Alexei wrapped one arm around Sean, trying to hold the unconscious man up as he half-turned and raised an arm toward the threat behind them. Fire snapped into existence around his hand in angry curls that roared toward the threat. From somewhere below, he heard tires squealing, getting closer by thesecond.
Training was instinctive at this point, but instinct couldn’t outrun a hit from a neuro-jammer gun. The whine of the weapon echoed loudly in the parking garage and in Alexei’s ears. He only got a glimpse of the two sorority women through his fire, each braced in a two-handed shooting position, before a snarling wave of excruciating agony ripped through his body, cascading down every last nerve. What felt like an explosion went off in his brain, brightly colored spots filling his eyes until the world whited out like asupernova.
* * *
Apunchto the face wokeSeanup.
His head snapped to the side, teeth cutting into his cheek. The coppery tang of blood filled his dry mouth, coating his tongue. Beneath it was a bitter, almost medicinal flavor that spoke of drugs. Sean swallowed the taste of both and forced his eyes open, reeling from the hit and the vise-like pressure surrounding his head. Black dots danced in front of his eyes and he flinched away from the dim lights in the low ceilingabove.
“So glad ye can finally join th’party,Sean.”
The Irish-accented voice burrowed through the fog in Sean’s brain, kick-starting a sense of terror he hadn’t felt since Belfast. He tried to phase and ended up crying out as what felt like a jackhammer tried to punch through his skull. Dry-heaving against the stomach-churning agony in his brain, Sean struggled to take stock of the situation at hand beyond the obvious leashing of hispower.
He sat in a chair, hands cuffed behind him, suit jacket missing and dress shirt torn over his right upper arm. A bruising soreness near his left shoulder blade stood out for its odd placement, but the deep ache in his left wrist spoke of his bioware and RealIdent being burned out. Which meant no working comms. A sharp sting from a wound in his right upper arm was in the exact location his subdermal tracker was once located. It felt like it had been cut out none too gently, which wasn’tsurprising.
A thick tiredness tugged at Sean’s thoughts that was difficult to shake off. Every time he moved his head, embedded electrodes pulled at his scalp, the wires from the Faraday cage an itch he couldn’t scratch. No wonder why he couldn’t use his phasepower.
Blinking rapidly, Sean struggled to push back his fear and clear his vision, the lazy smile on Cillian’s pockmarked face swimming into view. Sean’s aching brain processed where he was being held in slow flashes that eventually formed a windowless room with a cracked cement floor, a messy work table topped with tools, and a set of stairs leading to somewhere above. There was no way to figure out where he was, if he was even still inWashington,D.C.
With his bioware burned out and his tracker removed, a rescue wasn’t looking toolikely.
Sean slowly scanned what he could see of the room and the handful of guards in civilian clothing scattered around it. Then he finally focused his blurry vision on the one man he never thought he’d ever seeagain.
“Cillian,” Sean got out around a bottom lip that was rapidly swelling up. His jaw felt hot and sore from the punch, one molar wiggling more than it should when he pressed his tongue against histeeth.
“I’d offer ye a pint o’ Guinness, but ye lost th’ right ta reciprocity when ye betrayed th’ cause,”Cilliansaid.
“Wasn’t mycause.”
A second punch caused his head to jerk backward, the tear in his bottom lip splitting wider when it cut across his teeth. Sean sucked in a ragged breath, blood and spit trickling down his chin to drip onto his shirt. The pain in his mouth was almost negligible to the burning agony that set his nerves on fire when he tried again to phase. He had to stop almost as soon as he started, gasping againstthepain.
“Did ye think we would nae come prepared ta be dealin’ wi’ ye an’ yerpartner?”
Sean’s memory was a fuzzy blank that wouldn’t fill. The last clear moment he remembered was riding in the car with Alexei on thewayto—
Alexei.
Fear coursed through his body like ice, the pain he felt receding in the wake of the stomach-churning terror Sean felt at not knowing what had happened to Alexei. Coughing to clear his throat of a backwash of blood, he spat on the floor between Cillian’sboots.
“Where’s Alexei?” Seanrasped.
“Yer partner was harder ta wake up. He an’ I already had a little chat while ye had a bit o’akip.”
Cillian stepped aside and Sean stared numbly across the short distance to where Alexei sat, handcuffed to a chair like Sean was, his ankles bound to the legs of the chair with rough-hewn rope. He too had a Faraday cage covering his skull, short-circuiting his central nervous system in order to block his power. Dried blood painted the skin beneath his nose, and the left side of his face was beginning to swell from one too many punches. His gray eyes were open, a faint, glazed look to them that Sean remembered from Las Vegas during thesummer.
Sean hadn’t been hit with a neuro-jammer gun, but Alexeiclearlyhad.
“Alexei,” Sean said, leaning forward as far as his bound arms wouldallow.
Sean tried to keep his voice from shaking, but he hadn’t ever been in this situation before with someone he cared about. Sean remembered all too well the brutality Cillian had leveled against whoever the Reborn IRA designated an enemy, and that was before Splice chemical bombs came intothemix.
Cillian gripped Sean’s shoulder and slammed him back against the chair, fingers digging hard into his muscle. Sean had no choice but to look away from Alexei when Cillian blocked his viewagain.
“Did you follow us?” Sean asked, wondering where they’d gonewrong.
Cillian snorted, lifting a hand to slap Sean against the face. The blow sent pain lancing through Sean’s jaw. “We dinnae have ta follow ye when we knew where ye’dendup.”
Despite the soreness in his body and the spots of deeper pain, Cillian’s words were enough to chill Sean straight down to his bones. The utter certainty in Cillian’s voice could only mean one thing. “You’ve been in contact withStanislav.”
