Sascha, eyes pure black with the agony of the dying who littered the street, cupped Alice’s face in her hands. “Tell me what that is.”
Alice drew in a jagged breath while Ivy continued to do what she could, even as the pressure in her brain built and built to a nauseating pounding behind her eyes.
“Alice.” Sascha fought the urge to shake the other woman, knowing that wouldn’t hurry the retrieval of Alice’s buried memories. “What is a terminal field?”
Gaze blank, Alice stared at her, but just when Sascha was about to give up and turn back to the chaos, the other woman said, “You can block psychic abilities on a mass scale.”
Sascha’s heart slammed against her ribs. Forcing herself to hold firm against the horror and pain slapping at her senses, she focused on Alice. This was critical, could directly impact the number of fatalities. “How?”
Hands fisted on her thighs and eyes glittering wet, Alice shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t find that piece of memory.”
“Okay, okay.” Sascha touched her fingers to Alice’s cheek before shifting her attention to the fighting. “If I attempt to block everyone,” she said aloud, “it’ll negatively affect the defenders.”
So she’d have to narrow her focus, and do what? She wanted to scream at the unfairness of being told she had an ability that could save thousands of lives, then left to flounder without a road map as to how to activate it. Turning to Ivy to see if the younger empath had any ideas, she sucked in a breath, abdomen lurching.
Ivy’s face was a mask of blood.
Chapter 48
“IVY, STOP,” SASCHA said, using the same tone she used on recalcitrant juveniles in the pack. “Stop right now.” Panic beat in her—the other woman could easily stroke out, causing irrevocable damage to her brain. “Ivy.”
“There are too many, Sascha.” It came out thready. “I can’t stop, or they’ll swarm the defenders.”
Sascha grabbed Ivy’s shoulder, forced her physically around. “You stop right now, or I will telepath Vasic.”
“Not fair.” It came out mumbled, sluggish.
“Yes, well, you’re not exactly acting rationally.” She looked to Alice. “Can you get her to the medics?”
Nodding, the anthropologist rose to her feet with one of Ivy’s arms over her shoulders, her own around the empath’s waist, and staggered away. They were protected by Abbot and the Enforcement officers holding the line so the maddened couldn’t escape this pocket of insanity. Sascha watched long enough to make sure the two women were safe before returning to her task, automatically scanning for Lucas as she did so.
Her mate—claws out—was fighting beside a number of cops, taking out the more aggressive infected so the officers could get the uninfected and injured out. Vasic wasn’t visible, but since Ivy hadn’t raised the alarm, the teleporter must be safe.
“Terminal field,” she said to herself. “Terminal field. Figure it out.”
She tried every tactic in her arsenal, but all it got her was another bloody nose and a pounding in her ears that told her she’d soon be as bad as Ivy. “I am not giving up.” She refused to consign her daughter, any child, to a world overrun with vicious insanity.
That was when the Tk she’d chosen to focus on—on the theory his belligerence would make it easier to tell if what she was doing was working—looked straight at her . . . and teleported. Sascha hadn’t thought he was that strong, and maybe he wasn’t, but she was only twenty feet away and in plain sight. He was in front of her a second later, his hands shoving out as if to make her fly through the air to slam into the heavy- duty Enforcement combat vehicles. The impact would snap her spine.
Adrenaline took over. “Stop!” she yelled on the physical and psychic levels both. “You can’t do this!”
Blinking, he pushed out with his hands. Nothing. Staggered at her success, she almost fell victim to the meaty fist he swung at her face—except her mate was already there. Lucas took her would-be-assailant out with a clean punch to the jaw that left the Tk unconscious but alive.
“Kitten?”
“I’m fine.” Still on her knees, her heart a drum, she touched his calf. “Go, help the others.”
As Lucas returned to the fight, Sascha began to concentrate the terminal field on small, tight areas that didn’t weaken the defenders but eliminated the worst psychic threats. What she’d understood in that split second was that it wasn’t simply about telling an individual he couldn’t do something—it was about hitting his hidden emotional core to convince him he was incapable of the action.
Her nose didn’t bleed now, the pressure easing in her frontal lobe. This, this was what she was meant to be doing, the act as natural and as simple as breathing. And she understood why the post-Silence Council had wanted to eliminate empaths from the gene pool. Not simply because they were the personification of emotion, but because an E could strip power from Councilor and beggar alike.
IVY sat with nerves raw and teeth gritted in the back of an ambulance and listened to the fighting while an M-Psy told her that a blood vessel in her brain was critically close to rupture. “Whatever you were doing, stop it,” he said. “Or the next time, yours will be one of the corpses we body bag off the streets.”
Leaving her with those blunt words, as well as an order that she utilize pain-control mechanisms to ameliorate the agony in her skull, he went to deal with other injuries. Her psychic strain would heal on its own—all it would take was time. Time the world didn’t have, she thought, edging out of the ambulance . . . to see Vasic disable a man who’d been beating another to death with a broken chair leg.
Her throat filled with a raging scream she couldn’t allow herself to utter. He was so strong, so honorable, and he deserved happiness and peace, not this endless ugliness. Enough, she wanted to cry, he’s done enough! Let this gladiator rest. If only she could figure out the cure—
“You! This is your fault!”
Jerking around at the vituperative cry, she found herself facing a young woman on the other side of the secondary Enforcement barricade. She wore ordinary clothes but had a black band around her wrist. As did the man next to her . . . and the man beside him.
All three were staring at her.
A vicious telepathic punch.
Agony searing down her spine, she reacted in pure self-defense to suck out the cold rage that drove them. It poured into her, but she knew it wasn’t hers, that she could filter it to inertness. And though her vision was blurred from the assault, she nonetheless saw her attackers look at one another in confusion before melting into the crowd.
Worried they’d done further damage to her already traumatized brain, she went to find a medic when her mind shut down with icy finality.
THREE hours after the outbreak began and ten minutes after the street was stabilized, Vasic placed an unconscious Ivy in her bed. An M-Psy had confirmed she’d suffered no permanent injury, and Vasic had no intention of permitting that to change. “Stay with her, Rabbit.”
He petted the worried dog, then tugging a blanket over pet and mistress both, stepped out into the living area to speak to the others. “She isn’t going to do any more.” If he had to teleport her to a desert during the next attack, he would, regardless of her fury. “This is killing her.”
Sascha nodded where she sat on the sofa with her mate beside her. The DarkRiver alpha pair had both showered and were now eating. Sascha had expended so much psychic energy that she’d lost physical weight, her cheekbones slicing against her skin, while Lucas Hunter had fought with hot changeling energy side by side with Vasic.