by Nalini Singh
Like all of them, Dorian also had an immutable core of loyalty. No sentinel could ever be tempted into betrayal. But being tempted into something else was another matter altogether.
"You know the grid?"
Nodding, Dorian slung a rifle across his back. It was his single visible weapon. "Any problems?"
"Some wolf juveniles are playing at hunting in the east quadrant."
"Can I shoot them?"
"We're friends now." The two packs were, in fact, blood-bonded. But given that Lucas and Hawke, the SnowDancer alpha, had agreed on the bond only a few months ago, it was taking both packs time to adapt. "No using them for target practice."
Dorian's smile was feral. "I promise I'll only shoot to wound."
"I'm sure Lucas and Hawke would appreciate that." Giving the younger sentinel a quick rundown on the other movements in the grid, he changed back to jaguar form and took off.
He should've been going to his own lair to catch up on some sleep—his body had kept him up most of last night. When he had slept, it was to find himself waking from heavy dreams of sensation, more than ready to roll over and sink himself into a very specific female body.
If he'd believed that the hunger could be sated with another, he would've had no trouble finding a willing lover. He might be jaguar to their leopard, but the females in DarkRiver had always considered him a more than satisfactory sexual partner. And they weren't the kind of women who hesitated to let a man know if he wasn't up to scratch.
However, he ran not in the direction of one of those welcoming felines, but toward a Psy who might overload into a seizure at the fury within him. That was unacceptable to either half of his self. He'd marked her and he would have her, even if he had to coax her kiss by slow kiss. Cats were good at coaxing. It was only a more sensual aspect of their favorite game—stalking.
The jaguar covered the distance between his watch and her home with the efficient confidence that came from being the most dangerous thing in the forest. But tonight he had no interest in the small creatures that darted into the shadows at the sound of his approach.
Because tonight, he was hunting pleasure.
Faith's instinct was to fight the sucking edges of the darkness, but as she'd learned in the weeks prior to Marine's murder, the more she struggled, the harder it would hold on. So she let it—let him—take her under and bring her into his world.
His darkness churned with faint hints of red. The blood hunger was reawakening far more quickly than she would've guessed—Marine's murder hadn't sated this creature, it had simply whetted the edge of his appetite.
He released her when there was no longer any chance of escape. Now she would watch and see, now she would be his audience and his disciple, for he was a great being and expected others to pay homage. That she was the solitary individual aware of his genius was a source of great anger, which he took out on her by forcing her to bear witness to his every malevolent act. They hadn't yet come to pass, but while in the twisted coils of a vision somehow linked to the killer's mind, they were her reality.
A violent swirl of red sliced her thoughts in half as he shoved into her mind. She lost all sense of self, of being a cardinal named Faith, and became a creature of pain and fear. The darkness pushed her to the raw edge of madness, threatening her with the very emotions she'd been trained not to feel, or to even admit possessing. Her helplessness made the killer laugh. He grabbed her with his teeth, shook her hard.
He wanted her to not only watch, but understand his sick desires. That she didn't, couldn't, enraged him. Surrounded by the vicious thickness of murderous fury, Faith did the sole thing she could to protect herself. She surrendered the civilized thinking part of her mind and retreated into the walled inner core of her psyche, curling up around herself like a child going into the fetal position.
Still, the darkness battered her. He was amused by her inability to deal with him, playing with her as a cat might play with a trapped mouse. He didn't want to kill her. No, what he wanted was to flaunt his power until she stopped resisting and let him rape her mind. Then he'd be free to show her all his desires, every one of his planned future acts, an endless reel of horror.
Too deep inside the most animal heart of her psyche to remember that she wasn't supposed to feel fear, Faith began to struggle with everything in her.
And failed to break out.
Vaughn landed silently on the soft carpet of Faith's bedroom. His feet were bare but his legs covered—he'd cached a pair of jeans in the forest earlier that day, not wanting to scandalize Faith any more than she was already going to be scandalized. Of course, he was still looking forward to seeing the surprise in her eyes when she found him there for the second night in a row.
However, his senses went on red alert the second he took a step toward the bed. Her blanket in a heap on the floor, Faith lay curled into a tight ball, breath shallow and heartbeat sluggish to the cat's keen hearing. The scent of something that shouldn't have been there, something that didn't belong, was pungent in the air. When he narrowed his eyes in the semidarkness, he picked out a more extreme blackness around Faith, just as he'd done at the cabin.
Convinced the darkness would grip her tighter if it knew Vaughn was about to intervene, he got onto the bed in silence. His next move was lightning fast. Picking her up, he crashed her against him, physically blocking the darkness with the way his body curved over hers. Logic argued it wouldn't work—whatever was attacking her was doing so on the psychic plane. But instinct said it would. And instinct was proven right.
He felt the cold emptiness of sheer evil brush over him as the darkness was ripped in two by his body. It was unable to cling to anything in him because he was too different, too animal. Vaughn allowed a growl to rise up in his throat—his claws had sliced out the instant after he'd dragged Faith to safety. Now she lay protected by a human cage and, no longer able to feed on her, the dark thing withered away.
Vaughn waited until the air was purged of the noxious scent before he dropped his gaze to Faith. Retracting his claws, he used one hand to clear the strands of hair off her face. Her skin was cool, too cool. And her heartbeat was becoming ever slower, as if she continued to fight with all her strength, unaware she was safe. He wanted to do violence. But instead, he slid a hand under her nape and kissed her.
Only touch affected Faith deeply enough to break through the psychic nature of her mind. Most humans would've been shocked at the animal intensity of his kiss, but he wasn't human. And he wasn't shocked.
Something sizzled along Faith's most intimate inner skin and, though it wasn't painful, it demanded. Fearful that it was a trick, but incapable of ignoring the flaring pain of nerve endings snapping to wakefulness, she uncurled from her protective crouch. And saw energy arcing through her mind, silver and bright, passionate and unstoppable, a lightning storm that burned away the lingering echoes of malignant darkness.
Her blood began to pump with heat that burned. Around her, a thousand fires sparked to life. She stood in the center, protected but not shielded from the inferno. These flames wanted to caress, to touch, to stroke.
Unable to take the wild hunger of the storm, to withstand the intensity of the conflagration, she willed herself from the dream and into waking life. But the dream followed her to the outside. Her lips were on fire. Her body exploded with heat. Enfolding her was a stronger flame, skin that seemed to burn with a higher temperature than her own, living heat that lay against her nape, under her thighs, against the cheek she had pressed to a hard muscled surface.
She tried to suck in a breath, but her mouth had already been claimed. Her lashes flicked upward. Night-gold eyes met hers, brutal, savage ... and safe. Her lips were freed for the second it took her to gasp a breath and then reclaimed. She found that her hand was on his shoulder, holding on, holding him.
Her mind spun with too much sensation, but the alternative was worse. In her not-quite-conscious state, she wasn't sure the darkness wouldn't return if she broke away from this o
verload. So she embraced it, shifting to wrap her arms around the neck of the dangerous male in her bed, melding her body to his.
If it came to madness, she'd rather drown in heat than be sucked into the sadistic cruelty of darkness. The woman heart of her was aware that his hands were on her back, pressing her to him, and that while those hands were big and powerful, they did no harm. Then even that thought was swept under the shock wave of sensation and she became nothing but flesh, a creature who had no mind and no thoughts. Her eyes closed.
Vaughn sensed Faith's utter surrender. The cat was ready to take what was his, but the man knew this wasn't the kind of submission that would ever satisfy him and it might just scar her. She wasn't giving in to him. She was using him to escape the darkness. Vaughn didn't mind being used by Faith, but he did mind that she wasn't conscious of who it was she clung to.
He broke the kiss and had the pleasure of feeling her nails dig into his skin as she tried to make him return. "Faith."
She pressed closer, her eyes remaining shut.
"Faith." He made his voice a command edged with the roughness of a growl. It wasn't difficult. This aroused, he had trouble controlling the beast. It was something Faith was going to have to learn to deal with, but not today. Today was about keeping her safe. "Open your eyes."
She shook her head, but her hands slipped down from around his neck to curl into fists against his chest.
A slow smile spread over his lips. "I'm not naked." Taking one feminine fist, he pressed it against his jean-covered thigh, then had to bite back a very sexual demand when the fingers of that hand spread and sent sensation straight to his groin.
"Are you real?"
It was a question that made it brutally clear how deep she'd retreated into her mind before he'd pulled her out. Leaning forward, he nipped at the skin of her neck. She jerked and opened her eyes at last.
Silver lightning sparked in their night-sky depths, vivid and wild.
CHAPTER 11
"What?" she asked, when he continued to stare.
"I can see lightning."
"How—?" She shook her head but didn't shift off his lap, and that told him everything he needed to know. "Thank you."
"You're welcome."
She gave him a wary look. "Why are you being so agreeable?"
Because the cat found it amusing to tease her. "I'm always agreeable."
The wariness turned into full-blown disbelief. "You're playing cat games with me."
Surprised by her quick understanding, he shrugged. "I am a cat."
"You're right." Then she did something that stunned the hell out of him. Drawing up her body, she took a deep breath and brushed the most fleeting of kisses over his lips. "Thank you. I wouldn't have made it out on my own."
Raw anger wiped out the playfulness. "What the hell were you doing going alone into that kind of a vision in the first place?"
"You know I can't control them."
Pressing her closer with hands that threatened to go clawed, he stared straight into those lightning-storm eyes. "Then learn."
Faith blinked, not sure how to handle Vaughn in his current mood. But everything she'd learned about predators, about him, told her not to betray her lack of assurance. "I can hardly learn to control something without rules," she pointed out, "and there are none for the F-Psy, none that ensure the visions will only ever come when I want them to come. Yes, I can usually set them off with certain markers, but I can't hold them back for long periods of time."
"Who says?"
"My trainers, the PsyClan, the Council..." Understanding dawned. "Why wouldn't they teach me to block the visions if there were a way?"
"What would that control mean for the PsyClan?"
"It would contribute to a considerable rise in income," she said. "I could produce on command—there'd be no chance of my having a vision during sleep or in any other situation where my recall could be compromised, as sometimes happens now. So their not teaching me control, if they know how to accomplish it, makes no sense."
"Faith, why do you live in this house surrounded by sensors?"
She didn't want to answer and the impulse was so against any kind of rational behavior that she knew she couldn't give in to it. "Sometimes the visions are hard on my body and mind. I need to be monitored in case I need assistance."
"And if you could control the visions, then you could contain them until you reached a safe location. There would be no need for you to be caged up here."
Faith slowly drew her hands away from his body. "You want me to say they don't teach me control because this way I'm dependent on them, my ability at their beck and call. I have no choice but to forecast."
"What I want is for you to use that sensible Psy brain of yours—if they can train your visions to be lucrative and business focused, don't you think they could train you to decide whether or not you wanted to give in to a vision at any particular moment?"
For a member of a race notorious for acting first and thinking later, he made far too much sense. "Be that as it may," she said, instead of confronting his irrefutable logic, "I can't control them now and I absolutely cannot control the dark visions. Neither can I risk betraying the degradation of my conditioning by asking for further training."
"You're a cardinal." Vaughn tipped up her chin until she could no longer avoid meeting that wild gold gaze. "You don't need anyone to hold your hand."
"But I do need someone to hold back the darkness." There was no way she could become proficient enough at control, if control was even possible, soon enough to fight its growing power. "I can't break its grip when it hooks into me."
"Maybe because you've locked away what you need to fight it."
She pushed off his chest and slid down to kneel beside him. "Emotion."
He stretched out onto his back, acting as if this were his territory. She'd read about the way predatory male changelings liked to claim territory, be it land or sexual mates. Flames raced through her, a memory of the earlier lightning storm.
"Fire to fight fire, Red."
The echo of her thoughts might've startled her if she hadn't been concentrating on keeping her eyes from moving over the body lying so carelessly on her bed. Big and dangerous, there was at the same time something ultimately strokable about Vaughn.
"I can't." She shook her head to dispel the strange compulsion. "You don't understand the extent of the madness that infected the F-Psy before the implementation of the Silence Protocol." She'd seen the records, records no one could've doctored. "My own family records show generation upon generation of mad ones."
"How many in a generation?"
She triggered the memory files in her mind. "At least one."
"How many F-Psy in each generation?"
"The NightStar PsyClan has always produced an unusually high number of the F designation. Each generation has had at least one, but sometimes two, F cardinals and around ten lower-Gradient foreseers."
"One in eleven or twelve sounds like pretty good odds compared to what you're facing now."
Certain madness in twenty or thirty years if she was lucky, sentenced to spend the next five or six decades locked in the hell of her fragmented mind. "But the ones who went mad before—they were young. What if I'm the flawed one in this generation? If I break Silence, I'll fall."
"And if you don't break it, you'll spend your life in a cage."
"It's so easy for you to say." She shook her head. "You grew up on the outside, feeling and experiencing everything. You can't begin to imagine what you're asking me to consider."
A big hand flattened on her back, bare inches from the curve of her bottom. "Look at me, Faith."
She turned her body until her toes almost brushed his jeans at the thigh, her eyes on his face. He was nothing tame and she was drawn to that. But she was different. "All my life that I remember, I've lived in this compound. Even the freedom of the PsyNet was almost closed to me by some very delicate conditioning." Conditioning she'd broken on her own, she rea
lized with a warm glow she couldn't fully explain. "I'm changing that. I'm going out into the Net and seeing the information it has to offer."
"None of that involves leaving your safe little cocoon."
It was the blunt response of a man whose animal side clearly saw no reason for lies.
"You think that makes me a coward, that I should go out there and experience the world. What you don't understand is that the world might kill me."
"Then tell me."
She'd known there would be no easy acceptance from this jaguar stretched out on her bed, all gleaming skin and amber-gold hair. "One thing no one can fake is the reaction of my designation when surrounded by a large number of unshielded individuals. All species have a natural shield, though the changeling shield is far tougher, but the upper layer of the mind, the public self, is almost universally unshielded."
"Mine?" His jaw tightened.
She shook her head. "You're fully blocked. That happens with some individuals—an extension of the natural shield. However, in your case I'm guessing Sascha had something to do with it." He didn't answer and she felt some unknown thing inside her shrivel. "Not worthy of your trust, right?"
His fingers pressed lightly on her spine. "Trust is earned."
"I trust you."
"Do you? Or have you been forced into that position?"
There was no answer she could give him, because she didn't know. Moving, she felt his fingers fall off her back, but now her toes were nudging his jean-covered thighs. "The public mind," she began, turning to what was familiar as a means of grounding herself, "throws out a constant bombardment of thought and feeling. All Psy are trained to shield against those random pieces of data, to the extent that most no longer even notice the background chatter. But it's been well documented that F-Psy, no matter how strong their shields, are affected by those thoughts."
"Affected how?" His hand slipped under the thin material of her top to lie against her lower spine.