Heart of Obsidian (Psy-Changeling #12) 6

“There is no bargain.” Never would be. “You’ll tell me what I want to know, or I’ll break a bone in your body.” This didn’t count as torture to Kaleb’s mind—that would be if he was hurting her for no reason but to watch her scream. “I’m sure the infection won’t take long to set in, in your current damp accommodations.”

Fear crawled over her skin. Oh, she hid it well, but the one thing he’d always known about Tatiana was that she was a bully. And bullies never did well when they no longer had the upper hand. Santano had apparently begged for his life when the changelings came for him. One day, Kaleb would gain access to the recorded footage the packs had of the execution, then he’d sit back and watch until every instant of Santano’s torment was burned into his memory banks.

“Who else in your organization,” he said to the woman who was just like Santano where it mattered, “did you trust with the knowledge of Sahara’s ability?”

A twist of her lips. “Someone else is hunting Sahara Kyriakus? It’ll be an easy capture. She’s always been far too weak to actually use her power as it’s designed to be used.”

Kaleb didn’t argue, didn’t negotiate. He simply broke the smallest finger of her right hand.

Screaming, Tatiana cradled the hand to her chest. “You’re mad,” she gritted out after she could talk again. “Truly mad.”

“What I am,” Kaleb said, “is a man of my word. Now, would you like to answer the question?”

“I trusted no one.” Right then, she was the Tatiana the Net knew, ruthless, amoral, and willing to do whatever it took to win. “I would’ve been a fool to do so, given the temptation at hand—if and when Sahara regained full use of her faculties, a single intelligent individual could use her to take over the entire PsyNet. Why would I risk sharing that information?”

Truth, he judged. “Who in your employ is smart enough to work it out?”

“There was a guard,” Tatiana said, her finger already swollen. “David Sezer. He showed a little too much interest in Sahara. I had him reassigned after he was caught in the cell with her against my personal directive.”

Kaleb felt the chill darkness in him stretch awake, drawing the DarkMind’s eager presence. “That seems unusually magnanimous of you.” On the psychic plane, he “stroked” the DarkMind into patience—it would get the violence for which it hungered.

“I concluded that his Silence was flawed and that he’d been attracted by the opportunity to abuse a vulnerable female.”

The darkness grew icier. “You didn’t make certain?”

“Shield penetration takes energy and David was no one important. As he hadn’t managed to touch Sahara and was otherwise useful, I made the decision to keep him on. He did, however, come into an inheritance a year ago that would give him the financial resources to hire a hunter.” A sneer. “If he thinks he can use Sahara, he’s delusional. Even pathetically weak as she is, the girl is stronger than him.”

Kaleb rifled through PsyNet databases as the DarkMind curled around him. It took him a short two minutes to locate one David Sezer attached to a secondary branch of the Rika-Smythe corporation.

“Did anyone else with ‘flawed’ conditioning get close to Sahara?” Sahara was small, her physical strength nowhere close to that of a full-grown male’s—and she’d been drugged, her abilities suppressed on top of that. Easy prey.

“No.”

Catching the skitter in Tatiana’s eyes, he snapped another finger. The reverberating echo of her scream had no impact on him. “Who hurt her?”

Bent over, her body wracked by shudders as she threw up, Tatiana couldn’t immediately answer, but he was patient. “We had to gain her cooperation.” A voice raw with pain and fear. “Force was utilized.”

He would not kill her, no matter the provocation. It would be far too merciful. “Tell me where you keep the records of Sahara’s captivity, and I’ll leave,” he said in a pleasant tone he knew disturbed people on the deepest level. “Otherwise, we’ll be spending several hours together.” He teleported in a scalpel—she didn’t know of his promise to Sahara, didn’t know that her victim’s conscience was the only reason he wasn’t torturing her right this instant. “I learned many things at Santano’s knee.”

Fear a sheen of sweat on her face, she scrabbled backward into a corner. “A vault in the PsyNet.

I’ll have to telepath the location and pass codes.”

Kaleb smiled, knowing she wasn’t as broken as she was attempting to appear. “No, you won’t.

Talk.”

Tatiana talked and, when she was done, said, “You truly were Enrique’s protégé, weren’t you?” in the tone of someone making a discovery. “You helped him brutalize the changeling females he murdered.”

Judging she was in no danger of dying from the slight fever and her minor injuries, he left without wasting another word on her. Locating the vault wasn’t a problem, but he took care in downloading the data. Tatiana didn’t disappoint him—the booby traps were clever and meant to be fatal.

Once he had the data, he asked the NetMind to erase every other trace of it from existence, including the automatic copy in the PsyNet backup drive—which Kaleb had named the Obsidian Archive. No one else would ever know what had been done to Sahara during the years Tatiana had her in a cage. He would permit no one to look at her with pity in their eyes when she deserved only pride for her courage and strength.

That done, he began to read the files, noting the name of every individual involved in the sessions meant to break Sahara’s will. Three of them he’d already executed after tracking them through other methods, and another one was going slowly and terribly mad, thanks to Kaleb’s secondary ability.

The remaining two were minor players he told the DarkMind to suffocate in its blackness and consume.

David Sezer was the only one left, and the birds were beginning to sing outside when Kaleb decided it was time to pay the other male a personal visit. It was three hours later, once he’d showered and dressed after taking care of that matter, that he went to meet the two people other than Sahara who had a claim on his loyalty.

It was nothing akin to what he felt for her, but it was enough for him to teleport into the night shadow of San Francisco, the clouds hiding the sickle moon from view. Sliding into the last pew in the church where Father Xavier Perez welcomed all who came, he spoke to the back of the former Arrow who sat in front of him. Never did the other man look at his face, but he knew it was to Kaleb that he spoke.

“You want to discuss Pure Psy,” Kaleb guessed. The three of them—Xavier, Judd, and Kaleb— had long been bound by a mutual desire to collapse the rotten power structure of the Net, but where Judd and Xavier wanted to save the innocents of all races caught up in the rot, Kaleb had fought only for Sahara.

That he had saved a number of lives during their fight, helped some of those innocents, had been a consequence rather than an aim. Then again, perhaps Judd and Xavier had had a deeper impact on him than any one of them believed; after all, he had spared the children in his plan to wipe the Psy off the face of the planet if his search for Sahara ended with the knowledge of her death.

He’d told her about Judd, about Xavier, and about the details of their strategic war, in the quiet minutes after he and Sahara had had sex under the starlit Moscow sky, his heart beating in time with hers as she lay warm and sated against him. The only person with whom he had ever understood friendship had seen that in his relationship with the two men. He had accepted her judgment, knowing Sahara comprehended far more about emotion than he ever would.

“No,” Judd said now. “Not Pure Psy. I need information on Ming.”

Kaleb thought about why his fellow rebel would need data on the former Councilor. “He’s become too big a threat to Sienna.” Judd’s niece might be the only individual on the planet as dangerous as Kaleb, but since she had no desire to impinge on his territory, nor he on hers, he’d left her alone.

That, and his loyalty to the fallen Arrow in front of him.

“Ming’s fixated on her,” Judd confirmed. “She managed to hurt him the last time they came in contact, and Ming never forgets a threat.” He raised a hand in a silent hello as Xavier walked down the center of the church toward them, while Kaleb drew back into the shadows. It was safer for Xavier not to know his identity.

Unlike Judd, the priest had never been trained to be lethal.

Sliding into the pew beside Judd, Xavier said, “We’ve worked for a better world all this time, believing the ugliness that was the Council needed to be excised from the Net, and now it appears that the Net is fracturing, with fatal results. I do not wish to bathe in the blood of innocents.”

“Innocents were never our targets,” Judd said, his next words directed at Kaleb. “Has that changed?”

“Do you remember when you asked me if there was one person in the PsyNet who mattered to me?”

“Yes.”

“That person has asked me not to destroy the Net.” Like the scars that marked him, the rot would be nearly impossible to eradicate without first sanitizing the network. But he knew he couldn’t do that and still have Sahara look at him the way she’d done on the terrace, a softness to her that made him believe he might understand happiness. “Your innocents are safe from me.”

“I’m glad.” Quiet words from the former Arrow.

“Would you have attempted to execute me if I’d answered otherwise?” While Judd’s Tk wasn’t as powerful as Kaleb’s, he was fiercely intelligent, might just have achieved his aim.

“Yes,” came the brutal answer. “It would’ve destroyed a piece of me to end your life, but I would’ve done it.”

Chapter 36

KALEB FELT NO sense of betrayal; he’d known the answer before he asked the question. He also knew the other man would’ve done everything in his power to save Kaleb before he attempted to assassinate him. Judd had somehow survived the cruel life of an Arrow with his conscience, if not intact, then not totally destroyed.