by Nalini Singh
Hex chose that moment to scramble down the counter and to the floor. "You want me to grab him before he makes a grand escape?"
"No. Hex knows the way home." Her pet moved quickly out of the kitchen. She knew he'd find his way to the seaward wall and sit there watching the deep in rapturous quiet.
"Odd pet for a cook."
Kaia could see no risk in sharing this truth with him. "My boy cousins put a mouse in my bed when I was twelve." None of the six had played a single trick on her while she was in the black hole of grief, instead surrounding her in warmth and affection and more compassion than most people would believe possible from a bunch of rowdy boys.
"They thought I'd scream. I didn't." The miscreants had been trying ever more devious tricks since then--every so often, the younger four could still talk Edison and Mal into joining in.
"Hex doesn't look a day over one or two."
"His full name is Hex Luna the seventh. The mouse life span is sadly short." Flippant words, but Kaia had mourned the death of each Hex. She would've never adopted Hex II if Edison hadn't turned up with the mouse six months after the first Hex's death.
"Love him, Kaia. He needs it."
Her big, tough cousins kept doing that, and she kept not being able to give the new Hex back. Each one had their own personality, their own way of being. This Hex was mischievous and loved to explore where Hex VI had been a homebody who mostly enjoyed sleeping--with very rare excursions to run on his wheel.
And though Kaia hated death, she'd come to terms with it with the Hexes--because when they died, it was after their natural life span. And in that life span, they were pampered and protected and loved.
It was the unexpected or unnatural losses that destroyed her.
Her eyes landed on Bowen and she thought of the ticking time bomb in his head . . . and of the untested compound in his brain. If the chip imploded or the compound failed, there'd be nothing natural about it.
It would destroy Bowen Knight right in the prime of life.
Chapter 13
"We can bandage up his physical wounds, but it's the damage done to his heart and his mind that'll scar him."
"My gentle, sweet boy. What will this do to you? Who will this make you?"
--Jerard and Leah Knight on their son, Bowen (13)
BO THOUGHT OF the plate of Scott's favorite food, of the cane thrust under his hand, of a room made warm so he could sleep comfortably and wondered how Kaia expected him to believe she just shrugged off the deaths of her pets.
"I was thirteen when my pet hamster died," he found himself telling her. "I cried for a week at night, when no one else could see me." It had happened four days after he killed in desperate defense of himself and his best friend, four days after his mind was violated so badly that he'd still been suffering ice-pick migraines, blood vessels bursting in his eyes from the pressure.
Kaia's expression stilled. "That's not a very macho admission."
"You've seen me flat on my back in bed, a million wires coming out of my body," Bowen said with a shrug, though he could feel a dark flush creeping onto his cheekbones. "I figure that ship has already sailed far, far away." Unfortunately.
"What was your hamster's name?"
"Toric the Destroyer."
A twitch of Kaia's lips. "Did you ever get another hamster?"
Bo deliberately forked up a bite of food, took his time chewing then swallowing. "No. Guess I grew out of it." He'd buried Toric in his parents' back garden and planted a tree over his small body.
That tree now provided a home for birds, and shade on a sunny day. And it reminded Bo of the boy he'd once been, a boy who'd held long conversations with his pet about the best way to lay siege to the ogre's castle in his favorite game. That boy seemed a mirage of the past now. A ghost who had never really existed.
"No, you didn't." Kaia looked at him with a disturbing intensity. "You were too sad to get another pet."
How could he explain to her without tearing open scars he'd spent a lifetime ignoring? "Some things were for the boy I was," he said at last. "The man has other priorities."
A sudden blink . . . and a stiffening of her features. "Why are you pursuing a friendship between humans and water changelings? It's not like we often cross paths."
"Water changelings do live on land," Bo pointed out. "Generally near lakes and rivers and the ocean, but they have definite land-based residences. Including many in my home base of Venice."
"You know what I mean."
"Yes, our paths don't often intersect," he admitted. "Water changelings tend to stick pretty close to their own." It was rare for them to even make contact with other changeling groups, far less humans. "How's the alliance with the leopards and wolves working out?"
"The wolves upgraded all the lighting in the station." Kaia pointed up. "We didn't have the simulated sunlight and moonlight till then." She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and released it with pleasure. "That's the one thing I used to miss about the surface--the light."
Bo had gone motionless the instant she raised her face, the softness of her catching him in its steely grasp. So much pleasure in such a simple act, her entire body worshipping the glow of sunlight. "What did you think of them?" he asked when she returned to her recipe.
"Engineers are engineers everywhere, but I've never seen such powerful dominants go so green." Laughter in the backs of her eyes. "Station commander says they set a speed record with the installation, they were so antsy to leave."
"Yeah." Bo found wonder in being down in the deep, and he had no claustrophobic tendencies--but he was also very conscious that it'd be nearly impossible for him to leave without BlackSea cooperation.
He had only a single ace to play: Kaleb Krychek.
Of course, calling the cardinal telekinetic for an assist would put the Alliance in debt to the Ruling Coalition of the Psy--which made his ace useless. "Humans and water changelings have a lot in common."
Kaia's scowl was a storm cloud. "Oh?" She put a jar of walnuts on the counter.
"What are those for?"
"Walnut coconut snowballs. The orcas like them and they haven't broken anything this week."
Orcas, sharks, women with tentacles who purred suggestive promises at him across the room, it all sounded like a drug-fueled dream. "They the bull-in-a-china-shop of the sea?"
"Walruses hold that title. Mostly because they're too bad-tempered to watch where they're going."
Bowen couldn't help but think of the mustachioed male who'd seemed ready to pound him into paste in the atrium. If anyone should be a walrus, it was him--especially with that mustache. "Do you want me to chop up the walnuts for you?"
Kaia passed him the jar along with a knife and a wooden cutting board--and when their fingers brushed, she drew back with jagged speed. "Unless you can swim underwater for hours, I doubt we have anything in common."
Heart thundering, Bo began to twist open the jar. "We're spread out across the world." It was hard to focus when his fingers burned with an echo of sensation, but he had to make her listen; only then might he get an answer on the cause of her anger and that of the man in the atrium. "It makes us less able to defend ourselves."
Jar open, he picked out a nut and crunched it between his teeth. "The DarkRiver leopards, for example, have well-defined and comparatively compact territorial borders they defend with blood and fury. Same with the StoneWater bears--huge territory but defined down to the wire. Cross their boundaries at your own risk."
Kaia crouched down to look for something in a lower cupboard. "What do you know about the bears?"
"One of my cousins just mated into StoneWater."
Kaia popped up from her crouch so fast she almost hit her head on the edge of the counter. "You're making that up."
Bo didn't take her disbelief personally. "I nearly fell down when Phoenix told me. He's so shy he couldn't even approach a gazelle changeling."
"A shy human with a StoneWater bear." Kaia sounded like she was being strangled.
"Is he still alive?"
"Not only alive but deliriously happy." In love in a puppyish way Bo simply couldn't imagine. To trust that deeply, so without fences or walls, to let yourself fall . . . he wasn't capable of it.
He'd seen masks on too many faces, had learned too well never to trust based on instinct alone. It had begun at thirteen, in an act of boyish trust that had almost cost his best friend his life and turned Bo into a killer.
Chapter 14
If a bear or a wolf tries to feed you, you wild women know to be on your guard. If an eagle suddenly turns up spic-and-span and wearing a pretty suit, you know to lift an eyebrow. But humans . . . humans don't follow any kind of a pattern that we've been able to work out despite extensive investigation on your behalf, so you'll have to be on your guard. Or you might end up in your sneaky human's bed before you know it.
--From the December 2081 issue of Wild Woman magazine: "Skin Privileges, Style & Primal Sophistication"
BOWEN KNIGHT WAS very good at hiding his thoughts and emotions, but nothing could erase the black cloud hanging over his head. Yet they'd been talking about a happy subject, about love, about a bear mating a--Oh.
Kaia swallowed hard as she grabbed the oatmeal she needed for the oatmeal raisin cookies, her skin suddenly frigid. Because it struck her that Bowen was probably caught in the vicious reality of his own existence, where he had only a five percent probability of surviving beyond two weeks with his mind intact. His chances of falling in love, mating--
"Does BlackSea have a relationship with the Moscow bears?"
Flinching inwardly at the sound of his voice, she stood to find he'd banished the blackness and was focused on chopping up the walnuts. His hair fell across his forehead, and the lines on that forehead were of concentration. She wanted to shake her own head--he even chopped walnuts with a dangerously intent absorption.
She curled her fingers into her palm when they threatened to reach out and push back that lock of hair. "You'll have to ask Mal or Miane about the politics, but I've never met a bear." Apparently the bears had been acting secretive for a while.
Malachai had mentioned it to her once, while muttering about how bears drove people crazy and those crazy people liked it. It had been on the heels of three of their young going missing--only to turn up gigglingly drunk in the Caspian Sea, on a boat with a bunch of bears.
That had been before the vanishings, before they'd lost their innocence.
"Here's what I do know," she said, fighting the sadness threatening to crush her; her kitchen hands would be here soon and they were only youths, deserved better than to exist in a clan mired in constant mourning. "Last week the bears threw a party so raucous it covered half of Moscow." She found the vanilla pods and set them out; she liked having all her ingredients at hand before she began to bake. "It was in the latest In the Know column of Wild Woman magazine."
Bowen looked up. "What magazine?"
She waved away the question to tell him something far more interesting. "Kaleb Krychek attended and the column had a photo of him dancing with his mate." The Psy couple had been surrounded by large bears in bear form wearing party hats.
"Any reason for the party?"
"Mating celebration for their alpha." She realized something. "You probably don't know, do you? Valentin Nikolaev mated Silver Mercant."
The knife thunked to motionlessness on the cutting board. "Seriously, Kaia," Bowen said with a pained look, "you all have to stop messing with me. My coma-brain is going to explode. The last person Silver Mercant would ever mate with is a bear."
A laugh bubbled up inside her at his expression. "Here." Picking up the organizer she generally used to make recipe notes, she brought up the most recent edition of Wild Woman and flicked to the article about the mating. "They even managed to get a short Q&A with Silver for their story."
Kaia had a feeling the powerful woman had agreed in order to humanize herself, breaking down barriers that might stand in EmNet's way. She had to admire the telepath for that--because Silver Mercant had a sense of containment about her that said she valued her privacy. Yet she'd given that up for the good of people across the globe who might one day need assistance from the Emergency Response Network supported by all three races.
Bowen took the organizer, spent the next five minutes reading the article. "One measly coma and the world turns upside down. Silver Mercant with a bear. What the hell am I going to find out next? That Psy Councilor Nikita Duncan has fallen madly in love and eloped?" Shaking his head as he muttered that ridiculous scenario, he turned a few pages, then seemed to get engrossed in another article.
Kaia wondered what he was reading; Wild Woman was aimed at changeling women for the most part, though she knew her cousin Armand had a subscription. Ask him around other men and he'd smirk and say it was for "research on women," but Kaia knew full well he loved the fashion and beauty editorials. He'd even asked her to help him make the natural skin-softening cream described in one issue.
"I have the worst stubble rash," he'd said, scratching at his jaw with black-painted fingernails.
Amused at Bowen's fascinated concentration and speculating whether he'd found a beauty tip of his own, she bent down to grab the jar of raisins she had to hide behind pungent spices so people wouldn't steal them. No, not the kids. Grown adults who should know better, but who kept purloining her cooking supplies--as if there weren't perfectly fine packets of snackable raisins in the huge "goody" jar she had out front.
Apparently, her cooking raisins were "juicier."
Bowen had put down the organizer by the time she rose back up to her feet. As she watched, he threw a walnut into his mouth.
"How about eating more actual food rather than my walnuts?" She looked pointedly at his half-full plate.
"I'm taking a break." He continued to chop the walnuts.
As Kaia began to measure out the ingredients for the first set of cookies, he said, "You lost someone, didn't you? In the vanishings?"
Kaia's spine went ramrod straight at the quiet question. God, the man was dangerous--he might have just come out of a coma, but the security chief part of his brain was fully functional. And she'd let down her guard in the silliness of a conversation about bears and walnuts.
Chapter 15
The Consortium wants Trinity to fail. Peace and cooperation between humans, Psy, and changelings hurts their bottom line and their posited ambition of being shadow powers who treat us all as their puppets. As we come from all three races, so do the members of the Consortium. None of us can wash our hands of this scourge. They are the enemy of peace, of unity, of Trinity.
--Message sent to all signatories to the Trinity Accord
"MY BEST FRIEND, Hugo." Kaia measured out the sugar with jerky hands. "He went out for a long-range swim and never came back."
"Consortium." White lines around Bowen's mouth, his jaw hard. "Those bastards want to use water changelings to get into places they can't."
Kaia had heard all the theories. It didn't matter that she wasn't in security. Three of Atalina's brothers were--and then there was Mal, Miane's right hand and one of the deadliest men in the clan. But when the cousins all gathered together, Mal and the others spoke openly on many things. They knew nothing they said would ever leave the room.
And it wasn't as if Mal was going behind Miane's back in sharing the information; she was often right there with them.
In the beginning, it had been strange to have her in the group-- Miane was their First, their alpha, the most powerful person in BlackSea and capable of bloody retribution against those who harmed her own. The distance, however, hadn't lasted long under the force of Miane's charisma and incredible warmth.
Kaia now knew that Miane had a weakness for salted caramel bites, basil-infused pasta, and strong Turkish coffee. During those dinners full of conversation and laughter, she became just another clanmate, albeit one who hummed with so much power that Malachai alone could handle the full force of it.
So Kaia knew full we
ll that everyone was blaming the Consortium for the vanishings--but they weren't the only nasties in the water. "Or maybe," she said, too angry to watch her words, "illegal human fishers are murdering our people and blaming the bogeyman of the Consortium." What she didn't say was that those fishermen also gave Bowen Knight and his people plausible deniability.
Bowen's hand tightened on the wooden hilt of the knife she'd given him. "No." A flat statement. "Any human who has chosen to become part of the Alliance knows never to breach BlackSea's territorial waters." Ice in his tone. "If you have evidence to the contrary, give it to me and I'll make sure the perpetrators are severely and immediately punished."
A shiver ran across Kaia's skin at the chill in his tone, at the implacability of it. But she wasn't about to be intimidated. "It's not my job to clean house for you." She dumped chopped butter into the mix. "You're cutting the walnuts too big."
"Kaia."
Thrusting the bowl under the mixer, she set the attachment spinning. "Yes, the Consortium has unquestionably taken some of our people," she said, "but as you said--humans cover the world. Your people are perfectly placed to hunt water changelings who get in the way of their illegal harvesting of the ocean's riches." She met his eyes, was stunned by the raw dominance in them. She'd never realized humans could interact with changelings on that primal a level. But hell if she'd look away.
"Is it possible?" he said, his cheekbones pushing against his skin and his shoulders taut. "Yes. But the missing have almost uniformly been healthy and young. BlackSea should've lost older people, too, if the vanishings were due to malicious kills by illegal fishers."
Malachai had said the same, but his features had been grim. He hadn't just brushed her off. Neither had he brushed off the information Hugo had compiled and given her for safekeeping. Her best friend had told her he wanted to undertake further investigation and confirm his data before he passed the dossier to Mal, but when Hugo disappeared, Kaia had known what she had to do.
On the data crystal she'd given Mal had been the names of a significant number of human fishing ships and how very close they'd been to the last seen locations of BlackSea's lost, the ships going to the very edge of BlackSea's boundaries and occasionally nudging over.