Branded by Fire

by Singh, Nalini

  A falcon lay a little to the left. It was alive. Good enough. Hawke turned back to those who were his own and knelt down beside them. The wolf didn’t turn to look at him, all its attention focused on the fallen leopard. When Hawke went to check the leopard for injuries, he moved slowly, ensuring the wolf knew he didn’t intend to do harm. Even so, the wolf stood ready to strike, those amber eyes watching Hawke’s every move.

  That was when Hawke noticed the wolf’s left back leg was broken. He didn’t tell the male to sit. Instead, he focused on finding the leopard’s injuries. The most dangerous one was obvious the instant he looked at the downed feline’s side. A massive gash split the black and gold of her soot-covered fur, probably caused by flying debris.

  Hawke swore and pulled off his T-shirt to stop the blood flow. He could’ve helped the wolf, but sharing strength with a leopard was beyond his abilities. It agitated the alpha wolf inside him—this leopard, this woman, was Pack. He had to help her. “Hold on, Mercy,” he murmured, shoving a hand into his pocket to close around his cell phone.

  It proved unnecessary.

  Lucas ran out of the smoky haze that very instant, followed by Tamsyn. Behind Tammy and Luc, he saw two other falcons land and shift. In normal circumstances, they’d be dead for having invaded another predator’s territory, but Hawke knew they’d likely been coming in early for the meeting at the Glade.

  “Lara had to stay at the hospital,” Tammy said in a quick-fire report. “One of your young men is having a bad reaction to the tranquilizer they used.” A glance at the wolf who stood in silent watch. “Can you take care of Riley?”

  “He won’t let me,” Hawke informed her. “Not until Mercy’s okay.”

  “Men,” Tamsyn muttered but she was already removing his wadded-up T-shirt and checking the wound. “It’s bad, but she’s a fighter. Come on, Merce.” Putting her hands over the wound, she closed her eyes.

  Hawke could feel the healing energy emanating from her, though her energy was unfamiliar—feline. Healers calmed everyone when they began working; however, the injured wolf stood guard, ears raised, but mouth closed. Watching. Waiting. If anyone made a wrong move, that unfortunate individual would find their jugular sliced clean through.

  Riley was in no way rational right now.

  Placing one hand on Mercy’s head beside Hawke’s, and the other on Tammy’s shoulder, Lucas frowned. “Sascha’s got her, I think.”

  Hawke knew Luc and Sascha had a strong connection, but he hadn’t realized it was telepathic to a degree. A twinge of envy uncurled in his gut. Like the leopards, changeling wolves mated for life. He’d never had that chance—the girl who would’ve grown into a woman he adored had died decades ago. And now his wolf walked alone.

  It was as well, he thought, that Riley had mated. They needed a strong male-female bond at the top of the leadership structure. It would center the pack, anchor it. Now he felt the strength of that mating bond flow into Tammy, and through her, back into Mercy. Changeling healers fixed things with touch, but the energy had to come from somewhere. Riley nudged at Mercy’s nose with his own, touching her with one careful paw.

  That was when Hawke felt something tug at him. Similar to when Lara drew power during a complicated healing. He glanced at Tamsyn. “You feel that?”

  A distracted nod. “It’s from Riley.”

  No, Hawke thought, it wasn’t. It was coming from him, too. And that meant Riley and Mercy had completed the mating. His gaze met Lucas’s.

  “You can’t have her,” the leopard alpha said, as if he’d read Hawke’s mind.

  Their eyes clashed, alpha to alpha, wolf to leopard. The air stilled.

  “Fight over her later,” Tammy hissed, her voice a lacerating whip. “Come on, Mercy, wake the hell up.”

  But she didn’t. No matter how many times the wolf tried to nuzzle her back to consciousness.

  CHAPTER 53

  The Councilors didn’t bother to have a full meeting to deal with the Alliance issue. They simply agreed on a course of action and dispatched squads to take care of it. If the Alliance wanted a war, they’d get a war.

  But the chairman had miscalculated on one crucial point. The Council chose stealth, not public violence. With the recent surge of hostile behavior by Psy, overt bloodshed would’ve run counter to their attempts to calm the populace. Instead, things were taken care of with such subtlety, it was impossible to prove Psy involvement.

  And the Psy didn’t kill everyone. Instead, minds were scanned and dossiers built. The one called “the chairman” had escaped the net, but three of those at the top of the food chain had been tracked and eliminated. The others would be found sooner or later. The worker bees had been left alone . . . with their memories of what had happened intact. Their leadership had abandoned them to take the heat, knowing the assassins would come.

  The Psy had had a century to learn the cold logic of demoralizing the enemy.

  Now, the paramilitary arm of the Alliance was crumbling from within.

  CHAPTER 54

  Lucas and Hawke stood looking down at the badly injured male prone on the hospital bed. “What the fuck happened, Adam?”

  “I got shot out of the sky. Like a damn plane.” Ignoring the myriad other wounds that marked his body, the tall, heavily muscled man stared at his shattered wing, having remained in half-shift form to allow the wing to set properly. “Fuck, that’s going to take weeks to heal.”

  “Only reason you’re not dead,” Hawke pointed out, “is because you’re alpha in waiting.”

  “Wing leader,” Adam corrected, an odd catch in his voice. “It’s you four-legged beasts who have alphas.”

  “Insulting us?” Hawke drawled, though his mood was anything but buoyant.

  Lucas looked over, his own face drawn. “I don’t think he realizes he’s in our territory and we can bury his body where no one can find it.”

  “Ha-ha.” Adam’s sarcasm was rendered less effective by the fact that his normally copper-colored skin was dull with injury—where it wasn’t black-and-blue. “Is Naia here? Our healer?”

  “Yeah, she was on your tail. With one of your wing-seconds.” Hawke raised an eyebrow.

  “Shut it,” Adam snapped. “She’s one of the highest-ranking members of the wing. She needed to be at the meeting.” A wince. “Jesus, my head hurts.”

  “Naia had to shave off your hair to check for injuries,” Lucas said. “Turns out you’re too hardheaded to hurt.”

  Hawke folded his arms, forcing himself to focus on this problem and not the one he could do nothing to solve. “But you’re not as pretty anymore without those long, silky—what’s the word—yeah, tresses.”

  Adam was giving Hawke the finger when a softly curvy woman with the mystery of the Greek Islands stamped onto her features walked into the room. “Out,” she said. “Both of you. He needs to heal.”

  “We’ll go, Naia,” Lucas said, his voice quiet. “But we need to know what Adam brought into our territory.”

  “Nothing,” Adam said.

  “I might believe it if I heard it from Aria.” Hawke scowled.

  “There’s been a change in the structure of our wing.”

  “What change?” Lucas asked when the other man fell silent.

  “Aria’s dead.”

  Hawke sucked in a breath. “Hell. I liked her.”

  “She had a good life,” Naia said, eyes drowning in sorrow. “She was a good wing leader.” A short glance at Adam, and Hawke understood without words why Naia, and Jacques—now the second-highest-ranking member of WindHaven, had come with Adam. Aria hadn’t only been their wing leader, she’d been Adam’s grandmother. They’d probably been worried he’d blow the negotiation by picking a fight with either Lucas or Hawke just to let off steam. Both men would’ve understood, but it would’ve delayed things.

  “She was,” Lucas agreed. “So we have to deal with your feathered ass now.”

  “You’ve been dealing with me for years,” Adam reminded them. “Now there’
s no filter so we have to become friends.” The sarcasm fairly dripped. “Did you get the bullets?”

  “No. One went through your body, the other shredded your wing and disappeared.” Hawke didn’t like it. His men would shoot down an enemy, but only after checking with him. Lucas had already told him it hadn’t been one of his people. “We’ll find out who it was.”

  “Jacques knows the location,” Adam murmured, the words hazy. “He was . . .”

  Naia waved them out as Adam lost consciousness, exiting herself a few minutes later.

  “How did Aria die?” Lucas asked.

  “Old age.” Naia’s face was sad, and yet there was peace in it. “We knew it was coming. She somehow survived her mate’s death, perhaps because she was wing leader, but the life went out of her—she only lasted six months after he took his last breath. There was no foul play.”

  Which made it less likely that someone had targeted Adam. Since neither Lucas nor Hawke liked unknown threats in their territory, they went out with Jacques. What they found was unexpected—spent shells and eight dead men with chips in the backs of their necks.

  Mia and Kenyon, one of the SnowDancer boys who’d been among the missing, identified three of the eight as having been involved in their kidnapping.

  “I’m going to call Bowen,” Lucas said, “see if he can shed any light on this.”

  The Alliance man arrived twenty minutes later, took one look at the dead men, and nodded. “Two of them worked directly for the chairman, probably saw his face.” He bent down by one particular body, sorrow in every line of him. “Damn it, Claude. Why?”

  “Your chips seem to have a kill switch,” Lucas said, feeling a stab of pity despite himself. “Their brains are literally leaking out their ears.”

  Sorrow morphed into cold rage. “No one told us.”

  But the evidence was plain to see. Whether these men had attacked Adam in retaliation for DarkRiver and SnowDancer’s interference in their plans, or whether they’d been given orders to simply cause chaos, it didn’t matter.

  Because it seemed the chairman was cleaning house.

  Riley hated seeing Mercy so still, so quiet. He could feel her in his soul, a vibrant presence, but in front of him, she was pale, unmoving. Tamsyn was worried about a hidden infection—Mercy should’ve woken by now. Riley’s wolf grew frantic with every passing second. God, he’d just found her. He couldn’t lose her. Who’d jerk his chain when he needed it most? Who’d make him laugh at himself?

  He closed his hand around her fingers and squeezed. “Wake up, kitty,” he said, trying to reach the wildness in her. “I need you.” He hadn’t said that to anyone since the day his parents died.

  Deep in his soul, he thought he felt a pulse of love, of warmth, but the mating bond was new. He didn’t know if it had been real or if he’d imagined it because he needed it so much. In his hand, her fingers lay quiescent, so unlike the woman he adored with every part of him.

  All those years they’d danced around each other, all those insults they’d hurled at each other, all those times they’d stood nose to nose, toe to toe, it had been preparation, he thought. They hadn’t been ready for each other then. But now they were and damn if he was going to let fate steal the future from them.

  Getting into bed beside her with effort, he held her to his heart. And then he dropped every remaining shield, every barrier, and willed her to heal.

  Bowen and his team left San Francisco two days later, heading for Venice. Bowen had been recalled by the remaining members of the security team. “I can’t believe you’re taking over the chairman’s job,” one of his men said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “I’ll be making it my own,” Bowen said, his mind full of the images of death. So many of his friends gone, all so the chairman and his cronies could rule supreme. “I will not send my people out like cannon fodder, and I’m through with picking fights just to prove I can beat the big boys. From now on, we do it like the changelings—become so strong within ourselves that no one dares pick fights with us.”

  “The temptation, though, Bo,” Lily said. “It’s gonna be a kicker. And you’re not a politician.”

  “Yeah?” He grinned. “Then how come I have the beginnings of a business agreement—maybe more—with the two strongest changeling packs in the United States?”

  Lily’s mouth dropped open. “How? I thought you were persona non grata.”

  “I fucked up,” Bo said, still angry at himself for his part in terrorizing a child. “But I owned up to it, too. Honesty matters with changelings. When I got recalled, I set up a meet with the alphas and said maybe we could turn a bad start into something good.”

  “And they listened?”

  “It’s a work in progress. They’ve agreed not to boycott Alliance businesses—it’s a temporary deal, but it’s a deal.” DarkRiver and SnowDancer hadn’t reached where they were without being highly intelligent operators. They were fully capable of slicing away all contact with the Human Alliance—as you would a diseased limb—if Bowen didn’t manage to clean up an organization that had gone from hope to violence on the back of one man.

  The chairman had fouled something humans had created after the Territorial Wars as a way to rebuild their lives. Now that powerful business/education network was under fire around the world, with innocent men and women being accused of masterminding violence. Bowen had to prove the Alliance was more than that—first to their members, then to the world. “We’ve broken, Lily,” he said, thinking of Claude. “I want to bring the pieces back together.”

  “Do you think you can?”

  “Yes.” It wasn’t too late. The chairman’s evil hadn’t yet taken root. “The ‘leadership’ might’ve tried to find glory through war, but we can give our people something concrete—used correctly, the chips could level the playing field once and for all.”

  Her nod was slow, her glossy hair reflecting the light. “No one would be able to strip our shields, steal our secrets.” There was old pain in those words, memories of terror.

  “Yes.” Bowen squeezed her hand. “I want humans to become integral to the fabric of the world. To do that, we have to be willing to step out of the shadows and take our place on the negotiating table. No more blood.”

  His adoptive sister looked at him, a strange clarity in her large gray eyes. “You’re not going to stay security chief for long. You’ll lead.”

  On the other side of the world, Tatiana Rika-Smythe rose from a chair and drank two glasses of a protein mix. Her body was close to skeletal. She’d paid a high price for this gamble, but if it had all gone according to plan, she’d now be the sole surviving member of the Council, and no one would’ve considered her a factor in the deaths of her peers. As there were no aspirants strong enough to become Council, she would’ve effectively owned the Net.

  At the time, the cost-benefit ratio had seemed satisfactory. That was no longer the case.

  I believe you have served your purpose.

  She waited as the chairman paused and considered if his chip was faulty.

  Your chip is defective. I made sure of it the night I found you—your mental shield makes you careless about more physical means of attack. Such a human failing.

  Trembling, the man slid a hand under his hair.

  Mind control takes large amounts of energy, and I really can’t spare any more.

  The chairman drew himself a bath with no prescience of danger. He was dead five minutes later.

  Tatiana sighed in exhaustion as she retook her seat. She would’ve preferred not to lose him—as a tool, he’d been perfect. When she’d found him three weeks ago, his mind had already been full of both hatred toward the Psy, and a willingness to use violence to achieve his aims. All she’d had to do was nudge him until he’d set out to destroy the Council itself.

  Every other action, from pushing the kill switch on his men, to going after the changelings, he’d taken on his own. Tatiana had no interest in anything unconnected to the murders of her fello
w Councilors. But that very independence of thought had made the chairman too dangerous to leave alive.

  It would, of course, have been better if she’d been able to control the Alliance as a whole, but even one mind-control link was draining. She’d been forced to watch the continued development of the chip and the drug, but that, she decided, was a minor issue, one she could deal with when she was stronger.

  Right now, she had to recover . . . and reassess the other Councilors’ weaknesses. Perhaps, she thought as she walked haltingly to her bed, she might eventually program the next leader of the Alliance. Humans made such perfect stalking horses.

  CHAPTER 55

  Mercy woke in a spacious but unfamiliar room. No. She remembered seeing it before, but the images were hazy. Most likely, she’d woken earlier, then slipped back into sleep. Her side ached, and when she reached down to investigate, she found bandages wrapped around her middle. Still, she thought, it didn’t feel too bad—not like when that piece of tin had sliced into her.

  Yawning, she snuggled deeper against the familiar male body beside her. “Riley?”

  Silence.

  Surprised, she raised herself up on her elbow and looked down. His face was drawn, lined with fatigue. Stupid man, she thought, he’d been staying up to watch over her. She’d felt him as she slept, knew he hadn’t left her side. Even though the plascast on his leg and thigh told her he’d suffered an injury himself. The break had to be a bad one if Lara had cast him so solidly. He should’ve stayed in animal form for the healing, but it didn’t surprise her that he hadn’t. She wouldn’t have, either, had their roles been reversed.

  Kissing him on the jaw and petting his chest until his face relaxed, she groaned and got out of bed on wobbly feet. Riley’s fingers immediately clenched on the sheet where she’d been. “Sleep,” she said, holding on to the headboard as her muscles got used to being upright again. “I’m right here.”