Captive Heart

by Anna Windsor

  Jack glanced in the general direction of the Hudson, wondering exactly how much water Andy could bring to bear if she really channeled that power of hers. A few seconds later, he saw an OCU van pull up, and a small squad of plainclothes officers got out, followed by the Sibyls in the East Ranger group—Sheila Gray, Maggie Cregan, and Karin Maros. He recognized Sheila easily enough from the no-hair-out-of-place ponytail and the creepy sort of calmness she seemed to radiate. Maggie’s short red hair was distinctive, too, like Karin’s stocky build—unusual for an air Sibyl.

  Almost immediately, Jack’s eyes moved to the sword belted at Maggie Cregan’s waist, only partly hidden under the folds of a black cloak she wore to conceal it. Sheila had on a cloak, too, while Karin didn’t need one since her throwing stars—shuriken—looked like belt decorations. But that sword of Maggie’s kept nudging out from under the cloak.

  Of course it was just the wind stirring through the hot summer day. The sword wasn’t moving by itself, but still, something always felt off about that damned thing. Jack didn’t much like being on the same block with it, and he really didn’t like it being only a few hundred yards away from Andy.

  Duncan saw where Jack was looking, and he acknowledged Maggie with a nod. “You’ve heard the rumors about her weapon?”

  “That she’s carrying a sword handed down to her by executioners in her family tree?” Jack made a quick visual check on Andy and Bela, who started walking again. “Yeah, I got that part from some of the OCU officers who work with her.”

  Duncan edged ahead of Jack on the sidewalk as Bela took a lead over Andy in the tracking. “Bela told me that one of the women who used to carry that sword also hung people outside her own window, for the local jailhouse. After the victim died, she’d sketch the swinging body on her bedroom wall. Somehow one of those sketches ended up etched into that sword’s blade.”

  Jack checked Andy. Checked the sword. He’d like more distance between her and that … thing, but the East Ranger Sibyls had responded to his call for backup. He couldn’t very well order them off again and ask for a different group. “John Cole said the sword hates him. Think there’s anything to that?”

  “It tasted his blood. Now it can find him anywhere. I’ve seen the damned thing try to pull out of Maggie’s hand to cut him when he got too close.”

  Jack closed distance with the Sibyls so he could watch Andy and the strange blade at the same time. “Why does she carry it?”

  Duncan gave a quick snort of amusement. “I guess because it kills the bad guys.”

  Jack forced himself to stop monitoring the sword and how close Maggie was getting to Andy. He’d really rather that sword not be a part of this, though he couldn’t say why. And he damned sure couldn’t tell a Sibyl what weapon to carry, not if he liked staying alive with all his body parts still attached.

  Jack figured that from above, this tracking operation looked like a leather-headed snake, with Andy and Bela up front and Sheila and Maggie close on their heels. Karin Maros had backed off and disappeared into the crowd like air Sibyls tended to do, keeping a broader view of the whole situation. Jack and Duncan walked a few steps behind the Sibyls, and four OCU officers kept pace right after them.

  Bela and Andy followed a strange path, up and down different streets, first one way and then the other. Canal to Broadway. Broadway to Nassau. Back to Broadway. Over to Church. Finally they ended up on Greenwich, and the Sibyls made a sharp right behind what looked like an abandoned storefront.

  On instinct, Jack’s hand moved toward his Glock. His nostrils flared, picking up the doughy scent of pizza and, from somewhere close, something sweeter, like pastries. “Anything?” he asked Duncan, who could use his enhanced Bengal senses to pick up threats Jack wouldn’t notice.

  “Not yet. I mean, the monster thing smelled like stink and blood when it left the warehouse, so I’ve gotten a few whiffs of that, but the trail’s old and degrading with every minute we’re out here.” His nose wrinkled as they got closer to the storefront. “Like now. I can smell the bastard, but not strong enough that I think he’s here or anything.”

  As they moved down the small alley beside the storefront, Andy and the other Sibyls turned a quick left and Jack lost sight of her.

  “Shit.” He drew his weapon and broke into a jog. So did Duncan. The OCU officers tailing them stopped at intervals, covering the alley and making sure nobody followed them. A blur of movement on a nearby rooftop almost made Jack take aim, but he realized it was Karin, keeping her vantage point clear.

  Jack rounded the corner and spotted Andy immediately, standing in the center of a small paved area with Bela. Looked like a private patio, enclosed—maybe one that used to be attached to a restaurant or bistro. Open crates and broken chairs and tables littered the ground, and the space smelled like musty concrete and motor oil.

  As soon as he was close enough to Andy to grab her if anything went nuts, Jack stopped. He didn’t holster his weapon, and neither did Duncan, who stopped beside him.

  The Sibyls seemed to be studying something on the ground, and when Jack got closer, he could tell it was a gold coin. The design looked old, but the way the thing caught the light and glittered, somebody had polished it before dropping it—or placing it on the ground for the Sibyls to find.

  Andy seemed particularly bothered by it, or maybe startled. Jack wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw her twitch like she might be hearing something nobody else could perceive.

  Bela cocked her head for a different perspective on the coin. “Looks Far Eastern or maybe Persian—kind of like a dinar, but a lot smaller.”

  “Are you getting anything from it?” Sheila asked Bela, her voice as serene as that of some yogi on a mountaintop. Andy’s red curls and Bela’s dark hair moved in the light breeze, but Sheila’s ponytail stayed neat and still. Jack wondered if it was possible for an earth Sibyl to anchor herself so completely to her element that she turned frozen or something.

  “Nothing.” Bela stooped toward the coin for a better look. “It’s like the energy’s muffled, or the coin’s never been touched by anything anywhere—even the ground beneath it. And that monster’s energy ends right here, too. It doesn’t trickle or dwindle. It’s just gone.”

  “Same for me.” Andy didn’t seem inclined to get close to the gold piece. In fact, she took a step back, shook her head once, then rubbed her right ear. “If I weren’t looking straight at that coin, I’d swear there was no metal on the concrete in front of me—and no traces of the altered creature. It’s like somebody took out a big hose and washed away all the natural energy and traces we should be sensing.” She rubbed her ear again, then lowered her hand. “Does anybody hear anything?”

  “Not a thing but Karin’s wind,” Bela said. “You getting something auditory?”

  “I thought I heard my name,” Andy said. “Like somebody called me.”

  Bela gave her a quick glance. “Right now? Ongoing?”

  “No,” Andy said. “Only when we first got into the alley, and again when we got close to the coin.”

  “There’s another one.” Maggie Cregan broke away from the other three Sibyls, her short red hair so bright it gleamed like the coins. Jack caught a glimpse of her strange-colored eyes and fought off a ripple of discomfort as she went close to the boarded back door of the abandoned storefront. She knelt beside a second gold coin on the ground, but she didn’t touch it.

  “Sampling metal’s more Camille’s thing than ours,” Andy said to Bela. “Should we have Jack call somebody to get her and bring her back here?”

  “I can use my sword,” Maggie offered. “It can assay metal as well as it does blood, only without some of the unpleasant effects.”

  Sheila nodded, and Maggie slowly drew the blade Jack wished she’d keep in its scabbard. The weapon had an oddly short hilt, but the flat blade was massive. Even at a distance, the details of its form seemed glaring and disturbing, and Maggie seemed to struggle to grip it for a few seconds. As she tightened her hands on t
he hilt, tiny flames caught along the blade, illuminating rune-like etchings.

  Easy enough to see what those freaky little pictures showed. A hanging man. A beheaded man. A guy in pieces. A guy with a blade sticking out of his back. There were lots of them, and Jack decided to stop cataloguing them. The more the sword flamed, the brighter those pictures burned.

  “Shit,” Duncan whispered. “Are those pictures moving?”

  Jack didn’t answer because he’d stopped looking at the sword. At the moment he was more worried about Duncan, because Duncan’s voice sounded too forceful and deep.

  Duncan held out his hands so Jack could see the swaths of orange and black tiger fur breaking across Duncan’s knuckles and wrists. “The energy coming off that thing’s enough to make me puke. Definitely projective, but contained in the blade somehow.”

  “Will it make you change?” Jack knew a full blast of projective energy usually brought out the paranormal aspects of half-breeds and other demon mixes. “Are you safe?”

  “No, I don’t think it’ll make me change. And even if I change, I can handle myself.” Duncan’s gaze moved back to Maggie and the sword. “But I want that sword out of here pretty damned soon.”

  Maggie lowered the tip of her blade toward the coin and touched it, and Duncan, Bela, and Andy jerked like they’d been hooked to jumper cables. Duncan let out a loud howl. His skin rippled, then pulled as he changed completely and fully to his Bengal form. He collapsed on the ground, head covered and still howling, as Andy and Bela slumped to the concrete. Andy landed near the other coin and rolled away from it, shrieking like the damned thing had gutted her.

  No fucking way. Jack bolted toward Andy with zero idea what to do.

  Sheila ran toward Maggie, who seemed to be locked to her sword and the coin, rattling so hard her teeth clattered together. Jack jammed his Glock in his holster and dropped to his knees beside Andy. Her eyes had gone wide and her mouth hung open. She was breathing. Jack reached to touch her neck, to check her pulse, but he couldn’t get his hand close to her. Something repelled him. Same with Bela. He fought like hell to push through the fuzzy-feeling nothingness surrounding them, but he couldn’t.

  “Damn it!” Jack turned to yell at Sheila, but wind blasted across the concrete and Karin Maros hit the ground beside him in a crouch.

  “Wait,” she barked in a tone so unexpected Jack did wait.

  Sheila launched herself in the air, straight toward Maggie, arms out like an NFL tackle. Karin sent a rush of wind to speed her flight.

  When Sheila slammed into Maggie, the two of them fell away from the sword—which stayed upright on its tip and flaming, attached to the coin.

  Andy moaned. Jack reached for her again, but he got an even harder pushback from whatever energy held her hostage. Christ, she was going pale. Bela twitched beside her, ghost white, and he couldn’t do anything. Nothing. Fuck!

  Karin yanked a throwing star off her belt and hurled it hard and low. The howling wind she sent with it shoved Jack on his ass.

  The star blasted into the coin. Sparks flew in every direction. The sword spun and gave off a wail like some writhing creature in hell—and the coin underneath it exploded like a flashbang.

  Light ripped across Jack’s vision and the noise punched at his eardrums. He fell like a discarded puppet, vaguely aware of pain as his head bounced off concrete.

  For a few seconds, he saw nothing but white-blue flashes. He couldn’t hear anything except his own pulse in his ears.

  Shake it off. Now. Up, soldier!

  His own voice from a million years ago. From the smoldering desert to the smoldering concrete where he lay now.

  Up. Ass, then knees, then feet. Get up.

  He struggled to sit. Blurred negative images of a burning sword seemed to dance on the ground in front of him. Then he saw what looked like a shadowy movie of three women staggering to each other and holding on—Karin, Maggie, and Sheila. The air smelled like fire and burned wood.

  Jack forced himself to his knees, then crawled straight back to Andy. Big blobs of light swam across his visual field as he tried to focus on her. She wasn’t moving. Eyes and mouth closed now. He reached for her—and this time his hand touched her shoulder.

  Warm. Relaxed. Alive.

  She opened her eyes and spoke.

  Jack couldn’t hear a word, but the relief of seeing her awake and moving nearly sent him back to the ground. She looked like somebody had wrung all the blood and energy out of her body, but she had fought off whatever energy had grabbed her.

  Bela rolled to her side, vomited, then got to a sitting position. Jack turned his head to check on Duncan and saw him crawling toward Bela on hands and knees. The tiger fur on his hands and face slowly shifted back to skin as he worked his way in their direction.

  The world tilted a little, and Jack had to catch himself with one palm on the still-smoking concrete. The muffled hearing, the blazing afterimages still popping across his eyeballs—way too similar to battlefield conditions. He repeated the date and time and his location to himself to keep himself grounded, but he knew from too much experience that he couldn’t make his stunned senses recover any faster than nature would allow.

  Andy put her hand on his wrist, and warmth flowed into him, hotter than the bright summer day. The sensation sped up his arm, then spread across his chest and face. Seconds later, he could see her more clearly. His ears popped open to sound again, and the world around him stopped swimming. Surprise made Jack look down at himself, then rub his ears to be sure they really had started working again. Amazing. He could hear traffic out on the road. He’d brought home so much hearing damage from the war it had been years since he could make out distant noises, much less sort them out and identify them.

  Andy’s hand fell away from his arm and her eyes closed again.

  Almost as one, the three East Ranger Sibyls shuffled Jack to the side, crowded around Andy, and put their hands on her shoulders and arms. Jack didn’t fight with them because he sensed they were helping Andy, doing whatever Sibyls did. Sharing energy. That’s what the Mothers had taught him. That Sibyls could share energy with each other, and with children, and with adults who had paranormal sensitivity. Even though water Sibyls had the reputation of being best with healing, any Sibyl could help a sister Sibyl out with a little infusion of energy.

  Sheila, Maggie, and Karin finished with Andy, then moved on to Bela. Bela seemed to do better with her dose of Sibyl healing, because she sat right up and crawled into Duncan’s waiting embrace.

  Jack listened to the sounds of everyone moving around and wondered how he could hear them so well. Had Andy done something to heal him? But that wasn’t possible. He had no paranormal sensitivity. The Mothers had as much as confirmed that, yet Andy had touched him and given him back his eyes and ears a hell of a lot faster than they would have come back on their own.

  Andy woke again, more slowly this time, and the East Ranger group got out of the way so that Jack, Bela, and Duncan could talk to her again—but Duncan and Bela were still busy holding each other. When Andy started to sit up, Jack supported her with one arm behind her back and his hand on her waist.

  She hesitated for a moment and gazed into his eyes.

  Jack felt more warmth, new warmth, generated from the closeness. He wanted to say something. No, what he really wanted to do was pull her to him and hold her there for a long time, just to be positive she was still breathing.

  As if reading his thoughts, Andy slipped her arms around his neck and gave him a quick hug, so slight and so fast he barely had a chance to feel her softness or the powerful tension in her muscles. She turned him loose and hugged Bela and Duncan next, and then the four of them helped each other stand.

  Jack kept his arm around Andy to be sure she didn’t sag or stumble, and she didn’t seem to mind. “What the living hell just happened?”

  “The coins must have been a projective trap.” Bela wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “It got triggered when the proj
ective energy from Maggie’s sword made direct contact with the metal.”

  Projective trap. Jack had heard that phrase before, but he couldn’t place it or add up how two gold coins could flatten a bunch of elemental warriors. “Fill me in here.”

  “It’s a Rakshasa trick.” Andy leaned into him just enough to make him feel useful. “Or at least we ran into a projective trap for the first time just after they came to New York City. When we went after the demons in their lair and started using our elemental energy, we got hooked into what felt like an endless feedback loop. We couldn’t stop sending out our energy, and we couldn’t pull it back. All of our power got drained away from us.”

  “And the building blew up,” Bela added, wiping her eyes one more time. Jack realized she had tears on her cheeks, probably leftover worry that the sword-and-coin trap had hurt Andy. “That part particularly sucked for me because I thought Duncan and my group and everybody else died in the blast. I didn’t understand the projective trap had wounded my elemental senses, so I just couldn’t pick up any signs of life.”

  Duncan stayed close to Bela, his expression grim, and Jack remembered now. He’d read those reports in detail. He hadn’t gone on that raid because he was already at Motherhouse Russia, recovering from the last set of broken bones he’d gotten from one of Andy’s waves. Seemed like a lifetime ago. “That explosion was a bad scene. Lots of dead and wounded—and Duncan, if you hadn’t realized you needed to knock Bela down to separate her from the energy drain, she and most of the Sibyls in New York City would have been killed.”

  Duncan’s expression got more fierce. “A projective trap was what held the Rakshasa in that temple in the Valley of the Gods for so many centuries, until John Cole and his patrol accidentally released them. The tiger-demons learned from their misery and got to be masters at building their own energy snares.”

  Jack wanted to wrap his arms around Andy and put himself between her and the still-glittering gold coin that lay only a few feet away. Scorch marks spread out from it like demented artwork, and he had no idea if the thing was still dangerous. He pointed it out, then looked at Andy. “That kind of trap affects you and your group even more because you have such strong projective talents, right?”