Damon flinched each time. At the fourth one, his eyes closed and his mouth went tight.
“Damon,” I said softly. But he didn’t answer. “Damon!”
“What…” He blinked, shaking his head. “You…what...”
“Look at me,” I said. “Are you looking at me?”
Dark, stormy gray eyes—as dark as I’d ever seen them—finally met mine. His throat worked as he swallowed.
“You two need to listen to me. This bullshit, macho, super-alpha shit doesn’t work with Nova. He’s not a shifter and he’s not afraid of either of you. He already picked you up, Damon, and threw you like a ragdoll.”
Damon’s lids twitched. I think his brain was starting to work.
I flung a hand toward him. “I already told you that he saved my life twice. One of those times was when I ended up neck-deep with a rogue pack in Alabama. There were thirty of them. Nova showed up and when he was done, not one was left standing—or alive.”
Chang’s eyes flicked to Nova.
Damon was still staring at me, his chest heaving like a bellows. He took a step toward me.
“No. We’re not doing this right now,” I said, backing up. “I’m talking to him. Which I should have done hours ago, if one of your men had let me know he was looking for me.”
Damon still took another step.
There was a light thump from across the room—the mattress settling back into place. Chang and I noticed.
Damon didn’t.
“I’d like to mention,” Nova drawled. “What I can do? It’s got nothing to do with metal, water…the element, the item, the weight, size…number. None of that matters to me.”
“Then what does?” Chang asked, sounding politely interested. But his eyes were on Damon who was moving closer and closer, like a man in a dream.
He wasn’t the only one watching the Alpha either.
I was watching Damon.
So was Nova.
“Me. I matter,” the man in question said. “I’m the most psychic piece of shit you’re ever going to meet.”
“Well, you are often a piece of shit,” I muttered.
“Thanks, Kit. Love you, too.”
Damon growled.
“Don’t,” I said, snarling back. I was about ready to punch him in the nose.
Chang moved up, possibly risking life or limb—both. He rested a hand on Damon’s chest, spoke to him urgently. Damon all but vibrated on his heels, eyes still locked on my face.
Damon closed his eyes after a moment and Nova took that opportunity to continue his one-man cheer squad. Although it was more like a doom and gloom squad.
“Psychic piece of shit or not… What I am is... well, call me a tool.” Nova braced his hands on the edge of the table and leaned forward, eyes moving ceaselessly between Chang and Damon. “I can tell you that you have exactly thirteen hundred and twelve shifters in the Lair right now—no. It’s thirteen hundred and twenty. More are en route. You’re calling in the troops, Alpha. I guess I’ve got you good and riled up. I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be.” Damon’s voice came out hoarse, like he hadn’t spoken in months. He shot me another look and I had the feeling he was fighting the urge to come for me again. “Right now, I’m holding off on having you torn limb from limb but that can change in a heartbeat.”
“You don’t get it, Damon,” I said, risking drawing that primal attention all over again. “Remember how I told you he came after Justin and me when it was like…oh, thirty to three? Only it was more like thirty to one, because I was injured and if Justin turned his back for a second, we were done for.” I stared at him, hard. “Thirty rogue shifters. Have you never heard about a group of rogue wolves running anywhere near here? Maybe you might have once been concerned about them, but were told to leave them alone?”
Damon’s lids flickered.
But Chang straightened, drawing himself rigid.
“They called themselves the Devil’s Angels. Not terribly original, I don’t guess. But maybe the name will ring a bell.”
Damon’s shoulders went tight, but that was his only reaction.
Chang, however…for once, his reaction was instantaneous, and obvious. Almost all of the malice drained out of him and he reached up, dragging a hand down his face. “That was you,” he muttered, swearing under his breath. “Kit, you went in after that idiot brat?”
I inclined my head. “That idiot brat was fourteen and I thought she deserved a chance to live long enough to know she’d made a mistake.”
It was one of my biggest regrets to realize we’d wasted our time—and nearly our lives. Sometimes evil lurks even in the heart of supposed children.
Her name had been Magdalene and of that group, she was the only one to survive. She hadn’t lived to see eighteen though. Her own family had been forced to put her down six months after her rescue. A very reluctant rescue. She was the reason Justin and I had needed Nova’s help to begin with.
She was the reason those thirty men had ended up with their insides liquefied by the power Nova carried inside him.
None of us ever took credit for taking out what would have become one of the ugliest threats in the south. It was Nova’s kill, but he didn’t want to be known for killing thirty in the blink of an eye. Neither did we.
So we’d said nothing.
That didn’t keep people from talking about it.
Chang stared at Nova, his face impassive now. After a moment, he turned away and paced over to a bookshelf, staring at the volumes there without seeing a single one.
Finally, he looked at Damon. “If he’s the one who took them down, perhaps we owe him the courtesy of…listening?”
I didn’t care what they thought they owed him.
Turning back to Nova, I said, “Stop it with the bullshit. Ignore them. Talk to me. My two best friends are missing. What’s going on?”
Nova talked.
I listened.
A few minutes into it, Chang started to listen…reluctantly.
And somewhere in the blur of it, so did Damon.
Chapter Twelve
“I’ve been trying to catch up with you and Justin since the deal with Chaundry and the salamander, Kit. I’m…fuck. I’m sorry.”
Hands over my face, I tried to take in what he’d told me but I felt like I was about to explode from it. Just explode. Taking in anything else was just going to be that one final bit that pushed me over and I’d lose it. Lowering my hands, I made myself meet Nova’s pale eyes. “It’s not your fault. Although, hell…next time, pick up a fucking phone.”
“You think I’m going to put this kind of information on a phone?” He scoffed.
We both pretended to laugh, but I understand why he hadn’t, even assuming I hadn’t destroyed my cell sometime last week.
“Mister...” Chang paused, a frown on his face. I realized it was because he didn’t know Nova’s last name, and a brief thought danced through my mind. This whole thing had to be frustrating for him.
He was used to knowing everything about everybody.
He knew nothing about Nova.
“Just Nova.” The psychic’s lips curled in a wry smile as he spun the chair and focused his eyes on the shifter in the dove gray suit.
“Nova, then. You’re telling us that you were a…guest of Blackstone. For two months.” Chang’s jaw tightened, his liquid black eyes unreadable. “Just how were you able to escape? And if you’re the most psychic piece of shit—such a charming turn of phrase, mind you—I’ll ever meet, one would think you would be almost impossible to catch off guard. Yet you were taken by Blackstone’s ham-handed handlers.”
“Yes.” Nova kicked back in the chair, propping his feet up lazily. It took a moment to realize he had propped them on absolutely nothing, even a bit longer to realize the chair was resting on the back two legs—yet it was as stable as could be. “And they are quite ham-handed, I gotta say. A bull in a china shop would catch less attention. As to why they grabbed me and how…” Nova jerked a
shoulder in a shrug. “I let them.”
I spun my head around so fast, it was a miracle I didn’t get whiplash. For a few seconds, I could only gape at him and then I shoved the confusion, fear, and more than a little residual anger aside. “I don’t think I want to know. If I don’t need to know to help Justin and Colleen, then I don’t want to know.”
“Whatever you say, Kit.” Nova crooked a grin at me. “What you should know is that they experiment on people—just like Justin feared. They have had some successful experiments. And...”
His gaze slid away.
“And what?” I pushed.
“Chaundry, Kit.”
A muscle pulsed in my eyelid. “What?”
“Fuck, Kit.” Nova drilled the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Think it through, Kit. I’ve already been to Red Branch—the salamander is probably going to die. It’s traumatized by what happened with Chaundry. They weren’t meant to be used like that, and it knows it killed its handler. And Chaundry—she wasn’t like that. They had her and they broke her.”
Memories of the way Justin had said her name, how he’d stared down at her, like he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.
“How?” I barely managed to force the question out as the staggering knowledge of what he was telling me drove home.
They could remake us—control us.
“They’re mind-wiping the NHs they take in. Manipulating them and turning them into the puppets they’d planned Banner to be.” Disgust dripped from Nova’s words. “This isn’t brainwashing we’re talking about. The NHs they’ve successfully…reprogrammed, for lack of a better word, have minds that are essentially a blank slate. They then send that one out to help hunt down their problem children.”
Shaken, I sank back down into my seat.
“How do you know this?”
“Like I said. I let them take me.” Nova looked tired now, exhausted really. He turned away and braced his hands on the window that faced out over the small courtyard. I realized he’d lost weight.
“They had you for two months?”
“Maybe a little less, maybe a little longer.”
“And why weren’t you…wiped?”
A mean smile curled Nova’s lips. “They couldn’t get to me. They open a door, I slam it shut. They try to wait until I’m asleep, I wake myself up. They decide they won’t feed me, I steal food from them—while they are eating. Trust me…I pissed them off. You know how testing goes with psychics—they can’t get a decent grasp on what psychic ability is, how it works, because every single psychic ability works on a different level. Once I had what I needed…I left. Actually, I left because of Chaundry. They were done programming her and I wasn’t going to let her go down like that. It took me a while to get out, though.” The look on his face darkened ominously. “I didn’t catch up with her in time. You know how that went down. Getting in was a lot easier.”
“Why did you do it?” Damon asked, speaking for the first time in quite a while.
“Because it’s what I’m supposed to do. There are a couple of…people there,” he said. “Some guys I’ve been hunting for a while. I went in to start laying the groundwork and realized there was a lot more going on than I’d expected.”
I sucked in a breath, unable to stop it.
Nova glanced at me over his shoulder and our eyes locked. “Don’t look at me like that, Kit. I told you the time was coming. It cometh right soon.”
I got up and moved away as fast as I could, pacing over to the corner and staring blindly at a wall. “It’s…this is what does it?”
“I’m what does it.”
A hard knot settled inside me, a miserable ache and I turned to face him.
The smile on his face was gentle, almost like he was trying to tell me it was okay.
The hell with that. He shouldn’t be consoling me right now—not about this. And it wasn’t okay.
As if he could sense my line of thought—and maybe he could—Nova just lifted a brow. “Yeah. This is it, Kit. I’m kinda glad. I’m tired, ya know? Besides, Blackstone…you have to admit, it’s a good cause.”
“What are you two talking about?” Damon demanded bluntly.
When there wasn’t any answer from Nova, I turned to look at him. He was still looking outside but he shrugged, as if to tell me he didn’t care if I said anything or not. But this…it wasn’t my place to say anything.
Nova’s sigh escaped him and he turned, leaning back against the window, his head falling to rest on it as he stared upright. “Ever wonder what it might be like knowing when you’d die? And how?” Now he straightened his head, pinning Damon with a sardonic look. “The one really shitty thing was never knowing why. But I got that now. Mostly. It’s a decent enough reason.”
An empty, hollow pang resonated through me and I tipped my head back, staring up at the ceiling until I’d convinced myself there was nothing to cry over.
“Now, not to be so flippant about my much-anticipated and likely to be under-appreciated demise, but none of that’s not why I’m here.” Nova braced his hands on the table. “Once I figured out just who they’d send Chaundry after, I tried to close the distance, but I had to make sure she didn’t pick up on me—and that made it dicey. I couldn’t get in touch with you by phone—makes sense after hearing you’d destroyed it.” He grimaced.
The quick shift in topic had my head spinning, but I knew I needed to pay attention. “I’ll make sure to give you the new number. Next time, if you…” I just tapped my head, my gut too knotted to say what I was thinking.
“I’m still recuperating from my…escape, Kit. Had to blow a lot of power to do it.” He crooked a tired smile. “Otherwise I would have. Don’t worry, I’ll be right as rain in time for the big day.”
I wanted to slap him for being cavalier about his death, but nobody better understood than I did how caustic humor could help a person cope. “Yeah. You’ll have to explain that, in detail. Soon.”
“Sure. In detail.” He wagged his brows at me. “It included me being naked.”
Damon didn’t move at all, but the predatory interest in him sharpened down to a knife’s edge.
“I should also mention it included a body bag and more blood and guts than you normally see outside of butchering day.” Nova’s smile went ugly. “They’ll be more careful about who they toss in a body bag in the future. They were running on a light crew that day because it was the same day they sent Chaundry out for the first time and they had as many people in the field with her as they could spare for risk containment. They make it sound so clinical. Risk containment. Like she was some sort of mutated rat. Anyway, I pulled a headfuck on them, because I needed them watching me less so I could watch her more. A shrink came in, told me life would be easier, better, if I’d cooperate. I’d get freedom, fewer restrictions if I’d stop resisting, blah, blah, blah…So for about a week, I’d been eating the food, then I started taking the pills—or so they thought. I was really just pulverizing them and that day, they switched the meds. It was perfect. I faked an allergic reaction, slowed my breathing, made my heart slow to nothing—”
“You can do that?”
He looked at Chang, brows arched as if to say, Can’t you? “Yeah. I can manipulate anything—your heart included. Want a demonstration?”
Damon snapped, “No.”
“Yes.” Chang came forward. “A demonstration—I don’t want it stopped. I assume you can do it without killing me.”
Nova looked at Chang as if he suddenly found him a lot more interesting.
“Chang…” Damon’s voice was a low warning.
But the slim man turned to look at Damon, one straight black brow arched. “I’m of a mind to trust him, believe everything he says. If he’s serious, then we have a lot of problems and we need to be ready to put the weight of the Clan behind him. And we owe Justin and Colleen debts that likely can never be paid. I owe Justin—I owe him for you. But I want proof that this man is everything he’s claiming. And I need proof—n
ot Kit’s word that I can trust him. Her word means a great deal to me, but for this…I need more.”
Damon closed his eyes.
A taut moment later, he nodded.
When Chang looked back at Nova, he asked, “Well?”
“I can speed it up, I can slow it down. If I really wanted to, I could rip it out of your chest and slam it into his—but that would kill you and we’ve established you don’t want to die for this little…demonstration.” Nova crossed his arms over his chest. “What do you want me to do?”
“If you speed it up too much, my body will want to change. Best not to tempt it.”
“I’ll control that.”
Chang’s mouth tightened. Then he nodded.
The only sign I had that anything was changing at first was the increase in Chang’s breathing.
Damon sensed something else, though.
He came out of the chair, pacing closer to us. His nostrils flared and he stopped a few feet away from me, his eyes flicking to mine for the briefest moment then he gave a slow shake of his head and stopped.
I looked at Chang, arms wrapped tight around myself. The tension in the air started to gather and it sent goosebumps crawling up and down my spine. Shifter energy has a feel all its own. When a shifter is going to change, that energy spikes and grows, until it’s like there’s a storm just waiting to explode.
That storm was here now and it hovered.
And hovered.
Seconds passed into a minute and then a minute became five.
Chang’s face was covered in sweat, his eyes a brilliant burning gold.
Damon said, “That’s enough.”
Chang almost went to his knees. I saw him sway, start to bend. Then his body steadied and through damp hair, he stared at Nova. “You…I think you just might be one of the most dangerous creatures I’ve ever met.”
Nova’s mouth twisted. “The first time I heard that I was five. Then my mother gave me a kiss and hugged me.”
“How sweet.” Damon’s voice was pure acid.
“The sweet part came after. The man she’d been shacking up with came up behind me and slammed a metal pipe into my head. They threw me into the river next. Of course, that wasn’t the first time she’d tried to kill me—nor was it the last.”
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