by Nalini Singh
Right then, Memory saw that Sascha had lived and survived her own prison, rising to spit in the faces of those who would crush her. “You think that passive aspect worked in reverse to nurture me?”
“It explains your high emotional intelligence and innate sense of good and evil. You were raised by a psychopath and yet you’re a good, whole person.”
“Add spite to the list of reasons,” Memory muttered. “I stayed myself to spite him.”
Sascha’s lips kicked up. “Poor Lexie. I think I need to look out for him, not you. He has no idea who he’s messing with.”
“That stubborn grouchy wolf can go jump in a lava lake for all I care.”
Eyes filled with stars again, Sascha chuckled. “I spoke to Alice Eldridge, as we discussed before lunch, and she suggested that you might be one of the E-sigma.”
Sascha had told Memory that Alice was the closest thing the world had to an expert on Designation E. Put into forcible cryonic suspension over a hundred years ago, the researcher had awakened to a world that had altered beyond comprehension. All her friends and family dead, her research on empaths all but erased from the world.
Memory’s heart ached for the woman she’d never met.
“But even Alice only knows bits and pieces,” Sascha added.
Pushing her braid behind her shoulder, the cardinal put both forearms on the table. “Apparently Es of subdesignation sigma never actually used their abilities. It was considered too dangerous.”
Memory had finished her sandwich without realizing it. She took an absent sip of what she’d assumed was coffee. It wasn’t. It was sweet and creamy and melted her bones. “What is this?”
“Hot chocolate. Food for the soul. I also brought cookies.”
“I understand why Es like me wouldn’t want to use their abilities,” Memory said after inhaling three oatmeal raisin cookies. “I’m only alive because Renault realized my long-term utility. Most psychopaths would drain the E to death at first contact.”
“It means previous sigmas didn’t have the ability to cut off the transfer from their end.” Sascha put down her half-eaten cookie, her brow furrowing. “Or, more likely, since the Es blocked their own abilities because of bad historical precedent, the question never came up.”
“Is it doable?”
“My mother can seed mental viruses and even she agrees I’m the best shield builder in or out of the Net.” A fleeting emotion on Sascha’s face, too complicated to label. “We’re going to build you a shield so formidable that you can slam it down mid-transfer, slicing the feed in two.”
“Then I’m ready.” Alexei would keep. Next time the two of them met, Memory was going to metaphorically singe off his fur.
Chapter 28
Dear Aunt Rita,
My wolf friend has suddenly begun to bring me random gifts of food. It started off innocently enough—a piece of candy here, a sandwich there when I forgot my lunch at home. But two days ago, he left a box of out-of-season white peaches at my door. Then yesterday, he turned up with an entire trifle along with a can of whipped cream. What does this mean?
Sincerely,
Confused Human
Dear Confused Human,
Sit down, dear. I have some news for you.
—From the October 2078 issue of Wild Woman magazine: “Skin Privileges, Style & Primal Sophistication”
MEMORY’S PLAN TO sear off Alexei’s fur hit a snag out of the gate: the damn wolf was suddenly never around when she had free hours in her intensive training schedule. Oh, she knew he kept an eye on the compound, could taste him in the air, but he was avoiding her.
It didn’t take much work for her to find his comm code. Three days after their last encounter, she was standing in front of the comm, about to call him, when she thought about what she was doing. Was Sascha right? Had she imprinted on Alexei because he’d pulled her to freedom?
Every cell in her body rebelled against that idea.
“But that’s not enough,” she said aloud. “You have to prove it to yourself and to him.” Otherwise, she might cause her wounded wolf even more pain, and that was unacceptable.
Clenching her jaw, she deleted his comm code from her system, then strode outside, off into the trees. When a black-clad form appeared a short distance from her without warning, a phantom she hadn’t detected with her empathic senses, she froze.
Her mouth went dry.
Yuri, that was his name. A man with rough-hewn features and strands of silver in his chestnut hair, his jaw always clean-shaven in the morning but dark with shadow by the end of his shift. A tiny detail that had made him seem more approachable to her, but she’d never actually spoken to him. And now, alone in the trees with him, she saw only the deadly assassin who was part of the Arrow squad.
“You’re aware of the perimeter limits?” His voice was ice—not because of the nothingness, but because of Silence. In his late forties, Yuri was the oldest Arrow in the security team, had spent too long under the Protocol to emerge unscathed.
“Yes.” She rubbed her hands down her sweatshirt-covered arms.
“I apologize. I am causing you discomfort.” He began to fade into the trees.
“No,” Memory blurted out, infuriated by her reaction to this man who had done nothing to hurt her. “I’m just not used to many people yet.” All the myriad personalities, all the different levels of lingering Silence.
“I felt the same,” Yuri said unexpectedly, his hands behind his back. “But now I have a family, and it is good.” A moment of eye contact, his irises a dark hazel against weathered skin that didn’t hold a tan but was marked by tiny lines at the corners of his eyes—and what appeared to be a knife scar on his left cheekbone. “Do not allow the past to shape your future.”
It was another version of what Ashaya had said to her. If the universe was sending her a message, it wasn’t being subtle about it. “I won’t,” she promised him, and when the next day dawned, she made a deliberate effort to talk to him again.
As the days passed, they began to walk together. Yuri’s energy was as calm and patient as Alexei’s was wild and turbulent. Her reaction to Yuri was different, too. She felt no urge to antagonize the quiet, contained male who had lived so long in the shadows that sunlight had once seemed an enemy.
“Now, I sit in the light with the youngest and most innocent of us all,” he told her one day as sunset drenched the compound in myriad hues of orange and gold. “They ask me to tell them stories, so I’ve had to learn human and changeling tales for children. I hope they’ll never have to know the blood and pain that is the history of every adult Arrow.”
Caught by the touch of melancholy he permitted to escape, she said, “Why are you worried? Arrows are free now, too.” He’d told her why the squad had first been formed and what it had become, how good men and women had been used by power-hungry Councilors for their own ends.
“Arrows are Arrows for a reason,” he said to her. “The children . . . they have deadly abilities. All we can do is care for them, teach them to use their strength in the pursuit of good.”
“I think they’re lucky to have you,” Memory said honestly, and though Yuri didn’t smile—she hadn’t ever seen his lips curve—she thought he was pleased. She liked him so much, was glad he seemed to consider her a friend, too, but never did she feel any compulsion to know him as a woman knows her man.
But this relationship, their friendship, she treasured it in its own right.
She made herself get to know the other Arrows, too, as well as her fellow empaths—and even the leopard and wolf soldiers who swung by the compound every so often on their patrol routes. She had to understand her own heart, had to know if the fact she dreamed of Alexei night after night was more than a thing of happenstance.
In those dreams, she felt the hard muscle of his body against her, shivered at the rasp of his stubble, gasped when he
bit her. Each morning she woke frustrated and alone, she glared another hole in her mental photograph of a certain golden wolf. Then one day, she opened her door and found a small sealed box outside.
Eyes narrowed, she scanned the dawn-quiet compound, but found no grouchy wolf hanging around. She took the box inside before opening it . . . to find it full of granola bars. Dark cherry with white chocolate. Salted caramel and almonds. Apricot and mango. Walnuts with nougat.
Memory emptied out the box, but there was no note. Not that she needed one.
Scowling, she put all the bars back in the box. Then, at mid-morning, she took the box around the entire compound, offering the bars to the other Es, the Arrows, and especially a couple of SnowDancers who’d dropped by. The dark-haired one, who’d introduced himself as Riaz, accepted a bar with a gleam in his eye, and she knew he’d scented Alexei all over the box.
Good.
This was war.
* * *
• • •
THE obstinate, crabby wolf who’d rescued Memory then rejected her left her a full-size apple pie the next morning. In a warmer.
Memory fed it to an ecstatic bunch of empaths.
Two days later, she woke to a basket of exotic fruit.
Those she gave to Yuri, to share with the children at the Arrow squad’s own compound.
Then came the single-serving-size blueberry cake with her name written on it in white icing that glittered with sparkles. It hurt her heart, it was so pretty. She wanted desperately to keep it.
She set her jaw: Alexei didn’t get to look after her when he’d walked away from her and stayed away.
Picking up the small cake box, she headed outside.
No one would take it off her hands. Her fellow trainees fought not to laugh as they waved it off with cobbled-together apologies about expanding waistlines and newborn allergies to blueberries, while Jaya bit down hard on her lower lip and pressed a hand to her heart. “Oh, Memory. That’s so sweet.”
“Hah!” Alexei wasn’t being sweet; he was just trying to win their silent battle.
Giving up on romantic Jaya—who was convinced the damn wolf’s feelings would be hurt if anyone but Memory ate the cake—Memory went to the most clear-eyed and practical people in the compound. But the Arrows solemnly stated that they didn’t wish to start a war with SnowDancer.
“Very funny,” Memory muttered to a stone-faced Yuri before heading toward her next target.
Riaz, his hair tumbled from his run, took one look at the cake she thrust out under his nose and whistled. “What’d Lexie do to make you this mad?”
“Do you want it or not?” Memory tapped her foot.
“While the woman I love and adore would find it highly amusing if I ate that, Lexie would tie my intestines into knots.”
“Ugh!” Stomping back to her cabin, Memory slammed the door shut behind her. Then she put the lovely little cake box in the center of the table and, hands fisted on her hips, stared at it. She was going to have to eat it. Wasting food was beyond her. And such a lovely confection of a cake?
No way she could throw it away. But she wasn’t going to take this lying down.
Hauling her door open, she saw Riaz finishing up a conversation with Yuri. “Riaz!”
The wolf glanced over, one eyebrow raised.
“Tell Alexei he’s a big, wolfy chicken!”
Chapter 29
As the first generation born and raised in Silence comes of age, a problematic abnormality has come to light, one that appears to affect only those with abilities above 8 on the Gradient.
—Report prepared for the Psy Council (circa 1997)
THE ONE WHO had awakened stared at the papers on his desk.
Things hadn’t developed as he’d planned. Dr. Mehra had found no defects in his brain, but this new power was a huge, rapacious beast that wanted to devour him whole. He’d nearly suffered an out-of-control emotional reaction to a problem the previous day, and this morning, he’d woken obsessing over the empaths.
The pen in his hand snapped, spilling blue ink across his skin.
He watched the runnels of blue as they spread out in a spiderweb, and he thought of the web in which he was caught: the Honeycomb. If he was having trouble with his Silence, it couldn’t be the power at fault—he’d always had that inside him. Which left only one other possible explanation: the Honeycomb must be altering him on a far deeper level than he’d realized. He had to contain the damage.
If he didn’t, he would become a slave to his power rather than a master of it.
Two hours later, as he thought over a critical business move, he didn’t realize he was writing Honeycomb-Designation E, Honeycomb-Designation E over and over on his datapad.
Chapter 30
Hey, Lexie, I hear you have your own handpicked flowers situation going on. Unlike some wolves who laugh at their friends’ misfortunes, I am piously sad for your disappointment.
Shut up, Matt. No one likes a gloater. And scuttlebutt is Nell sent back your handwritten letter after stamping it with Not interested in red. Don’t be too brokenhearted though—she got the stamp made special for you.
Karma will come for you, you asshole. And if you don’t steal that fucking stamp off her desk and throw it in the deepest hole you can find, I’m gonna come over there and beat your skinny ass.
You could try, you lumbering bear masquerading as a wolf. I already have the stamp—what do you take me for? I put it in the pack post for you so you can hold it hostage.
—Messages between Matthias Agrey García and Alexei Vasiliev Harte
ALEXEI GRITTED HIS teeth and kicked the wall.
That bastard Renault had gone under so deep that he’d become invisible on every technological level. Aden had confirmed that even the PsyNet was devoid of useful data. “The man is a ghost.”
Not that Alexei was about to stop hunting. Just as he wasn’t about to stop his daily run to and security review of the empathic compound—even though he’d been accused of being a “big, wolfy chicken” by an E with a mouth he wanted to devour. After he bit her for the insult that had spread through the pack like wildfire.
If he found one more rubber chicken in his gear, he was going to wring the pranksters’ necks. The entire pack found it hee-fucking-larious that a tiny E had no fear of one of the most dangerous wolves in SnowDancer. D’Arn the future dead man had opened a betting book on the “Memory versus Alexei Live Action Drama.”
Even Lara had gotten into the act—and she had a newborn pup who’d decided he enjoyed being awake all hours of the day and night. Walker, the healer’s mate, had become a familiar sight in the corridors at night, as he paced quietly up and down with their pup cradled against his chest—in hopes that the irritable little guy would decide he actually wanted to behave like a sensible newborn and sleep now and then.
Hawke had pulled alpha privilege and taken the week-old baby with him for a night shift the other day so the couple could get uninterrupted hours of sleep. Alpha and newborn had apparently had a grand old time, but so soon after birth, the pup was too little to spend much time apart from his parents with anyone other than his alpha, so the rest of the pack had to contain their champing-at-the-bit desire to pupsit.
As for Lara, she was radiant. She’d kissed Alexei on the cheek when he went to visit, and, with a straight face, requested he bring her his special wolfy chicken soup. Toby, the now-teenaged cardinal she’d claimed as her own with fierce maternal love when she mated his uncle, had protested innocence when Alexei accused him of bringing the news to her ears. The kid was a fucking terrible liar. It was a good thing Alexei’s wolf liked him.
His own second-in-command, Ember, had picked Memory for the eventual winner in the game.
“I’ll remember this,” he threatened when they spoke over the comm, only for her to laugh and ask him to send her a photo of his E.
&nb
sp; “She’s not my E.” Could never be his anything if he wanted to keep her safe.
But when he went down to the compound toward the end of a glorious mountain sunset and spotted Memory sitting on the porch of her cabin with her shoulders slumped and her eyes on the ground, he had to grip the trunk of a tree to stop himself from striding directly to her. “What happened?” he asked Jaya; the young empathic teacher had been pacing in the trees when he arrived.
Fine lines flared out from the corners of her eyes. “You know Memory and Amara are continuing to work together?”
“Yes.” Alexei wasn’t exactly happy about that, but Memory needed to practice cutting the feed, and Amara was the safest suitable option.
Not that anyone trusted Ashaya’s twin an inch. Memory always had backup, Alexei included. He just remained out of sight, ready to offer a physical assist if Sascha called for it. “She disengaged Amara on her own yesterday.” Pride burned in him, as hot and dark as it had while he stood with his back to an external wall of the old cabin and listened to her gasp at her own success.
He’d lost the battle to leave a congratulatory gift at her door.
He wondered if she’d thrown the colorful beaded necklace in the garbage. Word from the wolves who ran patrols along here was that Memory now gave the death stare to any wolf who crossed her path. His packmates blamed him for making a pretty woman mad at them, while Alexei’s wolf fought not to eviscerate the assholes for attempting to flirt with her.
He couldn’t stop looking after her, but he wasn’t going to be the dog in the manger. Memory deserved to be loved, deserved to be adored. If Alexei couldn’t do it, he had to let her choose another man.
His claws sliced into the tree trunk. “Did Amara hurt Memory?”
“No, it’s not that.” Jaya slid her hands into the pockets of her jacket, her lilting voice holding the cadence of her homeland, lush green atolls set in turquoise-blue lagoons. “Memory’s phenomenally powerful. She won’t have her new Gradient tests until she’s had a bit more training, but it’s obvious she’s over a 9. And there’s so much stubborn will there. I’ve never seen her give up. She just gnaws at a problem until she figures it out.”