Page 71 of Storm Echo

Yet the separation of this island from the Nethadn’tbeen chaotic.

No, it had been very well planned, and it had succeeded in its goal. Which meant that the Scarab power was being somehow stabilized. A task so difficult that, per information supplied by Grandmother’s byzantine maze of personal contacts, only a rare few empaths had succeeded in doing it, and even then, the stability of their subjects was precarious at best.

He added it to the list of questions for which he needed to unearth answers. The priority was to find out the reason for the comas, catatonia, and disordered states. Especially as it appeared that, as of now, he was the only person outside the island who could access it.

With that in mind, he began to move away from the edge of the broken-off segment. It might be that the solution to his problem of being stuck here, cut off from his mind, might also lie deeper within the island.

If it didn’t …

Death had never worried Ivan. He’d been up close and personal with it at too young an age. He’d always figured that when it was his time, it was his time. But to die because he hadn’t set up a fail-safe—a stupid basic error?

He’d have to haunt his own dead body.

That this was an unknown situation that had thrown everyone wasn’t an excuse. He was a security specialist, his job to consider how things could go pear-shaped. Yet he’d assumed he could get himself out of this—because he’d been getting himself out of various situations all his life.

“You, Ivan, take independence a touch too far at times,” Grandmother had once said to him. “You don’t always have to rely only on yourself. Such violent independence can become a weakness.”

He’d been sixteen then, had politely listened to her words—then ignored them. Canto, Silver, Arwen, they’d worn off some of his edges with their unrelenting support, so that these days hedid, at times, reach out to them for an assist.

At the core of it, however, he hadn’t changed. And he’d proved Grandmother right. “You can say ‘I told you so’ if I make it out of here,” he muttered in the strange psychic space he now inhabited.

Since he couldn’t extricate himself, he’d have to hope that one of his family would give in to their nosy instincts and come looking for him before it was too late. Even then, they were unlikely to be able to wake him since he’d separated his mind into two parts. What theycoulddo was ensure that his body stayed alive, while he fought to find a way out before it was too late and his mind simply stopped.

Because Ivan wasn’t done with life. Not yet. Not while he was still himself enough to watch over Soleil, ensure that her new pack would treat her well, and that she’d live a life of happiness.

A small cat prowled inside him, swiping at him with an annoyed paw for what he’d done, the mess he’d gotten himself into. Mad, he had to be going mad to believe that their wild bond had followed him here, but he carried that annoyed cat with him as he walked in this psychic space unlike any he’d ever explored.

It was nothing akin to the PsyNet, with minds neatly grouped or laid out in various patterns, each with a small section of the Net to themselves. Here the minds sat jumbled up against each other, or hung twisted in streams of violent psychic energy that crackled with random bolts of lightning.

Driven by instinct, he’d avoided the bolts but now deliberately took a glancing hit—he needed the data. It felt like being sucked into a cyclonic vortex that didn’t know whether it was twisting clockwise or anti-clockwise, creating brutal opposing forces that threatened to rip him apart.

Shaking it off with effort, he looked once again at all the minds being buffeted, felt a cold chill run through his veins. If the lightning continued … People were going to start dying. Soon. Those bolts held far too much unrestrained power, enough to crash and crush.

This explained the comas, the catatonia, the mental chaos.

He was no expert in psychic mechanics, but it was obvious that there were no safe zones. The power was too erratic. The only way for those caught in this zone to protect themselves would be to hunker down behind shields so heavy they could no longer interact in the physical world—but those would only last so long, and anyone not in on the plan for separation would’ve been taken by surprise, with no time to realize what was happening before they were hit by a bolt.

These people were in a critical countdown.

A tug on the part of him that held all those silver threads.

It led to a mind under considerable pressure from the bolts. He recognized that mind, though that should’ve been impossible. It was of a person he’d thrown onto the island, away from the abyss. In the same way he recognized this mind, he knew that it was on the brink of total catastrophic failure, far too weak to survive much more.

The cat nudged at him, told him toremember.

The memory came in a rush: Of the healer with big brown eyes who owned Ivan, and an alpha changeling with claw marks on one side of his face. A primal bond sealed in blood. A bond that would permit a transfer of power.

Ivan was no alpha. He was a monster, a spider that sucked others dry. He could kill this person if he opened up that part of his mind, the very part that had shoved a tendril outside a once-solid cage and formed the link between them. Yet if he didn’t, they’d die regardless.

Thoughts grim, he consciously opened the door of the psychic prison for the first time in nearly two decades, releasing the spider but using all his adult knowledge in an attempt to reverse the polarity—his aim to pulse energy from himselfdownthat silvery thread. Giving rather than devouring.

The mind flared with light, became stronger.

It had worked.

Shocked, he stood there for a second, staring. Why had he never considered this before? It was agoodskill. He received his answer a heartbeat later. Because now that the spider was free, it was bunching in readiness to shoot out more lines of its web, hook in others, begin tofeed.

Ivan slammed it back into its prison, feeling the pushback as it fought him. He’d have to be extremely careful with any future assists, act at rapid speed. To allow the spider to linger was to expose everyone in the vicinity to the mutation in him that just wanted to feed and feed andfeed.

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