yep. Definitely trying to kill me.
The smell of the tires burning rubber and the thousand tiny pains running across my body came to the fore of my mind as I felt the next attack coming. My fingertips felt attached to the handle only lightly, and as the spear of her attack hit my mind full force, I felt the grip loosen, the last digits falling free of the steel as I dropped toward the freeway–
Without my powers to save me from the painful death that waited below.
Chapter 17
Rome, Roman Empire
280 A.D.
Marius ate with wild abandon, fine foods of a sort he could never have previously imagined arrayed in front of him in amounts that would have seemed absurd to the villagers he’d grown up around. There was cheese and honey and meat—meat!—aplenty, and cooked in succulent ways with spices and flavors the likes of which he’d never even imagined. The smells filled his nose and the heat of them, fresh from the spits and fires and ovens, warmed his hands as he pushed morsel after morsel into his mouth.
“You are hungry, then?” Janus asked, but in a way that left no doubt, even to Marius, that he was not asking. “Have you eaten since you left home?”
“Scarcely,” Marius said, pushing more food into his mouth. The flavors were sumptuous, were incredible, were beyond anything he’d ever even considered before. They tasted like a skin of good goat’s milk on a hot day after tending the animals, sating him in a way that he couldn’t have imagined himself being sated.
“Ah, poor lad,” Janus said, and Marius looked up enough to see him … sympathetic? “Yes,” Janus said, as if answering his thoughts, “I do feel more than a bit sorry for you. You have had a difficult life, I would estimate, what with the … additional company … you have in your mind.”
Marius halted, letting a clump of meat fall from his outstretched hand onto the wooden table. He stopped chewing, swallowing what he’d eaten with great care. “How do you know … about …”
“About the voice in your head?” Janus asked, and he looked like he was surveying Marius. “I am what they call an empath. I can read the emotional states of people—their sorrow, anger, joy, and so on. You … you have not just the emotional weight of a single person hanging about you. You carry an additional burden, one filled with anger and sorrow and no joy, if I may say. Someone furious at being trapped in your body and being subverted to your will.” He looked at Marius carefully. “Who is this person? A brother? Close friend? A girl you knew in your village, perhaps?”
“My mother,” Marius said, not taking his eyes off of Janus. “Or at least she says she is.” He glanced around, waiting to see if anyone sprang from the shadows of the room. It had grown late, and there were flickering candles casting shadows around the manse. It had looked stately indeed when Janus had brought him here. When the woman named Diana had disappeared after their arrival, Marius had half expected Janus to kill him quietly.
“Goodness,” Janus said, stark surprise causing his eyebrows to rise. “And you do not recognize it as the voice of your mother?”
“She died giving birth to me,” Marius said slowly. “I never met her, but all the villagers say it is so. That she died in the last moments of labor. That she died from touching me.” He raised a hand, palm out, in front of him. “Anyone who touches me will die, they say. Two women tried to nurse me and ended up gravely ill before they determined how to feed me milk through a skin.”
“An incubus,” Janus said, leaning forward with interest. “And you manifested at birth, no less.”
“I do not understand what you are saying,” Marius said, leaning back in the chair. He felt the hard wood underneath his back, and realized that he was very tired.
“You are more than human,” Janus said, his face now shrouded. “There are many of us, those who have powers beyond those of normal people. You are one of us. We are comparatively few, and our powers tend to manifest, or appear, at around sixteen or seventeen years of age. Yours, which include the ability to drink the souls of those whom you touch, appear to have originated at your birth.” He leaned back in his chair, his thumb and forefinger stroking his bearded chin. “Unusual, but not unheard of.”
Marius blinked. “But you … you cannot … drain souls? As I can?”
Janus shook his head. “There are many different types of us, with powers of varying kinds. An incubus, as you are, is a fairly unusual power as of now. There are not so many of your kind. They are all of one family, and I can only assume that your father was also an incubus.”
“No one knows who my father is,” Marius said. “My mother never said.”
“It was probably Valerianus,” Janus said with an air of distaste. “He has a tendency to float about the countryside having his way with women and leaving them dead in his wake.” He looked sickened. “Few of his victims survive, I am sad to say.”
“Why would he … do such a thing?” Marius asked, trying to wrap his mind around all he had heard. People with powers, gods walking the countryside? He had had faith, but to hear that it was all true, existing beneath the surface of the cold and cruel world he had witnessed with his own eyes … that was something else entirely.
“Out of desire,” Janus said. He sounded like the villagers when they had discussed a murderer who had been caught and killed. “He lets his primal lusts rule him and woe betide any who get in his way.” Janus leaned on the table, his eyes connecting with
Marius. “I must caution you that there are many of our kind who conduct themselves in this way, treating people as objects to be used for whatever purpose or gain they can find. They view humans around them in much the same way that your hometown likely treated you.”
Marius felt a sudden revulsion creep through him. “That is …” He searched for a word.
“Appalling, I know,” Janus said. He eyed Marius warily. “Yet I understand the temptation. You will likely feel it yourself, now that you realize your power over others.”
Marius swallowed, felt the bile burn down his throat. “I don’t … I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Janus watched him then nodded once. “That is an excellent place to start, with that intention in mind.”
Marius leaned back in his chair again, but now he found no comfort in it. A chair was a luxury he’d never imagined in the barn. There was food before him of the like he had never seen. The house that surrounded him was unlike anything in his village. And yet— “What is to become of me?” he asked.
Janus shifted his weight from his elbow and sat up straight in his chair once more. “An excellent question, and one I would have myself were I sitting in your seat. Now, I think we will have the servants bathe you, and show you to a lovely bed not made of straw, and give you a night to rest before we discuss the paths in front of you.” He snapped his fingers and a servant appeared out of the shadows. He gestured for Marius, spreading both arms in such a way as to indicate the nearest door, shadowed under an archway.
Marius drew himself up slowly, his limbs suddenly feeling the weariness of the last few days. He started toward the doorway and halted, looking back at where Janus sat, still deep in thought. “Why are you helping me?” Marius asked.
Janus shifted, turning his head ponderously toward Marius and then smoothing his beard. “Because, my boy, you are, after a fashion, family. And it is good form to take care of one’s family.”
With that, Janus stood and said no more, as he himself exited the dining hall into the shadow of a doorway in the opposite wall. Marius stood there and watched him disappear before following the servant into the darkness himself.
Chapter 18
Sienna
Now
GET OUT.
The voice nearly shouted in my head, overcoming the sound of the freeway and the wind. The feeling of weightlessness that had accompanied my flight was gone, replaced by the heady, stomach-dropping sensation of a fall.
My fingers slid across the smooth surface of the white van I’d been holding onto only moments before, hoping I’d find some place to grab onto. The sweat on my fingertips caused them to slip, and I fell in slow motion as I closed my eyes at the sound of the voice resonating in my head.
GET OUT, it repeated again, deep and rich and …
… familiar.
The psychic spear that had been causing my brain to scream in pain only a second earlier was gone, I realize dimly as I slipped past the back wheel of the van. It spun so slowly I could see it turn, faint lines of dust coming off it like mist rising off the low fields around the Agency in the mornings.
I could taste the exhaust from the cars around me, and the ground was rising to greet me. I knew it would hurt, knew that I’d bounce and probably break something. But there was nothing to stop it now—
SIENNA …
The familiar voice called to me. Jarred me out of the reverie of my slow fall to oblivion. I closed my eyes and I could see the speaker in the dark space in my mind where I greeted the souls I’d taken.
Sienna, Dr. Zollers said, his voice urgent. I’ve driven her out. Sienna!
I blinked in my own head, coming back to myself. “Driven her … out?” I felt memory flood back. “Claire,” I said, remembering. “Oh, God, she was in my head—”
She was attacking you, he said, quickly. She didn’t get into your mind, just kicked you around a bit. I’m keeping her at bay now. But, Sienna, you’re falling—
My eyes snapped open as I reached within and felt myself clutch hands with Gavrikov somewhere inside. The pavement was inches away—
I lifted off and soared again, matching speed with the white van that lingered behind the battered SUV that Reed was still driving down the highway. I looked and saw it in front of me, looking as if it had been driven straight out of a junkyard and onto the road.
I was flying inches from the ground and I made myself ascend, bring myself up to the side of the van. I caught another look at Claire in the van’s rearview.
This time, her eyes were wide. And the smile? All gone.
I swayed to the right and then swooped left, hitting the van in the side and sending it hard against the concrete divider in the middle of the highway. The side door opened as I flew right and prepared for another attack. Instead of slamming into the van again, I flew inside with a spinning, twisting maneuver that knocked both of the gunmen waiting inside the doors right off their feet.
I didn’t hesitate, stomping on one while punching the other. Their bones cracked and broke, screams came flying from their lips, and all the while I saw movement ahead with every stolen glance I sent to the front seat. Claire was moving now, her stout form crouched between the two front seats, eyeing me as I finished the two gunmen. Both humans, I was pretty sure.
“Sienna,” Claire said, glaring back at me from where she’d perched.
“Claire,” I said, twisting a certain enjoyment from seeing her like this. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Well,” she said, “you know how I like to harass and annoy you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’ve followed me from Vegas. It’s almost like you’re stalking me.” I clenched my fist at my side.
“You killed Weissman,” she said, and I caught a hint of danger in her eyes. I didn’t worry too much about it since I knew she was mentally crippled.
“Did not,” I said. “That was my mom. But I did kill the Wolfe brothers and crash the plane. So … there’s that.” I watched her warily, just savoring the moment. “I talked to your boss last night. He was pretty pissed at Weissman for that whole deal, he said. So I’ve just gotta ask, between you and me—has he finally wised up to the fact that he doesn’t have a chance with me? Because trying to assassinate me and my friends on the freeway like this—”
“Oh, this isn’t Sovereign’s doing,” she said, and I caught a hint of a smile. “And what he doesn’t know … will only hurt you.”
“You’re crossing him?” I almost laughed. “For what?”
“I’ve got my reasons,” she said, and nearly snarled.
“Tell me it’s because I broke your leg,” I said. “Because if it’s to avenge Weissman in some misguided attempt to bring me down, I’m just going to die of laughter.”
Her hand emerged from behind her seat, pistol clutched in her chubby fingers. It almost looked like a single-barrel shotgun chopped down to a handgun. “It’s for Weissman, yes.”
I blinked at her, dully. “Seriously? For that greasy, sorry-ass—”
She fired and it felt like the world exploded around me. I burst out the back doors of the van in a haze of smoke, coughing and feeling the sting of burning pain in the center of my chest. I hit the ground hard and rolled, feeling Wolfe’s psyche brushing against mine.
The smell of something burning filled my lungs and my throat even as my arms and legs hit the ground. I rolled and felt my clothes tear, felt my skin give way as my body bounced. I had no will left to summon forth Gavrikov; the pain in my body was everywhere, down every limb and in my torso, too.
After a few moments that stretched into a few years, I felt my body roll to a stop. The sky hung overhead, and I could taste acrid smoke in my mouth. I tried to cough and it hurt. I moved my arm slightly and it screamed at me in such pain that I gave it up.
I heard tires screeching, people screaming, all in the distance, like they were miles away. Sirens sounded, voices called, and I cared about none of them.
I could see the blue sky over me, and faint do
ts checkered my vision. There were faces around the edges—J.J., I thought, maybe, and Kat. Reed was there, too, and I saw his dark eyes staring at mine from a million miles away. They got darker and darker, and it felt like I fell right into them as I lunged into the blackness of oblivion.
Chapter 19
I awoke without waking, and in the darkness I saw the outline of the construction site take shape once more. I wanted to sigh, but I didn’t, instead staring into the hazy night surrounding me and waiting for him to appear. I glanced down and found myself dressed in slacks and a blouse with a leather jacket to cover it all. At least it wasn’t pajamas this time.
“All right, come out,” I said with that same feeling of weariness. “If you’re going to go to the trouble of dragging me here, you could at least show up promptly.”
“Just trying to give you a moment to adjust,” he said, stepping out of the shadows. He looked much less young this time, furrows in his brow as he stared at me. He seemed taller, too.
“Yeah, well,” I said, and ran my fingers over the leather jacket I was wearing, “I don’t need that much time to get used to this. It’s not like I get a ton of dreamwalk action … errr …” I adjusted my jacket to cover the indignity of misspeaking. “Err, I mean I don’t really dreamwalk that often, or with many people, or …” I sighed. “Never mind. What do you want?”
“I wanted to see if you were all r—”
“If I was all right,” I said, cutting him off and finishing the sentence for him after he stopped speaking. “If that isn’t becoming a familiar refrain …” I folded my arms in front of me and listened to the leather squeak on my jacket as I did so. Nice detail. “I’m fine, I assume, though I won’t be sure until I regain consciousness. You see, I landed on the highway after your friend Claire shot me with a hand cannon and sent me flying out the back of a van doing about sixty on the freeway.”
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