by Nalini Singh
Lucas didn’t think it was chance that Kit was talking to Jamie.
“The Ming situation.” Clay bared his teeth at a double-parked car in front of them, before managing to swing around it. “Is it going to be majority rules?”
“Trinity has no official voting system.” One of those things that had been skipped over in the rush to create a united front against the Consortium. “Those of us Aden pulled in right at the start, we didn’t consider that we might want to keep people out of the Trinity network. Discussions were all about how to convince people to have faith in it.”
Lucas often wondered why the hell he’d volunteered to be the first point of contact for overall Trinity business for more than twenty-five packs and counting . . . and then he’d remember Naya. His and Sascha’s smart, funny cub who’d smacked big kisses on his face today before he left the aerie, and who collapsed into giggles when he tickled her. Half Psy, half changeling, all mischief—and as Aden’s intel had put into sharp focus today, a threat to those who abhorred change and wanted to freeze the world in time.
His gut tensed again, claws shoving at his skin. He’d permit no one to dim her light.
He also wanted her to grow up in a united world, not a divided one. Naya should never have to choose between the two sides of her heritage.
Lucas would fight to his last breath to make that happen.
“What’s the second problem?” Clay brought the car to a stop in front of an Embarcadero warehouse owned by DarkRiver. “You said two.”
“Let’s walk and talk,” Lucas said. “You might still make the site in time.”
Stepping out into the salt-laced air of the waterfront after putting up the passenger-side window, Lucas shut the door, then joined Clay as the other man headed in the direction where the boys were waiting. The sun rained down on them out of a cloudless blue sky, the winds light. Lucas could hear the faint buzz of voices in the distance, feel the vibration of the vehicles on the road, smell the saltwater taffy made fresh in a nearby boutique candy shop.
The sunshine made the panther within Lucas stretch out into a lazy sprawl; he had to resist the sudden temptation to shift and sun himself on the pier. That was not alpha behavior—on the other hand, it would be amusing to see people’s reaction to a black panther in their midst, especially if he walked into a butcher’s and pointed to a prime cut of meat.
Changeling cats being bigger than their wild counterparts, he’d make quite an impression.
“Gotta love this sun,” Clay said right then. “Makes me want to curl up and go boneless like that tabby over there.”
Grinning, Lucas told the sentinel what he’d been thinking. Clay’s smile was slow, deep. “Let’s do it for Halloween. Give the tourists a shock. We can chase the ones who are mean to the shopkeepers.”
Deeply amused in a way only a feline could be, Lucas skirted a tiny yapping dog on a leash that thought it was a mastiff. A single hard glance from Lucas would’ve shut him down, but why spoil a tiny dog’s dreams of glory?
“Second issue is connected to the voting situation,” he said as they walked. “It all arises from the lack of a governing charter or constitution.” Something that was deeply necessary to the success of such a diverse body, one with members scattered across the world.
Right now the accord was an agreement to communicate, and they had vehicles in place for that. But to become a truly stabilizing force that would lead to the United Earth Federation, it needed to become far more cohesive. Especially since trust remained a huge, complicated question for the entire membership.
“There are the boys.”
Lucas nodded, having already caught their scent, recognized them as pack. Shoulders tensed and legs bouncing nervously on sneakered feet, the four teenagers were huddled in a small group, their faces unusually solemn.
Spotting Clay and Lucas, Jon said something and the boys jogged across to meet them in the middle of the pier. The four sixteen-year-olds were dressed as boys their age currently dressed—white T-shirts under open shirts of various hues and types, atop baggy board shorts that reached past their knees, and brightly colored sneakers they’d all personalized.
However, though they were wearing shorts meant for the surf, they were carrying hoverboards. All in all, an ordinary sight.
“We were hanging out when we saw it,” Jon said, his extraordinarily beautiful face shadowed under the bill of a battered gray cap and his distinctive violet eyes hidden by hazel contacts.
Certain dangerous people knew the teenager existed and was part of DarkRiver, but there was no reason he had to make himself a high visibility target. Right now, he looked like a thousand other boys in the city. He wasn’t. Jon was one of the Forgotten, part of the young generation that was displaying striking new psychic abilities.
DarkRiver had promised to back the boy should he want to ditch the contacts, stop dyeing his white-gold hair, but Jon had decided it was safer for his buddies and his little sister if he stayed under the radar until he was older and stronger. “Stops people from staring at me, too,” he’d said to Lucas, rubbing the place on his neck where he’d once had a Crawlers gang tattoo. “I just want to be one of the juveniles, you know?”
Lucas understood, even better than Jon likely realized. Clay, Talin, Noor, and DarkRiver were the first real family Jon had ever had, the first time he had people around him on whom he could rely no matter what. He hated being reminded that he was in any way different from his packmates.
“Is the thing you saw in the water or caught under the pier?” Clay asked the boy he’d adopted. It could’ve proved problematic, given Jon’s past, but of all the men in DarkRiver, it was Clay who best understood what it was to be a lost boy.
He and Jon had connected like two puzzle pieces.
Now, the boy shook his head, while around him, the other teenagers looked anywhere but at their alpha or Clay. “We were goofing off and it looked interesting, so, um”—his golden skin pinked—“these guys hung me off the pier by my ankles and I plucked it out.”
His panther impressed by the group’s ingenuity and huffing in laughter at their very cublike behavior right then, Lucas took the small bottle one of the other teens held out. He could see why it had caught their attention. The bottle was crafted of lime green glass and partially covered by barnacles. Bobbing on the water under the piercing sunlight, it would’ve sparkled like a jewel. “You boys opened it?”
Again, Jon was the one who spoke. Definitely a dominant and one Lucas was certain would grow up to become a cornerstone member of the pack. Lucas wouldn’t hesitate to leave Naya in Jon’s care; that said everything about his trust and faith in the boy.
“Yes, sir.” Jon’s voice was as clear as a bell. “We saw the stopper and were joking about finding a message in a bottle. And then . . .” Lifting a hand, he passed a thin, curling piece of paper to Clay. “I didn’t want to try and put it back, maybe tear it.”
“You did the right thing.” Unrolling it with care, Clay held the flimsy paper so he and Lucas could both read it.
My name is Leila Savea and I’m a marine biologist. I was kidnapped while working alone in the Pacific Ocean a mile off the coast of Samoa and I’ve been held in a cold, gray prison since. They scarred my face, cut it up, said it was so a teleporter who uses faces to go places couldn’t find me. I don’t know if that’s true or if they just wanted to hurt me.
I’m often drugged but they’re late with the dose today. I can write today.
A week, maybe ten days ago, they took me out of this room to test drugs on me and when they weren’t looking, I stole a bottle that was on the shelves outside. There were lots of bottles. Like it was someone’s collection once, but they’re all covered with dust now.
I took the paper and pen another time, when one of them forgot his lab coat in my room.
I’m going to hide this letter in the bottle and if they ever take
me outside this place, I’m going to look for water. Water will carry it somewhere. Carry it to my people.
They won’t break me.
There was a subtle change in the ink on the following line, possibly indicating that the next part had been written some time after the first. The words, the tone, it too implied enough of a passage of time that the writer’s defiant spirit had begun to crumple under the pressure.
Miane, please help me. I’m so far from home and I hurt. It’s cold here. There’s snow everywhere but no ocean to feed my soul. I listen so hard for it, but all I hear is the wind and the trees and my captors. The sea doesn’t speak here.
Even if I escape this prison, I won’t get far before my body gives up. I’m not meant for this kind of cold. They want me to swim to places, do bad things. They think no one will miss me because I prefer to swim alone.
Please miss me. I miss you.
They’re trying to break me, turn me into an automaton, a slave.
I don’t know where I am. But I saw things when they first brought me here. They miscalculated the drug and I was almost awake. It’s a square concrete building in the middle of snow and trees. So much snow that it hurts my eyes when I look out the narrow strip of window at the top of my prison.
The building has this symbol on the side, faded and old.
A painstakingly hand-drawn symbol followed. A triangle with the letters CCE on the inside, the font blocky and squat.
I hear ducks sometimes. As if there’s a river or a stream or a lake nearby. I can’t see anything but I hear them. And—
The letter just ended, as if the writer had run out of time or been interrupted. What Leila Savea had written was chilling enough.
Lucas’s eyes met Clay’s before they both looked at the bottle in Lucas’s hand. Barnacles crawled up over a quarter of the bottle’s surface, betraying a long sojourn in the ocean. The chances of Leila Savea still being alive were low to negligible.
That didn’t matter.
His anger a cold, icy thing that burned, Lucas turned to the teenagers who’d had the intelligence and heart to understand what they’d found. “I’m proud of you,” he said because cubs needed to hear that from their alpha. “We’ll take care of it now.” He’d get the bottle and the message to the BlackSea water changelings, to the people Leila Savea had hoped to reach.
“Will we find her?” Jon’s fingers were bone white on the edge of his hoverboard.
Lucas gripped the side of the boy’s neck, anchoring him in pack skin privileges. Jon might’ve been born Forgotten, but he was DarkRiver now. And Lucas didn’t lie to his packmates. “I don’t know, but we’re sure as hell going to try.”
No one deserved to be tortured and tormented and trapped in the Consortium’s clutches.
Chapter 3
MIANE LEVÈQUE, ALPHA of BlackSea, ended her comm conversation with Lucas Hunter with rage in her blood and determination in her bones. Leila, sweet, happily nerdy Leila, who loved the sun and the ocean and who was never more contented than when she was swimming with the tropical fish she studied, was caged in a cold box, drugged and hurting.
Dying.
She jerked as Malachai closed his hand over her shoulder, squeezed. The big male had stayed out of sight of the screen, but he’d been privy to her entire conversation with the leopard alpha. “She gave us clues,” he reminded her. “The bottle itself may be a clue.”
Miane had asked that DarkRiver give the bottle to a trusted member of BlackSea who’d be able to run tests the cats wouldn’t even think to run. They didn’t understand water, didn’t know all the moods and tastes of it. Not simply salt and fresh. Each ocean had its own complexities. Different parts of an ocean had different personalities.
“Leila was always clever.” But even the cleverest young woman couldn’t share what she didn’t know.
The comm beeped again, notifying her of a file transfer from DarkRiver.
Downloading it, she saw that Lucas had sent through information on the triangular symbol Leila had drawn. The search had been running as they spoke. “It’s the logo for a long-defunct utility company.” Canadian Cheap Electric. “Hundreds of possible facilities across Canada.”
“Wait.” Malachai scrolled down, swore with uncharacteristic harshness.
Miane’s right-hand man was usually almost Psy in his ability to control his emotions.
“It says historical records were damaged forty-five years ago,” he told her. “The locations of the substations, the part of CCE’s infrastructure that best matches Leila’s description, were lost.”
Some, Miane thought, had undoubtedly been destroyed by time and human interference. Others might be hidden by the kind of tree cover Leila had described, while still others may have been repurposed into legitimate uses. “It’s our only real clue. We run it, even if it means tracking down each and every substation one by one.”
Malachai didn’t tell her that was an impossible task—Leila would be long dead and turned to dust before they found the right location. All he said was, “We have to think smart.” His pale gold eyes held hers, the color so clear she sometimes couldn’t believe it was real. Malachai’s true eyes looked like a beam of sunlight cutting through the clear waters off the most pristine white sand beach.
It befit what he was, a secret unknown to the world.
“We’ll have the tests done,” he continued, “get an idea of where she might have dropped in the bottle and how long ago.”
Because there was a high chance Leila was no longer in that old CCE facility.
Miane refused to believe the bright young woman was already dead, like so many of BlackSea’s vulnerable and far-flung members. The ones who swam alone or in small groups. Where the Consortium believed they wouldn’t be missed.
I miss you, Leila.
The girl was on their list of vanished members, the disappearance reported by another lone swimmer who’d crossed paths with Leila once a month and who’d searched weeks for her in the warm waters around Samoa. She’d found only Leila’s small research vessel; it had been bobbing on waves far from the zone where her friend said Leila would’ve normally dropped anchor.
“We also have people in Canada,” Miane reminded Malachai, ruthlessly silencing the memory of how Leila’s friend had sobbed when she’d reported her missing, how she’d begged Miane to find Leila.
She’s so gentle, Miane. And she has this childlike wonder in the world, this belief that people are mostly good.
Hand fisting so hard her nails cut into her palm, Miane forced herself to speak. “I’ll blast out a notice, put our people in the region on alert.” The Canadian landscape was full of lakes and the changelings that called them home also called BlackSea pack.
Malachai’s expression darkened. “It could go to one of the traitors.”
Bile threatened to burn Miane’s throat.
The realization that BlackSea must have at least one traitor in their midst was a terrible one. There was no other way to explain how outsiders had so accurately been able to predict the location of BlackSea’s most isolated members—those lone water changelings generally had well-hidden places of sleep scattered across oceans and along beaches, riverbeds, and lakefronts.
The ones like Leila, who lived on boats, moved around from day to day, though like any living being, they had favorite spots.
The realization of betrayal would’ve been devastating for any pack but it was viciously heartbreaking for BlackSea because of the pack’s unique genesis. Water-based changelings tended to be made up of pairs or small pods. Some did run in large schools, but those changelings thought in “groupmind.” It made them smart and strong when functioning as a group, but different enough that they had difficulty dealing with outsiders who demanded to speak to the boss. The schools had no leader, were truly a single multicelled organism.
On the flip side, the water was also
home to the dangerous and the powerful, but the lethal predators rarely came into contact with the other species. That had worked fine for centuries, but as the world developed and the oceans and lakes and rivers of the planet became a coveted source of power and trade, fishing going from small boats that changelings could easily avoid to huge trawlers dragging massive nets, their isolation began to kill them.
It had been Miane’s ancestors who had reached out to their brethren, after losing half their family to a huge fishing conglomerate that had flat-out ignored the warnings that certain waters had been legally claimed for changeling use. Big business knew that scattered groups of water-based changelings had no way to enforce the rules and as the decades passed, people had become used to ignoring them.
Coming together to form BlackSea had never been about power, though power was a much-needed by-product. BlackSea had been born so that their people would be safe, so that they could protect and nurture their young in waters unpolluted by outsiders, free of their deadly nets and traps.
Now one of the pack had sold out the members who needed BlackSea most.
“We need eyes out there,” she said, her gut churning. “Not just for Leila, for all of the vanished.” This was only the second time they’d had any clue where one of their stolen packmates might be. “We’ll have to take the risk.”
“Let me handle it.” Malachai was a wall of strength in front of her, a man she’d never seen lose his temper. “I know several Canadian members personally, people I trust. I’ll pass on the information to them, have them feed it out to those they trust. It should lower the chance of treachery.”
“Do it.” Miane knew her brain was hazy with rage, her decision-making skills compromised. She needed Malachai’s calm, his way of being a still pond even in the midst of a crashing sea.
When he pinned her with those clear eyes of pale gold unseen on any human or Psy or terrestrial changeling, she glared back. “What?”
“You need to swim.” It was an order. “You’ve been out of the water far too long.”