a telepathic mayday. You can’t be here when they arrive.”
Ashaya didn’t release the girl’s hand. “What about you?”
He met her eyes. “I won’t leave her alone in the dark.”
“A silly emotional choice,” Ashaya said, but her voice shook. “One I find myself wishing I had the freedom to make.”
He shook his head, his leopard clawing at him in angry panic. “Go, Shaya. I keyed the car to you and the route’s preprogrammed. Set it to automatic and get the hell out.”
She withdrew her hand slowly from around the girl’s. “This was a frenzied attack. She was cut so badly that she can’t have come far.”
“Go!”
His snapped command made her give a stiff nod and run back to the car. A minute later, she drove past him as he carried the girl off the road and through the stand of manicured trees that lined the road. The line of greenery acted as a fence for the complex of homes behind it. Small, contained buildings no predator would live in, but that suited the Psy. It was obvious the girl had come from the nearest house.
The door stood open and even from the bottom of the drive-way, he could see the bloody handprint on the door. It was stretched, as if she’d slipped. More blood lay drying on the steps leading down from the entrance hallway, on the white cobblestones of the drive, on the ground inches from his feet.
Carefully skirting the last of her lifeblood, he carried the girl’s body back up to what had once been her safe haven.
Then he was on the doorstep and what he saw made him wish, for one selfish instant, that he’d driven by a minute earlier, that he’d missed seeing the carnage. Now these images were imprinted on his retinas, to be filed away beside the ones that tormented him night after night. Holding the girl tighter, he stepped inside the house.
A single delicate hand was all that showed of what had to be another female body in the room to the left. He glanced inside, saw that she couldn’t have been more than thirteen. She’d been stabbed only once but the weapon had hit her heart. The acetic furniture preferred by the Psy lay overturned, as if she’d made a desperate bid to escape. She hadn’t even reached the doorway.
Not moving from his position in the center of the hallway, he looked to the right. Another room. Another body. This one was a male. Slender, perhaps in his early twenties. He’d fought hard—his hands were bloody and broken as they lay upturned on the pale carpet, his chest a veritable mass of stab wounds. The room paid silent testament to his struggle to survive, the hard-wearing plastic of the chairs cracked and splashed with the rust red of drying blood.
He looked down at the carpet. Following the trail of lost life, he found himself in what had to be the bedroom area. In the first room, he discovered a lone middle-aged male. The man lay on his back, dead from what appeared to be a self-inflicted stab wound to the heart. One of his hands was still wrapped around the blade. There was no peace in his face, none of that icy Psy calm either. No, this man looked tormented. As if he’d seen a glimpse of hell itself.
A flicker of movement behind him. Dorian turned slowly.
The Psy who’d teleported in was dressed in the head-to-toe black of elite Psy guards. His uniform bore the now familiar image of two golden snakes twined in combat—Ming’s emblem.
Their eyes met. Cool Psy gray. Bright changeling blue.
Dorian recognized him in a single instant. Ming’s emblem but Anthony’s man. Zie Zen’s pickup.
The Tk-Psy’s attention went to the girl’s body. “You need to leave.” He raised his arms.
Dorian held her tighter. “What will you do to her?”
“Erase her,” was the pitiless answer. “Erase all of them.”
Dorian’s jaw set. “No. Give me her name.”
The Psy male held his gaze for almost a minute, then blinked very deliberately. A thin piece of plaspaper appeared in his hand. “Her birth ID.”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll talk about this and blow your cover?”
“No. In an hour, this place will be clean, so clean that not even changeling noses will be able to sniff out the blood.” As if to prove that, he looked at the carpet and Dorian saw the blood drops literally detach from the fibers and rise to hover an inch above.
Dorian’s leopard growled low in his throat. “Where’s your team?”
“They’re coming by car.” The man raised his arms again. “You need to give her to me and disappear. I can’t hide your presence if you’re still here when the cleanup crew arrives.”
“Why do this if you don’t believe in your Council?”
“Every freedom has a price.” His eyes shifted from gray to crawling black. Dorian saw more and more blood begin to rise out of the carpet and off the walls. “You need to leave. The PsyNet isn’t ready to know this yet. But it will be one day.”
Dorian walked across the now clean stretch of carpet and faced the Psy, the girl’s body between them. “My memories will be your proof?” A Justice Psy could pick out those memories if he cooperated, and broadcast them to the court. “What about yours?”
The Psy took the murdered girl with the same care that Dorian handed her over. “I’m tired.” A calm statement. “I can’t continue to erase lives as if they were nothing more than marks on a page. I’ll make a mistake. Then I’ll die.”
Dorian’s ears picked up the sounds of steps on the cobblestones. “You don’t have the right to be tired.” He took the girl’s birth ID, which was hovering in the air between them. “When you can write her name on a memorial, when you can honor her blood, then you’ll have earned the right.” He didn’t give the Psy man a chance to answer, turning to make his way out the back door as the other members of the cleanup team came in through the front. As he moved, he could feel a screen of blood rising behind him.
Another image to add to the gallery of nightmare.
CHAPTER 28
Obsession comes easily to Dorian. It worries me. If he walks back into the abyss, if he chooses the darkness, I’m not sure we’ll be able to pull him out.
Ashaya had disobeyed Dorian’s direct order. She knew she was taking what could amount to a stupid risk, but had found that it wasn’t in her to leave him behind. She’d driven a mile down the road, raised every one of her shields to conceal her presence in case of telepathic scans, and pulled off into the shade of a large tree. The vehicle remained visible from the road but there was nothing she could do about that.
She’d wait another fifteen minutes, she rationalized. If he wasn’t back by then—
The driver’s-side door wrenched upward.
“Slide into the passenger seat.” Dorian’s tone was clipped, his clothing streaked with blood.
She moved swiftly and they were on their way seconds later. “What did you find?”
“An entire family, dead. Murder-suicide.”
She swallowed. “Someone breached Silence,” she guessed, “and didn’t come out sane on the other side. There were vague rumors that that was happening—”
“I told you to get the hell out of here.” Dorian turned in to a side road with a jarring movement. “What the fuck did you think you were doing?”
She’d been fooled into dropping her guard by his apparent calm. Her head jerked up. “I thought you might need hel—”
“I’m a sentinel,” he interrupted, his tone cutting. “That means I can take care of myself. Contrary to what you
