Storm Echo, page 32
He raised his fingers to the other side of his neck, still able to feel the echo of that bite, that wildness. “I have to go back.”
“You’re weak,” Soleil argued. “Your hands are trembling. Look!” She lifted one of his hands.
“Get me all the nutrient sachets you have,” Ivan said, gripping at her wrists. “There’s another spider in there, Lei, and it’s killing those people. I don’t think they have much longer. I have to go back.”
Fear a hot beat in her eyes, she nonetheless rose and raced inside to gather what he needed. Ivan, meanwhile, put together a plan of attack. He’d have only one shot at this. That fucking spider was bloated with a vast amount of power, which meant its black web must have captured a massive number of minds on that island.
“She calls herself the Scarab Queen,” he told Soleil when she returned with a glass, a pitcher of water, and the pockets of her dress filled with nutrient sachets their packmates had stocked in the pantry.
Rebooting energy by overdosing on nutrients wasn’t ever a good idea. The resulting crash could stop his heart, but all those people would die if Ivan waited another day. Not only that, but the bloated spider would then have even more power—power enough to capture another piece of the PsyNet and suck it dry.
And with each dead piece of the Net it left in its wake, it’d become more capable of “eating” bigger and bigger pieces. Left alone, it was conceivable that it could annihilate the entire PsyNet, piece by desiccated piece.
He dumped five sachets into one glass, drank it down, then asked Soleil to mix another. “She’s the monster I’ll become if I don’t stop myself.” He had a vision of himself as a bloated spider just like her, hunched over the defenseless minds of all those he’d captured.
All those who he was murdering.
Soleil’s hand on his cheek. “I’m with you,” she whispered. “No matter what. Always and forever and back again.”
He gave himself a single moment of peace and turned his lips into her palm.
Chapter 48
Ager’s vitals are beginning to deteriorate even faster than predicted. I’m sorry to report that they are on the brink of a total neural shutdown. You must prepare for the worst.
—Dr. Lee Luang to Payal Rao, bearer of Ager Lii’s medical Power of Attorney
THE SCARAB QUEEN stirred out of her torpor and reached out a slow psychic hand to capture the beautifully strong power she’d sensed the second prior. Most of the power coming to her was dull, even her Scarabs failing her. She’d chosen the wrong ones for this experiment, chosen the weak ones.
It was no huge problem. She’d simply make better choices next time around. But there was someone in this network whose power was a breathtaking punch. Not only that, it resonated along the same frequency as hers—she knew that if she took it, she’d amplify her own power by an order of magnitude.
Her lethargic pulse accelerated the instant she made contact … but then the power was gone, blinking out of existence without a trace. Had it been a Scarab that had imploded? She saw no debris, no psychic dust. But that had to be it, because she’d made certain no one could leave this island of their own will.
She sighed. What a great pity to lose all that pure power. Power that felt so similar to hers that it would’ve melded with hers without issue.
A moment of clarity in the power haze.
Could it be that one of her children was becoming like her? A burgeoning threat to her reign?
Yet when she searched her domain using the receptors in her web, she found no one akin to herself. She remained one of a kind, the blip she’d felt nothing but an anomaly.
Satisfied that all was well, she began to settle back down. Another part of her blared a warning that she’d become too heavy with power, could no longer strike with the rapidity of a cobra, but she switched off the warning. She had no need to be fast, not here. This place was her training ground—and her psychic depository.
Here, she would feed. Feed until nothing was left.
And when she emerged, she’d be a power unlike any the world had ever seen.
Chapter 49
Spider, spider, my beautiful spider.
With your web so bright, and your silk so strong.
Spider, spider, I see you.
—Norah Mercant (b. unknown, d. 2059)
IVAN MADE SURE to stay on the verge of the Scarab Queen’s field of death. From what he’d experienced the last time around, he had to get close to stir her out of her stupor—and he needed her to remain inert, half-asleep.
She was too powerful for him to take her on one-to-one. With the amount of energy she’d stolen from her victims and hoarded, she’d break his mind with a single action, then swallow him whole.
One strike.
That was all he’d have. A single attempt to cut the threads of her control. He knew from his own experience that a sudden severing of a thread of his web equaled a wound. Grandmother had been aghast when she’d accidentally injured him the time he’d webbed himself to other children—he’d come to her, dropped all his shields so she could see the nightmare web.
It had still been invisible to her. Today’s experience with the Scarab Queen told him that only another spider could naturally see a fellow spider’s web. With his grandmother, it had taken a visceral link, core-mind-to-core-mind. He’d then asked her to cut the threads. After checking to see what the repercussions might be and finding no obvious issues, she’d carefully severed a single one.
It had made Ivan seize, his body racked with pain.
When he was conscious and stable again, he’d asked her to do the rest. She’d refused. “I will not hurt you. We’ll find another way.”
That other way had been for Ivan to learn to do it himself. If he severed the thread, it didn’t cause him any harm. That made sense. The spider wouldn’t want to be attached to anyone it considered dead weight, its primary and only goal to feed. The dead were no use to it.
His theory was that if he severed a large number of the Scarab Queen’s threads, it would send her into convulsions on the physical plane. The best-case scenario would be that she’d drop out of this network and it would collapse by default—since she seemed to be the center, the core holding it together.
Worst-case would be if she was wounded and in pain but still able to cling to the ChaosNet. In which case, Ivan would have to find a way to kill her. The simplest answer was also the deadliest—he’d attach her to his web, suck her dry. The amount of power she was holding, however, would overload his mind and kill him.
Kill Soleil.
Rage burned through him in a cold fire, but the cat inside him stood unbowed, his mate’s courage endless. They would do this, because to do nothing would be to sentence all the people in this web to death. And the spider wouldn’t be satisfied with that. It would feed and feed and feed until it had absorbed the entire PsyNet.
Inside his mind, Ivan’s own spider stretched, avaricious and hungry. It wanted all those minds, wanted all that power. And for the first time in his adult life, Ivan was going to set it free and hope he could contain it once it was over.
A jagged inhale, a quiet exhale.
It was time.
He’d thought of how best to achieve his aims, had settled on spreading his web over and around the Scarab Queen. He’d always visualized his web as hard and cutting, so it took him very little effort to envisage each thread as razor-sharp.
Holding his breath in the physical world, aware of Soleil’s hand locked tight with his, he spread his web over the dead zone.
Softly, softly, Ivan.
He pushed the edges of the web outward to the point that he began to sense minds, then halted, because his aim wasn’t to damage any of those minds, not even those that belonged to Scarabs. They might be out of control, but cut off from their Queen, they might not be evil.
Then, his mate beside him, inside him, he dropped his razored web directly over the Scarab Queen’s web.
Her psychic scream was so piercing that it made his ears bleed.
Gritting his teeth through the agony, he did a rapid check to ensure he’d cut as many lines as possible … and saw that he’d severed every single one. The Queen was marooned in the dead zone, bleeding out from countless wounds, all her threads hanging limply around her.
They began to curl up and die even as he watched under the light of his silvery web … and she was gone. Disengaging completely from the web to save herself. Ivan could only hope that she was dead, but he couldn’t follow her—in fleeing the murderous tangle of her web and his, she’d detached herself from the island she’d created, had probably already linked up with another part of the PsyNet.
The center gone, the island began to implode.
That should’ve been the end of this, Ivan’s plan an unparalleled success—he’d even managed to keep his ability under control—but horror crawled through him as he saw minds sliding into the maw of the implosion. They should’ve all been dropping out like flies, their minds’ self-protective mechanisms in effect now that the spider was no longer keeping them captive.
This destroyed psychic island existed in the center of a much larger and comparatively stable psychic network. It shouldn’t even have required conscious thought for them to drop out of danger and hook back into the PsyNet.
Yet none of them were doing it.
“Too weak,” he said on the physical plane. “They’re too weak to cut themselves free.” He couldn’t do it for them either, not when he wasn’t linked to any but a rare few. Even those ones, he saw, he couldn’t release—they wouldn’t survive. Their minds were almost at flatline, with no capacity to re-engage with a psychic network if he dropped them from this one.
They’d just fall.
“Hold them, Ivan.” A soft murmur against his ear, a sense in his mind of arms opening wide to hold the broken.
Because his mate was a healer.
He wasn’t. He was a spider. “I’ll kill them.” It came out twisted with pain.
“You haven’t yet. And they’ll die without you.”
Knowing he was consigning Soleil to the abyss with him, he released the last leash he had on the spider. Threads of his web shot out in all directions, a shimmering thing that wasn’t hard and cutting now but soft and delicate. The better to grab hold of the minds in freefall. Mind after mind after mind after mind … until the ChaosNet shimmered with a silver web kissed by flame, and Ivan was the spider at the center.
Agony wrenched at him for what he’d become after all, but he wasn’t done yet. The Scarab minds still in the system continued to cause chaos. So he threw more and more of his web around them, until their chaotic energy was contained in spidersilk … and the slipstreams of this network finally went quiet, peaceful.
Not knowing how long he’d have control over the spider, he released his psychic energy through the lines of the web, in the hope that it would help strengthen the trapped minds. The web burned silver fire. And Ivan’s power ran out, his Psy senses going blank as his body and Soleil’s both slumped toward one another.
Chapter 50
Red! Red! Red!
—Priority medical alarm: patient—Ager Lii
THE SCARAB QUEEN fell to the Earth with a scream still emerging from her physical mouth. Her mind, a thing of vast power, reconnected to the PsyNet without effort, but her body was out of her control.
Falling out of her office chair, she convulsed violently on the floor, her arms and legs flailing against the side of the heavy desk and chair. One wrist broke from the force of the impact. Blood dripped from her mouth, her ears, her nose.
Any other being would’ve died then, the electrical signals in their brain haywire. But the Scarab Queen planned for contingencies. Through all this, she’d always kept a small part of her mind separate and protected, a part that was her fail-safe. Now that fail-safe took control and took stock.
The damage to her body and mind was severe, the sudden severing of her web having caused a massive shock to her system. No one else should’ve been able to even see her web, much less impact it. But they had. And she had to deal with the consequences.
Her body was shutting down, organ by organ, but her brain, while bruised, could be saved if she rerouted all her energy into protecting it while keeping alive only what was necessary for the survival of her brain.
“Sir!” A door banging open, footsteps racing to her.
The man who knelt next to her was young, strong, handsome. Gender didn’t matter, not to her. She was beyond that. And he was one of hers, a Scarab who’d given himself fully to her. She could take him, lay her consciousness over his.
No, said the most stable part of her. We need this brain structure to do what we do. His brain is not designed to create a web, and we can’t manifest those pathways into existence, can’t make him more powerful. We will be limited by his limits.
She understood.
In so doing, she sacrificed first her upper limbs, then her lower extremities, then her stomach and digestive organs, and more, until all that was left was her brain, her heart to pump the blood around her system, and her lungs and autonomic system. She could breathe, her heart beat, and her brain was alive, but she’d never walk again.
The muscles and cells in the shut-down parts of her body were already atrophying and dying under the strength of the energy draw. There would be no coming back from that. But not even such drastic measures would’ve worked had she not hoarded so much power.
“Full … medical … emergency,” she gasped to this child of hers.
“I’ve alerted the team,” he said. “They’ll be here in thirty seconds. Just hold on, sir.” He turned her over onto her side so she wouldn’t choke on her own blood. A smart decision; she would utilize him often in the times to come.
“Twenty seconds! Sir!” His voice was fuzzy, difficult to hear. “Sir!”
No more extraneous energy left. Heart or lungs? Partial shutdown of both, so that enough remained for oxygen to get to her brain. If her brain was starved of oxygen, it would cause catastrophic damage.
“Just ten more seconds, sir! They’re coming!”
Her heart stopped, her lungs following.
Her brain began final shutdown procedures.
Chapter 51
Mercy, you’re the closest. Go.
—Lucas to Mercy
SHE WAS MADE of stars again, his Lei. His mate. And she stood in the center of his web, this web that had collected so many minds. He didn’t want her to see him, the bloated spider at the core, but she took his hand, and she led him to the very nucleus of the nightmare.
“Look, Ivan,” she said, and pointed.
He didn’t want to see, didn’t want to look. But she leaned up to press her lips to his cheek and whispered, “Please, for me.”
There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her. So he looked.
No spider hunched below, but the space wasn’t empty. At the center of the network was … “It’s a heart.” A huge silver heart that burned with flame-kissed silver fire and pumped in time with Ivan’s heartbeat.
He opened his eyes to find Soleil’s open, too, her cat looking at him through irises tawny gold and wild. Content in a way he’d never before been, he just looked back at her, the two of them face-to-face on their bed.
The security specialist part of his brain activated. “How are we in bed? We were outside.”
Even as Soleil’s gaze flared, he twisted to get out of bed … and groaned, his entire body feeling as if he’d been stomped on by a horse. An angry one. That was when he remembered all the nutrients he’d taken to artificially boost his psychic strength.
He should feel worse. It was a miracle he was awake and functional.
No, not a miracle, he realized looking back at Soleil. He wasn’t in worse shape because his mate had taken some of the backlash. She sat up slowly, sleep lines on one cheek and a wince in her expression. “Ouch,” she said, “everything aches. And I need to go be unladylike right now.”
She was in the sanitary facility part of the aerie before his brain computed what she’d meant. That alerted him to the realization he, too, needed to use those facilities. But it took him so long to get his creaky body upright that Soleil was out by then. Deciding that if they were under threat, those threats would’ve had plenty of time to stroll in while he was moving about as fast as a hundred-year-old tortoise, he went in to do what needed to be done.
Afterward, he washed his hands, then threw cold water on his face. He was moving a little better and feeling more awake by the time he wiped off the wet and walked back out. Soleil was standing in front of the mirror that hung on one wall of their bedroom, fixing her hair with slow hands. As he watched her, he did a telepathic scan.
That he hadn’t done that straight off the bat told him exactly how bad a hit the two of them had taken. The first mind he touched was changeling and opaque to him … except he identified it at once as belonging to Lucas Hunter. Because Soleil knew her alpha, the knowledge shared with him through their bond.
The next mind was Psy and “felt” like Arwen’s, but it wasn’t Arwen. After that, he found Grandmother, the resonance of her permanently embedded in his brain. That mind was followed by … Arwen’s. Yes, that was definitely his cousin. And neither his cousin nor his grand mother was far away. In point of fact, he thought they were right below the aerie.
Inside DarkRiver territory.
That was when he hit a mind so opaque that he could have no hope of guessing its identity—so he simply walked outside and looked over the verandah railing. “Lei,” he murmured, knowing her sharp hearing would pick it up, “Kaleb Krychek is down there with Lucas, a woman I recognize as Lucas’s mate, Sascha Duncan, my grandmother, and Arwen. I think that’s everyone.”
Soft footsteps before she peered over the railing, too. “Guess what?” she said. “I looked at my phone. It’s tomorrow. I mean, it’s tomorrow from when we collapsed.”
Ivan double-checked her statement against the PsyNet. “We’ve been out for thirty-two hours.”
