by Nalini Singh
A small silence, followed by the sound of clothes shifting over skin. “Still got a smart mouth on you.”
The tightness in her chest eased. If Clay had told her to shut up…“Can I ask you some questions?”
“Auditioning me for your job? Sorry, Talin, I hold the power here.”
The emotional taunt hurt more than any physical blow. They had always been equals—friends. “I want to know you again.”
“All you need to know is that I’m even more deadly than I used to be.” He moved far enough out of the shadows that she could see the unwelcoming planes of his face. “I’m the one who should be asking the questions—tell me, where did you go after they took me away?”
His words opened another floodgate of memory. A groggy Clay being hauled to his feet by black-garbed Enforcement officers, his hands locked behind his back with extra-strength cuffs. He hadn’t resisted, had been unable to do so because of the drugs they had shot into him.
But his eyes had refused to close, had never left her own.
Green.
That was the color that drenched her memories of that day. Not the rich red of blood but the hot flame of incandescent green. Clay’s eyes. She’d whimpered when they’d taken him away but his eyes had told her to be strong, that he’d return for her. And he had.
It was Talin who had dishonored their silent bargain, Talin who had been too broken to dare dance with a leopard. That failure haunted her every day of her life. “There was media attention after Orrin’s death,” she said, forcing herself past the sharp blade of loss. “I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I went back and researched it.”
“They wanted to put me down. Like an animal.”
“Yes.” She dropped her arms and fisted her hands, unable to bear the thought of a world without Clay. “But the Child Protection Agency intervened. They were forced to after someone leaked the truth about Orrin…and what he’d been doing to me.” Bile flooded her mouth but she fought it with strength nurtured by a sojourn through hell itself.
She couldn’t erase the past, her eidetic memory a nightmare, but she had taught herself to think past the darkness. “It became a minor political issue and the authorities charged you with a lesser offense, put you in juvie until you turned eighteen.”
“I was there. I know what happened to me,” he said, sardonic. “I asked about you.”
“I’m trying to tell you!” She squared her shoulders in the face of his dominating masculinity. “Stop pushing.”
“Hell, I have all night. Take your time. I’m here for your convenience.”
“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you.” He was too raw, too earthy, too of the wild.
“You don’t know me.”
No, she accepted with another starburst of pain, she didn’t. She had given up all rights to him the day she’d let him believe that she’d been crushed to death in a car wreck. “Because of the media attention,” she continued, “lots of people came forward with offers to adopt me.”
“I know—it was in the papers.”
She nodded. “My old social worker was fired after the media discovered he’d spent most of his work hours gambling.” With the very lives he had been entrusted to protect. “The new guy—Zeke—had a little girl my age. He went above and beyond, personally vetted all the applicants.”
Clay was silent but his eyes had gone cat, perilous in the extreme. And she remembered—it was Zeke who had lied to him about her death.
She met the eyes of the leopard who stood opposite her, afraid, bewildered, stupidly needy. Sometimes, it felt as if she’d been born needing Clay. “He placed me with the Larkspur family, deep in rural Iowa.” The space, the endless fields of green, the constant supply of food, it had been a severe shock to her system. “You’d like it at the Nest—that’s what the Larkspurs call the farm. Plenty of space to run, to play.”
It seemed to her that his stance became a fraction less aggressive. “They were good to you?”
She nodded, biting down hard on her tongue before she could give in and beg him to go back to the way things had been before the day everything shattered. Orrin had split her lip, broken her ribs, but it was seeing Clay being hauled out the door that had destroyed her. “I was damaged, Clay.” No getting around that. “I was damaged even before Orrin died. That just pushed me over some edge in my own mind. But the Larkspurs took me in, didn’t judge me, tried to make me a part of the family. I suddenly had two older brothers, one older sister, and one younger sister.”
“Sounds like too much to handle.”
“For a while, it was.” Overwhelmed by the loud, laughing family, she had curled up in corners and hidden. “Then one day, I realized I’d been there for a year and no one had hurt me. By the time you were released, I was twelve and functioning fairly well.” Nightmares only once or twice a week, acting out at school less and less.
“So you decided to leave me in the past.” A bitter laugh. “Why the hell not?”
“No. It wasn’t like that.” She reached out to him, dropping her hand in midtouch when he withdrew even deeper into the darkness. “I just—” How could she possibly explain the tortured confusion that had driven her? She’d known she wasn’t yet strong enough to stand up to Clay, to face the horrors of the past, but she had worried for him, too.
“I stole four years of your freedom. I was determined not to be a burden on you for the rest of your life.” Barely twelve years old and she’d known he would give up everything to keep her safe. “I didn’t want to force you into bondage, into caring for me because I was too weak to care for myself. You’d already spent most of your life doing that for Isla.” That fact had twisted the relationship between mother and child, turned it into that of caretaker and patient. The thought of Clay putting her into the same category had made Talin distraught. It still did.
“Don’t lie to me.” It was a lethal warning. “You were scared so you ran.”
“I’m telling the truth.” She swallowed. “But yes, I was scared, too. You didn’t see what I saw, Clay. That day in Orrin’s bedroom, you turned into someone I didn’t know, someone more vicious than anyone I’d ever known.” She waited for him to say that he’d done it for her, but he didn’t. Her guilt intensified. “Why don’t you blame me? It would make this so much easier. Blame me, yell at me, God damn it!”
“For what, Talin? What did you do? Be my friend. That was your only crime.” He remained unmoving, so much a part of the forest that she could hardly tell where he began and the night ended. “These Larkspurs—why aren’t you going to them for help?”
“I brought darkness into that family. I can’t bring evil.”
“They’re your pack, they would stand by you.”
She was startled at his word usage. “My pack? No, I don’t think they are. I-I was a visitor. I made myself a visitor, left the family at sixteen after getting a full board and study scholarship.” Even their name, she had borrowed only until adulthood—long enough to blur the waters and dead-end any search Clay might have mounted. “I never let them in.”
“Why not?”
“Do you let your pack touch your soul?” she asked, desperate to learn about his new life, his new world, years of hunger coalescing into this single moment.
“DarkRiver cats have a way of adopting you even if you don’t particularly want to be adopted.” It was a snarl. “If I bleed, they’ll come to my aid. They would kill for me.”
She shivered at the wild violence of his statement. But there was also a seduction in that kind of loyalty. It made her wonder about bonds of a far different sort. “Do you…do you have someone in your pack?”
He went very still. “I don’t scent a mate on you.”
“Me?” Her voice came out high, startled. “No. I—No.”
He remained silent.
She coughed. “I don’t want to get in the way of a relationship by involving you in my problems.”
“Leave my relationships to me.”
Her insides twisted. “Fine.
”
Clay waited. Juvie had been hell, but it had taught him to contain emotion, to hold his anger inside until it was needed—then use it like a weapon. The Psy scientists who had come to observe “captive animal behavior” had been his unwitting teachers.
At the time, he’d been the lone predatory changeling under long-term incarceration—changeling packs usually dealt with their own without Enforcement involvement. But not only had Clay not had a pack, he’d crossed a racial boundary in his crime. Orrin had been human.
Yet instead of subjecting him to hard study and learning things—things that could have given the Psy Council an edge in the cold war it was currently waging against the changelings—the Psy had treated him as a curiosity, an animal behind bars. It was the animal who had watched and learned. Now he watched as Talin shifted from foot to foot before folding her arms around herself again.
“I work with kids in San Francisco,” she said without warning. “I’ve been doing it ever since I graduated. But not here. I was in New York until the start of this year.”
“Is one of them in danger?” He felt the embers of his fury flare into life at the realization that she’d been in his territory for close to three months. All those times he had caught a hint of her scent in Chinatown or down by Fisherman’s Wharf, only to find himself trailing a stranger; he’d thought it a sign he really had gone over the edge.
“Not like that.” Dropping her arms, she looked at his eyes, which he’d allowed to go night-glow. “Clay, please. Stop doing the cat thing and come out so I can see your face.”
“No.” He wasn’t ready to show her anything. “Did you know I was in the city?”
“Not at first. I had no way to track you after you got out of juvie.” She kicked at the grass. “Then one day, a few weeks ago, I thought I saw you. Drove me crazy—I thought I was hallucinating, making up fantasies of what you would’ve looked like as an adult.”
He didn’t respond, despite the near-echo of his earlier thoughts.
She blew out a breath. “I swear—” The abrasive sound of teeth grinding against each other. “I went back to where I thought I’d seen you, realized it was the DarkRiver business HQ, and looked them up on the Internet. I still wasn’t sure—there was no photo and you changed your last name to Bennett.”
It had been a way to drop off the face of the world, to lose any simmering media attention. But over the years, it had become his name. “We’ll talk about you tracking me later,” he said, cold fire burning a hole in his gut. “First, tell me why you need my help.”
“If you’re trying to scare me, it’s working. That doesn’t mean I’m going to cut and run.”
In that bravado-filled challenge, he caught another fleeting glimpse of the girl she’d been. The day they had met, she’d sat there beside him, wide-eyed and terrified to her tiny toes, but stubborn enough not to leave till the paramedics came. “Why not?” he said, shifting his anger into sarcasm. “You’re real good at it.”
She raised her face to the canopy and took a deep breath, as if trying to hold on to her temper. He wondered if she’d succeed. His Tally had always been very quiet…except with him. He alone had known that she was neither shy nor particularly calm. The girl had a temper like a stick of dynamite. Quick to heat, quick to blow over.
“Kids are disappearing, not only here but across the country,” she now said, her anger red-hot, but no longer directed at him. “At first, they were labeled runaways, but I knew some of them. They weren’t that kind.” Her shoulders drew up. “Now I have proof I was right, and I wish every night that I didn’t.” Her voice broke.
“Talk to me.” He didn’t like seeing her in pain, never had, probably never would. This familiar stranger, this woman who saw him as a monster, was his one fucking fatal weakness and didn’t that just suck?
“They found Mickey’s body two weeks ago.” A tear streaked down her cheek. She dashed it away with a furious swipe. “He was eleven years old, bright, so bright, could remember everything he’d ever read.”
“Like you.”
“Yeah. Except instead of being abandoned as a baby, he had the bad luck to live with a mother who always chose abusive men.” She gave him a smile but it was nothing happy. “He was mine, Clay. I promised him safety and in return, he went to school every day.” Tremors shook her frame, whitened her knuckles. “Someone beat him to death. Everything was broken. The bastards pulverized his face—like they were wiping him out!”
Anger shot through his bloodstream. He thought of the children in the pack, of what he’d do to anyone who dared harm them. “One of his mother’s men?”
“I might have thought so, but Mickey was at a camp out of state when they took him. And it’s not only him we lost.” A breath that sounded as if her throat was lined with broken glass. “They found two more bodies this week. At least one more kid remains missing.”
The leopard half of his soul—angry, hurt, and still in shock at her return—wanted to go to her. To hold her. Tactile contact, affection as a method of healing, was the way of changelings, something he’d been taught after being pulled into DarkRiver. But Talin was scared of him. She had told him that to his face, and the sharp knife of it was still buried in his heart. The man wasn’t sure he wanted to chance another rejection. Keeping the animal’s instincts in check, he finally stepped out of the shadows. “Do you want to be held, Talin?”
Her damp eyes widened at the blunt question, then she nodded in a little jerking motion. Something in him quieted, waiting. “Then come here.”
A pause during which the entire forest seemed to freeze, the night creatures aware of the leopard’s tense watchfulness.
“Oh, God, Clay.” Suddenly her arms were wrapped around his back, her cheek pressed against the white cotton of his T-shirt.
Hardly daring to breathe, he closed his own arms around her feminine warmth, blindingly aware of every inch of her pressed into him, every spot of wetness soaking through his T-shirt.
She was so small, so damn soft, her humanity apparent in the delicacy of her skin, the lightness of her bones. The Psy might be fragile in comparison to changelings, but they had powers of the mind to compensate. Humans had the same fragility but none of the psychic abilities. A wave of protectiveness washed over him.
“Shh, Tally.” He used the nickname because, at this moment, he knew her. She had always had a heart too big for her body, a heart that felt such pain for others while ignoring its own. “I’ll find your lost one.”
She shook her head against him. “It’s too late. Three bodies already. Jonquil is probably dead, too.”
“Then I’ll find who did this to them and stop him.”
She stilled against him. “I didn’t come here to turn you into a killer again.”
CHAPTER 4
“I am a killer,” he said, unwilling to let her hide from this. “I’m a leopard changeling and in my world, killing to protect your pack is understood and accepted.”
“I’m not part of your pack.”
“No.” So why was he going to help her? Especially after she’d made her opinion of him crystal clear. “No child deserves to die that way.”
A small silence. “Thank you.” She didn’t let go. “You’ve become so strong.”
“I was always strong compared to you.” Now he could snap her in two without thinking. It was that difference in strength that had always kept him away from human females. The rare lovers he took were all changeling. He was who he was. And gentleness was not part of his nature. “Unless you’ve muscled up and it doesn’t show on the surface?”
She laughed, a warm, intrinsically feminine sound. “I’m still a shrimp, but you—you’ve become a leopard.”
He understood. She had known him as an angry boy trapped inside the claustrophobic walls of their apartment complex. The lack of clean air had stifled the leopard, wounded him on an elemental level. He hadn’t even been able to shift without someone calling the cops to report a wild animal on the loose. Then ther
e was Isla, unable to bear the sight of her son in leopard form.
“Are you happy with DarkRiver?” Talin asked now.
“They’re my family, my friends.” For Clay, that loyalty meant everything. They accepted him as he was, didn’t give a shit that he preferred to roam alone more often than not, invited him into their homes without compunction.
“Who was the blond man with you?”
He stiffened. “Dorian’s a sentinel, too.” A pretty one according to most women.
“You two were being rough with those boys.”
“They earned it. Got drunk and smashed up the bar.”
“So you came to take them home.” He could hear the smile in her voice. “You look after each other. Your pack, I mean.”
“I’ll be kicking their asses three ways to Sunday soon as they sober up. We’re no Swiss Family Robinson.” They couldn’t afford to be, especially not now, with the Psy Council attempting to take down the only changeling groups—DarkRiver and SnowDancer—that had dared challenge its absolute rule.
Something made a rumbling sound.
“Hungry, Tally?”
She nodded, but remained plastered to him. “I was so nervous about meeting you, I didn’t eat all day.”
“If you don’t want to piss me off,” he snapped, “stop talking about how much I scare you.”
“It won’t change the truth.” Talin knew she’d surprised him. His muscles bunched. Then he let out a low growl that rolled down her spine like a thousand tiny pinpricks.
“Stop flinching or I’ll bite you and really give you something to worry about.”
She blinked. “You wouldn’t bite me.” Would he?
“Try it and see.”
Surrounded by all that powerful male muscle, feeling warm and safe, she decided not to push him. Not today. “Will you help me?”
