Romani Armada (20 page)

“We don’t attack our own,” the woman said. Her voice was rough, as if she didn’t use it very often. “The humans we have dealt with here will recover. We needed to clear your way for you.”

“Me?” Kieren asked.

“You are one of us,” the older man said. He had an accent that Kieren couldn’t place. From somewhere in Asia, he thought, although the man was Caucasian.

“I’m not
one of you
,” Kieren told them. “I’m not anything.”

The woman glanced at the old man, then lifted her hand, palm up, toward Kieren.

Images poured into his mind. It felt like he was recalling a memory, except that the images were strange to him. They rolled on, revealing a series of stop motion images that told a story over and over again of people who had discovered their unique powers under extraordinary, highly emotional circumstances. A young boy who evaporated all the water in his hated bath, just by looking at it. The high school sweetheart, who gave her boyfriend an embolism when she caught him with another girl. The woman whose children had grown and left home, who collapsed her entire house when she was given the news of her husband’s death. And the woman who was sharing these stories with Kieren, the day she learned from her father’s thoughts that he was going to kill her when he slid into her bed like he did most nights.

They were all heartbreaking stories. Kieren crossed his arms again. “So?” he asked.

You were the same,
the woman told him without moving her lips.

“You’ve got the wrong guy,” Kieren assured her. “Wardens are trained to be unemotional. Hysterics are inefficient.”

Denial does not remove the truth
.

“Now we are aware of you, we have made arrangements,” the older man said, using his voice to speak.

“This was an
arrangement
?” Kieren asked, spreading his hands to encompass the still, crooked figures of the Wardens.

“It was necessary to release you,” the man replied. “They are not permanently damaged. By clearing your path, we have allowed you to leave without complications.”

Kieren tamped down his surprise and dismay. “Leave?” he repeated, although in his gut, he already knew what they meant. He just couldn’t encompass the idea that they really intended to do this, that it wasn’t all a game.

“To join us,” the woman replied.

The older man gave her a sad glance. “He cannot join us. He is already one of us.” He looked back at Kieren. “You must take up your rightful role. We can arrange things here so that they will never know we were here.”

“Who is
us
?” Kieren demanded.

“You know who we are,” the man said. “We are like you.”

“Do you have a name?”

The three of them looked at each other, and Kieren had the strongest hunch that they were talking. Silently.

He shivered.

“We do not have a name,” the woman said, her strange voice blurring some of her consonants. If she did most of her talking in her head, it would explain why she couldn’t speak properly using her mouth. “We have always just
been
.”

“I’m supposed to refer to you as ‘you’? Or should I just call you the scary fuckers?” It was crude, but Kieren needed to see some emotion in their faces. Anything at all, including irritation at his rudeness, would be better than the blank stares he was getting from them. It was unnerving. So was their confidence. They were complacent about the fact that they had just brought an entire barracks filled with Wardens under their complete control. Kieren was used to being the one with the upper hand. Two Wardens per situation was considered overkill, but multiple Wardens reassured their clients.

Again, the trio looked at each other. Communing.

The woman turned her head toward Kieren once more. “Some call us the Jabbar. We do not.”

Kieren recognized the name. It was the Arabic word for
powerful
.

“I’m not going with you,” he said, keeping his tone even and devoid of anger. He didn’t want these people pissed at him.

“You have a rightful place among us,” the old guy said. “You cannot refuse it.”

“I’m not refusing it,” Kieren told him. “I’m just choosing not to step into it.”

“But…you have no choice,” the man told him.

“The fuck, I don’t,” Kieren growled. “Watch me.”

The younger man, who until now had not spoken a word, straightened and lifted his hand in an imperious “halt” gesture. He faced Kieren squarely. “We will not force you. We do not need to. We will leave you to try and live your human life, until you are ready for the protection and family you will need.”

Kieren snorted. “Won’t happen.”

The man smiled gently. “We will leave you now. You will know how to reach us when the time comes.”

The three of them stepped over the still bodies of Wardens, heading for the door, which was only just hanging from its mounts – it had been warped and ripped nearly completely from the frame. None of them looked back at Kieren and neither did they look down at the Wardens they had bested. It was as if the Wardens weren’t there.

Kieren let out his breath as they progressed down the long barracks room to the door at the other end. His exhalation was gusty. He realized that he was trembling with adrenal overload, something that hadn’t happened to him since he had finished his training.

Behind him, one of the Wardens groaned in pain and shifted on the floor.

They were waking up to a new world, Kieren realized. A world where they could be beaten as easily as a two year old child.

He considered Douglas’ emphatic demand that he speak to no one about what had happened in Sweden. That cat was out of the bag now.

Kieren turned and helped the struggling Warden, Michael, into a sitting position.

“What the fuck happened?” Michael demanded as others began to stir around them. He looked around the room, his gaze touching on the wrenched door, the downed Wardens that could be seen through the doorway and the weapons locker that stood open, with a compact laser rifle on the floor in front of it.

“They’ve left now,” Kieren told him. “The threat has been lifted.”

“What threat?” Michael replied.

“The people that just ripped their way in here,” Kieren told him. “You need to pull your thoughts together faster than this.”

Michael looked up at him with a scowl. “I’m oriented,” he snapped. “And I do not remember any people. I remember you just standing there, flat on your feet doing nothing while we were attacked…” He looked around, the frown deepening. “But I don’t remember what attacked us.”

He got to his feet and backed away from Kieren. “How come you’re the only one standing? Why didn’t you get dropped like everyone else?”

I can explain
. The words were on the very cusp of tumbling from his mouth, but Kieren gritted his jaw. He couldn’t explain. They wouldn’t believe him and Douglas had said to stay silent.

“It’s classified,” Kieren said instead.

“Classified?” Michael repeated in disbelief. “Something infiltrates right into the heart of the base, you’re the only one left standing and it’s
classified
?”

Others were on their feet now and by coincidence or intent, they ranged raggedly behind Michael, looking at Kieren with stony expressions.

No, they didn’t like the taste of defeat at all.

Kieren heard the sound of the laser rifle being cocked, which tightened his gut and made him reach for his missing firearm.

“Who the fuck are you?” Michael demanded.

* * * * *

The Agency Home Base – 2264 A.D.:
“Jesus Christ and Mother Mary,” Justin intoned as he scrolled back to the top of the chapter.

“What’s bothering you now?” Brenden asked sharply, from right behind Justin’s shoulder. He had sneaked up on him while he was concentrating on reading. Justin had been too immersed in the story to notice.

Justin pointed to the title and sub-title of the entry.

Terrorism in Yunnan Province, China, Twenty-first Century – The Liping Incident

“That’s where she is, isn’t it?” Justin demanded. “Liping village, in East Yunnan.”

“Your girlfriend talks too much,” Brenden growled.

“It says the village was hit by a hot blanket bomb. It was razed in twenty seconds.”

“Shut up, I’m reading,” Brenden replied.

“It has profiles of everyone that lived at the village, but it doesn’t give a list of victim names. She was there, Brenden. This article was cross-referenced with Adán Santiago, which means he was involved.”

Brenden placed a heavy hand on Justin’s shoulder and squeezed and Justin knew it wasn’t meant for sympathy. Brenden was gazing at the screen, absorbing it. The hand on his shoulder was Brenden’s way of insisting he stay silent.

Justin moved off the chair and out from under Brenden’s grip. He couldn’t just sit there. He stepped away from the table and waited for Brenden to finish.

“You going to stop pacing any time soon?” Brenden asked.

Justin turned to face him, and realized that he hadn’t stopped walking since he’d moved away from the screen. He couldn’t keep still. “Deonne was there,” he said, hoping Brenden would refute him.

“Looks that way,” Brenden said mildly.

Something hot and hard tore through his chest. Justin made fists of his hands, fighting the reaction. “How can you be so calm about it?” he asked. “She died!”

“Until I look into this further, I’m not going to agree about anything,” Brenden shot back. “Time is a funny bastard. You know how fluid it is. Just because you found a single report doesn’t mean a damned thing.”

“It was cross-referenced!”

“So are fiction books,” Brenden replied stoically. He lifted a hand, his finger raised like an admonishing parent. “Don’t even think about doing something stupid like jumping back there.”

“I can’t just sit here!”

“Yeah, you can. You
will not
go back there. You’re not a traveler. You will screw with timelines just by being there.”

Justin shifted on his feet. “I gotta get out of here,” he muttered, looking around.

Brenden took a step toward him. “I don’t have to put you under house arrest, do I? Because I can get Pritti to clamp you in one spot until Sparta reigns supreme once more.”

Fear touched him. Justin forced himself to look Brenden in the eye and keep his gaze steady. “You don’t have to do that,” he said quietly.

Brenden considered him for a good long moment. Then he waved him away. “Go and play with your humans. I’ll get my researchers on this, see what we can figure out.”

Justin nodded. “Thanks.” He moved through the cavern to the big adjoining cave – the default common room where everyone gathered to both socialize and work. There were dozens of picnic tables. A dozen of them at the narrow end of the cave held up computers, screens, and other work equipment, but all the tables in the middle of the room were empty of tools.

Eight of the tables were being used, with two or three vampires at each table. At the far side of the cavern, well separated from the other occupied tables, Demyan sat with Pritti. They were reading a board, their heads close together. Pritti was the single exception to the vampires-only rule; she could shield herself, her mind and hundreds of other people all at once. Gabriel would have more trouble reading her mind than a vampire’s.

Justin moved through the maze of tables and sat on the bench opposite the pair. Pritti looked at him, startled. Then her eyes widened. “You’re afraid,” she said softly. “Very afraid.”

“I thought you couldn’t read vampire minds when they weren’t in the past?” Justin returned.

“Thoughts can’t be read,” Demyan told him. “But Pritti is empathic as well as telepathic. Your emotions, if you have them, are as readable as print. Besides, she doesn’t need to read your emotions to see that something has you in its grip. What is it?”

“Her,” Pritti whispered.

“Deonne,” Justin said at the same time. He looked for the words that would explain it all as simply as possible but it was a jumbled, incoherent mess in his mind. He didn’t know where to start.

Demyan reached out and gripped Justin’s hand where it lay on the table. “Let me in,” he said very softly.

Justin met his gaze. “What?”

“Relax. Let down your guard. Let me get at your thoughts.”

“You can do that?”

“Vampire to vampire, yes. If one of them is a telepath. Silence.” His gaze was holding Justin’s attention, keeping him focused.

Justin put aside all his questions and tried to relax as Demyan had instructed, but it was impossible. He let out a shuddering breath.

Demyan sat back, letting Justin’s hand loose. He glanced at Pritti. “I have to go.”

She smiled softly at him. “Of course you must.” She looked at Justin and her warm smile remained in place. “She needs you.”

Pritti’s words shoved a hot poker into the middle of the chaotic knot in his chest. “Does that mean…?”

Demyan’s smile was smaller than Pritti’s, but there was light in Demyan’s eyes that seemed to glow fiercely. “I’ll take you there.”

“Brenden will kill you,” Justin pointed out.

“He’ll ground me and I’ll get an official reprimand. But staying close to home suits me right now.” He glanced at Pritti, who stared steadily back at him, her face calm. “I won’t be long.”

She nodded.

Demyan stood up. “Let’s find somewhere a bit more private to jump,” he suggested, his voice low.

Dazed at Demyan’s abrupt cooperation, Justin climbed from the bench and looked around. “Where?”

“Any dim corridor will do. Let’s get you in the same room as Deonne. Come.” Demyan strode ahead.

Chapter Fifteen

Liping Village, East Yunnan Province, China, 2054 A.D.:
Deonne shook her head. “I am not running this place! I can’t!”

Mariana dropped the ring of keys on her desk. They were actual, old-fashioned mechanical keys. Mariana had just finished explaining that they gave access to the common buildings in the compound. “If you don’t do it, there is no one else here who can,” Mariana said gently.