Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1)(5)

She was gone. He told himself to stop running. Stop, goddamnit.

Noah forced himself to stop sprinting and slow to a walk. He stood there in the street, panting. Vibrating with the near-uncontrollable urge to keep pursuing her.

Breathe. Breathe it down.

Cars swerved around him, horns blatting. He was making a spectacle of himself, standing out in the middle of city traffic. Like he gave a shit about the noise and shouted insults. He just kept staring, trying to follow her taxi with his gaze even after it turned the corner. But even his enhanced vision couldn’t bend light rays.

The dancer’s bulky disguise—it had to be a disguise—couldn’t fool him, not now that he’d seen her energy signature. Unique to her. Invisible to anyone but him. Unless, of course, that person used cutting-edge visual imaging, similar to the micro-tech implanted in his own eyes and brain to support his AVP combat programming.

Her energy sig was the most beautiful he’d ever seen. A vivid bloom of color, floating in the air and superimposed over her drab coat. It struck him as intensely feminine, though he’d never assigned any gender attributes to energy sigs before. His hands clenched as he tried to shut down his raging frustration.

At the speed that cab had been going, he could have outrun it without breaking a sweat. Like a panther taking down an antelope. He wouldn’t even need AVP to access his emergency fuel stores. He could have wrenched the door right off the vehicle, flung it away and claimed his prize, then and there. Nobody on earth could have stopped him.

He wanted to howl like a wild animal.

Just his luck that she’d gotten away. She’d saved him from police involvement, legal action, media buzz. Viral f*cking videos circulating on the Internet, filmed with the phones of whoever was passing by. And somebody was always passing by.

The Obsidian Group was lurking out there, watching and listening for them even years after rebellion day. Ready to come down on him, above all, like a ton of bricks. Behaving the way Obsidian had programmed him to behave would put everything and everyone he cared about in danger.

He would . . . not . . . do it. No.

Breathe, dick-for-brains. Grab a hook. Go sit in the freezer until you’re capable of at least pretending to be a normal human being.

A car horn blared long and loud, zapping his combat program into furious play again. He whipped his head around. Fixed the offending driver with a lethal stare.

The guy flinched, lifting his hands off the horn. He quickly swerved into the opposing lane of traffic to stay well clear of Noah’s highly effective Look of Death, tires squealing as he accelerated away. The other cars stopped well short of him and waited as he strode across the roadway and back onto the sidewalk.

The combat program was in full swing, measuring and analyzing everything his enhanced eyes perceived, pumping him full of corrosive stress hormones. Everyone he saw was was an enemy, automatically assessed for threat level. The program churned out an instantaneous bare-hands kill plan for each one, urging him to act, move, take them out fast, kill them, kill them now, now, now . . .

No. Those people are not enemies. They’re ordinary citizens of Seattle going about their usual afternoon business. Step back.

He would not follow their program. He was his own man. He was who he chose to be. Not Obsidian’s rabid hound lunging on a chain. Fuck that. Fuck them.

Grab the hook. Grab it!

He swiftly descended into his most efficient analog, an arctic glacier, a maze of ice caves, blue-tinted and deep. All senses engaged with the biting cold to chill him . . . the f*ck . . . out.

The red haze retreated. The constant scroll of data down his field of vision began to slow down, as did his thudding heartbeat. He was still generating kill plans, but the urge to violently follow through on them was ebbing. Slowly.

He’d trained himself over the years to function normally in the outside world while simultaneously analog diving. It created a double vision effect, but he was used to it, to the point where he could even conduct a coherent business conversation like that.

He chilled in his ice cave while he made his way back into the office building. Ignoring people’s puzzled stares in the same way that he ignored the combat program’s helpful, detailed suggestions as to how to most efficiently tear them all into small, bloody pieces.

Yeah. Thanks. Not today.

He hadn’t had a stress event this severe in over ten years. And right in the middle of an important meeting. Seconds away from signing key documents.

Hannah’s timing was a balls-on disaster. Everyone in that room, including his fianceé and her stepfather, had seen him chasing a party entertainer out of the building in much the way that a big predator chased down its lunch.

That was going to be tough to explain. He couldn’t even explain it to himself. He faked normal pretty well these days, for the most part. He did all the normal things. He’d even gotten engaged to Simone Brightman, the perfect woman.

He had his shit together, or so he thought. He was on top of the bad stuff in his past. He’d left it behind, had not allowed it to define him. Heading down the straight and narrow path to marriage, kids, a house in the suburbs. What could be more normal than that?

So his reasoning had gone. But he’d obviously been fooling himself. If a pretty dancing girl could knock him right off his rails and get him running AVP hot, right out of f*cking nowhere . . . that was bad.

He was still deep in the shit. Deeper than he’d thought. He groped for the shades in his jacket pocket. Put them on. The extra light shield helped a little.