Heart Of Obsidian Part 8

She gave a shaky nod and waited, skin clammy and pulse oddly muted, as if her hearing were damaged, the world heard through a wall of water.

"There's a tracker embedded under your skin here"-a light touch to the right of her spinal column just before it curved into her sweats-"about the size of a grain of rice."

"They tagged me like an animal." It came out a harsh whisper, the numbness that insulated her from the reality of the violation holding by a wire-thin filament. "Like a piece of property."

"Wait." Dropping her shirt back down, Kaleb continued to scan her body.

He found five trackers. Five.

"They aren't difficult to remove." Black ice coated the rage she'd earlier glimpsed. "I should've checked for trackers when I first brought you home. We could've taken them out before the Tk was close enough to get a lock on you."

"Do it now," she ordered, the water crashing around her in a roar of pain and anger and revulsion. "I want them out now!" Her voice broke. "Get them out! Get th-"

Kaleb squeezed her nape. "I'll have them out in the next five minutes."

His a.s.surance was enough for her to hold on to the shreds of her sanity . . . because Kaleb never broke his promises.

"Sahara! I'll come for you! Survive! Survive for me!"

Of course it was Kaleb who had spoken those words to her, made that vow. She was that important to no one else. Why that was true, and when he'd made the promise, those were questions she couldn't answer, but at this instant it mattered nothing. Not when, having led her into his bedroom, he placed his hand on her hair and said, "Lie down on your stomach and dampen your pain receptors while I 'port in a sterile medical kit."

Climbing onto the bed, she did as directed.

"I'm using a laser scalpel," he said, pushing up her shirt again to make a fine cut in her flesh. His hand was warm and strong against her skin where he braced himself, his knees on either side of her body as he straddled her. "You may feel the tweezers going in."

A cold push that burned, then nothing.

"Is it out?" she asked, skin continuing to crawl at the idea of what she'd had inside her all this time.

"Yes." Pressing a small thin-skin bandage over the wound, he asked her to flip over, then moved on to the next one. Placed just under her right hip, it really hurt when he used the tweezers, the whimper escaping her lips. It was strange. She remembered never, ever crying when they'd hurt her so much during her captivity, but here with Kaleb, her lower lip trembled, her eyes burned. As if all her defenses had fallen.

Kaleb paused, head jerking up. "Sahara"-a whip in his voice-"why haven't you done as I asked and dampened your pain receptors?"

"I don't remember how," she admitted, fingers flexing and clenching on the sheets. "I'm used to retreating into the labyrinth to escape pain. Please get it out. Please, Kaleb."

"I have it." Pulling the second tracker loose to her m.u.f.fled sob, he telepathed a set of step-by-step instructions about how to temporarily numb her pain receptors. "Try-I can't give you any pain medication without it impacting your psychic state."

It was hard to concentrate, but she made a fumbling attempt, managed to lower the pain a fraction.

"I'm not destroying the tracking devices," Kaleb said, head bent as he concentrated on marking the exact location of the third bug, which had been inserted under her right armpit-a location she would've never thought to check.

"Why?" It made her skin crawl to think they might remain in the house.

"I'm teleporting each to a different hard-to-reach location around the world."

Her horror abated under the cold reasoning apparent in his voice. "That's smart," she said as he pulled out the tiny piece of technology. "It'll confuse them." Focusing her eyes on his chest so as not to see what he held in his hand, she made a conscious attempt to keep her breathing even.

The fourth bug was implanted between two of her toes. But the fifth . . . "I'll do it," she said, gorge rising at the knowledge that she'd been so thoroughly violated. That it must've been done by a medical team made it no less repugnant.

"You can't. It's too deep inside you." Putting down the medical tools, Kaleb retrieved the scanner he'd originally used to detect the bugs. "If I can see it in enough detail, I may be able to get it out."

Sahara bit down hard on her lower lip as he focused the scanner on her navel . . . lower. It was such an ugly thing they'd done to her that she couldn't quite bring herself to think about it. Instead, she kept her attention on her lethal, enigmatic captor, his silky black hair sliding over his forehead as he said, "Hold the scanner in this position."

She reached down without looking to do so.

"I have it." Kaleb's eyes locked with her own, the connection painfully intimate. "I'll have to tear it out through your flesh, but the damage will be minor as it's embedded relatively close to the surface of the skin. It'll hurt."

"It's okay," she said, tightening her grip on the scanner. "I'm ready."

Kaleb's jaw clenched at the gasp that escaped her. "It's out and buried inside a mountain deep in the heart of SnowDancer wolf territory, where only the very stupid would attempt to trespa.s.s."

Her skin felt suddenly clammy. "Thank you."

"The wound should heal on its own within the next two days," he said, tugging the scanner from her bone white grip to place it on the bedside table, "but if you feel something is wrong, I can have you in front of an M-Psy in seconds."

"It doesn't really hurt anymore." Shivers wracking her frame, she curled into herself. "Others will come eventually," she managed to say through her chattering teeth. "When they cross-check their readings with the Tk's report, they'll realize the trackers were all in one place here."

Chapter 14.

KALEB LAY DOWN in front of her, tugging her close.

She resisted, though her skin ached for contact. "This hurts you."

"No." His hand closed over her throat in a dark possessiveness that was paradoxically calming. "I can turn off the dissonance."

The words made no sense, and then they did, her stomach dropping. If he could switch the pain controls on and off at will, there was no restraint on his telekinetic strength. It made him beyond lethal. "Impossible," she whispered, her eyes searching his expression for some sign that she'd misunderstood. "You wouldn't have survived to adulthood without the dissonance." It was what kept powerful offensive Psy from inadvertently causing harm to themselves or others.

"A child can learn many things." He gave her no chance to respond to that flat statement, before saying, "No one will come for you. Before his brain collapsed inward, I learned the Tk hadn't shared data because he wanted to use your recovery to increase his status."

The cold ruthlessness of him continued to shock her, and yet she allowed him at her throat, her pulse beginning to beat in time to his. "The trackers?"

"The devices only broadcast within a radius equal to that of a large city. No one else came toward this part of Russia."

So she was safe. As safe as she could be with a cardinal who had taken a life without remorse and with a calculated cruelty designed to prolong suffering. That she hadn't run screaming in horror, but into his arms, made her consider if her captivity had caused far more damage than she realized. This compulsive, brutal attraction that had her opening the top b.u.t.tons of his shirt to splay her fingers on his skin had to be a creation of her no doubt powerful survival instinct. What better way to survive than to make her captor believe her in his thrall?

The abhorrent thoughts slammed up hard against the raw emotions that had torn her apart in the kitchen as they'd had a conversation that had been missing so many parts, the words unspoken far more painful than those they'd said aloud. Nothing so deep, so painfully pa.s.sionate, so old, could be the work of a mind bent on survival alone.

Yet, regardless of the mysterious emotional tie that bound her to a cardinal Tk who could be a sculpture in Silence one minute and driven by blackest rage the next, the fact was, he appeared in not a single one of her returning memories. Either she had never before met him and she was going mad, or their previous meeting had been so horrific, her mind protected her from it even now . . . kept her from realizing that she was at the mercy of a man groomed to adulthood by a psychopathic murderer.

"Did you help Enrique murder his victims?" she asked, the words torn out of her.

Kaleb's eyes swirled with a blackness that seemed deeper than ebony as he shifted position so that he was looking down at her, his hand still at her throat. "I," he said, brushing his thumb over the flutter of her pulse, "was there for every second of their torture and deaths."

HOURS after she'd finally run from Kaleb, her stomach convulsing as she fought the urge to retch, Sahara lay in a fetal position in her own bed, beneath three blankets that did nothing to negate the frigid cold in her chest, in her bones. She should've been long asleep, but she couldn't get Kaleb's voice out of her head.

I was there for every second of their torture and deaths.

The way he'd said it, it was simple, absolute fact. No room for negotiation or subtlety. Even if he hadn't actively helped-and she knew that was a vain hope, no matter how much she wanted it to be true-he'd known what Enrique was doing long before it had come to the attention of the changelings who had eventually executed the Councilor. She'd never blame the innocent child Kaleb had once been, but he'd kept this silence even after he became an adult with full access to his telekinetic strength; he'd protected his mentor, his teacher.

"Loyalty is everything."

A fury of backsight spun into her mind on the heels of that distorted vocal echo, and as always when her mind saw the past, she was an uninvolved bystander . . . except this time, the subject of her vision was a younger version of herself. Her just-above-the-knee-length tunic a sedate gray over a neat white shirt, black ballet flats on her feet, she walked down a leafy avenue shaded with cherry blossom trees in full bloom, the light tinged a soft pink by the delicate flowers.

Sahara recognized the uniform as that of her junior high school. From the way she'd done her hair-a single neat braid that reached the middle of her shoulders-as well as the type of satchel she wore over her shoulder and the bruise on her arm, she knew she was fifteen and on her way home after a vigorous game of baseball in her last-period physical health cla.s.s.

One of her schoolmates had thrown for the plate, caught her on the arm instead as she slid home. He'd been very apologetic, but Sahara had been truthful when she a.s.sured him she was fine. Simply because, as a Psy, she had slightly weaker physiology than humans or changelings, didn't mean she was easily breakable, or that she couldn't take the normal wear and tear of life. As it was the body that supported the mind, physical exercise was a routine part of every Psy student's life.

It was the official reason why Sahara took dance cla.s.ses three times a week.

"Memory," Sahara whispered in a bed far from the school where she'd once played baseball, understanding the fragment of backsight had segued into a hereto hidden memory.

As she walked on that far-off day, she took in everything around her, from the falling petals of soft pink to the occasional hover-capable car on the road. She'd always liked the dappled shade created by the heavily blooming trees, though to admit that would have been to sentence herself to corrective conditioning, so she'd hidden the fracture in her already unsound Silence and continued to take pleasure in the myriad hues of spring.

The fact was, she was temperamentally unsuited to the Protocol. It just couldn't sink its hooks into her, no matter how hard she tried. And she had tried. As a small child, she'd wanted to be like everyone else, had been diligent in practicing her mental exercises. The latter had had some effect-she'd been able to pa.s.s for Silent, though she had always thought Faith suspected.

Faith! Red hair. Cardinal eyes. Her gifted cousin who had kept her secret.

Fifteen-year-old Sahara nodded h.e.l.lo at a pa.s.sing human cla.s.smate when he waved to her from his bicycle. Such actions were permissible in order to maintain social harmony, but the truth was, Sahara enjoyed interacting with different types of people. It was why she'd chosen to attend a school that wasn't specifically geared toward Psy, though when she'd made the request to the head of her family unit, she'd focused on the school's world-cla.s.s foreign-languages program.

She wasn't the only Psy student, the school's academic track a brilliant one, but they were a definite minority. It gave Sahara countless opportunities to mix with people who lived outside Silence. The girl she liked best in her cla.s.s was a gifted human pianist. The music Magdalena could create carried a haunting pa.s.sion that went beyond notes and keys.

Sahara also had a changeling cla.s.smate who could do things on the sports fields that should've been impossible. Though Sahara's mind was scalpel sharp, her educational workload far more advanced than that of the rest of her cla.s.s, her fingers couldn't create music that made the soul soar, her body couldn't move with the grace of a changeling's. But that didn't matter when she danced. It felt like flying.

That was who she was as she walked home from school that day-flawed, happy, smart enough to know that intelligence wasn't everything-and who she was when she chose to turn off the road in favor of a path through a quiet park. No other students walked here, but there was birdsong in the air, sunshine in the sky. She felt no concern, was utterly confident of her safety, and excited.

So excited!

SAHARA sat up in bed as the memory dissolved, leaving her with a single luminous piece of knowledge that tore apart her earlier doubts about her mental health. Her and Kaleb's relationship might be a thing of darkness, but it hadn't come into being because she was sick and damaged and struggling to survive.

She had met Kaleb before. A long time ago.

Not once.

Many times.

Every year on her birthday, he'd waited for her in a hidden curve of that pathway, and . . .

Her eyes went wide. Pushing off the blankets, she went to the right side of the bed, lifted up the mattress, and pulled out the small treasure she'd concealed there out of habit, she'd been protecting it for so long. She'd gone so psychotic when a guard tried to take it from her as a punishment that he'd been fired-because Sahara's hysteria had left her useless to her captors for days.

She'd still been cooperating to a certain point at that stage, in the hope that she could lull them into a false sense of security. That plan had failed, but after the mania of her reaction, no one had ever again tried to take her treasure from her, even during the worst punishments-as if they were afraid of fatally breaking her. Still, she'd stopped wearing it, hiding it in knots she created in her clothing.

Now, it glittered in the lamplight, a charm bracelet of shining platinum.

"Thirteen," she whispered and touched the key she knew was meant to represent the endless choices open to her.

"Fourteen." An open book. That was the year her ability for languages had become apparent, French as easy for her to understand and use as Cantonese and Hungarian-as long as she was taught by a fluent speaker of the language, rather than using computronic aids. Intrigued teachers had theorized she had some type of unheard-of psychic ability that allowed her to unconsciously absorb languages from those around her, never realizing how close they skated to the perilous truth.

"Fifteen." A tiny globe that represented her dream of seeing the world.

"Sixteen." She touched wondering fingers to the dancer who leaped into the void with abandon, her arms raised above her head, pure joy in her expression.

Four, only four.

All from the man who now held her captive.

She sat on the edge of the bed, the bright metal warm in her palm, the charms of exquisite workmanship. It was the kind of gift that could be taken in many ways, the majority of them troubling, given Kaleb's connection to Santano Enrique, as well as the six-year age gap between Kaleb and Sahara. It mattered nothing now that they were both adults, but at the start, Kaleb would've been nineteen to her thirteen.

Except . . . for her the bracelet was a.s.sociated with hope and a rare, incandescent joy. There was no hint of a taint, none of the ugliness that might mean Kaleb had been grooming her as a future victim. Even the idea made her stomach revolt, as if she'd done a terrible insult to something indescribably precious.

Kaleb would never hurt me.

Closing her fingers over the lovely present given to her by a familiar stranger wreathed in shadows, Sahara realized she had a choice to make: to trust in the emotions engendered by this bracelet-a bracelet she'd guarded and treasured for seven long, agonizingly lonely years, or to listen to the coldly rational part of her that reminded her Kaleb had walked hand in hand with a murderous monster since childhood.

IN spite of the late hour, he was working at his desk, his dark hair pristine, his steel gray shirt unwrinkled in the slightly yellow-tinged light from the table lamp that provided the only illumination in the room. Looking up when she came in, the roiling darkness she'd glimpsed in the bedroom yet visible in his eyes, he said, "Yes?"

The dead calm of his voice had her hesitating, the decision she'd made a painful hope she couldn't bear to have crushed.

"Sahara," he said at her silence, "if you're here for a reason, speak. If you're not, leave."

Swallowing at the cold warning that told her not to push him, she took a seat in the chair on the other side of his desk. He watched her with the unblinking gaze of a predator so deadly, the world had never seen anything like him. "Where"-she wet a throat gone dry as a desert sun-"where are the rest?"

His eyes didn't move off her.

Trembling within, she lifted her fisted hand in front of her. Platinum shimmered in the golden light as her fingers fell open. A moment of absolute, endless silence, and then Kaleb blinked and the stars were back in his eyes.

Not breaking the eye contact that threatened to brand her from the inside out, he laid his right hand palm-up on his desk. Seven charms lay on his skin between one heartbeat and the next. Biting back tears as the most secret part of her keened in joy, she leaned closer, hand rising.

He drew the charms away.

Anger flashed, hot and raw. "They're mine."

"That's not how it works."

Scowling, and wanting the charms, she sat back in the chair as he stood and moved around the table with that deadly grace that always drew her eye, her body taut with a very adult tension. Breath shallow, she slipped the bracelet over her wrist, snicked the clasp into place, and held out her arm toward him. "Now."

Leaning against the desk in front of her, he lifted his hand and a single charm appeared between his fingertips. "Seventeen."