Judd nodded. “Yes. And if the computer attack doesn’t succeed in warning them off, they’ll keep picking away at you and your nonpredatory allies—until your power base is eroded to the point of nonexistence. Then they’ll launch a quiet offensive to install Council-friendly packs in place of your former allies.”
His last words had the effect of a bomb. Questions came at him from every angle until he raised a palm for silence. “Yes,” he said. “There are packs that have made agreements with the Council for money, land, or simply immunity from Psy strikes.”
“So even if we set up some sort of chain of communication to prevent the Psy from starting another territorial war”—Hawke’s face was wolf-sharp—“we have no way of knowing who’s snitching to the Council?”
“I’d operate on the assumption that everything you say is being reported back.”
“That can be turned to our advantage,” Lucas pointed out.
Hawke nodded. “After we run this next op, we need to talk about how to fix our lines of communication—packs can’t remain isolated from each other anymore. Not if we’re going to survive the Psy Council.”
The meeting broke up soon afterward and Judd immediately contacted the Ghost. Because he didn’t want to leave the den, he took the chance of sending a coded message asking for a call on a secure line. The Ghost responded within seconds. “This call should be untraceable, but we can’t talk for long.”
“Understood.” Judd laid out the situation with the deer and the Psy without mentioning either DarkRiver or SnowDancer. Just as he didn’t know the Ghost’s identity, the Ghost had no knowledge of where Judd went after he left the church.
“You need the names of the exact officers?”
“Can you get them?”
“I’ll have to break into a secure PsyNet database, but that shouldn’t pose a problem unless the information has been highly classified. I assume you don’t want to talk to these men?”
Judd didn’t answer because no answer was needed.
“My goal is to help my people,” the Ghost said in the chill tone of a Psy fully enmeshed in Silence, “not sell them out. I may be a revolutionary, but I am not a traitor.”
“To fight an evil that butchers innocent women and children isn’t treason.”
“I agree—at least in this situation. Killing those deer was akin to taking out the most helpless civilians in a war no one knows is taking place.”
“Case by case? Fine. Your conscience will tell you where to go.”
“I have no conscience, Judd.” The Ghost’s voice dropped. “I’ve got so much blood staining these hands nothing will ever wash it away.”
“The future might surprise you.” It sure as hell had shocked him. “And if you don’t have a conscience, why did you become a revolutionary?”
“Perhaps I want to grab power for myself.”
“No.” Of that he was certain. “You do it because you see what the Council is turning the Psy into and you know it isn’t right. We were the greatest of races once upon a time, the true—and just—leaders of the world.”
“Do you think we can have that back again?”
“No.” The world had changed, the humans and changelings gaining in strength with the passage of time. “But we can become something even better. We can become free.”
Brenna was fixing
some kind of a small computronic device when he found her in her quarters. “Judd,” she said, putting down her tools. “You can’t be here. The dissonance—”
He interrupted her panicked words. “I need to ask you something important.”
“What could be more important than your life?” She sounded close to tears.
“
Your
life. If you die, I don’t know if I’d stay sane.” A simple truth.
Her hands trembled as she lifted them to push back her hair. “Ask your question.”
“The ferocity with which the shooter is stalking you argues for a deeper motive than the fact that he thinks you’ll remember something about Tim’s death.” Finally, he knew he was on the right path. “You know something else he’s scared you’ll reveal.”
“Tim’s death has to be it. It would mean a death sentence for him.”
“But, Brenna, he
knows
you didn’t see anything.” He leaned forward but caught himself before he touched her. Even so, he felt the start of a nosebleed. He managed to stop it with Tk, but it wouldn’t last. “He planned Tim’s death to the letter, made sure there was no trace evidence, no trail, and no eyewitnesses. He knows he didn’t betray himself.”
“Maybe he’s crazy. Like you!” Her nostrils flared. “Do you think I can’t smell you bleeding?”
He focused on the first part of her statement. “He’s acting with too much logic to be crazy. Think, Brenna, what else could you know?”
“Nothing!” She threw up her hands. “I was in healing for months, then I was being babysat by Drew and Riley. And you, come to think of it. I’m still being overprotected!”
Judd felt ice crawl down his spine as his brain made the connection that had been eluding it for days. “The day of Tim’s murder was when you started acting out—not following orders, behaving aggressively.”
“I was behaving normally,” she retorted.
“Yes.” He met her eyes. “For the first time since your abduction, you behaved as someone fully healed would behave.”
Brenna frowned. “Judd, you’re going to have to spell it out for me before you bleed to death on my floor.” Despite the sharp words, her worry for him was a wound in her eyes.
“Brenna, what happened the day Enrique kidnapped you?”
“Why are you asking me that?” she snapped. “You know I don’t remember.”
“Why not? You remember everything else.” Every cut, every blow, every hurt.
“Shock.” She hugged herself. “That’s what the healers said.”
“Your pack found evidence of an unknown van in the area at the time.”
“Enrique must’ve knocked me out somehow.” Her frown reminded him that they’d gone over this topic many times. “I’d never get into a van with a stranger.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“Then, why—” Horror bloomed on her face. “No,” she whispered, rocking back and forth. “No, you’re wrong.”
Judd wanted to be wrong if it would wipe that look off Brenna’s face. He’d been blinded by her loyalty to the pack when they’d first broached this topic and even now had not even a shred of evidence to support his theory, but he had instinct. The details of the kidnapping were the one thing Brenna,
and only Brenna
, knew about.
It made far more sense than her being targeted because of the statement she’d made about Tim’s murder. She’d been openly shaken at the time, and a smart wolf could have talked his way around anything she claimed to have seen. But with her gone, no one would ever be able to prove what Judd now suspected—that a fellow wolf, a packmate, had sold her out to Santano Enrique . . . to be butchered like so much meat.
CHAPTER 41
Nikita uploaded
the data crystal she’d received that morning onto a computer in her penthouse suite. The crystal held a file she’d paid a premium amount to acquire. Her contact had considered it little enough compensation for putting his life, and his sanity, on the line. Nikita had had to agree. Kaleb’s little gift—it was rumored he had the ability to cause permanent insanity—made even the most experienced of them reconsider.
The file finished loading. It was several pages long and stamped with the seal of the training facility where Kaleb had been placed at age three, when he’d first begun exhibiting his considerable telekinetic strength. As was usual, the juvenile files had been sealed at Kaleb’s majority, which was why she’d had such trouble getting them . . . and why she hadn’t known the name of Kaleb’s trainer: Santano Enrique.
Filing away that unexpected piece of data, she scrolled down. She soon began to notice odd gaps in the record. There was a continuous accounting of his progress up to age seven years, four months, but the next entry didn’t appear until age seven years, seven months. What had Kaleb been doing in the intervening three months? Again and again, the pattern repeated itself. The gaps were highly irregular. Training logs were meant to be kept strictly up-to-date.
She restarted from the beginning and immediately noticed a second pattern hidden in the first. Each gap in the log appeared one week to the day after Kaleb had had a personal training session with Enrique. With any other trainer, it would’ve been a cause for concern, but not a major problem overall.
However, Santano Enrique had been no ordinary cardinal. He’d been an exceptionally high-functioning sociopath, one of the small minority whose aberrant brain patterns had been given free license by Silence. Enrique had escaped all the procedures set in place to detect such anomalous minds and become Council. Now it appeared that Kaleb had been far more than merely Enrique’s student. He’d been his protégé.
The NetMind’s recent slew of fragmented reports, especially in relation to the unknown serial killer, took on a new implication in light of this information. The last time they had had such problems, the NetMind had been under Enrique’s control.
Returning to the file, she saw that Kaleb’s power arc had also been unusual. Most cardinals followed a steady and predictable progression from ungoverned and unreliable to total control. Her daughter, Sascha, of course, had been a different story. It would have been far easier for Nikita to terminate the fetus as soon as the in vitro psychic tests showed the near-certain presence of the E designation. It was, in fact, what the Council had ordered in the early years of Silence. The ability of E-Psy to heal emotional wounds had been considered redundant in a race that had no emotion.
A decade later, they had discovered the Correlation Concept—a direct if not scientifically provable relationship between the number of latent E-Psy and the overall stability of the populace. In simple terms, the fewer the E-Psy, the more cases of sociopathy and insanity. Now E-Psy were brought to full term and forced to contain their abilities under several undocumented layers of conditioning. That was what had led to Sascha’s irregular development.
Nothing like that could account for the nature of Kaleb’s psychic growth. At ten years of age, he’d been as focused as an adult. His concentration hadn’t lapsed during the occasionally problematic period of adolescence, but evidenced a sharp decline at age sixteen. That would have been a cause for severe concern, except that Kaleb had stabilized within the month. Despite considerable testing, the M-Psy had been unable to find any evidence of psychic or physical trauma that could account for his relapse. In the end it had been noted down as a delayed adolescent reaction.
Nikita had reason to disagree with that diagnosis. Closing Kaleb’s file, she pulled up another. It had been opened after the Council became aware of Enrique’s sociopathic history. They were using all of their resources to make a list of past murders that may have been committed by the now-dead Councilor—in case he’d left behind evidence aside from any possessed by the changelings. Loose ends had to be stifled before they spoke.
She scanned the list they had to date and found it at once. A changeling female—a swan—had disappeared seven days before Kaleb’s logged decline. And the decline had begun approximately twenty-four hours after Kaleb returned from one of those unexplained absences, likely times when he’d been with Enrique.
Not a protégé. An accomplice.
This could become a problematic issue if Kaleb ever lost control of his murderous appetites. Until then, she’d continue working with him. Every one of the Councilors was a killer in some form. Kaleb simply did his killing in a less sanctioned way.
CHAPTER 42
An hour
after he’d been forced to leave a distraught Brenna—she’d thrown him out when his nose started bleeding openly—Judd received the encrypted message from the Ghost. A simple list. Six names.
He called Brenna, audio only. The sight of tears on her face was disturbing to his senses. “I’m leaving my watch outside your door. Riley’s sending a replacement.” He’d already spoken to her brother about his suspicions and the other man was pulling together duty and leave rosters from the time of Brenna’s abduction. The data would help narrow their suspect base, but Judd’s sense of urgency said it wouldn’t be fast enough.
“I hope the bastard does try for me again—I want to flay him alive.” There were no tears, only a lacing of the most unadulterated anger.
“Be careful of everyone.” Riley had set tasks far from the den for those on their short list of suspects, but the killer could always sneak back in. It was also possible that he’d gained unauthorized access to the classified code and wasn’t a soldier at all.
“I will. Has the bleeding stopped?”
“Yes,” he said and ended the call. Not technically a lie. His nose wasn’t bleeding anymore, but other things inside him were.
D’Arn soon arrived to take over the watch and Judd left to deliver the names to Hawke. He was almost there when he saw Sienna limping out of a training room. She had a bruise on her cheek and her lip was promising to swell. A few months ago, he’d have discovered the name of the perpetrator and taken care of it. That was before Hawke—with Judd and Walker’s cooperation—had thrown Sienna into a training program designed to turn her from “tame housecat” to wolf. “Did you try to take on Indigo again?”
Sienna’s jaw became an obstinate line. “She keeps making me do exercises over and over. I wanted a bout.”
“And look where it got you.” Indigo walked out of the same room. Dressed in loose black pants and a gray T-shirt, she didn’t have so much as a hair out of place. “Good for me, though—helped work out the frustration from the crap I’m wading through.”
He knew she was referring to the drug situation, which she was now focusing on as Riley took over the murder investigation. “That bad?”
“Not if you compare it to the outside world, but I can’t believe how
any
of that poison got in here in the first place. We’re a goddamn pack. We look out for one another, get our strength from pack loyalty, not—” She glanced at Sienna’s interested expression. “I’ll fill you in later.”