Romani Armada (16 page)

There was a high shrieking noise as the train reversed its engines and applied the compression brakes, to bring it to a halt at the platform. The passing carriages slowed.

Kieren ran toward Justin and the gate. He didn’t dare hope that what he thought he had seen actually had happened. It could have been a vision his mind had produced.

He reached Justin as the last two carriages blew past. Justin was staring ahead, waiting. His knuckles on the top of the gate were white with pressure, something only a recently fed vampire could do.

“Did you see what happened to her?” Justin said, lifting his voice over the gusty rattle of the train as it swept past.

“Happened?” Kieren repeated. Had Justin seen what he had seen?

“She moved out of the way.”

Then he hadn’t imagined it. Kieren swallowed as his throat seemed to close down on him. “I don’t know what I saw,” he said.

Justin looked at him sharply, his pale eyes narrowed.

Then end of the train slipped past them, and the gate was clear. On the other side of the track, Deonne lay in a huddled heap up against the opposing gate.

Justin didn’t wait for the electronics to pull the gate up. He wrenched at the top of it, shoving it up and out of his way. There was a crunching noise from the articulated hinge.

He ducked under the bottom of the gate and rushed across the tracks.

Deonne made a small, feeble movement with her hands as Justin lifted her up. Her head dropped against his shoulder.

She was alive.

Kieren gripped the gatepost, relief circling through him, until Justin turned to look at him, Deonne in his arms. His eyes were still narrowed. His voice carried across the track easily. “What did you do just then?” he demanded.

Chapter Eleven

Stockholm, Sweden, 2264 A.D.:
Deonne struggled to orient herself, but nothing was making much sense. There was a high-pitch buzzing in her head, muffling her thinking.

All she knew was that she was in Justin’s arms and it felt incredibly safe there. She gripped his shirt in her fingers.

Justin was walking. She could feel the rhythmic motion transmitted through his chest. He was striding somewhere and talking at the same time. Deonne tried to focus her vision as she listened to him.

“You were a hundred meters behind me and I certainly didn’t push her out of the way. I wasn’t close enough.”

“It had to have been you.” That was Kieran’s voice. “Your kind can pick up psi tricks easily enough.”

Justin stopped and turned. To face Kieren, she guessed. She cranked her eyes open with heroic efforts. Kieren was turning back to face Justin and his face was a mask. He was holding something in.

“I don’t even like being
vampire
, Kieren. What the fuck makes you think I’d voluntarily accept a psi into my mind to learn how to do something like that? The last thing on this earth I could possibly want is to resemble psi-filers.” His tone was rich with disgust and dismay.

Kieran’s gaze skittered away. “
Someone
pushed her out of the way…and not physically.”

“Out of the way?” Deonne asked.

Kieren blinked, looking at her. “You’re conscious,” he remarked.

“Out of the way of what?” Deonne repeated.

Justin’s arms tightened around her, just a little. “You were standing on the tracks, right in the path of a g-train. Don’t you remember?”

Deonne thought backwards in her memory, but nothing about trains would come. “I was just standing there?” she asked, fear blooming in her chest.

“You had your hand out,” Kieren told her, lifting his own in demonstration.

The waterfall
. Fright tore through her. “I
imagined
it all?” she breathed.

“Imagined what?” Justin prompted.

She looked up at him. “I was in Switzerland, up in the mountains near where my father lives. I was…” She took a breath that seemed to sear on the way down, so tightly was her chest clamped. “I had my hand in the water.”

“You didn’t leave here,” Kieren said flatly. “It was in your mind.”

Demyan hurried up to them, barely stopping to check for traffic as he crossed the road. “She’s alright?”

“For now,” Kieren told him. “But I want to get her somewhere shielded and protected as soon as possible. The psi targeted her.”

“They fucked with all of us,” Justin growled.

Demyan nodded. “I reached out for Nayara and told her what was happening. She has returned to the branch. She’s waiting for us now. We’re to jump there. The chamber is waiting.”

* * * * *

Justin lowered her onto one of the sofas in the green room. “Relax. You’re safe here,” he told her.

“Am I?” Deonne asked him. “What’s to stop them from making me think I’m in Switzerland again? Or Timbuktu?”

“We’re pretty sure the psi have to be close to you to achieve that sort of neural blanket,” Brenden growled. “We’re five floors below ground, here, and guarded by Wardens.”

“I walked right by Kieren,” Deonne pointed out. “They made him think I was still in the apartment building.”

Brenden cleared his throat and glanced at Nayara, who gave her small smile. “There are nearly one hundred vampires on the premises. They are invulnerable to psi tampering. They won’t allow entry to anyone they don’t know.”

Deonne pursed her lips. “They made Justin and Demyan just stand there, helpless. Vampires are not
that
invulnerable.”

“That was a physical hold. They can’t screw with our minds. They didn’t. We watched it all,” Demyan replied. “We just couldn’t
do
anything about it.”

“The effect isn’t powerful,” Justin said, sitting on the edge of the sofa next to her and looking at the others in the room. “As soon as I realized something was amiss, I was able to move again. But I had to figure out there was a problem before I could raise the will to break it.”

“It was like being mildly drunk,” Demyan said. “That place where you’re feeling no pain, and nothing seems very important. You can watch a murder go down in that state, and it’s not until you process what murder means that you can stir yourself to care or move.”

Nayara turned to look at Kieren. The warden sat on the arm of another sofa, on the other side of the room. Distancing himself, Deonne suspected. He was steadily plucking at a loose thread of sofa fabric, between his knees.

“You are not psi, Kieren,” Nayara said. Her voice was melodious, but firm. She was making a statement.

“Ma’am?” Kieren responded, looking up.

“You are too old to be a psi. Yet you pushed Deonne out of the way.”

He licked his lips. “With all due respect, ma’am, I was across the road when De—…when Ms. Rinaldi leapt to safety.” He stood up. “Under the circumstances, I think it would be best if I recuse myself from this assignment. I’ll find a replacement who can step in immediately. You won’t notice any dip in efficiency.”

“Sit down, laddy,” Brenden rumbled. “You’re not going anywhere.”

There was a tap on the door – a light knocking.

Kieren turned to face Brenden and Deonne wondered if his hand resting on his hip, a short drop away from his weapon, was a coincidence. Kieren was feeling pressured. “I will speak to Assemblyman Stelios,” he said as Demyan opened the door. “He arranged this assignment originally and is paying all fees. The matter is in his hands. I know he will agree with me on this.”

“Just give us five minutes before you leave, Kieren,” Ryan said as he worked his way into the room. He was leaning heavily on the cane. Trailing behind him was the tiny woman they called Pritti. She entered the room, looking around with big, wide eyes, almost like she was frightened. Then she saw Demyan and hurried over to him. Demyan pulled her up against him, so that he stood at her back.

Kieren crossed his arms as Ryan limped over to him. “This is between the Assemblyman and me, sir.”

Ryan gave him a warm smile. “No one is trying to accuse you of anything, Kieren. You can let down your guard.”

Kieren stood motionless. His jaw rippled.

Ryan’s smile grew warmer and wider. “We
know
you’re not psi. We’re just curious to know what you are. As far as our awareness of human affairs extends, there has been no one able to do what you did, that was not born psi.”

“I didn’t
do
anything,” Kieren said.

“He pushed her out of the way of the train,” Pritti said. “I felt it.”

“I was across the road. I did nothing,” Kieren said, his words clipped and tight with control.

“You didn’t push with your hands,” Pritti said, her voice soft and piping in comparison to Kieran’s. “You pushed with your mind. I was guarding the whole area. I felt it.”

Kieren breathed heavily. He shook his head.

“What do you mean, you were guarding the area, Pritti?” Nayara asked.

Pritti seemed to shrink in on herself as she looked at Nayara. Demyan curled his hand around her shoulder reassuringly. “Demyan spoke to me. He said the ruffleheads were attacking, so after I told you, I reached out.” Her eyes were huge and luminous. “I pushed them outside.”

“Outside?” Nayara queried gently. “I don’t understand, Pritti.”

Pritti blinked. Deonne could see she was struggling to find a way to express herself. She glanced around the room, at everyone staring at her and her shoulders shifted inside the coat she wore. She stepped slowly over to the table that was pushed up against the wall next to the sofa Kieren had been sitting on and picked up the glass bowl that sat there. It contained a dozen or so strawberries and grapeberries. “Can I use these?” she asked.

“Go ahead,” Nayara told her.

Pritti dumped the fruit on the table and pushed it around with her fingers. She separated out four strawberries and put them together in a clear section of the table. “That is Demyan, Kieren, Justin.” She glanced at Deonne. “And her.”

She placed some of the green grapeberries around them. “The psi who did that thing to her.”

“There were eight of them?” Ryan asked sharply.

Pritti nodded slowly, keeping her eyes on the table. “They needed that many to make the pictures in her head strong enough.”

“Then it wasn’t Gabriel who did this,” Ryan concluded.

Pritti bit her lip.

“What is it, Pritti? Something about Gabriel?” Nayara coaxed.

Pritti nodded. “He was there with them.”

“Physically?” Nayara asked.

Pritti shook her head.

“Mentally,” Brenden concluded. “Fuck, the guy is going to be impossible to grab if he can command the fucking troops from afar—”

“Brenden!” Ryan said sharply.

Brenden swallowed back the rest of his tirade. He shook his head and dropped onto the sofa where Kieren had been. “The spirits save us,” he muttered.

Nayara stepped a little closer to the table, moving slowly, as if she didn’t want to startle Pritti. “You said you put them outside,” she reminded the tiny woman.

Pritti turned the bowl upside down, then lowered it over the fruit. The strawberries sat underneath the bowl, while the grapeberries were aligned outside the edge of the overturned bowl. “I put them outside,” Pritti repeated. “But they were still too close, so I…” She pushed the bowl so the strawberries were placed more or less in the center of the dome. The grapeberries were pushed along the table by the movement of the bowl, and rolled in wobbling curves across the tabletop as the bowl came to a halt.

Pritti lifted her hands away and stepped back. “They were outside. Everyone else was inside. Safe.”

“A mental shield,” Brenden breathed, staring at the bowl.

One of the grapeberries rolled off the edge of the table and splattered wetly on the tiles beneath. Everyone stared at the bowl, transfixed.

“Are you still holding that shield over us now?” Ryan asked.

Pritti looked like she might cry. She shook her head. “It hurts too much,” she said softly.

Demyan reached and picked up her hand and drew her back to where he had been standing. He glared at everyone as he wrapped his arm across her chest in a protective movement. The gesture was as clear as a shout. He didn’t want Pritti subjected to any more questioning.

Justin stood up. “We could dig around this all night and not get anywhere. Kieren won’t talk, Deonne
can’t
talk, because she didn’t see anything except Switzerland in her mind. Demyan and I have been fully debriefed. I want Deonne returned to the past, where she’s safe. You have no need of her right now.” He turned to Demyan. “Would you mind jumping Deonne? I will stay with Pritti until you get back.”

Demyan’s arm loosened. “Of course,” he agreed.

Everyone in the room except for Nayara shifted and relaxed, standing up or moving toward the door. It appeared they agreed with Justin. There was nothing useful to be gained by talking this over any further.

“Just wait a moment,” Ryan said, lifting his voice above everyone’s movements.

They grew still, looking at him, but Ryan was staring at Justin.

“Deonne is going back,” Justin said evenly. “Out of harm’s way. If you have a problem with that, then you can take it up with me.
After
she has left.”

Ryan considered it for nearly thirty seconds. “Very well,” he said flatly.

Justin turned and held his hand out to Deonne. “C’mon, Dee. Let’s get you home.”

She let him help her to her feet, feeling a deep weariness in her bones. She was aware that everyone was watching her. Measuring her and reassessing now that Justin had openly championed her.

Deonne paused in front of Pritti. “Thank you for your help, Pritti. I didn’t know until now how much you did for us, back there. I am in your debt.”

Pritti tilted her head and looked up at Deonne. “He wants you gone,” she said softly. “He doesn’t like what you can do.”

Deonne’s chest clamped, stopping her breath. She could feel and hear her heart, thundering in her temples. “Who?” she asked breathlessly, but she already knew.
Gabriel.
“I can’t do anything. Not like vampires can. Or that you can. Why would he want me gone?”

“You scare him,” Pritti whispered. “What you do…he can’t control that.”