Storm echo, p.7
Storm Echo, page 7
Soleil didn’t swear. Yariela had brought her up to be ladylike, but she was swearing a blue streak inside her mind—even as she ran frantically through the known nonleopard members of DarkRiver. The blue-eyed man hadn’t been changeling, of that her cat was certain.
Psy or human, then.
But not a person who’d been identified as part of DarkRiver by the media. That didn’t mean much. While Lucas Hunter was visible in his position both as the head of the pack and as a changeling representative on the Trinity Accord, most of the cats kept a low profile.
The back of her neck itched; she knew that the blue-eyed man who’d awakened her cat was following her. He might have scrambled her neurons, but she had to shake him loose, or it was all over. The only way she could win against DarkRiver was by stealth—alone, she had nowhere close to the strength required to get to the alpha, take her vengeance.
He’d murdered her packmates, destroyed what little had been left after the Psy outbreak. He had to pay.
“Leilei,” Farah murmured in her ear. “You know you can’t kill. That’s not who you are. It’ll drive you to madness.”
I’m no one, she said silently, even as tears threatened. Madness would be better than this. Soleil was all alone, the sole survivor of a pack once called SkyElm.
But Farah wouldn’t let her be. “You’re my best friend. You wear the brightest colors in the world, laugh until everyone gets the giggles, and cuddle so fiercely that it’s a gift. You’re not a murderer.”
Throwing a glance over her shoulder as Farah’s words tormented her, she saw that the blue-eyed man remained on the other side of the street—but he was pacing her.
Her cat stretched in readiness to shove out of her skin, forcing the shift in a way it had never before done. It wanted to go to him with a feral desperation. “No,” she said under her breath, her hands fisted to bone whiteness. “Not until—”
That was when the world went to hell, screams splitting the air as people fell to their knees or straight down onto their faces. Bones snapped, blood spilled, and chaos reigned.
IVAN crashed to one knee on the hard asphalt right as he went to cross the street, follow a ghost. The only thing that saved him from a cracked kneecap was instinct born of years of training; he’d slammed his hand against the faux-adobe wall of the café he’d been passing and THROWN his body weight that way, absorbing most of the impact with his shoulder, arm, and upper body.
He’d be bruised, but nothing was broken.
All of that had happened in the space of split seconds, his vision going hazy at the same moment. Then his mind began to slide away into a black nothingness that chilled his blood.
He knew what this was: a major PsyNet rupture.
And his mind was caught on the cliff edge. If he didn’t anchor himself, he’d slip and fall, his connection to the PsyNet severed with brutal efficiency. At which point, he’d die.
Psy did not survive without a connection to a psychic network.
And reconnection was only possible should the psychic pathways in the brain remain undamaged. Such a violent separation would twist them to unusable knots, brain cells dying in a massive shock wave.
Teeth gritted, he shot out telepathic grappling hooks into the fabric of the PsyNet. Canto had taught him that. His older cousin was an anchor—one of the foundational elements of the PsyNet—and he’d made it a point to teach all his cousins “emergency first aid.” Once it became clear it worked, the anchors had disseminated that same information freely out into the PsyNet.
The first rule was to do anything you could to hold on.
Ivan wasn’t as psychically powerful as his cardinal cousin, but he hit 8.9 on the Gradient on his particular—and eerie—psychic ability. His secondary telepathic ability was a respectable 6.1. When he used the latter to look at the psychic plane, all he saw was horror. The PsyNet was fraying around him, minds blinking out at the speed of light.
Life after life. Gone. Erased.
This wasn’t a rupture.
It was too deep, too black, too endless.
No chance of survival or reconnection.
Grabbing another falling mind with a psychic hand in an effort to save it, he channeled even more energy into the grappling hooks … and then he felt it. Something—someone—had grasped his hooks and pulled them into such a deep part of the PsyNet that Ivan couldn’t even see it.
Anchor.
Not Canto. Not Payal. Not anyone he knew. Just an anchor who’d recognized what he was trying to do and helped him.
Ivan used his newfound stability to literally throw the untethered mind deeper into the PsyNet, where—since he’d caught it before a total break—it would reconnect instinctively. Psy were built to be connected to a network. Disconnection was the error.
In front of him in the physical world, a brunette woman who’d fallen to the ground gasped and sat up in a jagged movement. Ignoring her because she was safe now, he grabbed another mind, then another, then another.
At some point, he became aware that all those minds were now linked to him by fine silvery threads. Not unexpected with the continuing erosion of his shields. He’d deal with it later, would cut them free the same way he’d learned to cut his cousins free when he’d inadvertently captured them in his web as a child.
Behind him, the breach in the Net grew and grew, such a massive divide that he knew it couldn’t be fixed. That was when he saw it. A mind on the other side of the divide about to slide off into the abyss. Into death.
He didn’t even think about it, just threw a grappling hook over the fracture and toward that person. It slammed into the mind and was grabbed with scrabbling desperation, while Ivan threw another grappling hook into the piece of the PsyNet closest to the other mind.
The person clinging to him clearly saw what he was doing and was rational enough to switch telepathic lines and “climb” back to safe ground on the other side of the nothingness that was this unsalvageable fracture.
A fine silvery thread floated over the canyon, linking the two of them.
Spider, spider, my beautiful spider.
Ignoring the haunting singsong voice of memory, Ivan grabbed more people on both sides of the growing divide. Part of him knew that he shouldn’t have been able to reach that far, not across dead space devoid of psychic energy.
At the same time, he was conscious that he didn’t know half of his genetic history—and the half he did know had been compromised and reshaped by a drug that had seeped into the womb and into the cells of the fetus he’d once been.
No one knew what Ivan carried in his mind and in his blood.
He’d also never fully explored his toxic secondary ability. It was thanks to Grandmother that he was classified as a telepath alone—she’d known that any other classification would mark him and make him a target for the Council. That political body might now be gone, but Ivan’s ability remained as ruthless and cold as ever. He had no intention of wearing it as a label—but perhaps it had a side benefit he’d never before realized.
Rich iron. Wet.
His nose was beginning to bleed.
Judging it a sign of a minor psychic overload, he continued to grab and throw back as many minds as he could. Even with all that, he never lost his awareness of the woman he’d been following, the compulsion to get closer, find out if it was her so strong that it had overridden every other need.
Her eyes were dark, her lips as lush as the ones that had kissed him, her skin a familiar midbrown, and her hair a thick tumble of inky black, her curls so loose they were waves.
But while she had Lei’s height, she was painfully thin. Not the thin of genetics. The thin of not enough food. The evidence was there in the lack of light in her skin, the way her features didn’t quite fit right.
Hollows existed in her cheekbones, the blades sharp instead of rounded—and she bore no scar on her face. Her clothes were also nothing Lei would’ve worn: a baggy gray sweatshirt and ill-fitting jeans.
Yet every instinct he had said he’d found her.
Found the woman who’d awakened him … then left him in the dark.
The softness of her hair shone under the summer sunshine as she ran into his line of sight to assist a woman who’d crashed hard to the ground, cracking a gash into her skull.
Despite her apparent fragility, she wedged one shoulder under the fallen woman’s arm and got her up in a single lift, though the injured woman appeared far heavier than her.
Changeling.
Another piece of the puzzle slotting into place.
His quarry took the Psy woman to the side of the street, set her down gently against a wall. A store owner ran out with a red box stamped with a cross, and the familiar stranger who had to be Lei—unless he’d lost his mind at last—said something before grabbing gauze out of the box and holding it to the side of the woman’s head.
The shopkeeper nodded and took over the pressure, while Lei ran back to assist others who’d collapsed in ways that caused injury. Even with most of his mind focused on the Net, Ivan was too compelled by her not to note the way she moved, so fluid and quick and graceful.
The same way Lei had moved when she played with him. This time, however, he had an advantage: he’d been in San Francisco long enough to have seen plenty of leopards in motion. She was a cat. Of what variety, he didn’t know, but he would bet that one dazzling kiss on his prey being feline.
Then he saw five minds going over the cliff edge at once as the chasm widened, and turned all his energy into holding them to the world. To life.
Chapter 11
Your mother’s heart, my boy, is a fierce beast, ferocious in its will. Healers are like that.
—Carlo Hunter to Lucas Hunter (2058)
SOLEIL IGNORED THE terror rising at the back of her throat, burning her from the inside as people continued to fall around her, and just got on with it. She didn’t think about the fact that she was blowing her cover wide open—she was a healer; to help or not, it wasn’t a question.
Her cat had given up its rebellion, was with her every step of the way. They were and would always be one in this. To care, to help, to heal, that was the very nature of Soleil’s soul.
She knew deep within that had the cat yet been dormant when the world broke around her, it would’ve awakened with a clawing jolt. Its retreat had been fueled by the biggest shock any changeling could ever suffer—the loss of the entirety of its pack—but even that traumatic shock couldn’t kill the drive that was a healer’s heart.
A man went down with a sickening thud to the head that told her it was too late to help him even before she checked on him and found a broken neck. Leaving him with a whispered apology for being too late, she ran to the teenage girls who’d collapsed as a group. All five gasped in a breath right then, their eyes flashing open, pupils expanding to cover their irises.
Soleil’s heart pounded, her head jerking toward the man her cat craved. He knelt on the other side of the street, his hand braced against the wall and his eyes obsidian.
No whites, no irises. Just black.
She’d seen Psy eyes do that during the worst day of her existence, the world filled with pain and death. But he wasn’t out of control, wasn’t violent. The impossibly, ridiculously perfect line of his jaw was set, his body rigid in a concentration so merciless it was a pulse in the air.
Her cat batted at it, delighted by him in a way far too familiar between strangers, but that wasn’t important at this moment. He had to be the reason these girls were alive. Of all the Psy in the street, he was the only one who was functional—and those black eyes told a story.
After doing a check on the girls to ensure that they’d sustained no physical injuries, she moved on to the next person, her mind and actions driven by years of practice and study. All the while, the scent of death lingered in her mouth, a whispering echo of terrified screams at the back of her brain.
So much blood.
There’d been so much blood then.
Her pack decimated by Psy driven mad by a psychic infection. The ones who hadn’t been intent on murder had clawed out their own eyes, smashed their own heads bloody against walls. And they’d been so quiet, some of them. Horrifically, shockingly quiet as they self-destructed in a fountain of violence.
Soleil had fought to help the ones who’d turned the violence inward, had literally tied one’s hands to a bicycle park station to stop her from the clawing. The woman had looked lost … then smashed her head into the footpath.
Soleil had heard her skull crack like an egg.
These Psy aren’t going mad, she reminded herself as she checked on a broken arm, they’re dying.
“You’ll be fine,” she told the man with the broken arm. “Just stay here until the ambulances—”
His skin turned to ice without warning, air escaping his throat in a last rattling gasp.
Cat hissing inside her, Soleil almost dropped his arm.
Almost.
She was sane enough, patched up inside enough, to lay it gently against his rapidly cooling body and think not like a woman broken by loss—but a healer. What had just taken place wasn’t normal, how quickly all evidence of life had been sucked out of him, how fast his face had lost color. Whatever was happening to the Psy was catastrophic.
Shoving aside images of the dead piled up on top of her, their bodies going from warm to cold and stiff and hard while she bled out below their weight, she moved on to the next injured individual. She had to run around a crashed vehicle to do so, steam hissing up from its crumpled hood. The driver was dead, his spine twisted into an unnatural shape.
But not far away sat a woman propped up against the pole of a streetlamp, her eyes a dazzling green. Those eyes were trained on Soleil’s dangerous stranger.
Blood coated one side of her face from where she must’ve fallen, but she didn’t react when Soleil knelt down with her borrowed first-aid kit. It held nowhere near the supplies in her own healing kit, a kit that had vanished from what had once been her aerie, but it was enough to patch people up, keep them breathing until the paramedics reached them.
“You have a severe gash on your cheek,” she told the woman with a confidence that first her parents, then Yariela had nurtured with a warmth that Soleil missed each and every day.
Rummaging in the kit, she picked up a small device. “I have a basic stitch-stapler that I’m going to use on you that should halt the bleeding. I’m sorry, I have no numbing gel.”
The woman continued to stare at the stranger. “I can feel him.” It came out a rasp. “Inside me. Holding me to life. He’s so beautiful. Cold crystal fire.”
Her words, her almost slavish focus should’ve raised every hair on Soleil’s body. Instead her cat licked its paw, annoyed at her patient because the stranger was Soleil’s. Regardless of her unhinged thoughts—her cat disagreed vehemently with that diagnosis—healing came first. So she used the woman’s preoccupation to start stapling up the cut.
It took until the third staple for the woman to jolt and wince. “It hurts.” Her eyes were suddenly wet, the dreaminess erased by pain.
“I know, but the cut is too deep to allow it to remain open.” What she hadn’t told the woman was that prior to the stapling, Soleil had been able to see inside her mouth—one entire side of her face had been flapping open.
Looked like the blonde had fallen on a sharp piece of metal protruding from the crashed car. It had nearly sliced off half her face. But the stitches would help minimize scarring, and there were cosmetic procedures for later on.
Soleil kept her mind on that track. Medical, healing. The beautiful stranger.
Her cat purred inside her, more than happy to focus on him.
She couldn’t allow herself to think about death, about how bodies went hard and cold and began to smell. She couldn’t think about how people screamed for help when they were being torn apart. And she couldn’t think about how she’d fallen with an ax in her back and blood in her mouth, her face half-buried in rucked-up soil.
The scent of damp earth in her nostrils.
The odor of decomposition.
The crushing weight of body after body.
Shoving the memory away with brutal force, she finished stapling up the woman, her hands slick with blood in the aftermath. She used the medical-strength sanitizer in the kit to quickly clean them before she moved on to the next person. Because this was nowhere close to over. People were still falling, still dying.
That was when she saw the pregnant woman, her body convulsing.
Soleil slammed down next to her, managed to get her into the recovery position, and risked her hand to make sure the woman’s airway was clear. The patient seized for another few seconds before shuddering, her breathing ragged.
Her eyes were cloudy with bone-deep fear when they met Soleil’s, her ebony skin slick with perspiration. “My baby. Please. Help my baby.”
Severe contractions rippled under the hand Soleil had put on the woman’s stomach. “I’m a healer,” she said with firm deliberation, her cat at attention. Birth was her favorite part of healing—but not like this, with the mother coated in pain, in fear. “You just do what I say and your baby will be fine.”
Yariela had taught her that birthing mothers responded better to firmness than gentleness. “They need to know that you know what you’re doing and that you’re in charge, chica,” the senior healer had said. “Especially when you have such a pretty young face.”
Soleil’s scarred face had never exactly been pretty, and was haggard these days, but she continued to follow Yariela’s advice. “What’s your name?” she asked, as she touched her fingers to the woman’s wrist to get her pulse. “I’m Soleil. My friends call me Leilei.”
The woman swallowed. “Zoula.”
“Okay, Zoula, I need you to sit up.”
“It’s too early.” Zoula sobbed as she allowed Soleil to put her into a seated position against the wall of a shop.
“Eight months by my glance.” Soleil took her vitals again, didn’t like what she was sensing, but kept her tone even and calm. “Survivable even outside a hospital.” She pushed up the woman’s legs so they were bent at the knee, then pulled off her own sweatshirt to drape it over Zoula’s knees to give her a semblance of privacy.
