Ethan understood her logic, but—“I don’t have the time.” That kind of highly individualized shield building took intense amounts of time to design and create.

As if to hammer home the point, the scent of iron filled his nose. He pulled a tissue from his pocket to stop the bleed, but both wolves in the courtyard were already growling. Gripping his jaw in one hand, Selenka turned his face to hers.

“Your eyes,” she bit out. “You have multiple hemorrhages in the whites.”

“It’s from the pressure building in his brain.” Memory’s voice was taut, her hands fisted. “It goes on much longer, his brain will literally crush itself against his skull.”

Chapter 30

I will pass on any and all information as retrieved or discovered. Please do the same. One of ours is now also yours. The squad wishes to assist you to eliminate this threat.

—Senior Arrow Cristabel Rodriguez in response to Alpha Selenka Durev

“ETHAN,” MEMORY CONTINUED, “if you’re willing to try, I know someone who can design those shields for you at speed. After it’s done, you release the rogue power—and we see what comes out.”

“I can’t be a murderer again,” Ethan whispered, speaking to his mate, her eyes the pure gold of her wolf. “I won’t be a murderer again.” He would not go to his grave with fresh blood on his hands.

Shifting her grip to his nape, Selenka dug her nails in. “We’ll control the test,” she said on a growl. “The den has plenty of rooms that can be made dark, without light. We can shut you inside one for the test.”

Ethan knew without asking that it infuriated her to think of locking him in a room without light, but if that was what it would take for him to agree to Memory’s test, she’d find a way to deal with it.

Pressing his forehead to hers, he said, “All right,” to Memory. “But the shield builder will have to be very fast.” Contact with Memory had supercharged the rogue power; the surges were coming once a minute now, each new surge causing another crack in his shields.

He was maintaining, but just.

Memory moved to speak to her mate, their heads nearly touching. After a short conversation, Alexei Harte brushed his hand over her curls before turning to Selenka. “I need to make a call. If I get agreement, you’ll have to permit one or two other predatory changelings into your territory.”

“Do it.”

Alone with Selenka when the other couple moved to the far end of the courtyard to make the call, Ethan slid his hand to her nape, under her hair. She tilted back her head to hold his gaze with her furious one, her hair catching the smudged sunlight. Pink and purple fire and obsidian silk, it slid over his hand.

“What if Memory is wrong and I lose myself when I allow the rogue power free?” It was the nightmare that haunted him. “What if I forget who I am and turn into the pitiless killer Ming trained me to be?”

“Then I’ll execute you.” His mate’s hand went clawed against his chest, her words harsh, rough. “I will not allow you to become a murderer. It’s a promise from your mate.”

Ethan knew deep within that keeping the promise would break her in ways that would never heal. “No.” He tightened his grip. “Not you. It can’t be you.”

When she stared at him without the least indication of changing her mind, he played dirty. “I won’t allow the test unless you agree to delegate the task to the squad.”

A hiss of air from between her teeth, her claws pressing in deeper. “This is not a negotiation.” It was a growl.

“And you’re not my alpha.” He held those wolf eyes. “Agree or I call this off right now.”

Cheekbones cutting against her skin, she said, “I won’t forget this.”

He waited.

“Fine.” A word ground out between her teeth. “Stubborn zaichik.”

Shuddering, he pressed his forehead to hers again. “Your zaichik.”

That clawed hand fisted in his hair. “Yes. Don’t you forget it.” A sharp nip of his lower lip before she turned toward Alexei and Memory, who were walking back.

“Sascha’s agreed to do it.” Alexei slid away his phone, his next words directed at Ethan. “She needs a teleport to this location, since she isn’t in the PsyNet and can’t access your mind that way.”

He could only be speaking about one Sascha. Sascha Duncan, cardinal empath, daughter of Councilor Nikita Duncan and defector into the DarkRiver leopard pack. And, apparently, a shield builder. “I’ll ask if a teleporter is free.”

Aden’s voice entered his mind at the same instant: We need you. Kaleb can lock onto your face if you’re willing.

Ethan’s head throbbed with another surge, but he’d only ever heard that kind of urgency in Aden’s voice in severe emergencies . . . though it had never before truly registered. In the gray numbness in which he had lived, he’d cared about nothing.

At times, he’d believed he was a stone-cold psychopath.

Today, he heard both the urgency and the exhaustion, wanted only to help this man who’d fought for him when Ethan couldn’t fight for himself.

Five seconds. Grabbing Selenka’s hand, he ran out of the courtyard and through the HQ to arrive at the public front entrance.

He had just enough time to say, “Critical emergency. Teleport pickup,” before Kaleb Krychek appeared in front of him. The cardinal telekinetic’s eyes were pure black, as if to match his black-on-black suit. His hair was unusually windblown, his suit jacket unbuttoned.

When Ethan looked at Selenka, he saw the face of an alpha who understood hard choices. “Go,” she said and released his hand. “I’ll organize the rest.”

Krychek teleported them.

And Ethan landed in a zone of madness. Screams rent the air, people walking around in circles with their hands at their temples as they keened. He had no idea of their number, but it was large enough that the available assistance wasn’t enough. The keening walkers, however, were the calm ones. Others rolled on the ground trying to gouge out their eyes, or beat their foreheads bloody on the asphalt.

“I thought we had a solution to this,” he said, having seen images of such nightmarish scenes before the advent of the empathic Honeycomb.

He didn’t wait for Krychek to respond, just telepathed: Close your eyes! on a wide band.

The Arrows obeyed at once, as did Krychek, and Ethan released his light. He had to do it three more times, in quick succession, Krychek ’porting him to different areas of the street before he got all the affected—but it still only took seconds.

“Useful,” Krychek murmured, staring at the bodies crumpled on the street. “We could’ve used you during the earlier incidents.”

“I wasn’t functional during those incidents.” He’d been all but catatonic at the time, seeing the world through such a heavy gray veil that it had been a distant murmur. “Where is your empathic assistance?”

“Exhausted.” A single flat word. “The Honeycomb is taking more and more of their energy to maintain—we don’t want to wipe them out when we need them so badly.”

The deadly cardinal crouched down beside one of the fallen. “This isn’t the same as the previous outbreaks—many of those individuals attacked others, but here, all the violence was self-directed. Not only that; they confined the violence to their heads, almost as if they were trying to tear an intruder from their brains.”

Ethan focused on the individual injuries, saw Krychek was correct. People hadn’t only gouged at their own eyes; they’d pulled out chunks of their hair and, in one gruesome case, shoved a sharp implement through one ear. “Have you checked the PsyNet?”

“Nothing, no indication of infection.”

A kind of itch at the back of his brain, Ethan looked around until he saw a familiar face. Abbot, he telepathed, which area of the PsyNet correlates to this location? He didn’t recognize the buildings, and the people around him were a mix of ethnicities, nothing in their features or clothing to nudge him toward a particular zone.

We’re in Hamburg, the other man responded, his blue eyes vivid even from this distance. Sector 17. I’ll ’path you a map—but there’s nothing to see there.

Despite that confirmation of Krychek’s cold statement, Ethan waited only until he had the map to enter the area of the PsyNet that corresponded to this location. What he saw had him scrambling: Aden, Krychek, the PsyNet here is crawling with parasites. How had the two missed this?

Two brilliant minds appeared beside his.

“I see nothing,” Aden said. “What do you see?”

“I’ll send you an image.” Ethan telepathed what he saw to both men, realizing too late that maybe there was nothing to see, and he was imagining the tiny glowing creatures with multiple feet that crawled all over the minds in this area. The power surges hadn’t stopped. It was possible the Scarab power was free and he was hallucinating.

His stomach clenched as he waited for the two others to tell him his telepathed image was blank of anything relevant. But Krychek’s midnight voice said, “That is disturbing. Can you safely capture one of the parasites?”

Exhaling, Ethan quickly wove together a tiny psychic vault. Such vaults were usually used for private conversations, but there was no reason it couldn’t be used to contain one of the creatures. Though what they were, he couldn’t comprehend—the PsyNet was a place of minds and data, nothing else.

He placed the small trap near an infested mind, and one of the creatures all but tumbled into it. Locking it, he left the vault in place.

“I wonder if an empath will be able to see what you do,” Krychek mused. “I’ll ask one nearby.”

The E responded quickly, confusion in her mental voice when she said, “I see minds in the PsyNet. Am I missing something?”

Ethan waited until the E had left to say, “Ask Memory Aven-Rose.” She wasn’t like other Es and her mind had connected with his in a way he didn’t understand; the impact of that contact continued to fracture his shields.