Branded by Fire

by Singh, Nalini

  It was a miracle, that smile. Toby had been a shocked, too-quiet child when she’d first met him. Now he could’ve been any child in either pack, with as much mischief in his heart as laughter. But, she thought, he was a little more sensitive than even the healers. “How about we start with you telling me how things have been going?”

  “Well, the rainbows are stronger.”

  The “rainbows” were pieces of color that floated in the dark spaces within a neural network. The PsyNet had no such rainbows. The Web of Stars had had it from Sascha’s first glimpse—because those rainbows were the psychic emanations of an E-Psy, an empath. Sascha didn’t consciously create those emanations—they were simply part of who she was. But in the PsyNet, that truth had been buried under a thousand shields.

  As had Toby’s.

  The boy wasn’t an E-Psy. His main ability was a variant form of telepathy, but he had enough E in him to affect the LaurenNet. “Do you think it’ll get any stronger?” She had a theory—that if the LaurenNet had had a powerful E-Psy in its midst, Toby’s latent ability would have remained that way. But because the LaurenNet was without its own empath, need had compelled the strengthening of muscles that might otherwise have lain dormant.

  The boy frowned in thought, easy in showing emotion. His face was a masculine version of his sister, Sienna’s, intense and compelling. “I’m not sure,” he said at last, “but I don’t think so. It feels . . . finished now.”

  “That’s what I think, too.” She touched his hand, and their fingers intertwined. “Have you been feeling people’s emotions?”

  A nod. “It’s not all the time now—the shields you showed me work good.”

  “Excellent.” She’d had to learn her skills rough. There were no other E-Psy—no free E-Psy—around to teach her. With the recent discovery of the Forgotten, the descendants of the large rebel contingent that had dropped from the PsyNet a hundred years ago, she’d hoped for more knowledge, but the Forgotten had evolved in different ways, their blood-lines enriched with human and changeling blood. They’d been able to give her some help, but not much.

  It had been disappointing, but not catastrophic—she’d been well on her feet by then. Her shielding skills had always been excellent, even in the PsyNet, so she’d had a good base to work from. One thing she’d learned since mating with Lucas was that she didn’t always have to leave herself open to the emotions of others—it was draining, and more than that, it invaded their privacy. But there were some things an E-Psy couldn’t control. “Are you still picking up on people’s emotional resonance?”

  “Like sort of knowing what they’re feeling without trying?”

  “Yes.” It was second nature to her, as effortless and as unstoppable as breathing.

  Toby nodded. “But it doesn’t hurt or anything. It’s normal.”

  “That’s exactly it—being aware of others’ emotional states is normal for us.” No one, she thought fiercely, remembering her own childhood, would tell this bright, beautiful boy that he was flawed. No one would crush his smile. Sascha would make sure of it. “It’s like the wolves can scent where people have been, or who they’ve touched.”

  “I saw Riley before I met you,” Toby volunteered.

  “You did?”

  “He was sad.” Quiet words. “Not crying-sad, but deep-inside-sad. Old-sad.”

  Sascha understood in a way most people wouldn’t have. “Like the sadness is buried so deep, he might not even know it’s there?”

  “Yeah.” A pause. “Was that . . . unethical?” He said the last word with frowning concentration. “That I knew that about him?”

  “Well,” Sascha said, “it depends on how you found out. Did you use your abilities consciously, or did you just know?”

  “I just knew.” A definitive nod. “Like I know when Sienna’s grumpy, and Marlee’s happy.”

  “Then I see no reason for worry.” Smiling, she brushed his hair off his forehead, the gesture more of affection than necessity. “Now, shall we practice your shielding?”

  Riley was heading into his office to clear the decks when he heard the strangest thing. Sienna was speaking to Hawke in his office, and since the door was open, he could hear everything. That wasn’t the strange part. The strange part was that Sienna was being polite to their alpha.

  “I appreciate you giving me a position in the hierarchy,” she said, sounding more mature than he’d ever heard her.

  Silence. Then, “You earned it.” Short, clipped. Hawke probably wasn’t sure what the hell she was up to now.

  “I won’t let the pack down,” Sienna added. “Indigo says I pretty much have the physical aspect of soldier training down—it’s a case of becoming familiar with the other parts.”

  Riley wasn’t surprised at the rank Hawke had decided to assign her. Sienna was a dominant. She’d be far happier doing jobs associated with protecting the pack than otherwise.

  “See that you do. Or Indigo will flay you alive.”

  “I will.”

  Okay, this was getting beyond strange. Sienna wasn’t built for such unresisting compliance. She was like Mercy. A little wild, full of passion, incredibly vivid. Instinct told him that whatever was happening in Hawke’s office was important.

  “Is that all?” A harsh question from Hawke.

  “Yes. Bye.” And then Sienna walked out. She saw Riley and gave a little wave but didn’t come over to say hi. Riley narrowed his eyes, almost able to feel the vicious strength of the control she was keeping over herself. One hard push and that girl would shatter. “What the fuck is going on?” he asked, stepping into Hawke’s office and shutting the door.

  “You’re asking me?” His alpha’s jaw was clenched so tight, Riley could almost hear bones grinding.

  “She’s closed up tighter than a fucking drum.” And Riley knew that was wrong with every fiber of his being. “If she was wolf, I’d say she was trying to choke her animal.”

  “Fuck it, Riley.” Hawke pushed back from his desk and paced across the office. “I don’t know what’s up. I went to talk to her, gave her the option of becoming a trainee soldier.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing.” Hawke kicked the stone wall violently enough that it had to have hurt, then turned and walked in the other direction. “She said ‘thank you’ and ‘I’m happy to accept.’ ”

  “That’s not Sienna.”

  Hawke’s pale eyes were wolf furious. “Apparently it is now. Good thing for the den, too.” Except he didn’t sound convinced.

  Mercy opened her front door to a gorgeous male. Unfortunately, it was the wrong one. “Joaquin. What a lovely surprise.” Her tone said otherwise.

  He reached up to push a hand through that sleek black hair of his, dark eyes watchful. Unlike Eduardo, he didn’t flirt. But that only meant he did his hunting in a stealthy fashion. “I thought we might have breakfast together.”

  “I don’t recall inviting you.”

  “I’m here at your grandmother’s behest.” A gleam of feline cunning in his eyes. “She said you’d treat me as an honored guest.”

  “She probably told you I’d kick your ass to Mexico.” Mercy snorted and folded her arms. “But what the heck. I have to eat.”

  Joaquin didn’t move from the doorway. “Won’t you invite me in?”

  “You just want to come in so your scent will be inside.” And if Riley walked in and smelled it, she wouldn’t be able to stop the resulting bloodshed. Part of her was irritated that she was allowing a male’s possessiveness to dictate her actions, but the other part of her was thinking like a sentinel. And buried below that was a raw protectiveness that broadsided her with its strength. “I’m not having you create an interpack incident. We’ll go to a pancake place.”

  To her surprise, Joaquin turned out to be an interesting breakfast companion. He also clearly adored her grandmother. “Isabella is an alpha we’d follow to our graves, no questions asked.”

  “Isn’t that the definition of a sentinel?” she said,
taking a bite of her maple-syrup lashed stack. “I’d do the same for Lucas.”

  “We’re both lucky. I’ve heard of packs with a weak alpha, one who doesn’t command such respect. It ends up killing the whole pack.”

  Mercy nodded. “So is that why you’re here? She asked?”

  “It would’ve been a good enough reason, but she showed us videos of you.” A smile in his eyes. “I was away when you visited us. If I hadn’t been . . . well, perhaps you’d be roaming the Amazon now.”

  “In your dreams.” Laughing, she finished off her coffee and stood. “I have to get to work, but Joaquin, you have to know—the field is not open. Go home.”

  Implacable dark eyes. “You still don’t wear his scent.”

  Rolling her eyes, she left him to the temporary duties Cian had assigned as part of the agreement to allow two out-Pack sentinels into their territory. But the way he’d said those last words, the confidence in them, niggled at her. Scent layers only became ingrained in long-term lovers or mates.

  She’d only been intimate with Riley a handful of times, but they spent a lot of time together. And still no scent? It was her, she thought, taking an unflinching look at the almost mutinously independent nature of her leopard. That leopard was suspicious of even the ties between lovers. What if the suspicion never ended?

  That thought worried away at the edges of her mind even as she got to work in a CTX station in Oakland. It was a relief to get a call from Ria, Lucas’s administrative assistant—she was sick of going round and round in circles inside her own head.

  “Sentinel meeting tonight,” Ria told her. “At Lucas’s place.”

  “Time?” She circled a possible security hole in the blue-print in front of her, her mind flicking to the last time she’d been in an underground garage. Damn but she missed the wolf already. And, scent layer or not, that spelled trouble.

  “Seven. Sascha’s doing dinner.”

  “God save us all.” Sascha had decided she liked cooking. Unfortunately, cooking didn’t like her back.

  Ria chuckled. “She’s improving. She made me a cake the other day, and it was only a little salty.”

  “That makes me feel a whole lot better.”

  “Don’t worry—tonight it’s tacos. She told me there’s not much she can do to destroy that particular meal.”

  “We’ll see,” Mercy joked. “Any other news?”

  “Zara’s designing for us again as of today.”

  Mercy liked the changeling wildcat who’d been on contract to DarkRiver’s construction arm before heading back to her own pack. “Say hi to her for me. Tell her Sage still has a crush on her.”

  “Aw, cute. How come your brothers are single?”

  “They say I scare the women off.”

  “More likely they’re spoiled—they’re not going to settle for any woman who doesn’t match the standard you’ve set.”

  Buoyed by the compliment, Mercy shook off her odd mood and focused on the work. The rest of her day, including a security shift in the city, passed with surprisingly little drama—the Alliance had gone cold again, and Bowen and his crew were still behaving. Even Eduardo and Joaquin were nowhere to be seen, for which boon, she could only thank the heavens.

  And if she continued to find herself thinking about a certain wolf much too often, she was sentinel enough to keep her emotions from interfering with the job. But those feelings were fresh in her mind when she got a call as she was about to leave to change for the meeting.

  “Come up and meet me tonight.” That deep, now familiar voice soaked through her skin, rich, dark, and tempting.

  Her hand clenched on the receiver. “Can’t. Got something else.”

  “When’s it finish? I’ll meet you.”

  “No.”

  “That’s it—no?” The edge of a growl in his voice. “I thought we’d settled this.”

  The sheer arrogance of his commands—not requests, commands—made the cat snarl. “Doesn’t mean you have an entry into my pants anytime you please.”

  “Jesus, Mercy, I just wanted to talk to you.”

  She felt a little twinge. Of guilt. Of hunger. “Talk now.”

  “Fine.” He told her about the conversation he’d witnessed between Hawke and Sienna.

  Mercy’s antennae twanged. “Something’s seriously wrong.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. I want you to tell Sascha. She’s the one Psy we know who might have a shot at getting to the bottom of this. Judd says Sienna’s stonewalling him.”

  “Why didn’t you call her yourself?”

  Not even a pause. “Because it’s you I want to talk to.” No lies. No subterfuge. No hiding his intent.

  “Damn it, Riley. This’ll leave us both broken in the end.” The naked emotional response pushed out past any logical rebuttal. She was starting to think of him as hers, but he wasn’t, might never be. Not when her leopard wouldn’t even accept the bonds of scent.

  “And is fighting it any less painful?”

  No. No, it hurts just as bad.

  CHAPTER 29

  He was only twenty-two, a telekinetic with a Gradient rating of 7. Powerful, he was truly powerful. And he’d lost control.

  Trembling, he levitated the fallen bureau off his roommate’s body. The Tp-Psy lay crushed, his organs static, his brain destroyed. Dead. The Tk-Psy swallowed the word past the jagged glass of a parched throat. He’d never seen a dead person before. That wasn’t part of the Psy curriculum.

  But now his roommate was dead, and he was a murderer.

  He didn’t even try to hide it. Didn’t want to. He wanted to find an answer, something that would stop him from doing the same thing ever again. Enforcement processed him quickly, since there was no question of culpability.

  When a representative from the Center came to offer him mild rehabilitation in lieu of a sentence, the Tk-Psy didn’t hesitate. Even if they’d said he had to do the sentence, he still wouldn’t have balked. Because he never again wanted to feel his powers sliding out of his grip, never again wanted to see blood seep into the carpet.

  For the first time, he truly understood the salvation that was Silence.

  CHAPTER 30

  Mercy sat in her car, staring out at the light show of a cloudy dusk. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel until she felt like she could break the damn thing. When the first flick of rain hit the windshield, she finally turned on the engine and headed to her cabin, wanting out of her work clothes before going over to Lucas and Sascha’s aerie.

  Turned out she was the first to arrive. Sascha was in the kitchen, looking mournful. “Lucas went to grab some take-out.”

  “You found a way to destroy tacos?” Mercy raised her eyebrows. “This, I have to see.”

  Sascha threw a tomato at her. “I dropped the box of taco shells and managed to break every single one into a million pieces.”

  Looking into the box, Mercy whistled and put down the abused tomato. “Wow, sure you didn’t throw this at his highness’s head?”

  A guilty look. Mercy burst out laughing. “That does my heart good.”

  “What?”

  “To know you two still fight.”

  Sascha’s lips tugged up at the corners. “It’s fun.”

  “Yeah, it is.” Grinning, she used one of the broken pieces to scoop up the salsa Sascha had already made. “I got some info for you on Sienna.” She filled Sascha in.

  “Hmm, I’ll have to go up and see what’s happening. I’ve been working with Toby, but I don’t think I’ve talked to Sienna in several weeks.” She leaned against the wall and looked at Mercy with those penetrating cardinal eyes. “You’re wound up tighter than tight.”

  Mercy decided to take up the implied offer. “Riley’s pushing.”

  “That’s what predatory changeling men do.” A meaningful glance at the broken taco shells.

  “Not that kind of pushing—though he does that, too. He’s pushing for more than sex.” She paused, then admitted the truth. “It already is m
ore than sex.” The strength of these new emotions threatened to crush her heart, steal her breath.

  “Ah.” Sascha took a few moments. “Is there a possibility he could be your mate?”

  “I’m not what he’s looking for in a mate, trust me.” A stab deep in her soul, a twisting pain that seemed to get stronger with every day that passed.

  “That hurts you.”

  She went to deny it, then decided it was unmitigated stupidity to lie to an empath on the subject of emotions. “Yeah, it does. But I’m glad he was honest—that’s more important than anything. As long as he doesn’t try to mold me into what he wants, I can deal.” Because she wanted him, too, the idiot.

  And maybe, since he wasn’t asking for a lifetime, her leopard wouldn’t resent being tied down, perhaps even find some peace in it. Except . . . “The way he draws me, the sheer strength of it . . . I don’t know what to do.”

  Sascha gave her a surprisingly mischievous smile. “Doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy him while you figure it out.”

  And the tension broke, just like that. Mercy threw part of a taco shell at Sascha. “Some help you are.”

  They were still laughing when Dorian arrived, followed by Clay. The four of them managed to demolish the salsa by the time Lucas returned, with Nate and Vaughn on his heels. None of the sentinels’ mates had come today, which was surprising. Mercy said as much.

  “Kids are at Tammy’s—Tally’s gone to dinner with Ria,” Clay told her. “They’re calling it a strategy meeting—how human females deal with changeling males.”

  Everyone but Dorian laughed. His next words told them why. “Shaya’s with Amara.”

  “She’ll be fine,” Lucas said. “Your mate’s tough.”

  “Yeah.” A proud smile. “I can’t help but worry, though. Keenan’s at Tammy’s.”

  “Faith, too,” Vaughn added. “And Brenna was there when I left.”

  No one found that strange. Brenna and Faith had quietly become very good friends over the past months. “Did Judd come down?” Mercy asked.

  “Probably.” Dorian passed her a box of take-out fried rice. “He has trouble letting Brenna out of his sight.”