Wolf Rain

by Singh, Nalini

  Renault gave a strange, jagged laugh that raised the tiny hairs on the back of her neck. She’d never heard him laugh before—even in his sickest pleasure, he’d been cool and calm. “Don’t you know, little girl?”

  “No,” Memory said, willing to play along with his delusions if it would gain her room to beat him and escape, gain her mate time to find her. Her golden wolf had lost too many people; she would not let Alexei lose her, too. “You know I never had the usual training.”

  He hugged his arms around his body as he walked back and forth, back and forth, rocking slightly all the while. “No, you had my training.” A satisfied smile. “I was in your mind long before you found your new friends.” The last word was hissed out. “Where are those friends now? Hmm?”

  Memory frowned inwardly, suddenly realizing that Alexei must’ve contacted the Arrows. One of those Arrows was a born teleporter. Yet she remained alone with Renault. “I don’t understand what you did.” She forced a tremor in her voice. “Why has no one come for me?” Even as she spoke, the mating bond surged inside her, Alexei’s love for her a storm.

  Never again, not even in the darkest, deepest hole, would she be isolated and alone, she thought fiercely. But Renault didn’t know that, didn’t know the beauty of a bond that wasn’t Psy but changeling. A bond he hadn’t been able to prevent even though he’d imprisoned her mind.

  It was too primal, too beautiful, far beyond his comprehension.

  “You think you’re so smart to shut all the back doors into your mind.” Another laugh. “But this wasn’t a door. It’s a path tied to your PsyNet biofeedback link. I had to make sure I could retrieve my little mouse if she got out of her hole—retrieve her and put her in another place where no one would look for her.”

  Clearly, he’d needed physical contact to do it or he would’ve taken her long ago. Memory didn’t need to hear the technical details, but she urged him to speak, and he did, because she was once again his captive audience—an audience he didn’t respect and considered useless in every way but one.

  He took great pleasure in telling her how he’d laid the groundwork in her mind while she was recovering from the coma he’d caused during the first transfer. Laid it so deep that it was part of her core self. So deep that Judd would’ve had to invade her mind in horrific and traumatizing ways to discover it.

  Renault’s trap had survived because the former Arrow had treated her with courtesy and dignity.

  “It gives me a rope,” Renault boasted. “I can pull that rope and you move. Away from those nasty spies around you and where I want you.” A sudden, piercing look. “You’re inside my mind now and I’m keeping you there. No one will ever find you again.”

  Memory asked more questions about his actions, her only aim to keep him talking. And talk he did—between bursts of rage when he’d scream at her to let him in. When he raised a fist to her, she held the eye contact. “You injure my brain and that’s it. No more transfer.” She had to straddle a careful line between appearing too strong and antagonizing him—and appearing so weak that he’d simply ignore anything she said.

  “I’ll break you.” Despite the threatening words, he dropped his fist to his side. “I have you now and I’ll break you.”

  Memory’s skin went cold, not because of his promise, but because of what she saw on his face. His pupils were dilated, his skin shimmering with perspiration. She’d never seen Renault in such a state—not even when he’d left a transfer a little too late and had come to her wired. “You don’t look well.”

  “It’s the medicine,” he said, stepping back from her and running his hands over the stubbled skin of his head. “I had to use it to deal with my illness, but it has side effects.”

  “Illness?”

  “Muscle tremors, dry mouth, the inability to maintain a steady body temperature.” Renault shivered hard and, hugging himself, hunched in and began to pace again. “I can’t consult top-level M-Psy because your friends have made me a fugitive, and the people I considered allies have shown their true faces.” A twist of his mouth. “They’ll pay. All of them.”

  Withdrawal, he was in withdrawal. From Memory and the rush of the feed. “Do you need more medicine?” she murmured, because this was about survival, about stopping a monster, and, most important, about protecting her golden wolf’s wounded heart.

  Renault jerked his head toward her, hazel-brown eyes glittering. “Yes.” A manic brightness to his face. “Yes, the medicine calms me and I need calm to break you.” Striding over, he took a pressure injector from his pocket. It looked like the disposable kind you could buy at most drugstores.

  Memory’s heart kicked, her mouth like dust. “Narcotics affect my ability,” she blurted out. “Remember that first time?”

  He hesitated. “You were in a coma because I overfed.”

  “I’ve been tested since I’ve been . . . away,” she said, choosing her words with care so as not to unnerve his disturbed mind. “Any trace of a narcotic in my system and I can’t guarantee the transfer will work. Remember—you gave me a sedative that first time.”

  He’d never again bothered with the drugs, because he either had his claws in her mind, or she was in a place where no one could hear her scream.

  “You’re lying.” He jabbed the injector against her throat, hard enough to bruise.

  “Doesn’t matter to me.” She shrugged. “At least you won’t be able to feed off me while I’m comatose or lost in delirium.”

  A pause stretched thin as a wire before he shoved the injector into his pocket. Striding out of sight around a group of the tall metal shelves, he did something in the distance that made clattering sounds; then she heard boxes falling to the floor. When he returned, it was with another rope.

  This one was long enough that he tied it around her entire body, pinning her legs and arms to the chair. “You won’t be going anywhere,” he said with a satisfied look followed by a giggle. “I’ll be back soon with my medicine.”

  She wondered which drug he was on—it couldn’t be any actual medicine, of that she was certain. Drugs had unpredictable effects on psychic abilities—that part of what she’d said was no lie. However, whatever was happening with Renault, his abilities remained razor-sharp.

  “Scream as loudly as you want,” he said as he walked away, tugging the hood of his sweatshirt over his head. “The local laws mean the warehouse has sound shielding. No one will hear you.”

  Alexei will hear me, she thought on a wave of defiant love. My mate will always hear me.

  A creak of sound, then a shaft of light in the distance that soon disappeared, in time with the clang of a door. She began to struggle the instant he was gone, but it took her only a minute to realize he hadn’t left any slack in the ropes.

  “Think, Memory,” she whispered. “Think.”

  The chaos of her thoughts narrowed down to the glint of a spoon inching its way across a table.

  . . . nothing is useless if you know how to utilize it.

  Stopping her struggles, Memory focused on the knot in the rope that bound her right wrist to the chair arm and reached for the tiny droplet of Tk power inside her, the one that couldn’t even knock a knife from Renault’s hand.

  She began to nudge at the knot with her mind.

  * * *

  • • •

  ALEXEI turned left into the Embarcadero, the pull of the mating bond a dull throb in his entire body as he drove on through the darkness that had fallen, onyx curtains eclipsing the light. Surely Renault wasn’t arrogant enough to bring Memory into the heart of DarkRiver territory? One glimpse of her and Renault would be overrun by leopards.

  The busy public piers passed, followed by the more utilitarian ones, the buildings hulking shadows against the night sky. And still he was pulled forward. All the way to a section of the city that held a number of large business warehouses. The tug became blindingly powerful
, encompassing all the warehouses in the area and driving his wolf to a feral edge.

  Parking the Jeep, he got out and took several deep breaths.

  As with any city, a thousand, a million strands of scent lingered in the air, but Alexei was a wolf, designed to sift through those strands without becoming overwhelmed. Underneath the heavy mix of the city’s buildings and residents, he caught faded scents of cats and wolves.

  None of those scents were fresh, however, and he needed backup. Renault was a teleporter and—“You idiot, Alexei.” Hauling out his phone even as he began to prowl through the area on the hunt for his mate, he called Judd. “Can you teleport to a location in San Francisco?”

  “Yes. I haven’t exerted much telekinetic energy lately. Send me a visual.”

  Alexei took a shot of a doorway festooned with creative graffiti, sent it through. When Judd arrived next to him, he was wearing a sweaty black T-shirt and workout pants, his feet in black sneakers bearing dark green stripes down the sides. “I heard about Memory. What do you need?”

  “Fucker’s teleported her somewhere here.” Memory’s presence was a song inside him, calling to wolf and man both. “I need you to hold him if he tries it again.”

  “Doable,” Judd said. “I need a missile of some kind.” After a quick search, he picked up a rocky piece of debris from a construction site where a new warehouse was being put up. “I can interrupt the teleport long enough for you to get to him.”

  “You pick up anything?” Judd had Gradient 9.4 telepathic abilities.

  “Nothing useful. Too many minds scattered around to zero in on a particular suspicious set.”

  Alexei froze, his nostrils flaring. “Renault passed through here.” The cold metal twined with a hint of acidic sweat, that was the hallmark of Memory’s abductor.

  He tracked the scent with icy focus, coming to a halt near a doorway cloaked in murk. The street lamp had been smashed, but Alexei didn’t need it to see. The scent was thick here. As if Renault had stopped for long enough to spill the scent like water.

  “Hey, I don’t want no trouble.” The hoodie-wearing dealer in the doorway held up his hands. “I follow the rules. I don’t sell to no cats or wolves or kids. Even leave the fucking Rats alone—their alpha’s a bad mofo. I don’t need that kind of trouble in my life.”

  The man was human, Alexei judged. A predator preying on his own kind. There was only so much DarkRiver and SnowDancer could do to protect people in their territories—those who hungered for poison would find it. Brodie had found it as a teenager, only Hawke’s immediate and personal intervention stopping Alexei’s brother’s slide into addiction and oblivion.

  Controlling his rage at the heavyset bearded male, who was unlikely to have ever met his brother, he pulled out his phone and brought up an image of Renault. “You make a deal with this guy recently?”

  “Yeah, but the asshole don’t look so swish now.” A curl of the dealer’s lip. “He nearly broke my arm when he used his telekinesis shit to throw me against the wall. Stole a whole bunch of my merchandise.” He spat to one side of his alcove. “I put out the word among my people on the street. Psy parasite’s dead if he shows his face again.”

  One human against a Tk had no real chance, but many violently inclined humans who knew to approach their target with stealth? Yeah, they could win. “Which way did he go?”

  The dealer nodded to Alexei’s right with a grin that revealed a missing tooth and a gold one, side by side. “Hope you tear out his guts and use them as a noose!” he yelled out after them.

  Alexei followed Renault’s scent in the direction the dealer had indicated. It wove in and out of the district, intersecting with itself several times—either Renault was being clever and laying multiple trails to confuse anyone hunting him, or he’d been searching for drugs for a long time before he’d finally found the dealer.

  Alexei hoped to hell that meant Memory had been safe from the bastard the entire time. I’m coming, lioness. You hold on.

  Chapter 52

  Never underestimate an empath.

  —Author’s Note, The Mysterious E Designation: Empathic Gifts & Shadows by Alice Eldridge (Reprint: 2082)

  MEMORY’S HEART POUNDED a rapid beat, feeling somehow more powerful than it ever before had. As if she had a wolf’s heart now. Sweat dripped from her temples and her head throbbed from the constant use of her minor telekinetic gift . . . but the bond around her right wrist suddenly came undone.

  She had no time for surprise or elation; she worked with desperate speed to untie her left wrist, then bent to release her feet—it was where Renault had knotted the long piece of rope he’d wrapped around her. Her fingers slipped, a nail broke, but she managed to undo the tie around her ankles. The rope tangled around her body was now the only thing that stood between her and freedom.

  The door to the warehouse creaked open, letting in a shaft of streetlamp-yellow illumination. It shut with a bang. A bright ceiling light came on soon afterward.

  Memory gritted her teeth and kept on working with angry calm. She was not going to let Renault win. Breath shallow but pulse rapid, she tugged off the last of the rope as she sensed Renault’s twisted presence coming closer and closer.

  There!

  Stepping out of the pool of ropes, she padded softly away from the chair despite the heat in her blood that urged her to run toward the monster, take him down. She had to think like Alexei, like a wolf.

  A good hunter stalked her prey, took him from a position of power.

  She slipped behind a shelf just as Renault appeared from the other side. She examined him through the shelving, noting his slightly unsteady walk, the glittering brightness of his face. Whatever he was on, it had him hyped—it might be one of the new drug formulations aimed at Psy that had recently hit the streets.

  The Beacon had reported on it last week.

  Whatever it was, it had messed with his senses, because it took him several seconds of staring at the empty chair surrounded by ropes to realize she wasn’t there. His face contorted, his mouth opening. His scream of rage echoed throughout the warehouse—she took advantage of the noise to duck around another corner, putting more distance between them while ensuring she could keep an eye on him through the breaks in the boxes stacked on the shelves around her.

  Protein supplement.

  Nutrient mix.

  Her foot hit something.

  She glanced down and had to slap a hand over her mouth to control her reflexive scream. A dead man in a security guard’s uniform lay on the floor, blood oozing out of his nostrils and ears. She sensed nothing from him, no indication of a living presence, but she bent down to check his pulse. Clammy skin, nothing but death.

  So this warehouse wasn’t one of Renault’s that he’d somehow accessed. He’d broken in—and murdered in the process. Either the place had no alarms, or he’d forced the guard to give him the codes. She was betting on the latter.

  Her resolve to end him hardened. Renault would keep on killing if he wasn’t stopped here and now; he’d spread pain like a cancer across the families of his victims.

  No more.

  “You bitch! You think I won’t find you!”

  Memory braced herself for a telepathic sweep—she was the only other mind in the vicinity, couldn’t escape it, but Renault wasn’t going to attempt to kill her with telepathy, not unless he’d completely lost it. If she kept moving, he couldn’t use his Tp to zero in on her location so he could then freeze her in place using his telekinesis.

  And if she managed to incite him into coming after her, she might be able to get him in a position where she could push one of the heavy shelves on top of him before he could use his abilities to block it.

  She had Alexei, too.

  Her mate was coming for her, his wolf a prowling wildness inside her.

  Renault screamed again and Memory realized she hadn
’t felt a telepathic sweep. Oh, of course. She was inside Renault’s own shields; he couldn’t attempt to find her mind without first releasing her.

  It had to be the same reason her attempts at swamping him with negative emotion weren’t having any impact—her energy was being trapped inside the shell he’d placed over her mind. The next thing she felt was a slam of power against her mind that had her gritting her teeth, her eyes watering.

  “Run! Run! I’ll smash your shields open!” He kicked over the chair so it fell to the floor with a clatter, all the while battering at her mind.

  He was a stronger telepath than her, and he’d had decades longer to learn aggressive tactics than she’d had to learn defensive ones. In a blunt-force fight, she’d lose. So she had to be cleverer, had to outthink him. Aware from past experience that she could telepath him while locked inside his shields, she said, Shatter my mind and you kill the part of me you want. No lie. This kind of savage and violent breaching often led to severe brain damage.

  She watched through the shelves as he paused, the muscles in his jaw and neck bulging. Come out and I won’t hurt you. His eyes moved in jittering sweeps.

  Damn it, she’d made a strategic error. Now he knew for certain that she was nearby. I want an agreement, she said, stalling while she looked for anything that would work as a weapon.

  An agreement?

  I’m not a child any longer. I’m an independent contractor.

  An incredulous look on his face. An independent contractor?

  Yes. Memory crept toward the door. If Renault stayed where he was and didn’t pursue her into the shelves, then she’d slip out and wait for Alexei, and they’d take down the monster together.

  One way or another, this ended here, tonight.

  I like having money and being able to buy pretty clothes, she ’pathed him. Pay me and you won’t have to spend energy trying to keep me caged. I’ll appear as scheduled for regular sessions.

  Renault stared around the warehouse before leaning down to calmly right the chair. “If you’re attempting to get to the door, don’t bother. I twisted the lock with Tk. I’ll have to untwist it to let you out.”