The Psy-Changeling Collection (45 page)

It wanted her to get out.

Faith knew without a doubt that there was no way it was going to let her go any farther down the road. Though she’d never before met a changeling, every part of her said she was in the very real presence of one. And if she was wrong?

Not seeing any other logical course of action, she turned off the engine, picked up her backpack, and opened the door. The cat landed in front of her as she stood frozen beside the vehicle, belatedly conscious of her ignorance about the protocol governing interspecies contact. Nobody had ever taught her how to speak to the changelings. She didn’t even know if they communicated like other sentient races.

“Hello?” she tried.

The cat pressed against her leg, nudging her away from the car until she stood alone in the pitch black of the road, a very large, very dangerous creature padding around her.

Hello,
she tried again. It was a cautious and extremely polite mental page, something considered acceptable in exigent circumstances.

He lifted his head and growled at her, teeth gleaming even in the heavy darkness that cloaked the world. She withdrew immediately. The cat didn’t like her mind attempting to touch his, recognized what she’d been doing. Someone had taught him shielding beyond natural barriers. And there was only one person who could’ve done that.

“Do you know Sascha?”

This time the teeth that were bared at her made her want to take a step backward but she stopped herself. She was Psy—she felt no fear. But all sentient beings had a survival instinct and hers was now asking what she’d do if the cats didn’t want anyone near their personal Psy. The answer was that she had no real choice but to continue.

“I need to speak to Sascha,” she said. “I have very little time. Please take me to her.”

The cat growled again and the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stood up in a reaction her body would usually have controlled. There was something very territorial, very aggressive about the sound. Then it walked away a short distance and looked back at her. Surprised at the easy acquiescence, she followed. Instead of heading up the road, it led her into the forest, deep enough that they were hidden from the road. Then it marked a tree with its claw.

She didn’t understand until the cat nudged at her legs hard enough to collapse them under her. “Okay, I get it. I’ll wait here.” That was when strong jaws closed around her wrist. She froze. It wasn’t hurting her but she could feel the power of those teeth. One press and she’d lose her hand. “What? What do you want?” She fought her need to reach out with her mind and speak to it on a level that was normal and familiar. Teeth scraped over her watch.

“Okay.” She waited for him to release her and he took his time doing so—the cat was very definitely male. Her eyes met his and she saw the sharp intelligence, the power and the fury. Dangerous and wild, he was also the most exotic thing she’d ever seen in her life. The urge to stroke her hands through the fur so close was almost impossible to resist. Except she knew this was one cat who’d never allow such an experimental touch.

Finally, he let go. She removed her watch and he took it in his teeth. Then he was gone, a blur so fast she barely caught the movement. Alone again, she shivered in the chill of the night and wrapped her arms around her pack. Would he come back? What if someone else found her here? The possibility of being surrounded by more of those cats made her reconsider the logic of what she was doing. They were unquestionably
not
Psy; therefore the rules she’d based her preparations on didn’t apply.

Pressing hard against the tree, Faith waited. She had no other option.

Vaughn walked out
of the bedroom and into the living room of the aerie wearing only a faded pair of jeans. He held
her
watch in his hand. “It doesn’t have a tracker.”

Lucas frowned and reached out to take it. Vaughn felt the irrational urge to keep the slim metallic band for himself, a surge of possessiveness so unusual that it startled him. He handed it over.

“Let me see.” Sascha peered at it from beside her mate. “It’s relatively ordinary as far as Psy timepieces are concerned.” She took it from Lucas and looked at the back. “Not engraved with any family designation.”

“I thought you might be able to pick up something from it.”

Sascha shook her head. “My psychometric skills are growing but this is too cold. I don’t think your Psy places much emotional importance on it.”

The oddness of the statement wasn’t lost on any of the three. The Psy placed no emotional importance on anything.

“You said she came out of that compound in Tahoe you were asking about?”

“Scaled the fence like she didn’t want anyone to see.” He retrieved the watch, hiding it away in his pocket. Where no one else could touch it.

“I didn’t think you Psy were much into the physical,” Lucas said, and there was a vein of sensual teasing in the words that Vaughn felt as sharply as a knife blade, though he’d never before been affected by the open sexuality of the pack’s mated pairs.

“Why don’t we discuss it tonight, hmm?” Sascha leaned her back against Lucas’s chest. “But that is unusual—did she do it with any skill?”

“Smooth as a cat.” It was the highest compliment Vaughn knew how to give. “Like she’d done it before.”

“Odd. And she said she wanted to see me?”

“Yes.” There was no way Vaughn was going to take Sascha out there and he knew Lucas wouldn’t allow it either. Psy couldn’t be trusted. Not even pretty redheaded Psy with skin as soft as cream.

Sascha’s night-sky eyes unfocused for an eerie second. “What did she look like?”

“Red hair.” He’d never seen hair that deeply red, that luxuriously silky. The cat had wanted to play with it while the man had wanted to do much, much more intimate things. “Cardinal eyes.”

Sascha stood up ruler-straight. “It can’t be. Impossible.”

Both men watched as she started to pace around the aerie. Vaughn felt Lucas’s possessiveness as if it were a physical being between them and for the first time, he saw a glimmer of where that emotion might spring from.

“What is it, Sascha?” Lucas caught her around the waist as she passed.

She leaned into the embrace. “I could be wrong, but red hair is common in one particular family in this area of the Psy. The NightStar line has an unusually high incidence of the recessive gene.” Sascha sounded utterly Psy at that moment. That was to be expected. She hadn’t been cat for much more than a few months. It would take time.

“NightStar line?” Lucas played his fingers through her hair.

“They’re a group of related families who operate under the PsyClan NightStar.”

“You said PsyClans were utilized by F-Psy.” Vaughn crossed his arms, his fingers tingling with the urge to know what it would be like to comb through the flame-red silk of a woman who climbed as well as any she-cat he knew.

She nodded. “The NightStar family has a history of producing F-Psy. They’re rare, but NightStar has always had at least one in every generation. Some weak, some powerful. The only cardinal I know of in this entire region is Faith NightStar.”

Faith.

He tested the name on his tongue and it fit, felt right. “Her name is the same as her PsyClan?”

“Yes. I’m not sure why, but that’s how it works for them. They align themselves to the PsyClan as a whole rather than to their individual families.” She bit her lip. “Cardinal eyes and red hair plus an isolated location—it could be Faith, but I don’t know every Psy in the area.”

“You’ve never met her?” It was Lucas who asked.

“No. The F-Psy are like shadows. People rarely see them. Even lower Gradients are considered too important to be left unprotected.”

“Why would an F-Psy want to see you?” Lucas looked at Vaughn. “She say anything else?”

“No. But she’s been waiting for over an hour and a half now if she’s where I left her.” And for some reason, that made Vaughn edgy. “We need to take care of this.”

“I want to speak to her,” Sascha said.

“Absolutely not.”

“No.”

Both men spoke simultaneously, Lucas with the protective instincts of a mate and Vaughn with those of a sentinel. Sascha rolled her eyes and shook her head. “You two still haven’t figured it out, have you? I’m never going to turn tame.”

Lucas scowled.

“Neither of you knows how to deal with her, how to ask the questions that need to be asked. Vaughn probably terrified her into silence anyway.” She turned those night-sky eyes on him.

“Psy don’t feel fear.” But her wrist had been very delicate under his teeth. “She’s much smaller than you.” And despite her height, Sascha was already fragile in comparison to the changelings.

Sascha nodded. “That would fit if she really is one of the F-Psy. Let’s go. And don’t even argue about it.”

The low growl came from Lucas. Vaughn wisely left the room and went out onto the platform, using the chance to get out of his jeans—leaving the watch tucked safety inside—and shift. He was waiting there when Lucas and Sascha exited.

“Head out and scout the area. Sascha and I will be behind you in the car.” Lucas didn’t sound pleased and Vaughn couldn’t blame him. “If you scent
anything
, let Sascha know.”

Vaughn nodded. Sascha was now connected to the sentinels through the Web of Stars, a mental network that Vaughn wasn’t completely comfortable with, but which did have its uses. Though they couldn’t communicate telepathically, they could send each other emotions, feelings. That in itself made it different enough from the PsyNet to calm his more aggressive instincts.

With a further nod, he jumped off the aerie and onto the ground. The night air rushed past him in a cool caress and then the earth was soft under the pads of his paws. He began to run.

CHAPTER 4

Faith had
no concrete idea of how much time had passed since the cat had taken her watch. But she estimated that it had been two hours at least, maybe three. What if he had no intention of coming back? She took a deep breath and told herself to focus. If he didn’t return, she’d get back in the car and drive on. Then it struck her that if the cat was intelligent enough to have stopped the vehicle, he was probably smart enough to have put it out of commission.

Something rustled to her right and she hunched closer over her bag, but when nothing happened, she allowed herself to relax. Strangely enough, though this was an unfamiliar place and situation, she was far more comfortable here than she would’ve been in a city. The rare times that she’d visited cities, she’d come away feeling bruised on the mental plane—as if she’d been under constant attack. Those experiences had always made her home seem more haven than prison.

She turned her head to scan the area again and felt every muscle in her body lock tight. Feral eyes looked calmly into hers. If she’d been human, she might’ve fainted. As it was, containing her reaction took every ounce of her control. “You’re very quiet,” she said, blindingly aware of the lethal danger scant inches away. “I guess it’s one of the benefits of being a leopard.”

A low, deep growl.

“I don’t understand.” What had she said to provoke that aggressive reaction?

Suddenly, the leopard loped off and she was left alone again. “Wait!” But he was gone. Logic stated she should get up and start walking. Sooner or later, she’d run into another member of DarkRiver. Leaving her pack on the ground, she stood and took a couple of steps in the same direction as the cat, hoping to see a path.

A hand closed around her neck and a hard male body pressed against her back, a line of living fire. She went completely motionless. He might be human now, but she knew with every ounce of her being that this was the same predator who’d growled at her a second before. The hand around her neck wasn’t the least bit painful, but she felt the power in it, understood that he could crush her windpipe without effort.

“I am
not
a leopard,” he said into her ear, and the sound was so rough she wondered if he’d come back fully from the animal.

“Oh.” Her mistake was no surprise—she knew less than nothing about the reality of changelings. Her world had never been one where they intruded. “I apologize for offending you.”

“Aren’t you curious what I am?”

“Yes.” She was also curious about his human face. “Can I turn around?”

His soft chuckle vibrated along her body and demanded her complete attention. “It’s not that dark, Red—I didn’t have any clothes with me.”

It took a few moments for her brain to work through that statement. The second she did, she became hyperconscious of the sheer heat of the body aligned so closely to her own. The part of her that craved new experiences wanted to turn, but she knew that would be sheer foolishness. This man was hardly likely to indulge her intellectual curiosity about his body. He’d almost bitten off her head for daring to call him the wrong species.

“Please let go.”

“No.”

The flat no took her by surprise. Nobody said no to her, not like that. They always tried to couch it in more polite terms. That treatment may have kept her cooperative and rational, but it had also left her no tools with which to deal with the hard reality of a world where people didn’t follow the accepted rules of behavior. “Why?”

“Why not?”

She raised her own hand to the one he had around her neck and tugged. No movement. The message was clear. He wasn’t going to hurt her, but neither was he going to budge. “If you’re not a leopard,” she said, deciding to attempt a civilized conversation, “then what are you? You’re in DarkRiver territory and according to my information, it’s a leopard pack.”

“It is.” His thumb stroked absently over her skin. She cut off the physical reaction before it began. If her body felt, then soon her mind would want to experience emotion and that was unacceptable.

“You’re not with DarkRiver?” Had she been fooled into trusting the wrong cat?

“I didn’t say that.”