“You know about them?”
“They’re mentioned in our records.” Dev’s own ancestors had been hunted by the Arrows, families torn apart, loved ones forever lost.
“Well, they deal in death. They’d know all about the destructive abilities.” She put her hand on his arm. “Unfortunately, I don’t know any in the resistance. Ask Ashaya—she has more contacts.”
Loath to leave Katya in a sterile environment that had to awaken terror-filled memories, he pressed a kiss to her lips. “One day, you’ll be free of him. Then you can walk through any room you want, any place you want.”
“One day.”
But as he headed back upstairs, he knew their time was running out at an inexorable pace. According to the text Glen had sent to his phone half an hour ago, Katya had suffered a severe nosebleed that morning. And as he’d looked into her eyes before he’d left, he’d glimpsed a pinprick hemorrhage.
Rage tore through him, leaving devastation in its wake. Forcing himself to the comm panel in his office, he put through a call to Ashaya. Her eyes widened at his request. But all she said was “I need more information.”
Dev sent through Jack’s notes on his son—and on what William had done. “Ashaya, whoever you share this with, make sure you trust him absolutely.”
“Understood. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
Switching off the screen, he walked to the window. It was a cloudy winter’s day, with snow an ominous threat in the sky, but New York moved with clockwork precision below him—there were so many Psy in the financial center of the country that efficiency was less striven for than expected. But even from this far up, he could spot the humans, the Forgotten, the changelings. They wore color. Splashes of bright red, azure blue, even shimmering gold.
The Psy shunned color, and if there was no other hope for William, the boy Dev had held as a newborn would learn to shun it, too. Why color? Perhaps, Dev thought, it was because the vibrancy of it spoke to something within the Psy soul, the same as music. No Psy ever sang, ever attended a symphony. He’d heard it said that their voices were uniformly flat, but he didn’t believe it. No, what was more likely was that their voices had been flattened by Silence, by the cold control it took to maintain a stranglehold on emotions so powerful, they should never be contained.
The door opened behind him. “What is it, Maggie?”
“Is that any kind of greeting for your nani, Devraj?”
Spinning on his heel, he crossed the office with long strides to pull his grandmother’s rangy form into his arms. “What are you doing here?” The scents of spice and paint filled the air, overlaid with an edge he’d always thought of as glass. As if Kiran Santos’s love for her work had infiltrated her very being. “Where’s Nana?”
“I left him at home.” His grandmother winked as he drew back from the embrace. “I wanted to spend time with my other favorite man.” Strong hands, scarred by a thousand nicks and cuts, closed on his upper arms. “You look tired, beta.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “You know that.”
“Don’t you think the Psy spies know about me?” A squeeze of his arms. “Of course they do. They see me as a weakness, but I’m a strength.”
He’d never yet won an argument with his grandmother. Giving in, he took the hand she held out to him. “Why are you here?” She’d always left him to run Shine as he saw fit, no matter that she hadn’t agreed with all his decisions—such as the one that had precipitated a heart attack in a member of the old board earlier in the year. Dev hadn’t apologized for that. He couldn’t. Because the old board had been hiding from the truth, burying their heads in the sand.
Meanwhile their children had been dying, systematically culled by the Council.
“You needed me,” his grandmother said, switching from English to Hindi without pause. “Why didn’t you call or come to me on the ShadowNet?”
“Because there are no answers here.”
“The woman,” she said. “You care for her a great deal.”
“Yes.” A stark answer. “Yes.”
“Tell me.”
And he did. Because she was one of the very few people he trusted implicitly.
“I want to kill Ming—tear him apart with my bare hands—but what I really need from him is the key that’ll release Katya from her psychic prison, wipe out the compulsions. For that, I need him to talk.”
“Devraj, you must realize . . . holding a gun to Ming’s head will achieve nothing. Not unless you can somehow cut off all his avenues of escape.”
That’s why he liked his grandmother. She was practical. “It has to be a short, hard hit.” A brutal hit. “Even if he gets out a telepathic cry for help, I have to convince him he’ll die before that help reaches him.”