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Every hair on his body stood up in alarm. Aghast, he dared a quick look around and almost passed out in sheer terror. She was running headlong across the field toward him, not looking right or left, her hair flying like a dark flame. A body lay in her path, and she hurdled it without pause. “Fry their asses!” she bellowed, evidently wondering why he wasn’t using his greatest gift.
He had recharged enough of the enormous energy needed for a psychic bolt, and without warning, he shot it at the tall woman. She turned, instinctively bringing up her sword to deflect the bolt as if it were another blade. The blast hit the big blade broadside, shattering it, driving needle-sharp shards of steel into her. She screamed, pierced in a hundred places from her head to her knees. One long shard protruded from her right eye. Shrieking nonstop, she instinctively put her hand to her eye and hit the shard, driving it deeper. She dropped to her knees and toppled over, much as the tree had done.
Dante spared her no more than a glance as he danced in a circle, trying to keep Lorna behind him and out of the kill zone, trying to keep the remaining two Ansara where he could see them. If he could hold them off until his energy rebuilt…
Without warning, one shot a psychic blast at him. Not all warriors could muster enough energy to wield this most powerful of gifts; most used more physical weapons, like the swords, which might be gifted with different powers but were still essentially used in traditional moves. This bastard had been hiding his light under a bushel, as it were. If their tactic had been to let Dante bleed his energy level down before unleashing their own blasts, the ploy had worked.
Lorna never stopped moving, stooping as she ran to pick up a fist-sized rock. “Fire!” she kept screaming. “Use your fire!” She was only twenty yards away, rushing headlong into the circle of death. His blood froze in his veins.
“Yeah, Raintree, use your fire!” one of the Ansara taunted, knowing he wouldn’t. Then the man turned and shot a bolt at Lorna.
He miscalculated, not taking enough time to anticipate her speed. She made a furious sound and heaved her rock at the Ansara, making him duck. “Amateur,” Dante muttered, firing a blast at the bastard—or trying to. He was too tired; he didn’t have enough energy left.
The Ansara wolves circled closer, grinning, enjoying his helplessness as they waited for their own energy to rebuild. They had used far less than he had; it would take only seconds more.
“Link with me!” Lorna screamed. “Link with me!”
His heart almost stopped. She knew what it would do to her, knew the agony….
There was no time for careful preparation, the gradual meshing of minds and energies. There was time only for smashing his way into her mind and tapping the deep pool of power. It fed him like water crashing into a valley after a dam collapsed, a deluge of energy that shot from both his hands in simultaneous bolts. Linked to him as they were, Mercy and Gideon both felt the enormous surge and were fed in turn.
Dante furiously fired bolt after bolt. Tears burned his eyes but never fell, the moisture evaporated by the cascade of energy running through him. Lorna! He could see her on the ground, lying motionless, but her power still poured into him as if there were no limit to it. He didn’t need time to rebuild; the energy was there immediately, flying off his fingertips in white-hot blasts.
Faced with the killing machine he’d become, the Ansara retreated, drawing back to regroup. Agonized, Dante broke the link with Lorna’s mind and charged to where she lay unmoving, her face paper white. There were bodies all around her, testament to how close the Ansara had come. If she hadn’t been lying so still that they must have thought she was already dead, they would surely have killed her.
If he hadn’t done the job for them, Dante thought with an inner howl of savage pain. He fell to his knees beside her, yanking her into his arms.
“Lorna!”
She managed to open her eyes a little; then her lids drooped shut again as if she didn’t have the energy to hold them open.
He had drained her, turned her mind to mush. She had recovered before—but would she recover this time? Mercy and Gideon, not knowing what they did, had also been siphoning power from her. He couldn’t predict the effects on her brain, because what he’d done to her—twice, now—simply hadn’t been done before.
He looked up, looked around for help. The Ansara were retreating, disengaging from the battle. He felt numb, unable to make sense of everything that was happening around him. He needed Mercy. If anyone could heal Lorna, she could.
Lorna jerked in his arms, batting at him with a limp hand, and he realized he was crushing her to his chest. His heart leaped, almost choking him. Gently he laid her back on the ground, hoping against hope as he watched her swallow and try several times to speak.
“Are you okay?” he asked, but she didn’t answer.
He picked up her hand and cradled it against his cheek, willing her to speak. If he could hear her talk, he would know her brain was recovering.
“Lorna, do you know who I am?”
She swallowed, nodded.
“Can you talk?”
She held up her hand like a traffic cop, telling him to slow down, to stop peppering her with questions. Slowly, laboriously, she rolled to the side and began trying to sit up. Silently he supported her, kept her from falling, as he watched her efforts. Finally she could sit, her head hanging down as she took in deep breaths. Dante rubbed her back, her arms, and asked again, “Can you talk?”
She blinked at him, then nodded, the movement as ponderous as if her head weighed fifty pounds.
Thinking she could and actually doing it were two different things. He waited for a sentence, a single word, anything, but she was silent.
In just a few minutes she got to her feet. She stood weaving, staring around her at the carnage, the sprawled bodies. He would have done anything to spare her seeing this. War was ugly, and war between the gifted clans was brutal. No one went to war and came out of it unmarked.
“Honey, please,” he begged softly. “If you can, say something.”
She blinked at him some more, frowning a little; then her gaze wandered back to the bodies around her. She took a deep breath, let it out, and said, “This looks like Jonestown, without the Kool-Aid.”
