The Psy-Changeling Collection (31 page)

“Why not?” His hand parted the sides of her white shirt and it was only then that she realized he’d unbuttoned it. Long fingers found her breast through her bra and plucked at her nipple.

“Lucas.” It was more moan than word.

“The mating dance is what two leopards go through on their way to mating for life.” He closed his hand over her breast and squeezed.

Her eyes flicked open, cold fear dousing the fire he’d stoked. “What happens if one half of a mated pair dies?”

“The survivor will never mate again.” That possessive hand was pulling down the cup of her bra to rub lazily at her aroused flesh.

“No, Lucas.” She tried to wiggle out from under him but he wouldn’t let her. “You can’t. I might not survive the week.”

“You aren’t going anywhere.” He sounded more dominant than she’d ever before heard him sound, his eyes completely panther. “You belong to me.”

They were words she’d waited for her whole life but she couldn’t accept them. “Don’t I get a choice?”

“You made it when you brought me into your dreams, into your mind.” He nipped gently at her lower lip. “And you made it again when you let me into your body.”

There was no way Sascha was going to leave Lucas without a mate for the rest of his life. “I won’t cooperate.”

“Sure you will.” Moving his head, he sucked her nipple into his mouth.

Her fingers tunneled into the silky lushness of his hair. “Stop.”

He murmured in pleasure and his other hand slipped down to cup her between her legs. Even through the material of her slacks, she felt the rough heat of his hold.

She tugged at his head and he lifted it only enough to give him room to move to her other breast. Instead of pushing down the cup, he licked her through it, one hand molding her stomach. It was impossible to think with this much sensation overloading her. But she had to speak, she had to make him understand. “You don’t know me,” she whispered.

He raised his head. “I know you inside out.”

“No, Lucas. I’m not changeling—I’m Psy. My mind is who I am.”

“Liar.” He pinched one wet nipple.

Her entire body shuddered and for an instant she was nothing but a creature of the flesh.

“You’re as much animal as me.” It was a husky whisper against her ear. “As sexual, as hungry, as needy.”

She shook her head, shaken by the power of his words, the addiction of his touch. “I could kill you with one thought.”

He rubbed his jaw across the skin of her upper breasts. “Could you, kitten?”

That easily, he won their personal war. Lucas was more important to her than her own life. “Don’t,” she said. “Stop this before it’s too late.”

“No one can stop it. I’ll kill anyone who tries.”

Looking into those cat eyes, she was certain he meant every word. She was as certain that she had to stop him before he tied himself to a woman who was so deeply broken, she wasn’t even sure she was Psy anymore.

A day later,
Sascha sat in the living area of the safe house trying to think up arguments to convince Lucas of the soundness of her plan. The problem was, she hadn’t figured out how to create the diversion that would give the killer a head start to scenting her. She’d spent the whole day trying to think of something and all she’d come up with was a crude “bomb.”

If she couldn’t work out anything else by tomorrow, she’d have to use that—Brenna had suffered enough. At least neither Enrique nor Nikita had tried to contact her so far. She assumed that they were distracted by their own plan to catch the serial killer.

Lucas had been in and out throughout the day and she guessed that he’d been putting plans in place in case they weren’t able to save the lost SnowDancer. Right now, he was standing by the window, staring out into the night. His skin glowed a burnished gold in the soft light of the lamps around the room.

“What information did you steal?” he asked, turning to look over his shoulder. He’d barely spoken to her that day but had touched her at every opportunity.

She remained curled up in the corner of the sofa, watching him as warily as a gazelle might watch a lion. Lucas wasn’t human, wasn’t Psy. He was a predator and he’d decided she was his. It was going to take everything she had to get away from him before she destroyed them both.

Even if Lucas didn’t allow her to execute her plan, the Council’s mercenaries would hunt her down on the PsyNet the second her failing shields revealed her flaw. Her firewalls were already starting to show the finest of hairline fractures. She might not be able to save herself but she would save Lucas. She
would not
sentence him to a life without a mate, no matter how much she ached for him to belong to her. “My family’s history.”

Someone walked into the room from the kitchen. Tamsyn’s slender frame was followed by Nate’s larger body. “Hope we’re not interrupting.”

“There’s nothing to interrupt,” Sascha said quickly, thankful for their presence. She needed a buffer between Lucas’s demands and her own clawing desire to give in to them. “I was just telling Lucas I stole information about my family from the PsyNet.”

Lucas shifted from his position by the window and headed over to the sofa. His eyes tracked Nate’s every move and Sascha felt a huge wave of almost dangerous possessiveness hit her. In a quiet moment while Lucas had been out, Tamsyn had shared that leopards were highly unstable at this stage of the mating dance and liable to attack anyone they saw as a threat.

She’d asked Sascha not to dispute Lucas’s claim, warned her that fighting an alpha male during mating was simply not done. Sascha understood why Tamsyn had cautioned her but knew she couldn’t follow the healer’s advice, not if it meant a lifetime of loneliness for this male she adored. But she let him sit beside her on the sofa, let him put her feet on his thighs, let him massage her calves.

“Why would you need to steal information?” Nate frowned and took a seat as far from Sascha as possible. Tamsyn perched on his lap with her arm around his neck.

“Our family’s physical records were destroyed during a fire at some stage in the past.” Sascha had always been frustrated by that, had always felt like there was so much she didn’t know. “The files on the PsyNet should’ve been our backup but we were told the Net information had been inexplicably corrupted.”

Lucas’s hand tightened on her calf, a silent signal to pay attention to him. “Was it?”

“No.” She met his gaze. “It’s all there, centuries of history.” A rich archive that had been hidden from the very people who should’ve had access to it. What else did the Council keep from her people? What else was labeled restricted?

“What did you find out?” Tamsyn asked, curling up on Nate’s lap. The movement was so catlike, so sensual, that Sascha was momentarily startled. The other woman’s practical nature had almost blinded her to the fact that she, too, was a leopard.

“There was nothing really unusual until I went back to my great-grandmother, Ai.” Without conscious intent, she found she’d moved closer to Lucas until she was almost in his lap. One of his arms was stretched along the back of the sofa, while his other hand continued to stroke up and down her bent leg. “Her record was tagged with a red flag.”

“Is that some kind of indexing system?” Nate was rubbing the back of Tamsyn’s neck and his mate was almost limp in relaxation against him.

Sascha was struck by the trust evident between the two. No Psy would ever leave herself that vulnerable to a bigger male. Yet Tamsyn had without hesitation. And so had Sascha when she’d let Lucas love her as he pleased. These men might have the potential for the negative emotions that had driven her race to cripple their own children, but they also had the ability to care on a level the Psy would never experience.

“Not that I know of.” She glanced away from the other couple to find Lucas’s eyes looking at her so intently, she had the feeling he knew precisely what she’d been thinking. “My suspicion is that it’s something Henry and Shoshanna Scott are doing on their own. I can’t see my mother allowing them to go through our familial history.”

A tree limb waved across the uncurtained window, casting shadows against the wall. And she became aware she was sitting in Lucas’s lap, held to him by one arm while the other moved rhythmically over her outer thigh. She should’ve have been frightened at her need for him, a need so deep it was overriding the powerful mental blocks she’d created to force herself to keep her distance. Instead, she wanted to rub up against his masculinity until heat and sensation were all she was.

“Kitten.” The raw edges of possessiveness were gone from the husky murmur against her ear. It was as if her slow capitulation had calmed him. “Why the red flag?”

“I’m not sure but I think it had something to do with her talents as a Psy.” Laying her head against him, she shared the most terrifying thing. “After I saw that red flag, I went back through the more recent histories. There was a second flag.”

No one spoke.

“It was on my record.” Her mind snapped back to the way Enrique had been shadowing her. Someone knew or had guessed her flaw. That someone was watching her for any mistake. It was entirely likely that Enrique was playing both sides of the field, using Nikita and Henry to his own advantage.

“Do you have any idea why they might’ve singled you and Ai out?” The rough edge was back in his tone.

Sascha undid the top buttons of his shirt and slipped her hand inside to lie against the fury of his heartbeat. Almost immediately, she felt him pull his aggression back under control. It no longer startled her how she knew what to do to soothe her mate—it was part of the magic. “The terminology used back then was different. Ai was labeled an E-Psy. We no longer have that term in our lexicon.”

Tamsyn frowned. “Was there any other information?”

“Ai was born in 1973. Silence went into effect in 1979, when she would’ve been six years old. Everyone under seven years of age was automatically enrolled into the Protocol.” She couldn’t imagine how that young girl must’ve felt at being taught to obliterate everything she’d learned to value.

“How many did they lose?” Tamsyn asked gently, her healer’s mind seeing the problem.

“I don’t know. The numbers are buried deep but everyone knows it was devastating. The transitional children had a very low survival rate.”

Lucas’s fingers stroked through her hair, which he’d undone while she’d been speaking. “But Ai survived.”

“Yes. It was noted in her file that her mother, Mika, was one of the strongest opponents of Silence. I thought at first that that was why Ai’s file had been tagged but there were other odd things in there. Her designation was as an 8.3 E-Psy at birth but after she completed Silence, she was relegated to a 6.2 nonspecialized Psy.” More had been destroyed than simply Ai’s soul.

Sascha wept deep inside for the two women she’d never had the chance to know. What must it have done to Mika to watch the child she’d named Ai—which meant “love” in her language—be taught to devalue that very emotion?

“You’ve lost me.” Tamsyn sat up within Nate’s arms.

Sascha dragged her mind back from the horrors of the past. “Psy are classified according to our psychic strength and specialization. For example, my mother is a Gradient 9.1 Tp-Psy, which means her major talent lies in the area of telepathy. Like most Psy, she has several other skills, but in terms of strength, they all fall below 2 on the Gradient—our measuring system.” She paused to ensure they understood.

“Go on,” Tamsyn said.

“Then there are the Tk-Psy.”

“Telekinetic,” Nate guessed.

“Yes. We also have the M designation—Medical. The M-Psy can look inside a body and find the physical causes of illness. They’re the specialty other races most commonly come into contact with. There are several other fields of talent. Telepaths are relatively common and tend to have other specialties within their telepathy.”

Like her mother with her viral poisons and Ming LeBon’s genius at mental combat. “Medical is midrange. Some rarer specialties include psychometry, the teleportation-capable telekinetics, and transmutation—the ability to force a physical object to change its shape. The most rare are the F-Psy.”

Lucas’s hand slipped under her shirt to lie against the skin of her back, hot and burning, a brand she had no desire to escape. She was having to fight herself as much as him in this shatteringly important decision. Not to mention the rest of the pack.

The leopards had closed ranks. No one would tell her what the final steps of the mating dance were so she could avoid taking them. She was their alpha’s chosen mate and they weren’t going to give her the chance to slip away. Even Vaughn had refused, though she’d tried to convince him it would save Lucas’s life. Not one of them understood the power of the PsyNet. It could
not
be fought.

CHAPTER 20

“F-Psy,” Lucas murmured.
“Let me guess. Foresight?”

She nodded. “These days they’re usually hired by businesses to forecast market trends, but I’ve heard that in the past, they often worked for Enforcement and local government in order to prevent murders and disasters.”

If they hadn’t succumbed to the lure of cold hard cash, forgetting the human emotions behind death and loss, perhaps Lucas’s parents would still be alive. How could he not hate her people? Hate
her
?

“But no E-Psy,” Tamsyn said.

“No.” Sascha frowned. “It makes no sense. A specialty may be rare but it never disappears entirely.”

“Did you check the classification system?” Lucas asked.

She nodded and decided not to mention that she’d had to make a quick visit to the PsyNet to do so. “It wasn’t hidden. I guess they thought no one would ever care to look it up. Until Silence, E was an accepted designation. It disappeared soon after the Protocol went into effect and wasn’t replaced in the classification charts.” She made a frustrated sound. “But I don’t know what it means!”

“What’s your classification?” Nate asked.

It was the one question she didn’t want to answer, the one question that showed her how useless she was. “I’m nonspecialized.”