“You’re talking about loyalty.” His voice was uncharacteristically toneless, but she could feel the coiled intensity of his beast as if it were a third being between them.
“Maybe it’s not your kind of loyalty, but it is loyalty.”
“You’re right,” he said, surprising her. “But, baby, loyalty has to be earned and honored. Your PsyClan will one day lock you up in a mental institution and call it care.”
She knew he hadn’t said that to be cruel. Her jaguar was merely using every weapon in his arsenal. “Maybe they won’t,” she said, silently pleading with him to lie to her, to make this easy. “If you and Sascha are right, then I won’t go insane if I embrace my true abilities, if I accept that the darkness will come for me at times.”
He shook his head. “What happens the first time you see a vision of murder and realize you’re part of the body that’s going to authorize it?”
A shadowy realization took form in her mind, but faded away before she could grasp it. “Why would the Council—?”
“Sascha calls them anchors. Apparently your PsyNet needs them, but for some reason they’re the ones most likely to fall victim to one of the lesser-known side effects of Silence—murderous sociopathy.”
“You’re saying the Council feeds their need to kill.” Her heart was a rock crushing her chest from the inside out.
“We know they do.” His eyes had gone night-glow, beautiful and wild.
She didn’t doubt him—Vaughn was too much animal to lie. “Why?” Why would they continue to support the Protocol if it had proven so fundamentally flawed?
“Because they can.” A cruelly honest answer.
And one she couldn’t hide from. The Council had been the Psy race’s absolute law for over a hundred years. Before Silence, rebellion and dispute had apparently spouted freely in the Net, keeping their rulers in check. Now no one dared to speak and no one kept watch. “Say you’re right about everything. Can you imagine how much good I could do from the inside? I could work for the freedom of my race from a position of real power.”
“And if you cut free, you might sow the seeds of a revolution so your people, your pack, could fight for themselves.”
“They’ll never let me go.”
“No one could stop me from getting you out if you said yes.”
Say it,
his eyes urged,
say yes.
Faith fought the need inside of her that wanted to obey, a hungry, desperate, painful thing. “I need to think. Just let me think.”
“Alone, Red?”
She hated that the darkness had reduced her to this, to a cowering creature afraid to close her own eyes. “Yes.”
No more,
she thought, furious.
No more.
“Always, Faith. Always.”
She watched him leave via the skylight. He remained in human form, but was no less graceful, no less magnificent. The play of muscle under his skin was pure beauty, enticing, coaxing, seducing. Her fingers uncurled without her conscious knowledge and she reached for him.
But he was already gone.
CHAPTER 18
Faith had barely
gotten dressed the next day when she felt a polite but firm telepathic page. Her eyes widened. The touch was unfamiliar and only one group of individuals had the right to contact anyone they wished in this manner.
This is Faith NightStar.
Your presence is requested in the Council chambers. Authentication documents have been sent to your personal inbox.
Yes, sir.
She knew the mind was male and guessed it to be Marshall Hyde, the most senior member of the Council.
You will be escorted there.
The telepathic link terminated.
The first thing she did was check her inbox—she wouldn’t put it past Krychek to use such tactics to ambush her. But there it was, the unforgeable reality of the Council seal. Cheeks blazing alternately hot and cold, she told the M-Psy not to disturb her under any circumstances and tried to calm her disordered thought processes. Nothing of her confusion could be allowed to leak through. Nothing.
Choosing a chair near the curtained window as her seat, she took a deep breath and entered the PsyNet without her cloak of anonymity. Today, she had to blaze cardinal bright, a silent statement of strength. Two minds were waiting for her. If she’d been in her body, the hairs on the back of her neck might’ve risen in primeval warning, there was something so intrinsically disturbing about them. As they led her link by link toward the dark core at the center of the Net, she considered whether she might be in the presence of two of the Arrow Squad.
Though their existence or nonexistence had never been confirmed, rumors of the unit had turned up repeatedly in the research materials she’d unearthed in her quest to understand the Council’s interest in her. Faced with two highly martial minds, neither of whom had identified themselves with anything other than a high-level Council imprint, she came to the reluctant conclusion that the Arrow Squad wasn’t merely an idle rumor.
The idea of a secret squad, one allegedly used to permanently silence the Council’s critics, among other things, hardly inspired confidence. But none of that could show in the mental face she presented to the Council, so she buried her musings on the irrelevant matter. The guards led her through the first two checkpoints in the central core, then handed her over to a second pair, who took her even deeper. But when the door to the final vault opened, she alone walked in.
The door shut behind her.
She was locked in with the blazing minds of the six most powerful and deadly beings in the PsyNet. Nikita Duncan with her mental viruses. Ming LeBon, famed for his skill at mental combat. Tatiana Rika-Smythe, rumored to have the rare ability to disrupt the deepest shields. She was the one Faith was most wary of, because if the speculation were true, Tatiana could disrupt first-level shields without the victim’s awareness.
Which was why Faith was shielded four times over. Perhaps it was an overreaction, but she didn’t want anyone learning her secrets . . . Vaughn’s secrets. In addition to the layering, she’d learned an unusual and highly effective way to make certain her shields never settled into a static pattern, and were therefore nearly impossible to predict and unravel. Sascha had taught it to her that night on the porch—before Faith had broken conditioning on the most intimate level.
“Faith.”
“Yes, sir.” She answered Marshall without pause, having kept her other thoughts in a hidden segment of her mind. While with the Council, she couldn’t afford to be anything but absolutely on guard.
“You’re aware by now that we’re considering you for Council membership.” Marshall’s mind was a blade, sharp enough to make others bleed.
“Yes, sir.” If Vaughn was right, then the Psy Council protected murderers to protect Silence. Maybe they’d appreciate her warnings, appreciate stopping the murders before they made waves in the Net. And then? Vaughn’s accusations of murder by official sanction rang in her brain. Those she might not be able to stop, those she might choose not to stop, because it was the will of the Council.
Her will.
Could she become that inhuman? The slow creep of horror rolled through her veins, tiny claws that ripped and caused biting pain. She didn’t want to think of her people that way, didn’t want to be part of a race that would condone such a thing.
“What are your thoughts on the matter?” Ming LeBon, the Council member who never appeared in any news broadcasts or had his name linked to any high-profile events, a frighteningly dangerous power behind the civilized public facade presented by Henry and Shoshanna Scott.
“I’m young,” she answered. “That may be seen as a vulnerability by certain sectors of the populace.” And she wasn’t equipped with the ruthless ability to kill. The thought of stealing a life, of not only accepting but sanctioning the sick evil of the darkness, nauseated her.
Yet she understood that Vaughn had killed and would do so again in defense of his people, perhaps even in defense of her. But that didn’t fill her with revulsion. Maybe because there was a difference between the brutal but honest law of the wild, and cool, clear-eyed murder to increase the power of the very people most apt to misuse it.
“That’s true. However, your shields are extremely strong. You appear to have the capability to withstand attack.” Tatiana’s comment seemed a substantiation of the rumors. Faith hadn’t felt a thing, but her shields had evidently been tested and deemed adequate. It made her want to shiver—how many people had had their minds picked clean by Tatiana without ever perceiving the violation?
“Your foresight skills will also come in very useful,” Marshall added.
No.
She would not lend her mind to the furtherance of goals meant to keep her people in bondage to a Silence that was false. In that one second, her decision was made. That was when she realized that no other option had ever been truly viable—only her fear of going out into the unknown had made it seem that way.
Now all she had to do was survive the Council.
“While I’m flattered at being considered a candidate, I’m not ready to die.” Not when she’d just learned to live. “I’m well aware that Kaleb Krychek is one of the other candidates. He’s had years in the Council ranks to perfect his skills.” The ability to get rid of competition chief among them.
“I have no wish to be made a target when he’s the Psy you really want. I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I could best him should he decide to guarantee his promotion by removing me from the equation.”
“So you admit you’re weak.” Shoshanna, who’d never been anything but an enemy. Faith’s core mind whispered a knowing down the bond that linked it to her roaming self—the blood had spread on Shoshanna’s hands. The future remained unchanged.
Admitting weakness to the Council was never a good idea. “I’m saying that if you want me to consider joining you, I won’t do so until I’ve come to . . . an understanding with Mr. Krychek.” Let them think she meant to take Kaleb out. Of course, if Shoshanna was backing Kaleb, then he’d be apprised of what she’d said seconds after she left this room, if not sooner.
Survival was going to become a dicey thing if she wasn’t careful. “What I won’t agree to is being used by the Council as a pawn to test Kaleb’s strength. Find another target to pin the bull’s-eye on.”
Her stomach was
a knot and her muscles ached, but she’d walked out alive. Faith knew she had very little time. Either Kaleb would get impatient and decide to push his own agenda or the Council would figure out what Faith was doing behind their backs. And what she was doing was hunting a murderer.
She refused to leave Marine’s killer free to take another life. Whoever he was, he was too strong, too mentally powerful. She had to pinpoint him before he figured out a way to circumvent her new protections, protections that held faint, dangerous tendrils of emotion. He might not have tortured her again with his fantasies of death, but it wasn’t for lack of trying—his darkness had been scratching at her mind for two days, wanting to show her what he would do.
Tonight, she was going to let him in.
But first she wanted to gather as much useful data as possible. Not for herself, but for the changelings, the only people who’d ever treated her as anything other than a highly profitable machine. “Vaughn.” Her jaguar’s name was a talisman. Fur brushed over her hands, lips pressed against her neck, the sensations so real that she wrapped them around her like a protective cloak as she closed her eyes and stepped out into the starry field of the PsyNet.
Minds bright and weak flickered around her, a thousand points of beauty and grace. Once again, she made no effort to hide herself, to pretend to be anything but what she was—a born cardinal, her star bright enough to burn. While no one seemed to trail her, she wasn’t stupid enough to think that the PsyClan wasn’t attempting to track her in some fashion.
She’d made a plan to deal with that, prewarned by the same sense that had told her to be on the Net tonight. It had to be tonight. She didn’t know why, but hoped it was because the murderer was going to make a mistake. For now, she was out here to do the simplest of things—to listen to the pulse of the Net, to hear the voices the Council couldn’t hear because they were too hushed, too secret.
But something didn’t make sense to her. It was often said that the NetMind had been trained to flag any conversations that might be of interest to the Council. So why wasn’t the Council cognizant of the brewing dissent, the embers of rebellion? And it was clear that they weren’t aware of it. Because if they had been, those voices would’ve been mercilessly Silenced, rehabilitated until they had barely enough neurons for simple tasks like eating and washing.
Spurred by thoughts of the Rehabilitation Center, she put her plan to attain privacy into action, streaking through time and space to a far-off sector of the Net. At the same time, she raised the firewalls that ensured her anonymity. To any watchers, it would appear as if she’d popped out of existence. A very simple way to evade trackers, but she’d never been to this public link, having recorded its imprint unobtrusively during her last foray, so maybe they didn’t have a way to trace her.
Arriving at the link, she circled around it to merge into the local data flows. There was nothing particularly interesting in the information, composed as it was of regional news and other bulletins, so she spun out of the flow and breezed through to a public chat room. The participants were discussing propulsion theory. She stayed anyway. That way, if she hadn’t been successful in shaking off her shadows, and did find what she was seeking, it wouldn’t look odd if she hung around, given the other things she’d listened to.
After all, she was an F-Psy. They were meant to be a little weird.
Propulsion theory was followed by a chat area devoted to the newest yoga master in the Net. Effective as it was in teaching Psy to focus their minds to laser sharpness, yoga was considered a highly useful exercise. Faith, however, had begun to form a different opinion as to why Psy gravitated toward what had once been an ancient spiritual discipline and it had nothing to do with focus. Maybe they were simply trying to find something to fill the void inside of them.