by Nalini Singh
He’d seen her with taller, older Yuri, but the import of the way they’d interacted had escaped him until today—because he liked to stand too close to Selenka, just like Nerida did with Yuri. “How is Yuri?” he asked, wondering what else he had missed or not understood.
“Light duty.” Nerida’s jaw tightened. “Mostly at the empathic compound in DarkRiver/SnowDancer territory, but he’s scheduled to start here tomorrow—this was meant to be light duty, too.”
“Is he handing off to another member of the squad?”
“No. He has medical clearance and insists he’s fully capable.”
“Yuri is highly experienced and if he has medical clearance, then it may be time,” Ethan said, because that was a normal, unobjectionable response to the information she’d shared. He’d long ago learned to mimic normal human behavior even when he stood distant from it.
Of course, that brought up the question of whom he’d learned it from.
Ivy Jane Zen, aware of Ethan’s history because of her mating with Vasic and resulting deep connection to the squad, was one of the few people who’d perceived what he was doing. Though Ethan didn’t talk much in comparison to his squadmates, it had taken the president of the Empathic Collective a very short time to pick up on how good he was at echoing what people wanted to hear.
“I’d call it a survival mechanism, but I have the strong feeling you didn’t ever tell Ming what he wanted to hear,” Ivy had murmured the last time they’d spoken, her brow furrowed and gaze intent. “There’s something about you, Ethan . . .”
He’d stayed silent, but he knew what she must’ve sensed: the vein of madness that whispered in the quiet at the back of his mind. Ivy was an empath, a very strong empath. It was no surprise she’d picked that up in spite of the heavy shields he’d erected to hide the truth until it could no longer be hidden.
Ordinary people wouldn’t have known what to do with him, but the squad was a brotherhood. That brotherhood had breached the secret bunker that was Ethan’s prison minutes after Ethan killed Ming’s two stalwarts and walked out of his cell—only to come face-to-face with a blue-eyed Arrow armed with heavy weaponry.
“Identify,” had been the clipped order.
Ethan, pain yet ratcheting through his nerves, had considered just killing the other man . . . but a small, operational part of his brain had processed the fact that Abbot was young. In his twenties. In the time since he’d been held in the bunker, Ethan had seen only Arrows who were at least a decade and a half his senior. Abbot was the first peer he’d ever met.
So he’d said, “Ethan Night, Arrow, serial number Tk493b.”
“A telekinetic?” Abbot had never moved the gun off him, but his tone had shifted. “Why don’t I know you? I know all of us in the squad.”
Us.
It had been the first time ever that Ethan had been included in a group. Perhaps that was why he’d told the pure truth. “Because this place is a cage, and I’m the animal it was built to contain.”
Abbot had taken him to Aden, and whatever Aden had found in Ming’s secret files, it’d led the new leader of the squad to welcome Ethan as one of his own. Then Abbot, Vasic, Nerida, and all the other telekinetics in the squad had shifted and made room for him at their virtual table even though he was strange and didn’t speak for hours at a time and wasn’t a Tk who could move objects or teleport.
Now Nerida said, “I was hoping you could take my shift tomorrow.” She resettled her shoulders with a wince. “I trust you to have a cool head in any situation, especially around all these Es. Many of the newly trained tend to leak emotion.”
Ethan thought of Selenka, of the scalding burn of her in his veins, but said, “I can do that.” No alpha wolf was going to be anything but busy—better that he occupy his free hours or he would surrender to his obsession to stalk her every move, watch her with hot eyes and hotter need.
He didn’t have to be an expert in predatory changelings to know such behavior would be acid on the bond between him and his mate; Selenka Durev was no one’s prey, not even her Arrow mate’s. “You have another engagement?”
“No.” Nerida touched her shoulder with a hand built on bones so fine that no one looking at her would expect her to be able to throw around assailants three times her size. “Old injury acting up. Medic wants me to go in for treatment and with this situation contained and the world calmer than it’s been for a while . . .”
“Yes, the timing is perfect.” Of late, the Consortium had eased up on its violent attacks and assassination attempts. The gradual fade had some believing the power-hungry group was on the verge of disintegration.
Ethan was not one of those people.
“Thank you. I knew I could rely on you.”
Curiosity stabbed, a glittery spiked ball in his gut. “Why do you and the others accept me?” It was a question he’d never asked.
“Because we were all lonely, dangerous children once.” Nerida checked a message on the mobile comm wrapped around her left forearm. “All an Arrow expects from another Arrow is loyalty—and you have been loyal to us.” She was gone a heartbeat later, her teleport abilities strong.
You have been loyal to us.
A truth. Even when he’d accepted the offer of his would-be handler, he’d had no intention of betraying the squad.
Outside, the air was cool against him, the summer sun not yet at full strength. The colors of Moscow under the sunshine slapped into him at the same time as the mingled scents and the noises of people and birds.
Ethan sucked in a breath, throttling his sensory intake in instinctive self-defense. It still took five long minutes of intense focus to fight his way out of the howl of sensation and realize his shields hadn’t failed—no, it was that he’d lived so long in the gray that he wasn’t used to a world in full color.
There was so much he hadn’t seen, didn’t know. Such as how to satisfy his alpha wolf mate so she would want to be with him. Changelings were tactile by nature . . . yet Ethan hadn’t touched another living being with any kind of intimacy until Selenka hauled his head down for a kiss.
He had no weapons with which to fight for her.
The thought had him reaching out to Abbot, the action an impulsive one. Are you in Moscow?
Yes. Do you need a lift back to HQ?
No, I have a question.
Where are you? We could talk in person.
Ethan gave him the location, and Abbot walked around the corner two minutes later. The first thing Ethan noticed was the pink mark on the collar of his uniform jacket.
Catching his gaze, Abbot looked down and his face softened a fraction. “Jaya’s lipstick.”
Selenka wasn’t wearing color on her lips today, but Ethan wouldn’t mind it if she did and got it on his collar. He wanted her mark on him, wanted to be like Abbot and have that satisfied, possessive look on his face.
Stretching out his body by doing a partial torso twist, Abbot said, “What did you want to ask?”
“What makes a woman happy?”
Abbot put his hands on his hips, his head angled down a little. When he looked up, his brilliant eyes held a sense of warmth Ethan could almost feel. “I asked the same question once. Only I asked Jaya.”
Ethan paid close attention; an answer straight from the source could be invaluable. “What did she say?”
“That every woman is different—the key is to listen. She’ll tell you what she wants if you pay attention.”
Ethan thought of the madness in his head when he got close to Selenka, the way he turned into a devouring beast who had little of reason in him. Even now, his pulse accelerated and his body grew hard and tense at the thought of her lips slick and wet, her teeth taking bites out of him. “I’m not sure I can be that rational around her.”
“Don’t worry. There’s a manual—it began with information about intimate physical interacti
on, but now has a growing section on emotional connection and how to nurture it.” Abbot tapped his gauntlet. “I’m making a note to send it to you. I store it in my personal electronic vault.”
Ethan stared at his fellow Arrow. “Who created the manual?”
“Another Arrow—but all of us add to it as we learn.” Abbot held Ethan’s gaze. “When I first met Jaya, I knew nothing of courtship, just that I would do anything to keep her safe. None of us are experts, Ethan. We all stumble.”
That he wasn’t the only one out there trying to find his feet on shaky ground, it meant more than he’d realized. “I owe you.” For far more than this conversation; only now, the fog torn apart by wolf claws, did he see all the times Abbot had tried to reach out to him.
Waving away Ethan’s statement, Abbot said, “There’s no debt in friendship.” He paused. “I have to go do a pickup. We’ll talk later.”
Ethan was still digesting the other Arrow’s words ten minutes later when he felt a ping against his mind, a request for PsyNet contact.
His “handler.”
Ethan took his time responding, using the pause to consider his line of attack. The Consortium clearly had information that had led them to approach him in the first place. If Ethan had to guess, he’d say that the last of Ming’s surviving coterie of loyalists had had a loose tongue prior to her violent death.
No doubt the Consortium had seen him as ripe for manipulation. Too late, his handler had realized they’d put their hand out to a vicious dog. So they had arranged the surprise second assailant—but their attempt to eliminate him had put Selenka in the line of fire.
Selenka had never been meant to take physical damage.
Black ice crawled across his senses, so cold it would burn anyone in its path. In harming the strong, beautiful, dangerous woman who was his mate, the Consortium had made an enemy of Ethan Night, and Ethan never forgave or forgot.
“Yes,” he said at last, after stepping into the private psychic vault he and Operative C used for such meetings. He’d never met his Consortium handler in real life, but the mind that faced his was crystalline with power. A high Gradient but not a trained hand at subterfuge, he’d given away enough that he wasn’t as anonymous as he believed.
“Did it go according to plan?” the other man asked, his gender one of the things he’d allowed to slip.
“There was a second assailant—one who was aiming at me.”
“We decided to add her to ensure no suspicion fell on you.”
“She was shooting to kill.”
“We had faith in your reflexes—and she is an E. Not the best shot.”
Ethan felt a growl inside him, born of the shadow wolf that was his mate’s faint static-broken presence. Did the Consortium believe him mentally incapable as well as gullible?
“Does the alpha trust you?” Operative C asked.
“It’s too early for that. But we’ve made a connection.” A connection that meant Ethan would run this double cross until he could end Operative C, taking another chunk out of the Consortium.
The group would learn to never again look to an Arrow for collusion.
“I’ll work it as we discussed.” He had to utilize serious effort to sound as neutral as always because the wolf inside him was snarling. “Do not interfere.”
“Keep us updated.”
“When I can.” He dropped out of the PsyNet before he could surrender to the urge to strike out at that mind that thought it could control him and that had been involved in the wounding of his mate. Operative C was simply a symptom of a larger malignancy and might serve as a conduit to the core.
Regardless of reason and logic, however, the black ice continued to grow.
When he attempted to step back into the cold place simply to see if he could, he found it gone, obliterated from existence. Where it had been glowed tendrils of red flame that burned in furrows formed by claws.
Madness, his brain misfiring . . . but it was a beautiful madness.
Beyond the madness, his shields held firm, holding back the far more deadly force within.
Settling back against the outer wall of the symposium hall, he took in the area around him. Trees and gardens shimmered green in the sunlight and dappled shade onto the footpaths as people moved here and there, going about their lives in a way Ethan had never experienced.
“Woof.”
Ethan looked down at the dog with ragged fur that had wandered up to him, its body so thin that its rib cage pressed stripes against its skin. “I have no food.”
Tail wagging and tongue out as it huffed, the stray sat down beside Ethan. He resolved to ignore it, but his eyes kept being drawn to the creature’s ribs. Ethan had been that skinny during the worst periods of torture. The black ice cracked, riven with dark red embers.
“Stay here,” he told the dog, and went back into the symposium center.
It followed him to the door, then dropped its head when he went inside. Ethan didn’t think the creature would be there when he returned, but it was lying on the ground, tail flat—only to bound up in noisy excitement the instant it sensed Ethan.
“Down.” Ethan waited until the animal settled before giving it the food he’d gathered from the supplies inside.
There was no reason for it to starve when Ethan had access to food.
As the stray ate, Ethan leaned back against the wall and thought of Selenka, of her kiss, of her hands on his body and her claws against his nape, of how she scorched him with her primal intensity. Ethan wanted to be burned. It was the first time in his adult life he could remember wanting anything—but he wanted Selenka.
The stab of pain that lanced through his temples was accompanied by a head butting against his leg. The dog, wanting his attention. Used to the pain, he glanced down at the mangy creature. “Don’t look to be saved by me,” he warned. “I kill. I don’t protect.”
He was a monster, trained and raised. But he was now Selenka’s monster.
Chapter 9
Suspected cases of Scarab Syndrome logged to date: 32
Confirmed cases: 3
Excluded cases: 18
Tests in progress to ascertain status of the remainder of the group. Referrals speeding up, so the likelihood of further confirmed cases is certain. Patient Zero and Memory Aven-Rose, primary empath attached to this team, are assisting.
—Report to the Psy Ruling Coalition from Dr. Maia Ndiaye, PsyMed SF Echo
EZRA PUT HIS satchel down on the lounge sofa and screwed his eyes shut. The faint headache that had been plaguing him all day continued to linger like an unwelcome odor, but at least it hadn’t grown in strength.
The odd thing was, his telepathic powers felt stronger and sharper in an intense way. As if he’d gone up three or four Gradients in the space of a single day and could now telepath across continents.
Halos surrounded the objects around him, color refractions of light.
Groaning, he went to see if he had any medication on hand. At the same time, he reminded himself that he was a teacher of physics with an exam paper to write. He didn’t need to be distracted by migraine-induced delusions of grandeur and impossible spikes in his Gradient level.
He was also a respectable Gradient 6.9 telepath with a good job and excellent feedback ratings from his students, both Psy and otherwise. Not only that; he was partway through the post-Silence recovery program run by his new community PsyMed facility and was learning to recognize and deal with emotions. It appeared he was naturally inclined toward muted emotions, but he was definitely beginning to experience them.
Today, he’d spent a half hour longer than necessary in the facility library simply because he’d wanted to spend more time with another faculty member. His possible new friend hadn’t seemed averse to his presence, either.
Life was good.
Chapter 10
Ethan would be the perfect man to add to my team. His abilities allow for a non-damaging way to push out-of-control individuals into sleep.
He’s not ready. He barely communicates with us—to Ethan, we’re no more his people than any other strangers. I failed him, Vasic.
You were a child when he was brought in. Not even Axl knew of his existence and he was the closest operative we had to Ming.
The logic of it doesn’t matter. I see a broken Arrow and I feel him slipping away from the family we’re trying to build. Ethan is alone in a way I can’t comprehend.
—Conversation between Vasic Zen and Aden Kai (three months ago)
“HOW DID IT go with Natalia?” Selenka asked Valentin after Ivy Jane and Emilie teleported out with the blue-eyed Arrow.
Aden stepped out of the other room before the bear alpha could reply. “I recalled Nerida and had her teleport Jaya and Natalia straight to a mental health clinic for assessment—she was aggressive to the point of verbal and physical eruptions, with no sense of guilt or sorrow.”
Silver tapped one high-heel-clad foot, her sleek gray skirt suit spotless despite the events of the day. “That doesn’t seem a very empathic way to act.”
The other woman would know. Silver’s brother was an empath. The only reason Selenka had clued in to that well-hidden fact was because a month back, Enforcement had arrested Arwen Mercant alongside bears who’d been having too good a time—and the damn bears had managed to pull three of her wolves into the mess.
To his credit, Valentin had reamed his bears on that occasion. “There is fun,” he’d rumbled, “and there is anarchy. You’re all restricted to Denhome until I say otherwise. With no beer.”
As gasps of horror filled the cell where the miscreants had been sitting, Selenka had found herself watching the one person in the cell who wasn’t a bear or a wolf—and who aroused the same protective instincts in her alpha heart as healers. She’d ID’d him as Silver’s brother and figured he must be a medic. Then she’d come to this symposium, met all these Es, and realized the truth.
