Branded by Fire

by Singh, Nalini

  “Why are you looking at me like I’m a bug?” he asked, passing her the files he could’ve as easily e-mailed.

  It was a big, giant hint. But he hadn’t acted on it, which made Mercy suspicious. “I just realized how beautiful you are.”

  He went red. Bright red. “God damn it, Mercy!”

  “Sorry.” She grinned.

  “No, you’re not.” Rolling his eyes, he leaned back in his chair. “I don’t suppose your pack has anyone else like you?”

  “No, I’m one of a kind.” She stared at him. “Are you troll ing for women?”

  “Would you shut up?” But he was laughing. “No, but I’m keeping my eyes open—I’m getting antsy to settle down.”

  “That’s an oxymoron.” Flippant words but her mind was connecting the dots. “You came back to see if I was your mate?”

  He shrugged. “We had good chemistry and we’re friends. I figured it couldn’t hurt to come have another sniff—you know what I mean so stop gagging—and make sure. I can see I’m too late.”

  Mercy got a very bad feeling in the pit of her stomach. “And you know this, how?”

  “The scent layer’s new, but it’s unquestionably there. You’re marked, babe.” He grinned. “Does the poor man know what’s in store for him?”

  Mercy’s intestines tied themselves into a giant knot. It wasn’t surprising that Hamilton had picked up the scent layer faster than those in her pack. They knew how much time she and Riley had to spend together, probably figured it was a surface layer of contact. But she’d showered this morning after Riley left, then slicked pretty-smelling body cream over herself. And if Hamilton could still sense Riley . . .

  No need to panic, she told herself. Lovers often wore layers of scent that made it clear who belonged to who—females and males both. “What’s the scent layer like?”

  Hamilton gave her a keen glance, then whistled. “You didn’t know.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “I picked it up the instant I walked in the door—I’m getting a very definite ‘hands-off’ vibe.”

  Mercy swore under her breath. Then again. “It’s the start of the mating dance.”

  “Which is why I’m sitting wayyy over on this side of the desk and making no physical contact,” Hamilton said, raising his hands in the air. “I have no desire whatsoever to be hunted by some rabid male who’s decided I touched his woman.”

  “I’m no one’s woman.”

  “Not yet anyway. Am I the first to sense it?”

  She nodded, trying to find her footing when the world had just shifted sideways.

  “Since no one in your pack’s exactly a slouch,” he commented, “it means the change is recent. I probably picked it up because I haven’t seen you for so long.”

  “And you’re single,” she said between gritted teeth, realizing the dance had to have kicked in the night before. By accepting his word that he’d try to never again hurt her as he’d done yesterday, she’d trusted Riley on a level she’d never before trusted a lover. More than that . . . he’d trusted her. “Every male I’ve seen this morning has been mated. The scent wouldn’t register as strongly to them.”

  “So, who’s the lucky guy?”

  “I’m going to kill him,” she muttered. “He knew and didn’t tell me.” Changeling males always knew when the dance began.

  “Ah, Mercy . . . I wouldn’t tell you, either.”

  She felt her eyes go leopard. “Men!”

  “Please,” he drawled out. “Look how you’re reacting. Dominant females don’t like the idea of being tied down. So if it was me, and you somehow didn’t notice the scent, I’d make sure we were well and truly entangled before I said anything. Less chance of you deciding not to accept the mating.” Getting up, he gave her a mock salute. “Are you sure you don’t know any more like you?”

  She thought about it. “Indigo.”

  “The wolf lieutenant?” He whistled. “She’s all kinds of fiiine. Would she date a cat?”

  “Ask her.”

  “Damn if I won’t.” He held out his hand for Indigo’s number.

  Mercy gave it to him in thanks for the fact that he’d spilled the beans about the mating dance. She also threw in a bonus warning. “Don’t try any dominant shit on her—she’ll eat you for breakfast then suck the marrow from your bones for dessert.”

  It was a measure of Hamilton’s confidence that he grinned as if he’d just been told he’d won a million bucks. Hah, she thought as he walked out. He was all fun and games now, but if it got serious, he’d probably turn as crazy as Riley and try to keep Indigo from harm. Now that, Mercy thought, would be a fireworks show she’d pay to witness.

  Of course, Riley had seen the error of his ways. More, he’d offered her a glimpse of his heart, something she’d never expected. It had undone her.

  Ten minutes later, he surprised her again. “We need to go look at a corpse.”

  Mercy blinked. “Wow, so romantic.”

  “Intel came to me since I’m in charge of city security this morning. But I thought you’d want in on it. I’m on my way to pick you up.”

  “I’ll grab a kit with gloves and things.”

  It didn’t take them long to get to the body—found by a couple of the Rats in one of the less accessible corners of the bay, the information had traveled to cat and wolf ears rather than Enforcement, which meant they had free rein at least for a short time frame.

  The body was wedged between several rocks, having apparently been washed up at high tide. Parking the car in the shadow of a large tree, the two of them headed down the tiny dirt access road to check it out. Though the sea had done a credible job of smothering the man’s natural scent, they both caught the faint metallic tang.

  “Psy,” Mercy said, crouching beside the body. “Those squads that Sascha and Judd told us about must be combing the city, searching for him.” All Psy who disappeared from the PsyNet without explanation were tracked to verify the reason for their sudden disengagement.

  Riley nodded. “The instant word of his body gets to Enforcement, we lose all hope of figuring out how he ended up here.”

  “I’ve got enough training to process this,” she said. “We bring in our techs and we give away the game.” There was nothing much out here—two people might skate under the radar, but a team would be highly visible.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Anyway, it could be simple drowning or suicide.” Putting on thin protective gloves, she checked the corpse for evidence of how the male might’ve died, while Riley took photographs with a small but high-resolution camera. “Fish have nibbled a bit and he’s been banged around, but I’m not seeing anything that screams murder. Of course, I’m no expert.”

  He tapped a finger on his knee. “Can you take samples without it being obvious you took them?”

  “No problem—I’ll go through one of the bite sites.” She was drawing blood as she spoke. “Haven’t done anything like this for a while.”

  “Remind you of med school?”

  A pointed glance. “That background check sure was thorough.”

  “Of course.” He kept an eye out around them as he spoke, making certain to look skyward, too. “Falcons are coming today. They want us to grant them permission to fly over pack land.”

  She took a number of swabs, making quick notes on where they’d been taken from. “Been in the works for a while.” The WindHaven clan occupied territory—a large slice of Arizona—that bordered SnowDancer land. Their request wasn’t unprecedented. The bird changelings, especially the species that were meant to fly far and wide, often negotiated such treaties—the right to flight along strictly drawn paths.

  If WindHaven wanted even limited landing privileges, they’d have to agree on some kind of an alliance, but first SnowDancer—and DarkRiver, as the wolves’ main ally—had to find them worthy of an alliance. A weak partner could cause incredible damage. However—“They seem pretty solid.”

  “Guess we’ll fi
nd out when we meet.” He looked at her as she removed her gloves and put them in the biohazard bag before closing the lid on the whole kit. “Done?”

  “Yeah. At least we got this much.” She made a face. “Probably won’t be enough for any real answers.”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky with the blood work.” He held out his hand for the kit. When she raised an eyebrow, he didn’t so much as blink. “I’m stronger. Suck it up.”

  Her mouth fell open as he turned something she’d said to him more than once, right back on her. Taking the chance to grab the kit, he loped over the rocks and up to the car ahead of her.

  Since his back was turned to the cat prowling up behind him, he missed the smile tugging at the curve of her lips.

  Mercy checked her phone when they got back to the car. “Falcons postponed,” she told Riley. “Meet’s set for day after tomorrow instead.”

  “Must’ve been something big,” Riley murmured. “They’ve been working for months to reach this point.”

  Agreeing, Mercy cleared the message. “I’m thinking we get a Rat to call in an anonymous tip on the body. No use leaving him out there to rot. Who knows what’s in his system.”

  “I have to meet more of these Rats. Teijan wasn’t what I was expecting.”

  Mercy made the call before answering him. “They don’t like you wolves as much as us leopards,” she said, closing her phone. “Apparently, you’ve been known to threaten to skin any Rat you see sniffing around.”

  Riley gave a grim smile. “That was when they were spies with no allegiance to anyone. Now they’re valued associates.”

  Mercy snorted, but the cat was intrigued by his logic. As agile as it was, it needed a mate who could match it mentally as well as physically. “Getting back to the body—I can’t quite figure out how this guy fits into the recent slew of Psy going nuts. You heard of anything going down where the perpetrator wasn’t found?”

  “No.”

  “Me, either. But it’s not like Enforcement sends us memos.”

  “What about that cop?”

  “Who? Max?” Mercy frowned. “He went back up to New York.”

  “He might have contacts.”

  Mercy nodded. “I’ll ask Clay to tap him. But if the Psy decide to hush it up, no one will know anything.” She blew out a frustrated breath.

  “Mercy.” A tone so restrained, it spoke of the greatest emotion.

  “What is it?”

  “Am I out of the hole I dug myself with the last op?”

  “Maybe.” But she couldn’t help it—he was so serious. Reaching across, she brushed her fingertips over his jaw, tenderness tugging at her very soul. It would, she thought, be so very easy to hurt this man and never know she’d done it, he held everything so close. “You’re out of that hole.”

  He winced. “You found out.”

  “How long did you think the mating dance was going to escape my notice?” She folded her arms, though she wanted only to stroke him.

  “Can we talk about this later?”

  “Hmm.” She glanced at the kit he’d put on the backseat. “After we drop off the samples.”

  “I’ll get one of my men to take it up to Sierra Tech. Work for you?”

  Mercy nodded. Most of the respected R & D company was commercial, but a small area had been set aside to research things the packs needed to know. Since DarkRiver and SnowDancer paid for that section out of their own funds, the minority shareholders weren’t bothered. And both packs had a place where they could get work done in efficient privacy. “Let me call Ashaya and tell her about the samples. She’ll probably want to head up.”

  As she was finishing the conversation with the M-Psy, she remembered something else. “Did you manage to talk to Nash again?”

  “Yes, but he wouldn’t share any details of his research over the comm link,” Ashaya replied. “I’m sorry—I know you need more to evaluate his protection needs.”

  “Not your fault.” She leaned back against the seat. “Let me see if I can set up a face-to-face. Might get something that way.”

  “Good luck.”

  The NetMind came calling while Faith was sitting in the office Vaughn had rigged for her—an office she absolutely adored, because it was as wild as the man who was her mate, being situated in a hollow cavern off the spectacular main cave that Vaughn had made into a home. The walls in this cavern glittered with embedded minerals, setting off the glow in the thin tubes threaded through the walls of the entire “house.” Those tubes provided both heat and light in an eco-friendly way, leaving her cocooned in warmth.

  It was, she thought, just one element in the whole that added up to a feeling of total safety. No one would dare touch her now that she belonged to Vaughn, but it was nice to be able to work without any worry whatsoever—the route to her and Vaughn’s home was booby-trapped in every way you could imagine, and some most people never would.

  Lying back in her favorite easy chair, she began to go through the list of forecasts she’d been requested to make. She never made any business predictions alone, of course. There was always the potential for a Cassandra Spiral, the major mental cascade that could destroy her—the mating bond limited the danger, but neither she nor Vaughn wanted to take chances. Not when she was already so vulnerable to the dark visions, the ones that entered her mind without warning.

  But even there, she thought with pride, she’d learned to use the mating bond to anchor herself so the nightmare didn’t take her over. In comparison, this—playing with the list, “priming” her brain—was utterly safe.

  It was as she was going through the list for the third time that the NetMind “knocked.” She couldn’t really see it—had never been able to. She simply knew it was there, a vast, endless presence that was at once ageless and childish. Today she caught the tumble of roses it threw into her mind in its version of hello, and laughed.

  Talking to the NetMind was difficult—it seemed to understand images better than words, and yet it was the librarian of the PsyNet, holding on to and organizing the billions of words that passed through the Net. And it was a sentience, one that changed with the Net. Now its roses were followed by torrent of images Faith could barely process.

  Violence. Blood. Suicide. Over and over.

  She showed the NetMind a hand, palm-out, their by-now familiar signal for “slow down.” It obeyed, though its version of slow was still almost too fast for her brain to process. But it was better than before. Catching the avalanche of images, she put them aside for later review, sensing the NetMind’s distress. Worried, she sent it an image of a woman colored in darkness.

  The DarkMind.

  It was the twin of the NetMind, created out of all the horror, the hurt, the badness that the Psy had Silenced. Faith knew from painful experience that the DarkMind was mute—but it had found a way to scream, to vent its rage through acts of violence committed by those fragile minds already predisposed toward darkness.

  Now she asked the NetMind if its twin was behind the wave of violence.

  The answer came within a split second, less.

  The image she’d sent was returned to her, but with the DarkMind scrubbed out. So this wasn’t the DarkMind trying to speak in whatever limited, tortured way it could. But then the NetMind sent her another image—of the PsyNet, with tendrils of darkness creeping through it. Except this darkness wasn’t normal, wasn’t healthy. It was putrid in a way Faith couldn’t explain—she just felt it deep in her soul.

  An image of a thousand tears overlaid the snapshot of the PsyNet.

  The PsyNet was dying, Faith thought, and the NetMind was the PsyNet in many ways. Her heart stuttered. But this sending also had another message—the DarkMind might not be driving these acts, but its influence had subtly corrupted another, or others. However, though it was tempting to think of the DarkMind as evil, Faith knew that was wrong. It was also a sentience, and the blame for its insanity lay in Silence.

  She sent the NetMind an image of arms outstretched, an offer of h
elp.

  The response was of a globe, but a globe colored in the shades of the Net—white stars against a background of black velvet. Around that globe was a shimmering shield that repelled her hands.

  The Net wasn’t ready for help.

  But there were cracks in the shield. She touched a finger to one crack, and knew that was Judd. The one next to it, Walker. And not far from them, Sascha. So many fine, fine cracks. The most isolated one, the newest . . . no, this was the very first, but it was hidden, hidden deep. And it was male, powerful, so very powerful. When this ghost . . . “Oh,” she whispered, realizing who it was she touched. “The Ghost.” When the most notorious rebel in the Net broke his Silence, the shield would well and truly shatter.

  What the NetMind couldn’t tell her, and her foreseeing gift refused to see, was if the PsyNet would survive . . . or drown.

  CHAPTER 40

  “It’s later.”

  Riley looked around Mercy’s office, curious. It was neat, but with an indefinable flair that was indisputably her. “Where’d you get this?” He gestured at the striking wall hanging behind her desk.

  To his surprise, she didn’t push him. “Peru. I went roaming down south after I decided medicine wasn’t for me.” Coming to stand beside him, she smiled. “That was a hell of a lot of fun. I hung out with my grandmother’s pack for a while—even went to Carnaval in my leopard form.”

  He could see her in the wild color of Rio de Janeiro. “With Eduardo and Joaquin?”

  She laughed at his tone. “No, they were doing some roaming of their own.”

  “Why did you choose to study medicine?”

  “You know how we double up—I talked to Tammy and we decided it’d be nice to have someone else medically trained. But it didn’t fit.” She shrugged. “So I took some time off, went back and majored in communications instead. Much better fit.”