Shield of Winter Read online

  She'd just finished the final call when he remembered something she'd seen in a shop window just before an elderly woman had stopped to admire Rabbit. "We forgot to buy the pastries you wanted to try."

  Ivy blinked, laughed. "Next time."

  And he wanted there to be a next and a next and a next. Cupping her face, he kissed her smile into his mouth. Her gasp was startled, her nails digging into his chest through his T-shirt a tiny bite of sensation.

  Ivy's body rubbed against the hard ridge of his erection as she tried to become taller. It was, he thought with a surge of emotion in his heart that he couldn't categorize, an impossible task. She was small and perfectly formed, her curves made for his hands. When she broke the kiss to go down flat on her feet, he waited to see what she'd do.

  This was an operation for which he had no training. The boundaries were unclear.

  "If we keep doing that," she said a little breathlessly, "you'll get an awful crick in your neck."

  "My neck isn't the part of my body that has my attention at this point."

  Ivy's cheeks went bright red, her eyes dipping to his groin, then flying back up in a flustered flick. It was as if she'd gripped him in her hand, squeezed. He tightened his abdominal muscles, dead certain he was nowhere near ready to handle the feel of her slender fingers imprisoning his erection. "Should I not have said that?"

  A shy look, her hands petting his chest in a way that was already familiar. "I think we should say whatever we want," she whispered, skin glowing gold as her blush faded.

  Vasic decided to take her up on that. "I wasn't finished kissing you."

  Her skin heated up again. "There." She pushed him gently back with her fingertips. "Sit in that armchair."

  Vasic allowed himself to be nudged down and had his cooperation rewarded by Ivy's soft weight on him as she took off her coat and straddled his thighs, her knees on either side. "See?" It was a whisper.

  "Very practical," he said, and slid one hand under her curls to her nape. He liked the delicate warmth of her skin there, liked how she always gave a little shiver when he surrendered to the urge to touch. But most of all he liked that the hold was perfect for gauging her reaction to his kiss.

  Her pulse thudded hard and fast against his fingertips when he opened his mouth on hers, spiked when he played his tongue against hers. Vasic took note, repeated the act. Making small, impatient, feminine sounds, Ivy wrapped her arms around his neck and licked her tongue along the roof of his mouth.

  Vasic's free hand clenched on her hip, his fingers brushing the curve of her backside. Firm and yielding both, it made him want to explore. He shifted his hand down, cupped one cheek, squeezed.

  "Vasic." Shuddering, Ivy's head fell back, her pulse visible beneath her skin.

  He put his mouth on it, sucked . . . just as something smashed to the floor. Telepathic senses having been set to an automatic security sweep, he moved with ruthless speed to lift Ivy off and shove her into the armchair out of harm's way as he stood in front of her.

  There was no intruder.

  There was, however, a mountain of fine sand on the carpet.

  Ivy hooked her fingers into his waistband as she sat up on her knees behind him on the armchair and looked around his body. "There goes the security deposit."

  He turned at the solemn statement to see her eyes sparkling. Shoulders shaking, she fell back into the armchair. Laughter escaped her in giggling bursts. Bright and beautiful and sexually addicting and his. No way in hell was he leaving her. No other man would ever have the right to touch Ivy Jane.

  *

  ZIE Zen was reading an old and faded note when he received a comm call from the son of his heart.

  "Grandfather," Vasic said, his eyes steady and his voice calm, "I need your help."

  Then, as Zie Zen listened, Vasic told him about the malfunctioning gauntlet and the death sentence he'd been given. "Amputation won't solve the problem," his great-grandson told him. "The most critical malfunctioning component is directly integrated into my brain stem."

  Zie Zen thought of Vasic as he'd become in the past decade, remote and increasingly distant, as if he was already walking in the twilight lands. Zie Zen had tried to hold his great-grandson to the world and knew he had failed. Now, however, he saw that someone else had succeeded. "You fight to live," he said, something breaking inside the heart he'd walled up behind titanium shields an eon ago.

  "Yes, Grandfather." Ice gray eyes met his. "I cannot leave my Ivy to the care of any other on this planet, not even Aden."

  Zie Zen's hand clenched on the top of his cane, his thoughts suddenly full of a girl with sunshine in her smile who had teased him and laughed with him and left him notes all over the house.

  Z2--Eat this sandwich. I made it especially for you. xoxo Sunny

  Dear Z2, I hope you like the roses. I think men should get roses, too, don't you? Love you, Sunny

  Z2--Gone out to party till I drop with the bride. I promise not to run away with a stripper. Love, Sunny

  p.s. I wouldn't say no to a private show from my man ;-)

  Zie Zen, how dare you?! Samantha

  That last was the note he held in his hand today. She'd been so angry that day, his magnificent Sunny. "Send me the complete file," he said to his great-grandson now. "I will find a solution for you. It is not your time to die."

  His own death, he thought after the conversation ended, was coming. But not yet. Not until he'd seen this through. Then, he could finally close his eyes and see his Sunny again. She'd be angry with him for taking so long . . . and for many of the decisions he'd made, but she would love him. Always, she would love him.

  As Vasic's Ivy would love his great-grandson. All Zie Zen had to do was unearth the answer to a seemingly impossible problem.

  *

  THREE hours after his conversation with his great-grandfather, Vasic was on night shift while Abbot caught some sleep, when his mind alerted him to a threat. As there were no intruders in the apartment, he checked the PsyNet.

  There.

  Vasic didn't warn the mind that was attempting to hack Ivy's open with brute force. He simply reached out with his own and crushed the attempt, tearing open the other man's shields in the process. Abbot, he said at the same time, wake up and take over.

  I'm up, the other Arrow answered almost immediately.

  Having gleaned the attacker's physical location by slamming in through his torn shields, Vasic used the image coming in through the man's visual cortex to teleport to a utilitarian room with brown carpeting. The attacker lay convulsing on the floor. Vasic came down on one knee beside the thin man in his forties and waited until he'd stopped convulsing to speak.

  "Why did you attack?"

  "She's an abomination." Zeal in his blue eyes, fanatical and furious, his ears and nose dripping blood. "Tainting the purity of the Net with her strange mind, like the others. They must all be destroy--" He began to convulse again, his teeth slamming together over his tongue.

  Vasic used his Tk to stabilize the attacker's head as blood pulsed from the self-inflicted wound and his back arched, fists and feet pounding the carpet. When it stopped, he was dead.

  Vasic contacted Aden using the mobile comm built into his gauntlet. "I shouldn't have hit his shields that hard," he said, after giving his partner the rundown on the situation. Vasic's control was legendary in the squad, but the dead male had been a threat to Ivy, Vasic's reaction arising from a primal instinct that awoke only for her. "We need to find out if he was part of a larger cell--I'll check his apartment for any physical indicators."

  "I'll get our people to go through his life, track down his associates," Aden replied. "He might simply have been working on his own--we're seeing more and more incidents of people unable to cope with the fall of Silence. The Es are an easy, visible target."

  "Tell me if they find anything pertinent." With that, Vasic began a meticulous and detailed search of the apartment. He discovered nothing obvious but dropped off several datapads at Cent
ral Command for further investigation before returning to New York. I'll take over now, he told Abbot. Rest the full six hours. You need to recharge.

  Yes, sir.

  The next voice he heard was softer, feminine . . . and one he did not want to hear while his hands were stained with death. "Vasic?"

  Chapter 35

  HE TURNED FROM the night-dark living room window to see Ivy in the doorway to her bedroom. Sleepy eyed, her body clad in a pair of what looked like pale pink flannel pants teamed with a strappy white top, she looked warm and vulnerable and touchable. He wanted her in his arms, wanted to sink into the softness of her.

  "Go back to sleep," he said instead, his fingers curling into his palms. He hadn't used his hands to kill tonight, but he remained a killer nonetheless. That instinct had been trained into him, and it wasn't one he could ever erase. Nor would he even if he could--it was part of what made him capable of protecting Ivy.

  It also put him permanently on the dark side of the line, while Ivy stood in the light.

  His empath covered a yawn with one hand and rubbed her eyes with the other. "I felt something," she said, padding across the distance between them. "A pounding at my temples, but it was gone before it became truly painful."

  Vasic used his Tk to nudge her slightly. "You can't be in the line of sight of the window." He'd made certain his body was angled so as not to give any assassin a target.

  "Oh." Changing trajectory, she walked to stand in the corner beside him, walls at her back and side.

  He couldn't keep from turning to face her, and the instant he did, he realized his mistake. The corner blocked her in, and when he shifted slightly, his body completed the shadowed, intimate cage. Ivy didn't recoil or look afraid. Her eyes no longer hazy with sleep, she touched her fingers to his jaw in that way she had--as if he was the fragile one.

  "You took care of it, didn't you?"

  "Yes."

  Sliding her hand down his neck to his shoulder, the black fabric of his T-shirt little barrier to the lush heat of her, she said, "Did you have to kill?"

  "I used too much force. Death was the outcome."

  "One more death," she whispered, her eyes huge and dark. "It hurts you."

  "No," he said. "I don't allow it to." Even as he spoke, he realized that the numbness that had protected him for so long was cracked in multiple places, shattered by this raw, powerful thing he felt for Ivy.

  Her gaze searched his, her shoulders stiff. "Are you angry at me for it?"

  The question was so unexpected that he couldn't work out what had prompted her to ask it. "No." Nothing could ever make him turn away from Ivy. "Do you sense anger?"

  Ivy's gentle fingers traced his lips before she dropped her hand to his chest. "Yes. Deep and violent and so contained it's a gathering storm." She tugged him closer with her grip on his T-shirt. "And if the anger isn't directed at me, then it must be directed inward."

  Vasic wasn't ready to talk about the violence inside him, might never be ready. But one thing he had to say, one choice he had to give her. "I shouldn't touch you with blood on my hands."

  Lifting one of those hands with both of hers, she brought it to her cheek, turned her face into it. Her eyes were wet when her lashes lifted. "That blood is there because you protected me." A sweet, tender kiss pressed to his palm.

  It stabbed him to the core. "Ivy." He fought not to close the final inches between them, to take the gift of her. "I've done terrible things," he told her, showing her the dark, hidden places in his soul. "I've ended the lives of innocents and erased the murders of others. I'm no knight."

  Ivy's tears wet his palm. "You're mine," she said huskily, pressing two fingers to his lips when he would've spoken. "You were forced into a certain shape by those who wanted to take advantage of your strength." Her eyes glittered with unhidden fury as she continued to speak. "You were drugged, and then you were betrayed by a leader you thought you could trust. The instant you understood the truth, you began to do everything in your power to effect change."

  "None of that excuses my actions." Vasic would carry the weight of each drop of blood forever.

  "No." Ivy rose on tiptoe to cup his face in both hands. "But now, now you have a choice, Vasic. A real choice. What you do now is what matters." Each word was honed in stone, her resolve absolute. "Don't you give those who wanted to break you the satisfaction of allowing the past to hold you back."

  Shuddering, he braced himself with his palms on either side of her head. "I can't pretend the past twenty-five years didn't exist."

  "I'm not asking you to." Ivy's hands continued to hold him with near-unbearable tenderness. "Those years will always be part of your history, but they don't have to dictate the shape of your present or your future . . . our future."

  The words she spoke, the things she said, they made him want to believe he could be a better man, could find redemption. Further cracks in the numbness, the rage he'd contained for so long beginning to boil over. He thrust it back down. Not yet. He didn't have that freedom yet, couldn't afford to be compromised by a storm that could alter the bedrock of how he dealt with the world.

  "Vasic." Soft breath, Ivy's lips on his throat.

  Fingers tightening into fists, he stood in place, his head bowed slightly and his arms trapping her. Instead of fighting to escape, she kissed his throat again, licked out with her tongue to taste him. It made every muscle in his body go tight, the tattered vestiges of the psychological brainwashing he'd survived attempting to overlay the pleasure with pain, but he didn't move.

  "Vasic," she whispered again, her kiss damp this time, the sensation going straight to his rock-hard erection. "My Vasic."

  No one had ever claimed him so completely. Enslaved, he wanted to bend his mouth to her skin, lick her up as she was doing him. But this . . . being adored by her, it was an addiction that kept him in place. "Stop," he forced himself to say, when he wanted the opposite. "I'm on watch. I can't be distracted." And he hadn't yet worked out how to control his teleporting when she put her hands on him.

  A last, lingering kiss. "Good night."

  "Good night."

  Her lips curved. "You have to let me out."

  He didn't move. "Don't go," he said, and it was the first time since his father had abandoned him that he'd asked anyone to stay with him.

  Ivy's smile lit up the room. "Why don't I make us some coffee, and you can teach me how to keep watch like an Arrow?"

  Shifting one hand down to the thin strap of her top, he tugged it, only his nail brushing her skin. "Did you get this in the township by the orchard?" It was delicate and lacy and not the least bit sensible.

  "I ordered it from a catalogue," she whispered, as if confessing a secret. "I have a very bad habit of buying impractical items simply for the sensual pleasure of it." Nuzzling him, she said, "My favorite texture is that of your hand against my skin."

  He closed his fingers around her nape, squeezed in a silent reprimand that had her laughing, the sound a quiet intimacy as she slid her arms around his waist and pressed a kiss to his chest. It was a perfect moment, one he wished he could encapsulate and live in forever. But time, he thought, his eyes landing on the gauntlet, continued its relentless march forward. It wouldn't stop for a disintegrating PsyNet, nor would it halt for an Arrow who had finally found a beautiful reason to live.

  *

  THE first major wave of protest marches took place in New York, Shanghai, and Jakarta, with more scheduled in Berlin and other world cities in the coming days.

  Kaleb watched the news feeds from all three cities in his home study, taking in the banners that advocated a return to Silence, each emblazoned with the logo of Silent Voices. Unlike the small knot of placard-waving malcontents outside his Moscow office, hundreds marched in these groups, professional signs strung out between them.

  His first instinct remained to crush and eliminate what he saw as a threat, but Sahara, her hand on his shoulder as she leaned over his chair to look at the feeds, had a differe
nt view. "Under eight hundred people," she said, her breath soft against his temple. "And that's across three huge cities. Their numbers are minuscule, but it's good the dissent is out in the open. Our people have festered in the darkness too long."

  "Silent Voices isn't dissent--it's a symptom of the mind-set that paralyzes so many in the populace," he said, the truth a pitiless one.

  "You're right." She wriggled into his lap, her legs hanging over the arm of his executive chair. "But we're attempting to change the course of an entire race. It's going to be chaotic and messy, and people will make mistakes."

  Kaleb ran one hand down her thigh, his other arm around her waist. On the feeds, the protestors continued to chant, continued to irritate, but he ignored that to focus on the people on the sidewalks where the marches were taking place. Humans and changelings looked on curiously, but he also picked up faces that were clearly Psy. No one was joining in.

  That would alter, he thought, as fear crippled more and more. But change had begun, and it was inevitable, as evidenced by the color-washed minds that had begun to appear in the Net. Silent Voices might want to erase that color, but many others looked on with wonder, astonished that such beauty could be born in the stark cold that had always been the psychic plane.

  Kaleb fell into neither category. He was interested only in what the empaths could do to curb the infection--if those of the E designation could do anything at all. "I can only give the Es another two weeks at most." Then he'd have to begin to carve the Net into countless pieces.

  Sahara's exhale was shaky. "There's still no way to detect the fine tendrils of infection?"

  "No."

  "But," Sahara said, her mind seeing what his already had, "if the Net is in pieces, there's a higher chance at least some parts of it will stay clean, survive." Where now the infection could crawl unchecked across every inch of the psychic fabric that connected their race.

  "Have you considered a mass defection from the PsyNet?" Sahara asked, playing with the lapis lazuli pebble he'd had on his desk. "Everyone could drop out, create a new network, start fresh."

  "We'd take the infection with us." A large number of people already carried the disease in their brain cells. "A small group, however, one made up of those immune to the infection and those who share their immunity, could work."