by Nalini Singh
“So long as you’re gentle with me.”
And she knew he was going to tease her about this for the rest of their lives. Her smile almost cracked her face, she was so delighted by the idea.
EPILOGUE
Of course Dorian flirted shamelessly with Ria at her and Emmett’s mating ceremony. But Emmett didn’t carry through his threat to eviscerate the younger man. Because Ria was his now, and Dorian, like every other man in DarkRiver, would rather die than cross that line.
His leopard smiled indulgently as the blond soldier danced Emmett’s mate into a whirl, then caught her laughing form. Her eyes met Emmett’s over Dorian’s shoulder and she blew him a kiss. Smiling, he decided he’d shared his mate quite enough. “Go find another partner, Blondie.”
Dorian released Ria with a mournful smile. “But I like your mink.” Dodging Emmett’s swipe, he walked off with a cocky grin.
“Is your pack always like this?” Ria asked, looking up at him, her arms wrapped around his waist.
“Crazy?”
“That, too. But so . . . like family.”
“Yep. Pack is family.”
A frown gathered between her brows. “What about my parents, grandmother, my brothers, Amber, and Joy—will they be shut out now?”
“They’re family, too,” he told her. “Sometimes, they might wish they weren’t.” Grinning, he directed her gaze to where poor Amber and Joy were being “looked after.” The changelings weren’t touching either mother or baby, but it was obvious they wanted to. Then Ria noticed the beautiful handcrafted baby blanket being held out to Amber. Her sister-in-law looked stunned . . . before a slow smile crept over her face.
“We like kids,” Emmett whispered in her ear.
Pressing herself to him, she stood on tiptoe to whisper back. “Me, too.”
He squeezed her close.
“How come you took so long to find me?” she asked.
“Stupidity.” A nip of her ear. “But now that I have you, I’m never letting go.”
Ria smiled and kissed the edge of his jaw. “Who says I’d let you?”
Laughing, Emmett spun her off her feet and around in a dizzying circle. Ria met her grandmother’s eyes halfway through the first rotation. Miaoling was holding court with the young ones, but her smile was just for Ria. And Ria knew her grandmother understood.
Emmett was it for her. Forever. No matter what.
It was, she thought, looking down into eyes gone cat in joyful play, perfect.
The San Francisco Gazette
January 1, 2073
CITY BEAT
A New Wind
It seems that certain statements made in this column last year were prescient in the extreme. According to every person we spoke to during our research for today’s column, the real power in San Francisco is no longer seen to lie with our elected representatives, but with a group of leopard changelings. Perhaps it’s these cats who should be sitting in local government?
Lucas Hunter, the DarkRiver alpha, had this to say when I put the point to him: “We have no desire to stand for office. But we consider San Francisco our home—and we take threats to that home, and to the people within it, very seriously.”
Bravo, Mr. Hunter. As far as this reporter is concerned, DarkRiver has proven both its determination, and its right, to hold the city. San Francisco is unequivocally a leopard town.
Keep reading for an excerpt from the next Psy-Changeling novel by Nalini Singh
SHIELD OF WINTER
Available June 2014 from Berkley Books!
To be an Arrow is to be an island, devoid of attachments that create vulnerability.
First Code of Arrows
There was nothing left of the man he’d been.
Vasic stared through the glass wall in front of him as the computronic gauntlet biologically fused to his left forearm hummed near-silent in the diagnostic mode he’d initiated. Sleek black, the new invention remained relatively unstable, despite the constant and ongoing refinement by the medics and techs. But Vasic wasn’t concerned about his life.
He hadn’t been concerned about anything for a long time. At first it had been his conditioning under Silence that kept him cold, his emotions on ice. Now, as the world navigated the first days of a new year, he was beyond Silence and into a numbness so vast, it was an endless grayness.
The only reason he kept waking up in the morning was for the others, the ones in the squad who still had some hope of a normal life. It was far too late for him, his hands permanently stained with blood from the countless lives he’d taken in pursuit of a mandate that had proven false in a very ugly way.
“What is it?” he said to the man who’d just entered the common area of Arrow Central Command. None of them was sociable, yet they maintained this space, having learned through bitter experience that even an Arrow couldn’t always walk alone.
Today, the room was empty except for the two of them.
“Krychek has a theory.” Aden came to stand beside him, his dark eyes on the vista beyond the glass. It wasn’t a view of the outside world—the Arrows were creatures of shadow, and so they lived in the shadows, their headquarters buried deep underground in a location inaccessible to anyone who didn’t know the correct routes and codes.
Even a teleporter needed a visual lock, and there were no images of Arrow Central Command anywhere in the world, not in any database, not on the PsyNet, nowhere. Which made it all the more notable that Kaleb Krychek had demonstrated his ability to ’port into the HQ when the squad first contacted him. However, despite the subterranean nature of the squad’s base of operations, on the other side of the glass lay a sprawling green space full of trees, ferns, even a natural-seeming pool, the area bathed in simulated sunlight that would change to moonlight as the day turned.
It had been difficult to acquire that technology without tipping their hand—the SnowDancer wolves were very proprietary of their tech, usually installed it themselves. But the squad had managed, because that light was as necessary to their sanity and their physical health as the captured piece of the outside world on which it shone.
“Krychek’s theory—it’s about the disease in the Net,” Vasic guessed, knowing the broken remnants of fanatical Pure Psy and the sporadic new outbreaks of violence notwithstanding, that was the most dangerous threat that faced their race.
“You’ve seen the reports.”
“Yes.” The disease, the infection was spreading at a phenomenal pace no one could’ve predicted. Rooted in the psychic fabric that connected every Psy on the planet but for the renegades, it had the potential to devastate their race . . . because to be Psy was to need the biofeedback provided by a psychic network. Now that same link could well be pumping poison directly into their brains.
There were some who whispered that the fall of Silence a month prior was behind the acceleration, but Vasic didn’t believe that to be the truth—the decay was too deeply integrated in the PsyNet. It had had over a century to grow, feeding on the suppressed psychic energy of all the dark, twisted emotions their race sought to stifle. “Krychek’s theory?”
Aden, his hands clasped loosely at the back of his black combat-uniform clad body, said, “He believes the empaths are the key.”
The empaths.
An unexpected idea from Kaleb Krychek, who many considered the epitome of Silence . . . but that was a false truth, as the entire Net had learned when he lowered the shield around the adamantine bond that linked him to Sahara Kyriakus. Of course, it was a false truth only when it came to Sahara Kyriakus. That was a fact Vasic didn’t think everyone understood, and it was a critical one.
Kaleb Krychek remained a lethal threat.
“Krychek,” Aden continued, “theorizes that the fact the empaths are so prevalent in the population speaks to their necessity in subtle ways we’ve never grasped. Stifling their abilities has thus had a dangerous flow-on effect.”
Vasic saw the logic—e
mpaths might’ve been publicly erased from the Net, but every Arrow knew they had never been rare. Except once. Their emotion-linked abilities contrary to the very foundations of the protocol, the Es had been systematically eliminated from the gene pool in the years after Silence was first implemented, only for the ruling Council to realize almost too late that it was attempting to excise a vital organ.
No one truly understood why the Net needed the Es, but it was incontrovertible that it did. The Council that had first come face-to-face with that truth had named it the Correlation Concept—the lower the number of E-Psy in the population, the higher the incidents of psychopathy and insanity. However, while the current generation of Es might’ve been allowed to be born, they’d never been allowed to be, conditioned to stifle their abilities since birth. “Has Krychek considered the fact that it might not be a case of merely awakening the Es?”
“Yes. You see the critical problem.”
It was inescapable—if the empaths had to do something active to negate the infection, then the Psy race might well disintegrate to ash . . . because there was no one left to teach the Es what to do. By the time the ruling Council had accepted their mistake in attempting to cull the Es from the gene pool, all the old ones were dead and information about their abilities had been erased from every known archive.
“How many?” Vasic asked, knowing they couldn’t simply begin to nudge the empaths awake on a wholesale level. Their deaths had almost collapsed the PsyNet. No one knew what would happen if they woke all at once, disoriented and unable to control their abilities.
“A test group of ten.” Aden telepathed him the list.
Scanning it, Vasic saw the short-listed Es were all high Gradient, from cardinal to 8.7. “No,” he said, before Aden could make the request. “I won’t retrieve them.”
“You don’t have to retrieve them all. Just one.”
“No,” Vasic said again. “If Krychek wishes to abduct empaths, he’s capable of doing so himself.” Vasic was no longer on anyone’s leash but his own.
Aden’s response was quiet. “Do you think I’d bring you such a request?”
Turning at last, Vasic met the eyes of the telepath who was the one individual in the world he considered a friend, their lives intertwined since childhood, when they’d been paired up to do exercises designed to turn Vasic into a stone-cold killer. To their trainers, Aden had simply been a useful telepathic sparring partner, a well-behaved complement to Vasic’s erratic temperament at the time, an Arrow trainee only because his parents were both Arrows who’d worked to hone his skills since the cradle.
As such, Aden had been put into classes that eventually qualified him as a field medic; he’d been given the same harsh training all inductees were given, but was never deemed worthy of any extra interest—except when it came to punishments designed to “harden” a boy who’d been small for his age. Always, the ones who would use the Arrows had underestimated Aden, and in so doing, they’d given the squad a leader who’d saved countless lives and who they would follow into any hell.
“No,” he conceded. “You wouldn’t.” Aden knew exactly how close Vasic was to the edge, that the destruction of, or damage to, one more innocent life could snap the razor-fine thread that bound him to the world.
“Krychek,” Aden continued into the quiet between them, “doesn’t think his proposed experiment as to the impact of the empaths on the infection will work if the Es are forced to participate.” A pause. “I’m not certain if that’s his personal view, or if it’s Sahara’s, but whatever the case, each of the Es must volunteer.”
Vasic agreed with Aden that the compassion was likely to emanate from the woman who had appeared out of nowhere to forge an unbreakable bond with the otherwise cold-blooded dual cardinal, and who, their investigations told them, was in no way Silent. “Where does Krychek intend to run his experiment?”
“SnowDancer-DarkRiver territory.”
Very few things had the capacity to surprise Vasic, on any level. This, however, was unexpected. “The SnowDancer wolves have a tendency to shoot intruders on sight”—“shoot first and ask questions of the corpses” was their rumored motto—“and the leopards aren’t much friendlier.”
“I’ve told Krychek the same, yet I can see his point as to the area’s suitability.”
“An isolated location, no other PsyNet-connected minds for miles in any direction.” As a result, that part of the Net, too, would be quiet, giving Krychek a clean canvas on which to run his experiment.
However, that was a factor that could be replicated elsewhere.
Which left a single critical element that could only be found in the changeling-held territory. “Sascha Duncan.” Access to the only active E in the world no doubt played a crucial part in Krychek’s plans.
“There’s no infection in that section of the Net,” Aden said, instead of nodding to confirm what they both knew must be true, “but Krychek has the ability to shift the infection in that direction, or seed the area with it. He says he can’t control it beyond that, but I haven’t yet decided if he’s lying.” The other Arrow turned to acknowledge another member of the squad who’d just entered, walking over to her when she indicated she needed to speak to him.
Alone, Vasic considered the misleading simplicity of Krychek’s proposed experiment. An isolated group of empaths, surrounded on the Net by the infection. If the experiment failed, the infection threatening to overwhelm them in a wave of murderous madness or more subtle mental degradation, it would be relatively easy to relocate all ten men and women at short notice. As well, the deterioration of an empty part of the Net would cause few ripples.
In that sense, it was a clean plan, with no threat of major losses.
Of course, no one could predict how the infection would move, what it would do to the empaths. “I can’t, Aden,” he said, when the other man returned to his side, their fellow Arrow having left the room.
Aden waited.
“You know what happened when I had cause to pass near Sascha Duncan prior to her defection. It was a deeply . . . uncomfortable experience.” Councilor Nikita Duncan’s daughter had been pretending to be Silent at the time, but even then, there’d been something about her that had made his instincts bristle.
It was one of the few times he’d felt true pain as an adult—at first, he’d thought he was under attack, only to realize it was Sascha’s simple presence in a room separated from the one where he stood by a solid wall, that was sandpaper along the insides of his skin. As if some part of him knew she was the antithesis to everything he had ever been taught to be, the rejection primal.
It wasn’t until her defection and the resulting revelation of her empathy that he’d realized the reason behind the strange effect . . . and it had made him recall the numerous other times he’d felt a faint irritation against his skin as he moved through the shadows in populated areas. Sleeping empaths, their conditioning not as badly degraded as Sascha’s must have been.
He also knew he was an anomaly in sensing them in such a way—according to Aden, no one else in the squad had ever reported the same. Vasic had a theory that the awareness was an undocumented adjunct of being a Tk-V, a born teleporter. Patton, the only other Tk-V he’d ever met, had often complained about an “itch” under his skin when he was in the outside world.
Regardless of whether that was true or not, the effect continued unchecked for Vasic, deeper and more frequent serrated scrapes over his skin as the conditioning of the Es in the Net fractured further with each passing day.
Aden took several minutes to reply. “Uncomfortable, not debilitating.” The words of a leader evaluating one of his men. “The empaths will need a protection squad—their designation has never been aggressive according to the historical records I’ve been able to unearth so far, and none of this group are, either.”
The telepath’s tone remained even as he added, “I want you to run
it. You’re the only man I trust to get them all out of danger if there is a sudden spike in the infection, or if the pro-Silence elements in the Net seek to do them harm.”
Vasic knew that wasn’t quite the truth; the squad had other teleporters in its ranks. No one as fast as Vasic, but fast enough. None of them, however, stood so close to an irrevocable and final descent into the abyss. “Are you trying to put me on soft duty?”
“Yes.” Eyes on the greenery outside, but his attention on Vasic, Aden continued to speak. “You don’t see it, but you’re one of the core members of the squad, the one we all rely on when things go to hell. Outside emergency situations, the younger Arrows turn to you for guidance; the older ones use you as a sounding board. Your loss would be a staggering blow to the group . . . to me.”
“I won’t snap.” Even though he knew the oblivion of death was the only peace he’d ever find. “I have things to do yet.” And it didn’t only have to do with helping to save those Arrows who might still have the chance to live some kind of a real life.
You don’t have the right to be tired. When you can write her name on a memorial, when you can honor her blood, then you’ll have earned the right.
A leopard changeling had said that to him, over the broken body of a woman whose death Vasic had been sent to erase. The leopard couldn’t know how many names Vasic needed to write, how many deaths he’d covered up when he’d believed that what he was doing was for the good of his people . . . and later, when he’d known it was too early for any revolution to succeed. Each and every name had a claim on his soul.
“Nevertheless, I want you away from the violence, at least for a short period.” Again, Aden’s voice was that of the leader he was, and yet it was no order, their relationship far too old to need any such trappings. “There’s another reason I’m tapping you—and why I’m going to ask you to consider certain others for your team. Being near empaths may be uncomfortable for you, but it will likely be soothing for the Es.”
