The smile grew wider, deep grooves forming in his cheeks. "So, talk to Faith."

Having arrived at their destination, Sahara checked to make sure the coast was clear. Except this time, she pressed her hand against the door once inside to make sure they didn't inadvertently shock anyone else. "You're checking for small incendiary devices?"

A nod. "The Arrows found one at the other end of the station-cheap and easy to make, small range but big noise. Vasquez might have seeded the station with them to fool people into believing the entire place was mined to blow."

"To delay rescue efforts once people began to collapse from the gas." Intelligent in the most psychopathic of ways.

"Ye-" Vaughn's sudden silence told her he'd found something. "Stay behind the wall until I give the all clear."

Sahara didn't argue, well aware that, protective as he'd become of her, Vaughn wouldn't be able to focus if she flouted his command. Earlier, he'd thrust a chocolate bar into her hand with an order that she eat the whole thing. "Psychic muscles use energy," he'd said. "And don't even try to argue. Faith doesn't get away with that and neither will you."

Sahara had taken great pleasure in pointing out that he was acting exactly like Kaleb. His growl would've raised every hair on her body if she hadn't been grinning and eating chocolate at the time.

"Done," he said now, three minutes after he'd asked her to stay behind the wall. Placing the remnants of the device into his duffel bag, he rose. "Let's go."

They had just stepped outside when- "-may have been compromised. Push go!"

Sahara was speaking to Kaleb even as the final word echoed in her mind. They know! Kaleb! So close to the poison, he'd never survive the exposure.

A minuscule pause that sent her heart into her throat before Kaleb said, It's all right. We've defused the poison bomb. I'm in the process of teleporting the container out now.

There were three small booms on the heels of Kaleb's words, but though people hesitated, looking around for answers, no one panicked. Acting as planned in the event of a possible panic situation, the Arrows ducked their heads and merged into the flurry of people in the station, as changeling teams moved in to cordon off the damaged areas.

Since Vaughn was one of those changelings, she heard him feed the curious a story about teenagers playing with banned fireworks. The explanation wasn't wholly believed, but the travelers, regardless of race, relaxed as soon as they realized the changelings had the situation under control. It gave Sahara a glimpse of exactly how much San Francisco had become a changeling-specifically leopard-city.

In the end, that was the only damage done that day, but Vasquez, faceless and unidentifiable, remained in the wind. Accepting Kaleb's offer of a teleport, the changeling trackers used the faint scent found at the fan to begin their hunt, each changeling accompanied by an Arrow who could scan for and block possible psychic attacks.

Not strong or fast enough to keep up, Sahara decided to stay at the station. "In case Vasquez or his men decide to circle back," she said to Kaleb.

He nodded, his eyes connecting with Vaughn's. "Take care of her."

The jaguar male's responding nod was quiet, the grim look he laid on Sahara after Kaleb left not the least unexpected. "He's not the kind of man you want to be involved with."

Sahara made a face at him. "That would be my business."

"Sorry, doesn't work like that." Folding his arms, he leaned back against the wall, eyes fully jaguar. "You're family now, little sister."

"And look how safe you are," she said, hands on her hips. "I'm sorry, anyone who turns into a predatory cat with big teeth and claws can't exactly throw stones."

Vaughn narrowed his eyes at her. "I will hurt him if he puts a single bruise on you."

"You won't have to," Sahara said softly. "He'd end himself before causing me harm." As he'd once almost done . . . her beautiful Kaleb who had bled so much she'd thought he'd do permanent damage to his brain.

"No! Don't! Kaleb, stop!"

IT was a long day that merged into an even longer night. Kaleb stayed with the changeling trackers . . . and Sahara stayed with him. She'd left the station when it became night-quiet and gone to DarkRiver's HQ, but remained connected to Kaleb on the telepathic plane. It was a quiet reminder that he mattered, that someone would miss him if he was gone.

Ahead of him, one of the trackers-a wolf named Drew-held up a hand. Kaleb scanned the area and pinpointed a number of Psy minds in the vicinity, but there was nothing to tell him if one belonged to the individual who'd left the scent, whether it had been Vasquez or one of his skeleton team. Then a gunshot rang out from the four-level garage to the left and he had a far smaller area to scan.

Unable to teleport to the location without a clear visual, he ran to a vehicle in front of the structure, then reached for both Judd and Aden with his mind. I need cover.

Go. Laser fire erupted from all sides, interspersed with the harder sounds of gunfire.

I can bring in more people, he said to Judd once his back hit the inside wall of the garage. No hostiles on this level.

We'll stay out here, draw his attention. Looks like a single shooter.

Kaleb was already moving, taking extra care to ensure his footfalls didn't echo. He was almost to the fourth level when the world went silent. Judd, update.

He stopped without warning. May have realized you're there.

Kaleb increased his speed, aware Vasquez-if it was the leader of Pure Psy, and not one of his subordinates-had the skill to rappel down the side of the structure and once again elude capture. The bullet came out of nowhere, glancing off his upper arm. Gritting his teeth against the bruising pain, he rolled behind the protective bulk of a gleaming black all-wheel drive.

Kaleb!

He didn't know how Sahara had sensed the blow. Bulletproof fabric did its job. I'm fine. His arm remained functional.

Risking a look around the corner, he twisted back as another bullet snapped past his head, but the quick glimpse combined with the trajectory of the bullet gave him what he needed to zero in on the location of the shooter. He rose to his haunches as the all-wheel drive took multiple shots from both a projectile weapon and a laser, safety gla.s.s cascading around him. Shaking it off, he spread his hands, palms out, and shoved every single car on this level of the garage forward in a lethal wave that left the shooter with nowhere to go.

The guns went wild as the shooter tried to take Kaleb down and cut off the flow of his telekinetic power. Kaleb easily avoided the bullets . . . until one ricocheted off a metal sign on the wall to punch into his thigh with an impact that told him it had been designed to penetrate bulletproof fabric. It did. The violent pain might have interrupted the concentration of another Tk, but Kaleb had learned to work through worse as a boy.

Gritting his teeth, he slammed the cars into the back wall, the metal sc.r.a.ping along the sides of the parking garage to leave deep gouges. Then came silence. Total and possibly dangerous. Sweeping out with his telepathic senses, he found a living Psy mind, but it was flickering, for lack of a better word, critically injured. He had to shift three crushed cars to get to the shooter, who lay crumpled between the wall and the twisted hulks of metal, his guns crushed, his lower body sticky and red, bones in splinters.

The only way Kaleb could know if this physically unremarkable male was Vasquez would be to tear into his mind. But even with the blood pooling around his lower body, thick and dark, the man had a look in his eyes that told Kaleb his mind was apt to be rigged to collapse if breached.

Removing the man's knife and anything else he could use to speed up his own death, Kaleb 'ported to Sahara, after sending her a warning message, tugged the hood of her sweatshirt up over her head to shadow her face, and 'ported back with her.

Sounds had begun to echo through the garage by the time they arrived, the rest of the team doing a level-by-level sweep to make sure there was no one else hiding in the structure.

"No questions?" the critically injured male rasped on their return, blood bubbling out of the corners of his mouth.

Kaleb's leg was bleeding badly now, the viscous liquid having soaked into the tough fabric of his pants and trickled into his boot, but he would finish this. "You're unlikely to answer them."

The man's lashes came down, settled, then lifted to show he was still alive and conscious. "So you'll stand there and watch me die, not even attempt a retraction?" Contempt in those words.

It is Andrea Vasquez, Sahara said along their familiar telepathic pathway. But this was not his final strike. That is what he calls the Phoenix Code: he's split Pure Psy into multiple cells, each with the goal of collapsing as much of the PsyNet as possible, until only the "pure" remain-his belief system, as well as those of his followers, has altered until they now truly think that those who are "pure" are stronger. Anyone who dies was therefore not pure.

The tautology of that belief did more to disprove Pure Psy's "rational" rhetoric than any reasoned argument.

Geneva, Sahara continued, Luxembourg, Paris, San Francisco, they were all intended to give his people time to scatter and hide deep, only to arise anew once the dust has settled. While their goal to rid the Net of the impure is paramount, their secondary aim is to instigate a worldwide war that will eliminate the weak and the "inferior."

His legacy, as he thinks of it, is an organization with so many heads that it will be impossible to decapitate: a true hydra.

Chapter 43.

VASQUEZ'S PLAN WAS all the more terrible for its simplicity. It was too bad for the leader of Pure Psy that, at last count, the Arrows had taken down seventy-five percent of his lieutenants and were now moving on to the next layer. Even a multiheaded hydra needed some type of a command structure, and Kaleb had no intention of permitting the remaining lieutenants to set up any kind of a power base.

As for the weaker members-they might be troublesome, but only to the extent an insect is to a dragon. Eventually, they'd all be crushed.

"You would sentence your race to annihilation," he said to Vasquez, and it wasn't a judgment. How could it be when he had once considered destroying the PsyNet? No, it was a question, one Vasquez understood.

"We will rise as the phoenix from the ashes. Better, stronger, purer." His eyes met Kaleb's, the sclera red with burst blood cells. "You understand."

"Yes." And because he did, because he saw in Vasquez who he might've been but for Sahara, he crouched down to grip the other man's hand so he did not have to go into death as alone as he'd been in life. Neither did he tell Vasquez that the plan he'd sacrificed himself to put in place would never come to fruition.

It was the only peace he could offer.

The leader of Pure Psy coughed up b.l.o.o.d.y froth, his voice a raw whisper as his blood-slick fingers tightened on Kaleb's. "The Psy have always been meant to rule. When it is over, we will be the only power that remains." A final rattling gasp, his eyes fading to stare out into the nothingness of death.

Andrea Vasquez was dead and with him, his dream of a world enslaved by the Psy.

Closing the man's eyelids, Kaleb rose to pull Sahara close. "We may have won this battle, but now comes a far harder one-to rebuild a society that is so fundamentally broken it has begun to cannibalize itself."

"Which you need to be alive to do," came the furious response. "The bulletproof fabric did its job?" She was staring at his thigh as she repeated his earlier a.s.surance.

Only to Sahara would he explain himself. "That was a later shot."

Ignoring him, she twisted around as the first of the wider team cleared the level. "Judd can-"

"No." He teleported them directly to a private medical facility staffed by those who would not dare betray Kaleb, not only because he paid them very well, but because the agonizing punishment involved should they speak his secrets would in no way be worth it.

Pushing back her hood, Sahara began issuing orders to the medics. Stay still, was her snapped telepathic command to him when the head M-Psy reached for a scanner.

Kaleb obeyed.

"Projectile weapon. Bullet hasn't exited." The M-Psy put the scanner aside to pick up a surgical tool. "Sir, you may wish to deaden your pain centers."

Kaleb had done that when he was shot. "Go."

The M-Psy began to work with an efficiency that was a silent testament as to why she was in Kaleb's employ. Reaching out, Sahara went as if to brush Kaleb's hair off his forehead, then dropped her hand after a quick look at the medic. Sorry.

It's all right. There is no risk here.

Be quiet. Folding her arms, she stood stiff and silent and watchful as the medic put the retrieved bullet in a tray and used another piece of equipment to speed up the healing process.

"This procedure is complete, sir," the M-Psy said some time later. "You may have slight tenderness in the area, but it shouldn't last more than a day or so." She looked up after putting down the tool she'd been using. "Are you wounded anywhere else?"

"Scan my upper left arm." It was possible the impact of the glancing bullet had caused injuries of which he was unaware.

"No tearing or fractures," the M-Psy said after the scan was complete, "but significant bruising. I can work on it-"

"No, that's fine." Kaleb barely felt the injury and he wanted to be alone with Sahara.

"Yes, sir." Removing her gloves to leave them on the tray, the medic left without further words.

Noting from Sahara's unchanged stance that she was in no mood to talk, he teleported them directly into what had become their bedroom at the Moscow house. He'd already discarded his torn and dirty sweatshirt into the same medical incinerator he'd sent the bloodied equipment the medic had used, and now ripped off his long-sleeved bulletproof top in preparation for a shower, after kicking off his boots and socks.

Not saying a word, Sahara picked up his arm to examine the place where the first bullet had grazed him. His skin was beginning to turn the mottled shade that denoted it would be a heavy bruise, but was otherwise undamaged. She didn't say anything. Instead, she reached down to pull aside the fabric of his cargo pants where the medic had sliced it to work on the wound.

Delicate as air, her fingers danced over the spot. "Does it hurt?"

A strange sensation whispered through his veins now that she'd spoken to him again. "No. It wasn't a bad wound."

The look she gave him was murderous . . . but he saw her lower lip tremble.

At last he understood, realized he'd made her afraid. "I'm sorry."

Swallowing, she rose on tiptoe to wrap her arms around his neck. He bent to make it easier for her to hold him, entrapping her in his arms. "I'm sorry," he said again, remembering what it had done to him to lose her, and seeing in her response the same bone-numbing terror.

"If the bullet had hit your femoral artery, you'd be dead." Trembling voice, tears wet against his skin. "A quarter of an inch to the-"

"No," he said, needing to make this right. "I would've teleported immediately to the medics in that case." Changing his hold, he carried her to the bed and sat down with her in his lap, uncaring of the dried blood on his pants.

Tightening her hold, she buried her face against him. He didn't know what else to do, how to comfort her, so he simply held her, held the only person in the world who had ever cried for him.

The first time had been six months after their first meeting, when she'd noticed the blue-black bruises on one of his arms after he'd forgotten about them and pushed up the sleeves of his sweatshirt. Having no idea what to do, he'd warned her she'd be in trouble if she was caught crying, but no matter what he said, she kept crying silent tears and patting at his arm.

"I can't fix you. I'm sorry. I can't."

She was patting him like that again, her hand gently caressing the hurt spot on his upper arm. So he said the same thing that had finally stopped her tears that day. "Please stop crying. If you do, I'll make you fly."

"I'll make you fly."

Memory powered through Sahara in a single slamming punch, and all at once, she was sitting on the edge of a small, hidden pond in the farthest corner of the NightStar grounds, colorful koi moving lazily beneath the clear surface and the taste of salt on her lips.

"What?" she whispered to the boy who sat a foot in front of her, his arm telling her a story his voice never would.

"See." He held up the beautiful blue pebble she had given him after finding it in the small box of stones her father had given her as an educational tool. He'd told her to look up the properties of the stones, but Sahara had also read about the nonscientific meanings. Lapis lazuli, the text she'd accessed had said, was a stone meant to represent friendship.

Now the blue stone rose high into the air. "Like that."

Smiling, Sahara caught the stone, wiping the backs of her hands over her cheeks, and memory segued into reality.

Drawing back to look into eyes gone ebony, she cupped his face. "That was a fun day, wasn't it?" He had made her fly, after they stole away into a secluded section where no one would see them.

"You wanted to sit on the highest branch of the biggest pine in the woods."

Sahara laughed through the remnants of her tears. "You let me." Delighted, she'd sat up there without a care in the world, legs hanging off the sides as she waved to Kaleb. "I think you were terrified I would fall off."

"I may have been . . . uncertain of your balance."