Heart of Obsidian

Chapter 35

SAHARA SHOOK HER head, her voice grim. “If you harm the Ghost, you risk inciting another wave of rebellion, this time directly against you.”

Again, she displayed how well she knew him, using logic rather than any emotional plea for the safety and well-being of their race, a plea she knew would fall on deaf ears. “It won’t come to that.” The death of the rebel would cause an acute and violent disturbance in the fabric of the PsyNet, and that, Kaleb would not permit. Not when the Net would soon belong to him. “The Ghost will simply fade from the limelight at a certain nonnegotiable point.”

“Fade?” Sahara’s fingers dug into his muscles as she continued to caress him regardless of their discord. “Kaleb, everything I’ve read tells me this rebel has survived years of being hunted. He’s not the type to quietly disappear, even if it’s you giving the order.”

“He’ll listen to reason. The Ghost’s actions,” he said over Sahara’s inarticulate sound of disbelief, “show him to be an eminently rational individual.”

“Really?” It was a comment rife with disagreement. “Putting that aside, how do you even propose to find him? He’s a shadow.”

“I already know his identity, and have since he made his first move.”

Hands fisting on his shoulders, Sahara shook her head. “I don’t think he’ll fall in with your plans. This Ghost seems to be just as relentless and driven as—” A sudden pause, her eyes narrowing. “You,” she whispered. “It’s you!”

“Of course it’s me,” Kaleb said and took the mock punch Sahara aimed at his jaw, her skin soft against his. “No one else has access to the depth of data at the Ghost’s fingers, and the ability to be anywhere in the world in a split second.”

Sahara attempted to look stern, but she was too delighted by the fact Kaleb had just played a game with her—with cool eyes and an icy tone that had blinded her to what he was telling her. He was right: the Ghost could be no one but the cardinal Tk who held her. Else, Kaleb would’ve eliminated him long before the rebel became such a dangerous adversary in the Net. It was a truth as inexorable as the staggering power at his command.

The one question that remained and that she would not ask was why.

She knew the answer, knew it was written in blood and born of the sadistic pain survived by a gifted, scared child who’d had no one to whom he could turn. “Is that what the call was about?” she asked instead, leashing her anger because this night, it was theirs. She would permit no echo of evil to taint it. “You have fellow rebels?”

“Yes,” he said, tugging her forward for a kiss.

Opening her mouth for him, Sahara decided further discussion could wait. Right now, she wanted only to drown in the taste of Kaleb. No other male could ever match the visceral passion he aroused in her, and she’d met her share during her time with DarkRiver. Sensual and strong, affectionate and tactile, the leopard males laughed easily and considered play a normal part of life. The soldiers who patrolled her area were friendly, and a number had flirted openly with her, would’ve gone further had she offered any encouragement.

Sahara hadn’t—because it was only Kaleb she wanted. “I was very smart at sixteen,” she murmured, leaning down to kiss his throat, the scent of vanilla warmed against his skin and intertwined with his own natural scent making her breath catch. “I claimed the sexiest man in the world as my own.” Perhaps he was irrevocably damaged, scarred to the point that she’d have to destroy them both in order to save their very race . . . but she would not take that step until all hope was lost, her Kaleb fatally fractured at the vicious hands of a long-dead madman.

“I want to feel your skin against mine,” he said, his body still languorous in a way rare for Kaleb as he tugged off her pullover and got rid of her bra.

Then, as the stars glittered overhead and the world spun another hour closer to what might be a catastrophic global war, Sahara kissed her lover. Pressed against the ridged muscle of him, his hands strong against her back, she threw back her head as he went for her throat. Pleasure rippled through her in a sultry wave, the shooting star that passed across her vision a shimmer she grabbed onto with both hands.

We’ve earned this, earned our future! A fierce cry in silence. Just give us our time.

It was the simplest of wishes, but as Kaleb took her mouth with the relentless demand of his own, one of his hands rising to cup the back of her head, she knew it might also be one of the most impossible.

AN hour after he’d taken her under starlight, her body a flow of feminine curves, Kaleb didn’t fight Sahara’s decision to return to the aerie. Faith was no doubt waiting for her, and Kaleb had plans for the night of which Sahara would not approve.

Tatiana was huddled feverish and dirty in the hole where he’d left her, her hands bandaged using the rudimentary medical supplies. Blood on the walls made it appear she’d attempted to climb her way out, or perhaps she’d lost her sense of reason and pounded at the concrete until it shredded her flesh and tore off her nails.

Keeping a vigilant eye on his shields, he leaned against the wall across from her. “I thought you could use some company.”

Eyes flat and vicious as a snake’s looked at him, Tatiana’s Silence beginning to flake away at the edges. That disintegration didn’t impact her mind. “You need something. What’s the bargain?”

“There is no bargain.” Never would be. “You’ll tell me what I want to know, or I’ll break a bone in your body.” This didn’t count as torture to Kaleb’s mind—that would be if he was hurting her for no reason but to watch her scream. “I’m sure the infection won’t take long to set in, in your current damp accommodations.”

Fear crawled over her skin. Oh, she hid it well, but the one thing he’d always known about Tatiana was that she was a bully. And bullies never did well when they no longer had the upper hand. Santano had apparently begged for his life when the changelings came for him. One day, Kaleb would gain access to the recorded footage the packs had of the execution, then he’d sit back and watch until every instant of Santano’s torment was burned into his memory banks.

“Who else in your organization,” he said to the woman who was just like Santano where it mattered, “did you trust with the knowledge of Sahara’s ability?”

A twist of her lips. “Someone else is hunting Sahara Kyriakus? It’ll be an easy capture. She’s always been far too weak to actually use her power as it’s designed to be used.”

Kaleb didn’t argue, didn’t negotiate. He simply broke the smallest finger of her right hand. Screaming, Tatiana cradled the hand to her chest. “You’re mad,” she gritted out after she could talk again. “Truly mad.”

“What I am,” Kaleb said, “is a man of my word. Now, would you like to answer the question?”

“I trusted no one.” Right then, she was the Tatiana the Net knew, ruthless, amoral, and willing to do whatever it took to win. “I would’ve been a fool to do so, given the temptation at hand—if and when Sahara regained full use of her faculties, a single intelligent individual could use her to take over the entire PsyNet. Why would I risk sharing that information?”

Truth, he judged. “Who in your employ is smart enough to work it out?”

“There was a guard,” Tatiana said, her finger already swollen. “David Sezer. He showed a little too much interest in Sahara. I had him reassigned after he was caught in the cell with her against my personal directive.”

Kaleb felt the chill darkness in him stretch awake, drawing the DarkMind’s eager presence. “That seems unusually magnanimous of you.” On the psychic plane, he “stroked” the DarkMind into patience—it would get the violence for which it hungered.

“I concluded that his Silence was flawed and that he’d been attracted by the opportunity to abuse a vulnerable female.”

The darkness grew icier. “You didn’t make certain?”

“Shield penetration takes energy and David was no one important. As he hadn’t managed to touch Sahara and was otherwise useful, I made the decision to keep him on. He did, however, come into an inheritance a year ago that would give him the financial resources to hire a hunter.” A sneer. “If he thinks he can use Sahara, he’s delusional. Even pathetically weak as she is, the girl is stronger than him.”

Kaleb rifled through PsyNet databases as the DarkMind curled around him. It took him a short two minutes to locate one David Sezer attached to a secondary branch of the Rika-Smythe corporation. “Did anyone else with ‘flawed’ conditioning get close to Sahara?” Sahara was small, her physical strength nowhere close to that of a full-grown male’s—and she’d been drugged, her abilities suppressed on top of that. Easy prey.

“No.”

Catching the skitter in Tatiana’s eyes, he snapped another finger. The reverberating echo of her scream had no impact on him. “Who hurt her?”

Bent over, her body wracked by shudders as she threw up, Tatiana couldn’t immediately answer, but he was patient. “We had to gain her cooperation.” A voice raw with pain and fear. “Force was utilized.”

He would not kill her, no matter the provocation. It would be far too merciful. “Tell me where you keep the records of Sahara’s captivity, and I’ll leave,” he said in a pleasant tone he knew disturbed people on the deepest level. “Otherwise, we’ll be spending several hours together.” He teleported in a scalpel—she didn’t know of his promise to Sahara, didn’t know that her victim’s conscience was the only reason he wasn’t torturing her right this instant. “I learned many things at Santano’s knee.”

Fear a sheen of sweat on her face, she scrabbled backward into a corner. “A vault in the PsyNet. I’ll have to telepath the location and pass codes.”

Kaleb smiled, knowing she wasn’t as broken as she was attempting to appear. “No, you won’t. Talk.”

Tatiana talked and, when she was done, said, “You truly were Enrique’s protégé, weren’t you?” in the tone of someone making a discovery. “You helped him brutalize the changeling females he murdered.”

Judging she was in no danger of dying from the slight fever and her minor injuries, he left without wasting another word on her. Locating the vault wasn’t a problem, but he took care in downloading the data. Tatiana didn’t disappoint him—the booby traps were clever and meant to be fatal.

Once he had the data, he asked the NetMind to erase every other trace of it from existence, including the automatic copy in the PsyNet backup drive—which Kaleb had named the Obsidian Archive. No one else would ever know what had been done to Sahara during the years Tatiana had her in a cage. He would permit no one to look at her with pity in their eyes when she deserved only pride for her courage and strength.

That done, he began to read the files, noting the name of every individual involved in the sessions meant to break Sahara’s will. Three of them he’d already executed after tracking them through other methods, and another one was going slowly and terribly mad, thanks to Kaleb’s secondary ability. The remaining two were minor players he told the DarkMind to suffocate in its blackness and consume.

David Sezer was the only one left, and the birds were beginning to sing outside when Kaleb decided it was time to pay the other male a personal visit. It was three hours later, once he’d showered and dressed after taking care of that matter, that he went to meet the two people other than Sahara who had a claim on his loyalty.

It was nothing akin to what he felt for her, but it was enough for him to teleport into the night shadow of San Francisco, the clouds hiding the sickle moon from view. Sliding into the last pew in the church where Father Xavier Perez welcomed all who came, he spoke to the back of the former Arrow who sat in front of him. Never did the other man look at his face, but he knew it was to Kaleb that he spoke.

“You want to discuss Pure Psy,” Kaleb guessed. The three of them—Xavier, Judd, and Kaleb—had long been bound by a mutual desire to collapse the rotten power structure of the Net, but where Judd and Xavier wanted to save the innocents of all races caught up in the rot, Kaleb had fought only for Sahara.

That he had saved a number of lives during their fight, helped some of those innocents, had been a consequence rather than an aim. Then again, perhaps Judd and Xavier had had a deeper impact on him than any one of them believed; after all, he had spared the children in his plan to wipe the Psy off the face of the planet if his search for Sahara ended with the knowledge of her death.

He’d told her about Judd, about Xavier, and about the details of their strategic war, in the quiet minutes after he and Sahara had had sex under the starlit Moscow sky, his heart beating in time with hers as she lay warm and sated against him. The only person with whom he had ever understood friendship had seen that in his relationship with the two men. He had accepted her judgment, knowing Sahara comprehended far more about emotion than he ever would.

“No,” Judd said now. “Not Pure Psy. I need information on Ming.”

Kaleb thought about why his fellow rebel would need data on the former Councilor. “He’s become too big a threat to Sienna.” Judd’s niece might be the only individual on the planet as dangerous as Kaleb, but since she had no desire to impinge on his territory, nor he on hers, he’d left her alone.

That, and his loyalty to the fallen Arrow in front of him.

“Ming’s fixated on her,” Judd confirmed. “She managed to hurt him the last time they came in contact, and Ming never forgets a threat.” He raised a hand in a silent hello as Xavier walked down the center of the church toward them, while Kaleb drew back into the shadows. It was safer for Xavier not to know his identity.

Unlike Judd, the priest had never been trained to be lethal.

Sliding into the pew beside Judd, Xavier said, “We’ve worked for a better world all this time, believing the ugliness that was the Council needed to be excised from the Net, and now it appears that the Net is fracturing, with fatal results. I do not wish to bathe in the blood of innocents.”

“Innocents were never our targets,” Judd said, his next words directed at Kaleb. “Has that changed?”

“Do you remember when you asked me if there was one person in the PsyNet who mattered to me?”

“Yes.”

“That person has asked me not to destroy the Net.” Like the scars that marked him, the rot would be nearly impossible to eradicate without first sanitizing the network. But he knew he couldn’t do that and still have Sahara look at him the way she’d done on the terrace, a softness to her that made him believe he might understand happiness. “Your innocents are safe from me.”

“I’m glad.” Quiet words from the former Arrow.

“Would you have attempted to execute me if I’d answered otherwise?” While Judd’s Tk wasn’t as powerful as Kaleb’s, he was fiercely intelligent, might just have achieved his aim.

“Yes,” came the brutal answer. “It would’ve destroyed a piece of me to end your life, but I would’ve done it.”