Breaking Danger

by Lisa Marie Rice

  “Why Mac,” she smiled and simpered, dramatically fluttering her eyelashes at him. “I had no idea your tastes ran that way.”

  He made an exasperated noise deep in his throat and she laughed.

  They were in Haven’s infirmary. There was a massive rescue mission under way and new refugees were arriving hourly. None of them were infected. Everyone who arrived was placed separately in secure rooms, in quarantine, subjected to thermal scanning for half an hour and spot tests of pupils and body temperature. Infection showed up quickly. As soon as they passed the test, they were admitted into their community.

  Before the outbreak, Haven had been an outlaw community. Mac, Nick, and Jon had been members of a super-elite group of warriors known as Ghost Ops. But they had been betrayed, accused of treason, and had disappeared. Mac had known of an abandoned mine inside a mountain, and from there they built their high-tech headquarters, Haven. By some mysterious process, Haven had attracted a community of geniuses and good people, most of them on the run from something.

  Catherine herself had found her way here, to the home of her heart, by bearing a message from Mac’s commanding officer, Lucius Ward. The three men had thought Ward had betrayed them, but Lucius had been betrayed himself, together with three young soldiers of Ghost Ops. The four of them had been hideously tortured and experimented on by Arka.

  Their nemesis.

  The company was no more, but it had unleashed this terrible virus before dying, like a scorpion’s tail delivering one last fatal sting.

  “You are not going to joke your way out of this, Catherine,” Mac said in his laying-down-the-law voice. To most everyone he came across, that voice was the voice of God. Catherine obeyed him too. When she wanted to. The other times . . .

  She swept a hand at the infirmary. It was organized chaos. New arrivals were coming in hourly. Though there were no infected, there were plenty of people who’d been injured in the evacuation. Lacerations, broken bones, concussions were the order of the day.

  They both sidestepped as a volunteer nurse rolled in a patient on a gurney, a young woman with a severely bruised face and a broken arm. Soon the infirmary would be full and they would have to start stacking them in the corridors.

  Catherine looked up at Mac. “There’s so much to be done,” she said softly.

  He closed his eyes and pinched his nose.

  Catherine touched him, laying her hand on his muscled forearm. She had a gift. It had been a curse most of her life, but here in Haven she came into it fully and accepted it fully as a gift. She was an empath, and a powerful one. Each day refined her gift. She could feel people’s emotions at a touch. And if she was close to the person, she could almost read thoughts. And in Mac’s case, since she loved him, she could read his thoughts. He was an open book to her.

  And she could read clearly, as if in a book, how much he loved her and how worried he was for her. How worried he was for the baby in her belly.

  Mac had no family at all. Being without human ties had actually been a condition for joining Ghost Ops—a deniable team of elite warriors, completely off the books. They had to have no ties whatsoever, no family, no friends, no loved ones.

  At the time, that had been fine with them. Mac had never loved a woman. Had sex, yes. A lot—though he’d told her he hadn’t had sex since the group’s betrayal the year before. He thought they had been betrayed by a man he idolized and it had been nearly a mortal blow.

  She had changed all of that. She came to him with proof that he hadn’t been betrayed by his commanding officer, Lucius Ward, and it turned out she came with living proof that he could love.

  The moment she and Mac had met—even though he had suspected her of being a mole, sent in to find him and his teammates—the relationship had exploded. And now they were married and expecting a child, and it unnerved Mac completely. He hadn’t had a place in his head and his heart for love, had barely coped with the idea of falling in love with her, and now there was a new life coming, to love and to care for and—this still blew Mac’s mind—that new life would be his blood relative. His only blood relative in the world.

  Mac had no idea how to cope with all these feelings and the only thing that made sense to him was to make sure nothing harmed her or their child. He was a warrior, a protector, and that he knew how to do. And the way to do that, apparently, was to make sure that she did nothing more strenuous than sit on the couch and read a book. Maybe listen to a little music.

  While the world burned around them.

  Catherine loved Mac, and, more to the point, she understood him. Bone deep. So she cut him some slack even though he exasperated her enormously at times, like right now.

  Refugees were streaming in hourly, their resources were strained to the limits, every hand with medical training was absolutely essential. If they ever hoped to survive this plague, everyone had to pitch in.

  But fighting him would only get his back up. It was only the fact that Catherine understood deeply, bone deep, Mac’s fear of losing her, which kept her from kicking him in the backside.

  “Mac,” she said softly, taking one of his big hands in both of her own. Under his skin she could feel the emotions skittering, something that would surprise people who thought of him as an emotionless hulk of a man, cold as ice. Her Mac wasn’t cold, just controlled. She knew, too—and this was brand-new to her—that her touch soothed him, as if she were cool water poured over a burning wound. That had been his description of what happened when she touched him while he was upset. “My darling, we’re fighting not just for our lives here, but we’re fighting so that something remains when this—this thing burns itself out. We’re bringing a child into the world, and I want there to be a world for her, or him, to grow up in. And you know that—”

  “Make a hole!” Larry Vetter, one of their engineers, rushed by with a bleeding man on a gurney. Catherine and Mac pressed themselves against the wall. Larry caught Mac’s eye as he rushed past. “Bakersfield’s gone, Mac. No one left. Just got word.”

  Bakersfield gone.

  Just like that. A city of over four hundred thousand, all dead. Or worse. Infected.

  Catherine’s eyes followed the gurney. Beyond the door were over a hundred patients, tested to make sure they were uninfected, but still wounded and bleeding. She needed to help the way she needed to breathe.

  “Let me go, Mac.” She turned and met his dark eyes. “If we all work together, maybe we can ensure there are enough people to start again. I don’t want to think about what the world could become. I don’t want our child to grow up in the Dark Ages.”

  She was still holding his hand and she could feel the emotions in him, strong and pure. He was so easy for her to read. Love. Pride. Fear.

  Love won.

  “Okay,” he grated. He stepped away. “Go save the world, Catherine.”

  She smiled sadly at him. “Just our corner of it, my love.”

  She tugged at the front of his shirt and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. When their lips broke apart, she hooked a hand around the back of his neck and put her lips to his ear. “Thank you, darling. You are definitely getting lucky as soon as I can take a breather.”

  San Francisco

  Beach Street

  If they could tune out the sounds of violent mayhem from outside, it could almost have been a . . . a date. A romantic one, at that. Sophie had pulled her curtains and lit candles. No real way of telling if the infected had a tropism toward light, but better safe than sorry.

  And it did create an atmosphere.

  If it weren’t the end of the world, it would be pretty cool. Jon Ryan sitting next to her at her table—he refused to let her set his place across from her. He wanted to sit right by her. As dates went, he was a ten, an impossibly handsome and attractive man. The candlelight just loved him. He was so attractive it was almost overkill. Strong, sharp features limned in the glow of the candles, which picked out the gold highlights in his long hair. Much, much more handsome than Brad Pitt had been, back
in the day.

  For all his looks, he didn’t have an actor’s softness. No, this guy was all tough male. Hard muscles that didn’t look like they’d been built in a gym. They looked like they’d been won in battle. Hands not actor-soft but hard and callused and nicked. Hands that were used.

  Hands that knew what they were doing.

  Heat flashed through her body at the memory of him touching her as they made love. Hard and callused, yes, but his hands had also been expert and tender. She’d felt clearly the calluses on his fingertips as they circled her where she had been so slick and tender . . .

  Sophie’s face was probably beet red by now.

  She worked with people who had special psychic gifts. She’d worked with empaths, who could read a person’s emotions with a touch. Thank God Jon didn’t give any signs of being gifted in that way because she would just sink to the floor and die.

  “Here.” She gently pushed the platter with her zucchini omelet over to him, afraid that if she held it out, he’d see that her hands were trembling. “Have some more.”

  He’d already eaten half of her eight-egg omelet. His manners were impeccable, but clearly he’d been hungry.

  “Don’t have to ask me twice.” He smiled at her and cut himself another wedge.

  Oh God. It was the first real smile she’d seen from him and . . . he had a dimple. It appeared, unexpectedly, in his right cheek. A dimple. Oh, this was too much. She took in a deep breath and slid the wooden cheeseboard over to him as well.

  “These are all great,” he said as he cut himself a slice of goat cheese.

  “Yes, well, it’s San Francisco,” she said before she could think her words through. “Was San Francisco,” she corrected. Who knew when the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market would open again. If it could ever open again. To open, it would need the rebuilding of a subculture of farmers and cheese makers and vintners. She gave a crooked smile. “Maybe rat brains cooked over a trash fire will figure large in our future.”

  Jon put his hand over hers and squeezed gently. His big hand was so warm, so comforting. She looked down at her hand under his. She had a scientist’s hands. Soft and pale, with only the strength necessary to pipette liquids into vials and pound the keyboard. His hand looked as if it could haul a tank.

  “There won’t be any rat brains in Haven. Put that image out of your mind. We’re completely self-sufficient in energy and water and food. The refugees will put some strain on us but we have enormous reserves. Mac, Nick, and I are used to military planning and—well, we planned for a siege right from the start.”

  Oh no. Her breath blocked in her chest. Her hand slid from his and her back hit the chairback with a thud. “You knew this was coming?” she whispered. The words would barely come out between numb lips. “You knew and you didn’t stop it?”

  He grabbed her hand back. “No, God no. We didn’t plan for this. For a massive outbreak of a deadly virus, no.”

  Her lungs expanded on a loud gasp. For a second there she thought—No. Arka had engineered the virus, not some people on a mountaintop in Northern California.

  She had to wait a minute to be able to speak, though. “Okay,” she said when she could keep her voice even. “Explain why you have a community that plans for sieges.”

  He didn’t answer right away. He simply looked at her, his bright blue eyes burning into hers. He didn’t try to hide his scrutiny, didn’t try to pretty it up. He just stared so intensely, it felt as if he were walking around inside her head, picking at her thoughts. Turning them over. What was he waiting for?

  Finally, he spoke. “Okay.” He reached out and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. The touch was casual, a friendly gesture, no more. But she shivered.

  He noticed. Those bright ice blue eyes noticed everything.

  “Two years ago I would have been shot by the U.S. government for telling you this, but I think, all things considered, that soon there might not be a U.S. military to shoot me anymore, so it’s a moot point.”

  “If you told me, you’d have to kill me?” she teased. A thousand movies had used that line.

  He wasn’t smiling. “Exactly.” The way he said it sobered her. “If I had talked to you about us two years ago and someone in my chain of command found out, you’d have been tracked down and disappeared. No one would ever have heard from you again. Least of all me.”

  This happened in the real world. She knew that. Her smile was gone. “Your chain of command is probably gone,” she said softly.

  His jaws clenched. “It’s definitely gone,” he answered. “Mac, Nick, and I belonged to a deniable military unit. Deniable means that if we were ever caught, Uncle Sam would deny our very existence. We were Ghosts. We were off the books, our pasts wiped out, our military records erased. All photographs tracked down and destroyed. We didn’t exist. We deployed on missions where the U.S. government could not be seen as intervening. Posse comitatus didn’t apply to us, since technically we didn’t exist. Do you know what that is?”

  Sophie nodded. “Sure. It’s the law that stops the military from acting on American soil.”

  He gave a sharp nod. “Exactly. But technically we weren’t military. We weren’t anything. So when the military got word that a lab in Cambridge was very close to perfecting a weaponized version of Yersinia pestis, they called us.”

  She gasped. A weaponized version of Yersinia was one of the worst things she could think of. Almost as bad as what was happening outside her windows. “The plague! A genetically modified version of the bacillus that can spread quickly—maybe airborne—it would be a disaster!”

  “Oh yeah.” His face tightened. “Believe me when I say that the seven of us—the founders, the plankholders of Ghost Ops—were highly motivated to retrieve the material and shut the research down. We had a very short chain of command. Our team leader, Captain Lucius Ward reported to General Clancy Flynn, who reported to the President. So when we got our orders from Lucius, we were ready to go in fifteen.”

  “Who were the other three?”

  “Three of the best teammates you can imagine. Pelton, Romero, and Lundquist.”

  Something about the way he said their names . . . “Did they die in the mission?”

  Something dangerous flashed in his icy blue eyes. “No. It might have been better if they had. They ended up on the wrong end of a scalpel. They spent a year under the knife.”

  Sophie blinked.

  “It was a trap, Sophie.” His voice had been calm up until then. Now the heat of rage shaded through it. “It was an Arka Pharmaceuticals lab and General Flynn and Dr. Charles Lee wanted to get rid of Lucius and get rid of us. Nobody was weaponizing bubonic plague. They were actually perfecting a cancer vaccine. We were sent into battle under a lie. We were ambushed in a firefight and an explosion took out the lab. Only three of us survived, or so we thought. We thought Pelton, Romero, and Lundquist died and Lucius escaped. We thought he’d betrayed us for money.” His jaws clenched and he looked away for a moment, visibly trying to control himself. “The thought that the captain would betray us for money—well, it nearly brought us to our knees. Mac particularly. He was recruited by the captain, trained by the captain to head up the Ghost Ops team. Mac would have gladly given his life for the captain. All of us would have. And here we were—betrayed, under arrest, on our way to a secret court-martial.”

  He looked away again, jaws clenched. The memories brought him pain, distress. Sorrow came off him in almost visible waves, though his face betrayed nothing. It didn’t have to, she could see the pain.

  Sophie didn’t know what to do, so she did the only thing she could—she touched him. Since childhood she’d had two different types of touches. Normal touch, human skin to human skin. It could be a hug, walking arm in arm, accidental touches. But over and above that, she could also Touch. It was an entirely different thing altogether and she still didn’t understand it, even after a lifetime of it.

  She’d become part of the Arka research project not just to under
stand the science of paranormal phenomena, but to understand herself.

  To understand how she could heal.

  Not all the time and not always fully, because it was erratic, but when she threw a switch on inside herself, something that had no explanation in normal science happened. She was a scientist and she’d always gotten straight As in everything, including English. So she should have been able to explain to herself what happened when she threw that switch, but she couldn’t. She could barely describe it.

  But Sophie let it happen, this gift she barely understood.

  She warmed up in a flash, heat crackling through her in a palpable wave. The heat was entirely subjective, though, because she’d taken her own temperature during a healing session and it never went above 98.6. The heat didn’t feel like a fever. Fevers were a reaction to a pathology. This didn’t feel like pathology, it felt . . . right. As if she were throwing a circuit of nature, and power flowed from her to the sick person.

  Her first conscious use of her Touch had been at the age of twelve with Fritzi, the dumb and the beautiful. He’d been run over by a car on the street outside their house. The house had had a fence around it, but later they’d discovered that Fritzi had dug his way out. She and her parents had been having breakfast on a Saturday morning when they’d heard a loud thump and then anguished wailing.

  Rushing out onto the street, they’d seen Fritzi lying on his side, whining, trying to lick his red hindquarters. Sophie’s father had gathered Fritzi in his arms while Sophie clung to her father, crying as he carried the wounded animal to their porch.

  While her father took out his cell to call the vet, Sophie threw her arms around Fritzi, burying her face in his soft golden fur that smelled of shampoo and dog and . . . something happened. She felt waves of heat that didn’t burn. She was barely aware of the fact that Fritzi’s whines had stopped and that he’d started licking her arms instead of his hindquarters. All she knew was that she loved this beautiful dog who’d been a puppy during her own puppyhood.

  He stood up.