The Psy-Changeling Collection (156 page)
“Yes.” She jerked at Dev’s response, having forgotten she still held the phone to her ear. “Any way it could be legit?” Dev asked.
She was too shaken up to answer.
“Why use ‘fight for him’? It’s an odd choice.” Clay began doing that thing with her ponytail again and maybe it was that that calmed her down enough to think.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. “When we had that bust-up, I told him I’d fight for him if he fought for himself.”
“Give me that.” Dorian slipped the phone out of her lifeless fingers. “Did you trace the e-mail?” A pause. “You’re sure?”
As she waited, Talin’s earlier anger grew into an inferno, but this time, it was directed not at a disease she couldn’t name, but at this faceless stranger. “Who is this person to demand something for Jon’s life? What right do they have?”
Clay’s body grew very still. “The language—it’s Psy. A life reduced to a risk-benefit ratio.” He paused. “Judd’s contact must’ve come through, set things in motion. I owe him.”
Glancing up at him, Talin noticed he was rubbing at his temple again. She was about to reach up with her own hand when Dorian spoke.
“Fine,” he said, ending the call. “Dev got another hit—the possible mole this time—but he told me that he had someone trace the e-mail. It was easy, because whoever sent it didn’t know how to hide their tracks.”
Talin didn’t dare breathe. “Nebraska?”
“Not only that. They tracked it down all the way to Cinnamon Springs.”
Her hand crushed the back of Clay’s shirt. “Jon’s in that lab.” It was a storm inside of her, this need to reclaim what was hers to protect. But no, she had to think. Her brain wasn’t fuzzy now—in fact, it was almost dizzying how clearly she could think. Strange, given that the disease had to be escalating. “We can’t just barge in. The lab is too huge.”
Clay tugged at her ponytail, raising her face to him. “We bring in the pack and the wolves, we can do it.”
Talin had never had that much strength behind her. Her mind filled with a split-second montage of the people she had met—Nico, Tamsyn, Nate, Lucas, Sascha, Faith, and Vaughn. That kind of backup, she realized, was both a privilege and a responsibility. “No.” It was a painful decision. “We’ll lose too many people.”
“Pack is One, Tally. We bleed for one another.”
“I know.” She hugged him, strong enough now to accept the protective violence that was a part of him. “But it doesn’t matter. Twelve hours is too short a time frame to mount an organized attack. They might kill Jon before we ever got close enough.”
“Or,” Dorian said, picking up and unrolling a printout of the lab schematics taken from Judd’s data crystal, “they could have a built-in self-destruct mechanism.” He tapped several spots on the plan. “The lab is designed to collapse if you apply pressure at specific points—all those spots are internal. I’d guess they have the whole place wired. Input a specific code and boom.”
The coldness of such a plan shook Talin to the core. “They’d kill their own?”
“Without a pause,” Clay and Dorian said in concert.
People like that, she thought, wouldn’t hesitate to destroy a teenage boy if they didn’t get what they wanted. “Will they be able to track it back to us if I reply to this e-mail?” She copied the address, opened a new window.
“No,” Dorian reassured her. “I’ve set it up to encrypt all outgoing messages.” He tapped in a quick code. “This will feed an encryption worm into their system, too.”
Nodding, she typed in a single line:
What do you want?
Neither of the men said anything as she pushed Send.
They waited in silence. Dorian shoved a hand through his hair and began stalking up and down the makeshift runway. Clay, though he remained unmoving, was a vibrating column of rage.
She reached up to massage his temples with gentle strokes. “Maybe this person isn’t evil. He’s prepared to help Jon.”
“Why now? Why not the other children?” His arms held her firm against him, though he bent his head so she didn’t have to stand on tiptoe. “Whatever it is he wants, we’ll give it to him. DarkRiver has more than enough funds.”
“Thank you.”
He growled at her. “Thank me again for taking care of my mate and I’ll have to get mean.”
Mate
.
There was that word again, that incredible, impossible word. She knew it had been nothing more than a slip of the tongue on his part, but she hugged the mistake to her heart.
A second later, something flashed in the corner of her eye and she twisted to look at the screen. Striding back to them, Dorian opened the e-mail.
One day, I’m going need help to retrieve someone else. When I ask, will you answer?
“Hell,” Clay muttered.
“Yeah,” she said. “Not the mercenary demand we expected.” Reaching forward, she sent back a reply.
Will you trust my word?
The response was close to instantaneous.
Humans have an odd thing called honor. Jonquil seems to believe in yours and he is an intelligent boy. I will hold you to your honor.
There was something deeply poignant in those words. Whoever this Psy was, whatever he wanted, he wasn’t evil.
“Say yes,” Clay told her. “I’ll answer the damn IOU.”
She angled her body so he couldn’t see her next message until it was too late.
How do I know your request won’t lead to more deaths?
“Damn it, Tally!” Clay gripped her upper arms. “Why the hell did you do that?”
“Because you’re mine to protect, too,” she snapped. She wouldn’t barter Clay’s life for Jon’s. Losing Jon would break her, but, Lord help her, she couldn’t give up Clay. Not even if it meant betraying her deepest principles. Not even if it meant killing. The realization should have nauseated her. It didn’t. Truth never did. “I’m not having you sacrifice yourself again!”
“God damn it.” He gripped her nape, spun her around to face him. Then he kissed her. Hard. “After this is over, I’m giving you a spanking.”
She felt her face go bright red, though she knew he was simply blowing off steam. “Men,” she muttered, then glanced at Dorian. He was attempting to look uninterested but she saw the grin in those bright blue eyes. “Dorian, I swear to God, if you laugh, I’m going to peel your flesh from your bones.”
He picked up her hand and kissed the underside of one wrist. “I like you, too.”
“Stop flirting with Tally.” Clay wrapped an arm around her waist. “Okay, this falls through, we still have the original plan—we go in through that supply chute. Let’s start double-checking our calculations on its probable location.”
And that was how they passed the minutes as they waited for the answer to a question that might cost a child his life and shatter something deep inside Talin. When it came, it was so unexpected, it stunned all three of them.
It was illogical of me to ask you—you have neither the manpower nor the connections to assist me. But I will
help Jonquil escape. Can you come to these coordinates at exactly 9 p.m.?
Detailed instructions followed.
Talin didn’t hesitate, knowing Clay would get her there in time.
Yes!
The reply was immediate.
According to my information, you will have a 15-minute window to the second, after I give the signal. The satellites will be looking in another direction. Stay out of the coverage zone until then.
If you fail to get here in time, I may no longer be able to protect him. He is a boy with the capacity to achieve much. His life is worth more than this senseless death.
Don’t be late.
With those last three words, this unknown Psy won Talin’s loyalty.
The Ghost walked
into an upscale bar in downtown New York and was immediately shown to the table where his acquaintance awaited. She was a minor official, this meeting a front. But the public location would serve as the perfect alibi.
The bomb exploded
to life exactly sixty-five minutes later.
The majority of
the Psy Council convened in an emergency session eleven minutes after that. Two Councilors were nominated to do a physical investigation, while another took on the task of analyzing the bomb debris. The remaining members focused on damage control.
For a crucial window of time, the Implant lab was no longer under a Councilor’s direct supervision. During that same window, its security forces fell to below fifty percent of capacity, the majority of Ming LeBon’s army being pulled up into the PsyNet to strangle the spread of information. Their bodies remained in the lab, in a form of natural
suspended animation, but their minds were working with furious speed.
In the chaos, no one noticed the surveillance satellites blink.
At three minutes
past nine, in the black of true night, Talin maneuvered a seemingly ancient truck over a deserted piece of land several miles from where the lab was supposed to be. The Psy’s terse message had come precisely one hundred and eighty seconds earlier:
Now
.
Another minute of dangerously fast driving later, she brought the truck to a stop near a small ramshackle cottage. Hidden as it was by the slope of the land and the overgrown vegetation, it was no wonder it had remained undisturbed. Or maybe it was the deadly laser fence a ways back, a fence that had been disabled at nine p.m. on the dot.
Leaving the engine running, she got out of the truck alone. The plan had been for the others to hide in the truck bed, in case their uncertain ally had failed to turn the satellites. The Psy already knew about Talin’s involvement in the investigation, so her being seen was no tactical disadvantage. The opposite applied to Clay and Dorian.
However, to their surprise, they had discovered the area to be heavy with concealing vegetation, including huge trees that had to have been transplanted here. It was as though someone had
wanted
to hide something.
After a hasty conference, both changelings had jumped out of the moving vehicle. Clay had gone cat. Meanwhile, Dorian had taken to the trees, rifle in hand. Right now, she knew his sniper’s eye was located on the door to the cabin. The predators were ready to pull her out if this proved to be a trap.
Half-sick with hope and fear, she stood in place, in spite of her need to get inside, waiting for the signal that would tell her no danger had been scented or sighted. When she glanced to the side, it was to glimpse a pair of night-glow eyes hidden in the forest. They blinked once.
Go
.
Vividly conscious of time ticking down, she ran to the door and pushed it open. She was prepared to find anything … except what she did find.
Jon and a little girl lay on their backs on the dirt floor.
With a soft cry, she dropped to her knees and checked their pulses. Both beat strong. It calmed her as she waited for Clay to come. But the seconds ticked past without any sign of him. Something had to have gone wrong. Her instinctive urge was to run out to help.
Clay watched Talin
walk in, his senses on high alert. A shift in the wind brought him Dorian’s scent … and that of another. The leopard listened to what the wind told it and knew he could leave that scent to Dorian. The other sentinel was already moving.
He kept his eyes on the cottage into which Talin had disappeared only a second ago. But he wasn’t blinded by focus—he heard the crack of a twig several meters away as someone stalked toward his mate. Fighting the protective urge shoving at him to move and get Tally out of there, he stayed in place, listening, watching.
The ugly metallic/dead/cold scent of Psy mingled with the more astringent odor of gun-cleaning fluid. His predator’s mind immediately understood that they had either missed a sentry or triggered sensors their ally had not known to disable. He lowered himself into a crouch, hidden in the vegetation. He’d told Tally to stay inside the cottage until he or Dorian came for her. Trusting her to stick to the plan, he turned his attention to the intruder.
The man came into sight seconds later. Dressed in black, he moved with the careful gait of a trained soldier. But that wasn’t what interested Clay. It was the emblem on his shoulder. Two snakes locked in combat. The leopard bit back a growl. That was the same uniform as those that had been worn by the men who had butchered the DawnSky deer clan in an unprovoked attack.
The Psy male’s eyes glinted pure black, no whites, no stars. He could be telepathing.
Clay had to make a split-second decision. If this was their contact, killing him would gain them nothing. But if it wasn’t, he had to take the man out. An instant later, the male made up his mind for him by going down into a shooting stance and taking aim at the door of the cottage.
Clay didn’t bother with finesse. If the Psy felt him coming, he was dead. So he attacked in a heavy, silent rage. The Psy managed to turn slightly before Clay’s claws hit his chest, smashing him to the forest floor. A burst of pain slammed into his brain but he was already ripping out the other man’s throat.
However, even with that thousandth-of-a-second warning, the Psy had managed to get in enough of a psychic blow that Clay’s nose bled as he shifted into human form and picked up the body, wiping away the blood with his hand. The body had to be disposed of and in a way that didn’t give away changeling involvement.
He spent precious seconds wrapping the body up in a tarp from the back of the truck and dumping it in the bed. It was a good thing Tally and Jon weren’t changeling; otherwise, they would have detected the scent of death. Aware of time counting down, he nonetheless returned to the site of the kill and covered his tracks. The Psy soldier would appear to have vanished into thin air.
“Oh, God,” Talin
whispered, gritting her teeth and staying in place as the clock ticked over to ten minutes past nine. Clay was a sentinel, she told herself. He would defeat whatever enemy roamed the woods. Trying to distract herself, she brushed the hair off Jon’s and the little girl’s faces. The little one was
clearly of Persian origin, her skin a dusky brown, her bone structure fine enough for a princess.
