Visions of Heat p-2

by Nalini Singh

  She rode the waves of pleasure that lapped at her as he rode her, his lips on her mouth, his tongue dancing with hers. And when he finally pushed her over, she didn't crash. Instead the heavy fire inside of her turned into a shimmering mass of sensation. Rich and lush and addictive, it took her under and she went with a smile.

  Faith let the spray of the waterfall that was Vaughn's shower wash over her, hardly able to stand upright. Not that she had to. A certain changeling was more than ready to help.

  He nipped at her neck. "Stop thinking."

  "Too late." She turned in his arms and wrapped her own around his torso. He was so beautiful, so deliciously male that it kept surprising her. Her self-restraint where he was concerned was close to zero. But in spite of her lack of impulse control, her mind remained sane.

  "I think we're clean enough." His hands were big and warm on her skin. "Come on."

  She followed him out onto the drying platform and let him rub her down with a huge fluffy towel. "Silk sheets and plush towels," she said with a sigh, unaccustomed to such hedonistic pleasures. "You like comfort."

  "I'm a cat. Soft silky things make me purr." He nipped at the vulnerable skin of her thigh and smiled at her shudder. "Sometimes, though, they make me want to bite." Rising from his kneeling position to tuck the towel around her body, he caught her rusty attempt at a smile.

  "What?" One eyebrow rose.

  She shook her head. "You're a pussycat."

  Nothing could have prepared her for the blush that streaked across his cheekbones. Grabbing a towel, he began to dry himself, but the full-bodied grin across his face was so gorgeous and rare that she stared. "Yeah, well, you sucked all the meanness right out of me."

  She found her own smile growing wider, an unfamiliar action that was suddenly natural. "How long will this transformation last?"

  "Until I get hungry for you again." He wrapped the towel around his hips. "Which could be anytime soon."

  His delectably slow kiss was welcome. "You're insatiable."

  "Just for you." He tapped his finger on her nose and the gesture was so silly, so tender, so unbelievably heartbreaking.

  "Why don't you smile more?" She liked his smile, liked seeing such uncomplicated happiness on his face.

  "Never had much to smile about."

  Looking into that smile, Faith gave up her last hazy dream of somehow returning to the only world she'd ever known. "I'm never going back."

  The smile faded and something darker whispered into his eyes, something wild and savagely possessive. "Good. Because I wasn't planning on letting you go."

  She laughed and it was the first time in her life she hadn't been afraid. Silence had numbed her, but what she finally understood was that it was a numbness caused by fear. Her race was so afraid of their own talents, their own unique minds, they'd crippled themselves. But she was no longer in bondage.

  Throwing her arms around Vaughn's neck, she let him pick her up and spin her around in a circle. They'd talk about his stubbornness, his liking for getting his own way, but not now. Not in this perfect moment.

  Perhaps her newfound happiness was why she made the mistake, why she forgot that there were things hunting her that didn't live on the PsyNet, things that had direct access to her mind. She went to sleep in Vaughn's arms, but woke to find herself in the grip of malignant darkness. She knew she could move, could alert Vaughn, and he'd probably be able to bring her out of it.

  But with the fire of Vaughn's chest pressed to her back, she knew where she was, when she was. Her shields against the visions might've burned out, but her emotions were wide awake. And though those emotional muscles were unfamiliar, she was confident she could use them if the need arose— they were as natural a part of her as Silence had been unnatural. It would be hard, but not impossible to break out of this vision.

  Decision made, she let the vision sweep her under in an ebony wave of malevolence, let it swirl around her, let it show her.

  Vaughn knew Faith was having a vision. Beneath closed eyelids, he could see her eyes flickering in rapid movements that were not those of deep sleep. He'd awakened when the cat had sensed a change in the rhythm of her heart rate. Now her scent, too, changed.

  There was something not quite right about it, a sick miasma that made it seem as if she'd been infected by something vile. The beast raged to tear her from the grip of the vision, but Vaughn forced himself to think. Maybe Faith didn't want it to stop—he'd thought she'd been awake and aware when it started. Able to make a choice.

  He never wanted to stifle her gift as Silence had, but fighting the beast was hard, especially when the man had the same protective instincts. The urge to shake her awake intensified when he glimpsed the hovering edges of a physical darkness above her. It couldn't get in, but circled like a vulture just waiting for a vulnerable spot.

  Growling low in his throat, he held Faith closer. But ironically the sight also calmed him—it hadn't fully clawed into Faith, which meant she could break out on her own. If he made the decision for her, he might steal from her a chance to avenge her sister's death. And the need for vengeance was something both parts of his self understood.

  "I'm here," he whispered in her ear. Then he settled down to keep watch over her and hold back the darkness. It didn't matter that a psychic phenomenon should have had no physical form. He knew it existed, he saw it. And he would not let it touch Faith.

  Even in the depths of the vision, Faith was aware of Vaughn beside her, a wall of pure fire between her and the ugly menace that awaited. That was unusual enough to have broken her concentration had she not already made the decision to complete this. The darkness would never again steal a life.

  Even if Faith had to end his.

  The vision began to change from the unclear mix of emotion that had first roiled around her, the curtains of darkness parting to once again show her the face of the woman he meant to kill. The scene was clean—part of the stalk, not the kill—which left her free to concentrate on details that might identify the target rather than battling her own fear responses. By the time the vision faded, she thought she had what she needed. She was about to pull out when she felt a tug that signaled more was to come.

  Calm from the lack of brutality in the opening scenes, she let the next phase roll over her. Blood dripped down pale green walls, soaked into the slightly darker carpet, splattered the comm console. A charnel house she could smell—hints of putrid death hidden in the iron-rich taint of blood. Revolted, she could do nothing as he walked farther into the room, placing his feet in the dark red liquid that had once run in a living being's veins. The blood in the bathroom had had nothing to soak into. His feet slapped into it with a splash.

  Her mind shuddered under the overload. The carnage, the smell, the sporadic flashes of backsight that had her hearing screams of such terror that her bones chilled, it all smashed into her with the force of a truck going a hundred miles an hour. That was when she realized she hadn't survived the sexual heat with Vaughn.

  The earlier cascade had fractured her mind on the deepest level. It had no ability to withstand the fury of this blood-soaked vision. She felt herself start to cascade again but this time, it was nothing survivable—the Cassandra Spiral. A silent scream tore free from her psyche. The Cassandra Spiral was the worst grade of cascade, turning victims into mute vegetables without reason or sentience.

  No one survived without rapid M-Psy intervention.

  But there were no M-Psy here and she was drowning, sinking so fast that soon she wouldn't be able to breathe. The blood was creeping up her body, coating her feet, her legs. . . .

  CHAPTER 22

  No!

  It was a shout from a section of her mind she'd never before seen. Stubborn and rebellious, it slapped her back to her senses and told her to pull out. Now! If she didn't, the Council, the M-Psy, the PsyClan, they all won.

  The violence worked. Her mind's eye watering with the strength of the emotional slap, she shook off her panic and began to find r
eason again. She refused to let them win, refused to have Vaughn feel that he'd taken a weak woman as his lover, someone who'd constantly need rescue.

  Layered in determination born out of a lifetime of withheld rage, she threw a solid psychic block across the cascade. The Cassandra Spiral wasn't so easily escaped. It shoved at the block with such force that the wall bulged outward. But it didn't break—she had an excruciatingly small window before the avalanche hit. Not allowing herself to focus on that, she began to repair the cracks that had led to the cascade in the first place.

  The work was hard.

  Very, very hard.

  Her mind felt as if it was caught in a vise. Only her unpolished, ungovernable emotional reaction, her fury at the darkness, and her hunger for vengeance kept her going. That and the need she had to make Vaughn proud of her, to be a woman worthy of a jaguar. Without that wild cauldron of emotional fire, she would've been crippled as she had been for so many years, dependent on others to pull her out.

  However, none of her previous cascades—triggered by strong business visions—had ever been this severe. Never had she even touched the periphery of a Cassandra Spiral. A trial by fire, it threatened to engulf her in flames of poison, but Faith had no intention of being burned.

  She worked with single-minded determination, and as each fracture healed, the psychic block bulged a little less. Oddly, it was her training for commercial forecasts that came to her aid at a critical moment, when exhaustion was starting to dull her mental muscles and she was in danger of making a fatal error. She fell back on the trick of locking her neurons into certain repeating patterns, a step by mechanical step use of her mind that required no conscious thought.

  Leaving that pattern to repair the "easy" fractures, she focused her thinking self on fixing the almost invisible breaks in her innermost core. The next time she looked up, it was after she'd successfully rebuilt the core. The surface of her mind was peaceful, the darkness banished, the cascade subjugated. Tired but triumphant, she took a step back from the psychic plane and opened her eyes. She discovered herself cradled tight against Vaughn, the arms wrapped around her front pure immovable muscle.

  "You were in trouble." A rough accusation. "I could smell it."

  She tilted her head to look up at him. "I got myself out."

  His eyes were jaguar, but he wasn't completely gone. "I knew you could." Shifting to lie flat on his back, he curved one hand over her bottom as she rearranged herself to lean up against his chest.

  "Why didn't you break it?"

  "You knew what you were doing."

  Vaughn, she realized, would never let her shortchange herself. He'd always demand that she be all the woman she could be, even if that woman promised to make life more difficult for him. A stark contrast to the people she'd called family for so long.

  Heart aching in an inexplicable way, she ran her palm over a jaw roughened by stubble. "Vaughn, when my mind was pure quiet at the end, I saw something." Something so impossible that she wasn't quite ready to believe. And yet...

  "What?" His hand smoothed up her spine and little slivers of lightning danced through her bloodstream, sparked in her mind.

  "Another bond." She slid her hand down to lie against his shoulder. "Technically similar to the PsyNet link, but different in every other way. It's wild. Like you." Though she was no changeling to scent things, that bond had held Vaughn's mental scent, a scent as familiar to her as her own, though she had no recollection of ever being in his mind. "What is it?"

  "It ties you to me. Forever," he said, his tone absolute. "You're my mate."

  "Mate," she whispered, considering everything she knew about changeling society, which wasn't much. "Like Sascha and Lucas?"

  "Yes."

  She could barely breathe. "Really?"

  "Yes. It's done. You can't get out." His fingers tightened on her hip.

  "Get out?" She wanted to laugh, but couldn't find enough air to make the sound. "Vaughn, I was scared I was imagining it because I wanted it so much."

  His fingers relaxed. "Good."

  "How does it work?"

  "I don't know. It's the first time for me, too."

  "Oh." That strange ache inside of her intensified.

  "But I do know it'll keep you alive after you drop out of the PsyNet."

  "One changeling mind can't give a Psy brain the feedback it needs. Experiments have proven that conclusively." She shook her head, nails digging into his skin. "I won't kill you to keep myself alive."

  "Trust me?"

  She did, so much. "Always."

  "Then don't worry about it."

  "You can't provide the necessary biofeedback," she insisted. "It's psychically impossible."

  He kissed her. "Trust, Red. Trust doesn't have any logic or sense."

  "I trust you with my life." Placing a kiss on the hard angle of his jaw, she raised her lashes to meet his eyes. "But I'm not sure I trust you with yours." Because she knew how protective the cat was, how possessive.

  A slow smile curved over his lips. "Oh, no, Red. I'm planning on living a long, long time now that I've got me a mate who'll satisfy my every need." His fingers lingered on the swell of her buttocks, that wicked smile accompanied by images of—

  "Not on my knees," she said, more to tease than anything.

  "What if I licked you into submission?" His fingers dipped to stroke lower, hotter places. "Would you go down on your knees then?"

  "Perhaps." She felt her breathing start to alter. "You're trying to distract me from the point."

  "No, Red. I'm trying to make you see." He stopped teasing her with his fingers. "If I die because of the feedback, then so will you. I'm not letting that happen." Grim determination in every word.

  "The protections are holding. I could stay linked and download more data."

  "Don't be scared of letting go."

  She drew circles on his chest. "The PsyNet is so beautiful, so alive."

  "But it's time for you to cut away from it. You know that."

  "Yes." The second she was found missing, NightStar guards would be sent to locate her on the psychic plane and haul her back in. Whatever it took. That was if the Council didn't decide to do the job itself—she hadn't forgotten those cloaked martial minds.

  Arrows.

  Assassins.

  In her case, they'd probably attempt containment. But she'd rather die than be incarcerated.

  "I've got you." A callused hand pushed strands of hair off her face to cup her cheek.

  The unexpected tenderness wrenched at the heart of her, and deep within her mind, she saw the bond pulse. But then it stopped. A frown forming before she could Silence it, she looked inward. "I can't experience the bond in its entirety until I cut the Net link."

  "I thought you were unconsciously jamming it." He scowled. "Unless ... Usually, both sides have to deliberately accept the bond for it to come into complete effect. I thought we'd skipped that stage."

  "I'm not doing anything. I didn't even know it could be." She paused. "It must be an automatic mental process. It makes sense that only one deep link can be functional at a time. Otherwise, the risk of overload would become unacceptable. But the mating bond is functioning to a certain extent." She could see the images he sent. He could feel when she was in psychic trouble.

  Vaughn kissed her hard on the mouth. She gasped and stared.

  "You can analyze the bond all you like. After you're out." A demand. "I don't like you being open to Council attack."

  "Vaughn." She felt things for him she couldn't even have imagined feeling mere weeks ago. "My sister."

  "Do you think you have a real chance of finding the killer through the Net?"

  She took her time to answer, to order her thoughts. "The visions are the single link and they come through the channels of my mind. I haven't found anything on the Net."

  "Then do it now, Faith. Before they realize you've come over to the side of the damn troublemaking animals."

  A small laugh bubbled out of
her. It was over before it began, but it had been spontaneous and it had been very real. "Hold me."

  "Anytime."

  Laying her head on his chest, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Pain squeezed her heart. It was almost a compulsion to step out into the PsyNet for one last look at the magnificent world that was about to be lost to her. But she couldn't. Too much was at stake. The mating bond tied Vaughn to her—if she were ambushed or erased, who knew how it would affect him? And he was more important to her than anything. She did, however, regret that she wouldn't have a chance to say good-bye to the one entity within the Net that wasn't broken, wasn't twisted. It was her hope that the NetMind would understand what she'd done and why.

  Drawing in the scent of her mate, she went deep, deep inside herself, past every shield and block, past reason and cognition to the primitive nucleus—because the link to the PsyNet was powered by instinct and made at the instant of birth, the one thing about her race that wasn't controlled or manipulated.

  And there it was, in the absolute and utter center.

  She'd thought she'd linger over this, but she couldn't. It hurt too much. Saying a soft good-bye, she reached out and sliced through it in a single fatal stroke.

  Everything ended.

  For one microsecond, she was the only thing in the universe, the only light in the darkness, the only living being in memory. Nerve endings screamed in agony and she felt her physical body jerk in hard spasms that threatened to tear muscle from bone. Life couldn't exist in a vacuum and she was—

  But someone was holding her safe.

  Someone else breathed.

  Someone else lived.

  Someone else blazed bright in the utter black of nothing.