Shades of Dark

by Linnea Sinclair

  I do. Something prickled over my mind, my skin. I could actually feel Sully’s power building. I could feel the dark regions of the Kyi calling him, seducing him.

  It’s okay.

  A wave of warmth tumbled through me, a gentling. This was Sully. Not that seething darkness…

  Gregor wiped a hand down his thin face, his eyes suddenly wary. Snippets of Ragkiril lore filled the word-motes, popping in and out of my mind like a thousand tiny bubbles.

  “Let’s start with the Farosians,” Sully prompted.

  “You didn’t know Nayla Dalby,” I added, “but you knew the Interceptor would find us. You helped it find us. Why?”

  “I hate Fleet. Fleet hates Dalby,” Gregor said but some of the bravado was gone from his voice. “Simple enough.”

  “No, it’s not,” I told him. “Fleet hates Sully. How long have you been feeding the Farosians information about the Karn? About Sully?”

  Gregor’s gaze jerked up to Sully. “You should’ve listened to them, worked with them.”

  “I’m not interested in getting you a bigger bonus,” Sully replied smoothly. “Seventy thousand, was it? Sorry. Your loss.”

  Once again, Gregor frowned. Once again, the fear around him thickened. Fear and confusion. The word-motes were running amok.

  “And how do you think the Farosians will pay you,” Sully asked, his voice dropping to a menacing tone, “when they learn you’ve sold them out?”

  “Fuck you!” Gregor leaned forward in his chair. “I still got things to trade, things you can’t get to. If something happens to me, if I die, that information’s out there, Sullivan. You hear me? You space me, and there’ll be nowhere you can run. They’ll get you. They’ll get your Fleetie whore. All of you.”

  The high-pitched tone started again. I waited for Sully to stop it but he didn’t. Instead, he pulled out the chair next to me and sat, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. I didn’t know what information Gregor had. If it was that Sully was a Kyi-Ragkiril, he was incredibly stupid to be pulling the stunt he was now.

  But I also knew there were things, whole duro-hards of things, I didn’t know about Gabriel Ross Sullivan.

  “I’m not going to space you,” Sully said, folding his hands on the tabletop. “But I can make you wish I had.”

  Gregor snorted. “Gonna break my nose again?”

  I held my breath, waiting for Sully to lash out. He had little patience for insolence—though he was a master at it himself. But more than that, I could feel energy coiling and uncoiling inside him.

  Get the information, I told him, not even sure he was listening. Wipe his memory of us. We have a lot ahead at Narfial.

  Something glinted briefly in the air. The Kyi, I realized after a moment. Not the silver haze but the sparkling, hungry version Sully had been wrestling with. It drifted from Sully’s hands, hovering between the three of us, just a tiny eruption of light.

  Gregor rubbed at his eyes, telling me he saw it too.

  He just didn’t know what he was looking at. Until he focused on Sully’s outstretched hand.

  Sully opened his fist, energy mushrooming from it so quickly I sat back in my chair, even though there was no physical sensation.

  Gregor jerked back too, but there was nowhere he could go. His chair was against the wall. And the glittering energy stalked him like a fiery silver shadow.

  “All that time and money you spent researching Ragkirils,” Sully said quietly, his eyes that infinite shade of dark, “and you don’t even recognize a real live mind-fucker when you see one.”

  Gregor inched back, his hands slipping off the armrests of the chair as he tried to literally climb the wall. The silver energy coiled closer. Gregor lurched to his right, the heel of his boot catching on something, the leg or edge of his chair. I didn’t know what. I just saw his knee come up, I saw his body weight shift in the chair. I saw the stark terror in the death-mask grimace on his face. Then the chair tilted and I fully expected Gregor to tumble to the decking with it.

  He didn’t. He launched himself over the small table, his hands grabbing Sully’s throat.

  I saw Sully falling backward, Gregor’s hands locked on his throat. I saw black-clad arms gripped around the stained, sweaty back of Gregor’s gray shirt. I was standing, Stinger set to stun, but I couldn’t get a clear shot. Sully and Gregor, tangled together, pushing and shoving, toppled into the small space between the table and the wall.

  Ignoring the grunts and curses, I shoved the table away with my boot, giving Sully more room. I didn’t know why he didn’t just blank Gregor’s mind, shut him down then and there, but he didn’t. Instead, he yanked on Gregor’s arm, wrenching it around. Gregor turned, knees coming up. Sully jerked sideways, Gregor moving with him. If Sully wasn’t going to use his Ragkiril methods, then I needed a clear shot. But they were too close.

  I danced out of the way of a swinging leg just as Sully flipped Gregor over on his back, pinning his shoulders to the floor. A chair skittered sideways, fell.

  Move, Sully. I have a shot! “Stop it, Gregor, now!” I took aim.

  Gregor reared up, bellowing a guttural cry. Sully swung, smashing his fist in Gregor’s face. Gregor thrashed back, bleeding, cursing, twisting, reaching—

  Something glinted in his hand. I saw the thin edge of the knife. “No!”

  The room exploded.

  I was flash-blinded, seeing nothing but light. I dropped to the floor, shielding my face, waiting for the intense heat from the detonation to roll over me. But I felt nothing. Heard nothing.

  I jerked my face up, blinking. Light melted into haze. Still clutching my gun, I pulled myself onto my hands and knees. Sully was three, four feet in front of me, down on one knee next to Gregor’s body, fingers splayed. The silver fire of the Kyi whipped all around him, flowing over Gregor and past me, but it was nothing compared to the luminescence radiating from within Sully.

  Sully? For a moment I wasn’t sure who I was looking at.

  Jagged streaks of lightning striped his face like blazing tattoos, one down each cheek. More streaks disappeared beneath his black shirt, which barely contained the heated glow. It was Sully’s profile, it was Sully’s clothes. But this was not a Sully I’d ever seen.

  I stared at him. His focus was fixed on Gregor.

  The only movement on Gregor’s body was a thin trickle of blood flowing from his left ear. His gaze was riveted on Sully’s hands. His mouth was open in a silent scream.

  This was not supposed to happen. You’ll control yourself because of her, Ren had said.

  This was not control. This was…I shook myself, trying to process what I was seeing. The only thing I knew for sure was I had to stop this. Sully. Back off.

  No answer.

  Gregor’s chest jerked up, his body arching unnaturally, almost as if Sully’s fingers pulled him up. Pulling the life from him. Kyi energy sparkled in small bursts all around me.

  Was this what would eventually happen to Thad?

  “Sully!” I hissed. “Enough!”

  Gregor’s gaze moved to me. He heard me. God. Gregor was still alive. Stark terror showed in his eyes. His throat moved convulsively. He panted in short, hard gasps through his gaping mouth, sounding more animal than human.

  Another abrupt jerk on his body. Then Gregor’s right arm came up smoothly as if guided by the thick silver haze around it. His hand clutched the knife, bringing it toward his own face, his own throat—

  “Stop this! Or I will!” I levered up on my knees and raised my Stinger, taking aim at the man who was ky’sal to me. And I screamed, in my mind, for Ren.

  For two, three heartbeats, nothing happened. Then Gregor’s fingers spasmed. The knife fell, sliding off his arched chest, hitting the floor with a muted clink.

  Keeping the Stinger on Sully, I grabbed blindly for the knife with my left hand, then shoved it across the floor behind me, toward where I remembered the door being. I wasn’t going to turn around and check. And in this silver haze, I wasn’t even s
ure I could see that far.

  Stupid, I told myself when I heard the knife hit against something metallic. He wants a knife, he can think a thousand of them into existence.

  Sully turned suddenly, his expression of intense concentration shifting to one of an almost detached curiosity. No, this wasn’t Sully, mercenary, poet, and lover. But Gabriel, shape shifter, telepath, Kyi-Ragkiril.

  I had no way of knowing if he heard my mental comment or had suddenly noticed I was there. But it was the first time he’d looked at me. A chill ran up my spine. I didn’t know this man kneeling a few feet away from me, this luminescent demon with lightning glowing in flashes under his skin. But I could taste his power. It was a cold thing, thick and astringent. It had no mercy.

  And I had no choice.

  “Gabriel, let him go.” Silver tendrils still writhed around Gregor’s partly suspended body. “I will shoot you.” And I swear, if you rip this gun from my hands, or in any way stop me from stopping you, you will be sleeping alone for the rest of your very miserable, very celibate life.

  Another flicker of light limned Sully’s face from within. His quizzical expression didn’t change, not even as he stared at the Stinger in my hands. Then Gregor’s body went limp, thudding softly against the floor. He groaned. His eyelids fluttered, his mouth closed. Short, panting gasps abated, but he was breathing. That didn’t mean he wasn’t dying. It just meant I didn’t know.

  Sully sat back on his haunches. The energy of the Kyi pulsed and flowed, part of it pulling away from Gregor. It gathered at Sully’s feet like a colony of netherats swarming to the nest. Flashes of lightning reflected in those fathomless eyes. Then he frowned. Chasidah? There was a noticeable uncertainty in his voice, a lack of recognition framed by dipped eyebrows.

  I didn’t want that voice in my mind, not this stranger’s. “I’m Chasidah. And I don’t know who in hell you are, but I want Sully back. Now.”

  The Kyi around me darkened to a molten silver. It curled around my knees where I crouched by the upended chair. Its coldness warmed, caressing me. It stroked my thighs with the surety of a lover, a lingering yet insistent touch. Demanding. Sensual. Sexual.

  I knew where this was going. I lurched to my feet. “Call off your pet. I’m not interested.”

  Sully rose too, a distant, searching look in his eyes. Then the brows that dipped, arched slightly. A small smile touched his lips. Confusion lifted. I felt his recognition of me, of what we were, of what I was to him. Chasidah. His voice was deep and husky. He stepped toward me, the warmth around my body growing into a familiar heat, the heat spiraling into surges of pleasure, caressing, drawing me…

  “Shut it down. I mean it!” My body throbbed in response to a deep hunger I could far too clearly feel emanating from him.

  He was an arm’s length away, his eyes hooded, the glow of his skin making his lashes that much darker, the silver in his hair that much brighter. He reached toward me, palm upturned, two fingers extended as if he intended to raise my face to his. Passion flared in anticipation of mouth on mouth, breath mingling with breath, heated skin—hard to soft—stroking…

  I took another step back, bumping against the edge of the table. I was shaking, his exquisitely enticing mental foreplay threatening to make my knees collapse. This had to stop. Now. I gripped the Stinger with both hands.

  Angel-mine, he whispered as lightning traced the edges of his jaw. I’d never hurt you.

  “I know, Gabriel. I’m sorry.” I fired.

  His chest was sore. Coming to full consciousness, he moved his arm up over his head and his muscles responded in pain. That made his eyes flutter open, but by that point I’d already risen out of my seat at the deskcomp in the middle of sick bay, and was walking toward the small cubicle where he lay, feeling every twinge and throb that results from being shot close-range by a Stinger on stun.

  We were still linked. I sensed his confusion, watched memories flash by, saw my own face as he’d seen me: hard-eyed, pale, lips pressed in determination as I fired the Stinger.

  Then a different pain. Not physical but one borne of shame and fear and rejection. An overwhelming despair. A sense of helplessness. A fury at a twist of fate that had endowed a human with Kyi-Ragkiril gifts, that had damned a man named Gabriel Ross Sullivan. That had made him love a woman named Chasidah Bergren.

  He lay motionless, the beeping and trilling of sick bay’s equipment the only sound, and watched me approach.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked, even though I knew. The closer I came, the more I felt emotions twisting in his gut, pushing against his heart, threatening to choke him. If I let it, it could overwhelm me, drag me under. I couldn’t let it. There was too much at stake.

  “Is Gregor alive?” His voice sounded rusty and harsh.

  His question surprised me. He wasn’t reading me. I didn’t think it was that he couldn’t. More likely, he didn’t want to. Yet he hadn’t closed off to me completely or I’d not feel his pain or see his recollections.

  Now I knew why he’d used physical force, not his Kyi talents, when Gregor launched over the table at him. He’d known what seethed beneath his own surface and didn’t want to let it out until he’d had no choice. Until Gregor pulled the knife.

  I jerked my thumb over my shoulder, motioning to the med cubicle on the other side of sick bay in answer to his question. “Room A. He has a lot of internal bruising, and is missing a few teeth.”

  He closed his eyes briefly. Worry, fear tumbled from him. “How much of his mind did I destroy?”

  He definitely wasn’t reading me, and he wasn’t reading Gregor. He’d shut himself off like that before, though, under circumstances that were not dissimilar.

  “Ren doesn’t think it’s too bad, but we won’t really know until Gregor comes out of sedation. It hasn’t even been fifteen minutes.”

  He frowned, glancing at the clock on the diagnostics panel on the wall, then shook his head. “Time moves at a different pace in hell.”

  I leaned on the edge of the bed. He regarded me warily, more in uncertainty than in distrust.

  I raised my hands, palms out. “Weapon’s holstered.”

  “You should have used it on full power, not stun.”

  “Ren said you’d say that.”

  He stared pointedly at me. “Do us both a favor and don’t make that mistake again.”

  I narrowed my eyes. He dropped his gaze and turned his face away on the pillow. A dull ache grew between us.

  “What went wrong?” I asked him.

  He turned back with a bitter, quiet laugh. “Nothing, actually. You saw a Kyi-Ragkiril at work, doing his job. You just weren’t supposed to see it, that’s all.” His voice dropped off. “Ren was wrong. What I am is stronger than what I want to be.”

  “You could have killed me. You didn’t.”

  He shook his head slightly. “You’re my property. That would be wasteful.”

  “You let me shoot you.”

  A noncommittal shrug, a rustle of shirt fabric against the bed’s thermal sheet. Then: “I knew it was set for stun.”

  “When I told you to stop hurting Gregor, you did.”

  A short sigh. “Kyi-Ragkirils are highly motivated by pleasure. Sleeping alone for the rest of my very miserable, very celibate life didn’t appeal to me.”

  “So you’re just here for the sex, is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  He wanted me angry at him. I wasn’t going to take the bait.

  “What’s Gregor here for? Who’s he working for?”

  He wet his lips before answering, his demeanor and emotions shifting from defeat to disdain. “Get an archiver. This isn’t going to be a short conversation.”

  When I returned from the desk, archiver in hand, he was sitting up, arms crossed over his chest, one leg dangling off the edge of the bed.

  “Do you remember,” he asked, without any preliminaries, “what Bralford said to us on the Loviti?”

  Jodey Bralford, Philip’s second in comma
nd at that time, had said any number of things to us when we escaped from Marker. But the main focus had been Philip’s belief that the Empire was about to be blown wide apart because of political promises made in secret committees after the Boundary Wars. Those promises hadn’t been kept. That had festered over into Tage’s Legalists struggling for power against the Admirals’ Council. Struggling for control of Prew, an ineffectual emperor whose loyalties shifted with his fears: the Farosians, the Stolorths, the Takas. Xenophobia ran deep. So did greed.

  Control of certain worlds meant control of resources. Prew had the power to bestow those worlds, and whatever mining or agri rights that came with them, to his favored few on a whim. That’s what we suspected comprised those promises not kept.

  Sully’s father, Winthrop Burke Sullivan, had been one of the powers behind those promises, decades ago. So had the Burkes and the Guthries. But many of the old guard died off. Winthrop Sullivan was dead, as was his exotically beautiful wife, Sophia Rossetti Sullivan.

  Jerisina Petroksi, Maida Bell, and Ademar Javieros were gone. And not all had died of old age.

  That was something else Jodey had commented on.

  Hayden and his father, Morley Burke, were still alive. And as the ranks thinned, they gained power, but also fears. When the rights to those worlds were finally doled out, what if they found themselves shorted?

  “Gregor was working for Hayden Burke?” My guess shocked me. I’d seen vids of Sully’s older cousin. Darkly handsome like Sully, but with light eyes and a polished, almost artificial demeanor. And where Sully was sensual, I found Hayden smarmy. Though according to the celebrity gossip commentators, he rarely lacked for noteworthy female companionship.

  But Burke hiring Meevel Gregoran? No, that did make a bit of sense. Hayden wanted the Sullivan fortune, badly. Knowing where Sully was would be important to him.

  Sully was shaking his head. “Cousin Hayden had Lazlo. He didn’t need Gregor.”

  “Then who?”

  “The one person Guthrie trusted. The one person he confided in. The one person who suddenly came to Hayden’s defense after Marker.”

  “Tage.” First Barrister Darius Tage. A man who’d had the ear of the emperor for over two decades. Yes, a Legalist who was in opposition to the Admirals’ Council, but known for being a middle-roader. A peacemaker. A man most believed kept the government running when Prew became increasingly unfocused and uninterested in the problems of a rapidly expanding empire that neither the economists nor the military could quite control. The worst criticism I’d ever heard of Tage was that he was a benign despot.