Through the Static (2 page)

Curse took point while Jinx and Charm fell into place at his flanks. The Three crept forward as a single, almost perfectly cohesive unit—but even the tiniest deviations gave Jinx pause. A year ago they would have been
perfect
, every step and thought in unison. But the crackles in the static were coming more often now. They'd have to report it to Spellcaster the next time they checked in to bring him the bounty from their raid. Jinx shivered. There was no telling how he'd react this time.

A low lick of current sizzled down Jinx's spine, and his eyes jerked up involuntarily to meet Curse's. There was a rebuke there, a reminder to stay on-point, but there was also agreement. Jinx wasn't alone in recognizing how things were breaking down.

One mind. One mission.

It was the mantra of the Three, but it didn't resonate the way it used to. Not for Jinx.

Pushing the uneasiness away, Jinx followed them through the woods to the closest point of access to the base. At his partners' mental signal, he peeled off and darted to the secondary control panel located under the rear entrance, and with the others covering him, he plugged in.

Whoever had spliced into the security had been good, their manipulations almost invisible to all but the most trained eye. Jinx saw through the layers of interference quickly though, tracing each one through the system to its source.

Sweat dripped from his brow as he overrode the falsified instructions. “Breach occurred at twenty-one hundred.”

“Shit.” Curse lifted his weapon higher.

Someone had been inside their base's system for two hours.

Charm sent a wave of calm over them both. “Damage?”

“Minimal. Only…” That couldn't be right. Jinx checked again, his heart pounding. Disconnecting from the panel, he cast a wary eye at the door. “Only there's a heat signature from inside.”

A singular shudder passed through their link. If they'd been compromised, there would be no second chance. On top of the emerging defects in their circuitry that they refused to acknowledge aloud, a security breach of this magnitude would be all the reason Spellcaster needed to pull the plug.

Curse spat, the fat weight of his sputum landing on the already wet ground. “Neutralize and interrogate,” he directed.

Jinx hid the lurch of guilty reservation that rose up in him at the thought, but the others still got a whiff of it. Curse's hand tightened on the handle of his gun, the mental weight of his disdain as harsh as his discipline would have been. Jinx stiffened under his partners' disappointment. He drew his weapon and stepped away from the wall.

“After you,
leader
.”

After all these years, where had this resentment come from? This burning thing, dripping acid in his heart?

Curse ignored it and turned to the door. “Come on.”

And then there was no more dissension. With the Link at its full strength, tethering them as one, they hit the door. Curse burst through first and flung himself at the wall, weapon pointed straight ahead, covering for Jinx and Charm as they followed. Spouting directions straight into their minds, Curse ordered them to fan out. They covered the few sparse rooms in seconds, looking for signs of disruption.

“Blood
,
”
Charm transmitted.

Jinx looked down, and his stomach twisted. The crimson drops had dried into the floor, painting a clear trail from the entrance through the house, with the freshest spatters leading straight toward his quarters.

“Formation.”

Jinx fell in behind Curse, with Charm at his side as they approached the half-open door. Curse reached out a hand, pushed open the door and projected his gun into the room. From behind him, Jinx peered through the darkness, fight-or-flight instincts jacking him up into
fight fight fight
mode.

He swept his gaze through the space three times before he found it. And then he stopped cold.

There, in a blood-soaked, broken ball on his bed, was a woman. She was all soft, pale skin and a heart-shaped mouth, loose red curls and the most perfect, tiny nose.

His heart hiccupped, his circuitry misfiring. But it didn't matter. It didn't matter that his partners could hear his thoughts. After all, they were practically screaming.

Because instinctively, he knew: this was no intruder. No infiltrator bent on destroying his mission or his Three. This was just a girl. A woman.

And for the first time in his existence, Jinx remembered what it was to be a man.

Chapter Two

The shock of electricity didn't matter. Not the hands clutching at him or the muzzle of the gun against his back. Jinx pushed past his companions in a surreal, shimmering moment of understanding, feelings and memories resurfacing, sensations that for the longest time had been lost to him. In a burning rush, he remembered the press of a woman's body, the softness of her skin and the taste of two people's breath mingling.

He remembered humanity.

And then the blackness nearly brought him to his knees. Frozen in place under his Three's command, Jinx fought to move or speak, but an iron clamp squeezed tight around him, and in his mind, there was only Curse's bellowing mental scream.

“What the fuck do you think you're doing?”

“Can't you see?”
Jinx thought back at him.
“She's hurt.”

“Not as hurt as you're going to be in a second.”

“She's not a threat.”

“You don't know that,”
Charm insisted. Her psychic weight added another layer of pressure, holding Jinx in place.

“I do. Of course I do. Just look at her.”

By sheer force of will, Jinx compelled his vision to return. Over and over again, he raked his gaze across that soft form, and with every sweep, the swell of life inside his chest bloomed hotter. She was perfect.

Too perfect. Too perfect for him.

“No. No fucking way.” Curse was standing over him then, yanking on his hair and forcing his head backward. “There's a line, Jinx.”

Jinx bore down and forced his eyes to shift toward Charm.
“And you cross it every day.”

Charm's eyes widened. Had she really thought she'd fooled him?

Jinx turned his gaze back to Curse to find his nostrils flared, but no longer just in anger. He was rattled. Primed. Appealing to his leader's logical side, Jinx struck out, insisting,
“Listen
.
She's no good to us like this. You won't get anything out of her if she's half dead.”

“She's an intruder.” Curse's voice wavered. Just slightly, but discernibly.

Sure enough, a second later, sensation slowly seeped back into Jinx's limbs, a modicum of control returning to him as the other two eased up their mental grip. He popped his jaw, tasted the blood from biting down on his own tongue in his paralysis. Looking back at the woman on his bed, he felt just as strongly as he had in the instant he'd seen her.

His own tone wasn't as steady as he would have liked. “She's not a threat.”

But then there was another voice, a faintly flickering one inside his head.

“You're right,”
it whispered.
“I'm not.”

Aurelia's body was heavy, the very weight of it pulling her down even as her mind floated up through layers of consciousness. There was a drag to the back of her eyes, a pounding in her skull and an ache in her shoulder, a shakiness to her very thoughts.

There were people in the room with her.
Three
people.

She tensed, fighting hard against the urge for flight, struggling to stay still. They must have noticed her by now, maybe even recognized her, and she had nothing left—no energy to run nor will to push past the blanket of pain. And she'd been the one to leave herself like this, vulnerable and unarmed while unknown forces were still in pursuit. She'd been such a fool.

Through barely cracked lids, she strained to focus on the other figures in the room—on the tattoos behind their ears. Pentacles, she realized. Not stars. And their LEDs were green instead of blue. A different Three, then. But there was no assurance their master wasn't the same.

The room was eerily silent as they all stared each other down. A psychic conversation, probably. Judging by their postures, it must have been a heated one.

Suddenly, the biggest of them, a mountain of a man with short-cut blond hair, stepped forward and started swearing aloud. The person to his left stiffened, and Aurelia's eyes went wide.

She almost could have missed it. Could've registered the close-cropped black hair and military posture, and skimmed over the rest of it. The slight delicacy to the features. The hints of curves beneath the body armor. Aurelia's heart started to pound.

Women weren't unheard of in Threes, but they were rare, especially now. This Three was an old one, then. Meaning…

The third pushed out a blistering pulse of psychic energy, and Aurelia's gaze flew to his. Fierce, dark eyes shone, their irises almost glowing with a tortured intensity as the other two flinched.

Dissension. There was dissent inside this Three. Just as she'd predicted. Maybe… Aurelia let her own mind unravel, feeling out the waves of thought in the air. She rode them in toward shore, tasting the tenor of suppression, and then of something so powerful it would have knocked her back, had she not already been lying down.

This man, this third…he
felt
something. It was breathtaking. Impossible.

She looked at him anew as she worked to attune herself to the frequency of his thoughts. He was slighter than his leader but still strong, his frame tall and proud. His raven hair was just long enough to begin to curl, and it looked soft, even though everything else about him, from his jaw to the cut of his muscled chest, was hard.

He was gorgeous. Beautiful, even. And deadly.

His signal came in crisply and then faded. She homed in tighter on its frequency.
Bingo.
The instant she locked in on it, the third's silent voice filtered into her head.

“You won't get anything out of her if she's half dead.”

Aurelia's stomach lurched. So they knew who she was after all. And all this man's passion was bent toward deciding the best method of extracting information. The heat in his eyes morphed inside Aurelia's mind, becoming something else entirely. Something cruel. Maybe he got off on torture. It wouldn't be unheard of in his kind.

The big one stamped his foot, practically spitting bile. “She's an intruder.”

A shiver ran through the man with the dark hair and dark thoughts, and his muscles seemed to uncurl. “She's not a threat.”

Aurelia did a double take. Was he actually arguing in her favor?

In the span of a second, as his pronouncement hung in the air, a hundred possible courses of action flitted through Aurelia's mind, each riskier than the one before. To reveal herself was dangerous, but to lie there waiting… That was unbearable.

And besides, watching their interaction, it seemed there might be things she knew about them that they did not.

The woman looked as if she was about to speak, and Aurelia saw her window for action closing. Striking out with only the most desperate of hopes, she flung her own voice into the third one's mind.

“You're right,”
she swore.
“I'm not.”

She'd barely inhaled before he was turning, shifting to cast the full power of those dark eyes on her. The depth of them staggered her as she met his gaze, staring unflinchingly into a rich umber that seemed to go on for miles. There was life there. A spark. This was no mindless automaton.

And in that instant, she knew something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

“Who are you?”

His secret voice in her mind was quieter, more intimate than his spoken one, and she searched the faces of his two companions. While their attention too had turned to her, nothing on their countenances indicated they had heard.

Impressive. The third had used her own channel to speak back to her, ensuring their words were theirs alone.

Then it dawned on her: unless he was acting, he had no idea who she was. Air filled her lungs as she drew in a deep gasp of relief, sending spikes of flame through her shoulder and into her chest. Panic followed swiftly after. Whatever lie she gave him would be easy to ferret out, and what she needed now was time. Time to rest and regroup. Time to figure out who had attacked her.

She gazed into his eyes again, struck anew by their brilliance in the dark.

How long had it been since their link had failed?

The others fidgeted, the static of silent communication crackling in the air, followed by that low hum of suppression. Her third shook it off, all his focus trained on her. He repeated once more,
“Who are you?”

She looked over the edge of a cliff. And then she jumped over.
“Someone who can help you.”

The man's eyes widened just as the leader's patience finally broke. “Jinx. Tell me what the fuck is going on or I swear to God—”

“Quiet.”

“Help me how?”

Aurelia swallowed but kept her face calm.
“Do you really not know?”

“Jinx…”

He ignored the big man, his gaze piercing. And Aurelia could tell. He knew.

“Enlighten me.”

Ready to crack from the pressure, the exhaustion and the pain, Aurelia tried to hack deeper into his system, but at every access point she was turned away. So she had to guess, faking a bravado she didn't feel.

“Don't pretend you haven't noticed it. The glitches in the system.”
Her gaze shifted to the way the other two stood side by side, nearly touching. Lifting her chin and praying her hunch was right, she continued,
“The way your partners hold you apart.”

His nostrils flared, his hand tightening on the handle of his weapon, and Aurelia felt her chest expand. She'd hit a nerve.

She made one last entreaty to him, voicing the products of her research—the ones no one knew about yet except Stan and Isabel and her.
“If your link disintegrates while you're all still tied to it, it'll take you with it.”

His eyes went wider, and her heart raced. It was risky to lay her cards on the table like that. But what did she have to lose?

“You're sure.”

“Completely.”

His reaction betrayed no surprise.
“And you'll help us.”

“I will.”
As she pushed the words away, she spoke another even more silent prayer. She had no idea who she was promising to help. All she could do was hope they were worthy of it.

The big one's voice boomed. “Soldier.”

There was just a moment's hesitation, and then dark eyes looked away from her. “I'll take responsibility for her.” Her third, Jinx, rounded on them, turning to face them but still keeping Aurelia in his periphery.

“And what precisely do you intend to do?”

Jinx glanced her way and then back again. “Get her back on her feet. Find out what I can.”
“Trust me,”
he whispered psychically. “You can do what you need to in the morning.”
“I will never let them touch you.”

At that, Aurelia let her head fall back, the tension draining from her spine at his reassurances. She was thirsty and achy and covered in blood. She'd watched her partner die and she'd put her lot in with a Three. As if there were anyone less worthy of her trust.

But she was safe. At least for tonight.

It was all Jinx could do to stand there, negotiating, when every buried instinct was suddenly blooming to the surface and screaming at him to go to her. In his head, Curse and Charm laid out a hundred reasons to restrain and interrogate her, right here, right now. Threats rippled just beneath the surface of their arguments, but he could hardly focus.

The way your partners hold you apart,
she'd said.

How long had their Three been two against one?

“Enough,”
he said, interrupting.
“Who did you plan to have watch her tonight anyway?”
The two of them didn't even have the decency to look guilty. Summoning all the resentment, all the pain of these lonely, frustrated years, he threw their attachment back in their faces.
“I know what happens in that other room.”

“Tread carefully there,”
Charm warned.

He'd had enough warnings.
“I watch her tonight. And in return, I will say nothing.”
Raising one eyebrow, he flashed a hundred memories from a hundred nights. Noises. Whispers in their link and strains of passion from which he was always, always held apart.

The static hummed, the way it always did when Curse and Charm blocked him from their private conversations. As if he hadn't felt like enough of an outsider among them as it was. A few tense seconds passed before Curse let loose a growl and walked away from them, straight toward the door, where he slammed his fist into the wall.

“I'm relieving you of your security privileges for the night.” The leader cast one look back over his shoulder. “Keep the girl, if that's what you want so badly. But neither of you leaves this base.”

With that, he stormed out and down the hall. Charm lingered for a few seconds, reaching out to touch Jinx's arm, but he pulled away from her. She stiffened and dropped her hand back to her side.
“Be mad at Curse if you want to. I'm the one who told him he should let you have her.”

The door slammed behind her, and then she was gone. And Jinx and the woman were alone.