Wolf Rain

by Singh, Nalini

  Memory nodded. “I guess when I was younger, the ‘hit’ didn’t last as long. He’d come out to ‘make a call’ or ‘use the facilities,’ and in reality, he’d duck in to initiate a transfer.” She and Alexei walked up the rise down which they’d come what felt like a lifetime ago.

  There was no rain today, the mountain sun a searing near-white brightness.

  “Later on, he liked to take me as his aide so he could make the transfer right before a critical negotiation—he said the effect was strongest in the first hour.” Memory shrugged. “Personally, I think he enjoyed parading me in the world knowing I couldn’t cry out for help.”

  She leaned into her wolf when he growled. “I’m free now and I’m going to stomp on his brains, remember?”

  “That’s my E.” Releasing her hand to put his arm around her shoulders, Alexei nuzzled her curls with his chin.

  The smug pride in him made her lips curve. “The day I met Jitterbug, Renault’d taken me to a small hotel. He’d ordered me to wait in a back room while he spoke with investors out front.” She drew in the primal scent of her wolf. “Normally, I had no choice but to obey, but that day, I heard this pitiful meowing outside the window and it got through the fog in my brain.”

  “Your empathic instincts fighting to help a hurt creature.”

  Memory didn’t refute his conclusion. She’d made the decision to claim her future—and in that future, she wasn’t a monster. She was just an E with very disturbing patients. “It was the first time I’d been able to resist him when he had his spider legs wrapped around my mind.”

  Renault had utilized mind control each time he took her from the bunker, using the pathways he’d laid in her brain to suffocate her freedom. “I don’t know how long it took—maybe ten, fifteen minutes, but I was able to force my body to crawl to the door, open it.”

  “Bastard didn’t secure the door because he thought he had your mind locked down.”

  “Yes.” A “privilege” she’d lost that day, but it hadn’t mattered, not when she had Jitterbug. “The back door into the alley wasn’t far from the hallway outside the back room, and I literally crawled on my hands and knees to get to it.” Her palms tingled at the sensory memory of the cracked linoleum, her chest tight at the echo of how the walls in the narrow hallway had loomed.

  “I fell out into the alley and into the rain. I could see Jitterbug shivering against this pipe. He was so skinny and small with raggedy fur, and I wanted to help him, but I’d reached my limit and just lay there, blood dripping from my nose to be washed away by the rain.” A smile found its way from her grieving heart. “We stared at each other and it was as if he knew I couldn’t go to him. So he came to me.”

  A tiny, bedraggled fluffball, Jitterbug had nudged at her chin as if trying to rouse her, get her to stand up. But all she’d been able to do was lift a hand and put it over the kitten’s back. Jitterbug hadn’t bolted. “He curled up against me and that’s how Renault found us.”

  “Why did the asshole let you keep him?” Alexei asked as they reached the rock through which lay the trapdoor entrance.

  “Renault saw Jitterbug as a way to control me.”

  “Behave or I’ll hurt your pet?”

  Memory nodded. “I was never sorry to have found him though. He was a companion through the hardest years of my life.” She looked up at Alexei. “It probably sounds foolish to you—”

  “No, it doesn’t.” A kiss that was pure predatory changeling. “He was a loyal friend when you had no one else. It’s good you honor that, honor him.”

  Heart huge with emotion, she touched her hand to the stone. “Let’s do this.” Thanks to SnowDancer’s extensive search, she knew this was the only entrance into her former prison.

  Alexei went first. “Pack rigged the entire place with surveillance on the off chance Renault would come back, but he’s never dared.”

  Memory’s captor had to know the bunker had become a trap for him.

  Regardless, Alexei dropped down first into the small tunnel, then swept the bunker. All he scented were the fading echoes of his own pack. Patrol routes had been altered to make this a compulsory stop, with the wolf on duty dropping inside to check that things were undisturbed. Other than that, it was a place that sat abandoned.

  No wolf wanted anything to do with it.

  After we capture Renault, we’ll be filling that fucking hole in the ground with dirt and giving it back to the mountain.

  Hawke’s words, with which Alexei was in full agreement. These walls had never been about anything but torture and pain and imprisonment. Better to bury it and let nature cleanse the tainted earth. “It’s safe.” He held up his arms and Memory jumped down in a sweet trust that had him playfully nipping at her lush lower lip.

  She pretended to claw at his shoulders and they both grinned. That was how they walked into the bunker, with smiles on their faces and their hands linked. When he felt her go stiff in front of the doorway, he leaned down to murmur, “You’re not the child he took and abused. You’re a lioness who fucking kicks ass.”

  “Yes, I am.” Fierce words as she stepped through into her past.

  She was silent as she walked around. She picked up nothing, looked at nothing but her cat’s sleeping basket with sentimental eyes. “It seems smaller,” she said at last. “It was always small, but now . . . I’d go mad if I came from the spread of SnowDancer territory to this. I guess it was a blessing that I was an apartment child before he kidnapped me.”

  Alexei’s claws dug into his palms at the idea of any of this being a blessing. “You want to take anything with you?”

  “I made Jitterbug’s blanket—I learned to knit watching comm shows and I made that, and I’m glad it’s holding him warm in the earth.” She swallowed. “Other than that, nothing here is mine; even the knitting needles and the wool for the blanket were tools for Renault to control me.”

  Alexei forced his claws back in. “He didn’t allow you to take anything of your mother’s?” As an official adoptive parent, Renault would’ve had the papers to request the release of Diana Aven-Rose’s belongings.

  “I don’t think he ever asked to collect.” A tightness to Memory’s features. “She was over and done with to him as soon as she was dead and he’d had his psychotic rush.” Squeezing her eyes shut, she whispered, “I wish I could hear her voice again. I can’t remember that anymore, and it haunts me.”

  Wrapping her up in his arms, Alexei rubbed his cheek against her curls. “I have this recording a packmate made of my parents’ mating ceremony, and I watch it every year just so I can hear their voices.” So young and happy, their eyes bright. “But Brodie . . . Asshole somehow managed not to leave behind any recordings, and it fucking tears me up that one day I might not remember my big brother’s voice, his laugh.”

  They held each other for a long time before separating so Memory could take one last look around the bunker that had been her cage for fifteen long years. “I’m okay,” she said at the end. “I was afraid I’d fall back into the nightmare if I came here, but I’m proud of the girl who survived this.”

  Alexei stepped out of the doorway, turned to hold out a hand. Memory, the tension gone from her features, had one hand on the doorjamb, reached out the other to take his.

  Renault teleported in right behind her.

  His eyes widened, but he moved with reptilian speed despite his surprise. He lunged to wrap an arm around Memory’s neck. Alexei was moving, too, his wolf reacting without conscious thought. But Renault was a teleporter. Alexei’s hand sliced through empty air.

  Memory was in the hands of a psychopath.

  Had it been a physical abduction, Alexei would’ve shifted into wolf form and hunted down the cold metal of Renault’s scent, but he couldn’t follow a teleporter.

  Hauling himself through the trapdoor and into the mocking sunshine, he called Krychek using the dir
ect number SnowDancer’s senior people had for the dangerous Tk. The call went unanswered.

  Fuck.

  He input the number that’d connect him to the Arrows. When Amin answered, Alexei asked for Vasic, the only other teleporter he knew who could lock on to faces as well as places.

  “There’s been a major PsyNet collapse,” Amin responded. “He and the other teleporters are on the ground shifting people out of the destroyed zone so their minds can relink in a healthy one. Casualties are mounting.”

  Alexei hung up. If Vasic was out there, then so was Krychek. He felt for the innocent Psy caught up in the disaster, but stopping a monster from harming his mate was his priority. His wolf clawed at him, wanting to follow, wanting to hunt, but there was no scent trail and Renault was too intelligent to have taken Memory to one of his known hidey holes.

  Rage tore through him . . . and came up hard against the echo of a late-night conversation in a dingy no-name bar. It had to do with Tamsyn and Nathan, and the story Nathan had told him about how he’d blocked the mating bond.

  Alexei had gone out of state, found a dive of a bar where no one would try to stop him from getting blind drunk. He didn’t need the comfort of pack. He needed to get so drunk that he forgot Brodie was dead, Etta was dead.

  His plan might’ve worked in a pack with a less intelligent alpha. Hawke had sicced the cats on him, and Nathan had been in the area at the time. He’d slipped onto the bar stool next to Alexei’s, and they’d sat in silence for over an hour, while Nathan nursed a single beer and Alexei downed three before admitting to himself that he hated being drunk, hated being out of control, and wasn’t going to get shitfaced that day.

  The most senior of DarkRiver’s sentinels, Nathan had a powerful presence. He also had that vibe some men got when they became fathers—calm, nonjudgmental, used to misbehavior. And Alexei needed to talk.

  He’d unloaded on the sentinel.

  “I never want to mate,” he’d said at some point. “The idea of murdering my mate when I go rogue is a fucking nightmare.” He’d shaken his head, his hand tight around the bottle of beer he’d stopped drinking. “Grandfather, father, brother, it’s a fucking unbroken chain of death.”

  Nathan, midnight-blue eyes calm, had asked Alexei if he was sure. When Alexei reiterated his vow, Nathan had told him the story of his own mating. “Tammy left me, and no one would tell me where she’d gone,” he’d said toward the end. “I’d blocked the mating bond too long and it hurt her so much that she left.” A roughness in Nathan’s voice that said everything about his panic.

  “I did the only thing I could to track her. I dropped every shield I had, and the mating bond snapped into place like a thunderclap booming in my soul. Her heart had always been open to me. I was just too much of an overprotective idiot to see it.”

  The leopard sentinel’s words ran through Alexei’s mind in the space of three heartbeats. He knew what he had to do. Memory’s life over his need to stay sane? No contest. As for afterward, he’d deal with it. Even if it meant asking his alpha to execute him at the first sign of madness.

  No one, and especially not Alexei, was going to hurt Memory ever again.

  His wolf snarled in agreement.

  He opened his heart wide, no fear, no hesitation. The shields he’d put in place after Brodie’s death, they fell with a crash at his feet. The mating bond shoved its way through time and space—and there was his Memory. Her heart as open to his as Tamsyn’s had been to Nathan. The visceral punch of the bond snapping into place sent Alexei to his knees, his breathing harsh gasps.

  Inside him burst a kaleidoscope of emotion and color and piercing love and he knew that was her: Memory. God, she was even softer inside than he’d realized. The world would crush her if he wasn’t around to teach her a little cynicism, a few growls.

  Rising to his feet as his heart thundered, he called his alpha and told him what had happened. “Blast Memory’s and Renault’s faces across our network and those of our allies,” he said afterward. “Make it impossible for the bastard to hide.” Changelings across the world, millions of humans linked to the Human Alliance, Psy who had signed the Trinity Accord, each and every one would get the blast.

  “We’ll blanket the planet,” Hawke promised, but Alexei didn’t think Memory was in another country or even another state. Renault had been bony and hollow-eyed when he appeared, far from his full power, and the mating bond felt strong inside Alexei, not stretched thin by huge distances.

  Hanging up, he began to run.

  At full speed, he was faster in this terrain than a vehicle, since a vehicle could only go along certain routes. Branches whipped past his face, small creatures scurried in panic at the approach of a predator, and the wind turned into his ally, pushing rather than obstructing.

  His target was the beacon of Memory’s presence.

  Nathan had told him the mating bond wasn’t like a homing signal—it’d get him to the general area, but then he’d have to hunt by more conventional methods, using the senses of his wolf.

  Erupting out of the trees halfway through DarkRiver territory at a specific spot often used by both packs to park a car or two, he found a familiar dusty Jeep, the keys in the ignition. Hawke. The forest tracks were smoother from this point, the vehicle an asset.

  Shooting out onto the main highway not long afterward, he turned the Jeep in the direction of San Francisco and floored the accelerator.

  It still wasn’t fast enough.

  The only thing that kept him sane was that Memory’s light burned strong and unflinching inside him; she wasn’t badly wounded or dead. He’d know. As her mate, he’d know. “I’m coming, lioness. You fucking kick that bastard’s ass in the meantime.”

  Chapter 51

  Alert. Alert. Alert. Subject lost from view.

  —Alarm sounded by psychic sentries around Memory Aven-Rose’s mind

  WRISTS TIED TO the arms of a heavy old chair, Memory watched her captor pace back and forth in front of her. Her heart pounded from the wild storm of emotion that had burst inside her soon after Renault teleported them into what appeared to be a warehouse.

  Boxes sat neatly stacked on metal shelving against the walls, while a small hovercrane stood silent in one corner and more prosaic forklifts in another. A large number of pallets were stacked on the floor not far in front of her, blocking her view of what lay beyond. The only light came from wide horizontal windows high up near the peaked roof.

  Whenever Renault spoke, his voice echoed in the cavernous space.

  The walls had to be either soundproofed or the warehouse isolated, because she couldn’t hear anything from the outside. She’d also been very loud when they teleported in, and he hadn’t seemed to care. At the time, he’d been focused on tying her to the chair he’d hauled out of what looked to be a back office, while using telekinetic strength to immobilize her.

  His mind couldn’t break into hers, but it had snapped shut around her like the deadly jaws of a great white shark. That skill of his he’d honed too well for her to counter—Memory had told herself not to panic, that she was no longer a child without resources. She’d spent hours with Sascha and Amara, had learned plenty of tricks.

  And she was no longer alone in the world. Alexei would come for her.

  Renault’s split focus on containing her on both the psychic and physical planes was probably why he hadn’t noticed her go rigid, her heart stopping for a brilliant, blinding moment of beauty that had claws pricking from inside her skin and fur brushing her senses.

  Alexei. That was Alexei.

  Her golden wolf had initiated the mating bond and Memory had accepted—of course she’d accepted. She’d never had any intention of rebuffing him should he ever reach out to her. But it wasn’t meant to be this way—she was terribly afraid that he’d regret their connection afterward, but in that searing moment when he’d reached for her, all she’d f
elt was incandescent joy.

  Mine, Alexei’s mine. And she was his.

  “The ropes aren’t that tight,” Renault snapped when she stayed stiff, fighting not to betray her joy. “Stop the theatrics.” He walked over and, with a smile he’d learned to fake, cupped her face. “It’s time for us to get reacquainted.” His eyes gleamed, his tongue flicking out to wet his upper lip.

  An addict waiting for his fix.

  Fear threatened to close a hand around Memory’s throat. But she had Alexei inside her and she wasn’t the Memory who’d walked out of the cage nearly four weeks ago. She was the Memory with glittery shoes given to her by a wolf who thought she had the heart of a lioness, and she was the Memory who practiced with a high-functioning psychopath day after day.

  Amara, at 9.9 on the Gradient and icily rational with it, was more proficient at attempting to breach Memory’s shields than Renault. And Memory had learned to block Amara. So though the contact with Renault burned her, though the howling black hole of his nothingness tried to suck her under, she held firm. “You are not going to feed from me ever again.”

  Letting out a terrible scream, he slapped both hands to her face, so hard that her ears rang. She blinked back the sting, set her jaw, and raised an eyebrow. “Losing control already? Tut tut.”

  He released her with a violent jerk, began to pace the room again. Every few minutes, he’d return, touch her, try to enter her mind—and fail. And fail. And fail. Memory didn’t celebrate, not with Renault’s eyes bulging and his mental stabs increasingly erratic. Unstable as he’d become, he could kill her in a single burst of rage.

  She also had another problem: the psychic watchdogs left by the Arrows should’ve alerted the squad to her disappearance in the PsyNet, her mind swallowed by another. That no one had responded to her disappearance told her a chilling truth.

  “How did you move me on the Net?” A Psy’s location in the PsyNet wasn’t altered by temporary moves in physical location—only if the shift was meant to be permanent would the mind move its anchor point.