The Psy-Changeling Collection (81 page)

“Is he going to be alright?” Brenna asked, when Tai moaned a second time.

“Give him a minute or two.”

Glancing back at him, she sucked in a breath. “You’re bleeding!”

He stepped away before she could touch his shredded forearms. “It’s nothing serious.” And it wasn’t. As a child he had been subjected to the most excruciating pain and then been taught to block it. A good Psy felt nothing. A good Arrow felt even less.

It made it so much easier to kill people.

“Tai went clawed.” Brenna’s face was furious as she glared down at the male slumped against the wall. “Wait till Hawke hears—”

“He won’t hear. Because you won’t tell him.” Judd didn’t need protecting. If Hawke had known what Judd truly was, what he had done, what he had
become
, the SnowDancer alpha would have taken him out at their first meeting. “Explain your comment about Sascha.”

Brenna scowled but didn’t press him about the scratches on his arm. “No more healing sessions. I’m done.”

He knew how badly she’d been brutalized. “You have to continue.”

“No.” A short, sharp, and very final word. “I don’t want anyone in my head again.
Ever
. Sascha can’t get in anyway.”

“That makes no sense.” Sascha had the rare gift of being able to speak as easily to changeling minds as to Psy. “You don’t have the capacity to block her.”

“I do now—something’s changed.”

Tai coughed to full wakefulness and they both turned to watch him as he used the wall to drag himself upright. Blinking several times after getting vertical, he lifted a hand to his cheek. “Christ, my face feels like a truck ran into it.”

Brenna’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”

“I—”

“Save it. Why did you come after Judd?”

“Brenna, this is none of your concern.” Judd could feel blood drying on his skin, the cells already clotting. “Tai and I have come to an understanding.” He looked the other male in the eye.

Tai’s jaw set, but he nodded. “We’re square.”

And their relative status in the pack’s hierarchy had been clarified beyond any shadow of a doubt—if Judd’s rank hadn’t already been higher, he’d now be dominant to the wolf.

Shoving a hand through his hair, Tai turned to Brenna. “Can I talk to you about—”

“No.” She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I don’t want to go with you to your college dance. You’re too young and too idiotic.”

Tai swallowed. “How did you know what I was going to say?”

“Maybe I’m Psy.” A dark answer. “That’s the rumor going around, isn’t it?”

Streaks of red appeared on Tai’s cheekbones. “I told them they were talking shit.”

This was the first that Judd had heard of the clearly malicious attempt to cause Brenna emotional pain and it was the last thing he would have predicted. The wolves might make vicious enemies, but they were also fiercely protective of their own and had closed ranks around Brenna as soon as she’d been rescued.

He looked at Tai. “I think you should go.”

The young wolf didn’t argue, sliding past them as quickly as his legs would carry him.

“Do you know what makes it worse?” Brenna’s question shifted his attention from the boy’s retreating footsteps.

“What?”

“It’s true.” She turned the full power of that shattered blue-brown gaze on him. “I’m different. I see things with these damn eyes he gave me. Terrible things.”

“They’re simply echoes of what happened to you.” A powerful sociopath had ripped open her mind, raped her on the most intimate of levels. That the experience had left her with psychic scars was unsurprising.

“That’s what Sascha said. But the deaths I see—”

A scream ripped the moment into two.

They were both running before it ended. A hundred feet down a second tunnel, they were joined by Indigo and a couple of others. As they turned a corner, Andrew came tearing around it and clamped his hand on Brenna’s upper arm, jerking his sister to a halt and raising his free hand at the same time. Everyone stopped.

“Indigo—there’s a body.” Andrew snapped out the words like bullets. “Northeast tunnel number six, alcove forty.”

Brenna wrenched out of her brother’s hold the second he finished and took off without warning. Having caught the un-hidden blaze of her anger before she’d quickly masked it, Judd was the first to move after her. Indigo and a furious Andrew followed at his back. Most Psy would have been overtaken by now, but he was different, a difference that had predestined his life in the PsyNet.

Brenna was a streak in front of him, moving with impressive speed for someone who had been confined to a bed only months ago. She’d almost reached the number six tunnel when he caught up. “Stop,” he ordered, his breathing not as ragged as it should have been. “You don’t need to see this.”

“Yes, I do,” she said on a gasping breath.

Putting on a burst of speed, Andrew grabbed her from the back, linking his arms around her waist to lift her off her feet. “Bren, calm down.”

Indigo raced past, a flash of long legs, dark hair streaming behind her.

In Andrew’s grip, Brenna began to twist furiously enough to cause herself harm. Judd couldn’t allow that. “She’ll calm down if you set her free.”

Brenna jerked to a stop, chest heaving and eyes surprised. Andrew wasn’t so silent. “I’ll take care of my sister,
Psy
.” The last word was a curse.

“What, by locking me up?” Brenna asked in a razor-sharp tone. “I’m never going to be put in a box again, Drew, and I swear if you try, I’ll claw my hands bloody getting out.” It was a mercilessly graphic image, especially for anyone who had seen the condition she’d been in after they had first found her.

Behind her, Andrew paled, but his jaw remained set. “This is what’s best for you.”

“Perhaps it’s not,” Judd said, meeting Andrew’s angry eyes without flinching. The SnowDancer soldier blamed all Psy for his sister’s pain and Judd could guess at the line of emotion-driven logic that had led him to that conclusion. But those same emotions also blinded him. “She can’t spend the rest of her life in chains.”

“What the fuck would you know about anything?” Andrew snarled. “You don’t even care about your own!”

“He knows a hell of a lot more than you!”

“Bren.” Andrew’s voice was a warning.

“Shut up, Drew. I’m not a baby anymore.” Her voice held echoes of darker things, of evil witnessed and innocence lost. “Did you ever stop to wonder what Judd did for me during the healing? Did you ever bother to find out what it cost him? No, of course not, because you know everything.”

She took a jerky breath. “Well, guess what, you know nothing! You haven’t been where I’ve been. You haven’t even been close.
Let
.
Me
.
Go
.” The words were no longer enraged but calm. Normal for a Psy.
Not
for a wolf changeling. Especially not for Brenna. Judd’s senses went on high alert.

Andrew shook his head. “I don’t care what the hell you say, little sister, you don’t need to see that.”

“Then I’m sorry, Drew.” Brenna slashed her claws across his arms a split second later, shocking her brother into letting her go. She was moving almost before her feet hit the ground.

“Jesus,” Andrew whispered, staring after her. “I can’t believe . . .” He looked down at his bloody forearms. “Brenna never hurts
anyone
.”

“She’s not the Brenna you knew anymore,” Judd told the other male. “What Enrique did to her altered her on a fundamental level, in ways she herself doesn’t understand.” He took off after Brenna before Andrew could reply—he had to be beside her to deflect the fallout from this death. What he couldn’t understand was why she was so determined to see it.

He caught up with her as she raced past a startled guard and into the small room off tunnel number six. She came to such a sudden halt that he almost slammed into her. Following her gaze, he saw the sprawled body of an unknown SnowDancer male on the floor. The victim’s face and naked body bore considerable bruising, the skin splotched different colors by the damage. But Judd knew that that wasn’t what held Brenna frozen.

It was the cuts.

The changeling had been sliced very carefully with a knife, none of the cuts fatal but the last. That one had severed the carotid artery. Which meant there was something wrong with this scene. “Where’s the blood?” he asked Indigo, who was crouching on the other side of the body, a couple of her soldiers beside her.

The lieutenant scowled at seeing Brenna in the room but answered, “It’s not a fresh kill. He was dumped here.”

“Out-of-the-way room.” One of the soldiers, a lanky male named Dieter, spoke up. “Easy to get to without being spotted if you know what you’re doing—whoever did this was smart, probably chose the location beforehand.”

Brenna sucked in a breath but didn’t speak.

Indigo’s scowl grew. “Get her the hell out of here.”

Judd didn’t follow orders well, but he agreed with this one. “Let’s go,” he said to the woman standing with her back to him.

“I saw this.” A faint whisper.

Indigo stood, an odd look on her face. “What?”

Brenna began to tremble. “I saw this.” The same reedy whisper. “I saw this.” Louder. “I saw this!” A scream.

Judd had spent enough time with her to know that she would hate having lost control in front of everyone. She was a very proud wolf. So he did the only thing he could to slice through her hysteria. He moved to block her view of the body and then he used her emotions against her. It was a weapon the Psy had honed to perfection. “You’re making a fool of yourself.”

The icy cold words hit Brenna like a slap.
“Excuse me?”
She dropped the hand she’d raised to push him aside.

“Look behind you.”

She remained stubbornly still. Hell would freeze over before she obeyed an order from him.

“Half the den is sniffing around,” he told her. Pitiless. Psy. “Listening to you break down.”

“I am not breaking down.” She flushed at the realization of so many eyes on her. “Get out of my way.” She didn’t want to look at the body anymore—a body that had been mutilated with the same eerie precision Enrique had used on his victims—but pride wouldn’t let her back down.

“You’re being irrational.” Judd didn’t move. “This place is obviously having a negative impact on your emotional stability. Step back out.” It was a definite command, his tone so close to alpha it set her teeth on edge.

“And if I don’t?” She gladly embraced the anger he’d awakened—it gave her a new focus, a way to escape the nightmare memories triggered by this room.

Cool Psy eyes met hers, the male arrogance in them breathtaking. “Then I’ll pick you up and move you myself.”

At the response, exhilaration burst to life in her bloodstream, chasing away the last acrid tang of fear. Months of frustration—of watching her independence being buried under a wall of protection, of being told what was best for her, of having her rationality questioned at every turn, all that and more snowballed into this single instant. “Try it.” A dare.

He stepped forward and her fingertips tingled, claws threatening to release. Oh yeah, she was definitely ready to tangle with Judd Lauren, Man of Ice, and the most beautiful male creature she had ever seen.

CHAPTER 2

“
Brenna
, what are you doing here?” The sharp question was bitten out in a familiar voice. Lara didn’t wait for an answer. “Move aside, you’re blocking the doorway.”

Startled, Brenna did as ordered. The SnowDancer healer and one of her assistants slid past, portable medical kits in hand.

Judd moved when she did, continuing to obstruct her view of the body. “This room is getting crowded. Lara needs space to work.”

“He’s dead.” Brenna knew she was being unreasonable, but she was sick of being pushed around. “She can hardly help him now.”

“And what do you intend to achieve by remaining here?” A simple question that highlighted her ridiculous behavior with cool Psy precision.

Hands curling against the urge to strike out at this male who always seemed to catch her at her weakest, she turned and walked out. Packmates glanced at her curiously as she passed. More than one wore a look of judgment—poor Brenna had finally snapped. It was tempting to walk past without meeting their gazes, but she forced herself to do the opposite. She’d had her self-respect stolen from her once. She would not relinquish it ever again.

Several pairs of eyes shifted away at being caught staring, while others continued to watch her, unblinking. Had the circumstances been different, she would’ve taken their intransigence as a challenge, but today, she just wanted to get away from the overwhelming
dead
scent of the body. However, that urgency didn’t blind her to the fact that even the boldest of them dropped their stares after looking past her shoulder.

“I don’t need you to fight my battles,” she said, after they cleared the crowd.

Judd moved to walk beside her, no longer a shadow at her back. “I wasn’t aware I was doing so.”

She had to concede he was probably telling the truth—most people in the den were simply too scared of Judd Lauren to want to draw his attention under any circumstances. “You saw the cuts.” She could still smell the odor of death mingled with the metallic edge of blood. “They were just like
his
.” The sharp gleam of a scalpel flickered in her mind. An image of spurting blood. Screams ringing against the walls of a cage.

“They weren’t identical.”

His cool response pulled her out of the nightmare chaos of memory. “Why do you sound so certain?”

“I’m Psy. I understand patterns.”

Dressed in black and with those emotionless eyes, there was no doubt he was Psy. As for the rest . . . “Don’t try to convince me that all Psy would’ve been able to process the details so quickly. You’re different.”

He didn’t bother to confirm or deny. “That doesn’t change the facts. The cuts on this victim—”

“Timothy,” she interrupted, a rock in her throat. “His name was Timothy.” She had known the fallen SnowDancer only in passing, but couldn’t bear to have him being reduced to nothing more than a nameless victim. He’d had a life. A name.