The Quest (2 page)

“Terry, something’s wrong,” I said. “I was just talking to the building security and–”

Terry cut me off, shaking her head and saying, “That’s not possible, Adrian, because there’s no building security left.”

“What?”

“They’re
in
the building, Half-head! The Angels are in the goddamn building!”

I stared at Terry for a moment. I only had one ear, my right one having been shot off a little over a year ago, but I had heard Terry right.

Angels in New Haven One.

Terry locked the front door as I turned to Alia and said, “Stay close.”

Alia nodded silently, giving me her bravest look. I wasn’t too worried. Alia knew the drill. We had been through some tough times together and somehow survived them all. At ten years old, my sister was an Honorary Guardian Knight herself, and she often acted the part better than I did.

“Where’s Cindy?” asked Terry.

“At a meeting,” I replied. “Probably down in the subbasement.”

Under the basement parking lot of our building was hidden a secret network of rooms. There was the dojo where Terry taught me to fight, a shooting range, a jail, and meeting rooms of various sizes. Cindy could be in one of those meeting rooms with Mr. Baker and the Guardians’ ruling Council, or possibly in another New Haven building altogether. I wasn’t exactly sure where she was right now, and it worried me a lot.

“Hope she’s okay,” said Terry.

“The security guys, or whoever they were, said there are Knights coming up here,” I told her.

“Well somebody’s coming up,” agreed Terry, “but probably not Knights.”

The Angels’ fighters, known as Seraphim, were on their way up here to either kill or take Cindy prisoner. The fact that Cindy wasn’t home wouldn’t stop them from attacking anyone else they found.

“Safe room?” I asked hesitantly. I wasn’t sure I wanted to barricade myself in a dead end.

Terry shared my concern. “Not yet,” she replied, picking up the phone.

Then she hung up. “It’s dead.”

The panic alarm turned on again.

“I’ll go check,” I said, running back to the safe room, and Terry and Alia followed.

As soon as I pushed the intercom button, the siren went silent again. The intercom crackled to life and a male voice said, “Spider to Gifford safe room.”

It was the voice of Mr. Ted Williams, who was a member of Mr. Baker’s personal security.

Terry wasn’t taking any chances, though. She quickly pushed me aside and said, “Rabbit here. Confirm security code, Spider. This is Rabbit 22-R-31-G.”

“Spider confirms Rabbit. This is Spider 13-A-99-L.”

“Rabbit confirms,” replied Terry.

Security ID codes were a new protocol for the Knights, added but a month ago as Angel-Guardian tensions reached an all-time high. My acquired distrust of psionic powers in general made me wonder if the voice of Mr. Ted “Spider” Williams might still be suspect, but his code was good enough for Terry.

“What’s going on down there, Spider?” asked Terry.

“We have retaken NH-1,” said Mr. Williams, “but other buildings are reporting disturbances as well. We are not yet sure of the size of the Angel forces. You are under no immediate threat but we strongly advise that you remain in the safe room for now. Are your charges secure?”

In addition to being my personal combat trainer, Terry was our official live-in bodyguard, and her “charges” were Cindy, Alia and me.

“Hansel and Gretel are with me,” replied Terry. “Is Silver alright?”

“Roger that, Rabbit. Silver is safe. We have evacuated the Council to a secure location. Please remain locked in the safe room with your charges until further notice. Spider out.”

The line went dead, and I could almost touch the frustration radiating from Terry’s body. Staying locked in a safe room while Guardian Knights fought Angels inside the borders of New Haven would be a serious test of Terry’s self-control. Ever since the Angels had tortured her brother to death, Terry had been itching for revenge.

I couldn’t be certain because she refused to give me details, but Terry probably spilled some Angel blood early this year when, in order to cure my blindness, she kidnapped a reconstructive healer from an Angel fort. But aside from that, as a member of the Raven Knights, Terry had so far only fought God-slayers, the non-psionic religious fanatics who were trying to exterminate us. It was the only work Terry could get because she was still too young to learn how to block psionic controllers from her mind. She already planned to transfer to the Lancer Knights to fight psionic Angels as soon as she learned blocking, but in the meantime, she was stuck with us.

Terry looked ruefully at Alia and me before closing the safe-room door, locking us in. I didn’t particularly pity her.

“Hansel and Gretel are with me,” I mimicked dryly. “Thanks a lot, Terry!”

Terry laughed, and suddenly Alia and I laughed too, letting out our little sighs of relief. It seemed that my sister and I had been holding our breaths ever since Terry burst into the penthouse with her news. It felt good to break the tension.

New Haven was under siege by an as-of-yet-unknown number of Angel Seraphim, but we were safe here and it appeared that the battle had already turned in the Guardians’ favor. New Haven One was secured, the Council was safe, and most importantly, so was Cindy, wherever she was.

I sat cross-legged on the floor, meditation style, picturing Cindy’s face in my mind. Our adoptive mother took her Guardian call sign, Silver, from the color of her long, straight hair, and I still remembered how it seemed to shine in the moonlight when I first met her one cold night, years ago. I remembered how her calm manner and comforting voice had drawn the fear out of a near-feral child who had been on the run for weeks and might otherwise have kept running until he was caught by the Angels or worse.

Before Terry started living with us, I was Cindy’s designated live-in bodyguard, and as an inactive Guardian Knight, Cindy was still officially my charge too. If the Knights expected Terry and me to stay here in this stuffy vault, they had better do a damn good job of protecting Cindy!

Alia had sat down behind me and was just getting comfortable resting her back against mine when Terry asked, “You want to play a game of nine-ball, Adrian?”

“Sure,” I said, jumping to my feet.

My sister let out a little shriek as her support vanished and she tumbled backwards. “Addy!” she cried aloud, but she was smiling.

I pulled Alia to her feet. Levitating two cue sticks off the rack, I dropped one into my sister’s hands. Alia was horrible at pool, but I couldn’t exactly leave her out of the game. Terry grabbed another stick for herself as I set up the table.

Terry made the break shot by threading her cue stick through the metal hook attached to her left stump. Terry had four attachments for her amputated arm: a lifelike prosthetic hand, a heavy metal bar for pounding, a double-edged knife for stabbing, and the pirate captain’s hook. The hook seemed to suit her best on most missions and at the pool table.

We played three games. Terry, as was often the case, won them all.

Suddenly Terry asked me, “Don’t you miss being a Knight, Adrian?”

Technically, I still was a Knight. I trained regularly with Terry in the subbasement dojo and practiced my pistol work in the shooting range. But I knew what Terry meant.

“No,” I replied flatly, “I don’t.”

“Not even a little?” she asked.

“No.”

Terry threw me an exasperated look. “We’re in here playing games and people are dying out there.”

I shrugged. “It’s not my war.”

“You don’t care in the least?”

I sighed. “Of course I care, Terry,” I said patiently. “People are dying. But I only joined the Guardians because I once thought they would lead me to Cat. I’m only here now because Cindy is here, and she only came to New Haven because her idiot son needed rescuing from an underground research facility and the Guardians were the only ones who could help.”

Terry frowned. “And you don’t think you owe the Guardians anything?”

I shook my head. “We used each other, Terry. We’re even.”

“You are so damn stubborn, Half-head!” Terry spat irately. “Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to my grandfather.”

Ralph P. Henderson, Terry’s late grandfather, was not the kind of man I enjoyed being compared to.

I grinned at Terry. “I didn’t know you ever talked to Ralph.”

Terry let out a loud humph.

Then she narrowed her eyes, asking, “When you say you’re even, does that include us?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Us, Half-head! You and me!” Terry said emphatically. “You save me on that boat, I cure your eyes…”

“Hey! You’re my friend!” I snapped, genuinely insulted. “I never thought of our relationship as a trade!”

“I’m sorry, Adrian,” Terry mumbled embarrassedly. “I’m cranky today, I guess.”

I smiled. “We’re just different people, Terry.”

“Addy,” Alia said in a small voice, “I have to go.”

I was about to ask where but then I saw her shuffling her feet uncomfortably.

“Oh, right,” I said, chuckling at the memory of the last time we had been locked in here. “Let’s see if the coast is clear.”

I pushed the intercom call button and got in touch with NH-1 Security. The voice wasn’t Spider’s, so Terry went through the security code routine again. We were told that NH-1 was still locked down, meaning no entry or exit until the Knights canceled the alert, but we were probably safe on the upper floors.

We were forty floors off the ground, more than four hundred feet in the air, but I remembered a time when an Angel puppeteer had taken control of my body from miles away, forcing me to telekinetically blast Alia so hard that she had nearly died. The puppeteer had also been a finder and he had latched onto my location by sensing my psionic power from afar. Fortunately, that couldn’t happen here because we were protected by Cindy’s massive hiding bubble.

We let Alia out to run to the bathroom, and while waiting for her to return, I asked the Knight on the intercom for more details.

It had been nearly an hour since the Seraphim had first started attacking Guardians inside the New Haven high-rise condominiums. Currently, the fighting was sparse and mostly limited to the NH-2 and NH-4 buildings. In each high-rise, a team of Seraphim had barricaded themselves into a few of the upper floors, and the situation seemed to be turning into a long-term standoff. Local non-Guardian residents had called the police to report hearing gunshots, but Guardian Command had enough connections with the city government to keep police and nosy reporters clear of the New Haven area.

Terry asked into the intercom, “How long is this alert going to last?”

“We’re not sure yet,” answered the Knight. “Hang in there.”

That was when we heard Alia scream.

Terry and I sprinted out of the safe room and toward Alia’s high-pitched cries. I heard my sister’s telepathic voice desperately calling out my name. We found her lying on the living-room floor, her hands on her forehead, writhing about in agony. She couldn’t stop screaming.

Out of the corner of my left eye, I sensed something move.

The sun had set and the overcast sky was dark now, but the light from our living room illuminated a gangly figure levitating just outside, peering in through the window.

Watching us.

Terry shoved me hard from behind. “Damn it, Adrian, no eye contact!”

I had almost felt the controller’s power enter my mind, but Terry’s quick thinking broke the connection. I telekinetically pulled the curtains over the window.

My sister was no longer screaming, but her whole body was convulsing violently. I grabbed the sides of her head and looked into her dilated eyes.

“Look at me, Alia!” I said frantically. “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!”

She was completely gone.

“What the hell was that, Terry?!” I shouted, but even before Terry answered, I knew.

It was a berserker. A flight-capable telekinetic berserker.

Alia stopped shaking, but she was still panting like a dog. I knew from direct experience what was about to happen next.

I telekinetically lifted Alia up into the air as she glared at me and let out a low growl. Under the influence of a psionic berserker, even an undersized ten-year-old girl was a frightening sight. Alia’s growl turned into hissing and spitting, screaming and snarling as her arms and legs thrashed violently about in midair, looking for something, anything, to hurt. Finding nothing, she then turned on herself, pulling at her own hair and beating her head with her fists. I pumped more of my telekinetic power into her, restraining her arms, and Alia roared even louder.

As soon as Terry saw that I had my sister under control, she dashed back to the safe room to report what had just happened.

Watching Alia, I shuddered as I remembered how a berserker had made my father kill my mother. I remembered my father clawing at my bedroom door like a wild animal.

Keeping Alia safely above the furniture, I glanced at the closed curtain.

Ever since the renovations to the penthouse last year, all the windows were reinforced bulletproof glass. There was no way through, but was the Angel still hovering just behind the curtain?

No. If he was, he could have opened the curtain to look at us again. No doubt his flight up to the fortieth floor and his psionic attack on Alia had used up all his energy, forcing him to make an emergency landing somewhere.

But he could come back.

Alia finally stopped kicking and her whole body went limp. I gently set her down on a sofa as Terry came back into the room.

Terry said angrily, “That curtain was closed when I last saw it.”

“He must have opened it from outside,” I muttered, looking down at Alia’s pale face.

I checked her pulse. It was a little faint, but okay. She was breathing. I pulled open her eyelids and Terry found me a flashlight to check the pupils. Normal responses there.

But I knew from Cindy that many types of psionic mind control carried a high risk of permanent brain damage when used on children, and berserking was particularly dangerous. I had survived two long-range berserker attacks when I was twelve years old, but I sometimes wondered if those attacks might be the reason I often felt so unbalanced and irritable.