Cool Hand (46 page)

Feet and hands clumsy. Legs wobbly. Eyes blurry.

I had to get it together. Time was up; I couldn’t wait for Naryn any longer. I had to free Diana.

The night wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.

“Go,” I said, hitting bear and wolf on the shoulder. “Back across the river. Until we get Diana free.”

I started up the slope, feeling great, except for the fact that every part of me was hurting and my head felt like my brain kept shorting out. Just a little while longer.

And then, behind me, as if an orchestra conductor had just raised her baton, a new Call came sweetly up the hill.

The ritual had worked in a way that none of us had expected. What had been a discordant confusion of Denver, Cimarron and Cheyenne Calls before had now blended.

I could still sense each pack. There was no submission of one pack to another, but a new, stronger harmony, and a sense of shared purpose that lifted me up.

They were united. And they were coming.

Amaral couldn’t hear it; he was deaf to the Were Call. But he still wanted control of me.

“Get hold of her. Now!” he yelled at his guards.

But as his men turned to run downhill, they were caught in a surge of heavily armed Wind River Were with O’Neill at the head.
He
wasn’t deaf to the Call from across the gorge. Neither was he deaf to the reaction in the Confederation Call. It suddenly sounded like a cheap brass bell with a flaw in the metal.

O’Neill was getting ready to run.

“Santa Fe have attacked. We can’t hold them here, it’s too exposed,” he was shouting, waving his arms. “We have to withdraw. Get the trucks closer.”

But there was purpose in the apparent random way his Were moved, preventing Amaral’s security from reaching me.

The Wind River alpha knew the balance had changed. He had no commitment to Amaral’s plans, not now when he had a much better way of achieving the Confederation’s aims.

He wanted me for the Confederation.

Diana was no concern of his at all; he’d want to take me and escape as quickly as possible.

The Wind River Were formed an impenetrable wall between me and Diana.

I stopped.

Kaothos!
I called, but it was too far.

Luckily, Tullah saw it too.

There was a moment when everything lurched.

Tullah yelled something at Amaral. Amaral’s guards looked confused and raised their weapons, but they were hopelessly outnumbered by the Were.

And even though I wasn’t consciously feeling for it, I sensed Kaothos shed her masking. Her presence, like a ground tremor, rippled through the energy. Taggart’s head whipped around.

Even the Were felt it and halted.

I took the chance and sprinted forward.

“Get that bitch
now
!” O’Neill shouted. He jumped on top of one of the big rocks so he could see over the heads of his Were and direct them to me.

And then his head exploded.

Julie, you star. M24 sniper rifle, 7.62 NATO round, two hundred yards or more, at night, in a crowd. Straight through his eye. Freaking A!

The Wind River pack went berserk, but there was no way they’d be able to work out where the shot had come from in time to do anything about it.

I ran around them, heading for the black windbreak where Diana was.

Everyone was shouting at once. Amaral was surrounded by his security. He was screaming at them to get me, to take Diana, to shoot the Were, but they couldn’t hear him in the pandemonium.

Not everyone was bugging out, though. Evans spotted me. He had been standing guard over Tullah and he leaped up to intercept me.

He hadn’t tied Tullah up because she was only a girl. Mistake.
Fatal
mistake. He had a hundredth of a second to regret it when she grabbed his jaw from behind and twisted his neck. I could hear the crack from where I was.

A little part of me cried for Tullah. There is no right time or right way to learn that you can kill people with your bare hands.

I darted inside the windbreak, carrying the infection of chaos and panic with me.

The conference scene had been set up to project an image of calmness and rationality. A place where sober, measured decisions were made.

Except now, there was me. I didn’t have time to see their reaction to me appearing naked and filthy on their screens, swearing as I heaved the camera intended for Amaral around until it pointed right at Diana. Live. No cropping. The entire montage with Adepts and children.

The camera assistant tried to stop me. Not Athanate. Someone’s kin.

I threw him out of my way into a stack of audiovisual equipment. There was an explosion as fuses blew. Half the screens died right then.

So close.

Were guards charged at me, but they were still in shock.

I broke a boom mike over the first one’s head and stabbed the second with the broken remains.

While he was clutching the metal sticking from his stomach, I took his gun and emptied it at the remaining guards.

Closer.

I stumbled. Blinded. This close, the working wasn’t hissing. It was howling in the cold night air. It made my bones ache and my eyes blur.

Diana was sat close to the back of the windbreak, head down and eyes closed. Around her sat the children and on either side of her stood an Adept. Two more stood in front. All of them completely consumed in their working, unable to move.

Careful. Don’t kill the Adepts yet.

Kaothos?

There was fighting outside. She was too far away and there was no time.

No time.

I’d lost track of what was inside me and what was not.

No sound in the physical world, but my ears were full.

The fabric of the windbreak bowed in. There were faces pressed into the material. They sang. They screamed. Theirs were the voices in the wind, the cold voices of the uncaring stars wheeling above, the spirits rushing over the bleak hills.

A candle guttered in the darkness of my mind, its flame swaying through my head.

The energy flowed through me, pouring into the sink that was the lock around Diana.

Energy flowed from Diana, through the children and the Adepts, still frozen into their stations to hold the lock, and down, down into the ground.

I could see it right in front of me.

A precarious balance.

Maybe I didn’t need enough strength to break the lock. Maybe all I needed was enough to tilt the balance.

I reached into the tightly woven strands that formed the lock and tried to pry just one end free.

This wasn’t like Tullah’s lock. The Adepts’ minds were there, inside the lock. They fought me. It felt like the strands were slithering and slipping away from my fingers, tensing tighter wherever I touched.

Slithering like nightmares wriggling in my head.

I saw the Diana sitting in a chair.

Then floating, held in place by a mass of writhing snakes.

Then me. Strapped down. A windowless room. Screaming.

I caught one strand and tried sinking into it like I had with Tullah’s lock.

The energy flared through me, sucking away from the rest of the lock, burning through me like acid.

Pain.

I screamed and reached for a second strand.

Taggart was here. I felt him running to the defense of his community’s lock, his eukori livid with fear. He was shouting for help.

I ducked instinctively, and the empty rifle he’d swung at me struck across my shoulders.

More energy flared through me. The pain was unbearable.

I dug into a third strand.

“Stop her!”

Taggart dropped the rifle and wrapped his arms around me, trying to get a strangle-hold.

At his touch, I felt ice cold. Calm in the eye of the hurricane. The Athanate in the storm of wolf.

Hello,
I said, and laughed.

My jaw melted. Reformed. Wolf fangs, not Athanate.

I sank my teeth into his arm until I felt bone.

He screamed, shaking violently, desperate to get himself free of me.

My Athanate made my saliva poisonous.

Taggart felt it. Razor blades dragging through his veins. The pitch of his screaming going higher and higher, till it blended with the spirit screaming I could hear outside.

I was aware of Amaral and his security team bursting in through the side, ripping through the fabric of the windbreak.

Kaothos! Help!

I took strength from Taggart’s eukori. My cry for help was deafening.

Equipment exploded, and as the studio lights went out, one of the assistants started screaming to my left. “Look! Look! Look!” Over and over. Hysterical fear.

“Oh, God.”

Above our struggle, in the great bowl of the black sky, the uncaring stars began to disappear.

I could feel her manifest. Not as the smoky illusion that passed through walls and ceilings. A solid, sinuous shape, poised in the air, blocking out the starlight.

All the screaming merged into one, endless, wordless song in my head.

I felt her presence flowing through me. My spirit hands were like great claws latching onto the buzzing substance of the lock.

More explosions.

Huge scaled wings crashed down on the windbreak, collapsing it. Buffeting winds threw all the remaining equipment over.

People running. Amaral running.

No, not him. He is mine!

White fury in my head. The entire energy of the lock collapsing,
burning
through me. I couldn’t take it.

Kaothos
pulling
it through herself instead.

Fire in my veins. Me screaming. Kaothos screaming. The whole Taos community of Adepts scattered around the hillside, all of them, screaming. All of us bound into this one, hideous pain.

White. White. White. Burning my eyes.

No lock. No Diana. Just a ball of flame like a sun going nova.

Then no energy going through me. All of it feeding into the sun.

No pain.

Taggart falling into the sun, struggling.

His mouth and eyes open in terror. No screaming. Instead, a sound—a single note so deep I could only feel it.

Children floating, falling. Eyes closed, drifting.

And then my face was pressed into the ground. Blood and dirt covered me.

I heard a shout from down at the river, a huge cry echoed in the throat of every Were in the three packs, and echoed in the Call they raised.

Hunt. Kill.

Shots were fired, but I could feel the Confederation buckle and run.

What was that stench of burning?

Nightmare? Memory?

I knew I’d smelled that before. Human flesh burning has an odor that you never forget.

Hunt. Kill.

That was my Call too.

They were sweeping up the hill.

I rubbed at my eyes, wiping the muck away.

The windbreak was gone. Tables and chairs were splintered. All the audiovisual conferencing equipment was broken and scattered, tossed every which way.

The smell was coming from the four Adepts who’d been maintaining the lock.

They still stood rigidly in their places. Their heads were on fire, the flesh melting as I looked. Faces fixed in shock and pain lost their features and collapsed into unrecognizable ruin.

The children lay dead or unconscious around Diana.

She was slumped on the chair, her front bloodied.

Taggart was dead at her feet, his throat ripped open and his face fixed on his final moments of horror.

No sign of Kaothos. No sense of her. No sense of the spirits that had swarmed over this place. My mind was eerily silent and empty.

Except for the Call.

Hunt. Kill.

Amaral,
I screamed
. Amaral. Mine. Mine to kill.

Life simplified down to that one thing.

Death comes to all. To some it’s a blessing. But few get to choose the manner of their passing.

He struggles. He is getting weaker, but there is life in him yet.

He is old. Old. I can taste it in his Blood.

We have danced his last dance on this cold hillside, but the last steps can linger. Pain and fear. So sweet.

Eyes that first saw New England in 1757 from the rigging of a Yankee whaler are growing dim.

My jaws ease. There is a little life in him yet. He knows his death nears and he is so afraid.

Good.

“Amber. Stop it.”

I heard voices around me, but they meant nothing to me.

He’d run. The loss of the Wind River alpha, Kaothos’ sudden appearance, the death of the Taos Adepts and the great shout from the packs swarming across the Los Pinos River had broken the Confederation utterly. With only his Athanate security to protect him, Amaral had run.

I’d caught them halfway down the hill.

His security weren’t Ops 4-10, but they were Athanate and they’d been armed.

It hadn’t mattered to me.

I’d howled a challenge and felt the wolves racing in from all directions, passing like ghosts through the pine, flying over the uneven ground, faster than the wind that bore the first icy fingers of snow. Spirit and physical forms like black and white ribbons had mixed until they was only gray.

Every way bears
death and sorrow and pain and loss.

I have chosen.

Amaral would not get away. I’d seen his death in him.

Hands touch me. I growl. There is a bubbling sound in his throat.

Slowly. Slowly.

Dance a little longer.

There had been death all around. The cloud of fear and confusion. One if the Amaral guards in front of me. The taste of his Blood. The feel of cartilage crushed in my jaws. The sudden end to screaming.

Huge wolf, Silas, attacking the last group of guards. Others fighting.

Then Amaral himself.

I’d changed back briefly. I needed him to see who it was that killed him.

My body was painted in blood.

Amaral carried no gun. Too arrogant. Too well protected. Not anymore.

So he’d attacked me the way he thought was his strength.

Icy daggers in my head against a wall of my anger.

Then fighting hand to hand and mind to mind at the same time.

I’d never practiced that. Hand to hand I could beat him, even if he was stronger than me. Even if the damage to my shoulders made me scream in agony.

Mind to mind I could defend.

But I couldn’t do both.

He got a grip on me, and I wasn’t going to be able to break it.

I spat blood and poison into his eyes.

Not enough.

His attack was battering at my mind like a sledgehammer.

So I let him through and he shared my mind.

Memories I’d locked away, like fire rising up inside me, and he couldn’t let go. He couldn’t let go.

Betrayal and despair so strong they shatter your mind.

This is what it’s like, Amaral.

This is what it’s like to be strapped down unable to move while they break your arms and legs and cut and burn your flesh so they can test how long it takes you to heal from your injuries.

This is what it’s like when you hear them talking. Let’s try it with drugs this time. Let’s see if more injuries slow the rate of healing of individual injuries. Let’s see if starving has an effect on healing. Is she viable for reproduction?

This is what it’s like when it’s your own side doing these things to you and you wake in the middle of another experiment and scream until your throat is raw and someone says the subject is distressed and then there’s cold streaming into your veins and you can’t scream but you can still feel.

And then my wolf came and took me, and Amaral’s mental and physical grip faltered and I seized him by the throat.

Don’t die yet, Amaral. I’m enjoying this. There are still things you haven’t seen.

More movement.

They’re not here to save you, Amaral. You’re mine. Your death is my life.

A bang. A smell of burnt oil and nitro. Then my jaws are clamped on dead meat.

He was mine! I crouch over the body and snarl at the figures around me.

Mine to kill, however I wanted.

I will kill and kill. I need to kill so I can stop seeing the things that are in my mind.

Alex was there.

Thought was difficult. I didn’t want to think. If I thought I would remember.

He flowed into wolf form, took a careful step.

Snarl.

But I can’t fight him. He is my alpha. I have accepted him.

I let them drag Amaral’s body away, my lips quivering with more snarls, but my head sinking down.

Alex stood with his head high. My lips drew back, but I didn’t snarl at him.

Every way bears
death and sorrow and pain and loss.

I had chosen a path that ended here. Diana was alive. Panethus might survive and forge links across the entire paranormal community. Olivia was alive. The Confederation would stagger; the survivors of tonight would return to their individual packs bearing the virus of doubt and the Confederation would turn in on itself. My pack was safe for the moment. My House was protected. Amaral was dead.

For everything, a cost.

Even in wolf form, under Alex’s dominance, I could feel the madness in my head.

The irony. In the end, it wasn’t the Athanate driving the Were rogue, or vice versa. It wasn’t trying to be an Adept. It wasn’t the curse twisting in my belly.

It was the things they did to me in Obs before Colonel Laine rescued me. The memories they hid in the places I had prepared for such memories.

The walls that I had built, and that they had strengthened, had finally burst.

My wolf gave me some protection from it, but without Alex around, the killing rage would return. It would be worse if I changed back and let the Athanate take over. The thought of drinking Blood was making my wolf tremble with eagerness.

I closed my eyes.

Oh, yes, I’d bite. Deeper and deeper. Feeding on fear and despair. Uncaring.

My body pulsed with the thought.

Rogue. Rogue. Rogue.