I had my shield up, so I didn"t think my feelings would bother Keene or anyone else, but there was nothing I could do in the infirmary that the others couldn"t do better. "Okay, fine."
We rode down to the first floor and headed to the conference room. "I just heard from your brother," Stella said to us, seating herself at the long table in front of four computers. One was a laptop, two were personal computers, and the fourth was a hard drive hooked up to a large new monitor on the wall, a state-of-the-art gift from a local mortal ally. The computers were linked so Stella could interface with them all at once using the neural headset.
"Oh, what did Chris have to say?" Jace sat beside her but almost immediately bounced up again to pace. Energy seeped from him like steam from a pressure cooker. He"d need to work off some of that energy tonight or his combat ability would drive him insane. Normally I"d take him up to the gym on the fourth floor and spar with him, but I felt exhausted. Besides, I wanted to think about what I"d learned tonight and what it meant for the Renegades. Sinking onto the nearest chair opposite Stella, I upped my absorption rate. Unbounded didn"t need to eat, but I seemed to be craving something.
"He was just reporting on the refurbishing of the safe house." Stella glanced at her computers longingly but sat back in her chair and folded her arms over her stomach. "Actually, I think he called to make sure you two got out of the hotel safely."
Jace laughed. "Sounds like our big brother."
"Anyway, now that Benito"s back on his feet," Stella continued, "they"re moving right along, especially in mapping the underground tunnels. The more Chris tells me about it, the more I"m sure this will be a good move for all of us."
I hoped so. After our last safe house had been compromised, we"d made a pact to create someplace safe for Chris"s two young children. The house in San Diego was one Ava and the others had abandoned over fifty years ago when the Emporium had stepped up activity in the area. Now, with modern technology and surveillance methods, we"d all agreed it was our best option for a permanent residence. The Emporium might eventually discover its location, but by then the safe house would be impenetrable by anything short of bombing-and that would attract worldwide notice.
"It"ll be nice to put down some roots for a while," Stella added. "We"ve been moving around too much these past few years."
"I"m just glad Chris is somewhere safe," I said. At first Chris had protested at being kept out of the rescue attempt in New York, but he was mortal and I"d been grateful to keep him and our recently hired maintenance man, Benito Hernandez, out of the line of fire for a while. With two of our former black ops employees providing security, they were as safe there as anyone connected with the Unbounded could be. I pulled the blanket tighter around me. "It"s a bonus that San Diego is warm."
"You can say that again." Jace continued pacing as silence fell over the room.
How was it going with Keene? I wanted to go upstairs and check, but my backside seemed rooted to the chair. Besides, I"d only be in the way. Better to focus on something I could do. "So what do we know?" I asked, ignoring the urge to lay my head on the table.
Stella gazed at me and blinked. "You sounded just like Ava there for a moment."
I grinned. "Well?"
Sitting up, Stella plugged a cord into her neural headset and twisted down the eyepiece. "First, the vice president"s son being an Emporium agent came as a total surprise." Words began scrolling on the large wall screen but ran too fast for me to read them. "Often when the Emporium is working to get someone into politics, we can catch them while they"re still in the stage of creating backgrounds that will withstand scrutiny. It"s an involved process, but they have enough technopaths to make it possible. Usually ident.i.ties are created years before they need them. So for instance, when they can no longer hide that an Emporium senator isn"t aging, they have him retire, fake his death, whatever, only to have him resurrect some years later in disguise under the new ident.i.ty. We try to expose new ident.i.ties whenever we find out they"re being created, but the Emporium has a growing number of agents in high positions."
"To what end?" Jace asked.
Stella frowned, taking her eyes briefly from the monitor. "Sorry, I forget there"s still so much of this you two don"t know. We"re pretty sure their goal is revealing the existence of Unbounded to the world, but only once they have enough votes to effectively run the country. Since we know their ultimate idea of utopia is to create a world where Unbounded form a caste system supported by a mortal workforce, we"ve been fighting against this. At the same time, we can"t preempt them and announce our presence to the world and elicit help from the mortals without having certain safety measures in place to protect all of us from the violence we believe will ensue. We aren"t there yet."
"Patrick Mann could eventually become president." My arm was hurting again, and I laid it on the table, holding the blanket tightly over it. "Especially with Emporium support. He seems to be following in his father"s footsteps." I hoped Unbounded could make their announcement to the world sooner rather than later, but I"d seen enough of the Emporium"s hunger for power to worry about this new development.
"That"s exactly the problem," Stella agreed. "With that kind of influence, he could change a lot-health care, taxes, presidential term limits. But what"s bothering me at the moment is that he can"t be one of those false ident.i.ties the Emporium set up-he"s too prominently in the public view for that-and there are absolutely no Unbounded genes in the vice president"s ancestry. Or in his wife"s. And there"s no sign of record tampering or of adoption. Patrick Mann can"t be Unbounded."
"Yet he is." Jace finally sat across from me.
"So that means," I said, "the Emporium must have doctored their genealogy records too far back for you to trace and set their family on the political trail in the hope they would someday come to power. Either that or they"ve figured out a way to create new Unbounded."
Stella shook her head. "Not necessarily. If the Manns underwent fertility, the Emporium could have tampered with the sperm."
"You have a point." That was how I"d become Unbounded. My brother, too, though he was still unaware of it.
"They could have also killed the real Patrick Mann and had someone take his place," Jace put in.
"Uh, his parents probably would have noticed that." I took my hand from the blanket over my wound long enough to knead a pounding in my left temple. "Even if the Emporium had a sensing Unbounded remove memories of Patrick when the Manns were unconscious, they couldn"t cover a lifetime of memory gaps. And there"s nothing in his parents" minds that doubts Patrick"s ident.i.ty."
Stella"s attention wandered back to the screen. "I"m going to keep looking, but if it turns out the Emporium has figured out a way to create new Unbounded, or to impregnate women in prominent political families, Patrick Mann might not be the only one we need to find. Hopefully by the time Ava gets here with Tenika, we can come up with some idea as to what we should do next."
That"s right. I vaguely remembered Stella saying something earlier about Ava bringing the leader of the New York Renegades back with her. I rubbed my face, feeling cold despite the blanket.
Stella looked up at the door, though I hadn"t heard or felt anyone coming. "Ah, there you are, Ritter," she said. "How"s Keene?"
"Good, now that Dimitri"s given him the antidote for the poison that was on the knife."
"Stinking Emporium b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," Jace muttered.
Stella c.o.c.ked her head in apparent interest. "Was it one of the poisons I found listed on the thumb drive?"
"Yes. Lucky for Keene we already had the antidote." Ritter came around beside me and pulled out a chair, placing a syringe with a needle on the table, followed by a mound of gauze and a roll of medical tape. He reached for my blanket, but I pulled back so he couldn"t take it away.
"Hey, it"s cold in here."
"No, it"s not." He tugged off the blanket, his eyes going to my wound.
Odd that it was still drizzling blood.
"See that green tinge around the edges?" Ritter asked. "That"s from the poison. Not something that would kill you, of course, but it"s going to prevent healing for a good long time. Fortunately, we have something better than an antidote." He mopped up the wet blood and began injecting the clear substance we called curequick, a sugar-based substance containing proteins reduced to their most usable form, which sped up even our accelerated healing by as much as five times. Eight different injections went into my flesh around the slash that looked more gruesome than I remembered at the hotel. His hands were gentle, but the needle felt like fire.
"You should give her the antidote as well," Jace said, coming over to watch.
"It"s mixed in." Ritter finished and mopped up more blood before taping a patch of gauze over the wound. "You should be feeling better in a bit."
"Why don"t we get you upstairs to change before Ava arrives?" Stella removed her headset and placed it on the table. The numerous metal protrusions on the bottom and inside, usually hidden by her smooth dark hair, gleamed brightly under the light.
"I"ll take her." Ritter stood, looking far taller than I recalled. And why had he suddenly started swaying back and forth?
"Good idea." There was laughter in Stella"s voice. "She looks like she might pa.s.s out."
Ritter leaned over. "Want me to carry you?"
"I"m fine." I stood, my scowl daring Ritter to try.
"I can see that." His eyes traveled down the length of my body and the sc.r.a.p of red that hugged my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and waist like a second skin, flaring at my hips. His emotions burned and heat flushed through me.
Just the buzz from the curequick, I told myself. The substance was as addictive as narcotics for Unbounded, and I tried to avoid using it on a regular basis.
Ritter moved his arm in a sweeping motion toward the door. "After you, then." His lips twitched and I stifled an urge to smack him.
I didn"t really want to hit him, but given the Unbounded rate of reproduction and likelihood of mortal offspring-not to mention his old-fashioned ideas of commitment-anything else might lead to frustration or an obligation I wasn"t prepared for.
"Don"t be too long," Stella called after us. She"d already replaced her headset.
Ritter paused at the door. "Jace," he said, "go to the gym. Take the stairs. Work through your forms-all of them-and hurry back down. Or you"ll be no good to us."
"But I-"
"Now." Ritter"s voice left no argument.
I was already moving to the elevator when Jace sprinted by me and disappeared through the door to the stairs. "Thanks," I told Ritter, as the elevator doors slid open. "He"s strung tight." I wasn"t sure if it was the poison or his care of my brother that made me feel weepy.
"Not his fault. It"s hard not to be in the action."
He meant for someone with the combat ability, but in that instant his words took on quite another meaning. Decisions loomed in our future, but there had been no real time to work anything out. We"d been alone only a total of two times in the past three weeks. Plus Keene had been around. Or was that an excuse? The leader of the New York Renegades was a psychologist. Maybe I should ask her.
"You feeling better?" His voice was gentle, almost a caress that made my breath catch.
"Yeah." Thankfully, the fog did seem to be trickling away. "Strong stuff, whatever was on that knife." The elevator dinged as it reached the third floor where we had our living quarters. I moved through the doors before him.
"Enough poison to incapacitate even us for a time. Takes a bit to start working. It increases bleeding-that"s why Dimitri had to clamp off Keene"s artery." He shook his head. "I"ve seen Dimitri prevent a man with a severed leg from bleeding out with only a couple of rags and his touch alone, but poison complicates things. Keene must have gotten a lot of it."
The thought chilled me and I stopped walking. "He"s going to be okay, though, right?"
Ritter"s eyes wandered over my face, as if searching for hidden innuendo. "I"m predicting he"ll be up by tomorrow, annoying the h.e.l.l out of me as he always does."
I started walking again, falling silent. The carpet felt smooth and sensual on my bare feet, or maybe that was the way Ritter was looking at my legs. I stopped again, turning to him. Now probably wasn"t the time for relationship dialogue, but would there be a better one? The last three weeks didn"t seem to indicate there would be.
I realized I"d stopped outside my own room when he reached past me to a door, his bare arm brushing mine and sending a jolt of current rushing through my veins. He pushed the door open and crossed the bedroom to my adjoining bathroom as though he"d been here many times before, which he hadn"t. Not yet. Taking a towel from the rack, he wet it and came toward me. "Come sit down. Let me see that arm."
I followed him wordlessly to the couch that sprawled before the flat screen television on the wall. A television I"d never even turned on. He sat next to me, reaching for my arm. The towel felt warm and slightly rough on my skin as he wiped off the dried blood.
My body suddenly felt heavy, and I settled back on the cushions, letting my eyes close halfway. It felt good being close to him, having him take care of me. Even the pain created by the pressure of the towel somehow added to the sweetness of his touch. I wanted to curl up next to him and sleep for the next hundred years.
"Tough night," Ritter commented, amus.e.m.e.nt in his voice. It was a tone I hadn"t heard enough of these past few weeks.
I opened my eyes and found him watching me. My stomach turned in antic.i.p.ation. "It was all going fine until Edgel and his poisoned knife. He was going to take me to Delia." I hated the way my voice wavered on her name.
Ritter dropped the towel to the carpet, his eyes holding mine. "I would never have stopped until I found you," he said, the timbre of his voice going deeper.
I knew that. The connection between us was too strong for me to pretend otherwise. At least to myself. That didn"t mean I had to admit it to him. "You might have found me too late." I looked down at my hands, stifling a shudder.
"You"re stronger than you know. And getting stronger."
My eyes snapped to his. "How did you know?" I hadn"t told anyone but Ava about my growing abilities particularly because I didn"t want the others to be wary of me. Ava had shared the information with Cort and asked him to create some experiments that would be able to scientifically measure my progress, but no one else should know.
He grinned, resting his hands on his knees as he angled toward me. "Part of my ability is to measure an opponent"s strength. That way I know who to attack first. Your strength has grown."
Yes. When I was fighting the Asian and using Edgel"s combat ability, I"d known all along that Edgel was the greater challenge and that I couldn"t beat him.
"It would also help," Ritter added with a hint of mockery, "if you stopped doing things before people ask. Like pa.s.sing the salt at dinner or answering a question before they finish speaking."
I sat up rigidly, hurrying to explain. "Surface thoughts come to me now without trying, and I"ve been able to break through mental barriers, even some strong ones." I hesitated. "Not our people. Not without permission."
He gave a quick shake of his head, furrows appearing on his forehead. "You"re thinking about this all wrong. Maybe you can use this to teach us to create stronger shields. The Emporium has at least two sensing Unbounded, and they could have more. They"ve been breeding for it. Ava doesn"t believe they can penetrate our shields yet, but they could be training to do so. Like you have."
Leave it to Ritter to see my ability as a defensive weapon for everyone. He was right, though. "Okay, I"ll work on the shield thing," I muttered. "But you sure have a way of destroying the mood."
His left eyebrow arched. "There was a mood?" The teasing was back in his voice.
"I was definitely feeling it." My words were a challenge, one I knew he couldn"t resist.
He scooted over, closing the s.p.a.ce between us. "I think I can do something about that."
"Oh? Is that your ability talking? Because I didn"t know mood fell under the combat instinct."
"With you it does." His lips came down on mine and despite my exhaustion, I pushed closer, opening my mouth to his pressure. His hands ran down my back, the thin material of my dress feeling almost nonexistent. I rubbed my hands along his chest, letting them slide around to his back. The desire in our minds melded into one thought.
It was crazy to feel safe in his arms when everything was uncertain between us, but I did. He wanted to be here holding me more than anywhere else, and I wanted the same. The issue of fertility and two thousand years of posterity didn"t matter for the moment.
After a long while, we drew away. I felt stronger and oddly content as I arose from the couch, my lips tingling from his kiss. "I"d better change before Ava comes back."
His eyes took in the stains on my dress. "Do you need help?" He sounded almost hopeful.
I turned my back to him. "You could undo the zipper."
He stood and unzipped it steadily, trailing his finger down the opening, infusing my skin with heat.
"Ritter . . ." I swallowed hard, turning toward him.
He grinned, as though my obvious reaction amused him. "Erin . . . I . . . we-look, I have something for you." His uncharacteristic hesitancy sparked my curiosity. "I"ll get it and come back to walk you down." He was already moving away with the grace and speed that came from his ability. He was so beautiful that I wanted to call him back, but I decided I was more interested in what he wanted to show me.
Having no time for a proper shower, I used two precious minutes to rinse off, keeping a towel over my wound to protect it from any spray. What was it Ritter had for me? The memory of his touch was almost as powerful as the actual experience and it made me want to linger in the water.
After drying off, I slipped on what I called my catwoman suit, especially designed by Stella for carrying numerous weapons. This one was sleeveless and worse for wear, but Stella had others on order for me. I zipped the front up all the way, frowning at the bit of cleavage still exposed. Stella was a romantic at heart.
Next, I tied my ancient machete and scabbard around my waist. There was a pocket for the machete in my suit, but since I"d be wearing a coat anyway in this freezing New York weather, the leather tie would keep it handy. I"d gone through a lot to retrieve this weapon a native had given me in the Mexican jungle, and I wore it every chance I got. It was easier to carry-and sometimes more useful-than the swords the others strapped to their backs whenever there was a possibility of meeting Emporium agents. Besides, there was a legend attached to it, that if stolen, it would turn on the thief, becoming the object of his demise. I didn"t exactly believe it, but the last two people who"d stolen it had been killed, helped to their doom in a large part by the machete.
Next, I put on my ballistic knife and my nine mil Sig. I didn"t know if I"d be heading back to the Emporium compound tonight, or if Ava had something else in mind, but it paid to be ready. Thankfully, my interlude with Ritter had returned my strength. Well, either that or the curequick.
I"d finished restocking my other knives and was strapping on my backup pistol when Ritter rapped on the door. I could feel him there waiting, his body tense. Swallowing hard, I pulled on my calf-length leather coat and strode to the door. Don"t get distracted, I told myself. I"d felt two new life forces enter the building as I"d dressed, and I knew Ava would be waiting.
My plan to hurry faltered as I came face-to-face with gleaming metal. Ritter held two three-p.r.o.ng weapons, one in each hand. The middle blade was a foot long, the handle another six inches, and two side blades curved up and out on either side of the main blade, about four inches each.
I was fascinated. "What are these?" They reminded me roughly of a trident without the long handle.
"They"re called sai." Ritter lowered the weapons several inches, my eyes following the movement. "I got these in China a few years ago, and I thought you"d like them."
Was he flushing? My heart lurched, though I wasn"t sure why. I knew Ritter had a soft side. He just didn"t show it often. What did it mean that the softer side was showing now? No hint came from even his surface emotions, so I knew he"d clamped down on them.
"Now that you have the machete well under way," he said, "it"s time for you to master another weapon."
"You mean because you"re tired of the machete." It was all we"d been focusing on these past few weeks whenever we weren"t watching the Emporium compound.
He laughed. "Maybe a little."
I took one of the weapons, running a finger along it. Ritter did the same with the other. "Notice the edges aren"t sharp. Or the point. Sai are used mainly for striking and blocking. The idea is to disarm or repel your opponent so you can get away. They work well against clubs or any stick weapon."
"Like the bo staff?"