Disclaimer: Sadly, I do not own any of these characters. These belong to Nalini Singh, writer of the Psy-Changeling series.
Note: This chapter is not edited. My Beta is having some computer issues. Thanks to Zhian'tara for helping with his story. She helps me brainstorm, edits each chapter and helps me get all the information correctly.
Chapter 21. Friendship
Nikita's POV
Nikita opened her eyes to the sound of her communication panel ringing in the early morning. The sun appeared over the horizon as she sat up in bed. She grabbed the robe she kept close by and slid out of the covers.
"Sascha," she said to her daughter, not turning on the video feed. "Why are you calling me this early? And why didn't you telepath me instead?"
"I'm in Duncan Headquarters," Sascha said. "Can I come up?"
"Yes, take the private elevators." The time on the communication panel read 6:00 AM before she turned it off. She glanced at her reflection in the mirror, ran her fingers through her hair, and tightened up the robe around her waist.
"Good Morning," was the greeting she received when she walked out to her living room. It was also a greeting she was often receiving these days. Anthony, it appeared, did not follow her order to go home. He sat reading a newspaper on her sofa, already dressed in a long-sleeved pale blue bottom up shirt and black slacks.
"Why are you here?" She asked.
"You haven't thrown me out," he said.
"I did," she replied, and the doors to her elevators dinged open. Sascha and Lucas walked in side-by-side, with Max closely behind them.
"Good morning, mother," Sascha said, almost gliding towards Nikita and enveloping her in an embrace. Nikita didn't response, with no reference, she found herself unprepared for the hug.
"Good Morning, Anthony," Max offered Anthony a friendly handshake, which the former Councilor accepted.
"What's going on?" Anthony rose from his seat and adjusted the hems of his sleeves.
"Sascha suspects there will be another outbreak soon," the panther said, standing close to his mate. "We might not have much time."
"Has Krychek been alerted," Nikita asked, ready to start the metal call.
"Already done," Lucas said, but he didn't offer more explanation, "but we are going to need all resources available."
"Of course, my team is at your disposal." Anthony had already sent in the orders.
"I don't have much of an army," Nikita added, "but I can arrange a small unit."
"Actually," Sascha said, "we were wondering if you two could join us."
"You want us out on the street scanning for potential victims," Anthony rose from his seat and glanced at the timepiece on his wrist. "Nikita?"
Nikita stepped back, one slow step, and glanced at the expectant faces now turned her way. Among them, it was Sascha's hopeful expression that she cared the most.
"I don't know how it works," she said, trying to find the right words. Sascha, Max, and Lucas had already witnessed the effects of her so-called "gift," and they were requesting her help. She couldn't deny its existence anymore, and she found it a sign of weakness to say no without explaining how much she hated it.
"We can try," Sascha said, her hands clasped together in a plea.
"I have no control over when the voices come," Nikita said.
"It is not a perfect scenario," Anthony said, "but it's a good opportunity to learn how your gift works."
"Gift," Nikita found herself mumbling. Lucas exchanged a glance with his mate, and Sascha took another step forward.
"If it doesn't work, then, at least we know we can't control it," Sascha said, "but wouldn't you want to know?"
"We have two hours if we are lucky," Lucas added.
Nikita glanced over at Anthony, who nodded in return. Anthony was right, and she could not turn back now. If the experiment was successful, she might be able to channel and control the voices. It was worth the shot.
"Where are we going?" She asked.
"DarkRiver HQ," Lucas answered. "It's right in the middle of everything. You might be able to pick up something and remain safe."
"Safe in a cats' den," Nikita said, finding and retaining Lucas gaze. "It would be a first."
"I see where Sascha gets it," Lucas said, grinning in response to Nikita's sly comment. He picked up her mates hand and brought to his lips.
-RS-
Twenty minutes later, Nikita and Anthony were stepping out of Max's vehicle and into DarkRiver's HQ. The often-busy building was silent and desolated. Nikita kept her head high, preparing herself for whatever was to happen next.
They had barely stepped inside the building when the first wave broke out. Screams filled the hair, muffled by the walls surrounding them, and then accompanied by the sound of shotguns.
Nikita and Anthony stopped in their tracks, and both retreating to the net. The screams were not all outside in the psychical world, but it was also on the psychic plane. Stars were going out, one by one.
"What if this doesn't work?" She pathed the male walking next to her, somehow thankful that he had not gone home when she asked him.
"There's nothing to lose," he said.
"The episodes appear to happen independently of what I'm doing," Nikita added. "The only common denominator was that my mind had reached its highest resting stage."
"Sascha and I will be assisting on the ground," Lucas said, "follow Mercy to the conference room."
The sculpted female Sentinel was leaning against the wall. She was dressed cargo pants and a white t-shirt, and Nikita could have sworn that she was also pregnant.
"Sascha," she said, finding her daughter's gaze. The young woman paused on her way out of the parking lot and retraced her steps.
"Yes?" Sascha asked, but Nikita found the words she wanted to say were not easy to formulate.
One, two, three, four pairs of eyes fell on Nikita, all hungry for her response. She swallowed and resorted to something different. "We have things to discuss when you come back."
"I'll be fine, mother," Sascha answered, understanding her mother's predicament more than Nikita understood it herself.
-RS-
The room was wide, with its light green walls, colorful paintings, and wide windows. It was a room of temptation, and it made Nikita feel a light itchiness under her skin. She sat on one of the plush chair provided to them by the redheaded sentinel.
"Anything?" Mercy asked, after a few minutes. She stood with a hand on her hip, and another one hand on her belly.
"No," Nikita answered, before the shutting her eyes and retreating to the psychic plane. This area of the net had been evaluated, and it was going to take months to rebuild. There was a stampede of people running for their lives, scared, humans and psy all alike.
"The wave rattled the net," Anthony stated, coming back to the physical plane, "I hear voices, but I can't narrow down the sources."
"So do we just wait for the voices to come?" Mercy asked.
"We don't quite know how this works," Anthony answered. He kept his eyes on the Sentinel for a minute, scanning her with his gaze. "My daughter says you're pregnant with multiples."
"Did she?" Mercy beamed. "Did she perhaps tell you how many pupcups we are having?"
"What is a pupcup?" Max asked.
"I'm mated to a wolf," Mercy chortled, "and Faith doesn't want to tell us how many babies we are having or if they will be able to shift into pups or cups."
"You are small for multiples," Max said, a wide grin on his face. "How much do you trust Faith?"
"My daughters' predictions have a hundred percent accuracy rate." If it weren't for the neutral tone in his voice, it would have sounded like pride.
"How far along are you?" Nikita found herself asking.
"Four months," the Sentinel replied.
"You might not show until the last two months of pregnancy," Nikita said, "It's common."
"Can I ask you something, Ms. Duncan?" Mercy asked.
"Of course, but I can't guarantee to have an answer for you, Ms. Smith," Nikita replied.
"Why didn't you have more children?" The redheaded asked, long hair shining under the florescent lights in the room. "Why only Sascha? Wouldn't it have been wiser to have more than one child to be able to carry down the genetic inheritance?"
Across the table, Nikita blinked a couple of times in response to the unexpected question. The room was silent for a few seconds too long. Only the sound of the air conditioner as it turned on could be heard in the room.
"As recently leaked documents presented," Nikita started. "The E ability is dominant in the Duncan line. It seemed unwise at the time to undergo another fertilization treatment when the probabilities for another E was so high."
"Of course, why would you bring another flawed daughter into this world?" Marcy's words had a bite of bitterness. Nikita felt her heartbeat increased, conflicted on how to respond to the woman's take on her decision.
"Would you have done it differently?" Anthony asked, his response coming in expectantly. It must have surprised Mercy too because she was looking at him with furrowed eyebrows and wide eyes. "Would you have had, in her position, another child knowing that she or he would never be safe or happy in the net? Would you have double up the number?"
"No," she Sentinel replied softly, rubbing her belly with bit more determination, "that's another way of looking at things."
"You did not have to do that, Anthony," Nikita pathed, still replaying his words in her mind.
"I needed to do it for me, Nikita," he said. Did I lie?"
"No," she said, and it was an honest response. Nikita and Anthony stared at each other from across the table. The more time she spent with Anthony, the harder it was becoming to stay away him. In the minutes that followed, she felt tempted to say "yes" to him and his, mostly inappropriate, proposal.
"My baby!" Nikita felt a punch to her stomach, the kind that felt like a punch over a knife wound. She rose from her chair, a little uncertain and breathless. "Emma!"
"Someone has lost her child," Nikita stood, but held tight onto the table, regulating her breathing. "Anthony!"
Anthony's POV
Anthony grabbed Nikita's hands and waited for the images to come. The connection opened up quickly, and suddenly, Anthony was able to see through the person's eyes.
"Emma," the woman yelled. She was standing in the middle of the crowd, but it wasn't just a crowd. A woman in front her came running with a bag in her hand, and she used to hit a seemingly disoriented elderly human man. The woman ran away, away from the assault on the old man, away from the teenagers with sharp objects in their hands, but she kept walking in circles around the crowd. "Emma, can you hear me?"
"Mommy!" The woman looked over her shoulders, her eyes in desperate search of the child in question. "Mommy!"
Anthony, though the woman's eyes, spotted the child under a big white truck. In the middle of the child and the mother, stood a man holding a baseball back in his hands. He stopped the child first.
"Max," Anthony said in the physical plan. "There's a building in the middle of Chinatown, a dinner, Ran Huo's Dinner. Does that sound familiar?"
"Yes, I know precisely the place," the detective responded already in contact with the team on the ground.
"There's a child under a white truck. She's wearing a red shirt, and it looks like mother's trying to reach her." Anthony described the predicament.
In the hours that followed, he never let go of Nikita's hands, as the images and voices came in a cascade and battling for attention. It was overwhelming, how fast each voice switched and took center stage, but somehow Nikita was keeping up. She had dropped to the floor, the person in her mind having been hit with a metal object over the head. Nikita writhed in pain, pain that he couldn't feel, but he knew she felt.
"You are so brave," he pathed her, hoping that she was able to hear him among the vastness of noise. Anthony tightened his grip on her hands. Nikita had agreed to put herself in a vulnerable position. She had trusted her daughter, and she had trusted him. She had trusted them blindly. "Nikita, I'm here."
Nikita's POV
The next time Nikita opened her eyes, it was sunset. She was sweaty and panting. Someone had placed a pillow under her head, and Anthony sat with his back against the wall and his hands still clasped in hers.
"Mother?" Nikita followed Sascha's voice to find her daughter kneeling on the floor with her knees on each side of Nikita' head. Sascha's lips were set in thin lines, and there was a small wrinkle of a frown between her eyebrows. Nikita just gazed at her daughter, the woman who was once a just a baby. Sascha leaned over and planted an unexpected kiss on Nikita's forehead.
"Our healer came over to examine you," Sascha whispered. "She says you will be fine, but it looks like your nervous system taken the brunt of it. I'm sorry, I didn't know it was going to be this way."
"I agreed to come," Nikita answered, casting her gaze back to the man still holding her hands. She tried to pry her fingers out of his tight hold only to wake him up in the process.
"Nikita," he said, when he opened his eyes surveyed the room. Nikita did the same, only to find Lucas standing over them with water bottles in his hands, and Max was nowhere to be seen.
"Where's Mr. Shannon?" She asked.
"He ran over to the station to file some papers," Sascha said. "He got some detectives involved, and he wants to make sure no one gets suspicious. Do you remember everything that happened?"
"Yes," Nikita said, but what didn't dare offer anything in specific.
"You helped many people today," Lucas said, and there's something different in his voice, a tone of respect.
"We should go home," Anthony the said, before pushing himself off the floor and up. She was glad for his presence at that moment.
She found herself staring at his back and recalling the way he responded to Mercy when she asked her question. Now, Anthony had understood and verbalized her need without highlighting her weakness. It was new to her, and it felt like she had an accomplice, a friend.
"Mother," Sascha pathed after a polite knock. Nikita looked over her shoulders to find her daughter smiling ruefully."He's good for you."
In her mental and physical stage, Nikita had let her feeling showed, and Sascha had noticed. There were tears welling in her daughter's eyes, but she was smiling, so those tears were probably not sad tears.
"I'm not good for him," she replied, fearing that her daughter might start dreaming of things that could not come true. It was in Sascha' nature, Nikita thought. Sascha looked for the good in people, and she believed that good things could happen to everyone, including people like Nikita.
"You can't know that, mother," Sascha said, brought up a hand to her face and wiped away a tear. Sascha reached over and rested that same hand over Nikita's shoulder. "He's the only person who can make that determination, not you."
-RS-
Sascha's words were still in Nikita's mind when Sascha and Lucas dropped them off at the Duncan Headquarters. "He's the only person who can make that determination, not you."
"How's your head?" Anthony asked once in the elevator.
"I'm fine," she replied, instantly removing her shoes when she stepped into her penthouse apartment. The floor was cold under her feet, and it brought her a surprising level of decadent comfort.
"The DarkRiver healer seemed concerned about your nervous system," Anthony said, unbuttoning the first three buttons of his shirt.
"It's just a light headache," she answered, bringing a hand to her temple. In fact, it was a throbbing headache.
"Go shower," he said, stepping out of his shoes. "I'll prepare you something to eat."
"Anthony," she said, finding his eyes. Anthony looked over his shoulders before turning his body to face Nikita.
"What?" He asked, and suddenly, Nikita questioned what she wanted to say to him. She just looked at him, examined the shape of his eyes and the curve of his lips. Anthony's lips, she noticed, were full and a soft shade of pink.
"Nikita?" He asked, once again.
"Don't order me around," she ordered, but she didn't move from her spot, her eyes still settled on his lips.
"I wouldn't dare," he responded, unbuttoning his sleeves. "Now, you should go shower, Nikita."
"Thank you," she replied, which made him smile. It was a small smile, a light tugging of the lips, but it was a genuine smile.
It was also the first time she ever saw Anthony smile. She took a deep breath, slow and steady, and step closer to him. Nikita's eyes still rested on his lips. She rose to her toes, leveled the height between them, recalling her daughter's words echoing in her mind. "He's the only person who can make that determination, not you."
Anthony stepped closer and leaned over slightly, their eyes meeting for a brief, but intense, eye contact. She shut her eyes and tilted her face hoping that he understood her intent. He must have understood because Anthony's warmed breath graced her skin and his soft lips traced her lips.
-RS-
Comments and reviews are appreciated.
Best,
;-) Steph