She wasn’t allowed to die, he thought, his rage a dark red flame. Not until he’d flushed this vicious hunger for her from his system. But when he tracked the scent to a small clearing, it was to discover nothing beyond the slashing aggression of the lynx and the biting iron of fresh blood—no scent of a gut ripped open or bodily wastes expelled during the panic of death. Not even an overlay of sweaty panic. Psy liked to pretend they were cold until death but he knew very well that they screamed, same as everyone else. Santano Enrique had screamed … until Dorian had sliced off his tongue.
Knives held with familiar ease, he strode into the clearing. The group of lynx turned, their snarls promising tearing pain. He waited for them to recognize him. They hesitated—long enough to stop mauling whatever it was they had under their claws. He knew what they were thinking. There was only one of him, ten of them.
He growled, letting the trapped leopard in him sound through his vocal cords. It was a growl of anger, of fury, of domination. The lynx cringed but didn’t leave.
Damn.
He didn’t want to kill them. This was their land as much as it was his.
She
was the intruder, here and in his life—in his fucking dreams. But he’d deal with his crap himself. He wasn’t going to take an easy out and stand by while she was being ripped to shreds.
He growled again, putting menace into it.
Get out or die.
They knew him, knew the warning would be carried through. It didn’t matter that he was latent, unable to shift into the leopard form that was his other half. No, to these creatures, he was simply another cat. He smelled like one. He ran like one. He hunted like one.
And he killed like one.
One by one, the tufted-ear felines gave disgruntled snarls and wandered off. He waited—knives in hand—until he was certain of their surrender. Then he approached the tree where they had been savaging their prey. He stopped. The concentration of smell was wrong. Freezing, he analyzed what his senses were telling him. Almost smiled. And slipped into the deepest shadows. So fast that he would’ve been a blur to the eyes watching him.
Cloaking himself in the darkness, he moved as he spoke, well aware a Psy could kill with a single targeted mental blow. “I suggest you come down unless you want me to leave you here. The blood will prove an irresistible draw to the lynx.”
Silence. Did she think he didn’t know where she was?
“What I want to know is where did a Psy learn how to climb?” He stopped at an angle to the branch where she was perched, able to see one sneakered foot.
“A gymnasium climbing machine,” came the cool answer. “I’m afraid I’ll have difficulty with the return trip.”
He didn’t move, fighting his beast’s instinctive need to protect. “Clawed?”
“Or bitten. On my calf.”
He could hear movement now, knew she was attempting to make her way back down. The cat in him was chauvinistic. It liked to help women. And this woman, it wanted to bite, taste, savor. But that cat, despite its inexplicable and deeply sexual pull toward the icy Ashaya Aleine, was also a cool, calculating predator that knew one of the Silent had killed blood of its blood, heart of its heart. Forgiveness was impossible. “We’re even,” he said, staying in place. “The debt has been paid.”
A pause. “My son is safe?”
No emotion in that. So why had she asked the question? “We keep our promises.”
“I don’t know who you are. Only that you’re Talin McKade’s friend.” A burst of blood scent, followed by the sound of cloth sliding over wood.
He kept watch, ready to catch her if she fell. “How did you keep the cats from climbing up? There’s blood up the trunk, along the branch. Catnip.”
She didn’t return his verbal volley for several seconds and he heard labored breathing. “I hit them with short bursts of Tp, enough to discourage.”
His hackles rose. “Why not just smash their minds, turn their brains to jelly?” Psy had done exactly that in the past. It was why changelings had a policy of kill first, question later, with the emotionless race.
Another pause, more pained breathing. He guessed she’d reached the trunk, and was bracing herself to come down. The scent of iron had become darker, richer. She was bleeding badly. Instinct and anger collided, fought, came away scratched and torn.
“Not all Psy are born equal,” she said, her voice taut with strain. “I only have enough Tp to have kept them away from me one at a time. The big burst I tried was barely enough to give me time to climb—even then, they recovered fast.”
“You don’t have to be a powerful telepath to kill.” He was climbing the tree before he’d consciously made the decision to help her.
“No, but you need to have the ability to focus your other abilities in a lethal fashion. It’s a talent in itself. One I don’t have.” Her voice quieted. “Why am I giving away so much information?”
He reached the top to find her with her eyes closed, her legs straddling the branch. “Because,” he said, watching those eyes snap open, “you’re tired and weak from blood loss.” He pulled her toward him. “Shift the leg over.”
She obeyed, until she was sitting with both legs on one side. “I may not have the strength to make the climb.”
He put one arm under her thighs, the other at her back. And jumped. He landed on his feet, absorbing the shock of the sudden impact with the feline grace built into his genes. He confused medical personnel, had done so since childhood. Everything about him was cat, except that he couldn’t become the very thing he was. He’d never run on four feet, never felt the wind rustle through his fur, never bitten down on the neck of prey, taking it down in a furious rush of adrenaline and hunger.
“Impressive.”
He glanced down at the woman in his arms but didn’t speak as he lowered her body to the ground. She sat up, her hands going to her right calf. From the amount of blood, he knew she’d need stitches at the very least. Grabbing the pack the lynx had been mauling, he began to undo the closures. “Do you have a first aid kit in here?” Made of a durable material, the pack had survived relatively unscathed. If there was no kit, he could at least grab something with which to wrap her bloody leg.
“I don’t know,” Ashaya said.
The first thing he found was a small stunner. It didn’t bother him—he was too fast to make an easy target. And, since she didn’t appear to have claws of her own, having a weapon was smart. But—“Doesn’t do you much good in the pack.”
“Unfortunately, I appear to have forgotten to prepare for a wild animal attack.”
Ice and bite.
Both sparked along his nerves like wild lightning. When he met her gaze, he realized her eyes were dark. It had been night the one and only other time he’d seen her, but he was certain that wasn’t her real eye color. “Your disguise is good,” he commented, undoing the snap on the main section of the pack. “It’d be even better if you got rid of those braids. Psy never leave their hair out if it’s the least bit uncontrollable.”
“Mine is more than a little uncontrollable.”
He could feel her watching him as he went through her things. Luck was with her—he found the small kit emblazoned with the
globally recognized red cross symbol within seconds. The tube of dry antiseptic was right on top. “Lie on your stomach. It’s the easiest way to get this stuff in.” He kept his voice controlled and to the point, though his leopard was trying to shove through his skin, agitated by the scent of her blood. “Quickly.”
She turned and lay down on the carpet of dry pine needles without argument. Using one of his knives, he sliced away the shredded material above the wound and dusted the antiseptic over it. The fast-acting stuff melted, clotting up the wound within seconds. “This’ll give us time to get you to a medic.” The antiseptic was an emergency measure. It healed nothing, its function being to keep bacteria from getting in and blood from leaking out. The fact that it was working meant the lynx hadn’t damaged anything major.
The kit also came with a stack of “thin skin” bandages. Despite the nickname, the bandages were as tough as stretched steel. “Any pain?” he asked as he wrapped one around her calf, unaccountably infuriated by the damage done to her smooth skin.
“Nothing medically significant.”
He sat back on his haunches and watched her get back up into a sitting position. Her eyes went to his handiwork. “You’ve had some training.”
He bit back the urge to snarl at her frigid tone. The ice of it was a fist around his cock, arousing him against all reason, all sense. “First aid.” He shrugged, stuffed everything back into her pack, then paused. “You need anything from here?”
“Everything.”
“Tough.” He did up the straps. “I have to carry you as it is—”
“I can—”
“Yeah, you can crawl,” he snapped, “but that isn’t going to get me home in time to catch a few z’s.” And nowhere near fast enough to contain the leopard’s enraged attempts at exploding from within his skin. He couldn’t shift, had never been able to. But the cat didn’t know it was trapped. Right now, it wasn’t even sure if it wanted to savage Ashaya or fuck her. “Since I can’t dump you here, I might as well get rid of you as fast as I can.”
It was a deliberate attempt to provoke, but her face, a face that had haunted his dreams for two months, remained expressionless. Two damn months, he thought again. Endless nights of waking in a sweat, frustrated and hard. And angry, so
angry
.
The sole thing that had kept him from going out and hunting her down had been an enraged defiance against a sexual pull that had begun to turn into an obsession.
Now here she sat, looking up at him with those eyes that were the wrong color—and that blatant lie only stoked his fury.
“You have a lot of antipathy toward me.”
No, what he had was a bad case of lust. But he wasn’t an animal in rut. And his one stupid, drunken mistake in college aside, he didn’t sleep with women who might just freeze his balls off in the night. “I’m going to stash your pack up in the branches. The lynx won’t come near it now that it has my scent on it. Someone can grab it for you tomorrow.”
Ashaya didn’t argue, knowing she had nothing with which to bargain. “Another debt?” She’d recognized his voice at once as that of the sniper. After all, she’d been hearing it in her dreams for eight long weeks.
“Don’t worry. We’ll collect.” With those words, he shrugged into the pack and began climbing.
She couldn’t believe the way he moved. It was so smooth, it appeared effortless. He was ten times faster than she had been, a hundred times more graceful. If she’d had any doubts as to what he was, they would’ve been wiped away by that display. “Changeling,” she said as he jumped back down. “Cat.”
He raised an eyebrow, his eyes a pitiless blue so true—even in this darkness—that she wondered at its existence. “Meow.”
Something hidden sparked to life in her mind, and she found herself thinking that the sniper was beautiful. Darkness, she’d always cloaked him in darkness, but he was a golden god. “How did you know I was here?” Her breath came in pants as she managed to get to her feet, one hand braced against the tree trunk. Her palm landed on something sticky. Her own blood, she realized.
“I’m an F-Psy.” A mocking answer. “You’re going to have to ride on my back. Try not to stab me while you’re at it.” He came to her, turned.
The instant she put her hands on his shoulders, she froze. She hadn’t had this much close contact with another being for longer than she could remember. Even with Keenan, she’d kept her distance, aware that only Silent coldness would keep him safe. But there was no point of comparison between her weakness where
Keenan was concerned and this changeling who seemed to despise her.
And yet who fascinated her on a level it was madness to even consider.
This close, she could see that his hair was a blond so pure it was white gold, but that was the lone hint of softness in him. The body under her hands was hard, sleek with muscle. She had the sudden, visceral realization that he could snap her in two without thinking about it. Her stomach clenched in dangerous physical reaction, a reaction she should’ve been able to suppress.
“You waiting for an engraved invitation?” An almost lazy question, but she could feel his intelligence probing at her.
“No.” Putting her erratic thoughts down to blood loss, she shifted her weight … and almost collapsed. “I can’t jump up.”
His hands slid around and to the backs of her thighs. “Now.” As he lifted, she tried to push upward with her uninjured leg. Her contribution proved unnecessary—he was so strong, he had her legs wrapped around him with one pull.
“Hold on.” That was his only warning before he started to run.
Her arms tightened instinctively. She was vividly conscious that he was moving at a pace equivalent to that of a high-speed vehicle. If they crashed into one of the huge trees looming up ahead, their necks would snap. It would’ve made sense to close her eyes but she couldn’t. She needed to see where they were going, even if there was—
A sharp stab at her mind, something … someone, trying to claw in.
Amara.
She reacted almost automatically, relying on years of experience to throw up roadblocks created with the impenetrable chill of Silence. There was no way she could hide the fact of her “resurrection” from Amara, but the other woman couldn’t be allowed to slip into her mind, could
never
be allowed to learn that Keenan was still alive.
“You asleep?” The sniper whipped around to look at her, barely avoiding a tree trunk.
Every muscle in her body locked, and she realized her trainers had lied. It wasn’t possible to suppress any and all physical responses if you had enough strength of will. Ashaya had turned
her blood glacial over the years, and still, her body reacted to the threat of pain. “Don’t you think you should watch where you’re going?”
Laughter that she felt more than heard. It vibrated through the disturbing intimacy of their aligned bodies, threatening her conditioning on a level that could prove deadly. And yet she didn’t ask to be put down—it would betray too much, put her entire plan in jeopardy. She gave in to another compulsion instead, one born of the part of her mind that had awakened at fourteen and never returned to sleep. “What’s your name?”