by Anna Durand
The apparition of JT roared with animalistic rage. "Waldron! Battaglia!"
A hundred feet away, just over the lip of the depression, a monster snarled.
No, not a monster. It was the mechanical snarling of a vehicle engine as it revved to scale an incline. A pair of headlights popped into view as the vehicle, still invisible in the darkness, hurtled over the summit and down the slope toward them.
She had her gun, but she couldn't shoot JT's apparition and shooting the approaching vehicle would do no good. She'd still have the men inside it to deal with.
She sank back into her body, opened her eyes, and shouted, "David, help me!"
As he sprang to his feet, David glanced at the vehicle and then at her. She nodded.
She felt him near her, though his body hadn't moved. His presence surrounded her and she opened herself up to him in a way she couldn't have imagined until last night. She let him into her mind. Their combined power surged through her, warm and sweet and crackling with energy. In unison, they switched their gazes to the onrushing vehicle.
The black SUV flipped into the air. It smacked into the ground upside down with a crunching thud. The windshield turned opaque as the safety glass cracked.
David's knees buckled but he didn't collapse. He hung there like a marionette, arms and legs limp, as if an unseen force clutched his neck. His face reddened as he struggled to breathe.
Ten feet away from David, the apparition of JT held up one arm with his fingers curled in a strangulation gesture. JT shook his hand and David jerked in response.
Grace resisted the urge to lunge forward, to help David, because the she moved all her muscles might give out completely. Ice-cold exhaustion flooded through her. The ground looked so inviting that it took all her strength to stay upright rather than dropping to the sand, curling up in a ball, and letting herself fall into the abyss of sleep.
JT shook David again. The choked sound that David grunted out snapped her out of her half sleep. She sucked in a couple deep breaths, swallowing enough oxygen to rouse her brain and body.
"The flash drive," JT said. "Or I snap his neck."
"It's not here, but I can tell you where to find it."
"Nice try." JT squeezed his astral hand and David gurgled from the increased pressure. "Like mother, like daughter. I'm not falling for that one again."
Pounding noises erupted from the upside-down SUV. Grace darted her eyes to look at the vehicle. Someone had kicked out the gummy, crackled sheet that had once been the windshield. A pair of legs hung out the opening.
Waldron slid out onto the sand. He looked disheveled, his face streaked with what might've been blood, and he also looked very, very angry.
Grace focused on JT again. "Don't you want my power? Isn't that what you really came for?"
A wild look came over his features. His grip on David loosened a little. She could tell because David's chest rose and fell as he drew in as much air as he could.
"You think you're stronger than me, right?" She spread her palms in an invitation. "So come and get it. Come and take my power."
Without letting go of David, JT turned the remainder of his psychic energy on her. She experienced it like a rip current dragging her mind down and down into a swirling emptiness. Gathering every iota of energy she had left, she clawed her way out of the invisible vortex. It hurt like hell. She gritted her teeth, clenched her hands, and gasped from the effort. Still she held on. Couldn't say how. Didn't know if she could keep it up for long.
David crumpled to the ground. Panting and wheezing, he pushed onto all fours.
JT had lost his grip.
The sucking sensation lessened, and she pulled her mind free of it.
The JT apparition bellowed. She squinted at him. He looked less solid now, though not quite transparent.
Over at the SUV, Battaglia had crawled out of the space where the windshield had been. He straightened and tried to walk, but staggered a few steps instead. His face was not merely streaked with blood, but virtually coated with it. As he stumbled away from the vehicle, falling to his knees in the sand, another figure rolled through the punched-out windshield.
It was JT. The real one.
The lantern flashlights cast a pallid glow on everyone, but JT looked so pale he could've doubled for Casper the ghost. He crawled away from the vehicle, and Waldron had to help him stand because Battaglia was having mobility problems of his own. Saddled with propping up his boss, Waldron could do little more than glare at Grace. JT was muttering to Waldron, and based on the look on the other man's face, she guessed JT was issuing orders that the bigger, stronger man did not want to follow. The duo trudged away from the SUV toward Grace, David, and Sean. The boy still lay unconscious on the ground.
The JT apparition stood motionless and dead.
His physical body went slack in Waldron's arms, forcing the other man to support the dead weight by hugging JT to him as he continued slogging through the sand.
The JT apparition came to life. He fixed a hateful scowl on Grace. Both of his faces, the real and the projected, shared the same deathly pallor.
"Why haven't you taken my power?" she asked with a scornful tone. "That's right, you're about as strong as a Pekingese that thinks it's a Great Dane."
He struck out at her psychically. She felt the hit like a blow to the gut — though not as strong a blow as she'd expected. Wincing, she shook her head.
"Is that all you got?" she said. "You're just a week little twerp with delusions of omnipotence."
He lashed out again, in a different way, falling back on the same trick he'd used in the tunnel. She saw herself pulling the gun out of her waistband, raising it in front of her to take aim at David, and finally pulling the trigger. Unlike the first time JT had tried this trick, the effect was like a ghost image rather than a vivid hallucination. While she watched the semitransparent vision of her hand perform the actions, she also saw her very solid and real hand remain at her side. Meanwhile, JT completely lost his grip on David, who'd sat back on his heels gasping. JT was getting weaker.
Waldron seemed to recognize what was happening. He halted, and his entire demeanor changed from annoyed and strained to something darker and far more determined. He let go of JT's limp, vacant body. JT crumpled to the ground.
Reaching inside his jacket, Waldron brought out his gun. He swung it up toward Grace.
David launched himself across the space between him and Waldron, at first running, then flinging his body through the air to tackle Waldron. Limbs flailed and grunts echoed.
Grace yanked the gun out of her waistband and took two steps toward the battling men.
Something smacked her in the chest with the force of a boot kick. It felt real, and it sent her staggering backward a few steps. Yet she knew the force that had struck her was psychic, not physical. JT's last gasp, in telekinetic terms. She kicked back at him with a force exponentially greater than what he'd lobbed at her. His apparition shattered and vanished.
His limp body, no longer vacant, stirred.
She had bigger problems.
Waldron had flipped David onto his stomach. Jamming one knee into David's spine, pinning him to the sand, Waldron settled the muzzle of his gun on the back of David's skull.
Grace curled her finger around the trigger of her own gun as she took aim at Waldron's back.
Arms clamped around her from behind, pinning her arms to her body and squeezing so hard she couldn't breathe. The gun tumbled from her grasp. The arms that restrained her lifted her up until only her tiptoes touched the ground. She gasped for air, flailing her legs at her assailant, but her ears began to ring and darkness began to close in around her.
"Quit fighting," Battaglia snarled into her ear, "and I'll let you breathe."
She really couldn't match his strength anyway. So she stopped fighting.
He loosened
his grip enough to let her breathe. The ringing quieted and the darkness receded, giving her a clear view of David and Waldron.
"Now," Battaglia said, "you get to watch your boyfriend die."
Chapter Thirty
Grace looked around, searching for the other commandos. While some of them lay prone and unmoving where they'd landed, others had begun to stir. She really didn't need more problems. Now if she could just put them all to sleep the way David had done to her …
She didn't know how. And David couldn't help her. She sensed his diminished psychic energy. He looked awfully diminished on the physical level too.
Only one idea came to her. It was a bad one, she knew.
Waldron glanced over his shoulder to flash her an evil smile. Then he returned his attention to David and his body tensed, and she knew she was out of time.
So she did it.
A gust of hurricane strength blasted outward from a central point between her and Waldron. Battaglia flipped over backward, dragging her with him into a somersault. The momentum spun her out of Battaglia's grasp. She heard men screaming and bodies cracking as they hit the ground. Oh God, how many people had she killed?
No time to think about that. No time to think, period.
The instant she stopped rolling, she sprang to her feet and ran back toward where David and Waldron had been. They were gone. She spotted her gun, though, and snatched it up as she continued running.
Sean lay exactly where he had before. She stopped to crouch beside him and felt for a pulse in his neck. It surged under her fingers, strong and regular. She saw no blood or obvious injuries. There was nothing more she could do for him at the moment.
Rising, she turned in a circle to study her surroundings. The lantern flashlights had rolled and cast wedges of light in three different directions, leaving deep patches of darkness in between. She spotted a couple of the commandos, probably a hundred feet away, lying motionless on the ground. The wind blast must've thrown the other four even farther away, out of sight.
The screams. The crunching.
Her gorge rose in her throat. She gulped it down. Given the lighting conditions, the fact that she couldn't see the other commandos didn't mean the wind had flung them so far that they now lay in crumpled and broken heaps far in the distance.
Battaglia had come to rest a good fifty feet away, sprawled on his back, at the edge of one of the lantern beams.
She marched to the nearest lantern, plucked it off the ground, and swept the beam over the landscape.
There. She backtracked with the light. It flashed over a man-shaped lump on the sand. Not David. He'd been wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The man-lump was Waldron.
David and JT were nowhere in sight.
Too many bad guys, too many dangers. Dammit. If she had a way to disable Waldron and Battaglia, then at least she would have two less dangers to worry about.
Battaglia carried zip ties, which he used like handcuffs.
As much as she did not want to get within grappling distance of Battaglia, she sprinted across the distance to him and knelt beside the unconscious muscleman. He looked no less intimidating in this condition. Nevertheless, she rifled through his pockets until she discovered a clump of zip ties held together with a rubber band. She secured one of the ties around each of his ankles and connected the two with a third tie, forming a tight shackle. Next, she rolled him over onto his stomach and bound his hands behind his back with a single zip tie.
Satisfied that Battaglia couldn't chase after, she trotted over to Waldron and bound him in the same fashion. Tracking down every one of the six commandos so she could tie them up would take too much time. Besides, judging by the two she could see, the commandos seemed out of commission.
She had to find David. Traipsing through the darkness in search of him, even armed with a lantern light, left her more vulnerable than she liked. JT was out there too, after all. The last time she saw him he looked incapable of walking, much less attacking her — but she couldn't count on it. He might have another syringe in his pocket, chock-full of power-inducing drugs.
To find David remotely, she had one option. It left her vulnerable, possibly more so than marching off into the night. But she had no choice. It was the fastest method.
She launched her mind up into the crossroads, fast as a rocket. The void enveloped her, welcomed her. Two stars glimmered brighter than the rest. One was David — and the other, she knew, was JT. The stars hung close together. Maybe that meant David and JT were close together in the physical world. She couldn't follow both paths, but try as she might, she couldn't feel which one led to David. Her mind was getting tired. She was getting tired. Her time was running out and she had to make a choice, albeit a blind one.
Down she went, plummeting faster and faster.
Then it stopped. She, her astral self, stood behind the overturned SUV. The indirect glow from the lantern light, the one she still held in her physical hand way over there, painted an eerie half light over the area. An arm's length from her, JT crouched under the rear tire with his back against the vehicle.
Wrong choice.
She wanted to fly out of there, to the crossroads, to take the other path and find David. Something tethered her here. The energy was draining out of her slowly but surely. How long she had, she didn't know. When her energy was gone, she would have no chance of finding David this way. And given how weak her body felt, finding him the old-fashioned way might not be an option anymore either.
JT moaned. His eyes were bloodshot. Deep shadows around his eyes gave them a sunken look. His hands trembled as he wiped a rivulet of sweat from his temple. He could neither see nor sense her. His hand fell to the ground, and then his entire body went limp. Though his lungs still pumped labored breaths, his eyes stared vacantly.
She started to leave, but the tether tugged at her again. No, not a tether. More like a beacon. A signal that pulsed in her soul. She followed it around the end of the vehicle — and froze.
David lay there, on his stomach, with one arm pinned beneath him and the other flung out to the side. He was facedown in the sand. A dark liquid dribbled from the back of his head.
No.
She raced toward him, falling to her knees at his side. When she stretched a hand out to touch him, it passed right through his flesh. This was no good. How could she make sure he was still alive when she couldn't touch him? How could she help him?
Dammit, she needed energy. And she needed it now. Right this second.
Was he breathing? She leaned close to his face, but through the pounding of her own heart she couldn't tell.
Now, now, now. She needed energy now.
Heat rushed through her. She felt woozy for a second as the world around her blurred and swirled. The motion stopped with a suddenness that shocked her. She knelt there for a few seconds, unable to think. Finally, she dropped her hands to her sides and curled her fingers into loose fists, scooping up handfuls of cool sand. Goose bumps prickled her arms in response to a breeze.
Her heart thudded. She looked down at her goose-bumpy flesh. Lifting her hands, she turned them so she could examine the fistfuls of sand contained in her palms. What the —
She dumped the sand and patted her arms, her hips, her thighs. They all felt real. Warm. Solid. Somehow, without even realizing it or meaning for it to happen, she had manifested. The question of how flitted through her mind, but she ignored it.
Slowly, she settled her hands on David's back. Contact. He felt warm and firm, yet soft, in a manlike way. When she pressed her fingers to his neck, a pulse throbbed against her skin. With great care, she palpated the wound on his head, parting the hair to get a better look. A scratch. It was just a scratch, one that bled profusely because of its location on the scalp. She let out the breath she'd been holding. He was alive and, unless he had another wound where she couldn't see it, he didn't appear badly hurt.
She laid a hand on his shoulder and shook it gently. He moaned. She took hold of him with both hands and, inch by inch, rolled him over onto his back. Sand clung to his face. She wiped it away. He made a little noise, halfway between a groan and a word.
Pain tore through her back. A scream lodged in her throat, choked off by the searing agony. Her back arched. Her muscles went rigid, and then gave out. She collapsed sideways.
A shadow draped over her as JT rose from his crouch behind her. He towered over her, his expression concealed by darkness, a bloody knife clutched in his hand.
He giggled with manic glee.
Pain. Hot and sharp and wet. It wasn't real. This body wasn't real.
It felt more real than any pain she'd ever felt before.
The mind is the body, David had said. Whatever happens to your metaphysical body, also happens to your physical body.
She had to get out of this body. Now.
JT raised the knife over his head. He plunged the blade down toward her chest.
Go, go, go. Her manifested body disintegrated with a pop. Like a hot air balloon cut loose from its moorings, she drifted upward. JT waved the knife through the air where she had been, his expression wild and confused. She floated ten feet above the scene.
And then she flew. At breakneck speed, she zipped through the crossroads and pitched downward to descend so quickly that the shift hit her like a physical force. Spinning. Falling. The pressure of speed wrung her like a wet towel. But it was nothing compared to the soul-crunching impact of returning to her own body.
Her knees buckled. She fell forward, throwing her hands out to brace herself. Although she recognized her surroundings, they lurched and twisted around her as if she stood on the deck of a fishing trawler during a category five hurricane. Nausea swelled inside her and she nearly vomited. Sweat ran down her face to dribble over her neck and chest, chilling her skin.
