Atonement Sky, page 26
part #9 of Psy-Changeling Trinity Series
Eleri’s mind raced. Not only did he have her number, he knew about her and Adam. Was it possible the Sandman was a falcon? They flew vast distances, and changelings were used to keeping caches of clothing in multiple locations. He could as easily keep caches of supplies he needed for his murder fantasies.
No, the report from the pathologist had been unequivocal:
Their brain injuries are inconsistent with any type of external trauma. Even a sound wave wouldn’t do this. The only references I’ve discovered to similar trauma relate to those who’ve died as a result of a powerful telepathic assault.
A falcon couldn’t kill that way. Neither could a human.
“After we end this call,” the killer said while she was still calculating her options, “I want you to leave your phone under the desk, where it won’t be seen, then walk to the back door of the station. There’s a closed drink container sitting inside to the left of the door. Drink it and wait.”
Inside?
Knowledge of her direct call code.
Access to the cameras at the station.
Able to take Malia, an intelligent young woman who wouldn’t trust just anyone.
Beaufort, Whitten, Hendricks, were all human.
Who was she missing?
Her memory was her greatest asset, and today, it flashed with a snapshot of a little girl she’d met only for a minute, a girl who’d wanted to telepath to her to practice.
Sascha Duncan’s child.
Half-Psy. Half-changeling. Not in the PsyNet but a telepath all the same.
A man who was half-falcon, half-Psy would be a predator more deadly than anything the world had ever imagined.
Chapter 33
You know why I’m so smart, Eleri? I know falcons don’t have a great sense of smell, no better than humans. I don’t have to waste time covering up a scent trail, because they can’t track me or you that way—and this town doesn’t have many surveillance cameras.
—Unsent message written by the Sandman
The problem with her theory, Eleri thought, was that Psy had stopped procreating with changelings over a century ago, with Sascha’s child one of the first—the first?—of the new generation.
Unless someone had defected before Sascha. Not just defected, but sired or borne a child? It still didn’t make sense, not given what she’d seen of Adam’s pack. They lived in and around each other on a daily basis. No one would miss a half-Psy child. And Adam had been clear that he had no Psy in his clan.
“Convince me you’re who you’re pretending to be,” she said, fighting to buy time so she could figure this out. “I’m not moving for a copycat.” Of course she would because losing Malia was not an option, but she had to play the game, get what she could.
So she used his need for validation, his focus on his image, against him. “I’m only interested in the Sandman.”
“I’m glad you understand the importance of my work—I always knew you did, but it’s good to have that confirmed.” No laughter in his voice now. “I make them red dresses. Beautiful red dresses that turn them into goddesses in death.”
That piece of information hadn’t been released anywhere. Neither the fact that all three victims had been found dressed in red, nor that the dresses had obviously been made at speed, the seams ragged and the cut far from professional. He might believe them beautiful, but even Eleri knew no woman would choose to put those creations on her body.
“Now, move,” he ordered. “You have thirty seconds to get that drink down you or she’s dead.” He hung up.
And Eleri was out of time.
Throwing her phone under the desk, she just managed to push the emergency assist button built into the back. Invisible unless you knew it was there, it would send up a red flag with the Quatro Cartel, along with a GPS location. She wished she’d reset it to Adam’s phone, but they’d had no time…would’ve had even less if she’d left this morning.
Even if that failed, Dahlia would realize something was up when Eleri stopped forwarding her the IDs of the vehicle owners, would no doubt send a falcon to check. Eleri had to do whatever she could to give them a trail to follow in the few short seconds she had left.
Lifting her hand to her mouth as she ran, hoping the movement would be hidden in the motion of her flight—or that the Sandman was too distracted by excitement to notice, she bit down on the thin skin on the inside of her wrist hard enough to draw serious blood, then dropped her hand back by her side. Someone in WindHaven could track by scent—they’d traced Malia to the parking lot.
This was Eleri’s chance to give them a stronger trail to follow.
The numbness inside her that had stopped her from feeling Adam’s touch in all its primal intensity also insulated her from physical pain.
Her suit jacket slid neatly over the wound, covering it from view.
Whatever she was about to drink would no doubt affect her ability to make conscious decisions, but her blood would continue to drip. Whether in a vehicle or elsewhere, it’d leave a trace.
The silver flask was exactly where he’d said it’d be.
Silver flask.
She had it, his identity. But it made no sense. And she had no way to let anyone know because her brain was shutting down, whatever drug she’d just ingested acting fast.
Her knees went out from under her, her mind a blank.
• • •
Adam zeroed in toward the purple signal flare that had just gone up.
That color was reserved for him and to be used only in emergencies. Landing on the Canyon plateau at rapid speed, he shifted—to find Kavi standing there with a comm in hand.
“Call from some guy named Bram,” the nurse said. “Says Eleri sent out an SOS. Dahlia’s already on her way to the station—I was helping scan the road surveillance footage and Eleri stopped responding to our messages right before this call came in.”
Heart thundering, Adam grabbed the comm. “Bram, where’s Eleri?”
“Her phone sent out the alert from the Enforcement station in Raintree. No response to PsyNet attempts at contact. Her shields look normal, but as a J, she has heavy-duty ones that won’t show any external damage until it’s too late.” No attempt at calm in that voice. “Adam, she’s never sent out an SOS in all the years I’ve known her.”
“I’ll call you from the station.” A glance at the ID screen and he’d memorized Bram’s call code before he shifted and took off at brutal speed.
Beaufort was just jogging into the station when he landed. The detective took Adam’s shift in stride. “Adam, what—”
But Adam was already inside. Even as the senior detective threw him a pair of sweatpants from a gym bag, he’d already spotted Dahlia at the far end of the station, near the back door. “D!”
“Eleri bled here,” she said, because unlike him, Dahlia had a dazzling sense of smell.
It wasn’t because she was a gyrfalcon. Neither peregrines nor gyrfalcons had a great sense of smell, but while Dahlia’s father was a gyrfalcon, her mother was a vulture. Most changelings with parents from different species shifted into one, with little to no crossover, but Dahlia had inherited her mother’s acute sense of smell alongside her father’s raptor form.
It made her one hell of an asset.
“He’s got her.” Teeth gritted, Adam pulled on the pants because he knew his nakedness would distract any humans or Psy in the vicinity. Beaufort was having difficulty even looking at Dahlia. “How far can you track her?”
The answer was—not far. “Droplet here,” she said after taking a few steps outside. “Nothing else. He put her in a vehicle.” She looked up.
“Go! Eleri and Malia, hunt for both their scents.”
Shifting in front of him, Dahlia took off on a powerful gust of wind, a stunning bird of snowy white with gray and white top feathers who would be a ghost if she hunted in the snow. Her scent receptors were some of the best in the sky, but she had to have a pungent smell to track from above. The traces left by Jacques’s shooter hadn’t been enough, had dissipated on the wind by the time of her arrival.
But fresh blood that was dripping and falling to decay on the earth? That, Dahlia could track.
As she flew, he ran back inside the station. “Phone.”
When Beaufort threw over his own, already unlocked, Adam called Bram. “Is Eleri still in the Net?”
“Yes. What—”
“Abduction.” His eye caught on a glint below the desk.
Grabbing a disposable glove out of a box on the wall, he used it to crouch down and pick up Eleri’s device. “Do you know how to get into her phone?”
“No. J devices are heavily secured—iris print, live voice code, all of it. No way to get into it even by the manufacturer.”
Fuck. “Watch for her on the Net, contact me if anything changes.”
“Adam, I’ve got it,” Beaufort said at the same time that Adam hung up. “Outside camera feed.”
Vaulting over the desk to the screen on the other man’s desk, Adam watched as a black van he recognized as belonging to the local bakery stopped by the station’s back door and a black-clad figure in a grotesque horror mask got out. The person went into the station, dragged a limp Eleri out, and bundled her into the van before driving off.
All in under a minute.
“Not one of the Thompsons,” the detective said. “Definitely male.” He was already programming an alert on the vehicle.
Falcons on the ground would hear it, too, signal wing mates to new data via screens mounted on their ground vehicles. This wasn’t WindHaven’s first search; they’d long ago learned to coordinate from ground to sky and back.
“You talk to the Thompsons,” he said to the detective, aware that the elderly couple—both women—probably hadn’t even noticed the van was missing. “I’m going up.” The recording showed that Eleri was taken only eleven minutes ago.
Adam and his clan would find her and Malia both.
As it was, he saw Dahlia dive down in the distance as he took off. Arrowing toward her, Adam a far faster flyer than his gyrfalcon clanmate, he dived at the same spot thick with trees—to find her standing beside the open sliding door of the van.
She shook her head, her hair a tumbling darkness to her waist but for that streak of white. “Gone, but she bled in here.”
The abductor had driven Eleri out of the central area and out of sight of any security cameras before moving her into his own vehicle and taking off. “Can you track on?”
Leaning close to the carpet, Dahlia took a long breath. “Fresh. Not coagulated.” She shifted and was in the air a heartbeat later, Adam at her wing as they chased the scent of violence.
WindHaven didn’t advertise Dahlia’s ability, not even when they used that ability to help find the lost. No one outside the clan knew she could track over literal miles with the merest hint of a scent.
And today, she had a blood trail Adam’s mate had left for them.
The murderer’s first mistake had been to take one of their fledglings, his second to go after Adam’s mate.
He wouldn’t get the chance to make a third mistake.
Chapter 34
Js with weak shields are at catastrophic risk of a memory seizure, where the memories of another overwrite all of their own. There is no remedy for this because no J has ever survived a total overwrite.
—J Corps Medical Handbook (updated 2083)
Eleri was inside a nightmare, her world shattered pieces of color painful and jagged. Everything hurt, but she couldn’t pinpoint any of the pain. It was everywhere and nowhere.
Nausea churned in her gut.
Twisting instinctively to the side, she pressed her hands to a floor coated in straw and dust and retched. Nothing came out, her body refusing to release its pain. And all the while, the insanity inside her head wouldn’t stop—erratic flashes of memory, a throat being slit, a falcon in flight, a glass shattering.
It cut her.
Except it couldn’t. It was inside her head.
Then the falcon’s talons clamped on her arm. She shoved it aside, but her fingers were weak, and oddly, the talons didn’t feel like talons at all. They felt like fingers even though her…Her eyes jittered, snagged. She wasn’t wearing her gloves. Why wasn’t she wearing her gloves?
Because this was a nightmare.
And that hand that wasn’t a talon had taken hers and soon she’d be awash in another person’s memories and nightmares. She braced herself as much as she could, even as her mind spun and spun and spun.
The hand was solid. The mind was solid. Nothing to see.
Relief kicked her in the gut. Whoever this person was, they had an impenetrable shield. She tried to look at them, take them in, but her brain was so scrambled that her visual cortex couldn’t process the information.
Her hand clenched on the straw on the hard floor.
Lifting it up, she stared and tried to see. She couldn’t, but some small part of her brain wondered why she’d imagined straw. She’d never been in a farm-like environment in her life, and that was what her brain associated with straw. Yet the tactile sensations she was experiencing told her that she was holding straw.
The hand that wasn’t a talon shifted back to her arm, shook her hard. She couldn’t tell if it was causing her pain, but she felt the desperation in the other person, and that, she understood.
Turning again, she tried to focus on the person to whom the hand belonged, because surely it must belong to someone…unless this was a nightmare and she was lost in her own broken brain.
Exposure. Had she hit Exposure?
An echoey sound, as if someone was talking to her through a long tunnel.
Again and again.
A sob.
It was the sob that reached her in a pristine ball of clarity.
A child was crying.
She didn’t know why, but she reached out her hand into the chaos of color and sharp edges that cut and made her bleed, telling that crying person to grab on to her. The fingers released her arm to grip her hand.
Solid, strong, shielded.
Feathers in her mind, against her hair.
“—please, please!”
The echoey words had taken shape, become a plea. She still couldn’t make out the shape of the person who held her hand, and while her mind stretched and tried to reach the PsyNet, it couldn’t.
It was too shredded, too twisted.
But this being was pleading with her, and the part of Eleri that had assisted survivors of abuse escape murder charges reacted out of primal instinct, hearing in the plea the cry of a being who was trapped with no way out.
Their leg in irons.
Their freedom shackled.
She squeezed the hand.
It squeezed back, and the echoes continued, as did the nausea and the lack of clarity.
“—drugs! He said—your gloves—removed—”
It took a very long time for Eleri to process those scattered words, to even begin to gain some comprehension of the shape of them. It was the part of her that she’d designed to flick the shutoff valve to her life that got it; she’d separated the valve controller from all the normal pathways of her mind so it could flip the off switch even if the rest of her was compromised.
It was small and restricted and had only one real goal, but right now, it was also the only part of her that had retained even basic function. Cut off as it was from all other pathways, it had been accidentally protected from both the drug that had sown chaos in her brain and the impact of any direct contact she might’ve had with the person who’d peeled off her gloves.
All these thoughts happened in that same secretive part. The rest of her was a puppet with its strings cut.
Whoever did this knows Psy react badly to most narcotics, murmured the tiny hidden part of her. They overdosed you with something that ensures you can’t reach for help on the PsyNet. I can’t. I’m your secret. I’m not designed for communication, my only function to flip the switch.
Something dripped from Eleri’s nose. It smelled of iron.
That hand left hers and a soft sensation was dabbing at her lip…and that was when Eleri realized she was starting to regain a hint of clarity. Though the PsyNet remained out of reach, she’d been able to connect the sensation with the act, could now see the blurred outline of the person with her.
Young, so young. And such beautiful hair.
Malia.
Malia’s head jerked, her hand dropping as her breath caught.
When she grabbed Eleri’s hand again, the connection cleared up the chaos enough for her to comprehend the words the girl was speaking. “He’s coming. He’ll drug you again so you can’t telepath for help.”
Eleri wanted to tell the child that she couldn’t telepath anyway. The drugs had broken something in her already wounded brain. Things were never going to sit quite right again; she felt that in the deepest fiber of her being. That same part keened with a sense of loss and grief, but uppermost was her determination to save this child who was Adam’s.
Adam.
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t say anything, but she made her hands move and took the child’s face in her hands, then jerked her head to the side, even as she pushed the child that way.
Malia’s eyes were panicked, huge.
This time, Eleri pushed at her shoulder, shoving her toward the darkness in the corner.
“You want me to hide in the shadow? He’ll still see.”
Eleri shoved again, and this time, Malia, this child who was scared but trusted Eleri to help her, went where Eleri had thrust her.
A sound in the chaos, a creak. A door opening.
Eleri had already dropped her head to her chest as she slumped against the beam behind her. Drops of red in her vision as her nose bled onto the white of her shirt.
That was good. The more blood, the more…She couldn’t follow that thread, but an instinctive part of her knew not to worry about the blood, that it was something that could help Malia.
Only one chance, whispered the fragment of her she’d saved so it could kill her, but that she would now use to save this child so loved and protected. A second drug overdose and no part of you will come back.
