Gemini Cell: A Shadow Ops Novel (Shadow Ops series Book 4) (35 page)

Schweitzer shouted, poured all his will into their twisting torso and threw.

Please. Oh, dear God, please,
he thought as the chunk of wood spun through the air, level with the ground, its shadow blotting out the reflection of the starlight on the damp grass as it went, making the ground shimmer beneath it.

It caught her feet squarely as she leapt, turning the jump into a stumble and then a fall, the bone-framed head pitching forward into the grass just as the hay mower passed over it.

The body jerked and spun, sucked into the whirling blades with amazing speed, the Gold Operator’s shrill scream suddenly cut off as her throat, her lungs, her torso were ground to chuck and vomited back out.

Schweitzer got them on their feet as tiny chunks of meat and bone spattered them, a rain of flesh that had once been a thing of magic and death.

Sarah was screaming, though whether from victory or terror he couldn’t tell. Something hard collided with them and they went facedown in the grass. Cam, on their back, claws piercing their head this time, holding them in place, eyes canted, giving them a full view of the house’s intact side, the edge of the driveway beyond, a third Gold Operator galloping up it, gaze fixed on Sarah, chanting a litany in a strange language Schweitzer couldn’t understand.

Ninip’s voice finally reached him.
Let me help you! You cannot face them alone. You are too weak. Let me . . .

Schweitzer felt his own exhaustion. His spirit was leaden, his phantom limbs too heavy to lift. He knew he couldn’t resist the jinn should he let him fully out again, knew that Ninip would turn him against his family. He had always thought of the jinn as predators, but he had forgotten the primary rule of how predators operated. The wolf never took on the strongest buck in the herd. It chased down the young, the sick, the isolated.

It didn’t like fair fights. Given the choice between the hot blood of Sarah and Patrick or the cold force of the Gold Operators, Schweitzer knew which Ninip would choose. He couldn’t bear the thought of Sarah and Patrick dying, not when he had just found them. It was the worst thing he could possibly imagine.

Save his being the instrument of that death.

Schweitzer pushed with everything he had. Cam’s claws held them firmly in place. He couldn’t move their shared body an inch. He felt Cam’s knees lift off their back, replaced by the new Gold Operator’s feet as he prepared to leap for Sarah and Patrick. Two ribs snapped under the weight.

And, at long last, the artist, the professional, the victor of scores of life-or-death contests, gave in. Ninip’s voice receded back into a whining insect buzz.

Oh, Sarah, you fucking hero. You brave warrior. You give them hell.
Schweitzer forced the thought out to her, sending it down the link that connected them. He hunted for the smell of her perfume one last time.

I’m sorry I failed you. If there’s a way to find you in that mess, I will. I swear I will.

Ninip had gone silent, Schweitzer felt horror dawning through the jinn as he realized what Schweitzer intended to do.
No!
Ninip wailed.
Do not . . .

Schweitzer thought of his son, his youth a question mark, a life about to unfold. He mourned that potentiality, the man that he would someday become.
Close your eyes, little man.
Then, he fixed his wife’s face in his mind, tracing the hard line of her jaw, her narrowed eyes blazing defiance at her enemy. Sarah the warrior queen. His love, his light, braver and stronger than he ever could hope to be.

Good-bye, baby. I love you.

With the last shreds of will left to him, he turned on Ninip, pushed with all he had left, and forced the jinn all the way out, sending him tumbling free into the void, drawn inexorably to the storm beyond.

Schweitzer shut his eyes, pulled his senses inward, readied himself for his own tumble, the edges of the nothingness rushing in hungrily to take him. He steadied himself against the cold, tried to find the calm that had come to him before. Failed.

He pushed his will out to his ears, dialing his hearing down through the spectrum so that he could hear the minute scramblings of the ants beneath him. He listened to the deafening click of their mandibles and the pounding of their marching legs, grateful for the noise. Anything that would keep him from hearing Sarah and Patrick’s screams.

He realized two things.

The first: His power over his hearing was as acute as it had ever been with Ninip, his control as fine.

The second: He was still in his body and in complete control. The fatigue and despair had left him. His left hand sprawled over a stone. He flexed his fingers experimentally.

The rock split and fell away in halves, the fine powder of its remnants gusting off his palm.

Schweitzer felt Cam leap off his back, and exploded onto his own heels, propelling himself after Cam.

The strength in Schweitzer’s legs was incredible, as strong as it had been when Ninip had been in control. He felt the same strength flowing through him, his presence . . . larger, more vital than before. Almost . . . alive.

He came down on Cam, bearing the former Air Force PJ to the ground just short of Sarah, his head crunching against the steering console, the embedded cleaver snapping free.

Schweitzer could hear the other Gold Operator lumbering toward them, painfully slow, it seemed now.

But now Schweitzer’s training came surging to the fore. Without the jinn’s jabbering battle lust, he was free to concentrate. There was no rage now, only the cold artistry of the professional warrior he had once been.

Schweitzer placed his knee against Cam’s neck and grabbed his arm, pivoting and locking it back as his combatives instructor had taught him, as he had practiced hundreds of times. There was no need for strength. The torque of his position overpowered Cam’s flailings, a perfect pivot point between his pinning knee and his pulling arm. Schweitzer took his time, leisurely bending the limb back, twisting, tearing. He moved slowly.

Because now, he understood.

It had been lies. Lies from Ninip, from Jawid, from Eldredge, from everyone.

It was a lie that Ninip made him stronger. The jinn kept Schweitzer in check, and then, when Schweitzer had asserted himself, sapped his power. With the jinn gone, Schweitzer’s self was ascendant.

He had never needed Ninip.

The millennia the jinn had spent “soaking” in the void made no difference. The only thing all those years had grown was Ninip’s evil nature, his addiction to death and blood, his desire for violence. To die was to touch the source of the magic, to become imbued with it, to bring it with you when you were returned to a body. Whether you were dead two hours or two thousand years, Schweitzer was “jinn” every bit as much as Ninip was. He had the same power as any jinn, as all of them. From the moment Jawid’s magic had returned his soul to his corpse, he always had.

“Jinn” was the word Jawid used to describe the souls he summoned back. In the absence of anything better, it was the word that all in the Gemini Cell used. But the truth was that they didn’t know what Ninip was, what the things that drove the Gold Operators were.

Schweitzer didn’t know either, but he knew one thing—Schweitzer was different from the rest of them. He had one critical advantage.

He’d learned it from Sarah.

And that tipped the sum, so that there was no difference between Ninip and Schweitzer. Dead was dead. Souls were souls.

He gave a final heave, and Cam’s arm came away, trailing fronds of broken sinew, the joint dangling wetly. He brought it down just as the other Gold Operator reached the tractor, climbed up.

The limb hit him hard enough to knock the Gold Operator backward. Schweitzer followed with a peroneal kick, what he commonly used when he wanted an opponent down. It connected with a crack, and the Gold Operator tumbled, his shoulders skidding through the turf, sending clods of soil arcing.

Schweitzer reveled, not with the base rage of Ninip but in the joy of his years of training once again responding to his command, now paired with the power of the void’s magic. The two divided made him a blunt instrument, the two joined made him a scalpel again, precise, focused.

Deadly.

Schweitzer made his way down to his remaining opponent slowly, leisurely.
Now I’m going to rip off your own arm and beat you senseless with it.

But as the Gold Operator rose, he had another idea.

The Gold Operators fought like wild animals, as he’d been forced to fight when he’d shared his body with Ninip. Now, he fought like a finely tuned machine.

He caught his enemy’s clumsy punch at the wrist, leaning aside and jerking the arm taut. Then, he brought his right elbow down on his enemy’s forearm, using his full weight. He’d broken many an arm on ops with this technique. The Gold Operator’s bones were magically enhanced, but so was Schweitzer’s strength. The radius and ulna snapped like twigs, his opponent’s fist dangling loosely. Schweitzer’s claws, horns, and spines were gone, his jaw was clamped tightly to his skull, tongue firmly in his mouth. Those extravagances were Ninip’s calling cards, the flailings of a soul driven mad by too many years in the storm. He didn’t need them.

Schweitzer was a footman. Years with the teams had taught him discipline, the quiet valor of a professional.

But it was Sarah who had truly taught him right from wrong, in the soul-deep way that allowed ethical action in an instant, when the pressure was on. Ninip would have said it was womanish, weak.

But Schweitzer felt the strength of it flowing through him, powerful enough to make the might of the Gold Operators not insignificant but finite. A thing with limits. A thing that could be beaten.

The monster in his hands drove its head forward, fangs clamping over him, piercing through his shoulder and chest, lodging there.

Ninip would have raged at the insult, pride wounded by an enemy’s gaining purchase on his body. But Schweitzer the professional recognized the tactical advantage. The move held the enemy fast. Schweitzer punched his own hand forward, not bothering with claws, allowing the rigidity of his pointed fingers to puncture his enemy’s abdomen, walking his fingers past the wall of muscle, over the dead organs, until he found the spine at the lumbar vertebrae and gripped it tightly.

They’d lied to him. They’d told him Sarah and Patrick were dead. They’d told him that without Ninip he would go back into the void. They’d told him that his short time in the void made him weaker than Ninip with his thousands of years of death.

All lies. He’d believed every one.

The betrayal, the silver-tongued talk of service to the nation, the wasted time. Rage grew in him, and Schweitzer pushed it down.
Focus. Mission first. Emotion never helps.
He tightened his grip, felt the bones grinding in his palm.

The Gold Operator divined his intent, worked its jaw harder, trying to bite through him.

Schweitzer didn’t give it the chance.

He yanked with all his might. At first the bones held, and he struggled with the momentary panic that he might have overplayed his hand, left himself vulnerable to his enemy’s counterstrike. He felt the sharp teeth grinding against his scapula, his ribs.

But then he felt the spine bend, snap, and finally come dragging out through the thing’s stomach, leaving it to fold in half like an old coat suddenly off the hanger.

He turned as Cam rose, reaching for Sarah with his remaining arm, and stabbed the handful of bone and gristle into his buttock, lodging it there, a handle he used to drag the monster back down to the ground, where he planted one foot on its back, shoved it roughly toward the blades.

Sarah sat in the driver’s seat, staring. Finally calm, Schweitzer could concentrate on his own augmented senses. He could smell the slight tang of sweat in his wife’s perspiration, the sweet scent of her breathing, tiny traces that would have normally been overpowered by the oil and vinyl stink of the tractor under her. He dialed down, digging through the odors until he found what he was looking for.

The perfume was so faint it could barely be called a trace, a tiny patch of skin behind her ear, where she hadn’t scrubbed enough during the last shower.

But to Schweitzer it was overpowering, it was all.

He felt the slight ache, the hollow left by Ninip’s absence, bulge and fill out, a fender dent pushed back into form, buoyed from within by the expansion of his own fullness. Now, in death, Schweitzer felt more alive than ever before.

And now, without Ninip’s competition, he truly knew his power. The strength suffused him, the lightness in his limbs made him feel as if he could float. Every fiber of his body answered him, reported its condition, every atom in the world around him pulsed with information, pulsing at his touch. He tasted the air, he vibrated with the tiny tremors of the ground beneath him.

Jim Schweitzer the SEAL was an artist.

Jim Schweitzer the jinn was a god.

He itched to test his control, to find the limits of his power. But Sarah still sat in the tractor seat, Patrick was still bundled under one arm, awake and staring.

Cam still struggled feebly under his boot.

Schweitzer leaned back, gave Sarah a mock bow, gestured at the blades. He channeled the air, his lungs obeying him easily now, the muscles around his rib cage answering with precision, stretching to drop the pressure, then squeezing tight with precise control to send the air spiraling up his ragged trachea, the muscles of his throat crushing down around the wound to shape the words he needed. No more power, just greater control. But it made all the difference in the world.

“Well,” Jim Schweitzer said, in a gravelly approximation of his old voice. “You going to do the honors? I can’t hold him forever.”

Sarah gaped for another moment, then stepped on the gas.

Schweitzer stepped aside as Cam jerked and thrashed into the whirling knives, one leg shooting off into the darkness as the rest of him dissolved, and the tractor jumped with the effort of rendering him down.

Sarah killed the engine, sat staring.