The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Evac

Then Mordecai's breath was woofing loudly out of his lungs as she threw herself into his arms, curling her arms around his body to hug him tightly. Which, of course, was with werewolf strength, nearly crushing the life from the big man's body. But Mordecai was in no position to complain: he had Jeriko back and he wasn't about to question his extreme good fortune in any manner! His own arms folded around her lithe body, holding her to him with all his strength as he buried his face in her hair.

"God, I missed you!" she husked softly into his ear, her breath hot against his cheek as tears came unbidden to her eyes.

Mutely Mordecai nodded in agreement, his emotions abruptly more than he could bear to withstand, as hot tears of his own flooded into his eyes. And before he could speak, Dee was pushing to the front between stunned vampires as they stared on in astonishment at what they had witnessed happening.

"Hate to break up the happy reunion," the fiery redhead hissed tightly, her own green eyes blazing as she held a hand to the earpiece that was exploding with Duffy's voice, "but in case you forgot, we've got a situation downstairs! We need to get the hell out of here and now. Before this place is crawling with Rapid Response teams!"

Both Jeriko and Mordecai nodded as they untangled from each other to come to their feet.

"Just a sec," Mordecai said, reaching a telepathic probe deep into Jeriko's brain to brush against her psionic cortex. The blonde hardwire gave a start as she felt Mordecai switch the polarity of her psionic cortex and looked over her shoulder, a quizzical look painted on her perfect features.

"Trust me," Mordecai replied to her unspoken question. "It'll make a big difference!"

Knowing the big man as intimately as she did, Jeriko had absolute trust in her fellow lone gunman. So she quickly grinned and nodded before a transmutation wave swept over the mini skirt and jacket she was still wearing, replacing it with a jumpsuit and rig similar to Mordecai's.

"There," she said with a satisfied smile as she re-examined the jumpsuit. "That skirt was feeling just a bit too breezy for a battlefield!"

"Nice." Mordecai softly chuckled. Then, abruptly was all business once again. "Dee's right: we need to vacate immediately." The intense blue eyes swung onto a still stunned Lash. "Is your team reassembled, commander?"

The question punched past the big vampire's astonishment and, visibly shaking himself, Lash nodded.

"All present and accounted for," he reported huskily. "We took some casualties ..."

"No worries, Lash," Mordecai assured the big vampire as he began to summon the energy to create a bore portal. "I'll snap out your downed people at the same time we leave." He looked over at Jeriko. "Can you make a final sweep to make sure we're not leaving any Brotherhood psionics behind?"

As Jeriko nodded, a line of seething dark light tore into behind just behind the powerful man in black before irising open to form a roiling hole into absolute nothingness. Dee swallowed hard against a suddenly dry throat as she watched the doorway opening, so similar to the ones she had watched appear at the hospital, yet so radically different that she was struggling to connect them together.

The vampires also had their misgivings:

"A bore portal," Tahsis noted in a hard voice, his face a mask of caution. "Those gateways contain enough psionic energy to instantly kill us all as we step across the threshold."

Mordecai nodded as a number of the surviving Qos Viran muttered in agreement, including an abruptly uneasy looking Lash.

"With ordinary portals, I would agree," the man in black husked, his face tight. "But this portal is formed with inverse psionic energies, which we've already proven have absolutely no effect on vampire neurology's. You'll be completely unharmed by stepping through this portal, you have my word on that!"

"We can't hope to know that with absolute certainty!" Tahsis fired back heatedly, stabbing a finger at Jeriko, who was just finishing a telepathic sweep of the fallen Brotherhood complex. "You've just increased your number by one via some sort of strange event, improving the odds in a possible confrontation with us! For all we know, this is an elaborate trap to further improve those odds."

But it wasn't Mordecai that rebutted the wiry vampire's heated words, but his own commander, who turned on Tahsis with eyes blazing.

"Where is your honor, Tahsis?" he snarled, almost shoving his Shiva into his second-in-command's face as his body quivered with barely restrained rage. "Do you already forget your blood oath to the Lilith? The one that binds us without question to this man, psionic or not?" Then his finger was stabbing out at Mordecai. "Not only that, but this man has shown us nothing that would make me question his honor as an ally and comrade on the battlefield. If Mordecai the psionic says that there's no danger in stepping through an inverted bore portal, then there is no danger!"

To prove the validity of his own words, Lash abruptly turned from his abashed-looking lieutenant to step directly into the portal, instantly vanishing. Only to reappear a heartbeat later, stepping back into the devastation left behind by their attack. As his boots ground against debris on the once-spotless carpeted floor, he jerked a thumb back at the portal.

"It opens into the hotel room Detectives McMaster and Duffy have prepared for us," he reported harshly. "And I experienced no pain or discomfort! Again, Mordecai has proven himself. Now, get through that portal ... now!"

Nodding, Tahsis was the first through, Dee and the rest of the Qos Viran assault team right on his heels. Lash was the last through, pausing to look deep into Mordecai's eyes.

"My fallen comrades and Duffy's team downstairs?" he asked softly. Mordecai smiled and gave the big vampire a squeeze on the arm.

"Right behind you. Don't worry, Lash; I won't leave any fallen comrades on the battlefield!"

Nodding, Lash disappeared into the portal, leaving only Jeriko and Mordecai. The blonde hardwire wore a bemused expression on her face, her arms folded beneath her breasts.

"A compact with vampires to take on the Brotherhood?" she asked softly as she looked over at the grinning man in black. "I don't recall pulling that little tidbit out of your brain!"

"No, I don't imagine you do." Mordecai's grin grew slightly before he motioned that Jeriko step through the gate. "But I'll explain all of that later. Right now you need to get on your horse and out of here."

"You're not coming?" Jeriko paused at the edge of the portal to look over her shoulder at Mordecai.

"Not just yet," Mordecai replied, already reaching out with his mind for Duffy's team downstairs. "I have a couple things that I need to do before I rejoin you."

"Okay." Jeriko flashed a quick smile. "See you in a bit!" And then she was gone, swallowed up by the bore portal's powerful energies, swirling darkly and chaotically around the portal's rim.

Nodding, Mordecai turned away from the portal to step back into the destruction, his eyes searching.

"That you will, Jeri," he husked, feeling Duffy's team being snapped across time and space to where Lash and the others waited for them. They had been teleported by a second portal that the man in black had formed around them on the ground floor, just in time to whisk them out of sight of the advancing RRT officers that had begun to flood into the building.

"As soon as I find myself a couple more bodies!"

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