Shield of Winter

Chapter 21

“PENN, BRIGITTE, AND Isaiah,” he said when they dropped back out, “are the most distant from the infection in terms of their location in the compound.” While Ivy and Jaya were on the leading edge.

“I’m going to touch base with the others.” Closing her eyes, she did so telepathically, and he took the chance to just look at her. Her skin was delicate, her collarbones fine, but there was a lushness to Ivy that was diametrically opposed to his own body. No hard edges, only soft curves. Everything about her promised the opposite of pain.

When a strap slid off one shoulder as she thrust her hand through her hair again, he didn’t slide it back up, fascinated by the smooth line of her shoulder, the creamy plumpness of the exposed upper slope of her breast. It would, he calculated, take the barest telekinetic nudge to push the silky fine fabric farther down, exposing her fully.

Embers low down in his body flared to glowing life . . . and Ivy’s skin flushed a deep peach.

Tugging the strap up with a trembling finger, she said, “Jaya was the most shaken. Having Abbot around seems to have calmed her.” Her breath came fast and shallow. “He’s playing cards with her.”

As far as Vasic knew, the younger Arrow didn’t know how to play cards. “Is he losing?” he asked, conscious he’d crossed a line in looking at Ivy as he had.

“Badly,” she said rather than asking him to leave, “but Jaya says he’s catching on fast. We’re corrupting all your Arrows.”

He thought of the warmth of her scalp against his palm, the featherlight caress of her curls, the sweet curves that would flow like honey under his hand. She was the softest, most beautiful creature he’d ever touched, and he wanted to experience her again, wanted to indulge in this tactile contact that had nothing to do with pain or training or a cold medical checkup.

“Perhaps,” he said, watching her color deepen as he continued to look at her in a way he knew was sexual. He should’ve apologized. He didn’t. “But,” he said instead, “the corruption doesn’t appear to be doing harm.” A lie. Ivy was breaking things down in him that couldn’t be broken down for his own sanity. Even now he found himself wondering about the texture of her skin at the dip of her breastbone, his fingers curling into his hand.

It was the hand attached to the arm on which the gauntlet was grafted. A gauntlet that could function on many levels. One of which was to control weapons that could annihilate hundreds in a single strike. The hands he wanted to put on Ivy were of a killer.

Ice doused the glowing embers. “I need to check the compound.”

Ivy grabbed a thick orange cardigan she must’ve forgotten on a chair when she went to bed, and shrugged into it. “I’ll come with you.”

“You should remain safe in the cabin.”

She stepped up to him, jaw set. “If there’s a threat outside, you can ’port me out before I so much as see the threat. I don’t want to be alone.” A glance down at Rabbit. “Not that you’re not wonderful,” she reassured her pet.

He saw the quiver of her lip before she bit down on it and realized the level to which she’d sublimated her own fear to check on the others. “It’s a cold night. You should wear this.” Bringing in a heavy jacket he used when he had to go into bitterly cold environments and didn’t want to waste energy maintaining his body temperature, he helped her into it. It swallowed her up, the zipped-up collar coming past her mouth and the sleeves swamping her arms until he folded them up.

That done, he nudged her to the kitchen counter. “Make your favorite tea.” He knew the taste gave her comfort. “I can wait.”

When they stepped out into the starry night five minutes later, Ivy with her hands cupped around the mug of tea and her feet in snow boots, Rabbit scampered out after them. Giving Vasic her tea to hold, Ivy petted and cuddled the dog before carrying him back to his little bed. “Stay here, Rabbit. It’s too cold outside for you,” he heard her murmur gently, the sound carrying in the stillness of the night.

She was with him again soon afterward. Tugging the hood of the jacket up over her head, he stepped out to begin patrolling the compound. Nerida, get some rest, he said to one of the sentries. I’ll take over.

The other Tk sent back a quick confirmation.

“How do you measure harm to your Arrows?” Ivy’s voice was familiar in the darkness a quarter of an hour later. “Is it a breakdown in their Silence or something else?”

“It’s different for each member of the squad.”

She paused with him in the night shadow of the trees. “Some of them,” she said, tone solemn, “they’ll never break Silence, will they?”

They. As if he wasn’t on that list.

“A few are physiologically incapable of doing so.” He thought about how much to reveal, not because he didn’t trust Ivy, but because certain knowledge would put her at risk. “Part of our training used to involve a drug that can reset neural pathways if used too long. It intensifies natural psychic ability but eventually leaves the Arrow with no sense of self.”

“That’s so sad.” Stark pain in her expression, her empty mug hanging from one finger; she didn’t seem to notice when he teleported it away. “Are the victims conscious of what’s been done to them?”

“No.” That, Vasic thought, was the only mercy. “They remain members of the squad, and we’ll make certain they live out their lives at the optimal level possible.” It wouldn’t be anything those in the outside world would consider a good life, but it would be a hundred times better than anything Ming LeBon would’ve permitted.

Their former leader would’ve simply used up those men and women, then ordered their executions at the hands of medics who had promised to heal. Patton, the only other Tk-V Vasic had ever met, had been put down like a dog when he became so dependent on instruction that he was useless in the field.

An unfortunate error in his Jax regime, had been the note on the medical file Vasic had hacked into when he was old enough. The regime is being modified to ensure this type of extreme compliance does not reoccur. Vasic should be useful far beyond the usual age of termination of Arrows.

“And you?” Ivy asked, touching her hand to his gauntlet as she’d already done once before. “Did they use the drug on you?”

Vasic considered the delicate fingers on the machinery that encased him. “Aren’t you repelled by the gauntlet?”

“What?” She glanced down, frowned. “No, and stop avoiding the question.”

He thought he should tell her everything he’d done, so she’d understand who it was she touched, but then she’d be afraid of him . . . and he didn’t want Ivy afraid. “When I was younger, yes,” he said in answer to her question about Jax. “Later, thanks to a subterfuge by Judd, all Arrows were taken off it.”

“And you were fine?”

“I’m much, much better at delicate ’ports than anyone realizes.” They should have, after watching him deal with blood until not even a single fine droplet of it remained in carpet, but no one had ever made the connection.

Ivy’s eyes widened. “You ’ported out the drug while it was still in the delivery system.” A whisper that held a passionate emotion he couldn’t pinpoint. “That’s incredible.”

“Unfortunately, it took me time to learn the trick.” He’d been forced to work under the influence of the drug for dozens of missions and whenever Ming LeBon required his teleportation skills. As a result of the latter, he’d had more Jax in his system as a teenager than most experienced members of the squad.

He’d escaped a permanent reset by three injections at most.

“I couldn’t do the same for the others, except on random occasions when I was in the room while they were being injected.” He’d tried, but he couldn’t risk giving away the fact that the squad wasn’t as under Ming LeBon’s control as the former Councilor had believed.

He hadn’t needed Aden to tell him that those they lost to the drug, if given the choice, would’ve chosen that fate rather than jeopardize their brothers-in-arms. That made the losses weigh no less heavily on Vasic’s heart, adding to the other bodies that lay on it, until the organ had gone permanently numb.

Ivy’s hand tightened on the gauntlet. He could feel the pressure of her touch through the sensors that linked every single square millimeter of the hard black surface that protected the delicate computronics beneath to living nerve tissue. But he couldn’t feel her. And for the first time, he began to question his choice to allow himself to be used as the guinea pig for the experimental fusion.

That was when he became aware of the sheen of wetness in her eyes. “Ivy? You’re in distress.”

“You carry so much guilt, Vasic.” Raw, her voice sounded as if it hurt. “A crushing weight of it.”

Vasic thought of the deaths he’d meted out in darkness, the lives he’d erased, and shook his head. “No, Ivy. I can never carry enough.” Never do anything to balance the scales.

IVY wanted to pound against the armor that insulated Vasic, smash apart the gauntlet on his arm, though she knew her anger was misdirected. It wasn’t the outer shell that mattered. She could batter it to pieces and still never breach the ice that encased him.

He held me today.

Her body ached at the memory of his strength against her, his hand so tender and gentle on the back of her head. It was nothing he would’ve done at the start of this operation. And . . . and he’d caressed her with his gaze, the silver of his eyes molten. Melting at the memory, she counseled herself to be patient.

“Did you and Aden ever play together?” she asked, cuddling into the coat that smelled comfortingly of him. Clean soap and a warm male scent that was distinctly his. Last time Sascha had visited, Ivy had seen the cardinal empath nuzzle her mate’s throat as they walked away. Ivy wanted to do that with Vasic, draw in his scent directly from his throat.

He gave me his coat.

She smiled. Expert teleporter that he was, he could’ve no doubt called in something that was a better fit. He hadn’t.

“Not ordinary games,” he said into the hush of the night. “We didn’t have the time, or the freedom.”

“I’m sorry.” And angry, so angry. No one had the right to steal a childhood.

“We did, however,” he added, “find ways to keep ourselves busy during the rare instances we somehow escaped supervision. Once we managed to paint zebra stripes on every wall of a training room.”

Delight cut through her anger. “How did you manage that?”

“Aden and I stole the paint from work elsewhere in the facility. Then,” he said, “he created a distraction while I painted as fast as I could. Afterward, I hauled myself into the ceiling with the paint and the brushes, and crawled my way out. No one ever discovered it was the two of us that did it, since we left no clues and the head of the training center vetoed large-scale telepathic scans.”

“Why didn’t you teleport out for your escape?” Ivy asked with a laugh.

Vasic took so long to reply that her smile faded, dread growing in her abdomen. “I had a psychic leash on my personal ’porting ability as a child,” he said at last. “It was the only way anyone could keep me where they wanted me.”

Ignoring everything else he’d said, she focused only on the most important, most terrible part. “They created a lock on you like I had on my mind?” Except where she’d been unaware of what she was losing, he’d been fully conscious of it. It must’ve felt like having a limb hacked off.

“That doesn’t work for subdesignation V. Our ability is too deeply integrated into our minds.”

“Like breathing,” she said, her horror growing.

“Yes. Not fully autonomous, but close enough. The only way to control me was to use another Tk-V to do it.” He stilled as a wolf’s haunting howl rose on the air in the distance, followed by another a moment later, then another, until it was a wild symphony.

Hairs rising on the back of her neck and breath frosting the air, she turned toward the sound. “I wish we were allowed to go farther, to interact with the changelings.”

“They’re protecting their vulnerable.”

“Yes.” The fact this compound existed at all was a huge trust on the part of DarkRiver and SnowDancer, the biggest step in the relationship between the Psy and the changeling races for over a century. “The other Tk-V,” she said when the wolf song died down, leaving only a lingering sensory echo of its primal beauty. “He was an Arrow, too?”

Vasic nodded.

She waited for him to say something, but he’d answered her question, and as she’d already learned, he wasn’t a man who talked more than he had to. The snow crunched under her boots as they walked on, the sky a deep midnight dotted with stars. She didn’t interrupt his silence this time, her thoughts of a boy who’d grown up in a cage, taught to become a tool his captors could use . . . of the man who’d survived that with the will to protect a flame inside his heart.