by Nalini Singh
Where was she?
He growled deep inside his chest, his wolf rising to the surface to alter his vision. Had anyone been looking at him, they’d have seen his gray eyes turn a shockingly pale amber shot through with shards of gold, his pupils pinpricks of black.
The effect was startling because of his dark eyelashes and eyebrows—quite unlike the “sun-gold” of his hair—as described by his aunt. Even wet, it didn’t darken much. Thank God the color didn’t translate into his wolf’s pelt; his packmates would’ve never let him live down being a fucking yellow wolf.
Agony, such agony.
Clenching his jaw, he tried to pick up any scent that denoted a living being. He caught hints of a small woodland creature and of a wild bird, but that was it. Only sodden vegetation, snow, and rock.
Hauling himself over a large jut of rock as the rain became a raging waterfall, he dropped down into an easy crouch on the other side. He found nothing but a thick pile of snow protected by the shadow the rock would throw in sunlight. Glancing absently back at the rock he’d scaled, he stilled at the sight of the jagged crack in the stone. Once, as a pup, Alexei’s brother had found a small cave behind a crack just like that one and turned it into their secret hiding spot.
Brodie had always been generous with his kid brother. Maybe because he’d somehow known that, in the end, it would come down to the two of them. Except it hadn’t worked out that way.
Could the empath be curled up in there?
He took extreme care as he went to explore the possibility. That he still couldn’t scent even a hint of her told him his search was apt to be futile, because as far as he was aware, no one had yet discovered a way to cloak their scent from changeling noses. The closest people had come was to soak themselves in a scent that echoed their surroundings, but rain and wet was too subtle a scent to be counterfeited.
Far more likely was interference by the raging wind, the scents ripped away before he could catch them. Not that it applied to the cracked rock—this close, there was no way he’d have missed anyone.
The gap in the stone was barely large enough for his body, even though he turned himself sideways. He knew before he entered that there was no living creature directly beyond. The only smells he’d caught had been of cold and dirt.
Cold had a scent; any wolf could tell you that.
Snow cold was different from dirt cold. And dirt cold was different from night cold.
Grumbling silently in disgust when a lump of snow fell on his face from some ledge it had been hiding on, he wiped it off before managing to squeeze through the narrow opening. His eyes adjusted quickly, his night vision kicking in. The space inside the cracked stone was nothing much; if he tried to spread out his arms, he’d have to stop with his elbows bent at ninety-degree angles. The area wasn’t much deeper, either . . . but there, in the ground.
What the hell?
Alexei crouched down to stare at a depression in the dirt that was oddly square. Water dripped from his body and hair to darken the dirt. No way that was a natural shape, not unless nature had begun walking around with a tape measure and a slide rule.
Taking care not to make sounds that would carry, he began to push the dirt away using his claws. It was hard, compacted. As if it hadn’t been disturbed in years. No question now—there had to be a teleporter involved in this somewhere.
His claws scraped against what felt like iron.
Slowing down, he worked with grim focus until he uncovered what he’d expected: a trapdoor. It was bolted down securely from the outside, the lock twisted in a way that had to have taken telekinesis. Nothing and no one would ever again open that lock. Rust crawled over it, as it did the solid metal hinges on the other end and the thick strips of iron that formed the body of the trapdoor.
The thing was old, possibly old enough to be from the time that had left SnowDancer badly wounded, many of its strongest lost.
Grief, rising and falling, rising and falling. Piercing his heart.
He shook his head to clear it of the empath’s overwhelming pain, his wolf snarling inside his chest. Strands of hair fell across his forehead to drip water down his face. He shoved them roughly back. Despite his rage at finding a living being trapped in a fucking hole in the ground, he didn’t immediately begin to hunt for a way to open the trapdoor. Instead, he sliced his claws back in and took out his satellite-linked phone.
The signal was weak, but his message got through. Should anything happen to Alexei, another wolf would find the grieving empath. And if it was a clever trap to capture a wolf, then his packmates would be warned and armed. He also sent a second message telling SnowDancer not to mobilize until he’d scoped out the situation—no point in more wolves coming out in this ugly weather if there was no lethal threat to the pack.
A return message lit up the screen as he was examining the hinges on the trapdoor: We don’t hear back from you in twenty, we head out.—H.
Putting the phone in a side pocket of his black cargo pants, Alexei focused all his attention on the hinges. They were the weakest point in the entire construction.
And a predatory changeling wolf of Alexei’s size and training was strong.
Far, far stronger than the Psy who’d probably built this thing.
Yeah, it could’ve been a changeling or a human who’d put this trapdoor in place, but he didn’t think so. Such a thing couldn’t be built in so small a space; it had to have been brought in, and no human or changeling could have ever traipsed through wolf territory carrying a trapdoor, or pieces for its construction, without being spotted. Not even at their weakest had SnowDancer let its borders fall to that extent.
Psy, then.
Nearly all Psy underestimated changeling strength by a large margin.
Only one problem though—there was no way to get leverage anywhere near the hinges. No gap through which to insert his claws. No twisted or warped area to provide even a minor entry point. He could leave it, ask his packmates to come up with tools, but he’d have to be a psychopath himself to abandon the E. Her crying had become quieter inside his head, even more lost.
She was breaking his heart and he wanted to growl at her to stop it, even knowing his response was irrational. Another part of him wanted to gather her in his arms while he growled at her—Es had that in common with changelings: they liked touch, hurt without it. So he’d promise to cuddle her if she’d just stop hurting.
Wiping away water from his face, he switched focus to the lock.
No way to open it, but the part where it was attached to the main body of the trapdoor was bolted down into rusting metal. Teeth bared, Alexei grabbed the entire lock mechanism and wrenched.
His biceps bunched, his abdomen clenching.
One pull. Two. Three.
A metallic groan as part of the attachment tore away from the base. It only took one more pull to break it fully off. Dropping the entire mass of cold and rust to the side, he inserted his fingers through the small warping in the iron where the lock had been bolted and used that grip to lift up the trapdoor.
It came away with a loud creak.
He halted, but the waves of emotion didn’t stop or blip. No audible alarms went off. No voices rose in a shout. And no new living scents hit his nose.
Opening the trapdoor the rest of the way, he propped it up against the opposite wall. He wasn’t afraid of it falling in. With the lock gone, he could push it open from the inside with only minimal effort.
Blackness greeted him when he first looked inside the space exposed by the opening. But his night vision didn’t let him down and he was able to confirm the floor wasn’t a dangerous distance for a jump.
He dropped down into the hole without further delay, landing silently in a hunting crouch.
A second later, a high frequency hum had the tiny hairs on his arms rising, his wolf flashing his canines. He shook it off, but made a
note of what it represented: you didn’t get that hum with newer lights, only the old ones that occasionally flickered and failed. Dust drifted around him, the motes caught in the extremely faint light emanating from some distance away. He followed that light, followed the grief.
A door stood in his way, barred and bolted from his side, with iron padlocks at the end of each bolt.
A cage.
His wolf ready to kill by now, he looked at the door and saw it was wood. Heavy wood that would’ve stopped most people.
Alexei slipped his claws in under the hinges and pulled.
The first pull created enough space for true leverage. The second gave him room to properly grip the wood.
He wrenched.
The grief hitched at last. The empath had heard him this time . . . but there was no spike of fear, no terror, a worrying flatness under the grief. Not a lack of emotion. A numbness caused by constant pain.
Maybe he’d try not to growl at her. It’d be difficult since he’d been in a bad mood for twelve months, but scaring an E wasn’t a thing to be proud of—it’d be like stomping on a kitten.
Heat building in his muscles as he worked, Alexei kept going until he’d created enough weakness in the door that he could tear it off its hinges.
It hit the exposed stone wall of the tunnel with a hard thump.
Light poured out, muted and cold.
He walked in.
Chapter 2
Empaths are uniformly seen as good, but no sentient being is a two-dimensional caricature. We all have our light and our shadows—this truth is a core reason why I titled this book as I did. Because even Es aren’t without darkness. How can they be? They often deal with the grimmest and most violent emotions of them all.
—Author’s Note, The Mysterious E Designation: Empathic Gifts & Shadows by Alice Eldridge (Reprint: 2082)
SHE STARED AT him from where she sat crumpled on the floor, her tight black curls a wild and matted mass and her dark brown eyes huge and tear-reddened in a triangular face with a pointed chin and lush lips. Her skin was a pallid brown devoid of the glow that came from the heat of the sun, and her clothes hung off her frame: faded blue jeans, a large black sweater, and old canvas sneakers.
Her scent was soap and salt and an intrinsic bite he couldn’t name.
In her arms, she held the body of a gray cat from which Alexei could scent the tiniest edge of decay. Ragged thin fur, a sense of fragility—the cat had been old when it died. A creature that had gone when its time had come, not one whose life had been stolen. The E held it with infinite care, and when Alexei did nothing to approach or startle her, she bent her head over her dead pet and cried again, her grief like waves crashing against his skin.
She wasn’t afraid of him, was too lost in her pain to see the predator in the room. Or perhaps she did . . . and didn’t care.
And he knew: that cat had been her only connection to the world, to life.
Alexei fought his need to go to her, offer her comfort. Before anything else, he was a SnowDancer lieutenant, and their pack had been hurt by the Psy one too many times.
He did a quick but thorough reconnaissance of the entire bunker. It didn’t take long. He found a bedroom, neat and tidy, though the clothes in the freestanding wardrobe made his hand tighten on the wardrobe door. He barely stopped himself from wrenching off the door and breaking it to splinters. A large cat-sized basket sat to one side, complete with what looked to be hand-knitted toys and a blanket. A half-full bowl of water rounded out the items.
No food bowl, but he had a feeling the little E with the big eyes must’ve hand-fed her elderly pet soft foods. She must’ve been so scared as she watched over her pet, knowing that every breath could be its last.
Hands fisting at his side, he carried on in his recon.
The toilet and a tight cubicle shower flowed off the bedroom. Across the narrow hallway from the bedroom was a room that held a small kitchen on one side, and a sofa on the other. The sofa faced a comm screen set to entertainment-only. The communications module, he saw at a glance, had been manually removed.
The kitty litter box sat at the far end of the hallway, close to the door he’d torn off. It was a model that turned the waste into small, odorless pellets that could be disposed of in the trash.
The trash receptacle was similar and connected to a chute that must have been put in place when the water was plumbed in. It didn’t emerge on the outside or SnowDancer would’ve discovered it. Likely, it went to a small recycling or compacting unit concealed behind the wall, a unit that a teleporter could ’port out and put back when it reached capacity. And since the temperature in the bunker was mild instead of freezing, there was probably a heating and cooling system hidden beside the recycling unit.
It wouldn’t need to be big to service an area this size.
He’d also spotted signs of a ventilation system. It was clearly an excellent one—the air was fresh, with no stuffiness to it. He’d put his money on the intake and exhaust valves being hidden higher up the mountainside. If they were small enough, no one would notice, not among all the shattered rocks.
The original work must’ve been done during the period decades earlier when SnowDancer didn’t have the resources for satellites or the people to run regular patrols up here—the Psy who’d built this must’ve come in with precision plans, done the work at speed. Of course, having teleporters on the team took care of most of the risk.
The entire setup was perfect for a prison the warden didn’t often visit.
And that was it.
No other doors to the outside world. No light but that thrown by the old-fashioned battery-powered strips that hummed and irritated his ear and had nothing in common with natural light. No sign that anyone but the empath and her pet had ever lived here.
Yet this place was old. Much older than the empath. That information was visible in the fixtures and panels used to build the place, and in the wear and tear on the walls, along with the age of the built-in appliances in the kitchen.
Whoever had put the E in here hadn’t constructed the place. But it was the perfect hole in which to imprison a living being. No one would hear you scream, not even a changeling standing right on top of you.
Alexei would’ve either gone mad or broken every bone in his body trying to slam through the only door. The woman he’d seen was nowhere strong enough to have caused even minor damage to that door.
The E hadn’t moved while he prowled around, her tears silent as she hugged her pet to her heart. As a wolf, Alexei wasn’t much of a cat person—the only exceptions were a newborn SnowDancer who promised to turn into a leopard, and her mother. Little Belle would be the only cat with “dual citizenship” in a wolf pack. But no matter his views on cats, Alexei understood what it was to love a pet who’d been a loyal companion for years, and he understood what it was to grieve the loss of that pet.
That the cat had died a natural death didn’t mean the E’s pain would be any less.
Crouching down across from her, at least a foot of distance between them, he tempered his driving urge to haul her into his arms. She wasn’t a wolf. More to the point, he was a large, strange male.
Act civilized, Alexei.
His wolf took a step back while the human half of him tried to look smaller and less like a very dangerous wolf with sharp teeth. At least his eyes were human again. And while he was generally annoyed by his face—he was far too fucking pretty for a SnowDancer lieutenant—it might come in handy here.
The first thing he needed to know was if the teleporter who’d put her in this place was apt to return—and if that teleporter could lock onto faces or just locations. Barking out that question, however, was a bad idea.
“What was your cat’s name?” he asked with every ounce of gentleness he possessed.
The empath went motionless, her body stiff and her shoulders raised as she
hunched protectively over her pet’s body.
Alexei realized then and there that he couldn’t hope to gain this trapped woman’s trust rapidly enough to keep her safe; trust took time, took patience. “I’m Alexei, a SnowDancer wolf, and I need to get you out of here,” he said, switching tactics with the speed of the predator that lived under his skin. “I’m assuming it’s a teleporter who brought you here. Can that person lock on to your face?” The latter was a rare ability among teleport-capable telekinetics, but he could assume nothing.
A long silence from the E, followed by a jagged shake of her head.
“Then we move.” He could take care of himself, his bones tough enough to handle being thrown against a wall by telekinesis. She didn’t have that advantage—and a teleporter could grab and leave with her while he was out of action. There was a reason the now-defunct Psy Council had co-opted telekinetics into their ranks; the fuckers were tough opponents.
Alexei rose, went into her bedroom—to return with the knitted blanket from her cat’s basket. “You can wrap your pet in this.” He knew without asking that she would never agree to abandon the body, not even to save her own life. “We’ll give him a burial as soon as we’re safe.”
No response.
Barely stopping the urge to bare his teeth at her, his wolf wanting to get her to safety now, he said, “You don’t move, the teleporter comes back, you stay in this prison.” When she didn’t stir, he went for the jugular. “So does your pet.”
A burst of ragged motion at his rough words devoid of softness or apparent care. But regardless of her intent, she struggled to get to her feet with her pet’s body in her arms, as if she’d been in that position so long that her legs didn’t work quite right anymore.
“I’m going to help you up.” Alexei waited and, when she didn’t twist away, placed his hands under her upper arms.
He all but lifted her up.
Her bones were like a bird’s. He’d seen food in the kitchen, so her captor wasn’t attempting to starve her—but trapped creatures often gave up on eating. Jaw clenched, he made sure she was stable, then stepped back and spread the blanket over his arms. Her lower lip quivered as she put her pet on it before quickly reclaiming the blanket-wrapped body from him.