“That’ll leave me free to follow up the Shine connection.” Max rubbed at his eyes. “I just pray to God they don’t grab any more kids before we figure this out.”
Talin felt her stomach knot at the thought. “Thank you for sharing all this, Max.”
“Why did you?” Clay’s eyes were watchful, his hold on her so proprietary it made her feminine instincts spark in warning. “It’s confidential information.”
“I researched this town before I came in.” Max might’ve been human but he held Clay’s gaze with solid confidence. “Aside from the obvious Psy presence, DarkRiver and Snow-Dancer control San Francisco. And”—his tone shifted, became sharper—“the jury’s recently gone out on whether the Psy really do continue to have more influence than the cats and wolves.”
Talin’s mouth went
dry. The Psy made certain they were the sole power in any major metropolitan city, were ruthless in eliminating opponents. But if Max was right, then she’d begged the aid not of a friend, but of a man with a powerful network of influential connections. It shook her. What if Clay thought she’d only come to him because of his link to Dark-River?
“You always intended to ask us to get involved,” Clay responded, his fingers stroking over her hip. She would’ve objected except she had a feeling that it was an unconscious act. And disturbing as it was to her senses, she liked it.
“I wanted to meet one of the senior pack members first. Changelings help their own—I wasn’t sure you’d bother with lost human children.” Max’s tone was blunt.
“Still doesn’t answer the original question.”
“I need backup.” Max’s mouth twisted. “Like I said, Enforcement doesn’t see this case as a priority.”
Talin felt her anger spike but kept her silence. None of this was Max’s fault.
“You’re saying you’re on your own on this?” Clay asked, sliding his hand up and down in a caress that threatened to
make her shiver. She shifted but it only made him pull her closer, the heat of his body both a warning and a seductive kind of comfort.
“I have some friends in this city who’ll step in if necessary,” Max answered, “but yeah. The M.E.s usually get excited about unusual murders, and with the organ removals, these would qualify, but all I got this time were by-the-numbers reports. There’s pressure coming from somewhere, but hell if I know where. Especially if Shine is clean.” He tapped the side of his beer bottle.
“And,” he continued, “whatever marked these children’s brains as different, well, we don’t have it to work with. I’ve been able to get hold of some medical scans taken prior to death—usually as part of a Shine eval. Maybe you’ll spot something the M.E.s didn’t. Won’t be hard. I’m not sure they even looked.” A cynical smile. “Enforcement, the great protectors.”
“I don’t have medical training.” Frustrated, she clenched her hand against Clay’s T-shirt again, gripping the soft material in her fist.
“I know someone.” Clay fingers stilled before he cupped his hand boldly over her hip and squeezed. Stomach tight with awareness, she released his T-shirt but remained tucked against him, needing him more than she feared whatever it was that was growing between them. “You have any issue with me sharing the files?”
“I asked for your help. I have to trust you.” Max’s face took on a thoughtful cast. “You know the one thing I’ve always admired about the Psy?”
Startled by the sudden change in the direction of the conversation, Talin asked, “What?”
“They might be a race of ice-cold bastards, but they don’t abuse their kids. I’ve never heard of any sexual or physical abuse within a Psy household. Leave it to us animal races to sink that low.”
“Don’t be impressed.” Clay’s voice vibrated with withheld fury. “They begin their abuse at birth. Psy aren’t born emotionless, they’re conditioned into it. Their children have no choice but to obey—refusal gets you rehabilitated.”
Max frowned. “Rehab?”
“The process wipes memory, destroys mental capacity, basically turns them into walking vegetables.”
“Christ.” Max shook his head. “But even with that, I’m not convinced they didn’t make the better choice. Their children aren’t the ones being beaten to death.”
Talin was still
wrestling with what Max had told them when they reached Clay’s lair late that night. He pushed something on the Tank’s dash. “I’ve unarmed the lair’s defenses. Get your butt inside before you start snoring right here.”
“I’m not the one who snores,” she muttered, walking away from the vehicle and into the lair.
Darkness, complete darkness.
“Lights.” Her breath began to come in panicked bursts. “Full power.”
Nothing.
Strangling fear threatened to close around her throat as she scrabbled at the wall, trying to find the computronics panel. She was sure she’d seen it earlier today. God, she had to find it. The dark, it was closing around her. Suffoca—
“Talin, breathe.”
She spun around, gasped at the sight of him. His eyes were night-glow, an eerie green-silver that was completely cat. “You can see in the dark!”
“Of course I can.” He said it like it was the most normal thing in the world. “Panel’s five inches to your left. Middle pad.”
She tried to pretend calm as she found it, then pressed the central pad. Light poured out from a ceiling fixture. “You don’t have voice activation.”
He grunted. “Does this look like a palace?” A pause. “I’ll get one of the techs to put it in tomorrow.”
“No, you don’t have—”
“I said I’ll get it done.” His tone told her he was just itching for a fight.
She decided for grace instead. “Thank you.”
A dark scowl as he began to unbutton his shirt.
Her barely steady heartbeat took another jagged leap. “What are you doing?”
“Not attacking you.” He turned to throw the shirt on one of the large cushions that acted as his sofas. “I’m going for a run. I prefer that my clothes not disintegrate when I shift.”
“Oh.” She couldn’t take her eyes off the shifting muscles of his back. Clay had always been strong, but now … now he could break her like a twig. And yet even as she thought that, she couldn’t get past his beauty. Her fingertips tingled, her thighs clenched. She wanted to reach out and trace that tattoo high on his left shoulder, wanted to taste—
“Scat.” His hands went to the snap of his jeans.
She jumped, heart racing for a completely new reason. “We need to talk.”
“You need to sleep.” He stalked toward her, revealing a chest thick with muscle. Dark curls of hair stroked over that luscious, glowing skin, arrowing down in a viscerally male fashion. “Get upstairs.” His jaw was tight, his eyes anger bright.
Her jaw dropped. “You’re still mad at me. God, you’re stubborn!”
“I’m a hell of a lot more than mad.” Turning, he kicked off his shoes and began to undo his jeans. “I’m through talking. Leave unless you want a peep show.”
She could feel her cheeks flaming. “I don’t like you very much right this second.”
“Good. The feeling’s mutual.” He went as if to push down the jeans.
She ran to the ladder, able to feel his mocking gaze on her back. A huge part of her wanted to watch him shift, to experience the stunning sparkle of color and light as his form changed, then the wild intoxication of being face-to-face with a leopard. But another part of her was frustrated enough to scream. It was clear that the Clay she’d known hadn’t changed in at least one crucial respect. He had seldom exploded in open fury, but man, could he
brood
!
“What if someone comes?” she asked, once she was safe on the second level.
“No one will.” His tone dared her to question him.
“But what if—”
“Pull up the trapdoor on the third level and activate the internal security trap. The panel’s hidden by the trapdoor. That will keep the bogeyman from you.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Fine. Good night.” No response. “I hope a bear eats you.”
A growl drifted upstairs.
Smiling, satisfied, she made her way to the third level. The panel was exactly where he’d said it would be. She opened it and had a look. Her eyes widened. This was serious security. Once activated, this entire section of the aerie would be surrounded by lasers. Anyone attempting to cross that barrier without the access code would get one warning. If they didn’t retreat, they’d find themselves cut up into neat little cubes of flesh and blood.
Gruesome.
But it made her feel safe.
Fast and powerful
in his leopard form, Clay wanted to run forever, but he stayed close to home. This was his range and he knew every shift of air, every animal resident, every scent. He’d be home before anyone ever reached Talin.
Right now,
he
was the real threat.
The leopard let out a short, sullen roar. The forest creatures froze. But he wasn’t hunting tonight, too angry at Talin. She’d let him touch her at the bar, but he’d felt the tension in her body—as if she were bracing herself for violence. That wariness was a constant insult and it infuriated him. While that anger was on a leash right now, it threatened to break free and turn to a rage that might make him the very monster she accused him of being.
The danger was very real … because he wasn’t like the others in his pack.
It wasn’t his half-human blood. There were other half-bloods in DarkRiver. No, it was the fact that he’d grown up in surroundings incredibly wounding to a predator’s soul. All those years of being trapped inside the stifling walls of apartment buildings had taken their toll. The animal wanted
out
, wanted control. But ironically, he could act human better than anyone in the pack, his leopard disguised by a veneer of silent calm.
It had made Isla cry to see the leopard in him and because he had loved his mother despite her flaws, he’d buried the
leopard, crippling himself in the process. Changelings weren’t human and they weren’t animal. They were both. They
needed
to be both. To be one but not the other, it was a kind of amputation. Yet he had pretended to be fully human for most of his childhood.
However, in the past decade, his leopard half had made up for lost time. He could still pretend to be human, but blood hunger and animal wildness raced through his bloodstream every second of every day. Like the predator it was, the leopard didn’t see anything wrong in the cold logic of survival of the fittest. It was willing and able to kill without compunction. And Clay didn’t particularly want it to leave.
That
was the real danger.
Lucas had never said it. Neither had Nate. But both men had to know that though it was Vaughn who was the more outwardly animal, it was Clay who was the most near to going rogue … to never becoming human again.
Shaking his head in an angry growl, he clambered up a tree with the lethal grace of his kind and stretched out on a high branch, from which he could glimpse the light in Talin’s bedroom. If he turned rogue, he’d lose the right to touch her. To go rogue was to give in to the animal so unconditionally as to forget his humanity. But though a rogue’s mind held nothing of the person it had once been, some spark of knowledge remained. When a rogue attacked, it inevitably went after those who had once been Pack.
Clay had been fighting his beast for years. At fourteen, when he’d violently repudiated the inhuman control that had been forced onto him by Isla’s fragile mind, it had changed him. He had learned what he was, what he could do, learned the taste of blood and fear. Learned that part of him liked it. Exulted in it.
Being locked up for four years had only enraged the animal further. The day he’d walked out of the juvenile facility, he’d gone on a bloody hunt. He had taken down three deer and it was through blind luck that they had been true animals, not changelings. Back then, lost and unaware of the meaning of his heritage, he hadn’t known how to distinguish between the two. More to the point, he’d been too blinded by eighteen years of stifled blood hunger to care.
Over time, he’d become better at controlling that hunger. The fact that he was a DarkRiver sentinel spoke to that control. But it was inside of him, a pulsing need. He knew that Tally was his greatest vulnerability, the trigger that could push him over the edge. What he felt for her—protectiveness, rage, affection—it was all tangled up in a caustic stew. Each time she flinched, he came one step closer to going rogue. But today she had leaned into him and that had had an even more unpredictable effect.
Extreme, blinding,
violent
sexual attraction.
He’d been drawn to her as a man is drawn to a woman from the instant she’d walked back into his life, but with her small act of trust, that attraction had ratcheted up into a craving that scratched at his gut, made his cock hard with the need to claim, to brand. But he knew Tally. She had been sexually betrayed by the very people supposed to protect her. For her, trust and sex were incompatible. If he pushed her in that direction, it might equal
her
last straw.
Then there were the other men. So many she couldn’t remember their names.
He roared again, the sound vicious.
Why? Why had Tally sold herself so cheap?
Lost in the
coils of sleep, Talin frowned, turned, then settled back down. A few minutes later, she did it again. And again.
Fear twisted the sleeping peacefulness of her face, shuddered over her body, locked around her throat. Gasping for air, she sat straight up. She didn’t scream. She never screamed. Never had. Not even as a child.
For five long minutes, she sat there, adrenaline pumping, as she examined every corner of her well-lit room. Only when she was satisfied that no one had opened the trapdoor, that no one had entered while she’d been sleeping, did she get out of bed and pull on a cardigan over her sweatpants and tank top combo.
Walking into the bathroom off the room, she threw some water on her face, then tucked her hair behind her ears before walking back out. The bedside clock told her it was four a.m.
The hour of nightmares. The time of night a terrified child’s bedroom door had creaked open for so many years.