Burned (28 page)

The battle
sounds coming from the other side of the estate were growing—our
prong of the attack hadn't ever been meant to face real opposition.
Brandon and the rest had all come over the other wall.

I grabbed Isaac
and turned him back toward the blur of motion around the dark angel.
"Grab half our people and go help contain that—take
Grayson with you in case they launch another wave at us from this
direction."

I spun around
and took off at a sprint, Carson, Vicki and James at my back. The ten
seconds it took us to get far enough around the house to see the
fighting stretched out forever, and the vista of destruction awaiting
us made something inside of me recoil in horror.

Brandon had
brought even more warriors than I'd expected, and the Tucson pack was
fighting a rear-guard action against more than twice their number.
Jaclyn had seemed confident in her ability to beat Brandon in a
one-on-one fight, but even from so far away it was obvious to me that
he was toying with her.

Carson pushed
past me—faster than I was in my injured state—and then he
lit up like a signal fire on whatever wavelength of sight my beast
bestowed on me. He was far enough ahead of me that I only caught the
very edge of what he threw at the combatants, but it still drained me
of much of the anger that had been powering me. I managed to retain
my shape and continue stumbling forward, but the people it had been
directed at weren't nearly as lucky.

A ripple of
change swept through the battle, momentarily robbing the combatants
of the emotional peaks they needed to maintain their transformations.
Some of them still pressed forward, trying to kill each other with
their bare hands, but most just collapsed to the ground in a daze.

Whatever Carson
had done wasn't as targeted as what Grayson had done, but it still
seemed to hit the Coun'hij forces harder than it did Jaclyn's people,
who managed to kill several of their opponents before Carson stumbled
in exhaustion and dropped his emotional damping-field.

Between one
heartbeat and the next the battlefield re-erupted with violence, but
he'd bought us nearly three full seconds. It had helped, but it
wasn't going to be enough to save Jaclyn—not against a monster
like Brandon.

I reached
inside and for the third time that day opened up the conduit inside
of me as far as it would go. What I found shocked me. As long as I
could remember I'd been told that Brandon had the potential to
manifest a gift like nothing that had been seen among our people in
thousands of years. Somehow I'd lost sight of that in the face of his
blinding speed and unbelievable strength.

I'd seriously
underestimated him. I reached out intending on using my ability to
bring the fighting to a halt once again. I hadn't expected to be able
to maintain the absorption field indefinitely, but I only needed
three more seconds to make it to the fighting, and then every second
that passed would mean one more dead enforcer, one more person who
wouldn't be able to threaten my people.

Instead of
bringing the
fighting
to a stop,
I
was nearly brought
to a stop. The energy crashing into me before being sucked down into
the rift inside of me was unbelievable. In the aggregate, it was
every bit as fearsome as what I'd felt coming off of the creature.
Inside of my mind I could see a map of the people in front of me. The
hybrids shone brighter than the wolves, Carson and Jaclyn both shone
much brighter than the other hybrids, and Brandon was like staring
into the sun.

I felt
something inside of me start to tear as I exceeded the limits of my
gift, and immediately narrowed down the focus of my attack. I pulled
back the edge of my field, shrinking it down so that it didn't
include Brandon and Jaclyn, and then threw myself toward that dead
spot on our end of the fighting.

My people
didn't know as much as they would have liked about my ability, but
they all knew enough to stay out of the area I was targeting.
Jaclyn's people weren't as knowledgeable. Several of them lunged
forward intending on savaging a fallen opponent and instead joined
their targets on the ground.

I brushed past
the two hybrids between me and the dead spot, trusting James and the
others to distract the enforcers from taking swipes at my unprotected
back. It was risky, but I could feel the black hole inside of me
starting to destabilize—I needed to eliminate some of the power
sources that were overwhelming my ability.

I buried my
right fist in the chest of my first target while he struggled to pull
himself back up to his feet. I knew I would regret what I was doing
later—regret killing defenseless enemies—but right then
I'd locked my emotions safely away behind a thick wall. Sorrow, fear,
pain from my broken ribs and damaged shoulder—it was all
inaccessible.

The second and
third targets were close enough for me to kill them less than a
second later, and then a flicker of motion brought me around. My
people were streaming around the edge of the circle of immobilized
bodies and in our little corner of the battle we had numerical
superiority. Coun'hij hybrids were falling to groups of three and
four wolves working in unison or to paired hybrids, but the real
destruction was being dished out by Carson.

No living thing
could cross the invisible line in the ground created by my ability,
but Carson had figured out a way around that. He stalked along the
perimeter of fallen figures and his sword licked out with nearly
every step, crossing the boundary and killing with each stroke.

I almost yelled
for him to stop. I'd been focused on my targets, on killing the
enforcers as quickly as I could, but what flashes I'd seen of the
rest of the battle told me that Brandon was tearing his way through
the Tucson pack like they were nothing more than immobile paper
dolls. Carson was one of the few opponents Brandon couldn't just mow
down and part of me wanted him out there fighting the biggest menace
on the battlefield, but he was right. My usefulness on the field of
battle was limited by how quickly I could dispatch immobilized foes.

That was the
main weakness that made someone like Grayson or Heath so much more
effective in most situations. Carson was doubling my usefulness and
killing enemies even faster than he could have in open battle. It was
a stroke of brilliance, but it wasn't enough.

I yelled for
Jess and Jasmin as I saw them take down another hybrid.

"Follow
along behind me and kill any stragglers while they are still
disoriented and weak!"

I centered my
ability on myself so it would move with me, and then I took several
steps forward as a fresh wave of hybrids came soaring over the wall.
My forward motion brought new enemies into my sphere of influence at
the same time that it let me get to another target.

Some of the
newcomers realized what was going on too late—after they'd
already stumbled into the dead zone that surrounded me. The shock of
so many new bodies—new power sources—nearly brought my
absorption field down and I was forced to shrink it.

Carson paced me
on one side—now enveloped in fighting as some of the hybrids
I'd been immobilizing staggered to their feet—and I could hear
Jas and Jess behind me wreaking nine different kinds of destruction
on the hybrids that I'd bypassed, but all of that was secondary to
Brandon's bellows.

"Overwhelm
him—there are only so many he can affect at one time. Pile on
and bring him down now!"

He was right.
It was a replay of my experience with Shawn all over again. I'd
strolled into battle thinking that I'd thought through all of the
ways in which I was vulnerable, but I'd been gravely mistaken.

The fighting
behind me intensified as some of Jaclyn's people were free of my
ability and joined Jas and Jess, but the new arrivals among Brandon's
people were spilling around now and engaging the wolves behind me. My
ability wobbled again, and I was forced to reduce the radius I was
affecting once again or risk losing control altogether. I was
sprinting from target to target, trying not to be pushed back into
Carson, but seeing that moment approaching all too quickly.

In another
second or two my limit was going to be reached and then I'd be forced
back against the house and any of my people caught up in my field
would be set upon as soon as I'd passed them by, before they could
gather their strength again.

I desperately
looked for a way out that would allow us to survive what was coming,
and then I heard the first shot.

It was Adri.
She'd come out through the front door of the mansion and she was
calmly putting round after round into the shifting pile of shape
shifters who'd thrown themselves into the circle of my power.

She fired with
the precision of a metronome, emptying her magazine and then
reloading and resuming with barely a pause. I'd seen action movies
where the shots weren't as close together as she was managing, and
even shape shifters couldn't endure that indefinitely. Things
balanced on the edge of a razor, my ability trembling from the strain
of draining so much power, as Carson, Adri and I killed hybrids by
the dozen. Two more seconds dragged by, and then suddenly the
enforcer and loyalist hybrids were streaming around my dead zone in
an effort to get at the rest of my people.

As the pressure
came off of me, I stopped moving and let the area I was affecting
shift around more freely. I'd been thinking of this all wrong. It
wasn't about dropping people and pinning them in place until I'd
managed to kill them myself, it was about dropping large numbers of
enemies and then pulling my ability back far enough that my people
could kill them.

Carson figured
out what I was doing even before I announced the change in my
strategy. He watched me temporarily immobilize half a dozen hybrids
and then darted in once they began moving again, and killed them in a
series of lightning-fast strikes that took less than three seconds.

Jasmin and the
rest of the wolves at my back figured things out as I yelled for them
to alternately fall back and then attack. They'd been a fearsome
bunch even before that, but now they were four-legged reapers who
were felling enemies many times their size with each pass, killing
with near impunity.

A scream from
up ahead of me pulled my attention back to the wider battle, and what
I saw chilled my blood. The dark angel had fallen back around the
perimeter of the estate and had joined up with the cadre of enforcers
that Brandon had formed up around him.

The fighting
over there mostly involved members from the Tucson pack, and they
were even less prepared to go up against a creature like that than
our people were. Heath had moved around far enough that large chunks
of our people were flickering in and out of sight as he extended his
ability to its limit, but even that was only slowing the rout that
was developing on that side of the fight.

I tried to push
forward faster, tried to get over to where I could influence that
side of things, but more and more of my people had been peeled off of
my side of the fighting and forced to shore up Jaclyn's forces. The
only way to move through the press of people between me and Brandon
would be to turn my ability off altogether, and run through the horde
of semiconscious enforcers ahead of me. I could do it, but Jasmin,
Jess and the rest behind me would fall in seconds against those
overwhelming numbers.

I moved forward
anyway, trying to expand out my sphere of influence, and as an
ever-increasing torrent of energy roared through me and into the
semi-tame black hole inside of me, I realized something for the first
time.

The energy I
was siphoning off wasn't going somewhere, it was going
somewheres
.
My ability didn't just form a single conduit. There was one big
conduit, but I could also sense smaller threads heading off in other
directions. The reservoir where my ability was sending all of that
energy wasn't a single reservoir, it was one big reservoir and more
than a dozen smaller reservoirs.

I'd been right
in fearing earlier that I'd reached the limit of how much power that
reservoir could absorb. I had. The bigger reservoir was nearly tapped
out—or maybe just my ability to use it had been reached. The
smaller reservoirs though still had capacity.

I reached down
one of the threads between me and a secondary reservoir, and to my
inner eye it was a brilliant golden thread. It disappeared into the
ether, impossible to follow, but all of a sudden I somehow knew where
the thread went. It went to Carson, tireless, deadly, loyal Carson.

I followed
other threads, felt them go off into other dimensions that somehow
terminated in people I knew. Rachel was there, a tiny thread that was
so slender I almost couldn't see it inside the landscape of my mind's
eye.

Brindi was
there too, a thread that was nearly as big around as the one leading
to Carson, but the reservoir she represented was no bigger than the
one inside of Rachel. I expanded my awareness into each of them, and
there was one thread that was different than all of the rest. I
tracked it to its destination and found James, locked in combat
alongside Taggart and others against Brandon.

Heath had
warned me about the fact that his ability didn't work on Brandon, but
I hadn't been prepared for what that really meant. Brandon was
fighting some of our best warriors and it was obvious that he was
just biding his time, waiting for one of them to make a mistake that
would let him start picking them off.

Each and every
hybrid fighting him moved with the speed and precision that was only
found in the most deadly of our kind, but they were no match for
him—not individually, not even collectively. Brandon moved with
a speed and strength that allowed him to dodge out of the way of
multiple attacks all at once and check the blows that he couldn't
avoid.