Mind Tamer, page 15
Ha-whoosh. Ha-whoosh. Ah, a healthy rhythm. A man’s heartbeat. Breathe. She tried to hear his strong voice over the electrical buzzing of another voice, but the two rhythms wouldn’t reconcile. She shrank away from the distorted tone, but it amplified in her head.
Waves radiated on a dark sea, crashing into an invisible barrier. Burning infinity signs whistled overhead, sucked into black-rimmed explosions. The reflected waves churned and battled. The inky surface lost its gloss as the shadowed waves peaked higher and higher, absorbing any trace of light.
Then pain—long shards of searing, white-hot pain. Pointed edges of broken glass, sawing and cutting. She tried to open her mouth to scream, but no sound came. A thousand shrieking voices resounded from every place in her head, shattering her eardrums. The pain shot through her nerves, scorching her blood. Burning her alive from the inside out.
A new flavor of pain started pounding behind her eyes, throbbing like war drums, punishing and stinging like the fall of a whip. Each pulse built pressure in her brain, crushing, splintering and finally with a force imploding from the inside out, she fell into the void.
Chapter Thirteen
No matter what side of an argument you’re on, you always find some people on your side who wish you were on the other side.
— Jascha Heifetz, 1901–1987
He’d been ignoring Air Traffic Control the past several minutes, and now that his altitude plummeted for his descent to the runway, the controller in the tower shrieked for him to cooperate. Kyros radioed the tower, verified his call sign and shouted, “Negative. Clearance for full-stop landing on runway one-six.”
ATC argued back that he’d been given no such clearance. Kyros only repeated himself and gave a code that indicated he had clearance for whatever the hell he wanted. There was static on the radio for a long moment, then the suddenly polite voice of the controller, clearing his expedited landing.
Kyros went through the motions of landing the machine, less smoothly than was called for, but the F-18 was designed to land on an aircraft carrier and could undoubtedly handle a little abuse over his distraction. He was busy scanning the tarmac for a red Bronco.
Finally he spotted it and reached out with his mind, searching for Lyssa. Before the equipment was completely shut down, he raised the canopy and leaped out of the cockpit, leaving the frantic radio voices behind in his discarded helmet. The utter silence, the void where Lyssa’s consciousness should be, stopped his heart and made him shudder.
He reached the Bronco before Westbrook could get out of the cab, and without a word Kyros seized control of the electrical system and threw the locks back an instant before grabbing the passenger side door. He yanked it open. Westbrook pulled the seat forward. Kyros climbed in and gathered Lyssa in his arms.
She looked pale. She looked dead. Blood crusted in her ears and nose, and oozed out the corners of her eyes. Her breath came so shallow, it was almost nothing. Her mind had almost completely shut down, her essence like a pile of tattered rags.
A sharp pop, shadows, and a hailstorm of glass pellets on the tarmac meant he’d blown out a lamp post, reminding him to tamp down on his reaction. Panicking wouldn’t help Lyssa.
“What did you do?” he barked at Westbrook, who flushed with anger and balled his hands into fists.
“What did I do? What the hell did you do?” He jerked his chin at Lyssa’s inert form. “What’s wrong with her?” He pounded on the dash. It cracked; a few knobs and dials bounced to the floor. His southern accent grew more pronounced. “How ’bout you tell me what the hell is goin’ on, or I’m gonna kick yer ass and drive her to the hospital, like I shoulda done in the first place!”
Strangely, Westbrook’s outburst made Kyros calm. You did precisely as you should have done. No hospital can help her. Only me.
Westbrook jumped, his expression horrified. He glared at Kyros, then shook his head in disbelief. “Aw, hell. No way—”
I’ll explain later. “Back off and give me a moment. Did she say anything before she passed out?”
“No—she just started acting…blank. And then she was shaking and hyperventilating. It happened before, but she pulled out of it. This time, before she blacked out, she—uh, spoke in my brain, I guess. Like you just did.” Can’t believe I just said that!
Go on.
Westbrook raked a hand over his face. “She asked me to call you, so I did.” He thought something unkind about the answering service lady, then complained, “She hung up on me twice before I convinced her to find you.”
“I was in a cockpit thirty-thousand feet in the air. How long has Lyssa been out?”
“Uh…” He glanced around, as though looking for the answer. Kyros understood. Time was impossible to measure through an adrenaline rush. “Twenty minutes, half hour, tops?”
And stranded in San Antonio. Gamóto! He’d have to wait for that explanation.
“What happened before that?” Kyros had already fished all this information from Westbrook’s head. He was merely trying to calm him while he probed Lyssa’s mind.
“We were watching a movie outside…” Then Kyros prodded him to explain the details until he saw Westbrook was too embarrassed to confess what they had been doing—not that Kyros didn’t already see the entire scene in grisly detail. At least he knew what had triggered the attack and how to approach Lyssa to bring her back.
He told Westbrook to drive around to the bunkers. Kyros sat in back with Lyssa, shielding her from the garish lights illuminating the compound. The crew stayed away, and nobody waylaid the out-of-place Bronco as it cruised past the gates and checkpoints. Kyros finally noticed Cat sitting in the corner of the seat, keeping silent vigil. He stroked the animal’s mind, sending it a signal of approval for its loyalty.
Westbrook wanted to protest when Kyros scooped Lyssa in his arms and headed for the commanding officer waiting at the entrance, leaving Westbrook to trail behind with Cat. The odd entourage passed the guard with minimal delay. Soon afterward, Kyros stretched Lyssa out on a clean bed in the guest quarters.
“Unplug the clock and shut the blinds,” he instructed Westbrook as he cleaned Lyssa’s face with a towelette. Couldn’t risk her freaking out over blood again.
Then he went to work. Kyros knelt on the floor by Lyssa’s bed and rested his forehead against her temple. For a moment he debated whether to stimulate the dormant place in her brain where her natural defense mechanism had switched off consciousness, or lift the barrier muting the pain in her head, another biological defense. He tested both areas, then decided the latter—though less pleasant—was the safer method.
Carefully Kyros followed along the neuromatrix and awakened the delicate folds in the cerebral cortex that processed sensation. Lyssa erupted with a sharp wail and arched her back off the bed as shards of pain jolted her brain back to life. Kyros raced to send a signal of familiarity and comfort while scrambling to reassemble a hideous tangle of neurons.
Skatà. The last time he’d seen a cerebral mess like this, the victim had died of an aneurysm. Lyssa had been hemorrhaging through the folds in her brain for a half hour. He had to work fast—
Westbrook’s hands closed around his throat. “Hurt her and die, genius boy.” Lyssa moaned and thrashed on the bed. “Whatever it is you’re doing to her, stop. Immediately.”
In the space of a heartbeat, Kyros seized control over every one of Westbrook’s nerve endings and spiked a bolt of energy through them. An involuntary jerk, and he collapsed to the floor with a moan.
I don’t have time for this, Cowboy. He released his hold on Westbrook and turned back to Lyssa. “Back off while I work. I said I’d explain later, and I will.”
Kyros regrouped his lost progress, gathering loose ends. He dispelled the pain as he worked, but he found a riddle of illogical visions backed up like a traffic jam in her mind. He studied the macabre, sadistic images with distaste. Ah, the pattern—a common theme of failure and a fear of infinity. That made sense, considering Lyssa’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
What concerned him was how thoroughly her perception of reality had been overridden. The magnitude of this attack was much greater than the last. She’d have never recovered on her own. Human surgeons would have scratched their heads and labeled it a stroke.
Just like that, the rarest, most exquisite mind in the world would have been lost forever.
Kyros never should have let Lyssa out of his sight, knowing her vulnerability. He was vaguely aware of owing Westbrook an apology.
Once her mind seemed to run on smooth electrical pathways, Kyros could finally whisk away the pain he felt sympathetically, the sharp ache ringing in the back of their skulls and throbbing in both their temples. She went limp and exhaled in a long breath.
Westbrook echoed her reaction from across the room.
Then Kyros attempted to wake her. Lyssa. He sent her impressions of sunlight and silence, of being in the company of friends.
She was instinctively fearful of waking, and he guided her to break through the surface, into consciousness. She blinked then opened her eyes, taking in her surroundings.
Fancy meeting you here, love.
Kyros! She shot from the bed and tackled him in a tight embrace. She buried her face in his neck and lost her composure, her breath shaky as she wept for no other reason than to release stress.
He squeezed his arms across her back and muttered nonsense in a low voice, in Greek, as was his habit. Then he muttered in her ear, “Na eínai se eiríni, agápi mou. Chalaróste.” Be at peace, my love. Relax. Kyros stroked her hair and rocked her while she recovered herself.
“Dóxa to Theó, eíste edó.” Thank God you are here, she answered automatically, her voice hoarse.
Kyros laughed, and she pulled away to see why he was amused. And so it seems you can not only understand languages, but you speak them as well, agápi mou.
It took her a moment to realize she had even done it, then they both collapsed into another embrace, laughing.
Where are we?
Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio. The fates must be protecting you, Lyssa.
The odds that he’d taken Westbrook’s call at the last possible moment to change course? That she’d been only minutes from an air force base? Beyond dumb luck. His internal calculator complained Error—too improbable to calculate.
She finally became aware of Westbrook’s presence, and for a moment her mind teetered in precarious balance. She processed that the two men who had caused such conflict in her mind were in the same room together. Kyros clamped down on her reaction and smoothed her thoughts before they frayed.
Lyssa, relax. It’s okay, love. Go to him. He saved your life. Kyros forced himself to relinquish his hold on her.
She fell into Cowboy’s arms, in an embrace that looked familiar and comfortable, but with a kinky filial undertone for them both. Poor Lyssa. She didn’t quite comprehend why Westbrook wasn’t the right man for her.
Kyros had thought playing it cool would be the best way to win her over, but he’d been a fool to overlook her own conscience. The duplicity was killing her. And the stupid movie projector had set her off. He had his work cut out with her.
And then Kyros could see that Cowboy wanted answers. He was angry, he was terrified, he was grieved—he was a mess but disguised it well. Props, Cowboy.
“What the hell are you?”
Westbrook struggled to imagine a logical explanation for what seemed like the impossible. He gripped Lyssa by the shoulders and set her in front of him so he could study her face. “I want to know what happened. Lyssa, are you okay?”
“I’m fine now.” She glanced away. “Thank you for believing me, Mitch. You must think I’m completely insane.”
“I don’t know what to think. I’m pretty weirded out right now.”
Are you going to tell him, Lyssa?
Can I?
I think you should. He’s already seen far too much.
“You’re doing it now, aren’t you?” Westbrook complained. “You can talk to each other, like you both did in my head. Right?”
He’s all yours, love. He made himself comfortable on the bed. Cat leaped up and curled into a ball at his side, and Kyros stroked down her spine while he settled in. He was curious to see how Lyssa would handle this. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap, sighed, then launched into an explanation.
For the most part he concurred with her, occasionally clarifying her explanation. Westbrook listened, unnaturally still as he took in the outrageous story. Surprisingly, Westbrook accepted the most fantastical concepts on a whim—extra-sentients, seemingly supernatural talents, and longevity—but latched onto an incidental point:
“So you’ve heard every thought that’s crossed my mind for the past two years?” He groaned and slumped his shoulders.
“Ah, well, I try not to listen.” Lyssa blushed as Cowboy attempted to stifle a host of embarrassing memories, unwillingly conjured as if on cue. “Music blocks them, though, and there’s usually music around us…”
Kyros said, “That’s only a defensive device you’ve been using. It’s not necessary. You can learn to mute all thoughts or hear them all at will. It only requires training.”
Lyssa’s eyes went wide.
Westbrook scowled. “You still haven’t explained what exactly is going on between you two. I’d like the truth.”
“Ah…” She winced before she wiped the guilty expression from her face.
Kyros? Help!
You are my Eve, my goddess? He brushed her mind, projecting the image of them tangled in white silk sheets, both smiling in their sleep. With gentle stimulation through the layers of her skin, she imagined tingling spots where the late morning light filtered through gauzy curtains, and bone-deep warmth where her skin covered his.
Her pulse kicked in sympathetic excitement, and he took advantage. Kyros heightened the sensation of the vision to show her how it would feel to be achy and sated and covered in each other’s scent. He caressed her from the inside out with a rush of heated blood that made her feel his fingertips stroking the back of her left shoulder, tracing the flaming red phoenix.
Then Kyros caught the essence of the problem in both Lyssa’s and Westbrook’s minds: he had proposed to her. A bold move. And she hadn’t exactly said yes. Or no, to be precise.
Lyssa wrestled her thoughts back to the conversation. “I told you, Mitch, I don’t quite know, but can’t deny that I need him. You understand why.”
Kyros remained silent but watched Lyssa, following every nuance of expression in her remarkable sage-colored eyes until she flushed.
Westbrook turned to Kyros. “You don’t deny that you want her?”
“I freely admit it.” Kyros tucked his hands behind his neck and looked him in the eye. Westbrook cursed rather creatively in his mind, and Kyros politely ignored it. “You can hardly blame me, Cowboy. Lyssa is magnificent. She is one in a billion, and I have waited over three hundred years for her.”
A surprising twinge of sympathy whittled its way into his conscience as Westbrook tried to compose himself without an obvious emotional display. Kyros had to respect the man for his fortitude.
“Lyssa, I believe you forgot to mention one detail about our kind.” She shot him a pleading glance, completely bewildered, so he made the pronouncement in her stead. “Some of our kind—meaning extra-sentients such as myself and Lyssa—have the ability to control the chemical reactions in the body, which among other things, prevent aging. Lyssa has been doing this, however subconsciously, for…how long, love?”
Kyros! You beast!
No way around it. At some point he was bound to notice.
Westbrook looked between them, aware of being cut out of their silent conversation. “Just tell me.”
“I’m forty-five.” Awkward silence. “Of course, I only learned the meaning of all this recently, after I met Kyros. I swear I didn’t know I won’t ever—ah, grow old.”
Kyros subtly reminded Lyssa to relax her mind and whisked away the sharp ache brewing at the base of her skull. She hadn’t even noticed it until he’d taken it away. Then he decided to tell her the truth he’d withheld before. “Actually, you can control it either way, to maintain your youth or override the regeneration.”
At her burst of anger, he had to grip her thoughts like holding a short leash.
“You never told me that! Why?”
He shook his head. “It didn’t seem relevant. You acquired the skill naturally, as an extension of your survival instincts. To deliberately combat them could make you uncomfortable at best and insane at worst.”
“But it can be done?” she asked weakly.
Westbrook’s glimmer of hope disgusted him.
“Yes. But to you, it would feel like a long, tortured suicide.”
Westbrook made a growling sound and resisted pulling on his hair. “How could I ever ask that of you?” He gestured angrily at Lyssa. “No way! Never.” Then he gentled his voice although it cost him. “You can’t change who you are.”
Listen to the cowboy.
Shut up, Kyros!
“This sucks.” Westbrook rubbed an angry hand over his face. “Look, should I go?”
Kyros aimed a thumb at the south wall of the room. “If you wish. However, I took the liberty of arranging your accommodations for the night, if you’d like. Your quarters are next door. And you might want to explain to your family that you spent the night at the hospital with Lyssa. She had a hyperglycemic crash and learned she was diabetic, okay?”
Lyssa and Westbrook both blinked. Neither had yet realized they needed an alibi. They nodded in agreement.
“What now?” she asked, and Kyros heard her resist the urge to wring her hands.
“You should rest—” He bit off calling her love again in front of Westbrook. “I can hear your agitation, and you need to practice what I showed you earlier about guarding your mind against attack.”
“Eliminate, relax, focus, reality,” she droned with an eye roll.
“Honestly, Lyssa, it worries me how careless you are when your mind is so vulnerable. Did you make any effort to stop it? Did you at least recognize the warning signs?”
