Declaration of Courtship: A Psy/Changeling Novella

by Nalini Singh

  The fact was, it had taken an agonizing level of self-control on her part not to surrender to the bond. She’d been teetering on the cusp of it the morning at the station, but after his confession about his nightmares, she’d known she had to wait, no matter if the hunger to bond with him was a constant ache inside her. Never did she want him to wonder why she’d accepted the bond, whether she’d done it only so he’d always know if she was safe.

  He’d been a little shaky the first few days, his wolf waiting for the ax to fall. But as the nights continued to pass, dreamless and peaceful, he began to get aggravated by her resistance to the bond. She’d danced in joy when he restarted his relentless campaign, complete with deliveries of romantic handmade chocolates…inscribed with sexual favors on the backs; the sudden appearance of a coveted new tool in her toolbox; and daily love-song requests on the internal SnowDancer radio station that had every adult in the pack—and some clever juveniles—tuning in at 9 p.m. to see what he’d ask for next. And how.

  Her favorite was the time he’d dedicated it to, “The obstinate she-wolf who thinks I should learn the meaning of patience.” A pause before his growl turned silky. “Though last night, she threatened to murder me when I tried to demonstrate how good a student I’ve been.”

  Mortified by the intimate tease, she’d blushed her way through the next day…but secretly, she liked being an “obstinate she-wolf,” loved that he never used the careful voice on her anymore, demonstrating his rock-solid belief in her emotional strength with every dirty trick he played as he attempted to wear down her resistance.

  And Cooper had some very dirty tricks in his arsenal.

  Moaning with remembered pleasure, she rose out of the bath, dried herself off, then shifted. Her wolf sniffed at itself, not too sure about the floral scent but deciding it was acceptable since Cooper’s scent underlay it, embedded into her very skin. Jaw dropping in a wolfish grin, she padded to the door, pressed her paw to the special footpad to open it and slipped out, the door swinging shut behind her.

  It took her no effort to track Cooper, his scent vivid to her every sense. He was outside, speaking to several of the senior soldiers. When she would’ve remained on the edge of the clearing, waiting for him to finish, he turned and smiled at her, angling his head in welcome.

  She padded over to lean against his leg.

  As she listened, Cooper finished working out some kind of a rotation schedule, and the soldiers began to break away one by one, the grins on their faces having nothing to do with work.

  Cooper came down in a crouch after the last soldier left, stroking his hand down the slope of her back. “You’re such a pretty wolf, Grace.”

  She yipped in a request for play.

  Hand fisting in her fur, he said, “Okay, you convinced me. Give me a minute.”

  It took him less than that to strip and cache his clothes in the hollow created by the thick roots of a forest giant. A wonder of light and color, and she found herself faced with a heavy-boned wolf who had become a familiar playmate. He was at least a hand bigger than her, maybe twice her weight, his eyes shimmering yellow and his coat a luxuriant dark red.

  She quivered as he pressed his body against hers, acting shy…before she pounced up to grip at his neck with her teeth. He snapped his own teeth in a pretend growl and nipped at her ear as she jumped back, making her release a startled squeak-bark.

  A wolfish laugh.

  Snarling, she attacked him and they rolled around on the grass, wrestling and whipping around one another. She knew he was letting her play—he was so much bigger and stronger that it would’ve taken him but a second to seize control. But she also knew he was having fun. So when a low-hanging branch distracted him, she took off.

  Grace didn’t like being chased as a rule—it was scary, stressful…except when it was Cooper doing the chasing. Then it was fun.

  Heart thudding, she scrambled up hills and across clearings, aware of him gaining on her—and then his paws were on her shoulders, taking her down. It was a classic demand for submission, but when the bigger wolf nuzzled at her and jumped off, she knew he was telling her he’d won the game, nothing more.

  Grinning, she rose up to her full height and yawned in a gesture of impertinence.

  Cooper bared his teeth at his mate—if the contrary female would just accept the bond—and stared into her eyes. She stared back, unafraid, her tail up, her gaze bright. Had anyone come upon them, they might have believed she challenged him, but that wasn’t it at all. It felt as if she was adoring him.

  All at once, her form dissolved in faceted sparks of color.

  He shifted alongside her and let out an “oomph” as she pounced on him again, playful as a pup. “Hi, Cooper.”

  His cheeks creased where he lay on his back with her over him. “Hi, Grace.”

  “Guess what?” A very wolfish angle to her head.

  “What?”

  Leaning in close, she whispered. “I decided.”

  His spine bowed as the mating bond locked into place, as gentle and as fierce a thing as Grace herself. Throwing back his head, he howled his joy, heard the wild wolves howl back. And then he heard his Grace, her voice melding with his in a harmony that was their song of the heart.

  Epilogue

  LARA COULDN’T BELIEVE it was already the night of their mating ceremony. Held in the arms of her mate as they swayed to the music from the live jazz band, she looked around the Pack Circle, the dance area in the center surrounded by wooden picnic tables. Those tables held an array of delicacies that had the children and adults both in raptures—her mother, Lara thought with a smile, had no doubt been planning the menu since the day Lara mated Walker.

  Giant painted butterflies decorated several trees; Marlee’s contribution to the plan. The wooden creatures had been cut out and glued together by Toby and his friends before being painted by Marlee, Sienna, Evie, Brenna, and a number of the younger members of the pack, including a rambunctious but wildly talented Ben.

  “Look at what my baby did,” Ava had said with delight earlier that day, pointing to a butterfly painted with a joyful enthusiasm that made the creature seem alive. “The Stone artistic talent clearly runs true.”

  Now, that butterfly and the others shimmered in the fairy lights that lit up the early evening darkness, the sound of their packmates voices and the children’s laughter intertwining with the music to create a harmony unique to this moment.

  “Happy?” Walker’s breath brushed her temple, the masculine heat of him making her wolf rub up against her skin, as it had against his hand when she’d shifted for their early morning run.

  “So happy.”

  The pack’s pleasure in their match had been clear since the day word got out about Walker’s courtship, but Lara hadn’t realized the full extent of it until tonight. Kisses on the cheek, hugs, whispered congratulations accompanied by thoughtful gifts, they kept coming. Walker had found himself shaking hands with people throughout the night, been hugged by countless children.

  “Are you having fun?” she asked, aware he preferred to stay out of the limelight.

  “I get to celebrate you.” A slow curve of his lips. “It’s a perfect night.”

  “Walker.”

  Bending his head and sliding one hand around her nape, he kissed her slow and with exquisite patience…so long and deep that howls went up around them. But her mate didn’t release her until he was good and ready. Flustered and pleasured, her hands fisted on the fine cotton of his white shirt, she drew in a trembling breath. “Just when I thought I could predict what you’d do next…”

  Walker ran his thumb across her lip, his other hand splayed on her lower back to hold her close. “I love you more than I’ll ever be able to say, ever be able to describe. You’re my starlight on a dark night.”

  Eyes burning at the stark beauty and romance of his declaration, she whispered, “You just did.”

  He went motionless. “Lara, did you hear that?”

  “Yes, of
course,” she said, sniffing away the happy tears. “It’s not that noisy.”

  Walker’s lips curved, and then he was grinning in a way he hardly ever did outside the privacy of their home. Can you hear this, too?

  “Yes, I—” Her eyes went wide as she realized she hadn’t seen his mouth shape the words. “This is impossible.” She knew of two changeling/Psy couples who had a level of true telepathic communication between them, but there were unusual circumstances in both cases. “I don’t have any Psy genes.”

  Walker cupped her face, bending his knees so they were eye to eye. “Yes, but you have an ability that may as well be a Psy one. It makes rational sense that there is a connection, even if changeling healing is no longer recognized as a true psychic gift.”

  Lara tried to think, lost the thread, her mind a place of delirious chaos. “Let’s talk about the logic of it later.” Bubbling with excitement, she was the one who kissed him this time, nipping at his lower lip, suckling the sensual hurt, her wolf all but bursting out of her skin. “Can you hear me, if I think hard?”

  Walker cocked his head, frowned. “No. But it may develop in time.”

  Knowing that the telepathy only went one way for now didn’t diminish her excitement in the least, not when she’d just been given the greatest of gifts, the ability to hear the beautiful things her Walker thought about her. “Talk to me,” she whispered, snuggling close. “I like hearing you inside my mind.”

  His cheeks creased. Did I tell you how very, very much I like your dress?

  “No.” She linked her hands around his neck, his own on the waist of her flirty red halter-neck dress. “And I didn’t tell you how sexy you look in this suit.” The steel gray was perfect on him. “It makes me want to grip this tie and haul you off to our bedroom.”

  You won’t hear a protest from me.

  Reaching down to fiddle with one of the buttons on his shirt as they continued to sway to the music, she said, “Your starlight?” her voice soft with wonder.

  My everything.

  Keep reading for a look at the latest Psy/Changeling novel

  HEART OF OBSIDIAN

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  Darkest Part of Night

  IN THE YEAR 1979, the Psy race made the decision to embrace Silence and condition all emotion out of their young; to become without hope or despair, anger or fear, sorrow or joy.

  Mothers and fathers sentenced their children to lives of icy control out of a soul-deep love those children would never feel in return. They told their babies that Silence was a precious gift, that it would save them from the madness and violence that so often came intertwined with the staggering beauty of their psychic abilities.

  Without Silence, said a leading philosopher of the day, we will cannibalize ourselves in a storm of blood and death and insanity, until the Psy race becomes nothing but a terrible memory.

  In 1979, Silence was a beacon of hope . . . but 1979 was more than a hundred years ago.

  Those first children are long dead and the PsyNet has been rocked by the initial volley of a civil war that might yet tear it apart, taking the changelings and humans with it. A civil war that has awakened a whispering understanding in the populace about the ugly irony of Silence: in creating a society that rewards lack of emotion, the Psy have created fertile ground for the rise of psychopathic personalities to the leadership of their race.

  An individual who feels nothing is, after all, the perfect graduate of Silence.

  Ruthless. Cold-blooded. Without mercy . . . without conscience.

  Chapter 1

  KALEB KRYCHEK, CARDINAL telekinetic and a man no one wanted to meet alone on a dark night, had been searching for his quarry for seven years, three weeks, and two days. Even while he slept, his mind had continued to hunt through the sprawling psychic network that was the heartbeat and the cage of the Psy race. Not for a day, not for a second, had he forgotten his search, forgotten what they’d taken from him.

  Everyone involved would pay. He’d make certain of it.

  Right now, however, he had different priorities, his search complete, his target huddled in a corner of a small, windowless room in his isolated home on the outskirts of Moscow. Crouching down in front of her, he held out a glass of water. “Drink.”

  Her response was to crush herself impossibly further into the corner and tighten her arms around the knees she hugged to her chest. She’d spent the hour since he’d retrieved her from her prison rocking to and fro in brittle silence. Her hair was a tangled rats’ nest around her face, her upper arms bearing both fresh scratches and marks of older gouges.

  She was still a bare five feet, two inches . . . or so he judged. She’d been in a huddled position pre-teleport, had only curled further into her shell in the past sixty minutes. Her eyes—a blue so deep they were midnight—refused to meet his, skittering away if he entered her line of sight.

  Now she ducked her head, the matted waist-length strands that should’ve been a rich black interwoven with unexpected strands of red-gold, dull and greasy around her down-bent face. That face was all bone under pallid skin of palest brown, the nails on her hands gnawed to the quick yet embedded with dried blood that said she’d used the stubs to viciously scratch either her own skin or another’s, perhaps both.

  At last, he understood why the NetMind and DarkMind, the twin entities that knew every corner of the vast psychic network that connected all Psy on the planet but for the renegades, had been unable to find her—regardless of how many times he’d made the request or how much information he’d given them in an effort to narrow the scope of the search. Kaleb had been inside her mind during retrieval, had needed to be to complete the teleport, and even then, he wouldn’t have known it was her if he hadn’t had incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. The person she’d been was gone.

  Whether what remained was anything more than a broken shell was yet an unanswered question.

  “Drink or I’ll leave you to wallow in your filth.”

  He used words that would’ve once caused her to react—but he didn’t know if that part of her existed any longer. The file he’d so meticulously put together over the years, the file he’d studied until he could recite the contents in his sleep, was going to be useless. She was no longer that girl with her hair brushed straight and shiny, and midnight eyes that seemed to see far beyond the skin.

  “Perhaps you enjoy smelling like something from the garbage.”

  The rocking increased.

  Logic said he needed to get a Psy-Med specialist in here as fast as possible. But Kaleb knew he wasn’t going to do that. He trusted very, very few people, and he trusted no one when it came to her. Since his current approach wasn’t bearing the results he wanted, he shifted focus with the ease of a man who had no emotional attachment to a decision.

  “Your lips are cracked and it’s clear you haven’t had enough fluids for at least twenty-four hours.” In the split second that he’d teleported into the white-on-white room where she’d been held, the overhead light cutting in its torturous brightness, he’d seen the bottles thrown at the wall, the liquid soaked into the floor.

  His initial assumption had been that the painful brightness was a normal part of her existence, but it may have been a punishment, her captors attempting to break her will. That it wasn’t already broken. . . yes, it said something about the woman who refused to interact with him on any level.

  “If you wanted to kill yourself,” he said, watching for even the most minor response to the brutal words, “there are easier ways than dying of thirst. Or aren’t you intelligent enough to work that out?”

  The rocking accelerated further.

  “I can as easily pin you to the wall and force the water down your throat. I won’t even need to touch you.”

  She hissed at him, dark blue orbs glinting behind the tangled mass of her hair.

  He didn’t move, didn’t betray any reaction to the fact that she’d responded in some fashion at last, even if it was nonver
bal. “Drink it. I won’t ask again.”

  Still she resisted. Unexpected. Her mind might be broken, but it wasn’t—had never been—unintelligent. No, her intellect was so piercing, her teachers had struggled to keep up with her. She had to be aware that refusing him wasn’t an option. The power of a cardinal telekinetic was vast. He could crack every bone in her body with a fleeting thought, crush those bones into dust if he so chose. Even if she no longer understood that, she’d experienced his strength when he teleported her from her cell and to his home; she had to comprehend her precarious situation.

  Her eyes flicked to the glass in his hand, teeth biting down on her badly cracked lower lip. Yet she didn’t reach for the water she so patently needed. Why?

  He took a moment to think, consider the circumstances in which he’d found her. “It’s not drugged,” he said, talking to a face that held no recognition, no sign that she remembered their final blood-soaked encounter, an encounter where she’d screamed for so long and in such agony she’d caused damage to her throat that would’ve needed medical attention to repair.

  “Infused with the minerals and vitamins that you need,” he continued, “but not drugged. You’re no use to me in a coma.” Holding her gaze when it finally connected with his, he took a healthy swallow of the water, then held out the glass.

  It was snatched from him a second later. He’d teleported in another full glass from the kitchen before she finished the first. She emptied them both. Getting rid of the glass with a negligible use of his telekinesis, he rose from his crouched position in front of her. “Do you want to eat first or shower?”