The Psy-Changeling Collection (83 page)

He didn’t respond.

“Walker’s different.”

“My brother is a telepath with a special affinity for young Psy minds. He was a teacher in the Net.”

She took time to think that through, surprised he’d answered at all. “You’re saying he already had the capacity to feel emotions before you defected?”

“We all have the capacity,” Judd corrected. “The whole point of the conditioning under Silence is to cauterize that capacity—elimination is impossible.”

She wondered what he saw in her face, because
she
saw only the most chilly calm on his. He stood unaffected by her anger, her fear . . . her pain. The realization caused an odd, hollow sensation in her stomach. “But you said Walker’s different.”

A nod sent several dark strands of hair falling across his forehead. “My brother’s constant contact with children who hadn’t yet finished the conditioning process, contact that continues with Toby and Marlee, means that he was always more susceptible to breaching Silence in the right environment.”

“What about you?” It was a question she’d never before asked. “What did you do in the Net?”

She thought she saw his shoulders tighten. But when he replied, his tone was unchanged. “You don’t need any more nightmares. Now, tell me what you see.”

She stepped closer to the dangerous maleness of him. “You’ll have to talk about it someday.” But she knew from his inflexible stance that it wasn’t going to be today. So she gathered up her courage and opened that box of evil and death. “I saw Timothy’s death in a dream. But . . . he didn’t have a face then . . . just a smooth oval of bare skin where features should’ve been.” She couldn’t get the disturbing image out of her head. “I saw how he would die.” A sharp blade cutting through muscle and fat to expose bloodred flesh.

Judd continued to watch her without blinking. “Could be simple transference—your mind’s way of interpreting the images Enrique left in your brain.”

It disgusted her that Enrique had gotten that far. Sascha had assured Brenna that she hadn’t broken, that she’d kept the bastard from her innermost core, but it didn’t feel like that. No, it felt like he’d crawled into the very essence of her being, violating every part of her from the inside out. And Sascha didn’t know the worst of what the butcher had done . . . what she had submitted to—Brenna intended to take those secrets to the grave.

“Brenna.”

Stomach churning, she raised her head. “Transference?”

His eyes were piercing, as if he were attempting to see through her skin. “You could be mistaking or merging an old or known image over a new one.”

Because Enrique had liked to terrorize her by showing her recordings of his past kills. “No,” she disagreed. “Even before I saw Tim’s body, I could feel differences . . . in the cuts, in the evil.” Enrique’s favorite weapon had been a scalpel, used in conjunction with the telekinetic powers of his cardinal mind. Cardinals were the strongest grade of Psy, but Enrique had been a power even in that select company. “It’s as if I’m being forced to watch someone else’s fantasies.” It was her ultimate fear—having her mind raped again, being shoved full of dark, nauseating thoughts nothing could wash away.

“You’re a changeling, not a telepath.” For a second, she thought she saw the gold flecks spark to life in the rich brown of his eyes. “There’s more.” Not a question.

She swallowed. “When I saw the murder in my dreams, when I heard the screams, it—” Her nails cut into the fleshy pads of her palms.

“It what, Brenna?” His voice was almost gentle. Or maybe that was what she needed to hear.

“It excited me,” she admitted, feeling dirty and wrong . . . a monster. “I
enjoyed
it.” She had craved the agony of her victim, her blood fevered with sick excitement. “Every cut, every scream.”

Judd’s expression didn’t change. “But only during the actual dream?”

She wanted to be held so badly, but Judd Lauren was about as likely to do that as he was to turn wolf. “It’s like
he
left a piece of himself inside of me.”

“Santano Enrique was a true sociopath. He didn’t feel anything.”

Her laugh sounded jagged to her own ears. “If you’d seen him as I did, you would never say that. He might have been cold, but he enjoyed what he did. And he infected me.”

“Enrique didn’t have that ability. Transferring mental viruses is a rare skill.” He pushed off the door and walked to her. “Sascha found no trace of one in your mind and she’d know—her mother is the best viral transmitter in the Net.”

“He did something!” she insisted. “These thoughts, these feelings, they’re not mine.” They couldn’t be. Not if she wanted to remain sane.

“You shouldn’t be seeing anything,” he said, standing so close she could feel his body heat. Alarm and need mixed in raw confusion. “Your brain pathways function completely differently from those of a Psy.”

She went to thrust a hand through her hair and stopped. Her waist-length mane was gone, another thing Enrique had stolen. “Do you think he changed that?”

Judd’s muscles rippled as he uncrossed his arms. “It would seem to be the logical conclusion. If you let me scan your mind—”

“No.”

He inclined his head in a small nod. “Fine. But that makes it much harder to diagnose the problem.”

“I know. But no.” No one would ever again crawl into her mind. For most victims, it was the last inviolate space. For her, it was a part that had been brutalized once and would never trust again. “Do you have any idea what it could be?”

“No.” He reached out to touch her neck. “How did you get this bruise?”

Taken completely off guard, she found herself placing her hand over his. “A bruise? Maybe when I was sparring with Lucy.” Brenna might not be a soldier, but she needed to be able to protect herself . . . now more than ever. Because the truth that no one knew, the secret she’d successfully concealed since the rescue, was that Enrique hadn’t simply damaged her mind, he had destroyed her on a far more fundamental level, a level that threatened to obliterate her very identity. “Can you find out about my dreams?”

His hand was big under hers, his fingers long. She was exquisitely aware of every millimeter of skin-to-skin contact. Touch might be second nature to her race, but predatory changelings didn’t let just anyone touch them. Only Pack, mates, and lovers had skin privileges. Judd fit none of those criteria. Yet she didn’t push him off.

“I’ll put out some feelers.” He withdrew his hand, the roughness of his palm an unexpected shock. “But you have to accept that no answers may be forthcoming. You’re unique—the only one of Enrique’s experiments to have survived.”

He watched
Brenna Kincaid leave Judd Lauren’s room from the shadows. It was all he could do not to leap out and choke the life out of her right there and then. The bitch was supposed to die months ago, but she’d clawed her way back to life. And now she’d remembered something. Why else would she have pulled that scene with the body?

The words that left his mouth were low and vicious.

He’d been close to panic in the days after her rescue, but thankfully, her memory had turned out to be full of holes. If those holes were filling up, he was in trouble. The kind of trouble that could lead to an execution
—
especially if she had that fucking Psy on her side. He should’ve betrayed the whole Lauren family the first chance he’d gotten, but he’d waited too long to use the information and now his greed had come back to haunt him.

It made no difference. He had no intention of being hunted down like a rabid dog. He stared at the pressure injector in his hand, the same one that had weakened Tim and made him such easy prey. It could be used on Brenna, too. The crazy-eyed whore was not going to mess up his life.

Judd
kept his eye on Brenna until she reached the end of the long corridor and turned the corner to join the steady flow of people on the other side. His military-trained mind had picked up something in the air the second after he’d opened the door, but he could find no reason for the warning flag. Still, he didn’t move until she was safe.

Then, closing the door, he glanced down at his hand, flexing and unflexing it in an effort to lose the imprint of heat burned into it the second he’d touched Brenna. It had been an utterly irrational action, prompted not by thought but by some buried instinct that had momentarily overridden his conditioning when he’d glimpsed the bruise marring her skin.

His phone beeped, reminding him he had a job to complete. He couldn’t afford to be distracted from his goals by a changeling who looked to him to vanquish her nightmares. As if he were . . . good. What would Brenna say if he told her that he
was
the nightmare?

His phone beeped a second time. Picking it up, he switched off the alarm and went to wash off the sweat that coated his body. The tactile sensation of soft feminine skin continued to cling to his palm, but he knew it would disappear soon enough—the scent of death had a way of immersing everything in chilling frost.

And, Judd thought as he packed the surveillance equipment he’d need tonight, he was very good at causing death, had been since he was ten years of age. Tonight was a simple tracking job, but only days remained until the hit. The bombs were nearing completion. All he needed now was a window of time, of opportunity. Then blood would spread across his skin once more, a scarlet flower that told the true story of what he was.

CHAPTER 5

In the rich
velvet night of the PsyNet, the door to an impenetrable vault slammed shut. A vast mental network that connected millions of Psy across the world, the Net housed their collective knowledge and was updated trillions of times a day as Psy uploaded data. It also allowed those of their race to meet at a moment’s notice, no matter their physical location. Tonight, seven minds blazed into brightness in the darkest core of the Net, each appearing as a white star so cold, it threatened to cut.

The Psy Council was in session.

Kaleb was the first to speak. “What could you possibly have been thinking?” The question was directed at the dangerously powerful minds of Henry and Shoshanna Scott, married couple and fellow Councilors. “The Liu Group was not amused to find that their family archives had been hacked and several members’ files tagged as ‘at risk.’” They all knew the at risk label was one step away from a sentence of full rehabilitation.

“We are Council.” Shoshanna spoke for both Scotts, something she seemed to be doing more and more. “We don’t have to explain our actions to the populace.”

Tatiana Rika-Smythe entered the conversation. “I assume you targeted other family groups as well. What was your purpose in placing the tags?”

“To monitor those who might be susceptible to breaking Silence.”

“Rehabilitation takes care of that problem.” Tatiana’s voice held a ring of finality.

“If that’s the case, then explain Sascha Duncan and Faith NightStar to me,” Shoshanna said, referring to the two recent defectors from the Net. “Nikita? Sascha is your daughter after all.”

“Two anomalies.” Kaleb very deliberately backed Nikita. “Furthermore, it appears you were running unsanctioned searches long before those anomalies took place, so there can be no logical connection between the two.”

“We saw those anomalies approaching, as the rest of you didn’t.” Shoshanna wasted none of the calculated Psy charm she pulled out for media appearances. “Have you heard the whispers in the Net? They’re talking openly of rebellion.”

“She’s correct,” Tatiana said, her allegiance unclear as always.

“I suggest we let them talk. To a certain extent.” Kaleb directed his words to the entire Council. “Trying to stifle all dissent is what caused problems in the past. As the situation stands, we can keep an eye on the agitators . . . and take care of any problems before they have a chance to do any real damage.”

“Be that as it may, that’s not the issue at hand,” Nikita pointed out. “I submit that the Scotts’ findings be turned over to the Council. If they were acting as Councilors, then the information belongs to the Council. If they were acting on their own, they had no authority and the data should be seized in any case.”

Kaleb was impressed by Nikita’s neat trap, but said nothing to that effect. Shoshanna was already well on the way to becoming his enemy. But that wasn’t what kept him silent—he wanted to see who would speak in the Scotts’ favor, betraying a possible alliance.

“I’d be interested in seeing the data.” Ming LeBon finally spoke. A master of mental combat, he was a Councilor no one but his most elite soldiers ever actually
saw
. Kaleb had been unable to find a single image of him—Ming was a true shadow.

“It may prove useful.” Tatiana.

“Put it on the table and then we’ll decide.” Marshall, the most senior Councilor and their unofficial chair—by virtue of having survived longest as Council.

Three whose loyalties were unclear. Nikita and Shoshanna plainly stood on opposite sides of the line, and Henry was Shoshanna’s.

“Unfortunately, that’s impossible.” Shoshanna’s mental tone remained supremely confident. “It would require reentering each of the targeted files.”

“Surely you kept a master log?” Marshall articulated what they were all thinking.

“Of course. However, that log was hacked ten hours ago. The data has been scrambled beyond recovery.”

“Do you take us for rehabilitated idiots?” Nikita said, her psychic voice a razor. “No hacker in the Net is capable of circumventing a Councilor’s security.”

“It was a virus.” Shoshanna refused to back down. “The proof is here.” Something slammed into the empty “darkspace” inside the vault, a data file that vibrated with a broken viral signature.

Everyone but Nikita drew back. “It’s safe,” she pronounced a second later. “Not designed to spread through dark-space. Even if it were, all such viruses dissipate within a few inches at most. Dark-space is an inhospitable environment.”