Psy-Changeling [12] Heart of Obsidian (2 page)

Chapter 2

THE DRESSER MIRROR
against the wall opposite the bathroom door lay smashed, shards of glass on the carpet, on the bed, on her as she sat hunched in the center of that bed. A smeared streak of wet red sliced her cheek from where a splinter had flown directly at her, but she appeared otherwise uninjured.

Not far from the mirror lay the broken pieces of the mug she’d used to shatter the glass, the spilled tea a rusty stain on the dresser itself and on the pale rug that covered the polished wood of the floor.

Kaleb didn’t ask for the reason behind her behavior. “Stay still.” Gathering up the larger fragments of glass, he teleported them out into the waste receptacle. He knew a teleporter who could take blood itself out of carpet, but Kaleb’s ability worked on a larger scale. He could cause an earthquake that would devour a city, rip an airjet out of the sky with his mind, even create a tidal wave—what he could not do was pick up every tiny sliver of glass.

“You can’t stay in this room,” he said. “Not until it’s been cleaned.”

She shifted to press her back against the headboard in silent rebellion. Since forcing her compliance would run counter to his intention to win her trust, he reworked the situation, came up with another viable solution. “Hold on.”

His guest let out a surprised gasp, grabbing at the sheets as the entire bed lifted a foot off the floor. Holding it and the other furniture aloft, Kaleb used his Tk to roll up the thick rug that ran the entire length of the room and covered ninety percent of the floor. There appeared to be no shards on the floor itself, but he walked around the room to make certain before returning to his position by the door, the rolled-up rug at his feet.

Gauging the impact of the stains caused by the tea, he accessed a visual file he made certain to keep up-to-date and, using the image as a lock, teleported the rug straight into the incinerator of the region’s central waste processing and recycling plant.

Neither his DNA nor hers could be permitted to fall into the wrong hands.

He had her lifted off the sheets and the bedding rolled up and in the same incinerator before she realized what was happening. Placing her back on the now-stripped bed, he brought in a spare rug from the storage space under the house and rolled it out. “Try not to damage this one,” he said as he resettled the bed. “It’s hand-knotted silk.”

A vivid blue swirled with cream and a hint of indigo, he’d bought it five years ago, when his companies first started turning profits that went well beyond what even the most conservative individual would consider a healthy safety margin. “Is there anything else you’d like to destroy? Do it now so I can catch the shrapnel.”

The woman on the bed stared at him, before doing something he hadn’t anticipated. She picked up the small vase on the bedside table and threw it at something above his head. He ducked, turning just in time to stop the projectile from impacting with the tiny sensor light that gave away the position of the fire alarm.

As the vase hovered in front of the blinking red light, he began to comprehend the very rational reason behind her apparently irrational act. “It’s not a camera. And the mirror was just a mirror.” Even as he spoke, he understood that she wasn’t going to believe him. The alarm would be in pieces the instant he walked out the door, even if she had to use every projectile in the room to smash it.

Returning the vase to the table, he reached up to remove the alarm from the wall, his height—unlike hers—more than sufficient for the task. The removal wouldn’t compromise her safety; he’d make certain of that fact. Task complete, he got rid of the device and once more faced the woman who hadn’t taken her eyes off him since he’d appeared in the bedroom. “Anything else?”

Her gaze went to the recessed ceiling light.

“I take that out,” he said, “and you’ll be in the dark.”

No change in her focus.

Since the battle wasn’t a crucial one in this war, he ’ported in a small table lamp from another part of the house. “Go over that.”

She took her time doing so, but when she turned it on rather than attempt to destroy it, he judged her satisfied that it wasn’t rigged with surveillance equipment. Dismantling the ceiling light, he scanned the room for anything else that might read as suspicious to her mind. Nothing stood out, and given the areas on which she’d focused, it was likely she’d already checked the walls and visually examined the ceiling.

Categorically not a mind functioning on the animal level alone, regardless of what he’d seen of her twisted mental pathways.

Walking into the bathroom on that thought, he removed both the light and a ceiling-mounted heat lamp, replacing them with a tall, freestanding waterproof lamp she could take apart if necessary. The mirror went, too, and he removed the fine grille on the airflow system so she could see there was nothing beyond but a silent fan meant to mitigate condensation.

By the time he returned to the terrace, his skin had cooled, but it heated up quickly enough, even in the light breeze coming off the trees on the other side of the gorge. With each screw he drilled into place, he considered the room where she’d been held, the probable response of her captors when they’d lost the feed from her cell to sudden static. It would’ve lasted mere seconds, left them staring at the image of an empty room after it cleared.

The static was a useful tool he’d discovered as a teen while experimenting with his abilities. The sheer strength of his telekinesis meant he put out a low-level “hum” that wasn’t discernible to humanoid ears, but that made animals uneasy and messed with technology. He had it under control now, of course. The only time he permitted the hum to escape his shields was when he needed to obfuscate his presence in front of a camera or to otherwise disrupt technological surveillance. It was an aspect of his abilities known to only one other living individual aside from Kaleb.

Nevertheless, given the speed of the teleport, his guest’s captors would suspect the involvement of a high-level Tk, and there were very few of them in the pool, but no one would know it had been Kaleb. Not until he was ready.

And then they would beg for mercy.

Even the most powerful, most Silent begged in the end, the conditioning cracking in the face of a scrabbling panic that blinded them to the fact Kaleb had no mercy in him.

The final screw in place, he packed up his equipment and teleported it away. It was odd to see the terrace surrounded by metal railings—they allowed a view out from between the bars but no entry to the black maw of the gorge. Not even his guest was thin enough to fit in the spaces between the bars.

Sir.

The polite telepathic knock belonged to Silver, his aide and a member of the quietly influential Mercant family.

He opened the telepathic channel.
What is it?
He didn’t remind her that he’d asked not to be disturbed—Silver wouldn’t be going against his express orders unless it was necessary.

There’s been an attack against a small think tank in Khartoum. The think tank had just announced the parameters of its next research project: the benefits to Psy of greater political cooperation and social interaction with humans and changelings.

So, he thought, the next volley had been shot in the civil war that loomed over the PsyNet.
How many dead?

All ten of those in the building at the time. A poisonous gas introduced into their air supply.

Has Pure Psy claimed responsibility?
The radical pro-Silence group had gone quiet in the aftermath of its decisive defeat in the California region at the hands of a force comprised of the SnowDancer wolves and the DarkRiver leopards, as well as Psy who looked to the two Councilors in the area—Nikita Duncan and Anthony Kyriakus—for guidance. The humans, too, had joined in the resistance to Pure Psy’s attempt to seize control of the greater San Francisco and Sierra Nevada region, leading to an alliance that crossed racial boundaries Pure Psy wanted to maintain at all costs.

Such a motive seemed to run counter to the group’s avowed focus on the PsyNet, but underlying Pure Psy’s outwardly “rational” rhetoric was the belief that the Psy were superior to the other races, that if their people would only seal the cracks that had begun to appear in the foundations of the Silence Protocol, they would once again be the most powerful race on the planet.

Any attempt to better integrate the Psy populace with the humans and changelings was thus seen not only as an attack against the Protocol, but as a threat to the genetic superiority of the Psy race. It was an unsound premise. Kaleb knew the Psy were as flawed as the humans or changelings—he’d come of age in rooms ripe with the scent of congealing blood, screams echoing in his ears; he knew the dark underbelly of their race had simply been buried, not erased.

Confirmed,
Silver said after a short delay.
Pure Psy has taken responsibility for the poisoning, and the claim was public.
She sent him a visual, her telepathy strong enough that it was crisp, clear.

The side of the building owned by the think tank had been emblazoned with the image of a star with the letter
P
at the center. The
P
was white, the area around it black. Below were the words
Absolution in Purity, JOIN US
.

This is new,
he said to Silver.

Yes. It’s the first appearance of this decal.

A decal. That explained how the Pure Psy operatives had been able to put it up so fast. He wondered if the religious undertone was intentional. Vasquez, the faceless man at the head of Pure Psy since Councilor Henry Scott’s demise, might be a fanatic, but he was a smart fanatic, as evidenced by the fact that no one had been able to dig up any verifiable details about his physical appearance. Now, even as he decried those whose Silence was fractured, who believed emotion was not the enemy of the Psy race, he used an emotive call to arms.

Clever.

Or psychotic.

Why hasn’t this news hit the Net?
Kaleb might have been distracted over the past few hours, but his mind continued to scan the pathways of the Net, and he’d heard nothing of what was a significant act of aggression.

Bad timing,
answered Silver’s mental voice.
Pure Psy operatives must’ve finished putting up the decal seconds before an Enforcement vehicle cruised down the street and spotted it. The officers became suspicious, checked the building, and discovered the bodies.

As a result, the external processing is being completed while the city sleeps, the decal removed. The only reason I have the data is because of a cousin high in Enforcement Command in the country—they’ve managed to black out the incident as far as the media are concerned.

The failure to gain Netwide exposure would only incite Pure Psy to further acts of lethal violence.
Is your contact any closer to infiltrating the inner circle?
While Pure Psy was doing an excellent job of creating the instability he needed for his current endgame, the group was a rogue element. Kaleb preferred iron control in all things.

No. Vasquez is very, very careful.

Continue to monitor the situation in Khartoum
.
Keep me updated.

Yes, sir.

Hearing a tiny sound at his back as he closed the telepathic link, he walked to the railing instead of turning, his eyes on the impenetrable depths of the gorge.

The lights went off a second later, leaving the terrace lit only by the stars, the moon at full dark tonight.

Bare feet padding on the wood of the terrace, a whisper of scent, clean and fresh, a flutter of green as she came to stand beside him—though she left a good three meters of distance between them. Dressed in a green T-shirt and soft gray pajama pants, she’d clearly washed her hair, but it hung tangled and knotted around her face, hiding her profile from him as she closed her fingers around the bars, squeezing the cold of the metal so hard her skin turned ghostly white.

“It’s only a prison,” he said, “so long as you aren’t in control of your mind.” If he dropped the shields in which he’d encased her, she became vulnerable to even the weakest of their brethren, her mind shorn of its protective coating. “Rebuild your shields and I’ll set you free.”

It was a lie.

He would never let her go.

Chapter 3

IT WAS DIFFERENT
here, the harsh, cutting light that had hurt her eyes until her head throbbed nowhere in evidence. Everything was soft and unobtrusive. No, not everything. Not the man who had brought her to this place. He was hard.

Like black ice.

He spoke to her in a voice that made her skin prickle, said words that sometimes made sense and sometimes became lost by the time they reached her through the twisted labyrinth of her mind. She’d created that labyrinth, she knew that. What she didn’t know was why. Why would she sabotage her own mind? Why would she consciously hobble her own abilities?

The labyrinth was why they’d kept her in that white room for so long she couldn’t remember the beginning anymore, couldn’t think of the last time she’d truly been able to
sleep
. The glare had beaten down on her like a vicious hammer, even if she curled up into a ball and hid her face in her arms. Her jailers had promised to turn off the lights if she would unravel the labyrinth and be useful again,
do
things for them.

Mind clearing for a fraction of a minute as the labyrinth reset, she realized she should’ve been executed when it became obvious she had no intention of cooperating. That she’d been permitted to live told her that whatever it was she could do, it was important and powerful enough to keep her safe, if only half-alive, trapped, and chained. Her last attempt—

The labyrinth twisted, changing shape as it did a thousand times a day, and her thoughts warped out of all comprehension, shredding the gossamer weave of reason and memory. Fingers tightening on the iron bars of the railing that kept her from falling into the black abyss on the other side, she breathed through the change, blinking away the spots of light from in front of her eyes. But the spots didn’t fade, and it was with a sense of dawning wonder that she realized those dots were the stars in the night sky.

They glittered and shimmered until she reached out a hand, wanting to touch. But they were too far away . . . and in her hand, she held a book. Startled, she almost dropped the unexpected item, but the cushion of solid air around her hand told her the man of black ice wouldn’t have allowed the book to plummet into the abyss.

She couldn’t read the words on the cover in the dark, didn’t know if she could read words at all. But drawing the slender volume back through the bars, she held it against her chest as if it were a treasure, and when she was certain he wasn’t watching her, she chanced a look at the man.

He wasn’t like the guards in the white place full of painful light that had been her prison. They’d hurt her, but this man, he could slit her throat and not blink. She knew that with the same part of her brain that had birthed the labyrinth, the part driven by the relentless will to survive. It cared nothing for the quality of her life, only that she remain alive. That brutal pragmatism was why she’d lived long enough to be here under the stars beside a man who possessed eyes of the same starlight, icy white on a background of black silk.

Cardinal,
whispered a hidden pocket of memory,
his eyes are those of a cardinal
.

She k—

The labyrinth twisted again, wrenching the thought out of shape and turning her mind into a kaleidoscope; a million vivid images splintered and spun until nothing made sense and beauty was a creation of shattered glass. At times, she gave in to her fascination for the kaleidoscope for untold hours, allowing it to take her away into an inner world where the acute white light didn’t hurt and her mind wasn’t a crab without a shell, soft and vulnerable and exposed. So horribly exposed. It
hurt
.

But . . . she had a shell now.

Frowning, she poked a psychic finger at the adamantine black shield around her mind. No give. None. Intrigued, she stroked her fingers along the inner surface and found that it “tasted” of black ice. Of him. The dangerous, beautiful man with the hard voice who’d stolen her from the place where they wouldn’t let her sleep, where they demanded she do things that would bleed away her very being.

The same man who had put her in a place with bars.

It was the last coherent thought she had before the labyrinth reset once more, tearing words and sentences into confetti that dazzled her senses and blanked out the reality around her.

* * *

KALEB
watched his guest leave the terrace two hours after she’d arrived. Except for when she’d reached out into the night and he’d taken the risk of giving her the book, she’d stood motionless, her eyes lifted to the stars. It could be that part of her remembered the starlit night that was the PsyNet, as visualized by the vast majority of the populace, each Psy mind a spark in the darkness, or perhaps she’d been hypnotized by the openness of the sky after having spent so many years in a cage.

The sound of metal straining.

Twisting, he saw one of the heavy iron bars had bent almost in half. He fixed it with a glancing thought before walking into his bedroom via the sliding doors that opened directly onto the left side of the terrace. His room was located across from hers, meaning he’d be able to keep an ear open for her even in sleep.

It took only a few minutes to shower off the sweat.

Lying down in bed after drying off, the sheets crisp against his naked skin, he set his mind for exactly five hours of sleep. He could survive for long periods on less, but five hours was the optimal amount of rest he needed to recharge his physical and psychic batteries. The entire house was already locked and alarmed, but, setting a psychic alarm that would go off the instant she made any noise, he went to sleep.

He dreamed.

Dreams denoted a sublevel failure in his conditioning, but Kaleb had long ago learned to compensate for those failures, though he couldn’t control his subconscious. However, the dreams were no longer as all-encompassing as they’d been in his teens—then, he’d often woken so stressed it had taken him at least an hour to regain his concentration. As an adult, he woke alert and with full memory of every aspect of the nighttime visions conjured by his subconscious.

Psy-Med would draw some interesting conclusions from his dreams, he thought the next morning as he dressed in work-ready suit pants of black along with a white shirt, leaving the collar open for the time being; but as none of their number would ever be invited inside his mind, that was a moot point.

The door across from his own was closed when he exited the bedroom, and he didn’t disturb his guest’s rest—he had all the patience in the world now that he had her under his roof. Entering the kitchen, he came to an abrupt halt. She was curled up in a chair in the sun-drenched breakfast “nook” he’d embedded into the design during the custom build by several human corporations—though he’d never planned on using it.

The humans had seen nothing wrong with features that would’ve alerted a Psy architect to the fact that something was not quite right with the house, not when it was meant for Kaleb Krychek, considered one of the most Silent individuals in the Net. As it was, the humans had done a stellar job, and with each firm privy to only a strictly limited slice of the construction process, with Kaleb himself having put in the final security features, they had no knowledge of the advanced systems that protected it.

As his guest had no knowledge of the psychic alarm he’d set—yet it hadn’t activated, in spite of the fact she’d left her room. He checked the alarm, found he’d made a basic miscalculation. Because he was the source of her shields, and though his mind was separated from hers by an impenetrable firewall, his consciousness considered her a part of him. Resetting the parameters so the mistake wouldn’t be repeated, he walked to the counter and, after ’porting in breakfast pastries from the kitchen of a highly successful hotel he owned, prepared a cup of hot chocolate.

He had never tasted the sweet liquid himself, but he’d done his research on sensations and tastes that were considered to offer “comfort” in the emotional races. Given the current state of mind and physical health of the woman who sat in the sunshine, such items might be effective in breaching the wall of her distrust.

Walking over to place the mug in front of her, he asked, “Are you hungry?”

Dark blue eyes peered at him from behind the tangled but clean strands of her hair, and he had the disconcerting sensation she was looking right through his shields. Not that it mattered—she already knew his darkest secret, had tasted the iron rich scent of it as she screamed.

Breaking the eye contact with a sudden shift of her head, she bent closer to the hot chocolate. As she examined it, he mixed up the nutrient drink he preferred as breakfast, and mentally went over his schedule for the day. Whether he took the upcoming comm meeting here or at his central Moscow office made no difference to the eventual outcome—Kaleb would come out on top. He always did.

Failure was not an option.

Right then, the woman for whom he’d searched for seven years slid out of her chair to walk toward him. When she stopped a meter away, he stepped back, saying nothing as she reached for the food he’d teleported in, the remote ’port a simple matter: that particular hotel kitchen was run by a chef who liked everything exactly in its place, including the baskets of fresh pastries individually wrapped in distinctive paper sleeves. Kaleb’s image file of the kitchen gave him a location lock, the paper sleeves a detail lock within that specific location. Now, he watched as his guest chose a warm apricot Danish, put it neatly on a saucer, and took it back to her seat.

He’d expected her to eat the pastry, but she returned to the counter, picked up another Danish—blackberry—put it on a second saucer, and took it back to the table. It wasn’t until she placed it on the other side of the table and pushed the hot chocolate to the middle that he realized he was being invited to breakfast.

Lenik,
he said, waiting only long enough for Silver’s subordinate to open the telepathic pathway before saying,
reschedule my meeting with Imkorp.

Sir. They’re already unsteady about the agreement.

They’ll wait.
Kaleb held the power in the negotiation, a fact of which he’d be happy to remind the Imkorp CEO should he have forgotten.

I’ll contact them immediately.

That done, Kaleb poured himself a glass of water and took it to the table. “Thank you,” he said, pushing the mug back to her, “but that’s for you.”

She continued to examine him, a sudden, incisive intelligence in the deep, deep blue of her irises that had his instincts on full alert. “Who are you?” The words were a rasp, as if she hadn’t used her vocal cords for months . . . or years.

“Kaleb Krychek.”

A pause. “Kaleb Krychek.” Bending her head after repeating his name in the same flat tone he’d given it, she picked up her Danish and bit in. When she stared at him, he echoed the action.

The taste was a violent insult to taste buds accustomed to flavorless nutrition bars and drinks designed to deliver the necessary calories and minerals, with the occasional bland meal thrown in to balance his diet, but he swallowed the bite he’d taken of the pastry, drinking some water to wash it down. Seemingly satisfied with that, the small woman on the other side of the table continued to eat her own Danish in neat, precise bites until the entire thing was gone.

Good. She’s eating.

She’d always had a slender and graceful body, as befit the dancer she’d been, but she no longer carried the supple muscle that screamed health regardless of low body weight. Her frame was now fragile, her shoulder bones protruding through the green T-shirt she continued to wear, her cheeks sunken. When he teleported the remainder of the tray onto the table, she stared at it with considering eyes before choosing a banana muffin.

Taking a butter knife from the tray, she cut the muffin in two and put half on his plate. “Thank you,” he said again and took a bite of the soft, too-sweet item to pacify her.

She ate her half of the muffin and drank most of her hot chocolate before speaking again. “Kaleb Krychek. That’s a long name.”

“You can call me Kaleb,” he said, and they were words he’d spoken to her before, when she hadn’t understood what he was, why she should run from him.

“I have your shell, Kaleb.”

He processed her words, could make no sense of them. “Do you?”

“It’s black and hard.”

“You’re talking about the mental shield I’ve put over you.” He finished his water. “It was necessary. Your mind was exposed.” Naked, vulnerable—a fact unacceptable to him on every level. “The obsidian shield conceals all trace of you from the Net.”

Open concern on her face, she whispered, “Are you exposed now?”

Her empathy didn’t surprise him; it was what had led to her torture. “No,” he said, “I have the capacity to maintain dual shields without problem.” He was the most powerful Psy in the Net, of that he had no doubt, his psychic strength enough to destroy the very fabric of their race—or to control it. As to which he chose to do . . . it depended on her.

If she demanded vengeance, he’d turn the world bloodred.

She reached for his abandoned muffin, cut off a piece, and ate it. “Can you see me?”

“Your thoughts are your own.” He hadn’t invaded her mind past that instant of contact required for the teleport.

Piercing intelligence again. “Does sharing your shell mean I can see your secrets?”

“No. You don’t want to see inside my mind.” It was a warning. “The rumor in the Net is that I can drive people insane.”

No terror, no fear, just unwavering attention that said she heard far more than he said. “Can you?”

“Yes.” He wanted to ask her what she saw when she looked at him, whether the nightmare was apparent to those midnight eyes. “Until they see phantoms and hear terrible voices, until they can no longer exist in the rational world and become broken facsimiles of who they once were.”

“Why?”

“Because I can.”