Chapter 1
They hurtled across the range in cloaked dune buggies, streaking soundlessly through the darkness like sniper rounds fired from silenced weapons.
These were not scouts.
Jamaal had made that clear when he’d sent the warning call as the cartel forces headed north out of Mexico.
And Brawley felt that now, felt the chill of professional deadliness radiating from the cloaked assassins coming for him and his people.
Brawley stood in minotaur form atop the gravelly apex of a dome half a mile north of the speeding buggies. With him was only one person: the lovely, pain-in-the-ass telepath, Arabella Louise Carter. He’d let her out of her collar and was giving her a chance to prove herself under pressure.
“What are we going to do, sir?” Arabella said. In her hoop earrings and tight pink tracksuit, the blond Bender looked both sexy and ridiculous.
“Hush,” Brawley growled and checked the cloaked drone flying above the cartel kill team.
Sixteen buggies, one assassin per vehicle.
Frankie had reverse engineered and miniaturized the FPI psi detectors. Working with Hazel, she had also added aura detection.
So the drone-mounted detector not only revealed the brightly illuminated shapes of the cloaked drivers but also tinted the silhouettes in colors that told Brawley which type of psi mage sat behind each wheel.
Six Unbound.
Four Carnals.
Two Gearheads.
Two Benders.
Two Seekers.
Two teams, he reckoned, noting the number and distribution of the different psi types.
As this thought occurred to him, the buggies parted, splitting into two distinct packs. The strand colors divided evenly as one team began angling slightly eastward.
Using his mind, Brawley keyed the walkie talkie lying on the ground behind him and broadcast to everyone on the closed network. “They’re breaking into two teams.”
“I can’t see them, babe,” Nina’s voice reported.
His first wife was positioned across the arroyo atop another dome. With her was Tessa, the electrokinetic he’d rescued from Blanton Cherry’s trailers. Tessa was a valuable addition to the team, bright and willing and powerful, a real go-getter.
“We’re dark, too,” Remi’s voice added. Remi was down on the valley floor, dug into a wall of talus with Ursula and a ridiculous amount of firepower.
“Jaz, you can see them, right?”
“Affirmative,” the Gearhead’s voice chimed in from back at the ranch house.
“All right, Jaz,” he said. “Let’s hit them while the teams are still close. Bring in the Red Baron.”
“On it, boss,” Jazmine “Jaz” Jett said. Of all the new girls, Jaz had proven the most valuable over the weeks since he had crushed Blanton Cherry and taken over the 33,000-acre mega-ranch he was now defending.
Jaz was a Gearhead, but unlike Brawley and Frankie, her talent focused on technology versus mechanics. She had been a huge help with the security network, drones, and the Red Baron.
Brawley had named the old red biplane years ago, when he was just a kid, watching the Curtiss JN-4 work the skies over the neighboring fields of the Mitchell Ranch.
Under Jaz’s control, the cloaked crop duster swooped down on the buggies as silently as a hunting owl.
“Bombs away,” Jaz said.
A cloud billowed forth from the Red Baron’s belly, rosy in the moonlight, and enveloped the speeding buggies.
All at once, sixteen shapes appeared in the whirling dust cloud, and the whine of the engines filled the night.
Fuck your cloak, Brawley thought, and fuck you.
Voices popped off across the network; Brawley’s people chiming in at once, talking over each other.
“Visual!”
“See them now!”
“Me, too!”
Brawley selected two targets.
The cloud of fine-ground pink stone had erased the assassins’ auras. But that was okay. When you’re a Seeker, you remember everything.
Including the position of specific enemy personnel.
He snapped off two telekinetic rounds, popping the skulls of each team’s Seeker.
One buggy veered off and smashed into an island of mesquite.
The other jackknifed sharply. A second later, half the team crashed, tumbling across the rocky ground.
From atop the dome across the arroyo, Nina and Tessa unleashed a heavy salvo.
Nina had been strong when he had met her. As first wife, she had since benefited from five bonding boosts and multiple kills.
Now, she was a force mage to be reckoned with.
Her telekinetic hammer smashed down, and a cluster of buggies disappeared with a loud boom and a mushroom cloud of dust that lifted from the parched land.
A bolt of white lightning flashed away from Nina’s side, illuminating the range with the raw brightness of a tactical flare. The sizzling bolt forked out in a trident of electricity that impaled that team’s three remaining buggies, instantly electrocuting the drivers and flinging the fried vehicles into the air.
Meanwhile, gunshots cracked from down below. The two domes created a choke point. Remi and Ursula had set up across from one another, positioned among the rocky talus at the base of the two domes. Now they cut loose with tripod-mounted .50 M2 Browning machine guns.
It’s amazing what you can acquire when you have millions of dollars and access to the Dark Lattice.
Beside Brawley, Arabella Louise Carter reported, “The survivors are in a state of confusion.” The pretty blond Bender groaned, somehow managing to infuse even this wordless sound with the sugary sweetness of her Southern bell accent. “But I can’t understand their thoughts. They’re thinking in Spanish, Brawley!”
“That’s all right, darlin,” he said. “Ask them, ‘Para quien trabajas?’”
Arabella’s eyes swelled. “What?”
“Para quien trabajas?” he repeated in a deep growl, wanting her to hurry the fuck up before everyone was dead down there.
“I told you I don’t speak Spanish,” she whined.
“You don’t need to speak Spanish. Just transmit the damn words. Para. Quien. Trabajas.”
Arabella nodded, concentrated for a few seconds, and frowned. “They’re still thinking in Spanish.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just listen to what they’re saying.
“But I don’t—”
“Shut up,” Brawley said, “Just listen to their thoughts. Listen for names.”
Arabella frowned but said no more. Many females have a hard time taking no for an answer, but this pretty telepath took the blue ribbon in that division.
Even after weeks of Brawley crushing her constant attempts at manipulation, the mind-reading sorority girl was still trying to control him and everyone else… despite the fact that he kept her hobbled most of the time.
At least now in the heat of the moment, she seemed to be listening.
And that was good, because another buggy was tumbling across the range, its driver’s bullet-riddled corpse flopping loosely within the roll cage.
That left only three.
These survivors shot off in separate directions, slipping from the cloud and apparently flying along quickly enough to shake free most of the pink dust because on the drone detector, their signatures lit up in telling shades again.
Pink, silver, red.
A Carnal, a Gearhead, and—
Brawley’s danger sense flashed, and he whirled around, turning his massive back to the valley and scooping the blond Bender into his arms.
Arabella shrieked. A fraction of a second later, the sound of her scream disappeared beneath the tremendous explosion behind Brawley.
The ground beneath his hooves buckled. A hurtling wall of earth and stone slammed into his back, knocking him to the ground. Cradling the screaming telepath to his chest, he avoided crushing her by taking the impact on his hairy elbows.
For a full second, debris rained down. From behind them came the rumbling grumble of the hillside breaking away and landsliding toward the valley below.
That fucker had almost nailed him. How the cartel force mage had determined his position, Brawley didn’t know.
Probably the team Seeker had reported it prior to taking a head shot. Or maybe their Gearhead was using a drone, too.
Whatever the case, that son of a bitch needed to die.
Laying Arabella gently on the ground, Brawley said, “Stay here.”
He sprinted across the dome, vaguely aware of the telepath screaming for him to come back and keep her safe.
Brawley leapt from the edge. For a few seconds, he was in free fall, pinwheeling his thick arms and scanning the slope beneath him.
With bent knees, he hit the loose scree of the rocky hillside. For a brief, wild moment, thanks to his Carnal speed and athleticism, it seemed like he might take the impact in stride, but one leg snagged on some low-lying scrub, and he pitched ass-over-horns down the last third of the slope and slammed hard into the stony barrial at the foot of the dome.
He barely registered his snapping bones. Likewise, he barely registered the bones’ rapid re-knitting as his Carnal circuit boards lit up brightly, healing his huge body with supernatural speed.
Then he was up and running, pounding across the open range toward where one of the buggies suddenly disappeared, destroyed by another of Nina’s telekinetic mortar blasts.
The remaining two cartel killers abandoned their vehicles to hide among the brush.
Racing in their direction, Brawley flipped briefly into drone mode and spotted both assassins. The Carnal and the force mage who’d nearly killed Brawley were dug into the boulders.
Reaching out, Brawley could still hear his network’s chatter, but he was too far from any device to transmit because he needed a microphone for that.
Meanwhile, his people were still talking over each other. There was no panic, he was pleased to note, only eagerness and confusion over the location of their enemies. But the girls’ chaotic chatter was fucking up communication royally.
Frankie’s voice tried to break through with enemy coordinates, but everyone chimed in at the same time and drowned out her message.
He would talk to them about that later, during the after-action report.
For now, it was seek and destroy time.
He focused his attention on the rocky island concealing the cartel force mage. From this range and at this angle, Brawley reckoned he could probably smash the boulders hard enough to blast them across the valley floor and kill the assassin in the process.
But he wanted to test his team.
So instead of obliterating the boulders, he loaded a belt of telekinetic tracer rounds in his skull and blasted away as he sprinted toward the stones. Tracers of compact force streaked away, sparking brightly off the boulders.
Nina got the message.
So did Tessa.
As did Remi and Ursula.
A second later, the valley floor exploded. The boulders pitched into the air, tumbling like acrobatic elephants in the explosion of dust. Before this debris could even fall back to earth, it lit up like a thunderhead skewered by a crackling bolt of white lightning.
And this psionic opera of destruction was set to the lovely music of two belt-fed Browning machine guns blasting away in full auto.
And suddenly, the cartel force mage was very, very dead.
Brawley sprinted eastward toward where the remaining Carnal hid a quarter of a mile away. Perhaps he could capture the bastard alive and Seeker him for info.
It would be risky. The killer was obviously fast and heavily armed.
But the chance to crack open the Carnal’s mind was worth the risk.
Brawley grunted with surprise when a huge dragon rose up out of nowhere, riding a pillar of fire that stretched up and up and up until the fiery beast, burning bright orange in the night, flapped its tremendous wings and hovered directly before the boulders concealing the Carnal.
Brawley threw himself to the ground and reflexively drew a telekinetic bead on the gigantic dragon.
The glowing beast stretched out its neck and roared down at the Carnal with a voice that shook the entire valley. Flames gushed from the screaming mouth, raking across the arroyo just in front of the boulders, unrolling a carpet of billowing fire like a napalm strike.
The Carnal broke from cover like a terrified rabbit before the shriek of a diving hawk and sprinted in a blur away from the crackling wall of fire.
Brawley’s eyes ticked onto the speeding Carnal and blinked, and the fleeing man’s head exploded, punched through by half a dozen telekinetic tracers.
Before the corpse even hit the ground, the hovering dragon vanished.
At the same instant, the fiery conflagration winked out. Brawley no longer heard crackling or smelled smoke. The scorched ground suddenly showed no sign of incineration whatsoever.
There had been no fire. No dragon. Only…
Ah.
Yolanda.
The strange Cosmic had created an illusion and flushed out the Carnal.
Damn impressive illusion.
“All clear,” Frankie reported. “They’re all dead, Brawley, and Neuromancer reports no further intrusions.”
“Base concurs, husband,” Sage said. “As does Palm Tree One,” she added, using their pragmatic if uncreative code name for Jamaal, who was following along from his home back in Key West.
Cheers erupted on the general frequency.
Yeah, he’d have to talk to them about that.
Right now, he couldn’t say shit to them. He was too far from a mic. Another thing he’d have to fix. He needed a portable mic he could wear in either beast form.
“Good work, fam,” Remi’s voice said, “but let’s not take anything for granted. Everybody stay frosty. Now, sound off so we know we’re all here.”
One by one, his people reported in.
Sage reported her awareness of Brawley, too.
They had lost no one.
Outstanding.
But they needed to be sharper.
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