The Fire In My Eyes (26 page)

I nodded, still breathless. “I get it now. I think.”

“Self-defense training is one thing,” I shouted over the howling wind. “I didn't think he meant it this way!”

Nikki crouched behind me, adding her own strength to my shield. I could feel her warmth against my back. The wind howled again but our joint defense held up against the attack. This time, green energy crackled from my shield and my Sight showed a trace that led right back to our attacker. “See them?”

“I see them!” The attacker was thirty feet away, standing on a rooftop, their eyes two beacons of green light in the darkness. I focused the shield to cut down on their lines of attack, just as I had seen Shade do a hundred times in the past week. The figure flared again with psionic energy. I deflected the brunt of the energy up into the sky and immediately dropped the shield, inviting a follow-up attack, but also allowing myself to refocus the shield's power into an attack.

The warmth at my back began to burn, Nikki's power igniting into an inferno. While Nikki wasn’t as strong as I was, she had a certain sense of finesse. I didn't know exactly what she did, but I could see our attacker suddenly drop to their hands and knees on the rooftop. “Hit him now!”

My power was unstable from the exertion of holding a powerful shield up, so I couldn't hit him with full strength, but what I had left was enough. I pushed him off the roof with a simple ram of kinetic force. The glow of his energy faded from my Sight as he hit the ground. I hadn't hit him that hard. Had he fallen off the roof and been knocked out?

Nikki threw a weak shield up around us, deflecting another attack from a different direction. “There's another one!” she shouted, not bothering to waste the energy for telepathy. The new attacker struck again and Nikki's shield shattered. Frost and ice suddenly surrounded us, heat draining from our bodies and surroundings. The shock of cold distracted me and I couldn't focus to bring up another shield.

Nikki grabbed me around the waist and jumped, carrying us both free of the frost. We landed on the roof that had recently been vacated by the previous attacker. “Get a hold of yourself!” she snapped, then threw another shield up between us and the new attacker. It would take a moment for the attacker to focus on our new position and hit us again, and Nikki would buy us a few precious seconds with her shield. I pushed my power down to keep it stable, and by the time her shield broke again, mine was set in place.

“What should we do?” Nikki tele'd to me. “I can't sense this one. They're both able to hide their psionic energy up until the last moment before they use it! Do we just have to wait and get lucky? Any other ideas?”

I cast about with my Sight, trying to find where the attacks were coming from. They were crashing against my shield every four or five seconds, but each one was from a different direction. Shade had never done that. Was someone moving and attacking that quickly, or was it a trick? The regularity of the attack was forcing me to keep the shield up without a break. I couldn't hold it too long, maybe another minute. “Can you sense if they're moving and attacking, or if they're faking it?” I tele'd to Nikki.

“I don't know,” she replied. “But they're throwing something, I'm sure about that. It's not energy, that'd trace straight to them. What’s hitting us? Can you tell?”

I concentrated on the next attack. It struck my shield and instead of glancing off, a small chunk of asphalt crumbled on impact. They were flinging them hard enough to make it look serious. There were so many potholes around, it would be impossible to anticipate where the next attack would be coming from, and they would require next to no energy to fling. That was why we couldn't find where the attacker was. When the chunk shattered, the link back to the attacker would be too weak to trace.

I modified my shield, changing it from a solid sheet of energy to more of a liquid, something that would slow and catch the attacks. “Rocks. Try and sense them off the next one,” I tele'd to Nikki. The next rock thumped into the shield at eye level for me, an irregular chunk about an inch across. If I had let it through the shield, it probably would have knocked me out. Whoever was attacking us was aiming to disable, not to kill.

“Got it!” She pointed and the trace glowed briefly, leading to a figure crouching out of our direct line of sight in someone's back yard. I dropped the shield and struck the ground where the attacker was standing, hard enough to knock them off balance. Nikki followed up my attack. The trace of her attack was hard to see, but it connected to our attacker and I could see their power flicker and go out. “Think we got them?” she whispered.

A hand gripped the back of my collar. My concentration faltered and vanished. Nikki squawked. “No,” said Shade's familiar voice. “You didn't get them.”

“That was you?” I asked. “Up here on the roof?”

The grip tightened. “You didn't hit me hard enough. Wainwright, you did fine. Inducing vertigo was a good idea. It didn't last long enough, but you did fine for a trainee. If you had focused it on me a second or two longer, even Parker's half-assed shot would have been enough to knock me out. I suppose I should thank you for that.”

“Who are you?” Nikki demanded. “Let go of me!”

“It's just Shade,” I said. “Sounds like he likes you.”

Shade grunted and pushed me. I stumbled down the slope of the roof and flung myself backwards, trying to keep from falling off. Right when I thought I had my balance, he gave me another push, right between my shoulder blades. I fell face first off the roof. Even soft ground was not going to save me from a broken nose here.

Someone caught me before I could drop more than a foot. Two green eyes were glowing below me, a figure standing in the front yard of the house. I felt the telekinetic grip loosen and lower me easily to the ground. When the glow died away, I recognized the figure. She had her sunglasses pushed up to the top of her head and she gave me a lopsided smile. “Been a while, hasn't it?”

“I remember you,” I said. She was the woman who had healed Nikki. Had she been the other attacker, or was she just standing by in case anyone was hurt?

“Absynthe!” Nikki's squeal from the roof was shockingly loud in the quiet evening. Nikki flung herself off the roof right toward the woman, who caught her and spun her around with an easy laugh, her dark clothes and pale skin whirling around in the moonlight. “I thought that was you!” Nikki said as the woman set her down. “Maximum effect, minimum effort, right?”

“You got it,” the woman said. “Though your boyfriend here has all the subtlety of a tank. That shield is impressively strong, Kevin. Throwing rocks at a tank is exactly what it felt like. When you shifted the parameters of the shield to catch the rocks, that was well done. Don't you agree?”

That answered many questions. Attacker, healer, and mentor. I felt a thump as Shade jumped down from the roof. “He should have done it sooner.”

“That's what training is all about, Shade,” the woman said. Her voice had a tone of mild exasperation to it. She had been nicer that night than he had, I remembered.

“I expect more from him, Absynthe,” he replied. “So does Alistair. So should you.”

I stepped forward and turned my back to Shade. “I guess you're Nikki's trainer?”

Nikki was beaming. “Kevin, this is Absynthe, my mentor.”

“We haven't met before,” she tele'd me, then continued out loud. “Nice to meet you, Kevin. I've heard a lot about you. I feel like I know you quite well already.”

I nodded, smiled, and considered why she wanted me to pretend we hadn't met before. I assumed that it was because of the accident. Nikki didn't remember it, and Absynthe probably wanted to keep it that way. “Nice to meet you too, Absynthe. Nikki's told me you're a great mentor to her. You seem like you get along really well.”

“Oh, we do,” Absynthe said. “And before you ask, Absynthe is the Alistair-inflicted codename.”

“So what was this all about?” Nikki asked. “That was a surprise attack. Some sort of special training?”

Shade stepped around me, facing toward Absynthe and Nikki, turning his back to me. I cleared my throat, but he didn't budge. “Yes. Alistair has decided that since you two have already been practicing together, we should begin some joint training sessions, focusing on self-defense. It's especially important right now since the Establishment is shorthanded.”

“Are you sure you should be telling them that?” Absynthe asked.

Shade shrugged. I stepped to the side so I wasn't directly behind him. “They'll ask about it the first time they have a joint session and one of us is missing. We'll be free to take care of business in the region without having lapses in training. You know what the situation downstate is like.” He glared at me out of the corner of his eye.

“What are you glaring at me for?” I asked.

“Remember your friend while you were on vacation?”

“The purple-eyed gangbanger? They're causing trouble because of that?”

“They always cause trouble. More so now. They didn't appreciate me sending their agent back with a fresh twist, and now they think they have the chops to fight us straight up. They attacked three of ours in the past month. Two got clear. The third got twisted.”

Absynthe covered her mouth with a hand. “Who?”

“Wing,” he replied. “Not a hard twist. He's fine, we have him in the downstate center for recuperation. Alistair is incensed. He's ordering us to escalate.”

“Escalate?” I asked.

Shade gave us all a toothy grin. “That's the order. We have two dozen of our people in place and Alistair wants to send one of us down to run the show.”

“Why would he consider sending me?” Absynthe asked. “I'm not anywhere near as experienced in combat as you.”

“I think he plans on sending you to replace me after the majority of the fighting is over,” Shade replied. “Let you handle cleanup and restating our intentions with regards to the city's neutrality. They'll be more likely to believe you. I'd just tell them all to get the hell out.”

“Neutrality?” I asked. All eyes snapped to me. “I thought it was a border dispute?”

Shade sighed. “In a sense. The gangs down there claim the metropolitan area. So do we, but we try to keep it a neutral ground. A play nice policy, so to speak. Otherwise there'd be some serious wars for control of the city. Anyone who controls the city would control the financial center of the world, the United Nations, millions of people. Enormous economic, political, and social power.”

“And others accept this?” I asked.

“For the most part. We tell them to play nice in the city, or we'll come down on you. The gangs aren't playing nice anymore. We're going to put them down. Enough is enough.” Shade cracked his knuckles.

“Put them down?” I asked. “You mean, wipe them out?”

Absynthe shuffled her feet, but didn't say anything. Shade turned to fully face me. His dark eyes were unreadable. “They're a gang. I meant that when I said it. You could call them a psionic mafia if you wanted to, but they're far more dangerous than that. They use power for power's sake. They're more than willing to abuse their psionic abilities for their own gains. When Alistair says escalate, he means it. Yeah, we're going to wipe them out. We're going to break their organization down, twist their leaders, and force their people out of the city. Is that fine with you, Parker?”

“I'm just asking,” I said. I couldn't muster much sympathy for them. They had tried to kill me, after all. Still, wiping them out in retaliation for a couple of attacks seemed to be overkill.

Shade gave me a look of disgust, then turned back to Absynthe. “So. Joint training frees one of us up to go downstate. Also, Alistair is floating the idea of sending some of our trainees out locally. Simple investigations. Patrols. That sort of thing.”

“How many people do we have if losing two dozen is leaving us so undermanned?” I couldn't help but ask, earning fresh glares from both of the older agents.

I also earned some scorn from Nikki. “Come on, Kev,” she said. “Haven't you learned anything from the trainee materials? Even at our level we can see the Establishment's got about a hundred active agents, about a third of that again in stages of training.”

Shade chuckled. “Tell him off more, Wainwright. Maybe he'll listen to you. He certainly doesn't listen to me.”

“It's not like I have any time alone to read anymore,” I shot back.

“Oh, you want some time alone?” she snapped. “I can leave you alone if you want. Sorry. I didn't know I was bothering you so much.”

“I don't mean you, I mean whenever I do manage to get back to my room, someone's always there, and it's not like I can take my laptop into the bathroom and read there!” I had tried that. Once. Max had caught me and told everyone. That sort of embarrassment wasn't high on my list of things to repeat.

Nikki rolled her eyes. “Whatever. You really don't take this seriously, do you?”

Shade continued to laugh. “I like you more and more, Wainwright. Do you want to trade trainees, Absynthe?”

“Stop being an ass, Shade,” she said.

Shade's chuckling cut off instantly. He stepped away from us and donned his sunglasses. “Enough for tonight. We'll start the joint training next week. Be ready for another evaluation of your skills. It'll make solo training look easy.”

He walked down the sidewalk toward the campus, not leaping away like he usually did when normal training ended. Absynthe squeezed Nikki's shoulder, donned her own sunglasses, and jogged after Shade. When she caught up to him, I could see them exchange words, then she took his arm and fell into step beside him. I blinked. What was this?

“Are you seeing what I'm seeing?” Nikki murmured. She stepped over beside me.

“I'm seeing it, but I'm not sure I'm believing it,” I said. Almost as if he had heard me, Shade shifted his arm and put it around Absynthe's waist. “Yeah, now I'm wishing I wasn't seeing it.”

Nikki took my hand. “I think it's sort of sweet.”

“Poor Absynthe,” I said.

The next week of joint self-defense training was just as vicious as he had implied. With Absynthe's presence, I realized that Shade had been going easy on me. Up until now, he had never inflicted more than an occasional scrape or bruise. During the course of the next week, I suffered fractures, lacerations, burns, and worse. Each time, the agony of the injury faded almost immediately as Absynthe set to work, switching off my pain receptors and encouraging my body to heal. Nikki would assist her, blinking back tears all the while. I grew familiar with the sensation of bones re-knitting themselves.