The Psy-Changeling Collection (21 page)

“Tammy didn’t appear overprotective. In fact she seemed very open to letting them explore by themselves.”

“You’ve only seen her with them once.” But she’d guessed correctly. Tammy was the one who’d ripped into him for his behavior toward the juveniles. However, he couldn’t tell Sascha that. It was one thing to trust his instincts about her, quite another to place the lives of others’ cubs in her hands. That was a trust she hadn’t yet earned.

It was the right decision for an alpha but maybe it was also made because he was still fuming over the betrayal she’d contemplated. “What smells so good?” he asked, walking into the kitchen.

Tammy finished setting the places. “Chicken pot pie with strawberry tarts to follow.”

“You didn’t have to go to so much trouble,” Sascha said, and though the words sounded stilted, Lucas knew the sentiment was genuine.

To his surprise, so did Tamsyn. She touched Sascha’s hand in fleeting reassurance. “Cooking relaxes me—maybe it’s part of being a healer. If you don’t help eat my efforts, Nate’s going to start accusing me of trying to fatten him up.”

Lucas pulled out a chair. Instead of taking it, Sascha went to the other side and pulled out her own. Stubborn woman. “You eating with us, Tammy?”

“Yup.” She took off her apron and came to sit at the head of the table, Lucas to her right and Sascha to her left.

“I feel strange sitting here—this is Nate’s seat.”

That was why Lucas hadn’t taken it. He might be alpha but this was a packmate’s home and in here, Nate believed that he was alpha. Tamsyn might disagree, Lucas thought with a hidden smile, but she let Nate think what he liked because she loved him.

As they began eating, the healer started talking. “I can’t stop thinking about that poor girl—Brenna.” She put down her fork. “He’s probably hurting her right now. And we’re sitting here doing nothing.”

It was Sascha who said the right thing. “If you think so negatively you’ll make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Look past the anger and pain and think. Perhaps you’ll discover a way to help her.”

Tamsyn looked at her for a long moment. “You’re more than you appear, aren’t you, Sascha?”

“No, I’m not.” Sascha stared at her food.

“The word is that the SnowDancers are skating the edge,” Tamsyn commented, her eyes still on Sascha. “I heard her brothers had to be restrained until they came to their senses and stopped speaking about taking off Psy heads.”

Neither of them mentioned Dorian. After his wild breakdown, he’d been acting almost spookily normal. Everyone was afraid that he was going to snap when they least expected it.

“What did they hope to achieve?” Sascha raised her head to meet Lucas’s gaze. “Two changelings against the entire Psy race? It would’ve been suicide.”

“Logic and love don’t necessarily coincide,” he said, watching her eyes trace the clawlike lines on his face. Unlike many a nonchangeling, she’d never appeared put off by the violent-looking markings. He’d caught her staring at them as if fascinated more than once. Nor had he forgotten the way she’d caressed them in his dreams. “They were hurting because they couldn’t protect their sister—their need to strike out is understandable.”

Lucas appreciated their position as only someone who’d once been in that very place could. The years of waiting for his body to grow strong so he could claim vengeance had been torture of the most excruciating kind, slow and seemingly endless.

“What would Psy do in the same situation?” Tamsyn asked.

Sascha took long moments to answer. “There is no love in the Psy world, so logic would prevail.” Her words were crisp but her eyes gave her away.

Somehow, he’d learned to read those night-sky eyes, learned to interpret the haunting sadness that flickered over them for barely a millisecond before she asked, “Tamsyn, may I use your home for a few hours this afternoon?”

Lucas pushed away his plate, excitement churning in his gut. Sascha was going to surf the PsyNet.

“Sure. People might drop by, though.”

“I need a room where I won’t be disturbed.”

“You can use one of the upstairs guest rooms. Most visitors tend to hang around downstairs.” Tamsyn rose to get the tarts. As she placed them on the table, the doorbell chimed. “I’ll go see who that is.”

Lucas touched Sascha’s hand after Tammy had left. “You’re going to try and search the Net?”

She nodded and slowly slid away her hand. “You can’t be here.”

“Why not?”

“Because your presence distracts me.” The look on her face dared him to make anything of that.

The panther in him growled, smug. The man wasn’t so easily appeased. “I’m not going to leave you unprotected.”

“If I trip some silent alarm, you won’t be able to protect me,” she said, not skirting around the truth. “My mind would be jelly before you knew anything was wrong.”

His jaw set. “Then you don’t go in.” The answer was instinctive—he wasn’t even thinking of the lost SnowDancer.

“Don’t worry. I’m only going to search the public archives. Nothing will happen.” She looked over his shoulder as Tamsyn walked back into the room.

“I don’t think you two have officially met,” the healer commented. “Rina—Sascha. Rina is Kit’s sister.”

When Lucas turned, he saw Rina nod a wary hello to Sascha before the curvaceous blonde walked over to hug his neck from behind. Her cheek rubbed against his. Though Rina was a highly sexual female, her caress was asking for comfort. She’d never tried to come on to him, being young enough, now twenty-one, to have always treated him as her alpha rather than as an attractive male.

Moving his head, he kissed her on the lips, running his hand up her arm in a soothing gesture. It was a small thing but it helped her. She let go and sat in the chair beside him. Lucas glanced at Sascha to see how she’d handled the contact. Her face was expressionless, so much so that he knew she had to be hiding something pretty intense.

He bought his attention back to Rina. “What’s wrong?”

“Kit’s gone missing.”

CHAPTER 13

“What?”
The killer had never taken a male before.

“No, no, it’s not like that,” Rina protested. “He’s just taken off on some joyriding trip to Big Sur with a couple of the other juveniles and I can’t get in touch with them. I think it’s Nico and Sarah with him.”

“When did they leave?” A ban on nonauthorized travel had gone into effect early that morning.

“Before,” Rina said, glancing at Sascha.

Normally the three kids’ absence wouldn’t be a cause for concern. Juveniles were notoriously wild, but Lucas suspected that Kit’s sudden trip had to do with witnessing Dorian’s collapse. He hero-worshipped the latent sentinel. “I’ll track him down.” The SnowDancer lieutenants who controlled those areas were usually reasonable, but these weren’t ordinary times.

“Thanks, Lucas.”

“Tamsyn, I’m going to head out with Rina.” He stood and looked down at Sascha. “You staying?” He wasn’t convinced of the safety of what she was planning to do but as Rina had reminded him, more rested on this than his own desire to keep Sascha safe from harm. That didn’t make it any easier to leave her—comprehension about her place in his life was starting to creep in, in spite of the barriers erected the day he’d lost everything.

“Yes.” Night-sky eyes met his without blinking but refused to look at Rina.

Notwithstanding the bleak situation, it made him want to smile. “I’ll catch up with you if I return before six. If not, leave a message with Tammy.”

“All right. I hope you find Kit and the others.”

“We will.” They’d lost one of their young. It was more than enough.

Sascha stood
in the guest bedroom trying to concentrate but all she could see was Lucas with Rina. Sensuality had poured from every molecule of the female, rich and heady and almost tangible. She’d felt as if she were drowning in it as she’d sat across from the two of them.

Then they’d kissed and she’d had another shock. Affection had whispered between them. Not passion, not hunger, not desire. Her mind was having trouble with the thought that Lucas’s kiss hadn’t caused Rina to burst into sexual flame.

A knock on the door startled her into a soundless gasp. “Yes?”

Tamsyn’s smile appeared in the doorway. “I brought you a cup of hot chocolate. If you need anything else, let me know.” She put the mug down on a bedside table. “I’ll leave you in peace.”

“Tamsyn?”

“Yes?” She paused with her hand on the doorknob.

“Can you explain something to me?” Sascha couldn’t ask Lucas. It would betray too much she wasn’t ready to face. However, Tamysn had said she was a healer. Maybe that meant what was said between them would remain in confidence.

“The kiss?” Tamsyn raised a brow.

Sascha thought she hid her surprise well. “Yes.”

“It’s like when he kissed me the first time we met. He’s alpha and each time he touches us, he reinforces the bonds of Pack. With the women, he’s generally more affectionate.” She rolled her eyes. “They’re chauvinistic pigs but we love them. Anyway, as I was saying, that kiss wasn’t sexual in any way. It was about . . . togetherness.”

“What about with the men?” Sascha asked, the seeds of understanding blooming in her mind.

“They go for night runs, fight each other to test their skills, and occasionally get together to play poker or watch a game. It works.” She gave a mystified shrug.

“So a kiss is nothing special to Lucas?” Her idiocy where this one male was concerned kept surprising her into hurt. He’d said it was an experiment. Perhaps he’d wanted to know what it was like to kiss a “hunk of concrete.”

Tamsyn cocked her head to the side and gave Sascha a probing look. “Inside the pack, it’s special because it tells us he cares for us, that he’ll die for us.”

Sascha nodded, feeling worse and worse.

“But outside the pack? The only women I’ve known Lucas to kiss outside the pack are the ones he wants in his bed.” The door shut behind the grinning healer.

Sascha’s cheeks flamed. Lucas wanted her in his bed. In spite of her vows to not let him reach her, she was aroused to fever pitch. Concentration went out the window. Dreams intertwined with reality and she remembered his kiss in the forest as she remembered his far more intimate kiss in her dreams.

It was the prosaic sound of an engine getting closer that brought back the world and reminded her what she was meant to be doing. Taking a deep breath, she sat down cross-legged on the floor and started to recite a mental exercise so demanding, it succeeded in driving everything else from her mind. Ready, she took the first step out into the Net.

The world opened.

In front of her was an endless starry sky. Each star was a mind, some strong, some weak. Her star was at the center of this universe because she was the entry point. The PsyNet was spread across the world but if she wanted find a particular mind, all she had to do was think of it and it would appear in her field of vision, something like a link on the human-changeling Internet. However, similarly to a link, she had to have a starting point—knowledge of what the mind felt like, looked like.

There was her mother’s blazing star—a cool, pure brilliance. Over there were some of the Psy who worked in the Duncan empire. But she didn’t want to speak to anyone today. What she was interested in were the dark spaces between minds, the spaces where information floated, controlled into order by the NetMind.

She allowed her consciousness to flow out, letting data filter through her as if she were doing nothing more than catching up on the news. The NetMind brushed past her and kept going, not alive, not dead, but sentient in a way the world had never known. Still young, it was the librarian of this vast archive.

It would’ve been easy to become sidetracked by the endless streams of data, but despite her free-floating appearance, she was being very choosy, her senses tuned to a fine point. This was about murder . . . and the greatest lie that had ever been perpetuated by a race upon its own kind.

Lucas returned
a few minutes after five to find Sascha and Tamsyn standing in the yard.

“The juveniles?” the healer asked the second he got within earshot.

Sascha looked up, face drawn. “Are they all right?”

“They were already on their way back by the time I tracked down their whereabouts.”

“They heard?” Tamsyn’s relief was obvious.

Lucas saw Sascha frown as she realized that something was going on beneath the surface. It had been inevitable. She was too smart to miss much. “They were stopped by a SnowDancer patrol and told to haul ass back home.”

“Were your packmates injured?”

He shook his head. “They treated the kids as if they were wolf pups.” That was very unusual. When they’d first decided on a truce, Hawke had put out the word that the leopards were allies, but letting them pass without trouble and doing what the soldiers had done was something entirely different. Lucas had been alpha too long not to understand the implied message, but it was an offer he couldn’t accept without considerable thought. “They’ll be home by nightfall.”