by Nalini Singh
"Stop it, Vaughn."
Without warning, the fur disappeared from under her hands, the incredible softness shimmering into rainbow-bright sparks that ended with a naked male above her. Her hand was now clenched in amber-gold strands of hair. "So you'll touch the cat, but not the man?"
"I was trying to get you to move." She didn't release his hair, found she couldn't. His scent was everywhere in the air, his skin golden and close enough to touch, his smile pure cat.
"Where would you like me to move, little darling?"
She knew he'd added the "little" on purpose. "Away from me."
"Are you sure?" His smile turned wicked. "If I move, you might see more than you bargained for."
"I know this kind of behavior isn't acceptable among leopards." Technically speaking, she knew no such thing. It merely seemed the sort of thing that ought to be true. "How would you like it if an unknown male came into your sister's bedroom in this manner?"
All amusement was suddenly wiped off his face. He went still, so completely still that it was as if he were made of stone. The part of her that had been deriving considerable intellectual stimulation from pitching her wit against his went silent, aware she'd awakened something very dangerous.
"Let go of my hair, Faith. And close your eyes. By the time you open them, I'll be gone."
She'd spent the past minutes trying to convince him to leave and now that he'd agreed, she found she didn't want him to go. For the first time, she was with someone who'd come to see her. Just her. Not Faith NightStar the F-Psy, but Faith, the individual apart from her gift.
"I am sorry," she said, hesitant. She knew nothing about changeling interaction, but she understood she'd caused him hurt. It had been part of her training to learn to recognize emotion in order to banish it. That was why she knew. It had nothing to do with the odd sensation in the vicinity of her heart. "If I offended you, I am sorry. I meant to ... play."
Vaughn was caught completely off guard by that last word. His muscles relaxed without his conscious control. "Changed your mind, Red?"
"I'm not sure." She released her hold on his hair, but then began to stroke through it. "You're nothing I've ever experienced. The rules don't cover situations such as this."
"Rules?"
"The rules of Silence." Her fingers brushed the skin of his shoulders. She withdrew as if she'd been scalded, her hand dropping to lie against the pillow. "Why did my question offend you?"
Vaughn didn't talk about his past with anyone, but he found himself answering Faith—it was almost a compulsion, one neither man nor beast could fight. "My sister died when I was ten years old."
Skye had been so fragile, so weak at seven years of age that she hadn't been able to survive even in jaguar form.
He'd brought her food, given her everything he had, but Skye had given up fighting the instant she'd realized that their parents weren't going to come back for them. It was as if her soul had flown away and nothing he'd done had tempted her to return. She'd stopped eating, stopped drinking, and soon, she'd stopped breathing.
Vaughn had almost died then, too, because Skye had lived in his heart like no one else. She'd followed him around since before she could walk, a constant buzz of activity and energy. He hated his parents with a vengeance, but it wasn't because they'd abandoned him. No, it was because they'd broken Skye's heart.
"I can't understand what she meant to you," Faith said, her voice holding a quiet gentleness he'd never have expected from one of the Psy, "but I can guess. You mourn for her."
"Do you mourn for Marine?"
The quicksilver lights in her eyes dimmed until they were dull echoes against the darkness. "Psy don't mourn. To mourn requires feeling."
"And you don't have any."
"No."
"Are you sure?" Dropping his head, he bit her earlobe with sharp teeth and caught her resulting cry with the palm of his hand.
"What are you doing?" she whispered, pushing away his hand.
"Your body feels, Faith. Your body hungers." He spoke against her ear. "The body and the mind can't be so far apart. Can they?"
She didn't answer. He heard the rapid beat of her heart and knew he'd pushed her too far. But it wasn't far enough. She had to go further, had to understand more. It was imperative. The jaguar knew why, but the man wasn't ready to listen.
"And the answer to your question is that if I'd found a strange man naked in my sister's bed, I'd have ripped him to shreds." He ran his lips down her neck and tasted the fury of her pulse before lifting his head to look down into her face. "I'll do the same to any other man I find in your bed."
Faith blinked and by the time her lashes lifted up, Vaughn was a shadow sliding out of the skylight. But nothing could erase the scent of him on her sheets, on her skin. The feel of his lips on the suddenly sensitive skin of her neck had her clenching her hands in an effort to find control where there seemed to be none. How could he do this to her? How?
Her strength lay in Silence, in holding her emotions in a stranglehold. If she let go, what other sensations might her jaguar introduce her to? Her brain revolted, insisting on showing her images of her aunt's lipless face and rabid eyes. It was the bluntest of reminders—she had to regain control of her malfunctioning psyche or the visions would take her over as they were even now threatening to do. The logical course would be to go to the M-Psy, admit her conditioning was breaking down, and ask for retraining.
But would they give her what she wanted, or would they use it as an excuse to put her someplace "safe," a location from which she could make predictions without causing them any of the inconvenience she now did by asking for occasional moments of privacy?
It didn't matter what the M-Psy would do, because she wasn't going to go to them. She was going to make a choice where there was no choice; she was going to act in a way that might leave her wide open to the very madness she wanted to escape. That strange, unknown awakening part of her didn't want to stop being fascinated by the jaguar who touched her as if she belonged to him, as if she'd already said yes to his every demand.
Careful, Faith. It was a soundless whisper. He won't stop when you tell him to. Because he wasn't Psy, wasn't someone who'd follow her every command, wasn't a man who'd follow any commands he didn't want to. And still she wasn't going to keep her distance.
What better proof was there of her accelerating decline?
Vaughn entered his lair deep in the forests to the east of Lucas's aerie and padded up the natural stone steps that led, eventually, to the true entrance. His home was accessed through a warrenlike cave system that acted as his defensive perimeter. His living space was in the central core, brightly lit during the daytime by a clever use of several natural vents and low-tech mirrors.
From above, his lair looked to be nothing but a hill in danger of being taken over by the forest. To date, no one had stumbled upon it either by accident or design. His closest friends alone knew where he lived and how to negotiate the traps in the outer caves. Those who didn't know... well, jaguars weren't famous for their kindness.
Reaching the core, he padded through the living room to his bedroom, where he shifted back to human form. Naked, he stretched his arms above his head before walking into the shower, which seemed to be a waterfall cascading from the stone wall. He'd spent hours creating the illusion because his beast wasn't happy in any place that looked too human, too civilized.
But both man and jaguar enjoyed sensation and pleasure. And water. So his home had a waterfall, as well as lush carpets he'd collected year by year on which his paws or feet made no sound. The walls were hung with handmade tapestries finer than those seen in many museums. Not only objects of beauty, they acted to contain the warmth in winter—when he used eco-generators to heat water in the fine tubes that ran throughout his home. That warmth became particularly useful during those times when he worked through the night on a piece that required a lot of contact with cold chisels and hard edges.
His armchairs were comfortable, his b
ed big enough to sprawl in, and more than big enough to entertain a lover no matter how energetic he was feeling. But he'd never once brought a woman here. However, today, he could imagine dark red hair against the pillows, creamy limbs against the thick blanket. Faith would look like an exotic jewel laid on a bed of the finest black velvet.
A growl rose up in his throat as arousal caught him in a vicious grip and shook him hard. He could've eased the physical ache himself, but he didn't want to. He wanted the Psy he could still smell on his skin. The man advised caution, told him to wait to be certain she wasn't playing with his mind, wasn't a mole sent in by the Council to cripple DarkRiver from within, but the cat lived by instinct and it said Faith was his to take.
For many changelings, the human half would probably have won. But Vaughn's animal half was stronger than that of most others. Stepping out of the waterfall, he took a deep breath. The air should've smelled of the earth and the forest, but instead held teasing hints of fire and woman.
Pushing his hair out of his eyes, he stood there and considered his next step. Faith had come a long way since their first meeting. She could bear small touches, hadn't been made unconscious by his fleeting kiss, had reacted to his nakedness but in the same way any other woman would've reacted. He smiled at the memory. Faith wasn't cold, no matter how much she might try to pretend otherwise.
But all that didn't negate the fact that she was a long way from accepting the kind of touch the cat craved. He wanted to lick her from head to toe, with lingering stops in soft feminine places that drew him like a drug. However, the second he asked more of her than her mind was able to handle, he might lose her. And that was unacceptable. So, where did that leave him?
"Step by step," he murmured under his breath, body taut with expectation. Faith NightStar was about to be hunted. He had no intention of harming her and every intention of breaking down the sensual walls that separated them. By the time he finished, Faith would be enslaved by her body's hunger, the woman core of her screaming out for him.
It would take patience, but Vaughn was used to stalking prey without break for hours, days ... weeks.
CHAPTER 10
Faith found herself doing something inexplicable the next day. Instead of spending her time reinforcing shields that were clearly malfunctioning, she kept going over what Vaughn's skin had felt like under her fingertips, so hot, so different from her own. Caught in the memory, she ran her fingers over her upper arm. It was the first time she'd treated her body as a sensual object quite apart from its functionality.
A discreet alarm chimed.
Still disciplined enough to not betray startlement, she terminated the alarm. It was one in the afternoon and well past the time she should've started work. After a quick but thorough review of her shields, which actually proved not to be compromised, she walked out and took a reclining position on the chair. Monitoring functions came online with a hum meant to be inaudible to the human ear, but which she'd always heard with some unknown sense deep within her body.
A few seconds later, the voice of the M-Psy overseeing this session issued from the small communicator built into the arm of the chair. There was no visual because they hadn't wanted her being distracted by another face as a child, and she'd never asked for that to be changed. But she was under no illusion that they couldn't see her.
"All your biological and neurological functions are within the acceptable limits. There has, however, been an increase in your raw psychic potential."
That was a surprise. As a cardinal, she was off the Gradient but apparently, M-Psy could gauge fluctuations in her abilities. "An increase?" She feigned only cool interest. "Is that a sign of mental degradation?"
"On the contrary, it's a sign of health. Such increases have occasionally been noted in high-Gradient minds—we can't measure cardinals past 10.0, but we are able to tell when your abilities shift in either direction," he explained, displaying the truth that everyone, even Psy, liked to talk about what they knew. "We theorize that the mind learns psychic shortcuts over years of constant use, thereby creating extra capacity."
Double-talk, Faith thought. The reason her powers had increased was because the conditioning was falling away. The logical connection was irrefutable. Her vision channels were being forced to encompass more than the narrow field of commerce, thereby becoming wider. The subject matter or palatability of the new visions was irrelevant. That they existed was proof enough of her untapped potential, potential she'd deliberately been taught to suppress.
It made her wonder what else had been stifled. Who might she have been had she not been created in Silence, genetically selected to generate a steady stream of income? What would it have been like to have been born normal, born without fear of certain madness, born woman enough to take Vaughn on?
"Shall we start the session?" the M-Psy asked. "Or would you like to review the new brain scans?"
"I want to do some work first. Initiate random sequence, full list."
A clear panel rose up from behind the chair to curve over her eyes. It stopped half a centimeter from her lashes and clouded to opaque. A split second later, a steady flow of words began to scroll across it at high speed. It was her list of current dormant requests. Foresight could be steered, but not completely controlled, much to many a business's frustration. Faith, however, was a near-certain bet, which was why she had such a high price tag.
Once she'd entered the relevant triggers into her mind, she usually had a vision within a week or two and they could happen anywhere—in the garden as she walked, during sleep, while in a meeting with the M-Psy. However, over the years, it had become apparent that if she put her mind into a receptive frame, the visions could be guided out in a more controlled environment. That particular skill gave her some freedom from being watched twenty-four/seven, but so long as even one vision came outside of this chair, she'd never be accorded total privacy.
Her eye fell on the Tricep symbol among the mass of scrolling data. She kept picking it up again and again in spite of the speed and amount of other information. Her mind had chosen. Closing her eyes, she allowed her breathing to alter. It was the first step in putting herself into the half sleep she personally called suspended animation. While suspended, she existed neither in this world nor on the Net, but somewhere F-Psy alone could go, becoming part of the timestreams of the world.
Then she opened her psychic channels. In truth, she couldn't ever close them, but she could, with concentration, expand them to the nth degree. Part of her brain itself, the channels were inaccessible from the PsyNet—the only things that could come through them were visions. And if there was a part of her that wasn't sure which visions would choose to crawl in, she didn't let those uncertainties filter through to her conscious mind.
The Tricep prediction was child's play. She came out of it with the now-familiar feeling of barely having stretched her mental muscles. As she dictated the details of what she'd seen, it struck her that if she continued down this path, she'd most certainly go insane—from boredom. Having the M-Psy restart the screen scroll, she gave him two more perfect readings before he called a halt.
"We don't want to strain your mind."
Since the session had utilized a minuscule portion of her considerable powers, Faith could've overruled him, but she didn't. She had other things to do with her time and energy. "I'll be in my private quarters."
"Faith, your monitoring levels have dropped off considerably recently."
Meaning she was no longer spied on every minute of every day. "I've cleared it with my father." A stopgap measure at best. Anthony would soon realize that she wasn't reaching for induction into the Council ranks—then what excuse would she use to escape the stranglehold of surveillance?
Having made it to her bedroom, she peeled off the dress at the same time as ingesting a nutrition bar, then had a quick shower before pulling on cotton pajama bottoms and a singlet top. Ready, she took a classic cross-legged yoga position on the bed and began to calm the rivers of he
r mind in preparation for entry into the Net.
It wasn't necessary to be in such a state—Psy entered and left the Net at will. The difference was that Faith wasn't used to opening herself up to the massive information archive. Even in her last foray, she'd remained out of the most data-rich, and therefore most chaotic, areas. But she was through with being a perfect conditioned machine; she would not let programmed stress responses imprison her.
So, what other physiological factors did you experience?
Vaughn's amused voice drifted into her mind and threatened to negate the fruits of her meditation. She told herself to forget the scent of his skin, the heavy heat of his jaguar form as he'd brushed past her legs, the sensation of his lips.
"Focus," she muttered, and began to recite the list of companies on the waiting list for a prediction. It took her twenty minutes to complete and her mind was pure calm by the end.
Opening her mind's eye, she stepped out into the biggest and most constantly updated data archive in the world, ready to search for information on the F-Psy, on herself. But today the Net granted her nothing, despite her concentration. Her F designation abilities did pick up something below the surface, but whether it was an echo or a forecast, she had no way of knowing.
Hours later, she finally gave up the fruitless quest and, eschewing another nutrition bar or a cup of soup, curled up under the thin blanket on her bed. Usually when she was so mentally tired, there were no visions, or if there were, she remained unconscious of them. But the darkness hadn't been satisfied the last time it had invaded.
Now, it was going to make her pay.
Vaughn completed his watch on the extended boundary and met up with his replacement, Dorian. The latent male was in human form, as he had no ability to go leopard. That made him no less capable or lethal. He'd never have reached the rank of sentinel otherwise.