by Nalini Singh
They'd gone so far as to warn her against too much exposure to the Net, telling her that her mind was more vulnerable than those of other designations and therefore more easily breached. In response, Faith had built ever stronger firewalls and rarely ventured outside them. But if Sascha Duncan wasn't a flawed Psy, then maybe Faith NightStar wasn't a weak one. Flickers of memory rippled through her mind. Vaughn had touched her, kissed her, had never hidden the intense nature of his personality. But she'd begun to learn how to cope. And if she could handle a jaguar...
Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes and opened her mind to the dark velvet night of the PsyNet. Stars glittered in the darkness, but these flickering lights were alive, the unique minds of millions of psychic beings. The instant she stepped out into the Net, her mobile firewalls rose to protect her surfing psyche. Those without firewalls were vulnerable to sabotage and possible ambush, as cutting off the roaming mind from the physical brain was a sure way to ensure an irreversible coma. Most Psy were fanatical about their firewalls. Faith had gone straight to obsession.
She'd been out a couple of minutes at most, aimlessly letting information filter through her, when she felt something neosentient brush by her. The NetMind. It paused and she felt a second brush, as if it was verifying.
Apparently satisfied by her brain patterns, the NetMind moved on. The pause had been unusual, but Faith could understand it—even the all-seeing NetMind had probably rarely logged one of the F-Psy engaged in an active surf of the data streams.
Around her, the Net buzzed with information and activity. Minds flew smoothly to various destinations, some disappearing without warning as they followed links not visible to Faith's mind. That was normal. The PsyNet was based to some extent on what each Psy already knew—how could she link to a mind, and therefore to a location, for which she had no imprint?
The intensity and unfamiliarity of the flows around her had her moving quietly, keeping her presence low-key. With her cardinal star left behind, she was simply another Psy in the Net. Most cardinals didn't bother to shield their supernova brightness even when they roamed, but Faith preferred to travel incognito. Her complex firewalls did the job of keeping her anonymous. Oddly enough, it was the PsyClan that had first taught the techniques that masked her identity— they'd considered it a precaution against her being taken hostage.
She drifted into a psychic chat room, something she'd never before done. The M-Psy had been very specific about the danger of overload in this completely unpredictable venue.
"I hear they're discussing candidates," a mind threw out into the conversation.
"Took them long enough," another responded.
"Losing a cardinal of Santano's strength has to be worrying some of the weaker members," a third mind said.
Faith might've had no clue as to what they were discussing if she hadn't run across former councilor Santano Enrique's name during her research on Sascha Duncan. Paying more attention, she found an unobtrusive listening point and went mind-quiet.
"None of the Councilors is weak," the first mind retorted. "The only ones who like to think that are the aspirants."
"Any word on the possibilities?"
"I heard the Council's imposed a gag order. Anyone breaking it faces automatic rehabilitation."
"Does anybody actually know what happened to Santano? All that was reported was that he'd died of unknown causes."
"Nobody knows nothing from what I hear."
The same mind that had posed the Santano question now said, "What I'd really like to know is how Sascha Duncan left the Net."
"That's old news—she was weak and couldn't hold the link. Likely her mind was never meant to maintain it in the first place, which is why she survived."
"A tidy answer, but don't you consider it a little too convenient?"
A small silence and then someone said, "Perhaps we should continue this conversation in a more secure venue." The mind blinked out and two of the others followed, probably going to a destination known to all three.
Intrigued by what she'd heard, Faith let herself float through several other rooms, but nobody else was discussing such incendiary matters. However, it was as well that she'd been floating so seemingly without focus, because it became clear toward the end that she had two shadows. She tracked back through her mind and realized they'd been there from the start.
She knew exactly who was responsible for setting them on her. Even in the supposed anonymity of the PsyNet, she was too valuable to be left alone. A kind of cold fury settled in her gut and it was so pure she could feel it burning her. And she didn't care if that sounded like an emotional reaction.
She returned to her mind in as straight a line as possible. The second she was back behind the walls of her psyche, she opened her eyes and considered her next move. Would it betray too much of the changes in her if she demanded privacy? Could she live knowing she'd never be let alone?
No.
Swallowing the things shoving at the walls of her conditioned Silence, she got up, gathered her hair into a sleek roll, and put on one of the flowing dresses she preferred to wear while forecasting. This one was a deep rust brown with spaghetti straps and a hem that skimmed her ankles. Even when the visions refused to let her go, her body at least felt free.
Ready, she walked out into the living room and took her usual position in the chair. Monitoring would've begun the second she entered the living area, but now they'd be sitting up in expectation of a session. Instead, she threw up the strongest blocks she could imagine—she couldn't stop the visions, but she could occasionally contain them for a time—and started reading a book.
By the time she finished it two hours later, she knew they had to be getting impatient. She never used the chair for such mundane things. Then she picked up another book. Ten minutes later, her comm console chimed an incoming call. Using the remote, she flicked on the screen facing the chair.
"Father."
The title was nothing more than a convenient way to refer to him. Anthony Kyriakus was a stranger to her except as the governing force of the PsyClan, no matter that it was half his blood that ran in her veins. "Faith, Medical has informed me of erratic behavior on your part."
Here it came, she thought, the request for a complete mental and physical workup. "Father, would you consider it a breach of your rights as a free citizen to be monitored on the PsyNet?" An ultimately logical question. "Or am I allowed to shadow you wherever you go?"
Anthony's brown eyes remained cool on-screen. "It was for your own protection."
"You didn't answer my question." She picked up her book again. "As it appears I cannot inform myself in private, I thought I should do it in public." The most subtle of threats.
"You've never shown any desire for complete isolation."
Isolation, not privacy. It was becoming crystal clear how they'd been herding her along a certain path her entire life. But he was right—she couldn't show such a drastic change without some explanation. A flicker of memory from the Net gave her inspiration and if it came from the same part of her that showed her the visions, she chose to ignore that. "Perhaps an adult cardinal, one of the rare F designation, might possibly be interested in other opportunities... but those opportunities are highly unlikely to be offered to someone with a babysitter."
Understanding filtered so quickly into Anthony's face that she was certain he'd already been thinking along those lines. "It's a dangerous game. Only the strong survive."
"Which is why I can't appear weak."
"Have you heard anything concrete?"
"I'll tell you when it's time." A blatant untruth because the time would never come, no matter what Anthony believed. The Council was hardly going to consider a cloistered foreseer as a possible member. But as far as reasons for privacy went, it was close to perfect.
Something brutal and ugly shoved at the walls she'd set up against the visions and she knew she had to get out of here before it erupted and exposed her. Because the business visions
were never this powerful, this aggressive. Putting down the book, she swung her legs over the side of the chair. "My answer, Father?"
"Privacy is a citizen's right." He nodded. "But should you need assistance, contact me."
"Of course." She switched off the screen without further good-byes—they were redundant in her situation, something she'd figured out as a child. But at least now she'd be left alone on the Net, a huge step forward. No one could suspect her of anything at this stage—even the information she'd found out about Sascha had come from public bulletin boards. However, her next searches weren't going to be so innocent.
Another push on her mind. She strolled out of the room and forced herself to get water and several nutrition bars from the cooler. The second her hand closed around a bar, Vaughn's mocking smile appeared in the screen of her mind. She could imagine what he'd say to her choice of food and, though it was a dangerous game, she indulged herself and focused on him all the way to her bedroom. Once inside, she put down the food and closed the door.
The next push almost drove her off her feet. She swayed, but remained upright—if she fell, the sensors outside the door might pick it up. Breathing carefully, she somehow got to the bed before collapsing. Sweat dampened her hands and temples—a physiological reaction to unknown stress factors.
Fear.
She was Psy. She should feel no fear. But neither should she be seeing what she was now being forced into seeing. Then the darkness breached the flimsy walls of her defenses and hooked its claws into her mind. Her back arched, her hands clenched, her teeth snapped shut with crushing force, and she was no longer aware of anything but the vision.
CHAPTER 9
It was as if the darkness knew when she was alone and at her most helpless. Like some vicious beast waiting in the shadows for its prey to drop its guard, it crept in through the vision channels and seized control of her senses. And then it—he—forced her to watch what would come to pass if he wasn't stopped.
Blood, so much blood on his hands, in his hair, on his skin. The pale fragility of his hand was almost invisible under the rich, dark coating—wait. He was older than this, decades more experienced than the slender boy drenched in blood. But it was the same darkness, the same evil. She understood what she was seeing, though this had rarely ever happened to her.
An unexpected expression of the ability of foresight was backsight, the ability to see the past. F-Psy who primarily saw the past were very, very rare. Faith could think of none in the last fifty years. When they did appear, they tended to head into Enforcement. But most active F-Psy usually had one or two flashes of backsight during the year. In her case, she'd always caught innocuous images connected with the future she was trying to glimpse.
Never had she been so covered in blood that she was sticky with it, the iron-rich metallic scent drawn in with every breath. Her eyelashes were crusted with the dried fluid and the blood under her fingernails was so dark it was almost black. The imprint of her footsteps had started to set as the blood on the floor congealed. The knife she'd used was in one hand. When she raised it, the light from a torch glinted, off it.
A torch?
Turning, she found herself surrounded by a dozen black-suited men. The vision flash-fractured and the next time she opened her eyes, she was in the confines of a white-on-white room. Bloodlust roared in her veins and she realized she was older, years older. And hungry. So hungry. For human prey.
Another violent jerk along the timeline. She was with the dark-suited men once again. They set her free at the start of a maze and she started hunting. The fear she sensed in her prey drew her like a drug. She ran on strong feet, knowing they'd have chosen a suitable sacrifice. They always did.
Her hand clenched on the knife. She spied the vulnerable nape of the girl who'd stumbled onto the hard ground. A smile cracked the anticipation on her face. This would be so much fun.
No!
Faith ripped herself from the vision so violently that she fell to the floor. Curling up into a fetal position, she tried to stifle her whimpers, tried to wipe the taint of blood from her brain. For those long moments she'd become the killer, become the very evil that had taken her sister's life. That was what had brought her back to herself—the knowledge that if she let it continue, she might just feel her own hands slide around her sister's throat.
The bedside comm console chimed. They'd heard her fall of course. The outside sensors were very sensitive and she'd made a great deal of noise. Forcing herself to get up, she answered without visual. "I tripped on something."
"Are you injured?"
"No. I'm fine. Please don't disturb me till morning." She cut off the communication with that bare statement, aware her vocal mask was about to crack. Her voice wanted to tremble, wanted to cry.
Step two in the inevitable road to F-Psy insanity.
She had to get out of this claustrophobic compound. But she couldn't leave. Not now. Everybody was too aware of her wakefulness—they might even try to contact her again despite her orders. The urge to flee was so strong, it felt as if her skin had been drawn taut over flesh on the verge of explosion.
She couldn't satisfy the urge, couldn't run free, couldn't walk out to safety and toward the night-glow eyes of a predator so lethal that she shouldn't have thought of him in the same breath as the word safety. He was out of her reach anyway—she was a prisoner in this place everyone called her home. Would it one day become her tomb?
Shivering at the morbid thought, she crawled back into bed and lay there, staring up at the ceiling, memories of blood and horror her only companions. And though she refused to admit she felt anything, loneliness had a claw grip around her heart.
It hurt.
Faith woke the second someone whispered a breath against her neck. Her heart kicked into high gear. She knew that masculine scent, but its presence here was impossible. Thinking it an illusion of her stressed mind, she opened her eyes and found herself looking into the face of a human jaguar. He was lying alongside her, head propped up one hand.
"What are you doing in my bed?" she asked, too surprised to suppress the question.
"I just wanted to know if I could do it." He'd left his hair undone and it flowed over his shoulders in an amber-gold wave that shone, though the only light came from a small night-lamp.
That tiny lamp usually helped her delineate the line between waking and dreaming, but right now she wasn't certain where she stood. Raising a hand, she touched his hair. Warm strands slid through her fingers. The unexpected shock of sensation had her snatching back her hand. "You're real."
The smallest curving of his lips. "Are you sure?" He brushed a kiss over her mouth.
It was the most fleeting of touches but she felt burned. "You're definitely real." An accusation.
He chuckled, completely unrepentant.
"Don't make any loud sounds," she cautioned. "This room and my bathroom are private but everything else is monitored. Did you—?"
"They don't know I'm here." He looked up at the roof, at the skylight no one should've been able to open. "Psy don't monitor danger from above."
She couldn't figure out how he'd done it, but that didn't surprise her—he was a cat, after all. "Did Sascha send you?"
"Sascha thinks I'll eat you up if given the chance."
"Will you?" She wasn't sure about Vaughn, about the jaguar that prowled in the darkness behind the beauty of his eyes.
A finger trailed down her face and she forced herself not to move. She was strong and she would get past this block. Her fingers tingled with the sensory memory of Vaughn's hair and she wondered what his skin would feel like.
"Come closer and find out." His voice had gone rough, but there was nothing threatening about it. It was almost...
She searched the dictionary in her mind and found the answer. "You're trying to coax me." No one had ever before done such a thing. They'd demanded, ordered, asked in pandering terms, but never had anyone coaxed.
He was nearer to her, though she
hadn't noticed him move. But he remained atop the sheets while she lay below. Why then could she feel the heat of his body, almost as if he burned hotter than her?
"Maybe."
It took her a second to remember her question. "Why?" Her hands were on top of the sheets, a hairsbreadth from the bare skin of his chest. Her eyes widened. "Are you naked?"
"Unless you have some clothing to give me, yeah." He sounded entirely too comfortable with that fact.
"You can't enter a woman's bedroom naked." That wasn't acceptable behavior in any race.
"I was clothed when I entered ... in my fur." He was all golden eyes and gleaming skin above her, a male so beautiful that she wondered at his existence in the same world as her. "I can shift back if you'd like."
It was a dare. "Fine." She wasn't going to let him think he could get away with anything he wanted.
"Are you sure you want a jaguar in your room?"
"I think I already have one." But something in her wanted to see the change, the same something that knew Vaughn was beautiful, though she shouldn't have had the capacity to recognize male beauty.
"Don't move, Red."
The world turned into a rainbow-bright shimmer around her. She froze at the utterly unexpected sight. She'd thought the change would be painful for him, hadn't really expected him to do it. But nothing about this spoke of pain, only of awe.
A heartbeat later, the shimmer was gone and she found herself lying next to a jaguar who had very sharp teeth and eyes exactly like those of the man who'd occupied the space moments ago. She swallowed. She was Psy—she felt no fear. But it was practical to be on guard with something this lethal.
The jaguar opened its mouth and growled almost below the range of her hearing.
"Was that a question?" she ventured. "Because I don't speak jaguar." Where had that come from? It was a completely illogical statement—of course she didn't speak jaguar.
The jaguar lowered its head and nuzzled at her throat. Her heart threatened to rip through her skin and to the outside. "I'm stronger than this," she whispered, and forced herself to lift one hand around and over the jaguar's head until her fingers closed on the ruff of his neck. She tugged. He refused to move. She tugged again, harder. A growl that vibrated in her bones.