“They corrupted and stole my thoughts,” she said aloud through me, and Ayer met our eyes in the emergency lights now flickering on. He was pleased. His mystics had escaped, and he was thrilled. Something was wrong, but she wouldn’t listen to my one thought among her thousand. “These singulars will no longer be dreamed!” she shouted with my voice, and I found myself standing, unable or too sick at heart to stop her.

“You will die!” she raged, my body shaking with her anger. “I am all! Everything! You are one singular! You can’t make me become!”

This is a mistake, I thought at her, but with a primal scream, she drew her thoughts of anger into one point and exploded the room.

“Now!” Ayer shouted, and I gasped as the room flashed white.

“No!” I screamed as the Goddess’s power was pulled through me, out of the spaces and into their control.

“Secondary storage full!” someone exclaimed. “Third online!”

Stop! I howled into my thoughts, but she didn’t hear, continuing to funnel her frustration and anger into one act of violence that Ayer pulled to him like a master taking in a soul. With an unheard shatter, the windows blew out. I fell, my hair hiding my vision—but I could see it all from a thousand different angles as her eyes filled me.

“They are mine!” the Goddess raged, my throat becoming raw.

Looking alien in the emergency light and the smoke, Ayer smiled. “Do your worst,” he taunted. “I’m going to bleed you dry, bitch.”

Wild magic sang in me, heartbreaking in its singular intent of revenge and justice. I could only watch as the Goddess filled the room with her intent, not listening to me, ignoring my single voice among her outraged thousands.

They’re killing you. I begged her to listen as I felt the sensation of being sucked up from the inside. Stop! Just stop!

I . . . I . . . She faltered, only now noticing that she was failing, that we were slumped to the floor, the acidic bite of smoke stinging our eyes. I am . . . failing? she thought, a new idea born. She found my own memories of loss, and pain, and failure, learning from them, and I took a deep breath as the sting of a dart found me.

What . . . she seemed to mumble as I plucked it away, but it was too late.

“I told you not to do that,” I said, muscles going slack.

But inside me, the Goddess abandoned her new emotions of failure, fastening on an old one. You knew this would happen! she accused me. You betrayed me!

I curled into a ball. I could hear fire extinguishers and smell the outside. Wild magic pricked my skin, but it was the escaped mystics. “It was Landon,” I whispered, eyes clamped shut. “Not me. I tried to warn you! You didn’t listen.”

Your thought was too small! she said as men whispered in fear over us. Only thoughts with many agreements should be followed.

“Not when they come from a singular,” I whispered. The drug was taking hold, making it easier to think as the Goddess began losing her grip on me, and I moaned at the wild magic they pulled through me, lessening her bit by bit. “My single voice is the sum of a thousand thoughts. Listen to me!” I said, and another dart hit me. “You have to leave,” I breathed, eyes closing. “They’re destroying you. Go!”

But you have only one voice, she thought, trying to understand. How can it be correct?

“Storage unit three full, Ayer.”

“Go to four. I want everything this bitch can dish out.”

And with a sudden implosion of understanding, she understood. Making a sob that would make angels cry, she vanished.

“Wave complete!” someone said, and I gasped at the sudden silence in my mind.

Oh God. She’s gone. It was what I wanted, but I felt awful. Bleary from the drug, I turned my head, my cheek sliming in my own drool. Hands fell from me, and I welcomed the stark emptiness of nothing.

“Sir!” It held the confidence of a battle won. “Entity is gone. We tripled our density, but there are a few clouds condensing in the immediate area. Do you want us to mop them up?”

Heavy boots crossed the room, tripping on something in the dim light. “Go. Yes,” Ayer said, and I focused enough to see him bending over a glowing screen. “Don’t let them out of the area. I don’t want them increasing the isolation zone.”

I was empty, and as the drug took hold, I felt as if I was dying. I could no longer feel the sun pouring through the earth. Even the circling thoughts of the undead, revolving like lighted tops in the night, were missing. Numb. I was numb and empty. I shook, alone on the floor, ignored as nothing. What if she came back? She thought I’d betrayed her. She’d kill me, make my dream no more.

A toe nudged me, and I did nothing. “If she can survive the main entity, she might be able to draw all of them in,” Ayer said. “We don’t need Landon anymore. Cut him loose.”

“Sir.”

“Wrap her up,” he added. “Put her in the chair. As soon as the ranging cloud is collected.”

“Now?” someone new blurted. “She’s almost dead.”

“Which is why you’re alive,” barked Ayer, and I groaned when he flipped me over with his boot, my arm flopping to hit the floor. “She’s a demon. Treat her like one or you’ll be someone’s toy. As soon as the ranging mystics are collected, I want her hooked up. We get them talking, and that bitch will come back.”

Swell. I couldn’t even move my fingers as they bundled me up. All too soon I was being lifted, and the rattle of a gurney intruded. My breath came out in a gasp when they dropped me onto a rolling table and the disconcerting feeling of motion made me dizzy.

“Nicely done, Morgan,” Ayer whispered, and I felt the sudden lurch of an elevator. “You survived. Not what Landon promised, but I’m flexible. You’re going to bring the mystics right to me. Very efficient. You moved my timetable up two months. Let’s see what another minute or two connected to the divine will do.”

I cracked an eye. There were three men in the elevator with me, but I could do nothing. Wrap her up. Put her in the chair. Better and better. “That’s what she does, you know,” I said, and Ayer stopped the nervous man from darting me again. “She gives you what you ask for. And you pay for it in the end.”

Ayer grunted, eyes on his watch as he took my pulse. I couldn’t feel him holding my wrist, and he looked so much like Kisten it hurt. Between the drugs and my failure, I couldn’t help my eyes tearing up. How was I going to come back from this? I was so alone.

But then a tiny whisper of tingles sparked through me, shocking me. Mystics. There were some in me, resonating to my feelings of loss and grief. Eyes fixed open, I stared at Ayer counting my pulse, seeing my hand dangle limply in his. She’d left behind what she didn’t want to think about, and now her thoughts of betrayal and loss added to my own, almost crushing me.

“Are you sane?” I asked them, words slurring, and Ayer dropped my hand.

“History will judge me, not you,” he said, thinking I was talking to him, and he pushed me into the hallway when the doors opened.

But I was focused inward toward the abandoned mystics. Pitying the tiny new thoughts she’d left behind, I took them in, wrapping them up in my own pain, giving them a place to exist within me until I could return them to her. She’d probably want these back. God knew I didn’t want them.

Twenty

Tingles of returning circulation stabbed my legs as the gurney hit a corner. The dart was gone from my thigh, but the drug was clearly in force. I could do little as I was trundled down a corridor. The lack of an echo and the ornate wall sconces led me to believe we were still in someone’s residence, probably someone with severe light restrictions by the feel of it. The outward-looking faces of the three men above me held a wide span of emotion: unease, dismay, concern, excitement. That last was in Ayer’s eyes, barely beating out his avarice. I was a thing to him. A way to up his timetable, and it scared me.

“You’re making a mistake,” I said, glad the Goddess was gone and it was just me in my skull again. “Bancroft was trained in dealing with the Goddess, and your splinter was too much for him. I don’t know if you heard, but he left this world from the thirty-ninth floor this morning.”

The gurney slowed at a door, cracked open about a foot or so. “You misunderstand,” Ayer said, his voice oily. “I fully expect you to go insane. That’s what will bring the Goddess in, and then we will sop her up like spilled milk.”

“You want me to go crazy?” I said as the gurney stopped at the open door.

Crazy? came a thought-not-mine, and I choked as the alien fear lifted through me. It was a mystic. Is that different from loss?

The question hung in me, and shocked, I realized that mystics were able to change their purpose, in essence, evolve, when exposed to the complex matrix of sustained thought of a living system. Perhaps that was why they had gone wrong in the prison the Free Vampires had made. They couldn’t grow or return, so they’d became erratic—spinning in the same repetitive circle like the thoughts the undead made—alive but static.

There was a spate of muffled noise down the hall, and Ayer’s brow furrowed. “Can she move yet?”

“If I could, you’d be dead,” I muttered, then winced when one of the gurney guys lifted a lid and shined a light in my eye. “Ow?”

“No, sir,” he said, continuing to breathe normally despite my wish to choke off his air.

“Get her strapped in and wait for me,” Ayer said tersely. “Wait for me!” he shouted, taking one of the men and heading toward the noise. “And don’t take off that zip strip!”

“Yes, sir!” the remaining man shouted, eyes rolling as he backed out of the hall and into a quiet room, dragging me behind. “I know how to handle magic users,” he grumbled.

More circulation prickles washed through me, or maybe it was wild magic, but I was able to shift my head as they wheeled me to a stop. It was a bedroom, underground and decked out with too many pillows and a chandelier that screamed undead vampire. A thick bundle of wires snaked in from the hallway and prevented the door from being shut. Two living vampires were waiting, a woman sitting at an empty card table and a man standing at the bank of equipment the cords were feeding. Both were in military garb complete with little caps; both had pistols on their hips; both had them unsnapped. Neither looked happy.

The chair was where my eyes landed and stayed, though; the thing looked ominous with its straps and head brace, and my heart pounded. Why couldn’t they have just put me in a cell for a few hours? But no—let’s hook her up now!

“That’s her?” the woman said, and I tried to get the drool back in my mouth.

“Category five,” the man who wheeled me in said as he unstrapped me. “Though you wouldn’t know it to look at her. Keep that zip strip on her. She completely trashed the control room.”

The woman flicked a piece of broken glass off my shoulder, leaning to stare at me with her black eyes. Vampire filled my world, and my skin tingled. “I’m not touching her. You do it.”

I felt sick as the two men worked together to sit me up. The woman had taken up a handheld scanner, and her lips parted, showing her tiny canines, when she looked up from the reading. “Shit,” she whispered. “She’s already covered in them. Can you feel it?”

“No . . .” one grunted as I hung in their grip. “And you can’t either, Annie. Some help here, maybe?”

The scanner clattered as it hit the card table, and she turned the chair so they could just drop me into it. “This isn’t a good idea,” I said as I eyed it. Damn it, it even had ankle straps. “You think maybe you could just sort of let me go? I’ll tell them I hit you and everything.”

“One, two, three, shift!” the guy to my right muttered, and they moved me, very professional and with little wasted movement.

My heart pounded as they backed off. Two watched with pulled weapons as a third strapped me in to keep me upright. “Please,” I begged as they fastened my hands to the chair’s arms. “He’s going to kill all the undead. Is that what you want? All of them dead? Free Vampires are all about personal choice, right? This isn’t choice, it’s murder!”

“Shut up!” the man nearest me said, and I gasped when his hand smacked my face.

“Hey!” I shouted, and he grinned, leaning in to eye my exposed neck, my flash of anger triggering his bloodlust.

“Back off, Snaps,” the other man said, and Snaps, apparently, eased back, a new, sultry grace to him as he enjoyed his little daydream.

I couldn’t help but notice that the woman’s eyes had fallen in guilt. But then she dropped down to tighten my ankle straps and I felt my chance slip away, even as the rising tingle of mystics hazed me. Their curiosity finally outweighed their fear as they lifted from me like a second aura, drifting away in search of an answer I couldn’t give them.

The lack of their faint background voices was a blessing, and hoping they were gone for good, I slumped in the chair as the three people clustered between me and the tower of machinery with its lights and dials. A second bundle of cords punched through a rough hole in the wall, and I wondered if the entire place was designed for capture and containment, sort of like a huge dish. They were whispering over the readout of the scanner, and Annie looked scared. “There’s a lot of them already in her,” she said. “And he wants to add to it?”

“As long as he doesn’t hook me up, I don’t give a shit,” the one who’d hit me said.

Ivy, I thought, remembering her last look at me. And Jenks. They’d look for me. Bis, too. But if Bis could find me, he would have already, and as I watched the woman preparing an injection, I didn’t think anyone would find me in time. The memory of Bancroft screaming at the top of the FIB tower filled my thoughts, and I tried to breathe faster, willing the drug out of me.