“I’m not that brittle.” Her face was smooth, showing no sign of her earlier panic. “I had to learn how to keep it together. I was underground in that lab for a long time.”
He felt a layer of deepest respect coat his understanding of this woman who’d gotten to him from day one. “How did you do it?”
“When something has to be borne, there’s no choice.” She looked to him. “You know that better than anyone.”
He gave a slight nod. His latency—what it had cost him, what it demanded from him—was something he rarely discussed. He was who he was and people had learned to accept that. But Ashaya had a right to an answer after he’d scared her that badly. “And you had a son to protect.”
Her face softened in a way that was everything female, speaking to a part of him that had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with tenderness. “Yes. The worst mistake the Council made was taking him from me.” She held out her free hand. “Give me the letter.”
He handed it over, amazed but unsurprised by her strength. “What does it say?”
“ ‘Hide and seek, hide and seek. Boo! I seeked you!’ ” Ashaya glanced up. “It’s what I thought—she has a lock on me, but she hasn’t told the searchers the precise location.”
Nodding, Dorian punched in a familiar code on his cell. “I need an extraction. Quiet.” He gave the details of their location.
“The Rats’ tunnel—” Clay began.
“Not an option.”
The other sentinel didn’t argue. “I’m sending one of the vans to pick you up. It’ll be”—a pause—“an old ice-cream one.”
“Thanks.”
“You can swap to a normal vehicle once you’re out of the immediate danger zone—it’s the Council’s spies, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. You heard anything?”
“They’re sniffing, but they don’t have the scent. We know where they are and we’re letting them know that, too. Five minutes.” Clay hung up.
Dorian told Ashaya what was happening, then picked up the thread of their earlier conversation. “Now, tell me about your sister and why she can track you when the others can’t.”
“It’s complicated.” She pulled at her hand. “Please, let go. The more physical contact I have with you, the harder it becomes to maintain what shields I have left. One slip and the Council won’t have any need to physically hunt me—they’ll find and cage my mind.”
Releasing her hurt. The leopard clawed at the inside of his skin, until Dorian could almost feel skin break and muscle tear. “Start.”
She looked at him with cool brilliance. “You have a habit of doing that—treating me like someone subservient. I’m not.”
“I’m used to dominance. It’s part of what makes me a sentinel.” Only the strongest of the pack became sentinels. They had to be the alpha’s protectors, his enforcers if need be.
“Then become unused to it in my presence,” was the immediate response. “I’m not part of your pack and even if I were, I would hold equal rank.”
He felt his lips curve upward. “That certain of your strength, Shaya?”
“I saw the respect you showed Tamsyn. Yet she’s nowhere near as physically strong. Therefore, your pack gives women high rank. Given my abilities and focus, yes, I’m certain.”
He bowed his head in a slight nod. “Point taken. But I still want to know about your sister and you still have to tell me. Right now you’re a refugee seeking sanctuary. DarkRiver’s giving it to you for a number of reasons, but we won’t do it blindly—protecting our young comes first.
Choose.
” He held back the other truth—that she was going nowhere without him. The leopard wanted to keep her. And that, Dorian knew, spelled a very special kind of trouble.
“What about Keenan?” she asked, eyes locked with his. “If I don’t tell you what you want to know, will you withdraw protection from him, too?”
He heard the smooth engine of an arriving van. “I think the
real question is—will you keep hiding what we need to protect him effectively?”
She sucked in a breath just as he jerked his head toward the door. “Transport’s here. Come on.”
He was aware of her jogging behind him as he ran to the door and pushed it up. The van had been backed up right against it. “In,” he ordered, pulling open the vehicle’s back doors. As she scrambled inside the seatless interior, he closed up the warehouse and followed, pulling the van doors shut behind him. They were moving an instant later.
“Where are we heading?” he asked, recognizing the driver’s scent as that of Rina, Kit’s sister and one of the younger Dark-River soldiers.
“Out to the Presidio. Jamie’s gonna meet us there with a car for you. Okay?”
“Works.” He propped his back against the side wall of the van, aware of Ashaya attempting to do the same across from him. Stretching out his legs, he braced his feet on either side of her. She didn’t hesitate to put her hands on him. “You couldn’t find something with better suspension?” Not that he minded Shaya’s touch, but his teeth were about to rattle out of his head.
“Oh, hold on.” A few mechanical groans, the slight jolt of wheels retracting, and then the ride smoothed out. “I turned on the hover-drive. Barker told me this vehicle’s not really meant to be run on wheels. Sorry, forgot.” A sheepish sound.
“You’re doing fine.” Rina was under his direct command, and now that she’d figured out he was immune to her sensual nature, she was turning into a good protector for the pack. If the girl learned to control her quick-fire temper, she’d become one of the best. He switched his attention to Ashaya, keeping his legs where they were. “Better?”
She nodded, looked toward the front, then shook her head. Strangely, he understood. She would tell him her secrets but not with a witness. He’d accept that. But he’d keep nothing from his packmates that they needed to know—Ashaya was smart enough to have figured that out.
“Did you troll the message boards like I asked?” he said to Rina, keeping his tone low because changeling hearing was acute in close quarters.
“Yeah. Hold on.” Rina made a sharp turn. “Found out something
you might be interested in—you know how we thought there had to be backup root servers since the Internet was only down for thirty seconds?”
“Yeah?”
“Word is there’s a network of paranoid computer hackers who’ve made it their business to set up secret fallback servers all around the world.”
Dorian considered that. “Paranoia isn’t always a bad thing.”
“So says a computer geek,” Rina teased. “Anyway, Ashaya’s broadcast is doing the rounds—we uploaded a perfect version to make sure. Council seems to have given up trying to keep it under wraps.”
“Then I was a success,” Ashaya said.
Rina made a noise in the front. “I dunno. A lot of the posters are questioning whether you’re for real or just a publicity hound. Then there are the ones who accuse you of being a vindictive bitch because you were taken off a multimillion-dollar research project in favor of another scientist.”
“So”—Ashaya’s eyes filled with a quiet intensity—“since they weren’t able to stop the broadcast, they’re going to try to discredit me.”
“You knew that would happen.” Dorian watched her, examined her, knowing he’d never have a better opportunity. She was beautiful, something her intense intelligence had a tendency to overshadow. And beautiful in a very feminine way. Yet there was something missing—the spark that turned beauty into the truly extraordinary.
He knew what that spark was, of course, knew it was missing because he’d seen it light her up from within bare minutes ago.
Emotion.
Heart.
Soul.
Ashaya had retreated, rebuilding her shields as she went. She’d said it was necessary but he wasn’t convinced. He didn’t
want
to be convinced. Because the woman who’d told him to get unused to ordering her around, hell, she was just about perfect.
“You ask me, you have to do another broadcast pretty soon,” Rina said, breaking into his thoughts. “Right now it looks like you’ve cut and run, and that’s not exactly good for your image.”
“I’m not particularly concerned about my image.”
Dorian shook his head. “You might not be, but it’s what’s going to keep you alive.”
“My becoming infamous hasn’t kept them from hunting me.”
“It’s given them pause.” He considered what Zie Zen had said. “It’s probably why you’re not on the kill-on-sight list right now.”
“Possible. But more likely, they want access to the data I have. Ming is perfectly capable of siphoning it out of my mind and leaving me an empty husk.”
Dorian looked at her face, her slender shoulders, and knew she had the strength to carry this burden. “You’ll beat him. You made a stand when it would’ve been easier to run. That takes guts.”
“You know why I didn’t run.” Iliana had run. She’d returned home in a body bag.
“That doesn’t mean it took any less courage to go out there and fight for your son’s right to live, your people’s right to have a choice in whether or not they become nothing more than insects in a hive.” He quoted her with unerring accuracy.
Ashaya broke eye contact. Dorian saw too much with that vivid blue gaze. “I’m not that noble. I did what I did out of selfishness—to save Keenan.”
He shrugged. “I fight monsters to protect Pack. They aren’t any less dead because I do what I do out of a selfish need to save those I love.”
“People who stick up their heads have a way of getting those heads blown off,” she said, clenching her hands on the denim that coated the muscled length of his legs.
“I’ve got your back.” There was a promise in those words that whispered down her spine with the exquisite heat of a leopard’s touch. “You want us to set up another broadcast?”
She swallowed, but nodded.
“We’re here.” The driver brought the vehicle to a smooth stop.
Dorian was already moving. She’d come to expect that from him. He could wait with a predator’s silent grace, but in life he was full of movement. Now she watched as he pushed open the back doors and jumped down. When he raised a hand to help her out, she shook her head and gestured for him to go on ahead to speak with his packmates. Her shields were already paper-thin. Much more and they’d be nonexistent. And to think how
arrogant she’d once been, considering her defense of faux Silence unbreakable.
What a joke.
Of course it had been unbreakable in the Net. There was no one there who lived emotion every moment of every day, no one who challenged her as this wild changeling did. Other than her indefinable relationship with Amara, only Keenan had been a point of emotional weakness, and Ming had cut her off from him for months at a time.
Her lips pressed tight as her feet hit the ground and she knew that, no matter what, she would never again let anyone keep her son from her. It had almost broken her when the connection between them had been sheared off. She wasn’t strong enough to bear the loss a second time.
The connection.
In the chaos of everything that had taken place, she hadn’t even thought about how she’d known to go to Keenan this morning. The link had shattered—she’d never forget the tearing pain of it—when he’d dropped from the PsyNet. And since that link should never have existed in the first place, she had no way to search for it. Yet she knew it had re-formed—the knowledge had nothing to do with logic, and everything to do with love.
A hand on her lower back. Dorian’s voice in her ear. “Get in the car. It’s around the front.”
They pulled away less than a minute later. “This is a longer route to Tammy’s,” Dorian said. “I want to make sure we don’t have a tail.”
Heading into the shadows created by the tall stands of trees that covered the Presidio, he put the car on automatic. While most forested regions weren’t embedded for automatic navigation, this area was close enough to the city that it was a wild playground of sorts, hence the embedding, at least along the main route through it.
“Now,” he said, sliding away the manual controls and turning to face her, his arm braced on the seat behind her, “tell me about your twin.”
Amara’s lips curled
upward when Ming LeBon’s face appeared on the large communications panel at the other end of the lab, a lab located somewhere in Death Valley—they’d moved her there after she’d told them she could find Ashaya, but only if she was in the same state. It was a lie, of course. One that got her closer to her twin. “Councilor. I trust your hunt was successful.”
Ming looked at her with those too black eyes of his. Conversely, one side of his face was covered in a bright red birthmark. Some problem with pigmentation, Amara thought, unconcerned. Very few things concerned Amara.
“No,” Ming finally replied. “Your coordinates were incorrect.”
“Truly?” Amara played innocent. “She was there.”
“There were indications she might’ve been in the area. But the net was too wide.”
“Ah.” She smiled and spread her arms open, palms upturned. “I’ll try to do better next time.”
“I would rather you tell me how you’re able to track her in the first place.”
Raising a finger, she waved it in a chiding manner. “No, no, no. That would break the rules.”
“Rules?”
“Oh, no, Councilor.” Amara laughed, and it was a premeditated act. “We both know I’m not quite right in the head.” She took a cold delight in being deliberately offensive to his calculating Psy mind. “But it doesn’t affect my intelligence so don’t treat me like I have the IQ of one of the rehabilitated.”
“My apologies.”
She knew the words were meaningless. He was humoring her because he thought she could hand him the implant that would allow him to control the entire Psy race. Perhaps he would share it with the other Councilors. Perhaps he wouldn’t. It made no difference to Amara. “As to how I track Ashaya, I—” She broke off with a theatrical gasp. “Oops, I almost let the cat out of the bag. Naughty me.”
Ming stared at her and she wondered if he expected her to break. However, when he spoke, it was nothing expected. “You and Ashaya are identical genetic specimens. You gestated in the same womb, were brought up in the same environment.”
“Until you made me run away.” She pouted. “Why did you have to go put a rehab order on me?”