Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Then, his mate beside him, inside him, he dropped his razored web directly over the Scarab Queen’s web.
Her psychic scream was so piercing that it made his ears bleed.
Gritting his teeth through the agony, he did a rapid check to ensure he’d cut as many lines as possible … and saw that he’d severed every single one. The Queen was marooned in the dead zone, bleeding out from countless wounds, all her threads hanging limply around her.
They began to curl up and die even as he watched under the light of his silvery web … and she was gone. Disengaging completely from the web to save herself. Ivan could only hope that she was dead, but he couldn’t follow her—in fleeing the murderous tangle of her web and his, she’d detached herself from the island she’d created, had probably already linked up with another part of the PsyNet.
The center gone, the island began to implode.
That should’ve been the end of this, Ivan’s plan an unparalleled success—he’d even managed to keep his ability under control—but horror crawled through him as he saw minds sliding into the maw of the implosion. They should’ve all been dropping out like flies, their minds’ self-protective mechanisms in effect now that the spider was no longer keeping them captive.
This destroyed psychic island existed in the center of a much larger and comparatively stable psychic network. It shouldn’t even have required conscious thought for them to drop out of danger and hook back into the PsyNet.
Yet none of them were doing it.
“Too weak,” he said on the physical plane. “They’re too weak to cut themselves free.” He couldn’t do it for them either, not when he wasn’t linked to any but a rare few. Even those ones, he saw, he couldn’t release—they wouldn’t survive. Their minds were almost at flatline, with no capacity to re-engage with a psychic network if he dropped them from this one.
They’d just fall.
“Hold them, Ivan.” A soft murmur against his ear, a sense in his mind of arms opening wide to hold the broken.
Because his mate was a healer.
He wasn’t. He was a spider. “I’ll kill them.” It came out twisted with pain.
“You haven’t yet. And they’ll die without you.”
Knowing he was consigning Soleil to the abyss with him, he released the last leash he had on the spider. Threads of his web shot out in all directions, a shimmering thing that wasn’t hard and cutting now but soft and delicate. The better to grab hold of the minds in freefall. Mind after mind after mind after mind … until the ChaosNet shimmered with a silver web kissed by flame, and Ivan was the spider at the center.
Agony wrenched at him for what he’d become after all, but he wasn’t done yet. The Scarab minds still in the system continued to cause chaos. So he threw more and more of his web around them, until their chaotic energy was contained in spidersilk … and the slipstreams of this network finally went quiet, peaceful.
Not knowing how long he’d have control over the spider, he released his psychic energy through the lines of the web, in the hope that it would help strengthen the trapped minds. The web burned silver fire. And Ivan’s power ran out, his Psy senses going blank as his body and Soleil’s both slumped toward one another.
Chapter 50
Red! Red! Red!
—Priority medical alarm: patient—Ager Lii
THE SCARAB QUEEN fell to the Earth with a scream still emerging from her physical mouth. Her mind, a thing of vast power, reconnected to the PsyNet without effort, but her body was out of her control.
Falling out of her office chair, she convulsed violently on the floor, her arms and legs flailing against the side of the heavy desk and chair. One wrist broke from the force of the impact. Blood dripped from her mouth, her ears, her nose.
Any other being would’ve died then, the electrical signals in their brain haywire. But the Scarab Queen planned for contingencies. Through all this, she’d always kept a small part of her mind separate and protected, a part that was her fail-safe. Now that fail-safe took control and took stock.
The damage to her body and mind was severe, the sudden severing of her web having caused a massive shock to her system. No one else should’ve been able to even see her web, much less impact it. But they had. And she had to deal with the consequences.
Her body was shutting down, organ by organ, but her brain, while bruised, could be saved if she rerouted all her energy into protecting it while keeping alive only what was necessary for the survival of her brain.
“Sir!” A door banging open, footsteps racing to her.
The man who knelt next to her was young, strong, handsome. Gender didn’t matter, not to her. She was beyond that. And he was one of hers, a Scarab who’d given himself fully to her. She could take him, lay her consciousness over his.