Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity)

by Nalini Singh

  Grip on her nape tightening a fraction, he pressed the heel of his palm against her.

  Her breathing altered to become faster, more jagged. Breaking the kiss, she buried her face against his neck, her fingers digging into his shoulders. Smile no doubt pure wolf, Alexei very deliberately pressed hard against the seam of her jeans, right where it lay over her most delicate flesh.

  Her cry was short, sharp, deliciously shocked.

  Cradling her against him as she trembled, her breath lost, he rumbled raw words of pleasure in her ear. “My beautiful, sexy Memory.” He licked his tongue playfully along the shell of her ear. “That’s what I want to do between your legs.”

  She stiffened against him . . . and then her entire body melted in a rolling wave. Shifting his hand to her hip, he nuzzled her through the orgasm, but when he kissed her throat in the aftermath, her responsive shiver was a touch too hard.

  Protective instincts stirring, he tugged her head back so he could look at her face. She was all kiss-swollen lips and tumbled hair, and eyes of gleaming obsidian. He shouldn’t have been able to read those eyes, but for him, they were no longer fathomless. He saw her. She was drunk on sexual sensation; any more would push her over the edge into pain.

  When she cuddled against his shoulder, her hair bouncing against his jaw, he put his arms around her and indulged himself in petting her back in slow, soothing strokes. Her breath was soft and warm against him, her skin silk under his palm. And her scent, it was wild and bright tangled with the languid richness of something intrinsically soft and feminine.

  He knew this was it tonight. Memory was emerging out of an enforced deep freeze. He couldn’t and wouldn’t force her, wouldn’t rush her.

  He would, however, do his best to charm her.

  Careful, little bro. Remember what happened to me.

  The ghostly voice was painfully familiar. His heart fucking hurt.

  “Alexei?” Memory sat up in his lap, raising her hand to cup his cheek. “You’re sad.”

  Turning his head, he pressed his lips to her palm and knew he had to tell her the truth. Because this, what was growing between them, it was a thing of truth. It held the kind of potent power that could make a man . . . or break him. “My brother was two years older than me, and he loved crazy adventures and a lovely woman called Etta, and he had this laugh that was so infectious it caught from person to person until an entire room would be rolling around on the floor.”

  Memory brushed her fingers through his hair, her eyes slowly shifting back to deepest brown. “You loved him a lot.”

  “Yeah.” Brodie had been the most important person in his life for a long time. “Our folks died when I was seven, and Brodie was nine. Our aunt—our mother’s much younger sister—raised us, and the entire pack was there for us, but we were brothers. That bond . . .” It had been formed of loyalty and love and grief and a stubborn commitment to stay alive.

  Then Brodie had died.

  Petting her hands across his shoulders, Memory said, “You love him still, but you’re so angry, too.” Gentle voice, an empath’s knowledge. “What did Brodie do?”

  “He died.” The words were gritted out. “After our father died the same way, we made a promise and he broke it and he fucking died.”

  “Alexei.” She wove her fingers through his hair again. “Unless your brother took his own life”—a pause where he shook his head—“then he couldn’t thwart death. At first, I was angry at my mother for being dead and leaving me alone in the world, but I knew all the time that she couldn’t help it. The monster was too powerful.” Her eyes shimmered. “I wish every day that she was alive, but I’m not angry at her anymore.”

  Alexei gripped her hips, his fingers brushing the bare skin of her back. He’d never been that alone, even at the darkest times of his life. “You will never be alone again.” Would always have arms to hold her close.

  She stroked her fingers over his jaw. “Why are you Alexei and your brother was Brodie?”

  The question brought back memories of childhood laughter, his father’s deep voice, his mother’s soft arms. “I’m Alexei Vasiliev Harte and he was Brodie Harte Vasiliev.” His brother’s name felt so alien falling from his lips—it had been an eon since he’d spoken it aloud. “My father came from a pack in Russia, while my mother was a California girl through and through: Konstantin Vasiliev and Calissa Harte. They split the difference.”

  “Oh, how wonderful.” Petting hands in his hair, across his shoulders, his E trying to assuage his hurt. “Tell me more about Brodie.”

  “Damn adrenaline junkie could make anyone laugh.” Alexei’s chest squeezed. “It was his way of dealing with life, with the world. The day we buried our parents, he came to the funeral in wolf form with a big green ribbon tied around his neck. Our aunt tied the ribbon for him.”

  “She sounds like a wonderful woman.”

  “She’s the best.” A tough-as-nails soldier, but one with endless heart. “The ribbon was for our mom, who loved the color green.” Alexei swallowed the thickness in his throat. “I was always the angry one. I didn’t want to go to the funeral, but Brodie used his teeth to grab the cuff of my pants and literally dragged me there.”

  “All your people have left you.” She kissed his cheeks, his lips. “That’s why you’re so angry.”

  He exhaled a shuddering breath, took in her warmth and life on the inhale. “My family is cursed.” There was no other way to put it. “You need to know about it if you’re determined to be with me.”

  A narrowing of her eyes. “No, I get into the lap of every wolf who asks.”

  Growling low in his throat, he sat up. “Who’s been asking?”

  “Men,” she said primly. “Leopards keep leaving tiny, shiny gifts at my door, and before the Arrows withdrew, several of the single males asked if I’d be interested in a private dinner, or an evening stroll.”

  Alexei bared his teeth. “Any man who asks now is going to get an education on the sharpness of wolf claws. As for the damn cats, I’m going to scalp their spotty fur.”

  She cupped his face in her hands, her smile unrepentant and her kiss tender. “What’s the curse and why does it make you so angry and sad at the same time?”

  Alexei’s wolf lay down inside him, its head on its paws and its heart desolate. “Changelings have a single major vulnerability.” It was a topic on which he’d maintained his silence with even his closest friends, the wound too close to the surface. “At times, our animal halves threaten to overwhelm our human selves.” His fingers clenched on her hips. “That’s not always bad. When I run as the wolf, the wolf should be ascendant. It’s his time. The problem comes when a changeling gives up the human side of their nature forever and becomes the animal. We call them rogues.”

  It was so fucking hard to speak, to lay his family’s pain wide open. He held on to Memory, leaned on her warmth, her affection. “My grandfather went rogue when my father was two years of age.” Alexei had only ever known his grandfather as images caught on camera, a tall blond man with features startlingly similar to his own—the similarity had fascinated him as a child, but as an adult, it was a constant reminder of his ugly future. “My father went rogue when I was seven.”

  “Does this mean they are wolves in the wild, lost to you?”

  Alexei blinked back the burning in his eyes. “I could deal with that. If I knew they lived, I could handle it.” He’d have found them during his times as a wolf, run with them, been a family with them. “But rogues are so feared because they don’t simply become wild wolves. They’re drawn to those they used to love before they lost their humanity, and rather than just being with them—because that would be more than fine, their wolf selves welcomed—the rogues are violent. Rogues track, attack, and kill the people they once loved.”

  Memory’s cheekbones pushed up against her skin, her expression stark. “As if they’re angry at
what they’ve lost and want to destroy it?”

  Alexei shrugged. “Maybe. No one knows. I’ve heard rumors of rogues who made a return to being changeling, but I think they’re fairy tales we tell ourselves to find hope in a hopeless situation.”

  For the Vasiliev family, the pain rolled down the decades in an endless chain. “To be a rogue is to be under an automatic execution order.” The packs had no other choice. “Brodie attacked his mate when he went rogue. I found Etta’s mauled body when I went looking for my brother. She was still alive, died a minute later in my arms.” She’d been so light in his hold, a sweet, loving woman forever gone, her family devastated, their dreams for her buried in the earth with her body.

  “You should’ve seen Brodie with her before. He loved her.” Alexei didn’t want Memory to know his brother only as the violent killer he’d become; he needed to show her the generous and devoted mate Brodie had been before it all went horribly wrong. “Idiot once dived out of a plane above the territory with a parachute that opened out to say, ‘Etta, I’m sorry,’ after they’d had a fight.”

  Memory’s smile trembled. “I wish I could’ve known him. Known her.” She brushed back his hair, stroked his shoulder, his upper arm.

  Accepting the way she touched him, comforted him, he told her the rest. “I tracked him, but when the time came, I couldn’t hurt him. I would’ve allowed him to shred me to pieces.” He’d collapsed onto his knees at seeing his adventurous, funny big brother’s bloody muzzle and mad eyes, his heart broken. “Hawke knew. He’d followed me. He did what needed to be done.”

  “I’m so sorry, Alexei.” Wrapping her arms around his neck, Memory pressed her cheek to his. The salt of her tears was wet against him, the tremor in her voice potent with emotion.

  Alexei let her hold him as he hadn’t allowed anyone to hold him for a long time. But he couldn’t cry, the tears locked up in concrete inside his heart, the hard substance formed of his anger and his pain.

  “Just because this happened to members of your family, doesn’t mean it’ll happen to you.” Memory’s voice was fierce.

  Alexei wished he could grab on to the hope, hold on. “There’s a stressor.” He spoke against her ear, the words coming out husky and rough. “My father never said much about his father, but as a child, I once overheard him telling my mother that, according to older packmates, my grandfather began to act strange prior to going rogue. Spending long hours in wolf form and becoming aggressive toward his mate when he’d always before been gentle.”

  Sitting back so she could see his face, Memory frowned. “Did the same thing happen to your father and brother?”

  “My father was always a little different from other changelings.” Not that Alexei had consciously known that as a child—to him his dad was just his dad. “We stayed out for weeks at a time in the wilderness, and I don’t think my father ever shifted back into human form except when my mother made him. I didn’t know that wasn’t normal.”

  “So he was always predisposed to it? Then why are you worried it’ll happen to you?”

  “After my father’s death,” Alexei said, “we had to know the truth. We asked our aunt.”

  “Why not your mother?”

  Alexei squeezed his eyes shut. “She couldn’t live with the horror of what he’d become. She took a massive overdose of sleeping pills right after he was executed.”

  Memory felt a wave of fury roar over her, directed at a woman who’d permitted her own pain to overwhelm her duty to the two small souls who looked to her for hope, for answers, for love. Forcing the anger into a tight knot in her gut, she focused on Alexei.

  “I was nine by the time we demanded the truth from Aunt Min, Brodie eleven.” Alexei’s voice was ragged, his muscles rigid. “She said our father’s DNA had been tested, but as with all rogues to date who’ve been examined, the scientists found no genetic red flags.”

  Alexei’s claws slid out. “I knew there was more. I could tell. I asked and asked until she finally admitted that our father hadn’t begun acting the way he did—feral, secretive, just a little strange—until he mated.”

  A sudden chill settled on Memory’s skin. She’d been around changelings enough by now to understand what mating meant to them. She’d also felt the intense power of that bond in the glimpses she’d caught during her mental sessions with Sascha.

  Conscious that Memory had gaps in her emotional knowledge, particularly when it came to a healthy and loving relationship with a man, the cardinal had been very generous with her. Never revealing intimate details, but bringing Memory into her life, as if Memory truly was Sascha’s little sister.

  Even when Memory was mad with Alexei and fighting with him, the idea of being bonded as deeply to him as Sascha was to Lucas, it had been her secret dream. “Mating is the stressor?” she forced herself to ask.

  “Brodie and I, we made a promise to each other to never get mated,” Alexei ground out. “Then we grew up and began to forget, and Brodie fell in love.” A twist of his lips. “Etta was tall and slender as a reed, and as sweet and shy as Brodie was outgoing, and he adored her. When the mating bond called, he didn’t resist.”

  Memory’s heart ached for a man and a woman she’d never met, would never know.

  “The behavioral changes were subtle, but I’d known Brodie my entire life. I could see it happening, see him morphing into our father. He held on for three years before he surrendered to the wolf.” Alexei dropped his hands to the seat, his claws slicing into it.

  His torment was a wild creature in his eyes.

  Pressing her forehead to his, Memory cupped the side of his face, her first priority to comfort him any way she could. “You think the same thing will happen to you if you mate.”

  “Starting with my grandfather, every male in my direct line has gone rogue after mating—my father lasted the longest, nearly ten years, but he was increasingly erratic for at least four of those years.” Alexei’s jaw turned to granite under her touch. “No matter how anyone tries to spin that, they can’t make it add up to any other conclusion.”

  Amber eyes locked with hers, nightglow in the private dark of the Jeep. “I’m never going to be able to drop my guard enough to mate. I can’t, not if I want to survive.” Claws slicing back in, he gripped her nape, his next words a rough whisper. “And not if I want to protect the woman who’s mine.”

  Memory had a hole inside her, needed to belong in the deepest way to her golden wolf. “Can you love without it being a risk?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know.” Harsh words, but his hands, they stayed careful on her. “I’m not whole, Memory, not in the way you need.”

  Heat in her belly. “You let me decide what I need.” Drawing back, she stabbed a finger into his right pectoral and said, “And I’m not certain I believe in your curse, either.”

  “Memory.”

  “Did your father spend years learning to be a disciplined SnowDancer soldier, then lieutenant? Did your brother?” It sounded as if, along with loving his mate, Alexei’s beloved older brother had been an adrenaline junkie who liked breaking the rules. “You growl and snarl, but you’re always in control.” Not once had he so much as scratched her with his claws.

  “It might not matter in the end—no one knows what pushes a predatory changeling to go rogue,” said her stubborn wolf. “Might just be a switch in my brain that flips.” Moving his hands to her back, he leaned forward so his breath kissed her lips. “When the mating song rises between a man and a woman, it’s the woman who decides whether to accept or not, but it can be blocked on the male end if he wills it hard enough.”

  As Memory listened, her gut a knot, he told her how he’d learned about the male ability to block the bond from one of the cats. Tamsyn’s mate had been forced to do it for years because of the age difference between them—Tamsyn had been far too young when they’d first found each other.

  “I�
�ve never heard the mating song,” Alexei said, big, beautiful, and so hurt. “If I ever do, I’ll do everything in my power to block it.”

  Memory held his gaze, her own belligerent. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “You know.” A growl. “Don’t you dare pretend you don’t.”

  Huffing out a breath, Memory fisted her hands in the rough silk of his hair. “You’re mine, Alexei.” She was through with playing by his rules; what lived between them had nothing to do with gratefulness or imprinting. It had to do with Alexei and Memory. If she needed him, he needed her as much.

  As for his vow . . .

  Memory kissed him hard, shoving the shadows of the curse into the dark.

  Chapter 39

  Operation Scarab has launched on a wave of success. Results have been so stellar that we request permission to enroll twenty others in the trial. There is little point in wasting resources when Scarab could put those resources back into play within a relatively short period.

  —Report prepared for the Psy Council (circa 1999)

  THE POWER FLUCTUATIONS Kaleb had been sensing in the PsyNet were becoming dangerous. “It feels personal,” he told Sahara as they walked along the edge of a Venetian canal gilded in sunshine. “Unquestionably power from an individual, not a buildup in the Net.”

  Her hand in his and her body clad in a red coat paired with black jeans and ankle boots, Sahara frowned. “No luck tracking it back?”

  “No.” Kaleb wasn’t used to such failure. “It’s erratic. By the time I catch the surge, it’s faded at the other end.” A cresting wave that didn’t leave a trail. “I’ve dropped sniffers throughout the Net so I can react faster, but I think the mind behind the power is an intelligent one. They’re deliberately erasing the trail.”

  “Are you worried the fluctuations might destabilize already shaky areas of the Net?” At his nod, Sahara chewed on the inside of her cheek. “If it’s someone intelligent enough to wipe their trail, he or she must realize the risk.”