Shifters’ Captive(48)

She smiled and leaned into him again. This time, she allowed the combined energies swirling inside her to slide into his mouth along with her tongue. She roared in like a strong wind, filling him, shaking him, battering his senses. While he was assaulted by the gale-force of her energy, she seized one of the tenuous threads and broke the connection between Blake and one of the wolf shifters. She tossed the lifeline like the mooring rope of a ship back onto its own deck. The slender line of energy whipped away and disappeared.

One by one, she severed the strands. At the same time, Blake became conscious of the loss of his energy sources. His body went rigid in her arms. He grabbed her shoulders and thrust her away from him, breaking off the deep kiss.

Inside his mind, Sherrie hurried to the next victim’s line. Before she could break the connection, a powerful force shoved her away. Big and black and whirling like a tornado, Janus’s evil god face was revealed.

“What are you doing?” Rage, betrayal, pain thundered through her.

She instinctively retreated from the assault, withdrawing toward her own body. But she knew if she left his mind she might not get a chance to reenter it, and she hadn’t saved Liberty yet. She pushed back, punching a metaphysical fist through the blockade that stopped her from reaching the last of the lifelines.

She wouldn’t let Janus have Liberty. He was probably drawing hard on his remaining energy sources. He’d kill them before he’d let her free them.

Janus threw Sherrie’s physical body across the cave into a wall of rock. She cried out as she hit the stone, and sharp pain lanced through her back before she fell to the ground. Her concentration jolted from her mission, and her consciousness withdrew into her body, losing its foothold in Janus’s mind. Far away, echoing from the depths of the cave, came the eerie sound of a wolf’s howl.

Sherrie dragged herself to her feet and collected her concentration. The power of three still charged her. This man couldn’t beat her down. She gathered all her strength and sent a renewed wave of energy rolling at Janus just as he ran toward her. He stopped and fell back as if he’d hit an invisible wall then he raised his arm and hurled another bolt at her.

The energy lifted her and slammed her against the rock again. Sherrie could swear she heard the back of her skull crunching. The pain was so intense she couldn’t even scream. Blackness filled her vision, and she blinked it away. This was no time to lose consciousness.

This time her body didn’t drop to the ground. Janus held her pinned to the rock by the power emanating from his upraised palm. “Betrayed me! You liar, I’ll kill you.” Black thoughts swirled from his mind into hers like a cloud of angry wasps, stinging with raging hatred.

She fended them off as best she could, striving to repel his fury with positive thoughts. “Sorry.

Couldn’t let you kill people. Nothing personal,” she beamed back at him. “Let me go and we’ll work it out somehow. I know you’re not a bad person at heart.”

But an invisible hand clenched around her throat, crushing her larynx, stopping her breath. She pushed back against him with all her might and felt the balance of power shift just a little, enough for her to draw a breath.

Then, suddenly, everything changed. A tawny streak bounded into the cave and leaped on Janus, driving him down to the floor. Grant, in panther form, pinned the man to the ground, his huge paws holding down his shoulders and legs while he snarled into his face.

“Don’t kill him!” Sherrie screamed aloud and inside. “He still has hostages.” The power she’d accrued from John and Grant was fading fast. She felt disoriented from the blow to her head, and her body was so weak she didn’t even try to drag herself from the ground. Instead, she focused every bit of strength and willpower she had left into reentering Janus’s mind while he was distracted by the growling beast at his throat.

She pushed through the barrier he’d thrown up to block her and searched for the remaining lifelines she hadn’t had a chance to cut free. There’d been eight before. There were only four glowing lines now.

She could only assume he’d drained the others dry, leaving lifeless bodies behind.

Quickly she disconnected each precious thread and watched them zip away like the broken line of a flying kite. All Evan’s external power sources were gone. Without them propping him up, he wielded no real strength of his own. Janus was once more Evan Blake, a lonely man who walked through life feeling the world owed him more than what he’d been given.

Sherrie faced him in the dark, cluttered space inside his head. Blake’s presence was still a seething mass of impotent rage, coiled and ready to lash out at her.