Silver Storm: Timewalker Chronicles, Book 2 (24 page)

But the void had nothing to react with, nothing to die, it had nothing at all.

Send it into the void.

Tim forced the thought into her mind and she steeled her will to control the energy she’d need to twist open the pretzel in space-time she had around herself and pull them through. Or force them through.

Sarah leaned into him, aware now of his consciousness entwined with hers in the field of energy surrounding them. “I’ll try.”

And she did. But nothing moved. She could pull energy and move it around, had created a chaotic swirl of wind and lightning over Lake Michigan, but the vortex the weapon had created was what had pulled her into its reality the first time, and the enemy had firmly closed that door once their weapon had been launched through it.

So, the light of her soul, of the girl’s, and all the Timewalker descendants were still there, visible, stuck in that place of cold, inky darkness.

Sarah flung her consciousness and every ounce of will she possessed into her storm, trying to force, push, pull or draw the deadly glitter away from the city and reopen that door. She couldn’t do it.

“Tim!” She needed help, she needed something she could feel in the back of her mind, in
his mind
. Knowledge. Understanding of the nature of reality itself.

“Let me in, Sarah.” Tim shouted the command as a bolt of lightning slashed the antennae behind them and they were covered in a brilliant shower of sparks.

Let me in. Give me the storm
.

They had seconds before the deadly particles would reach the tops of the buildings. Seconds until death.

Sarah surrendered everything, opened herself completely to Tim. No secrets, no hiding. Everything was laid bare for him to see, her fear, her determination, and her love for him. He could destroy her now, but she didn’t care. She gave him access to her power. Gave him the small light she hid and trusted him to help her protect it. Gave him her soul, and had faith that he’d return it to her in one piece.

His spirit floated in beside her, filling her from the inside out, merging them into one mind with one goal.

She’d expected calm from him, cold determination and analytical strategies or theories to be running through his head like a machine.

Instead she was engulfed in a cold fire, an inferno of rage that this thing would dare threaten his world, his woman.

He was angry that this thing would destroy
her.
It was personal and fierce. The last thread of control she’d been holding snapped and she shoved everything she had into him, pulled power from the wind currents, the earth beneath her feet, the constant barrage of waves and water crashing in the lake. The buildup of power was enormous, and still he needed more. Lightning flashed across the sky in giant webs of her will, surrounding them in a deafening battle of sound that shook the building and reverberated through her chest like a bomb blast. She stopped thinking and became the weapon Tim needed to wield to save them. She would have lost her feet, but Tim’s solid stance behind her held their bodies in place as they battled the invisible enemy on the other side of the void.

They were watching, she could feel the sick oily stain of their malignant minds moving around the light of her soul, sniffing like rabid wolves at a piece of fresh meat. A chill raced through her, not a physical cold, nothing so innocent as that. This cold would drain her, send her heart and mind into an abyss of darkness so profound she’d never find her way out. The cold penetrated her defenses and crawled through her awareness like cold sludge moving through her body, chilling her and stealing her will to fight.

She pushed it back with more power from the Earth mother, the animals, the wind and rain and rocking water of the oceans. She expanded her consciousness until she was no longer human, no longer Sarah, but part of the universe itself.

And still the chilling cold pulled at the edges of her mind.

Tim!

I feel it.

Sarah dove into his thoughts and saw his plan. He knew how to fight this thing, he understood it in a way she could not, in formulas and mathematical theories that existed in his mind, making these things concrete, real, and stealing their invincibility from them.

He knew where they were. He understood what they did and how they moved through reality, through time.

He could find them, he just needed the power to get to them, to open the door.

Sarah pulled more, felt the tiny soul huddled within her own fight with her, calling on the link she had with all the Timewalkers and their descendants, Sarah drew them all into the fight. All their minds, their skills and energies. All their wills merged for an infinite moment in time into one will, one mind, one soul.

Katie was there, and Molly, Alexa and Luke. Those energies she recognized. But there were scores more, minds tuned to the call, souls that answered and fed her the power and control that she needed to help Tim do the impossible and command the door between worlds.

Force it open, and force this nasty death dust back to where it came from.

The energy built inside her, around her, until she was the center of a hurricane of invisible energy that would make a nuclear bomb look like a firecracker in the rain. The aliens wouldn’t need to destroy Chicago. If she didn’t get the energy under control they’d blow half of North America off the map.

“Tim!” She screamed it at him, body and mind, and tore through his barriers to his bare mind, forcing him to funnel the power, to twist it to his own ends.

His thoughts silenced, calm and cold as a machine, as his mind raced to comprehend and hold the incomprehensible. No human mind could cleave to the knowledge he now commanded, no mere human could withstand the rush of electromagnetic energy flowing through them.

“We’re more than human, Sarah.” Tim smiled and stepped up beside her, pulled her raised arm down and entwined their fingers. His meaning drifted between them and the hundreds of connected souls feeding them power, understanding and will. “We always were.”

Sarah squeezed his hand and nodded as they stood quiet and still in the eye of the storm. She kept the energy raging, throwing dust and debris into the air to interact with the
other
particles, slowing their fall and stealing their power in tiny increments.

The twisted lines of reality that were torqued and folded around her uncurled in response to Tim’s directed energy and will. He knew it existed. He understood it, and that gave him the power to open the doorway between worlds.

“Just a crack, Sarah. Any more and we could destroy everything, or worse, let more of this stuff in.”

She nodded and fed him the power he needed.

The moment reality shifted, the discordant notes of power shooting from that tiny rift in reality screamed through her like a police siren inside her head. It hurt like hell. She fell to her knees beside Tim, hand still clasped in his as massive amounts of energy flowed between them.

Tim focused on holding the door open, the crushing weight of two realities threatening to buckle their combined will despite the massive amounts of power she gave him to command.

“Now, Sarah!”

She had to summon the particles, she had to become the sound in her head, a giant magnet to attract them back home.

She wrapped her energy around that non-sound in her mind, the scream of wrongness in her soul and sent it out to ride the wind, to settle over the particles of this world like masks, fooling the
other,
drawing them to her in a river of dark matter streaming toward her.

The song of their home dimension pulled the particles through the door and a small river of beautiful shimmering death vanished into thin air in the space a few feet in front of them.

A giant vacuum of nothing existed in their wake and normal matter rushed in to fill the space with a sonic boom of sound. Shattering glass from hundreds of office windows filled the city as the doorway between worlds collapsed.

The repercussion hit their minds with the force of a sledgehammer and Sarah fell to her knees next to Tim as her vision went black.

<><><>

Tim woke with Sarah in his arms and the rumble of jet engines in his ears. They were laid out together on a makeshift bed of blankets and pillows on the floor of a six-seater jet.

He looked around and found Katie sitting nearby, a watchful and worried expression on her face as she stared at Sarah’s unconscious face.

“We made it?”

“You made it.” Katie’s smile was filled with relief and the aftershocks of terror he was sure they were all going to be feeling for a long time.

“Am I dead?”

Katie set his duffel bag beside him on the floor then resumed her seat and clapped her hands together in front of her face. “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

Tim sighed and hugged Sarah tighter. “Surprise me.”

“You are very, very dead, Timothy Daniel Tucker. We planted your cell phone up there, so we got you a new one. It’s in the bag. And we got Bandit on board.”

“Good.” He couldn’t go back. Ever. Luke’s flash drive held all the proof he needed to know that they were already twisting his work to their own ends at the government labs. He didn’t know who had stolen his work, or when they’d managed to sneak in and copy his private notes, but he wasn’t really surprised. “And the bad news?”

Katie’s grim face set free a colony of bees in his gut. “Luke and Alexa are off grid. Their house was destroyed by the Triscani right after the attack this morning.”

“Shit.”

“Yours was, too.” Her grin was forced. “Your estate will forward Mr. Davis the insurance check.”

His house? Gone? “What about Molly? Your house? It sounds like they are tracking Sarah.” His head spun with the implications. A life on the run. Had they finally found a way to track her? Or were they having an aliens’ version of a temper tantrum since they’d gotten their asses kicked this morning by the beautiful Mrs. Davis?

“Our house is fine. I don’t know how they knew about your house or Alexa’s, but there’s been no sign of them at all around mom’s house. And since this morning, we’d know.”

That was true enough. Every Timewalker descendant on Earth had been pulled into that battle with them. They’d all felt the strange energy and malevolent touch of the Triscani world.

To hell with them. If the bad guys tried to come after them, so be it. He and Sarah would take them down as many times as it took. The Triscani had to know that he wouldn’t run from a fight. Not with them. Fucking bastards.

He buried his nose in Sarah’s hair and let the future flow over him in a warm haze. Sarah on the beach under the hot sun, a cold drink in her hand and a tiny bikini barely covering her warm, willing body. His. Forever.

“Wake up, Mrs. Davis.” He ordered Sarah to come to. He needed to know she was all right, that the cold darkness he’d felt trying to devour her was well and truly gone.

Katie smiled in understanding. “You’ve both been out for a few hours. But all of her vitals were fine, so she should wake up any time.” She stood and tugged her jacket into place, ever the professional. “I’ll just go have a chat with the pilot and give you some time to adjust. We’ll be in Bermuda in a couple of hours. We’ve got Bandit up front. She’s keeping my uncle company.”

She walked to the cockpit and a heavily accented British voice drifted through the plane before she closed the door behind her, leaving him alone with Sarah.

He tightened his arms around her in what he knew would be a painful grip, but couldn’t stop his need to feel her, alive and warm in his arms. Silent tears defied his orders and slid into her hair.

That
thing
they’d faced had scared the living shit out of him. It was not good or evil, not dark or light, it was…nothing. A cold, alien nothing that would swallow the world whole and still not be satisfied.

And Sarah had faced it and not flinched. She’d battled it and defied it, denied it the souls it wanted to consume, the souls that stood in its way. Without the light, the Triscani invaders would be free to erase everything. The Timewalkers were the army in their path, defending existence simply by being, by fighting, by refusing to give up even in the face of overwhelming odds.

And he was one of them. He’d felt the call of the strands that wrapped around this reality, this stream of time that cradled them and their world.

If it were to unravel, their world would cease to exist.

His little experiments, his obsession with Nikola Tesla, were now insignificant in the face of this cold reality.

The darkness would stop at nothing to reach that little girl’s light still cradled safely on the other side of Sarah’s soul, of his own. They both would fight for her now, and ignore her stubborn, childlike desire to be free from their temporary cage.

He sent the child his tears, his pain at nearly losing Sarah and the full scope of terror, the absolute power over dark energies that the enemy hunting her had at its command.

The girl settled, defiant but not quite ready to face what he’d shown her. Sarah wouldn’t approve. She wanted to coddle the girl, surround her with love and warmth, to teach her humanity and compassion. Tim had to hope her parents, whoever and whatever they were, would take care of that. His job now, his and Sarah’s job, was to keep that little light hidden until she was grown.