Branded by Fire (43 page)

“That’s not what it looks like.” She was too disoriented, her pupils hugely dilated.

“Unless . . .” Glen raised an eyebrow.

Dev’s mouth tightened. “Chances she did it to herself?”

“There’s always a chance—but someone dumped her in front of your apartment.”

“I went inside at ten p.m., came back out at ten fifteen.” He’d left his phone in the car, had been irritated at having to stop work to return to the garage. “She was unconscious when I found her.”

Glen shook his head. “No way she had the coordination to get through security then—she’d have lost her fine motor skills well beforehand.”

Fighting the rush of anger provoked by the thought of how helpless she must’ve felt, he glanced back into the room. The bright white overhead light glinted off the woman’s matted blonde hair, highlighting the scratches on her face, the sharp bones slicing her skin. “She looks half-starved.”

Glen’s usually smiling face was a grim mask. “We haven’t had the opportunity to do a full checkup but there are bruises on her arms, her legs.”

“You telling me she was beaten?” Raw fury pulsed through his body, hot and violent.

“Tortured would be the word I’d use.”

Dev swore under his breath. “How long before she’s functional?”

“It’ll probably take forty-eight hours to flush the drugs out completely. I think it was a one-time hit. If she’d been on them longer, she’d have been even more messed up.”

“Keep me updated.”

“Are you going to call Enforcement?”

“No.” Dev had no intention of letting her out of his sight. “She was dumped in front of my door for a reason. She stays with us until we figure out what the hell is going on.”

“Dev . . .” Glen blew out a breath. “Her reaction to the drugs say she has to be Psy.”

“I know.” His own psychic senses had picked up an “echo” from the woman. Muted but there. “She’s not a threat right now. We’ll reassess the situation after she’s up and around.”

Something beeped inside the room, making the doc glance at his chart. “It’s nothing. Don’t you have a meeting today with Talin?”

Taking the hint, Dev drove home to shower and change. It was just after six thirty when he walked back into the building that housed the headquarters of the Shine Foundation. Though the top three floors were broken up into a number of guest apartments, the middle ten were taken up with various administration offices, while the floors below the basement housed the testing and medical facilities. And today—a Psy. A woman who might yet be the latest move in the Council’s attempts to destroy the Forgotten.

But, he reminded himself, right now, she was asleep and he had work to do. “Activate. Voice code—Devraj Santos.” The clear screen of his computer slid up and out of his desk, showing a number of unread messages. His secretary, Maggie, was good at weeding out the “can waits” from the “must-responds” and all ten onscreen fell into the latter category—and today hadn’t even begun. Leaning back in his chair, he glanced at his watch.

Too early to return calls—even in New York, most people weren’t at their desks by six forty-five a.m.

Then again, most people didn’t run the Shine Foundation, much less act as the head of a “family” of thousands scattered across the country, and in many cases, the world.

It was inevitable that he’d think of Marty at that moment.

“This job,” his predecessor had said the night Dev accepted the directorship, “will eat up your life, suck the marrow from your bones for good measure, and spit you out on the other end, a dry husk.”

“You stuck to it.” Marty’d run Shine for over forty years.

“I was lucky,” the older man had said in that blunt, no-nonsense way of his. “I was married when I took on the job and to my eternal gratitude, my wife stayed with me through all the shit. You go in alone, you’ll end up staying that way.”

Dev could still remember how he’d laughed. “What, you have a very low opinion of my charm?”

“Charm all you like,” Marty had said with a snort, “but women have a way of wanting time. The director of the Shine Foundation doesn’t have time. All he has is the weight of thousands of dreams and hopes and fears resting on his shoulders.” A glance filled with shadows. “It’ll change you, Dev, turn you hard if you’re not careful.”

“We’re a stable unit now,” Dev had argued. “The past is past.”

“Dear boy, the past will never be past. We’re in a war, and as director, you’re the general.”

It had taken three years into the job before Dev had truly understood Marty’s warning. When his ancestors had defected from the PsyNet, they’d hoped to make a life outside the cold rigidity of Silence. They’d chosen chaos over control, the dangers of emotion over the certain sanity of a life lived without hope, without love, without joy. But with those choices had come consequences.

The Psy Council had never stopped hunting the Forgotten.

To fight back, to keep his people safe, Dev had been forced to make some brutal choices of his own.

His fingers curled around the pen in his grip, threatening to crush the metal. “Enough,” he muttered, glancing at his watch again. Still too early to call.

Pushing back his chair, he got up, intending to grab some coffee. Instead, he found himself taking the elevator down to the subbasement level. The corridors were quiet, but he knew the labs would already be humming with activity—the workload was simply too big to allow for much downtime.

Because while the Forgotten had once been as Psy as those who looked to the Council for leadership, time and intermarriage with the other races had changed things in their genetic structure. Strange new abilities had begun to appear . . . but so had strange new diseases.

However, that wasn’t the threat he had to assess today.

If they were right, the unknown woman in the hospital bed in front of him was linked to the PsyNet itself. That made her beyond dangerous—a Trojan horse, her mind used as a conduit through which to siphon data, and implement deadly strategies.

Dev would allow
no one
to harm that which was his.

The last spy he’d found had discovered very well that Devraj Santos had never left his military background behind. Now, as he looked down into the woman’s bruised, scratched, and emaciated face, he considered whether he’d be able to snap her neck with cold-blooded precision should the time come.

His fingers dug into his palms, instinct coming up hard against the icy practicality that drove the director of the Shine Foundation. It was as well that the decision didn’t have to be made right then. Turning away from that still yet oddly compelling face, he was about to leave the room when he noticed her eyes moving rapidly under her lids. “Psy,” he murmured, “aren’t supposed to dream.”

 

“Tell me.”

 

She came awake with a jagged scream stuck in her throat. “He knows.”

Brown eyes looking down into hers again. “Who knows?”

The name formed on her tongue and then was lost in the miasma of her ravaged mind. “He knows,” she repeated, desperate that someone understand what she’d done. “He
knows
.” Her fingers gripped his.

“What does he know?” Electricity arced like an inferno beneath his skin.

“About the children,” she whispered, as her head grew heavy again, as her eyes grew dark again. “About the boy.”

Gold turned to bronze and she wanted to watch, but it was too late.