~*~
Danyael’s energy signature led Miriya to a Spanish-revival mansion that presided over three acres of prime real estate in McLean, Virginia. Her quick scan of the home and its residents offered little by way of psychic resistance, with the exception of Danyael. His psychic shield shimmered with the undercurrent of extraordinary power.
Her brow furrowed as she strolled unchallenged through the gardens, tracking him like a scent hound. Miriya knew, from Danyael’s council records, that he was twenty-eight and worked as a doctor in a free clinic in Brooklyn, New York. He had been born with his mutant powers, and for twelve years, he was abused by his caregivers. His uncontrolled psychic abilities incited love and hate in equal measure, twisting both into cruel obsession.
Like many alpha empaths, Danyael should have died young, but Lucien Winter, scion of the influential Winter family and sole heir to its fortune, then only fifteen, saved Danyael from the orphanage. Lucien protected Danyael until he was diagnosed as an alpha empath and learned to control his powers.
Lucien’s help notwithstanding, to survive as long as he had, Danyael must have been particularly tenacious of life.
The real question was whether he was as skilled as he was tenacious.
As luck would have it, the patio doors opened and the low-frequency hum of Danyael’s psychic signature shot up a few notches. Danyael himself.
Miriya crouched by the bushes. If the empath had seen her, he gave no indication of it. She smirked. How careless of him. It appeared that, like all alpha mutants, he tended to rely more on his psychic powers than his physical senses.
Danyael prowled the length of the patio beside the curved edges of the swimming pool, clearly disturbed, even distressed. She did not need any empathic or even telepathic skills to figure that out. Anyone with eyes would have noticed it from his restive motions; from the tension in his lean muscled frame; and from the way he clenched and unclenched his fists as he tried to work through his anxiety and stress.
Up close, the edges of his energy signature were jagged, though nothing slipped past his ironclad control. She allowed herself an appreciative smile. His pale blond hair contrasted with his dark eyes; both highlighted his sculptured features. Danyael’s beauty was of the sort made for blood feuds, his profile so flawlessly perfect that it could have driven angels to tears of envy. He was also doing his damnedest to hide it. He probably did not make many friends with his ingeniously designed psychic shield that continuously emitted emotional cues to deflect interest away from him.
Miriya inhaled sharply, bracing herself to make the initial contact with him, but halted when the patio door opened again and another man, inconceivably Danyael’s twin, stepped out. She gaped, stunned into inaction for several precious seconds, before probing the other man’s unshielded mind for answers.
A flurry of confused images pounded through her mind. Their voices united to scream one name, “Galahad.”
The destruction of Pioneer Labs and the disappearance of Galahad started the entire mess. Danyael was behind it all. There was no point in talking or even hoping that he would come in quietly, no point in giving away the advantage of surprise.
Alex Saunders’s words echoed in her mind: Take him down; do it fast.
Rallying her powers, she spiked an attack into Danyael’s mind to shatter his shields, and followed up with a blast that should have splintered his conscious mind into fragments.
Danyael screamed in anguish and reeled to one knee, clutching his head in both hands in agony, but his shields did not collapse. They did not even waver.
Damn it. She had taken out other alpha telepaths with the same attack. How could a mere empath withstand it?
Galahad raced forward. “Danyael!” he cried with alarm, leaning over Danyael, supporting him through the wracking shudders.
“Telepath…” Danyael’s warning was forced past clenched teeth.
Galahad tensed. He straightened, his dark eyes scanning the area. For a split second, his gaze darted past her before locking back on her. “Zara! Lucien!” His cry set off panicked alarm in the house.
Miriya tensed as Galahad sprinted toward her. No need for secrecy now. She pushed to her feet, prepared to send a psychic blast into Galahad’s mind, but froze. Fear so overpowering, so pungent she could smell it on her skin crawled through her, its icy claws sinking into her spine.
Some distant part of her mind, still rational, screamed at her that Danyael, who struggled to rise to his feet, was actually fighting back. He had latched on to the psychic trail left by her attack and followed it back to her mind. Miriya felt Danyael snaking insidiously past the psychic barriers that would otherwise have kept him out, before unleashing his own particular brand of hell.
Galahad reached her, but inexplicably, he grabbed her and in a smooth motion, pushed her toward Danyael, toward the house. She stumbled, falling beside Danyael as two people—a young man and a young woman—ran out of the house and raced past her to join Galahad. She looked past them and saw what Galahad had seen—six grotesque, vaguely humanoid forms loping rapidly across the lawn toward the house.
The escaped monsters from Pioneer Laboratories.
A strong hand closed around her wrist. Miriya jerked her gaze up. Danyael’s dark eyes were pools of pain. “Help me.” He broke off his attack on her emotions as swiftly and cleanly as he had launched it.
She sucked in a gasp of air as her emotions cleared, freeing her mind and body.
“Link us,” he said. “All of us.”
Miriya searched his face. Her mind touched his. Her eyes narrowed as she grasped the edges of his plan. “You’re crazy!”
“I have to try.” He forced the words through another hiss of barely suppressed agony. “Those creatures tore through an entire police force. They’ll tear through my friends unless I can keep them alive long enough to win the fight.”
His plan went against all of her better instincts, but Galahad and his companions were out of time. She closed her eyes. Like rippling tentacles, her powers surged out and latched onto the unshielded minds of Danyael’s three companions. She glanced over at him. His psychic shields dropped, permitting her entry. She reached into his mind, latched on, and met his gaze with new respect. It was an act of extreme courage, of stunning vulnerability. He had freely opened his mind to her, giving her full access to help his friends, even if it meant that she could easily destroy him.
We have found him…Brothers…Kill humans…Kill humans.
Miriya shook her head, her blond hair swaying as she braced against the flurry of incoherent images and maddened thoughts coming from the creatures. Scarcely ten feet away, Galahad, Lucien, and Zara fought against the creatures that came at them from all sides. The three humans were power and grace personified, trained elegance and precision of the finest martial arts disciplines pitted against brute strength and inhuman speed. The odds were stacked against the humans, but unnatural calmness flowed from Danyael through Miriya to the humans, reinforcing their ability to face the creatures without fear.
A massive claw, stained with dried blood, raked across Lucien’s abdomen, tearing through skin and flesh, but he did not cry out. Next to her, Danyael tensed and shuddered. His secondary powers—his empathic healing ability—surged through her and into Lucien, absorbing both the pain and the effects of the injury, sealing Lucien’s wounds even before blood had a chance to spill.
Miriya’s mind reeled. Danyael did not just control emotions. He could heal with a psychic touch.
Awestruck, she stood at the heart of power, the central link between Danyael and his friends. His primary and secondary mutant abilities flowed effortlessly through her, reinforcing courage, whisking away pain and injury, offering healing and succor.
Danyael weakened.
Miriya lost track of how many near-death experiences he absorbed. She crouched protectively over him as he curled into a fetal ball, shaking so hard it seemed he might shatter. He could not even cry out each time one of his companions
took the brunt of an attack that washed through the psychic chain directly into him. All his energy seemed focused on dragging another gasp of air into his lungs.
The other people in the house rallied and rushed outside. A young woman on the balcony braced a large handgun against the railing, took careful aim, and fired a single, precise shot.
One of the creatures roared in pain as the bullet slammed into its forehead. Breaking away from the core of the fighting around Galahad, Lucien, and Zara, it clawed through an older man and then scaled the wall to reach the young woman. Someone in the house shrieked a warning.
Danyael pushed to his feet and lunged after the creature, grabbing its leg as it leapt for the balcony. Snarling and flailing, it lost both its balance and grip, and fell to the ground.
Miriya cursed aloud as the creature collapsed on top of Danyael and clambered to its feet. Beneath it, Danyael stirred weakly and convulsed, coughing blood, as another brutal attack—this one sustained by Zara—surged through the psychic chain. He did not resist as the creature lifted him off the ground with no visible effort. Danyael’s head fell back; his eyes were closed. He was scarcely breathing.
The creature pulled a clawed appendage back and poised to rip through his flesh. Kill humans…kill humans.
Miriya blasted a psychic jolt with surgical precision into Danyael’s brain, straight into the primitive limbic system, into his subconscious where his innate instincts and innermost emotions resided. She screamed out a single, terse order: Fight!
Danyael gasped, shuddering back into full awareness. His eyes opened, and he stared into gaping jaws that dripped saliva and blood. He reached forward, grabbed onto the creature’s shoulder with one hand to brace himself, and drove the heel of his other hand into its temple. Danyael’s voice shouted into her mind. Shields up! Break the link!
Miriya tore her mind away from his and severed the psychic chain fractions a second before Danyael’s shields yanked back up. His mind and emotions were once again fully protected behind exquisitely perfected barriers. He pulled the plug on the dam that kept his most destructive emotions walled away. Physical contact was all he needed to direct his pain, and he wielded it with deadly precision as he drove it into the creature.
The creature froze, its mouth open in mid-roar. The sound died in its throat. Its hands flexed, dropping Danyael to the ground. He scrambled away from it, but it scarcely noticed. It moved again, first slowly, as its mouth opened wider to release a heart-rending wail of misery. With increasing speed, it tore into itself. Bloodied nails raked furrows into its deformed face, clawing out its eyes. The hands moved frantically across its body as it ripped through its chest cavity, all the time uttering a wrenching moan of desperate sorrow, the kind of sorrow that could end only in suicide. With inhuman strength, it used two hands to pull apart its ribs, breaking them, and then reached in to yank out its still-beating heart. It stared at the organ with an expression of pitiful relief, and then dropped to its knees before crumpling to the ground. The bloody, malformed heart rolled out of its hand to stop at Danyael’s feet.
With a loud gasp, Miriya released her breath. Danyael could not just heal with a touch. He could also kill with a touch.
The other creatures halted their attack, staring at the corpse with shock and horror. Brother…Brother. The wail began, an aching howl that echoed among the creatures. Humans kill…Kill humans…Kill humans now…No, leave now.
Miriya did not know which creature issued the order, but as one, they all turned and loped away, cutting across the lawn and vanishing into shadows as they neared the tree line. As suddenly as the attack had begun, it was over.
Only Danyael’s pained, harsh breathing punctuated the silence.
Lucien looked up at the young woman on the balcony who had fired the weapon. “Xin. Call the police; tell them what happened and that those things are on the loose somewhere in this neighborhood. Under no circumstances are the police permitted inside the house.” He pushed past Miriya, and knelt by Danyael, supporting the mutant as he slowly tried to rise. “Danyael. Are you all right?”
Lucien grimaced as Danyael coughed up blood with such force that he staggered and would have fallen if not for Lucien’s grip on him. “Damn,” Lucien cursed aloud. “Help me get him to his room.”
“No, wait. Carlos…” Danyael looked over his shoulder at the older man who had been torn apart by the creature and was curled in a rapidly growing pool of blood.
“Someone else will have to get to him.”
“Not enough time,” Danyael insisted.
Zara raced past them and knelt to gather the dying man in her arms. “Hang in there.” She pressed her hand against Carlos’s torn chest and glanced back over her shoulder at Danyael. “Help him!”
Danyael dropped to his knees beside Carlos. His face was pale, his breathing labored. Miriya watched, stunned. How much damage had Danyael sustained? How much more was he planning to take on, damage that he would then have to work through on his own, without help from anyone?
Her eyes widened as he touched Carlos. The psychic glow of Danyael’s empathic healing powers was weak, faint. It spluttered, rising and falling with every pained breath. It flowed out of him ungrudgingly, but it was a trickle compared to the powerful surge that had kept his friends alive through the fight. Apparently, his healing capability was limited by how much he could endure, and he could not absorb any more. His body had been pushed past all limits of human endurance. Any more, and his life would be at risk.
Carlos gasped, choking on the blood rapidly filling his lungs. He reached out, grasping Zara’s hands, clinging on to her like a lifeline. The rapid gush of blood slowed but did not stop, as Danyael’s powers trickled through the ravaged body. The open, raw wounds did not close. Carlos’s breath rattled in his throat, a weak, dying gurgle.
Zara glared at Danyael. “Why aren’t you healing him?”
“I…can’t anymore,” Danyael whispered in defeat. He slumped into Lucien’s supporting arms, shuddering as he turned his face away. A cough racked his body. He convulsed, spitting blood—dark and viscous—into his hand.
“That’s not good enough.” Zara grabbed his shirt with two hands and shook him hard until Lucien intervened by pushing her back. “You cower, you hide through the entire fight, and now when he needs your help, you can’t come through for him?”
Danyael paused and looked at Zara. Pain filled his dark eyes before he squeezed them shut. His teeth gritted; he reached out to Carlos once more.
Lucien held him back. “Enough,” he said.
Zara gripped Carlos’s hand. “He is dying!”
Lucien pulled Danyael away. “I’m not going to let my best friend kill himself trying to save Carlos. He’s done here. Galahad, give me a hand.”
Galahad moved to Danyael’s other side, and together the two men helped Danyael into the house.
Moments later, Miriya watched as Carlos died in Zara’s arms. Zara choked back a sob as she leaned over Carlos’s body and closed his eyes. The virulence of her thoughts, targeted against Danyael, caused Miriya to recoil. He’s pathetic, weak, Zara’s mental voice spiked with fury. He let Carlos die.
Ungrateful bitch! Miriya spun on her heel, ready to knock some sense into Zara, but was halted by Danyael’s voice speaking quietly in her mind.
Not her fault. Mine. With those weary words, Danyael’s mental voice trailed into exhausted silence.
Miriya reached into Zara’s unshielded mind without permission, flicking quickly through images captured forever in her memories. She saw Danyael as Zara had seen him, huddled on the patio, shaking as she, Lucien, and Galahad fought off the creatures.
The distinction of whether Danyael was shaking in fear or shuddering in pain seemed not to have occurred to Zara. She saw him as weak, incompetent, a failure. She did not seem to know or care that the reason she was standing tall, arrogant, and proud instead of crawling on the ground trying to stuff her entrails back into her stomach was because Danyael had protected an
d healed her through the battle at nearly unthinkable cost to himself. How could she be so blind?
The reason was perfectly obvious: Zara had been tampered with. Her behavior had all the trademarks of it. She was single-mindedly irrational to the point of interpreting all new information in precisely the same vein. No one—not even a prejudiced human—was actually capable of being that clueless. Danyael’s psychic shield was doing exactly what it had been designed to do, exacerbating a negative opinion into heightened dislike.
On the other hand, Miriya could not conveniently blame Danyael’s psychic shield for her own lapse into female oblivion. She had attacked him without provocation, and now, it was apparent, without any basis either. Whatever was happening there, it was clear that Galahad was not a reluctant captive. He obviously considered himself among friends.
Miriya’s smartphone rang. She took a few steps away from the small crowd gawking like curious children at the corpse of the creature. “Yes, I’m still alive,” she announced preemptively into the phone.
On the other end, Alex Saunders released an explosive sigh of relief. “Thank God! The machines picked up what I assume were your initial attack and Danyael’s counterattack. And then the machines went completely crazy for about five minutes, tracking your power signature and Danyael’s in perfect resonance, almost as if you were amplifying his, like two waves cresting to create an even greater wave. We’ve never seen his secondary healing powers spike that high before.”
“I’d be surprised if you had.” The corner of her mouth twisted in an ironic smile.
“And then he cut loose, didn’t he?” Alex finished, his tone quiet. “It happened once, when he was much younger, and didn’t have as fine a control over his powers. You probably won’t believe the power readings we recorded here. What happened, Miriya, and why are you still alive?” he asked bluntly.
“Probably because he wasn’t targeting me.” She shook her hair back from her face and glanced over at the corpse on the patio floor. “The abominations—the ones that escaped from the lab—showed up just seconds after I attacked Danyael. He concluded that surviving needed to be part of our revised agenda for the day, so we decided to work together, just for novelty’s sake.”
“And the abominations?”
“One’s dead. Danyael drove it to suicide when he ‘cut loose,’ as you call it. It wasn’t pretty. The others fled. And, Alex.” She hesitated briefly. “There are other things going on around here.”
“Spill it, Miriya. You know I hate secrets.”
“Yes, me too. It appears you left out quite a bit when you debriefed me on Danyael’s capabilities.”
“What do you mean?”
“His shields are insanely strong.”
“He’s a defense-class alpha empath, and he’s double-shielded. What were you expecting?”
“I’ve broken through defense-class alpha telepaths with far less effort, but that’s the least of it. Danyael followed my telepathic attack back to my mind. Since when could empaths do things like that?”
“They can’t,” Alex said firmly. “Danyael is an alpha empath. He has no telepathic capabilities.”
“Well, then you need to consider rewriting the alpha empath playbook, because not only did he manage to sneak past my shields, but we also linked telepathically, seamlessly, and he psychically healed his friends through me. I’ve never seen an empath pull off such a clean telepathic link before.”
“Danyael’s very capable.”
Nevertheless, she heard doubt in his voice and decided to push her case a bit harder. “Telepathic-level capable?”
“No, he is not telepathic. Trust me. We ran all those tests on him when he was first identified as a mutant, and there is no alpha empath playbook. There are far too few of them to make any generalizations on what they’re capable of doing.”
“I know what I saw,” Miriya said. “I think Danyael is overdue for another review. An alpha empath with secondary healing abilities and minor telepathic capabilities? That kind of mutant would be a little too capable and too dangerous to leave out there. We can’t run the risk of someone snatching him up.”
“You are blowing things out of proportion, Miriya. I know the results of Danyael’s tests. He’s not telepathic, and we’re not going to yank him out of whatever normal life he’s managed to make for himself.”
“I’d say ‘normal’ is about to go poof for him. Galahad, Pioneer Labs’ missing pet project, is here, and he looks just like Danyael.”
“What do you mean he looks just like Danyael?”
She shrugged. “They look like twins—identical twins. It’s far more complicated than we’d originally envisioned. I need to stay around, see it through.”
“I don’t want mutants involved in this.”
“It’s too late for that, Alex. Danyael is involved in this. And if you’re going to have an alpha empath running loose during this crisis, it may not hurt to have a telepath around to reinforce his shields, if it gets to the point where he can no longer sustain them.”
Alex inhaled sharply and was silent for a while. “How badly hurt was he?”
“He’ll probably want to stay in bed for a month, though I doubt he has the luxury.” She chuckled softly before turning serious again. “Alex, just how strong is he?”
“He’s stronger than people expect,” Alex Saunders said without any hesitation. “And he is stronger than he knows.” Alex paused for a moment. “Take good care of him, Miriya.”