by Nalini Singh
"Of course, though we don't know which. Enforcement is investigating. Get some rest." He nodded in a sharp physical period.
"Wait."
"Yes?"
She forced herself to ask. "What was the mode of murder?"
Anthony didn't even blink as he said, "Manual strangulation."
CHAPTER 2
Vaughn Jumped up onto the outer platform of the aerie Sascha shared with Lucas, having passed Mercy on her way down. He wasn't pleased to see Sascha outside—the platform might be high off the ground, but it was well past midnight and the Psy Council would like nothing better than to see this particular cardinal dead.
"Hello, Vaughn. Why don't you shift and keep me company?"
He let her know what he thought of that idea with a coughing roar unique to his species.
"Yes, I'm aware that I should be sleeping, but I can't." She leaned back in the chair she'd apparently dragged outside. "Mercy played chess with me." In the darkness, her night-sky eyes were lit with white pinpricks. Her fingers tapped constantly on the wooden arm of the chair.
Responding with a growl, Vaughn walked into the house. He shifted in the bedroom, then grabbed a pair of jeans and an old black T-shirt from the trunk where all the sentinels kept a change of clothes. When he walked back out, Sascha waved at the empty chair across the small folding table from her. He raised an eyebrow and perched instead on the railing that ringed the platform, hooking his legs around the posts.
"I'll never get used to the way you cats do that." Sascha shook her head and rubbed her bare feet on the wooden floor. "Do you realize you could fall and break every bone in your body?"
"Cats always land on their feet." Vaughn sniffed the night air and found everything as expected, but did a visual scan to confirm. Even in human form, his keen eyesight remained undiminished. "Are you always like this when Lucas is gone?" She seemed jumpy, agitated, though she was usually a calm pool in the midst of the predatory turbulence that was DarkRiver.
"Yes." She continued tapping her finger. "Were you running?"
"Yes." He looked at his alpha's mate, able to understand Lucas's fascination. Sascha was beautiful and utterly unique. It wasn't the night-sky eyes or the face, but the essence of her. She glowed from the inside out and that was to be expected. After all, she was an E-Psy—an empath, able to sense and heal the most damaging of emotional wounds.
But though he understood Lucas's fascination, Vaughn couldn't imagine feeling the same. Sascha was Pack. As a sentinel, he'd lay down his life for her, but he'd never have mated with her—because the concept of mating was alien to him. He didn't understand how the leopards could tie themselves to one person for the rest of their lives. It wasn't that he was promiscuous. He was very choosy about his lovers. But he liked his freedom, liked knowing that no one else was emotionally reliant on him.
His death wouldn't tear the soul out of anyone.
"I never know what you're thinking." Sascha stared at him, tilting her head slightly to the side. "I'm not even sure you like me."
The cat enjoyed being seen as inscrutable. "You're Lucas's mate." And therefore had his loyalty.
"But what about me as an individual?" she persisted.
"Trust takes time." Though she'd earned a good chunk of it the day she'd almost died trying to save Lucas's life. The other male was the closest thing Vaughn had to true family, a blood brother in the most brutal sense.
"There's something about you—you're less ... civilized than the others."
"Yes." There was no reason to deny it. He was far more animal than most predatory changelings, had had to become so to survive. As Sascha had had to become Pack. "Do you ever miss others like you?"
"Of course." She looked away and out into the forest, a lone Psy in a pack of leopards. "How can you not miss the world you lived in for twenty-six years?" Her eyes returned to him. "Do you?"
"I only lived in another world for ten." More than enough time to have the scars of betrayal burned into him. "Tell me something. Why would a Psy live alone, apart from the crowd?"
Sascha didn't berate him for his lack of a real answer. "Well, she could mate with a panther who prefers to live in the middle of nowhere on top of a tree." She made a face, but her smile gave her away. "It's uncommon but some Psy do prefer to live in isolated surroundings—they're usually on the weaker end of the Gradient. Maybe because their gifts don't threaten to overwhelm them like they do the rest of us."
"No." He shook his head. "This one was guarded like she was the president." She. Of that, the beast was suddenly certain.
"Are you sure?"
"Fences. Hidden cameras. Live guards. Motion sensors."
Sascha's eyebrows rose. "Of course. It must be one of the F-Psy."
"Foresight?" It helped to have a Psy in the pack. Before Sascha, they'd been close to blind about the intricacies of the Psy world. "I thought they were extremely rare. Wouldn't the Council want them locked up tight somewhere closer to where they could keep an eye on them?"
She shook her head. "I've heard it said that the most powerful of them need space even from other Psy. So though you saw live guards, it's likely no one actually lives in the home except for the F-Psy herself. I don't know that much more about them—foreseers are close to a subrace within the Psy and they belong to PsyClans, which represent them in public. Meeting one face-to-face is almost unheard of. Rumor has it that some of them never leave their homes. Ever."
Vaughn understood the need for aloneness, but there was a pathology to what Sascha was describing. "Are they prisoners?"
"No, I don't think so. They're too important to be made unhappy," she said, then seemed to catch herself. "You know what I mean—Psy don't feel happiness or unhappiness, but if the F designation decided to cease forecasting, the economic consequences would devastate the Psy.
"So no, I don't think they're prisoners, just that they prefer to live in a shell where they don't have to face the dark side of light." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Maybe if they stepped out occasionally, they'd remember the world they'd forsaken and wake up to the reality of their gift."
He watched her and knew she was remembering the vicious torture her mate had undergone as a child and his resulting vengeance—vengeance that had cemented the bond between Vaughn and Lucas. Perhaps if the F-Psy hadn't retreated into Silence, if they hadn't stopped forecasting disaster and murder, Lucas might've been spared that horror.
And perhaps Vaughn could've grown up jaguar, instead of being abandoned to the most savage kind of death by his own parents. Perhaps.
Manual strangulation.
Faith stared at the ceiling of her darkened bedroom, the two words slamming around and around her skull in an unstoppable loop. It was tempting to call the whole thing a coincidence and shove it to the back of her mind. Part of her wanted to do precisely that. It would be so much easier, so much more bearable. But it would be a lie.
Marine was dead.
And Faith had foreseen her murder.
If only she'd known how to interpret the visions, her younger sister might still be alive. If only. She'd been taught since childhood that it did no good to cry over the past, that it did no good to cry at all, and so now she didn't cry. She didn't even think she needed to, but deep inside herself, a caged and almost irretrievably broken part of her screamed in torment.
Faith was deaf to those agonized screams from her disintegrating psyche. All she knew was that she couldn't turn back from this. This wasn't some misjudged market trend, but the matter of a life. She couldn't choose to look away .. . not when she continued to feel the weight of the darkness pressing against her eyelids, violent and ugly.
The killer wasn't finished.
A discreet chime split the heavy silence. Glad that the bedroom hookup was vocal, not visual, she answered without turning on the lights. "Yes?"
"We've received no readings since yesterday." It was Xi Yun himself.
"I'm tired." And she hadn't wanted to sit in that red chair and possibl
y give away the tumult in her mind. "I need to catch up on my sleep as you suggested."
"Understood."
"I won't be back online for a few days."
"How many?" The question was supposed to be a precaution against her kind's tendency to forget, but Faith had begun to resent the intrusion of late, begun to see it as yet one more way to chain her, to ensure her talents were never out of reach.
"Three days." It was the longest they'd allow her, the longest they'd "trust" her capacity to care for herself. She'd often thought it was as well that NightStar and the Council were wary of damaging her abilities. Otherwise, they'd probably shove aside her PsyNet shields and monitor her on the most intensely private level—through mind control. All for her own good, of course.
She shivered and told herself it was because the room temperature was low. It had nothing to do with fear. She felt no fear. She felt nothing. She was Psy. More than that, she was an F-Psy. Her conditioning had been harsher than that of even other cardinals—she'd been taught to never allow even the faintest tendril of emotion to filter through to her conscious mind, because to do so would equal the utter destruction of her psyche. That, she believed. Her PsyClan had a history of producing F-Psy and in the days prior to Silence, one in every four had ended up in a mental institution before they'd completed their second decade of life.
Three days.
Why had she asked for that? Regardless of what Xi Yun thought, she wasn't tired. She slept less than most Psy, satisfied with four hours at most. But she hadn't asked for those three days in order to do nothing. Her mind had a purpose, a destination, albeit one she wasn't consciously aware of at that point. Despite that, she suddenly got out of bed and began packing a small backpack with enough clothing and toiletries for a few days.
She'd asked a member of her PsyClan to buy the backpack for her a month ago, for no reason that she could fathom. No one had questioned her demand, assuming it had to do with using a physical trigger for a vision. She hadn't disabused them of that notion because she hadn't been sure it wasn't in fact the truth. But now she saw that once again, her ability had led her to act in preparation for something that was yet to be.
Even as Faith packed for a journey she didn't know she was about to take, a psychic door slammed shut on the PsyNet, enclosing the six minds within it in a seemingly impenetrable vault. The Psy Council was in session.
"It's becoming imperative that we find a replacement for Santano Enrique." Nikita glanced at the minds surrounding hers—each appearing as a cold white star against the blackness of the Net—and wondered who was, at this moment, plotting to knife her in the back. Someone always was. The fact that their physical bodies were scattered across the world was no guarantee against attack.
"Maybe it's not just Enrique we need a replacement for." The silky suggestion came from Shoshanna Scott. "Are you sure you weren't the one who passed on your daughter's genetic deficiency?"
"We all know Sascha wasn't deficient," Marshall answered. "Nikita produced a cardinal—how many cardinals in your family tree, Shoshanna?"
Nikita was surprised by Marshall's support. As the most senior member of the Council and its tacit leader, he tended to remain neutral. "We can't afford to be divided at this stage," she pointed out. "DarkRiver and SnowDancer will take advantage of any weakness."
"How sure are we that they'll follow through on their threat?" This came from Tatiana Rika-Smythe, the youngest mind in the vault.
"We all got pieces of Enrique after they executed him. I think we know exactly how the leopards and wolves will react if we attempt to harm Sascha." Henry Scott's mind wasn't the star of a born cardinal, but it was extremely powerful nonetheless. Added to Shoshanna's razor-sharp political skills, the pair had the potential to rise to the leadership of the Council. Perhaps that was why Marshall was suddenly so willing to support Nikita.
"We need another cardinal to replace Enrique," Ming LeBon asserted, his mental voice as coolly lethal as his physical presence would've been in a meeting on the physical plane. An expert at mental combat, he was also a master in the human disciplines of karate and jujitsu. "No other Gradient will do—he was an anchor and did the most to keep the NetMind in check."
No one disagreed. Facts were facts. The NetMind, the policeman and librarian of the PsyNet, had a tendency toward unpredictable breaks of erratic behavior. For the past six generations it had been such that the Councilors took turns keeping an eye on it. Two particular Psy talents seemed to have an affinity for the task.
"Enrique's access to the NetMind also allowed him to hide his defective mind from us," Henry pointed out.
Ming's star remained absolutely calm. "That's unavoidable. Despite all our research, we can't predict the ones for whom conditioning will fail."
"Most of the cardinals in the Net are unsuitable for Council ranks," Nikita said. They were too cerebral, having little to no idea of the ruthless practicality needed to keep the Psy at the top of the food chain.
"Did you have anyone in mind, Ming?" Marshall asked.
"Faith NightStar."
Nikita took a few moments to locate the basic information files on the cardinal. "An F-Psy? I understand that the F and Tk designations are best able to control the NetMind, but the F-Psy are ... unstable."
"Over ninety-five percent of them are in institutions by the time they're in their fifth decade," Shoshanna added. "She's not a viable choice."
"I disagree. Faith NightStar has a mind as powerful as Enrique's and she's been giving us highly accurate predictions since she was three years old. No other foreseer has been as productive or as accurate. During her entire lifespan, she's shown no symptoms of mental deterioration and as an F-designation cardinal, she's been under extremely close observation."
"Ming makes a good point," Marshall broke in. "It may be that Faith is the safest choice after Enrique. At least we know she's not psychotic at this stage, and the monitoring she'll continue to need while doing forecasts as a Councilor will ensure any changes are immediately picked up."
"Whoever we choose, we need to confirm a successor soon." Ming's psychic voice was resolute. "I've prepared a comprehensive report on Faith NightStar." He showed them the mental storage shelf within the Council chambers.
"Does anyone else want to suggest a candidate?"
"Another possibility is Kaleb Krychek," Shoshanna responded. "He's a cardinal Tk and part of the Council ranks. I'm placing the files on him beside the ones on Faith. You'll note that his control over his telekenetic abilities is reputed to be superb."
"Kaleb is younger than I am," Tatiana pointed out, "and he's already nearly at the top. I'd say that makes him a better choice than Faith—aside from being incredibly young even compared to Kaleb and myself, she's been isolated. She won't have the capacity to survive being Council."
"I disagree." Nikita wasn't convinced of Faith's suitability either, but she was certain of the threat presented by Krychek. "Kaleb's risen to the top despite his youth. That displays a single-minded determination that might make him susceptible to the same kind of sociopathy as Enrique."
"We're all power hungry to some extent," Tatiana retorted.
"However, you may be correct in this instance—we may need a less aggressive Councilor to soothe the populace."
"The chosen candidate also needs to have the power to last." Shoshanna again. "If we go through two Councilors in a short time frame, it may undermine everything."
"Shoshanna's correct." There was no longer anything in Marshall's tone that hinted of partisanship. "Look over the files. We'll meet tomorrow and set up a timetable for evaluation meetings with both candidates. Unless any of you have a third suggestion?"
"Not so much a suggestion as something we need to keep in mind." Shoshanna's mind blazed with power. "There have been no M-Psy on the Council for the last two generations. Perhaps we need to remedy that. It might serve to keep us from unknowingly taking another Enrique into our midst."
For once, Nikita agreed with the
rival Councilor. "The other option is to mandate M-Psy checkups for the entire Council."
"It would be much more confidential if the medic were one of us." Henry.
"But it would also give that Councilor too much power in comparison to the rest of us." Nikita didn't like the idea of any of her fellow Councilors being privy to her body or her mind.
"I concur." Tatiana Rika-Smythe. "An M-Psy should be considered for inclusion, but as a representative of that designation, not our caretaker."
"What about the NetMind? F and Tk are the two specialties that control it best," Henry pointed out.
"That's something we can consider in the final stages of evaluation." Ming, the most Silent of the six and the one Nikita knew the least about. "Does anyone else have a suggestion?"
It was Marshall who answered, but not directly on topic. "It's a pity we lost Sienna Lauren. She showed great potential."
"That was unfortunate," Ming agreed. "I had my eye on her as a possible protégée."
Which could only mean, Nikita surmised, that Sienna Lauren had been born with the mental combat abilities that made Ming so deadly. "Given the Lauren family's tendency to break conditioning, rehabilitation was the logical response. They would still be alive if they hadn't attempted to circumvent our judgment."
"Of course," Ming said.
"In terms of M-Psy," Nikita continued, "Gia Khan on the Indian subcontinent has proven very useful in undertaking Council matters."
A small pause as the others scanned the basic files on Khan.
"She looks like a possibility. Let's add her to the candidate list along with Kaleb and Faith." Marshall.
"What about the aspirants? Anyone we need to take seriously?" Shoshanna.
"No. There are a few who think they're powerful enough, but if they were, one of us would be dead by now." Tatiana knew what she was talking about—she'd ascended to the Council when the Councilor who'd held her place, Michael Bonneau, had had an unfortunate "accident" while alone in his home with his most senior aide, Tatiana.