Retrieval (38 page)

“Do it,” whispered her father from his new perch on the conference table.

Besides the chair Dempsey had fallen into, it was the only other thing not destroyed in the room.

She glanced at Aleksei. His concentration was intense, his eyes a pure, clear purple as power surged through him while he struggled to shield her sisters, Sebastian, and his men. Their fear for her was written on their faces. Fear for her, thank God, not of her. Even Sebastian’s men and two others she’d not seen before held their acceptance of the inevitable. Then she looked Sebastian. Her heart screamed at his look of denial, and yet she could do nothing more than finish what she had started. He would think her a monster after this.

“I love you,” she mouthed.

Then she bent over Dempsey, placed her hands on his head, and twisted. He crumpled like a rag doll, and her father clapped in earnest.

“Wonderful job. I didn’t know if you had it in you. Murder becomes you child. You do have some of me in you after all,” Smythe-Ward said in delight.

She turned to her father and with a nod toward Aleksei, walked over to the man who had made her an instrument of destruction. She heard commotion behind her and then silence. Aleksei had eliminated the werewolf creatures and now had her family and Sebastian with his men inside a rock solid, impenetrable shield. She felt Piper’s anger, Raina’s love, and Kinsey’s despair before the shield closed completely. He’d had a difficult time preventing her sisters from going to her, but he was as she’d thought him to be, possibly equal in strength to her.

“I’ve hated you from the first. From the moment our awareness came in the womb I have detested everything about you. Our mother tried to make amends, but you? You just continued to hunt us as if we were prey. You sought us for the sole purpose of creating superhuman beings that would serve you in a court of horrors. You’re sick. A perverted freak. I’m shamed that any part of you resides inside of me, and I would gladly give my life to destroy you.”

Wind gathered again. Gale forces ripped apart walls, shredded the table her father was standing on, and still he remained upright. She’d done that on purpose. She wanted him to feel every bit of her fury before she sent them both to the hereafter.

“You won’t do it.” His words were the ultimate taunt.

Let’s play chicken then, Daddy.

“As brilliant of a scientist as you are you should know that nothing is foolproof, and I am the antithesis to the hypocrisies you’ve committed. I will do this!” Sky screamed as her back bowed with the force of the power driving through her.

“Sky!” Sebastian yelled her name.

Perhaps there was a shred of love left for her inside of him. Maybe she hadn’t killed it all.

She would never know. With lightning raining down from a roiling sky, the blackness she had been earlier spun around her. How she kept her bodily form she didn’t know as the power shrieked and whistled through her.

Her eyes shot beams of pure light, and for an instant, she was a prism, throwing off every color of the rainbow. She viewed it all as if standing outside herself. The blackness, the wind, the lightning and the colors coalesced, and heat surged through the room.

Smythe-Ward screamed as he was burned by the supernova she’d become, but still he stood because she willed it so.

She sent him every possible waking nightmare in his thoughts, and he screamed until there wasn’t breath left in him to do more.

Skylar burned as well.

Every pain that he felt, she felt tenfold. She was reaching her limit. She could overcome the worst of the pain, but her blackening consciousness was not something she could prevent. If she lost it now before his final breath, she would probably die leaving him alive with the potential to carry on.

“No!” she yelled in denial of that thought.

Finally the heavens opened up and rained down its hellfire. It seemed the stars fell to the earth, and the ground rumbled in sympathy of her pain.

“Die!” She poured all of herself into the final volley.

She became death and pushed her way into his body to find his beating heart. She grasped her tiny fist around the offending organ, crushed it and felt the last beat of her own echo inside his dying mind.

*

“Noooo,” Sebastian screamed as he watched both Smythe-Ward and Skylar fall at the same time.

“Let me out. Let me go to her,” he yelled hoarsely at the otherworldly being shielding them.

Logically he knew that he would be dead right now if the man hadn’t given all of his own power to protecting himself, Sky’s sisters, and his men. None of it mattered, though, if Sky were dead.

The shield winked out with a loud
pop,
and Sebastian made his way around falling debris to Skylar’s still form.

Her sisters were right behind him, but he made it to her first. He could hear the sounds of sirens, and was that the wail of wolves in the distance?

“No,” he whispered as he gently turned her over and scooped her up into his arms.

She was gone. There was nothing there anymore. He felt it like a raw hole in his soul.

“Come back to me, baby. Skylar,” he whispered urgently, shaking her irrationally as if the motion alone would cause her to breathe.

“Sebastian, we need to move fast; a DOD cleanup crew is on its way,” Micah said from behind him.

Where had the man come from?

He looked up into the other man’s light eyes, and whatever was on his face caused Micah to gasp. Micah bent to him slowly and took Skylar from him.

He held on, refused to relinquish even her dead body, until Raina stepped up to him and grabbed his cheeks, so he would look at her.

“Look at me, Sebastian. Look at my eyes,” she urged him as she dropped her hands from his face.

“She’s gone, Raina, just gone. Again.”

“No. Remember the hospital, Sebastian? Remember her torpor? Look at my eyes, and look who I’m touching. I’m only touching Sky, and if she were completely gone, my eyes would still be white. Look at me Sebastian.”

He did, and if some part of his brain recognized what she was saying he wouldn’t know it until later.

“I’ll take her to Ma’am. She’ll know what to do,” Aleksei said quietly, before taking Skylar from Micah’s arms and then turning again to vault over three stories down to the pavement of the GenTech parking lot. He became a shadow amidst the destruction.

“She’ll come back to you, doubt it not, Graham.”
Sebastian felt the other man’s words in his mind before he came back to himself and took off to the edge of the building.

“Sebastian. Come away from the edge, we need to get out of here right now,” Kinsey urged him.

“Where is he taking her, Micah?” Desperation edged his tone, but there was also a note of bitter defeat.

“To heal,” Micah said cryptically, watching as the DOD cleanup team arrived and began setting explosive charges to level the remaining buildings.

After helping them, being debriefed by them, and then settling Skylar’s sisters back at his home outside of Charleston, it was hours before Sebastian could replay the entire scene and try to come to terms with the loss of his heart.

Chapter 22

Two Months Later

Yellowstone Wilderness

It had been two months of hell, and Sebastian Graham was finally ready to come to terms with Skylar’s loss. He’d heard nothing from her directly and very little about her in the two months since the Bluffton episode, and her decimation of GenTech and Dolan Smythe-Ward. Senator Cobb had been brought up on ethics charges for misappropriation of funds, but none of the hellish experiments or creatures Smythe-Ward had created had been brought to light. They maintained a relative safety somewhere in the world.

He’d heard from Micah, who assured him that she was clinging to life somewhere safe, somewhere Sebastian was unable to get to her. He’d resolved himself to feeling relief that she lived, but the grief and crushing regret caused by her mistrust and desertion stung deeply.

Raina, Kinsey, and Piper had left yesterday and were headed back to Georgia. They were getting along well with their newfound sibling. Sasha had given birth to twins just three weeks ago. They proclaimed to have no information on their absent sister’s condition, and he believed them because their pain had been almost as palpable as his.

So here he was, living in relative seclusion in his rebuilt cabin in Bumfuck, Idaho. Lonely, though not alone, as Rover, Bleak, and Morrissey had all stayed on after they’d completed rebuilding. They claimed they needed the normalcy of solitary living after what they’d been through with the McKannon sisters.

Sebastian had grunted at that and also been secretly relieved that he wouldn’t be entirely alone with just his thoughts. And his surliness. He’d become someone different, and he wasn’t so sure he liked the new Sebastian. He was surly to the point of flat out meanness. His moods were unstable on the best of days and snake bitten the others.

He’d loved and lost and resented the fucking hell out of it. If he were honest, he resented her. He’d been glad when her sisters had left. He didn’t want the physical reminders of the woman who hadn’t trusted him enough to help her live, hadn’t trusted in him enough to divulge her plans for death.

He’d wussed out a couple of weeks ago and tried to find the link between their minds. He thought he’d almost had it when abruptly the connection had been shut down. He’d known then that she wanted nothing more to do with him, or she would have responded.

So here he sat, on a faded wooden rocker that had seen better days, more of a grouch than the bears in the woods around him searching for food before they denned for winter. Yeah, here he sat. Missing the hell out the softest skin he’d ever touched and wishing for just one more taste of the ambrosia of her kiss.

He was pathetic. And angry. And fucking pathetic.

“Hey, Seb?” Rover called through the new kitchen window.

“Yeah?” Sebastian grunted back.

“Got a call a minute ago from Dray Bonner. Come here would you? I feel like my
maman
, talking to you through the kitchen glass.”

“Open the bastard up then Rover. I’m fine where I am.”

“You stubborn,
mon frère
. Stubborn. Anyway, Bonner said he had a visitor last night. You listening?”

“A visitor … and?”

“She gon’ have to be more of a hard head than you to get through that thick-assed skull of yours.” Rover grunted before continuing, “Anyway, he says that his visitor is headed our way, and for me to tell you this one little thing: The fighting sucks, but the making up is awesome.”

Sebastian ignored the first comment because it wasn’t exactly a state secret that he was hardheaded. Anyone who dealt with him on an op knew that right from the start.

“Sebastian? Man, did you hear me?” Rover yelled this time, and his loud Cajun voice echoed down the valley Sebastian’s house sat in.

“Yeah, dude, I heard you. He made up with his woman. Woopdefuckingdoo.”

“Oohh. I’m tired of you sulking. Morrissey? Let’s go get some beer. Even you gotta be better company than that hardass out there.”

“You’re breaking my heart Rove, really. It’s breaking in two right now,” Sebastian said sarcastically, pulling a tug on his own brew.

“Well maybe I can put that back together for you.”

He stilled. The voice was straight from his dreams. For a moment Sebastian thought he’d imagined it. Then he stood up and looked around. There she was, outlined in the light from the kitchen door. He could see her silhouetted against it like a lush pinup against the backdrop of yellow light. His heart stopped for several beats and then picked back up in a rush.

Then, just that quickly, anger replaced the euphoria that seeing her had caused him. He deliberately looked her up and down, picked his beer back up, and sat back down in the dilapidated rocking chair. He could get through this. Couldn’t he?

“Oh. So you’re going to play it
that
way huh?” she asked him softly and again her voice was like a balm to his lacerated soul.

He didn’t respond. He couldn’t force the breath in and out of his body so words weren’t going to work at this point. Plus he was really, really angry. He didn’t remember ever being this angry, and as a man used to control he wasn’t going to give in to the rage that had been brewing since she left him here the first time.

He closed his eyes and wished he hadn’t, because the peek of her outlined against the light was now emblazoned on his memory. She looked healthy, rounded and lush. Her hair appeared longer, and her eyes practically glowed. They were whiskey-colored again not the black of the darkest night.

He still said nothing even as she pulled a chair from the opposite end of the porch and placed it beside his. She sat down slowly, and the wind from the hills carried her scent to his nostrils.

He inhaled deeply, his body tightened in a painful rush, and he knew that he’d never be able to not want her. She was beneath his skin, in his blood and soul.

Hold on to the rage
, he chanted silently, willing his dick to stop throbbing like an open wound.

“Okay, so maybe I deserve this,” she said, and he could hear the frustration creeping into her tone.

He risked a glance at her, cocked an eyebrow and then stared back out at the wilderness.

“Oookaaay, so I do deserve this, but Bastian can you not even speak to me?” Her plaintive voice almost made him lose it, but it was her calling him by her pet name for him that brought the rage full force.

“I
could
speak to you, Ms. McKannon, but really, what good would that do? We both know you don’t listen.” He sneered as he abruptly got up and paced to the top of the porch steps. He couldn’t be so near to her and not touch her.

She stood up too and walked to stand beside him, then in front of him, trying to block his escape down the steps.

“Bastian,” she whispered pleadingly before he cut her off.

“It’s
Se
bastian. Never Bastian, Ms. McKannon, never,” he said hotly, finally getting a look at her face in the light pouring from the kitchen.