by Nalini Singh
He almost heard her mouth snap shut. "I'm not your spy, Vaughn. Get someone else if you want a puppet." The statement was devoid of any emotion that might have made him excuse it, an unwelcome reminder that the woman beside him was a cardinal Psy. One of the enemy.
"You came to us," he grit out. "You came to us because you couldn't trust anyone in your precious world—they would've hung you out to dry. DarkRiver is not a charity for lost Psy." Fur ruffled the wrong way by her words, he accelerated down the road. "Asking you to give us something in return for our help is good business. You understand business, don't you?"
The second the words were out, he knew he should've kept a lid on his temper. He rarely lost it, but when he did, he tended to be brutal. Faith's hurt was all the more painful for being hidden under the brittle armor of Psy Silence, but he could feel it, feel it in the heart of his maleness. "I'm sorry, Red. That was uncalled for."
"Why? You only stated the truth." Her voice was so cold, Vaughn expected to see icicles forming in the air.
Something in him relaxed. He didn't mind Faith's anger—it was the emotionless mask he hated. "Yeah, but that's not why I said it."
"I don't understand." No hint of curiosity, pure Psy calm.
"I said it because you pissed me off." He turned down a leafy lane and glanced over at her sitting so motionless beside him. "We're not above collecting the information you give us—we'd be stupid not to gather as much as possible while you remain in the Net—but we aren't doing it behind your back, so don't accuse us of that."
Faith didn't know how to respond. For twenty-four years, she'd lived in a world that operated on a very different set of principles. Nothing was ever said so bluntly and without any hint of subterfuge. Shoshanna Scott's visit was a vivid example—the Councilor had been all allusions and hints, never quite coming out and saying what it was that she wanted from Faith, though Faith had a very good idea. What she didn't understand was why.
It was almost a compulsion for her to talk about it with Vaughn, but she couldn't. Not yet. If she gave away the Council to the cats, notwithstanding her lack of any definitive knowledge, then she was in a sense giving away her loyalty to the Psy race. And they were her race. They understood what she was, what she could do, and the price that she paid. She was respected, more than respected. If Shoshanna's visit was any indication, she might climb even higher, the highest of any in her PsyClan.
If she did as Vaughn wanted and successfully dropped out of the Net, what would she be? Nothing. A broken Psy without race or family. She'd done enough reading to know that her inborn talent wasn't always respected in the human-changeling world. Many scoffed at the idea of foresight. There were some who went so far as to call her entire designation a fraud.
Of course, none of that would mean anything if her abilities continued to spiral into chaos. She had to find a way to exert control over the dark visions, even if she couldn't block them. Vaughn's fingers whispered over her cheek. She was unable to stop her reflexive movement. "Yes?"
"We're here."
As she removed the blindfold, the lingering sensation of his touch threatened to smudge the strength of her recent decision to regain mastery over her own body and mind. She knew it was hazardous to feel anything, that emotions could drive her over the edge, but that did nothing to diminish the temptation to engage with Vaughn on all levels—physical, mental, and emotional. Because she knew that if she succeeded in leashing the dark side of her ability and returned to her normal existence, she'd live the rest of her life without a jaguar who liked to tease in the most sensual of ways, who pushed her to face her fears, and who, quite simply, made her feel alive.
Leaving the blindfold on the dash, she stepped out and closed the door. Vaughn was already on the lighted porch, speaking to Sascha. Faith couldn't see Lucas, but assumed he was nearby—the alpha had appeared extremely protective of his mate. It made her speculate whether the Council had done more than put a simple prohibition over Sascha Duncan.
"Hello, Faith." Sascha smiled and gestured to the chair beside hers.
"Hello." Faith took the seat, but found herself unable to look at Vaughn. He asked too much of her by his mere presence and she didn't know what answers to give him.
"I'll be close by." Vaughn walked off around the corner, and though it was impossible, she thought she felt him change.
"Where's Lucas?" Faith asked, instead of trailing behind him and indulging her need to see him as a jaguar once more. He was beautiful in either form, a lethal blade of a man, and she itched to stroke him. But she could justify it more while he was jaguar, tell herself it wasn't the same as permitting her fingers to trail over the human male's skin. Of course, quite aside from her confusion about which path to choose, she wasn't sure she could touch either man or cat without crumbling.
"My mate had some other business to take care of."
The unexpected declaration wrenched Faith's attention to the woman beside her. "He let you come alone?"
Sascha flicked her plait over her shoulder. "I'm a cardinal of considerable strength. Why does everyone think I need a keeper?"
"I didn't mean any offense."
"None taken." The other woman shook her head. "You're right, DarkRiver males are extremely possessive and protective. But you can't give in to it—you have to learn to take a stand or it'll end in disaster."
Faith found herself intrigued by the chance to learn something about Vaughn's world. "How?"
"Like all predators, the cats are very strong, physically and emotionally. If they don't receive the same kind of, what's the right word ... feedback, from their mates, they tend to become aggressive in the worst sense of the word." Sascha shrugged. "They try to dominate, but a dominated mate is not what makes them happy. Cats like seeing claws."
Was that what Vaughn had been doing to her? Pushing her to make her show her claws? "Can you tell me the changeling definition of a mate?"
"It's more than marriage, and far, far more than anything the Psy know." Sascha's lips curved. With her hair braided tightly off her face, she was beauty cut in perfect lines. "It's everything I never dared to dream."
Faith wanted to ask so much more, but their time was limited—she had to be back inside the compound before dawn. "The darkness is continuing to hunt me."
"Hunt? An odd word to use."
"But correct in this circumstance. Psychically, it feels as if the darkness searches for and locks on to me."
"It almost sounds like a forced telepathic link, not foresight."
Faith nodded. "Yes, but it's not. I am seeing the future, but the visions are channeled through the murderer, so in actuality, I'm in two timestreams at once. In the mind of the killer as he plans and in the future where the actual events take place."
"Go on," the other Psy said after a long pause.
"Once it's—he's—locked on, and maybe there is a component of telepathic interference there," she admitted, "I can't find a way to break away, to end the vision. He decides when to release me."
"But?"
"Vaughn can pull me out. By touch." Memories of his lips on hers merged with the shock she'd felt at having his claws on the tender skin of her face. "There's something else." She wiped her hands on her jeans. "I think I was having fragments of the dark visions as a child, perhaps before I turned three. So young, the memories aren't reliable, but I believe it to be a strong possibility."
"Interesting." Sascha leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "The Protocol may begin from birth, but I've heard it said that it doesn't really 'take' until a certain point of psychological development—which point depends on the individual child."
"I read a similar report a year ago. They're searching for a method to counteract that flaw in the Protocol—the consensus is that it's that period that produces the adult defectives." Even as she said the word, she realized it had been used to define the woman by her side, a Psy who was anything but defective. Another lie. Another break in the wall of her confidence in her own people.
>
Sascha shook her head. "I don't think it can be fixed. Very young children are far closer to their fundamental animal nature. Nothing short of rewiring the brain itself can alter that."
"That was one of the possible solutions raised in the Psy-Med Journal." Even then, months before her mind had begun to go haywire, Faith had found herself intellectually repulsed by the idea. The brain was the single thing that remained sacred among the Psy. To rewire that would equal the erasure of the individual, making the PsyNet a true hive mind.
"I want to not believe you, I want to be surprised and revolted." Sascha forced her heartbeat to lower. After years of hiding everything, the freedom to feel sometimes had her tumbling headfirst into emotion. "But I know the Council too well to believe they'd stop at destroying children's brains in an effort to consolidate their power."
"The procedure hasn't been implemented. It's purely theoretical." The words were crisply factual, but Sascha could feel the other woman's horror, a horror so deep that Faith, caught in the talons of Silence, was unaware of the fury of it.
Sascha understood. In any of the odher races, even a theoretical idea like that would've been considered heinous, a fundamental breach of the trust between adult and child. "What's stopping them?"
"They're afraid of damaging potential psychic abilities." Faith's eyes were an impenetrable field of stars. "I can't see how they could possibly neutralize that issue."
Sascha wasn't so sure. "Silence, too, was once a theoretical idea." She'd unearthed a lot of information about her race's history in the past few months and the majority of her research had found success through the most unusual of avenues—human libraries.
Trawling through those libraries dismissed by the Psy as outdated and inefficient, she'd discovered handwritten letters and documents that told of the beginning of Silence. The real beginning. It hadn't been 1979—Enrique had been wrong, his "tribute" of seventy-nine precise cuts on each of his victims, a mistake. And that made her delighted in a sense only her bloodthirsty new family could truly understand.
"I thought it was initiated by the Council in concert with our most noted Psy-Med researchers." Faith's voice drew Sascha back from the grim theater of memory.
"No," she replied. "It was initially raised by a cultlike group named Mercury."
No one had taken them seriously at the time. However, two decades after publishing their idea, Mercury produced their first successful subjects. The test graduates were only teenagers and the conditioning was prone to failure, but they were enough to change things. Mercury stopped being referred to as a cult by the majority and started being spoken of as a think tank.
It took one hundred years for them to morph into a group of visionaries, the saviors of the Psy. "The first pro-Silence Council was dominated by acolytes of Mercury. Two were graduates of their beta version of the Protocol."
"Sascha?"
Startled out of her painful thoughts on the high cost of such absolute Silence, she turned. Faith's hand was outstretched, a touch halted midthought. "You have to be more careful," she said gently. She had no desire to reinforce the straitjacket of Silence, but so long as the other cardinal was in the Net, she had to be hyperaware.
Faith's hand curled into a fist and she tucked it under her thigh. "I'm changing, Sascha. I want to fight it, but the change is happening on a level I can't seem to stop. And I'm not sure that's a good thing."
"Why?"
"I'm an F-Psy, valued and protected among our race. Out here, I'd be nothing."
"That's not true." Sascha attempted to use her empathic gifts to soothe the bruised pain inside of Faith, pain she could feel like a rock on her heart. "If you can learn to utilize and manage your gifts in a different way, you'll be as valued here. Imagine, you could warn of disasters and violence. You could save so many lives."
Faith looked away. She didn't want to see the other side of the ledger, didn't want to consider the deaths on the conscience of every foreseer who'd chosen an easier path. Like her. "Do you have any idea why my normal shields might be failing? These protections are specifically designed to guard F-Psy during visions, but they can't protect me against the darkness. They can't keep me safe."
Only Vaughn could do that, and she wondered why he bothered. If the foreseers hadn't withdrawn into Silence, perhaps his sister, too, would have lived.
CHAPTER 14
"What do you feel during these visions?" Sascha asked, not forcing her to face the issue as Vaughn would've done. "There's no one here but us."
"And a cat with very good hearing." Faith couldn't see him, but she knew he was out there pacing, protecting.
"Actually two," Sascha corrected. "A result of Lucas being overprotective is my guess, though I wouldn't put it past the sentinels to do it on their own." Her laugh was both amused and exasperated.
"Two?" She could bear Vaughn hearing her confession, because no matter what she'd said in the car, she trusted him. But another cat?
"Don't worry. Vaughn would never allow him within hearing range."
Something in the other woman's tone made Faith go still. "What?"
Sascha smiled. "Nothing. So, what do you feel?"
"Rage, pain, malice, fury, bloodlust." She couldn't bring herself to list the sick pleasure felt by the sadistic sexuality of that raping mind. Because during the visions, she was him and the pleasure was her own.
It made her want to vomit, to tear out her own mind. No wonder F-Psy had chosen the coward's way out and surrendered to the clean commerce of Silence.
"The worst possible way to snap out of the Protocol." The renegade cardinal's face softened. "I think emotions are the key to why your shields are failing. Psy in the past would probably have fought fire with fire, shoving up blocks powered by the depth of their horror at the acts."
Faith was startled by the echo of Vaughn's earlier comments. "Go on."
"It's speculation on my part, but I know my shields cracked because I was crushing emotion when emotion was my strength."
Faith didn't ask more about Sascha's abilities. Faith was linked to the Net. The PsyClan did monitor her. On top of that, the Council was now paying her an unusual amount of attention. "But my ability isn't based on emotion."
"I think you're wrong. If emotion wasn't at the heart of foresight, F-Psy would never have seen the things they once did, never have seen murder and disaster. They saw those things because they were people who cared about others, who were driven to try to stop the evil."
Faith couldn't begin to imagine the strength it must've taken to be a foreseer in the time before Silence, to see death and pain in an endless sequence of what could be. "You're saying it's possible that Silence left the section of my mind that has the capacity to see darkness, the emotional center, unprotected. To even accept the existence of such a center would go against the conditioning. Following that logic, I can't shield that which doesn't exist." Leaving her totally exposed to the malicious power of a killer in need of an audience.
"Exactly." Sascha's eyes flashed bright and Faith almost imagined she saw colors. Impossible. "I think that's why Vaughn can pull you out—his touch awakens that buried center."
Faith's stomach clenched at the mention of the cat who'd somehow become integral to her life. "Even if you're right and I find that area of my brain and reinitiate the protections, it won't stop the visions, just make them easier to escape, correct?"
"Faith." Sascha sighed. "If you continue to try to block your gift as it's been blocked for twenty-four years, you'll destroy yourself from the inside out."
And go insane, Faith finished silently, hands clenching into rigid balls under her thighs. "If I accept these visions, it'll be the same as accepting emotion and I won't be able to hide that for long. I'm too closely watched. The end result will be the same—incarceration in a mental health facility." Another trap with no way out.
"You always have choices. The question is, are you willing to see them?"
Or are you a coward hiding behind the conveni
ent shield of Silence?
Words Sascha would never say, but Vaughn would in a heartbeat. He wasn't gentle like the cardinal beside her. He was a predator and he went for the throat. And she watched the forest for him until he appeared for her in a flash of gold and black—a jaguar circling her, protecting her, perhaps caging her. She should try to run, try to escape, but of course, there was nowhere to go.
Not when the real threat was inside her own mind.
Vaughn did another sweep of his range and confirmed that the second sentinel in the area, Dorian, was keeping to the outer boundary. Only Vaughn was allowed so close to Faith. Even having Dorian in the same wide range made him want to react with brutal violence. The jaguar suddenly understood the extreme possessiveness that gripped DarkRiver males during the mating dance, understood why some of them turned close to feral.
Because the same violent fury was riding him now.
He roared and everything in the forest went silent. Brooding but ever watchful, he began to once again consider how to seduce the object of his hunger. He wasn't a fool. He knew sex would amp up the electricity between them, not turn it down. But if he didn't have her soon, he might gnaw off a paw.
The cat was frustrated with the man. Take her, it said; pleasure will crush her fear. The man wanted to agree. It would be so easy. Except that it would be a lie. No one raised as Faith had been, in the privacy-less box she called a home, would so quickly be able to adapt to the ferocity of his needs. And a Psy? Impossible.
Sex might actually send her into the very seizures she'd been conditioned to expect.
But she felt him on the psychic level, an intimacy he'd never expected. That she could pick up only his most erotic thoughts delighted him. It gave him the best of both worlds—his privacy and the ability to seduce her without subjecting her to touch, which might send her over the edge.
Sensual hunger beating in every surge of blood, he began to think of Faith and all the ways in which he wanted to take her. The jaguar, being a jaguar, wanted to enter her from behind. A view nothing could match, the man agreed. So much to explore, to stroke, while she lay helpless. His body reminded him of the sharp bite of pain that had been her response to his earlier provocation. Maybe not so helpless, he grinned inside. But this was his fantasy and here she was his—submitting, asking to be touched, to be kissed, to be mounted.