Retrieval (20 page)

“I didn’t pass out, you ninny. But son of a whore that hurt. Listen, Bleak, they’re getting closer and closer. I think he’s using pinpoint ultrasound to keep me from leav—urghhh—” Sky couldn’t finish as another wave of pain grabbed her by the throat and refused to let her go.

She foamed at the mouth and jerked violently as her muscles locked down.

“Sky. Damn it! What can I do?” Bleak asked her, holding her head up, so she didn’t swallow her tongue.

“Nothing … to … do. Leave,” she demanded as another wave of pain engulfed her and locked her muscles down again.

“Sebastian, she can’t breathe. Whatever they’re using out there is locking her muscles down. She’s going to suffocate. What?” Bleak asked the man in his ear. “Okay, whatever you think will work. Sky?”

“Wha—” she garbled, choking on her saliva.

“Take whatever you need from me, and let’s get the fuck out of here. You’re tiny, but I don’t relish the idea of carrying your ass for miles until we reach safety, do you hear me?” Bleak demanded of her now.

“Sure?” she asked him, relegated to one-syllable words, reaching for his hand and his permission.

“Take it, whatever the hell ‘it’ is. Just do it. I can hear cars pulling up, and we need to be leaving now.”

She took his hand, and poor Bleak, he was prevented from saying anything else. She was used to this feeling, but he wasn’t. Their connection would feel like an electric current had zipped through his body. His mind would blank, and then lights would burst behind his eyelids. He’d feel her presence as she siphoned energy from him. She hoped he understood what she was doing.

No more than ten seconds had passed, and she sat up, wiping spittle off her mouth and reaching for an electrical socket.

She placed her hand over the socket, and a bright blue ball of electricity hovered over her hand and then escaped into the wall. Bleak was looking at her in awe.

“Don’t ask, and I won’t tell, okay? Suffice it to say their little ultrasound trick is now no more. Little shits don’t know what they’re dealing with, but they will soon. Bleak, we got to hightail it out of here now.” She was still struggling to get her muscles moving.

The muscles of her calves and upper arms twitched. She grimaced as she tried to stand.

“Did you take enough of whatever it was you needed? I know, Sebastian, calm the fuck down,” Bleak said harshly.

“You’re getting a little schizophrenic on me, Bleak, and yeah, I’ve got all I’m going to take for now. If I take too much of what your own body needs to function, I’ll be carrying you instead of the scenario you gave me a second ago.”

Finally getting her feet under her, she noticed shadows moving outside the windows in the living room area.

“Damn. Why couldn’t we be on the top floor? I like heights. Okay, Bleak. If you’ve got any suggestions to get us out of here I’m game. Otherwise, we all go boom. Get it? Got it? Good.” Sky spit out words faster than the guy on the old FedEx commercials.

He shook his head. She heard a distinctive whump-whump-whump and knew a helicopter was headed their way. Up or down was a moot point now. Their only option out was the way they’d come in, and she was pretty sure all those exits were now covered by the team gunning for her.

“Motherfucker,” Bleak said, and despair was in his eyes.

“No worries, I knew it would probably come to this. This is what’s going down: I’m going to shield you, and then this entire condo is going to explode in one great big fiery ball. Now, it may not be pretty, and I may not be able to hold the shield for long, but when everything goes boom, you stay down, understand me? If you move, it will throw me off. Stay down. King. Here, to me now. Down, boy.”

Sky took a step toward the hallway when a loud crash signaled her father’s team’s entrance into the condo.

“Down, Bleak, and do not move,” she warned him even as she threw a shield that encompassed her, Bleak, and her dog.

“If this goes south, you tell him that he meant more to me than he could’ve ever known, okay Bleak?” Sky’s voice broke on the last.

“You just told him yourself, Sky, and you better not pull a hero act on me here you got that? I’m sick to death of women playing the hero while the little men wait to be saved. If this shit goes bad—take what you need from me, and get yourself to safety. Your sisters need you.” Bleak’s tone brooked no argument.

“You’re a good man, Bleak, but I gotta concentrate, so shut up already. Plus Raina may lose me, but she’s not losing you,” she said the last more to herself than to him.

She turned within her shield to face the men who’d entered the condo. A familiar voice ordered the men to stand down.

Good old Warren Goolsby to the rescue. Lucky her. Maybe if she did this just right, she could take the bastard out along with all the men who had come in with him. One of the men to his left caught her attention, and she sighed inwardly. She knew him.

“Micah, you show up in the damndest places.”
She pushed the thought at the blond behemoth standing to the left of Goolsby.
“Shield yourself.”

The man nodded, and it was an action of acceptance and faith. He knew her, too. She’d try not to hurt him, but ultimately, she had to keep Bleak safe, and Goolsby needed to die. If Micah got caught in the maelstrom, well, she’d warned his stubborn ass.

“Skylar McKannon. How good to see you again. It’s been, what, fourteen years or so?” Goolsby asked, and the permanent sneer on his face lent his words an evilness that not even Satan could hope to imitate.

She didn’t respond to his question; there was nothing to say. She was all about business now, and it was time to go to work.

She could feel her body ready itself for what was to come. Her extremities were falling asleep and getting heavier as her core pulled in all the blood from her arms and legs. She fell to one knee and tried her best to hang on. Since Bleak wasn’t a man used to letting a woman take control, it seemed all of the men on Bastian’s team were alpha to the core, she was shocked that he was taking her orders to stay down so well. Still, Bleak might get a little wigged out and start to move which would disrupt her entire energy flow and get them both either killed or captured.

Neither were ideal outcomes.

She looked at Bleak, gave him what comfort she could with her gaze, and he nodded once to let her know he understood.

Energy rushed out of her at an impossible rate.

Her organs wouldn’t last much longer, and her breathing was getting harsher. The wind picked up in the condo as if they were outside and lightning streaked in jagged lines throughout the small bedroom. Chaos reigned, and this was the worst scenario for her. Trying to protect someone while destroying someone else wasn’t easy business.

“Kill it, Sky. Don’t make me use what your father gave to me to control you,” Goolsby warned her ominously.

Skylar knew something that nobody else, not her sperm donor, not Goolsby, nobody knew: she was about to blow this mother scratcher sky high, and none of the weapons they had brought to control her were going to prevent it.

She’d sent electricity through the circuitry of the condo moments ago after Bleak had let her siphon off him. Not only had that killed the ultrasound machine the men had been using, but it had also shorted out the wiring, and even now smoke rushed in from the walls.

“Skylar? Let’s get you home like a good little girl. Your daddy really misses you. I have to say I do too.” Goolsby laughed after the last.

Just a little more, hold on a little bit longer.
She prepared herself for what she was about to do. The knowledge that he hadn’t been prepared for a last stand was in Goolsby’s eyes. He’d thought she was controllable with Smythe-Ward’s weapons. He’d thought the threat of harming her sisters would be enough to keep her in line.

“You just don’t know, Goolsby, but I hope you find out while you’re rotting in hell,” she tossed out at him seconds before the entire condo blew.

The explosion ripped upward, following the essential command of the woman who had created it. She’d sent pieces of herself throughout the entire room, igniting any flammable material, and that, in conjunction with the burgeoning fire behind the walls of the condo, sent it exploding into the night.

She slammed back into herself as her shield dropped. She hadn’t thought it possible to maintain her shield and send parts of herself outward, but she’d done it. And if the blood pooling around her head were any indication, she probably wasn’t going to survive it. Her organs were mush now. This wasn’t a survivable injury. Maybe if her sisters were here they could combine some resources. But they weren’t here, so death it was. Bleak lay on the ground beside her, King on the other side of him, but both were breathing. They were alive, and it brought her a measure of comfort.

The area around them burned and burned. She had a second to hope that the fire department could contain it before it spread to other units, that she’d done the unimaginable and somehow controlled the direction of the burn. She couldn’t hear Goolsby, or any of the men who’d been with him. Maybe she’d killed the asshole.

Pain stole up her spine, locked down her brain and refused to release its hold. She was so cold, but she had a moment’s thought for the sister she’d never known. She didn’t have the ability any longer to send out communication on the pathway she and her sisters used, but she sent what she could and hoped that they never forgot how much she loved them.

Her last thought was of Sebastian. Blackness crept into her vision, and then she knew no more.

Chapter 13

“Damn it! Move this fucking piece of shit faster, Rover,” Sebastian demanded as he slammed a fist into the passenger-side dashboard.

He was nearly insane with fear. He’d been castigating himself for the last two hours wondering what the hell he’d been thinking when he left her with only one man as protection. Sure, she’d proven she could handle herself, but this was different. There was an entire team of former spec-ops soldiers gunning for her, and if what Craven had told him was correct, they were searching for her under orders from Smythe-Ward.

He didn’t know how Smythe-Ward had found out where Sebastian had his team set up, and right now it didn’t matter. When he’d listened to Bleak as the man had struggled to keep Sky safe he’d nearly lost his mind. For the past hour he’d been unable to get anything out of his man.

Reports were coming in about a local fire, exactly where the team’s condo was, but there were no reports of any deaths. Did that mean they’d made it out, and if they had, why wasn’t Bleak responding to his repeated calls?

No, he had to go on worst-case scenario here and that meant Bleak or Sky was dead, or they were both dead. Neither his heart nor his mind could accept either of those thoughts.

“We’re about two minutes away now. Shit, is that our place burning?” Rover’s voice was quiet and full of disbelief.

Sebastian didn’t respond. He couldn’t. The kind of blaze he saw in the distance was the type that annihilated everything. The fact that it was still burning meant the fire was bad.

Rover pulled in at a squeal. There were firefighters, in their gear, fighting to control the blaze. It was the most bizarre thing he’d ever seen. The fire went straight up. It was as if there was an invisible band around it that kept it contained. None of the other units surrounding theirs had been touched. But there was nothing left of the condo Sebastian had rented for his team, and he didn’t understand why it was still burning. When he said there was nothing left to burn, he meant
nothing
.

He located someone who looked in charge, ran up, and demanded to know if anyone had been pulled out of the building.

The firefighter he stopped pointed in the direction of an ambulance. Bleak and King were sitting on the ground. Bleak’s face registered shock, pain. King lay beside him.

He made his over to Bleak, and he felt the first beginnings of hope that maybe, by the grace of God, Skylar was okay too.

“Where is she?” His voice was raw.

Bleak said nothing, just shook his head and wouldn’t meet Sebastian’s eyes.

“Where is she, Bleak? Tell me man. Where is Skylar?” Sebastian was so far gone that he didn’t realize he was shouting until Rover stepped up beside him and placed a restraining hand on his arm.

He shook Rover off, hunkered down beside Bleak, and asked him again, “Where is Skylar, Bleak?”

Slowly, as if the movement caused a pain so great that it couldn’t be borne, Bleak looked at Sebastian and shook his head from side to side.

“No way, man. You made it out; she could have too. Where the fuck is she?”

“Sir?” someone called from the side of the ambulance.

“What?” Sebastian snarled.

“There was a woman who was taken to the ER at Northwestern. She didn’t have any burns, but she was in cardiac arrest when we arrived. We couldn’t get a pulse, but as far as I know they continued to work her until they arrived at the ER,” the man said quietly, his tone an attestation of the situation’s hopelessness.

“Get me to Northwestern, Rover. Now,” Sebastian ordered as he made his way back to the Tahoe.

“I’ve got Bleak and King,” Rover said as he made his way to the vehicle.

Twenty minutes later found Sebastian beside a hospital gurney. On the shiny metal stretcher lay a small, covered body. Her chest wasn’t moving. Her heart wasn’t beating. The monitors that surrounded the bed had been shut off, and the ER doctor had covered her face when they pronounced her … dead.

She was dead.

He’d found his heart only to have lost it again.

Bleak had given him an idea of what had gone down in the condo, but Sebastian still couldn’t wrap his mind around any of it. The only thing he could do was feel. And it was devastating. Mind numbing pain had invaded his body. He couldn’t believe she was gone.

He reached for the sheet, pulled it back slowly. She was so still, so
cold
. He traced her lips, imagined the warmth from her kiss, and the beauty of her smile. His fingers moved down her cheek, followed the hollow of her collarbone to find purchase on the vein that had once beat with the steady flow of her life’s blood. He bent over, grabbed her head, and buried his face in her fiery strands.