Heart of Obsidian

IT was the creak that woke Sahara in the pitch-dark early morning hours, intruding on hazy dreams of a boy she couldn’t quite see.

Snapping to full alertness with the speed and silence of someone who’d been at the mercy of others for too long, she nonetheless kept her eyes closed, listening with every cell in her body. It was a trick she’d learned during her years of confinement, a way to gather information while the guards thought her asleep.

She flicked her eyes open only once she was sure the intruder wasn’t in the room. Her attention locked on the door, her pulse a drumbeat. Releasing a quiet breath, she listened . . . and just barely heard the stealthy movements of someone attempting to disengage the lock she’d flicked on for no reason but that she was obsessed with her privacy.

Father?

No response along the old telepathic pathway to her call, nothing but a dull silence that made enraged fear ripple through her blood. Reaching under the bed, she retrieved the butcher’s knife she’d stolen from an unused set of kitchen tools her father had been given by a patient who was an F, and as such, received goods from businesses as a matter of course. The idea of ever again being caught unarmed and vulnerable was her worst nightmare.

Pushing off the sheets with care, she shoved the pillows underneath to create the illusion of a person and pulled the sheets back up, just as the lock snicked open. Heart thudding and eyes on the knob as it began to turn, she padded across the floor to press her back to the wall. She knew every inch of this house, her feet silent on the old wood that had given the intruder away.

When the door opened, she waited only long enough to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake, that it wasn’t her father, before she struck. It might have been cleaner to use her ability, but Sahara had no intention of getting any closer to the stranger than she had to be before he was immobilized. All indications were that no one had any effective means of defense against her ability; however, she wasn’t going to bet her life on that assumption so soon after leaving the labyrinth.

Screaming as the butcher’s knife buried itself between his shoulder blades, the darkly-clad intruder spun around, reaching for her with his arms and no doubt his mind. She felt nothing of the telepathic assault inside the obsidian shields that protected her, and it took little skill to avoid his hands, his balance destroyed by the blow she’d struck, the heavy blade lodged in his back.

The man’s feet skidded in his own blood right as she caught a flicker at the corner of her eye, and suddenly the unknown male was thrown across the room.

“Wait!” she screamed an instant before his back hit the wall, realizing Kaleb had to have detected the attempted attack on her shields.

The man froze in midair, blood dripping to the floor in fat droplets.

“Don’t kill him. We need to know who sent him.” Sahara went to step closer, but she was too slow.

“Done.” The intruder’s body slammed into the wall, the blade thudding home against his breastbone with a sickening crunch as it all but cut him in half. He crumpled to the floor, blood pouring out of his mouth.

Her stomach might have lurched at the sight at any other time, but she was already running out of her room and into the one down the hallway. “Father!” Leon Kryiakus’s big body lay limp beside his bed, a necklace of sticky red wreathing his throat. “No, no. Please no. Father, please.” Fingers trembling, she searched for a pulse. “Kaleb! He’s alive!”

“Move.” Gathering her father’s body in his arms with telekinetic ease, Kaleb teleported out with the terse instruction to keep her telepathic pathways open.

He returned less than three minutes later, to find her seated on the bed, staring at the smear of blood on the carpet. She snapped up her head. “Is he—”

“Your father’s in emergency surgery, watched over by a temporary guard from one of my units in the area. I’ve notified Anthony, and NightStar’s people will be at the hospital within the next half hour.”

Hand shaking, Sahara went to thrust it through her hair when the iron-rich scent of blood hit her nostrils. Her fury reignited as she realized it was her father’s blood on her fingers. Shoving past Kaleb to the attached bathroom, she washed it off with jagged actions before wiping her hands clean. “I want to go to him.”

“You’d just be waiting outside surgery,” Kaleb said with grim pragmatism. “My man knows to contact you should there be a change in your father’s condition.”

She couldn’t bear the idea of her father slipping away just when she’d found him again. “I want—”