Before he could respond, Zara called out his name. Giving her a wave, he said, “Who said the Psy can’t be anything else?”
Sascha didn’t speak
again until Lucas was on the other side of the site. “Nature.” The ragged whisper revealed the best-kept secret of their race. Like the rest of the Psy, she was dependent on the PsyNet for every breath she took. Cut off from it for much longer than a minute or two, she’d die a miserable death. And if her flaw were discovered, she’d be sentenced to living death through rehabilitation. Her only hope of survival was to become more Psy than the Psy, to become . . . unbreakable.
This morning she’d gone to Nikita with the full intention of giving her everything she had. Filled with confusion and a kind of blind anger at a fate that had shown her glory and then told her she couldn’t have it, she’d convinced herself that if she betrayed DarkRiver, she’d redeem herself in Nikita’s eyes, at last be the daughter her mother had always wanted.
Yet when she’d opened her mouth to speak, all that had come out had been a string of lies. Every single one of them had been told to protect the changelings, to protect Lucas. They’d come from a hidden part of her she’d never before seen, a bright, hard knot of fierce loyalty and utter determination. That part wouldn’t let her do anything to hurt the panther who’d kissed her and smashed the glass walls of her existence into a million slivers.
It was then she’d realized that, for the first time in her life, she wanted something else even more than she wanted to belong. If only for a moment, if only for a second, she wanted to be loved.
What a futile, impossible dream for a Psy.
She would never have it, but she could at least help this race which knew
how
to love. Perhaps that would be enough to feed the need in her soul. Perhaps.
Lucas allowed Sascha
to keep her distance as they finished the measurements, but he had no intention of letting her withdraw. He’d never been very good at following orders.
“Don’t,” she’d said when he’d tried to touch her. Not because she was one of the untouchable Psy but because she was something more—a woman who felt. If he hadn’t been convinced of that after their kiss, he would’ve been left in no doubt after her confession. He hadn’t forgiven her for even contemplating betrayal, but that didn’t mean he was going to let her go.
He couldn’t
.
She was his. The idea of watching her walk away was simply not tolerable. He might’ve been blinkered to the facts before now, but the fire of his rage at the thought of her selling him out had ripped the blinkers from his eyes. The truth had hit him like a slap. As much as Sascha might react to him, he definitely reacted to
her
—physically, mentally, and sexually.
What she didn’t know, because he’d been very careful not to let her agile mind figure it out, was that he didn’t touch easily outside Pack. He hadn’t been joking about skin privileges. Yes, he was more tactile than the Psy, but he didn’t get affectionately intimate with those who were not his. Yet from the first, he’d found himself playing with her as he might play with a woman who’d aroused his most primitive instincts. Never had he treated her as the enemy deserved to be treated.
Part of him continued to resist the idea of what Sascha meant to him, really meant to him. That part had been tortured, broken, almost destroyed. It didn’t want to open itself up, didn’t want to permit a vulnerability that could lead to a harsher pain. Paradoxically, it was that same part which understood what this Psy was to him, and it was that same part which couldn’t let her go.
Only one thing was certain—he was keeping her.
“Have you had lunch?” he asked at around one thirty, as they prepared to leave the site.
She continued heading to her car, parked several meters from the others. “I’m fine.”
“You didn’t answer my question.” He could play this game just as well as his Psy.
“I have an energy bar in the car.” Reaching her sleek vehicle, she went to open the door.
He stopped her by the simple expedient of putting his hand on hers.
“Don’t,” she said again, pulling away.
“Why not?”
She didn’t answer but he saw a spark light those eyes. That temper of hers was flickering again, bringing her back to life. What he’d give to see her in full fury. “Come with me to Tammy’s. She was asking about you.” The healer had taken an unusually strong interest in Sascha.
“I don’t think that would be wise.” Her face was cool but he could hear the whispers of her soul, the panther in him attuned to every nuance of her body.
Leaning close, he whispered, “Don’t worry—the cubs are off visiting family.” In truth, they’d been spirited away to safety with the rest of DarkRiver’s young. Something was going to break soon and the worst-case scenario equaled massive bloodshed. But for this one moment he allowed himself to play, aware that he was standing with the lone woman who might be able to stop the carnage. “Your boots are safe.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Grinning at the bold-faced lie, he tapped her cheek. “Zara’s already taken my car back to the office. Keys?” He held out his hand.
She crossed her arms. “You have a short memory.”
“Only for things I don’t want to remember. Do you know the way?”
Her expression clearly said that that was a stupid question. “Get in.”
Lucas let her give him the order, aware he’d won the first skirmish in their very private battle. However, it was a battle he could only continue if they won the much more dangerous war hanging over their heads.
Sascha waited until
they were on their way to bring up the subject preying on her mind. “Have you learned more?”
Lucas didn’t try to pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about. His sudden fury was so pure and taut that she felt like she could reach out and touch it. What amazed her was that there was no confusion in that anger.
Lucas could think through his feelings, displaying a strength of will beyond anything she knew. She was barely skirting the edges of emotion and already it felt like a yawning abyss at her feet, ready to suck her in and spit her back out battered, bruised, and possibly dead.
“The SnowDancer he took is a twenty-year-old female. Brenna was on the way to classes at a private school at the time she was taken. When she didn’t arrive, a packmate in the same class sent out an alert.”
“What was she studying?” She filed away the data—she’d need it to narrow down the search parameters in the Net. At the same time, she reached out with her psychic senses and soothed the jagged edges of his anger. It was done so instinctively that she was barely aware of it.
“Repair and maintenance of computronic systems, concentrating on communication consoles.”
“Intelligent,” she muttered.
“Yes, that’s part of his pattern.”
“When?”
“It must’ve been around noon because that was the time Brenna would’ve been on the path from where she was taken—she usually cut through a small park in her neighborhood.”
“So someone could’ve picked up her habits?”
“Yes. But to abduct her in broad daylight speaks of extreme confidence. The park isn’t large or particularly wooded. He could’ve been seen from several angles.”
“Yet he wasn’t.” If he was Psy, then there were things he could’ve done to hide himself. “A Tk-Psy with the ability to teleport could’ve taken her out with him.”
“Tk?”
“Telekinetic.”
“How much power would that take?”
“More than most Psy have. I doubt it was done that way.”
“Why?”
“Strong telekinetics can transport themselves easily but taking along another person is difficult, especially if they won’t give you entry into their mind to ease the psychic transition.”
She’d learned all this during elementary school, when the different skills had still been in the same classes. Before the other cardinals had gone on to specialize and she’d been left alone to hone what pitiful skills she had, an embarrassment no one wanted to acknowledge.
“Could he have forced her mind open?” Lucas stretched out his legs and linked his arms around the back of the headrest. The lazy movement made her want to reach out and pet him . . . as she’d done in those forbidden dreams.
Clenching her hands
on the wheel, she shook her head. “She’s a changeling. That immediately doubles the difficulty, and even for a cardinal, forcing open a mind is already one of the most difficult of tasks. If you don’t care about killing the victim, it can be done with a massive burst of power, but he wanted her alive.” So he could torture her.
Sascha took a deep breath and forced herself to continue. “Plus to do that
and
teleport her would’ve taken enough power to lay him up for days. I haven’t heard of any strong Psy in that condition. That sort of thing, a Psy flaming out, tends to create a buzz in the Net.” She tapped the wheel. “He could’ve just planned it carefully and had a vehicle nearby. A lot of human serial killers function that way.”
“That’s what the SnowDancers think. They’ve found a witness who saw an unfamiliar large vehicle with muddied license plates.” He rolled down his window as they entered a leafier part of the city. “Enforcement doesn’t know. Except for the detectives working underground, this time nobody’s even bothering to pretend to carry on an investigation.”
The conceit of whoever it was who was controlling Enforcement stuck a spear into the bubble of hope Sascha had been carrying around that her people were innocent. “Were you able to identify the owner of the vehicle?”
“No.”
“What was she wearing when she was taken?”
Lucas’s scowl sounded in his voice. “Why do you need to know that?”
“The PsyNet is full of information. Anything that helps narrow things down might be useful.” There was no way to explain the Net to those who hadn’t experienced it. It was a mass of data and the only controlling factor was the influence of the NetMind, which tried to make order from chaos. An entity that had evolved into its own separate sentience, it wasn’t
alive
but it thought in a way that took it beyond mere machinery.
“Blue jeans, white shirt, black sneakers.”
She shot him a glance. “I didn’t expect you to have that information at your fingertips.”
“An alert’s already gone out to every changeling clan in the region, friendly or not, warning of the killer’s proximity and asking for assistance. This is Brenna’s photo.” He slid the glossy hard copy out from the pocket of his jacket but waited to hand it to her until she’d pulled up at a stop-light.
She took it with a feeling of inexplicable dread. The woman was laughing in the picture, her brown eyes brilliant with amusement, her head thrown back. Sunlight glinted off the pure blond strands of her straight hair and highlighted the curves of her body. She was short, perhaps five-four, but there was such life in her that she seemed to dwarf the two men in the photo with her.
“The males are her older brothers—Riley and Andrew,” Lucas said when she handed back the picture. “According to the SnowDancer alpha, they’re homicidal.”
The light changed as she tried not to give in to the despair she’d felt from touching that photo. It was as if Brenna had reached out and pulled her into the hell she was undergoing.
Brenna
. A name. A face. A sentient being. “He wants to steal her life,” she whispered.
“After torturing her.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” She turned down the leafy lane that would eventually lead to Tamsyn’s home.
“What, then?”
“She appears so vibrant, so full of joy and
life
. He wants to take that from her, wants to keep it for himself.”
Silence in the car.
“I don’t know how I know that. I just do.” She came to a stop outside the sprawling house she’d visited once before.
“He must be driven by the most poisonous rage.” She hadn’t felt any such emotion in that odd, fleeting moment when she’d seemingly been sucked into Brenna’s world, but what else could drive one being to so savage another?
“He doesn’t know what rage is.”
She turned to look at Lucas, not frightened by his open blood-hunger. There was something clean about it, something real. “No one who feels the dark things he must is going to be able to hide it forever. He’s going to break sooner or later.”
Lucas’s eyes were hard green crystals. “For all our sakes it better be sooner. The clock is ticking.”
Tamsyn was edgy.
“I miss the cubs,” she said to Lucas the second he walked in.
Hugging her, he tried to lend her some of his strength. Sascha stood quiet beside him but he felt the stirring at the base of his nape. It was, he realized, an almost constant feeling around her, so constant that he’d hardly been noticing. Something about Sascha gave off a low-level indication of Psy power in continual use.
Exactly what the heck was his Psy up to? Despite her unsuccessful attempt at betrayal, he wasn’t immediately suspicious. The panther said that she was safe and the panther ’s instincts had never been wrong. Tamsyn took a deep breath and let go of him after several minutes.
“Better?” he asked, brushing her hair off her face. Every time he looked into those healer’s eyes, his heart broke a little and then rejoined. She was a persistent reminder of the mother he’d lost but she was also a reminder of the goodness Shayla had been.
She nodded. “I made Nate go to work. Stupid.” With that, she turned to head to her domain—the kitchen.
Sascha waited until Tammy was out of earshot. “If having the cubs away from her makes her this anxious, why did she let them go in the first place?”
“Overprotectiveness isn’t good for predatory changelings.” He’d been guilty of making that mistake, especially in the months after Kylie’s death. His need to keep his people safe, to not lose anyone ever again, had threatened to suffocate them. He’d caught himself before he’d caused irreparable damage but it was a fault he had to guard against day in and day out.