Dusk (10 page)

The line went dead.

Solomon slowly tucked the phone back into his pocket. He’d never
find Lucy while his senses were going haywire like this. Energy swirled through
him in a stronger wave, and he swayed, overwhelmed. “Dammit,” he muttered,
pivoting. He knew exactly how to get to Greyson’s place. He just didn’t want
to.

****

Lucy staggered into her parents’ house and headed straight for her
room. “Have to leave them a note,” she told herself, shoving spare clothes into
her overnight bag. She was going away, because she couldn’t stay here. Her
nerves were fried, literally. Energy zoomed through her willy-nilly and she
didn’t like it one bit.

Thank God the parents are out tonight,
she thought as she headed back
downstairs, dragging the bag behind her. She scribbled them a quick note:

Gone to New York for the weekend. Will see you either late Sunday
or Monday. Love you!

She locked the door and headed down the sidewalk toward the town
center, not looking forward to sitting on a bus for half the night, but she
didn’t have a car. She couldn’t take her mother’s vehicle, so a bus would have
to do. She was lucky the town even had a station, given how isolated they were.
She ducked into the small building on the corner, sighing gratefully when she
saw that it was empty.
Well, empty except for stray cigarette butts and
garbage,
she thought, wrinkling her nose. She walked to the automatic
ticket dispenser and dug through her purse.

“One roundtrip to Manhattan,” she muttered to herself as she slid
her credit card into the machine. She punched a few buttons and her ticket slid
out. The bus would be here in ten minutes. Worry ate at her gut as she hovered
near the door. Should she wait outside? No one was there. She should be okay.
She rubbed her arm.

When the bus pulled up five minutes later, she hurried on,
gritting her teeth as she settled into her seat. Luckily, the bus wasn’t
crowded and she managed to find a seat to herself, so she wouldn’t have to
share with anyone. The emotions of the people around her grated on her nerves.
Everything felt louder. Too loud. She dug out her earbuds and stuck them in her
ears, but didn’t play any music. She plugged them into her phone for show. It
helped, a little.

What’s wrong with me?
she wondered, then jumped when her phone vibrated in her hand.
Eva.
She slid a finger across the display.

“Lucy, thank God. Are you all right?” Eva sounded stressed.

“Eva, I don’t know what’s happening to me,” Lucy whispered, eyeing
the couple across the aisle worriedly.

“Solomon said you’d paired,” Eva told her.

“He said something like that, but I don’t believe him.” Lucy
rubbed the bridge of her nose. “That’s crazy.”

“It’s not crazy. In fact, that makes more sense than anything else
right now,” Eva said.

“I don’t understand,” Lucy replied, grabbing at the window as the
bus lurched onto the road. The ring on her finger clicked against the sill, but
the cool glass soothed her prickly skin. “Why would that happen?”

“I think it had something to do with when he healed you,” Eva
explained. “He must have formed an affinity with you months ago.” She took a
deep breath and let it out. “Hell, I don’t know. I’m speculating. The one thing
I
do
know is that you had to agree. Give consent and let him in. It
doesn’t happen by accident.”

Lucy digested this. “He asked me if I trusted him.”

“Do you?”

She sighed. “Yeah. Dammit. I do.”

“Okay, let’s just go with the assumption that you’ve paired. If
that’s the case, you should be feeling things that make no sense.”

Lucy let out a short laugh. “Yeah. You could say that again.” The
couple across the aisle glared at her. Lucy shifted so that her back was to
them, and hunched down over her phone. Their irritation with her talking felt
like needles against her body. “What the hell is happening to me?”

“Remember when I paired with Greyson?” Eva asked.

“Yeah,” Lucy replied, warily. “You were happy. I don’t feel happy.
I feel like I just tried to swallow a giant fireball.”

Eva chuckled, even though Lucy hadn’t really been joking. “Yeah,
that’s part of it. The reason is, when you pair, you gain something. You become
a Sentry.”

Lucy chewed on her lip. “I thought that was just a formality. Like
marrying him and taking his name.” She played with Solomon’s ring nervously.
She thought about Eva reading her emotions and stilled her fingers. “Or maybe
not,” she whispered.

“No, it’s not a formality. You know I can sense people’s emotions
now. It’s not always fun,” Eva explained.

“Well, shit.” That made sense. Too much sense. “Yeah, I can feel
that, but there’s more. It’s not just empathy, Eva. I feel like the hand of God
is about to come down on our heads.”

Eva sighed. “Yeah, we can feel that too. And there’s more going on
with it all. We’re not sure why, but it has something to do with you and
Solomon pairing. It did something to the Stronghold net. Something big.”

Lucy’s breath caught. “Is this phone line secure?” Dear God, if
someone overheard them talking about the Stronghold net…

“After all I went through with my stepfather hacking into things?
Hell, yes, it’s secure.”

“Thank God,” Lucy breathed.

“Anyway, the energy is fluctuating all over the place, in the net,
and in
us.
” Eva’s voice had risen with each word. “You know that the
Sentries power the net, right?”

What? They do? “Well, I do now.” Lucy paused. “Eva, what’s really
going on? I’m scared.”

“I don’t know, and that’s not good. Greyson called Solomon and
told him to come here. The pillar is flaring energy like a sparkler. It’s
unnerving.” Eva sounded even more stressed than when she’d first called. “Where
are you? That’s another thing. You shouldn’t be separated from Solomon. Not
now. And he can’t concentrate when you’re off somewhere where he can’t protect
you.”

Lucy frowned. “I had to get away from him.”

“This isn’t his fault, Lucy. You panicked.”

Shit. Eva knew her too well. “I’m not going to be gone long. Just
until Sunday night.”

“That’s too long. Where are you going, anyway?”

Lucy rubbed her eyes. She was so damn tired. “If I tell you, you’ll
tell Solomon.”

“Where are you?” Solomon’s voice suddenly growled through the
cellphone.

Startled, Lucy almost dropped it. She took a deep breath. “I’m
safe, Solomon. Don’t worry about me.”

“You have no idea what you are doing,” he bit out.

Lucy flinched. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t stay there. It was too much.”
She wanted to hang up on him, and she wanted him to come get her. Her own
emotions made no sense anymore.
Although, running hadn’t particularly helped
with the looming feeling of doom,
she mused darkly. “I’ll be okay,” she
told him.

“Where are you?” he demanded.

“I’m safe, Solomon,” she said, then slid her hand across the
display. Almost immediately her phone buzzed again. She declined the call, then
powered off the device.
Dammit,
she thought, pressing her forehead
against the glass window.
Now what do I do?

****

“Shit!” Solomon cursed, almost flinging the phone across the room,
but Greyson rescued it and handed it back to Eva.

“Maybe you can find her via the net,” Greyson suggested, tugging
Solomon by the arm to the grey pillar that dominated the center of his rustic
cabin.

Solomon gritted his teeth and compressed his panic over Lucy’s
distance into a little ball that he shoved in the corner of his mind. “Fine.”
He slapped both hands onto the grey stone. Immediately, a diagnostic screen
appeared, but he wasn’t looking at the pillar with his eyes. Instead, he let
his senses sink into the Stronghold net. They could all do this: interact
directly, mind to net, but Solomon was the best at it. He was the one who
reprogrammed it when needed. He was the one who developed new tech. He was the
one who truly understood how it all worked.
And yet, for all my skill, I can’t
find one small, infuriating woman.

“Is he okay?” he heard Eva ask Greyson. “I’m worried about him.
And Lucy. You know what can happen. He grabbed my phone before I could warn
her.”

“Hush,” Greyson murmured.

Solomon grimaced, concentrating. The energy fluctuations were
increasing in speed and intensity. It almost felt as if they were winding up
the Stronghold net to a new power level. He quickly shuffled through the
topmost architecture of the network, then dropped down into the framework
section. With his mind, the net looked like a delicate tracery of energy lines
set against a fuzzed darkness. Usually the lines were thin and clean and
bright, but right now they pulsed with little globules of energy. The pulses
flashed down the lines, creating new ones. He touched one, delicately, and it
immediately stabilized. The line was brighter than it had been before the
surge, but it was no longer pulsing. Quickly, before the entire thing crashed—
which
would be very, very bad,
he thought—he stretched out his mind and touched
all of the network, all at once.

It hurt. It was as if he’d plugged his own nervous system into a solar
system, but he refused to give into the pain. He concentrated and sent his will
along the lines, settling them all until the Stronghold net glowed brighter
than ever before. Slowly, carefully, he pulled out, wincing as his senses
tingled with the after-echo of trauma. The taste of Spiders faded.

“Solomon,” someone murmured.

He groaned, then rolled over. “How did I get on the floor?” he
croaked.

“Greyson caught you before you went down.”

It was a woman’s voice. Eva. He remembered. “Stronghold—”

“Is stable,” his brother assured him.

Solomon tried to sit up, but his brother’s warm hands on his
shoulders kept him prone.

“Easy. Let yourself rest a moment,” Greyson said. “We were afraid
to move you away from the pillar.”

Solomon did as he asked, taking inventory of his body as he lay on
the floor. Someone had placed a pillow under his head. His empathy felt acutely
sensitive, as if he’d poured a ton of energy through it.
Which, in effect,
you did,
he told himself. At least the echoes were gone. He breathed
deeply… in and out. In and out. When he sat up, this time Greyson let him. His
brother and Eva hovered over him until he stood up and ran his hands over his
face and back through his hair.

“How do you feel?” Eva asked. “The energy fluctuations are gone.”

“I watched you reset the entire framework,” Greyson said, a hint
of worry in his voice. “That was dangerous.”

“It had to be done,” he told his brother. “Lucy is traveling east,”
he added, surprising himself. He hadn’t even realized that he could feel her
clearly until he spoke, but now his sense of her gleamed in the silence of his
soul like a beacon. “I must go.” He glanced at the windows, staring at the dark
glass.
How long was I in the net?
Abruptly he realized that only a few
lamps lit the large room.

“You’ve been unconscious for eight hours,” Eva told him. “It’s one
a.m.”

Solomon stared at her.

“Can you tell where she is headed?” Greyson asked, pulling out his
cell phone. “With the extra energy, all of our senses are stronger. Isaac
called me an hour ago to tell me that both he and Bruno can feel it, too.”

Solomon shook his head. “East.”

“She’ll go to New York,” Eva said. “It’s familiar.”

“And big enough to hide in,” Greyson added. “I’ll call Bruno and
have him watch for her until you get there.”

Solomon nodded. “Thank you.” He turned and regarded the pillar in
the center of the room. The stone was lighter. It almost glowed in the dark
room. He frowned, thinking. “Our pairing destabilized the Stronghold net.”

“No, it energized it,” Eva said, tapping the pillar. Her face
looked pinched and tired. “It’s stable now that you retraced the framework. And
it’s stronger.”

“What would happen if Isaac found a mate? Or Bruno?” Solomon had
to ask, taking the question to its logical conclusion. “None of us knew that
pairing would add power to the network, though we should have. We are its
power, after all. Our lives give it energy.” He considered the past. When his
parents paired, the Stronghold net was in its infancy. And theirs was the only
pairing they knew of, all through their long lives as brothers. “It’s not
surprising that we did not know,” he murmured.

“There would be more power in Stronghold should our brothers mate,”
Greyson said quietly. “And I have a feeling we should prepare ourselves for
that day. Events seem to be moving at a faster pace, these days.” He glanced
up. “There is more in heaven and space than meets the eye.”

Solomon sighed. “Have we been ignoring our best weapon for
fighting the Spiders, all these years?”

“If we have, we’ll figure it out out,” Eva said, certainty in her
voice.