The Reckoning (4 page)

A brief disorientation and we were there. I reached for Ritter’s mind, while still keeping track of Mari. I could only channel one ability at a time, but I could use my own talent to protect her if needed. She was the most inexperienced operative here and had shown repeatedly that she’d risk herself if she thought we were in danger. I could take out several Hunters with a mental blast, but it would leave me helpless so it was something I only used as a last resort.

Now,
I sent to my friends.

I started firing. My third man fell and Mari’s second before the group turned in our direction. Two men at the back dropped from Ritter and Stella’s fire, followed by two more. Nine down. They opened fire. The
rat-a-tat-tat
of their automatic weapons sliced through the stillness of the night. We had to hurry. Mari crouched behind the car, while I went over the top, using Ritter’s speed. He was already there. I landed on one rotund Hunter while bringing my tranque gun down on another. I rolled as I fell. Another turned his gun in my direction, but I was already diving away, the bullets spraying the short grass. Twisting, I came around, my foot out, kicking the gun from his hand. He slammed his fist at me, but I deflected it with my left arm and jabbed my right hand into his gut. He grunted and leaned forward into my next punch. I looked around as he fell, but I already sensed everyone was down.

“Get them into their van,” Stella said. “It won’t be long before someone comes to investigate those shots.” She grabbed a guy and started tugging him to the van.

I sent my thoughts out wider, finding two more life forces slinking in our direction. They were dimmer than the average life forces, which meant they were shielded. Before I could warn the others, Desoto’s two patrolman emerged from the trees only twenty feet away. I caught a glimpse of automatic rifles before a spotlight blinded me.

“Stop,” said a voice I recognized as belonging to the Unbounded who’d found Walker asleep in the security room. “Put down those weapons.”

Unbounded. Both of them,
I told the others.
Mari, stay behind the car until I tell you.

Ritter, Stella, and I dropped our tranques and raised our hands as the Unbounded moved closer. I could see a red dot on Ritter’s forehead, and as there wasn’t one on Stella’s, I figured another must be on mine. Though the bullets wouldn’t kill us, we’d be out of commission long enough to lose the information we’d obtained unless Stella had already uploaded it to our servers. Worse, we’d be back in Emporium hands.

I’d rather die a true death.

I pushed at their shields. Tight, but I could get in. Summoning a mental image of the ancient machete I’d picked up in Mexico, I jabbed it at one of the mental barriers. The real machete was back in my closet in San Diego, but visualizing its image sometimes gave me the extra force I needed to break into stronger mental barriers. The swirling black mass was tough enough that it told me the Emporium was beefing up their own mental shields. For an instant, I wondered if Delia Vesey had admitted to her people that shields could be breached by certain sensing Unbounded. I doubted it. But she could have told them we created a device to do the deed. That would protect her people without exposing her seventeen centuries of lies.

“Who are you?” demanded the second patrolman. Squinting, I could just make out that he had dark hair and a haughty manner that usually accompanied most Emporium agents. Unless they recognized us or were gifted with the rare sensing ability, they wouldn’t be able to tell that we were also Unbounded. Maybe it was possible we could talk our way out of this.

Stella put on an innocent expression, apparently having reached the same conclusion. “Hey, we were just out here paintballing and ran across these weirdos. They were having some sort of disagreement. We just waited them out.”

A snort from the first patrolman. “That might make sense if we hadn’t seen you take out half of them. Now we’ll ask you nicely one more time, who are you?”

Stella shrugged. “Well, it was worth a try. Anyway, they weren’t here looking for us. They’re Hunters. You know what that means.”

The first Unbounded came forward to check the nearest Hunter for the telltale insignia: a hunter with a rifle. He bent over at the same time I finally penetrated his shield. His gun was still pointed at Ritter’s forehead, though, and I had no doubt he could make the shot even with his momentary distraction. Just like Ritter, he wouldn’t need to pause to aim.

I felt Ritter tense.
Now, Mari,
I put into her mind. She shifted, appearing behind the second Emporium patrolman, the one with his rifle aimed at me. Had she chosen him because she felt Ritter could take care of himself?

Mari’s target turned, even as she appeared, his combat ability apparently warning him of a danger he couldn’t yet see and hadn’t planned for. On one level I was aware of her stepping close, slipping her knife almost gently up under his ribs. The guard I was linked to started to fire. I pushed hard, sending a flash of mental energy into his mind.

The shot left his rifle and I felt Ritter jerk. Yet in the next moment he took off from my side, launching himself at the guard. I sank to the ground, spent as Ritter reached his target. The man’s gun went flying. Fists flew in a blur. If there had been any doubt about the patrolman’s ability at combat, that was put to rest immediately. Even so, my confidence in Ritter was such that I might have enjoyed the battle, if not for the blood drenching his head and face. He looked gruesome, like something from a slasher nightmare, and his grim expression made me shudder. This was the man I hopelessly loved.

I tried to stand in order to help him, but my limbs wouldn’t obey. Fortunately, even wounded Ritter was more than a match for his opponent.

“I got him, Ritter,” Stella said.

I looked to see her pointing a rifle at the guard, who froze as he noticed the weapon. Ritter stepped forward and dealt him a crushing blow. The man crumpled.

Stella bent to check the pulse of the man Mari had knifed. “I was careful,” Mari said. “He’ll heal in no time.”

“No one else has shown up.” Ritter wiped blood from his face with a cloth Mari had found somewhere and then held it tight against the side of his skull. “But if we take these two with us, the Emporium will know something’s up.” His gaze slid to me and then skittered away.

I knew what he needed me to do. I tried again to rise, with as little success.

Stella came over and crouched beside me. “You okay? You made him miss Ritter, didn’t you? It’s natural you’d be drained. It always happens when you overexert yourself.”

“Not like this. It wasn’t as much effort as I’ve used before. I can still see. My head doesn’t even really hurt.”

Stella frowned. “It’s been a rough couple months. Accumulative stress can do a lot of damage.”

I wanted to protest. I’d had two weeks’ rest since my last mental battle, and for Unbounded that was enough time, with the help of a little curequick, to regenerate completely. So maybe it was something more. All the Renegades knew about the shiny miniature snake—a type of mental binding—Delia had planted in my mind during our last battle and had voted to keep me active but under regular mental checkups with Ava. Knowing Delia as well as I did, I wasn’t sure it had been the right decision.

Ritter walked toward us, the grisly wound on the side of his head still bleeding. I knew the request he would make before the words came. “Can you deal with those guys or should we take them with us?”

“I can do it,” I said. “But even if I remove memory of us, they’re going to know something’s up when they wake up hurting.”

“At this point, just erasing us will be good enough.”

For long moments, I sat there and absorbed, pulling in nutrients from the vegetation around us. One of the best things about the Change was that we were no longer dependent upon eating or drinking but could sustain ourselves completely by absorbing. It was as natural as breathing, and we did it unconsciously, though we could increase our rate as needed. And I needed energy now.

Feeling stronger, I pushed to my feet and steadied myself enough to walk to the first unconscious patrolman. Sinking to his side, I sent in my thoughts. I was getting rather skilled at dropping into the unconscious mind and examining thought bubbles. The ability to insert false memories had supposedly been lost over the centuries, but having glimpsed at what else Delia had hidden from even her own people, that might only be more of her lies. I planned to try my hand at fabricating a memory someday, but the first time shouldn’t be on Unbounded agents who would later be examined by the Emporium. Tonight I’d have to content myself in simply removing the memory of me and my companions.

Dropping into the calm blue lake of the man’s unconsciousness, I dodged a thought bubble, looking for what I needed. There it was, at the point they’d left the gate. They’d heard the shots, and he was reporting it to the guard inside the security room as they ran, so obviously they’d left themselves some way to communicate, even though the shield would have kicked back on. The patrolman was filled with anticipation since this assignment at Desoto’s was normally boring enough to make him wish he were assigned elsewhere.

That was when they’d spotted us—particularly me doing acrobatics over the car and Ritter whirling into his opponents faster than the eye could follow. A tremor of fear mingled with anticipation rippled throughout the patrolman’s body, making him feel alive and tingly.

I reached for the thought bubble, extracting the memory at the moment we came into it, making sure I took it all. Pulling it toward me, it vanished. I had no idea where the memories went after I extracted them, but it really didn’t matter. I looked around briefly, hoping to discover secrets, but he was a low-level Emporium soldier, prevented by his fierce sense of loyalty from becoming too curious.

“We’ll need to put them beyond those trees,” I said before reaching into the other man’s mind. “Just where the van comes into view. If we’re lucky, they’ll think the Hunters jumped them at that point and won’t guess that I took away their last memories.”

“We’ll leave something behind from the Hunters,” Stella said. “Not something too obvious. I’m tempted to leave a couple of the Hunters themselves, but we don’t want to be responsible for their deaths. I don’t know what the Emporium will think of why the Hunters didn’t take the guards, though. If the Hunters had knocked them out, they would have taken them prisoner.”

Ritter shook his head. “As long as the Emporium doesn’t suspect anyone was ever inside the house, it really doesn’t matter now. We can’t change things.”

By the time I’d finished with the second man, most of the Hunters had been thrown into their van, and Ritter was carrying the first Emporium patrolman to the location I’d indicated. “Tell him to go about ten feet to the left,” I said to Mari when Ritter stopped. She nodded and shifted next to him.

Stella grabbed the shoulders of the second man as Mari reappeared to help her. Ritter passed them at the halfway point, unfazed by their rejection of his offer to help. “Go get yourself some curequick,” Stella told him. “Or at least a little morphine.”

Since we weren’t in any impending danger and we didn’t have any other jobs to accomplish right away, I knew Ritter would let his body heal at its naturally speeded-up rate without using the addictive curequick.

Ritter grunted, but instead of going to the car, he came to where I had staggered to my feet. “We’d better get going. We may still run into more trouble.” He hesitated a second before asking, “Are you okay?”

“Me?” I forced a laughed. “Last I checked, you’re the one bleeding. Who was it that said not to get shot? You’re lucky he didn’t blow your brains out.”

“Next time I’ll move faster.” As he put an arm around me and led me in the direction of the car, practically supporting my weight, his presence hit me like a punch to the gut. In a normal life I wouldn’t have been able to break into someone’s mind, the bullet would have hit Ritter straight on, and he would have died. Really died. Because in a normal life he wouldn’t have the Unbounded gene. I wanted to weep with the tragedy of mortality.

Almost at once, the emotion passed. In my old life, I wouldn’t
live
the way I did now. Or fight. Or love—with the knowledge that we had two thousand years ahead of us.

“You’re not going to let me forget this, are you?” he asked, his voice the gentle mixture of amusement and determination that he reserved only for me.

“Not on your life.” He might still look gory, but that only made him more attractive. What’s more, I didn’t care what my attraction said about me.

Stella was to drive the Hunters’ van with Ritter riding shotgun, while Mari and I followed in the rental car. As Mari started the engine, a glimpse of white drew my attention to the trees near the unconscious Unbounded. I concentrated on it. Definitely a life force. A face moved into view, peering at us from behind a tree. If my impression wasn’t mistaken, it was Walker, the blond guard from the security room. He hadn’t been out earlier because I’d been checking, and I didn’t think he’d seen us get into the vehicles, so he wouldn’t be able to identify us. Hopefully, whoever he reported to would lump us in with the Hunters.

If he had unwittingly led the Hunters here and didn’t know of the Emporium or the Unbounded, he was in for a rude awakening when the man Mari had temporarily killed with the knife came back to life inside the hour. Nothing we could do about that now.

We left the van with the Hunters’ unconscious bodies in front of the Austin library and headed toward the airport, taking all their weapons with us. My older brother, Chris, our mortal pilot, met us at the plane. His dark blond hair stood on end as if he’d been running his hands through it while he waited for us, and now concern filled his gray eyes as he caught sight of Ritter’s bloodied head. But all he said was, “I thought this gig was supposed to be boring. Jace is
so
not going to be happy that he missed all the fun.”

I gave him a crooked grin before collapsing into one of the plane’s nine front-facing passenger seats. “Maybe we shouldn’t tell him.”