Primal Mirror, page 35
“What can RainFire do? Just tell us, and we’ll do it.”
“You’re already doing everything you can for a population of your small size—you can’t take any further load,” Aden had explained. “My people have bonded with yours. The emotional ties will further strengthen our local network. We may end up having to move closer to you and ask for you to initiate blood bonds to help with the integrity of it. It might be uncomfortable, but it shouldn’t hurt your pack.”
“Consider it done,” Remi had said without hesitation.
The leader of the squad had stared at the floor, his shoulders slumped and his hands hanging between his knees. “And your home territory, it’s far from where millions of Psy will die in a matter of days. Our children deserve not to grow up in a graveyard.”
Too bad his brave, loving, little cat’s family was full of cockroaches who’d probably survive the biggest loss of life the world had ever seen. The horror of it was something Remi’s brain struggled to comprehend.
So for today, for this minute, he focused on a wrong he could put right, a piece of the world he could fix.
“Where is this Hayward Scott?” he asked Angel.
“Moved into the compound with his people a couple of hours ago, soon as the authorities cleared it.”
Those authorities hadn’t been from Enforcement but from an arm of the Ruling Coalition set up to deal with the crimes of the powerful. Each member of the team was both strong on the psychic plane and—crucially—underwent regular sessions with empaths to ensure they remained uncorrupted and devoted to their task of justice.
But the team had to follow its own ethical rules.
The Scotts were about to learn that Remi’s ethics were those of a predator who understood honor as well as it understood violence.
* * *
• • •
HAVING something concrete to do gave him focus and energy. He left Rina with Auden when he went on the op with Angel.
Just the two of them, because this was about stealth.
He could’ve initiated legal proceedings, but that would take too long, and he wanted the Scotts to be afraid. From how they were acting, given the oncoming collapse of the PsyNet, they clearly thought they had an exit strategy figured. No need for fear.
That was about to change.
The Scotts were about to gain a close, private understanding of the emotion. He especially wanted them to be afraid of Auden so they’d stop treating her as a commodity they could use and discard.
Most of all, he wanted to punish them for making her afraid for so long.
Auden could make the final call about what she wanted to do when she woke, but he wasn’t about to let them steal that choice from her as they’d already stolen so many others. “Ready?” he said to Angel in the depths of the night.
He could only see his friend because of his night vision—they stood a significant distance from the security lights around the compound. While Remi was dressed in black, complete with a mask that covered all of his face but for his eyes, Angel wore the stripes of a tiger.
Now he rumbled a growl of acknowledgment, and they moved.
He and Angel, they’d pulled off plenty of ops when they’d been out on their own, barely needed to communicate to understand what the other wanted in the heat of a fight. But this, they’d discussed down to the minutest detail, because Angel wouldn’t otherwise be familiar with the layout of the compound.
As Remi watched, his best friend streaked into the lights, deliberately allowing himself to be seen by the guards who monitored the external feeds. He moved so fast that it appeared multiple tigers were prowling the compound.
Auden’s changelings on the attack.
The guards boiled out of the house, shouting orders and reaching for weapons.
He counted. Idiots. They were all outside. He knew that because Angel had organized a surveillance crew to keep an eye on the place since Auden was hurt. All of them understood that the Scotts were snakes, and snakes had to be watched.
For all her psychopathic faults, Charisma Wai would not have hired imbeciles like this.
As a result of their incompetence, Remi was able to run straight through to the house while every single guard was distracted hunting the tigers that appeared and vanished before they could get off a single shot. Angel growled several times right as Remi ran, once again capturing all their attention.
A heartbeat later and Remi was climbing up the outside of the house. Psy just didn’t think about changelings when they built. This house had so many hand- and footholds—and so many shadows of which a cat could take advantage.
All the security lights pointed outward, leaving the walls of the house itself dark.
Having aimed himself at the floor that held the family’s rooms, he now hauled himself in through an open window. He’d been prepared to break one if needed, would’ve just waited for the next burst of noise from the guards as Angel ran them ragged. But once again, the Psy sense of arrogance came to his rescue. They didn’t expect entry from such a high point.
He landed on the carpet with feline stealth before making his way down a hallway swathed in shadows. In his hand was a blocker that hid his progress from the cameras, because—if the Psy staved off their oncoming apocalypse—Remi wasn’t going to play into the desire of certain Psy families to start an interspecies war.
No one would ever have any proof of his presence here tonight.
Less than thirty seconds after he’d entered, he knocked on Hayward Scott’s door, the rap a firm one. “Sir.”
Rustling, as the man inside moved to unlock his door. “What is going—”
His words ended in a gasp as he came face-to-face with Remi—and the fast-acting sedative in the auto-injector in Remi’s hand. Psy didn’t do well with drugs, but he’d checked with Dr. Bashir about sedatives. The doctor, believing Remi was thinking about Auden’s possible future need for them, had given him a short list of fast-acting agents that would knock a Psy out almost at once.
“The problem will be at the other end,” Dr. Bashir had said. “When the patient wakes. Their psychic senses will be tangled, take time to unravel. However, with the ones I’ve listed, there’s no chance of a permanent injury.”
Dr. Bashir hadn’t been overselling how rapidly this stuff worked.
Hayward Scott slumped forward, unconscious almost before Remi had pulled the injector away from his neck. Remi was confident it had all happened too fast for him to scream for help on the telepathic plane. Throwing the older man over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, he walked down the stairs, sticking to areas in a surveillance shadow because there was no point in being arrogant and relying only on the blocker.
The house was more active now—he could hear movement, see lights at several corners. But it was a big house, and the entire group in residence was focused on the area Angel had turned into a circus. Remi heard a scream at that instant, knew his friend had taken one of them down to ensure they saw him as a continued and deadly threat.
Smile cold, Remi slipped out of the house right under the noses of the guards. Even if they spotted him in the external lights, none of them could match his speed. On their cameras, all they’d see was a human form racing away with one of their own.
As for Angel…well, there was no tiger pack in the country. Only friends and packmates were aware that Angel was a tiger, not a leopard. Remi could deny sending an assault force of “tigers” with a straight face.
He’d sent only a single highly intelligent tiger.
Who joined him at their vehicle ten minutes later, jumping into the back seat beside their package before Remi drove out. No one sought to stop them. If Remi had to guess, the guards were still hunting ghost tigers.
A shimmer of light in back.
“That was fun,” Angel said with a rare grin Remi saw in the rearview mirror. “I got four of them. Left them alive, but nicely mauled.”
Remi’s own grin was vicious. “We have to keep this asshole drugged until the Scotts decide to toe the line.”
“We could send the family his pinky finger in a lined box as further incentive.”
“You’re terrifying sometimes, my angelic friend.” Because he knew Angel—protective and fiercely loyal Angel—had meant that.
A shrug he heard in the rustle of the clothing Angel was pulling on. “Sometimes, you have to play with bastards on their own level.”
It was at times like this that Remi wondered about the lost years of Angel’s childhood, the ones about which he refused to talk even to Remi. “Scotts are about bloodlines, and they have no one else suitable of age if Hayward vanishes.”
Remi felt no pity for the unconscious man; he’d decided to take advantage of Remi’s wounded mate. Now he was paying the price.
“The family will do what we tell them to do.” Or more of them would meet with a leopard’s claws one dark night.
Remi didn’t play when it came to his mate and child.
Chapter 46
PsyNet status: Critical. Total collapse predicted in thirty-six hours. Mass casualties are to be expected.
Cooperation from the Human Alliance and all major changeling groups has been fed into the survival projection, but the possible success or failure of those attempts to merge with changeling networks, and/or to incorporate humans into small Psy networks as an emergency measure will not be known until Net failure.
The ShadowNet is also ready and waiting to accept refugees, but experiments to date suggest that direct links are not possible and must be made through an emotional tie to an individual already in the ShadowNet.
Current projection: 92% loss of Psy life.
—Report to Ruling Coalition and EmNet from PsyNet Research Group Alpha (21 November 2083)
SILVER MERCANT, DIRECTOR of the Emergency Response Network and mate to the alpha of the StoneWater bears, stared at the report that had just popped up on her organizer. She’d known. They’d all known. But to see it laid out in black and white…
Shoulders locked to rigidity, she pushed away from her desk to look below it—where a small polar bear cub sat playing with wooden blocks. “Dima?” she said, holding out her arms to the child she was babysitting while his mother ran errands.
Sleepy and lazy because it was close to his naptime, he came happily to cuddle with her, and she held him close as her eyes burned and her heart reached for her mate. Valentin was the reason she would survive the collapse—and he was the reason her family would survive.
She and her brother had both mated into the bear clan, and between them, they were near certain they could wrench the rest of the family into the clan.
Because Ena had built a family linked by bonds of love and loyalty unbreakable.
But near certain wasn’t complete certainty. And the Mercant family’s lives weren’t the only ones at stake. Snuggling a half-asleep Dima to her, she thought of all the people with whom she worked on a day-to-day basis, all the good, honorable people who might have no way out.
And the children…
Silver squeezed Dima tight enough that he grumbled little bear grumbles in his sleep. Softening her embrace at once, she kissed his head. If she could, she’d hold all the children of the PsyNet in her arms, give up her life for theirs. Her bear mate, with his huge heart, would do the same. But that wasn’t how it worked, no exchange of lives on the table.
The entire world had stepped up to the plate in the past weeks, when the collapse of the PsyNet had gone from a slow erosion to a sudden oncoming crash. Changelings, humans, the Forgotten, they’d offered to assist in any way possible, but the reason the PsyNet existed in the first place was that it needed to exist.
Even if every one of the contingencies—even the most unlikely—worked as intended, they’d be left with a shortfall of millions.
Millions of lives. Millions of hearts. Millions of deaths.
Hiding her face in Dima’s soft fur, Silver Mercant, ice queen to many and beloved mate to Valentin, cried tears silent and hot.
Chapter 47
Jaya, sweetheart, I have a patient for you. Coma as a result of bodily trauma and insult to the brain. I know things are difficult right now, but if you have even a couple of minutes, I think you could help her as I can’t.
—Message from Sascha Duncan to Jaya Laila Storm (21 November 2083)
“I’M GOING TO put our cub in her carrier for a little bit so she can warm up.” A deep rumble of a voice familiar and beloved. “Libby doesn’t need the incubator anymore, but Finn wants me to use this carrier in short bursts during her visits with you.”
Auden felt the loss of skin-to-skin contact like a limb being cut off, the small warmth on her chest suddenly gone…but the loss was so deep because her joy had been even deeper. Remi had brought her baby to her. She knew it had been him even before she’d heard the rumble of a purr against senses dulled and wrapped in cotton wool.
Our cub.
He’d claimed Libby, would protect her with his life. Libby would never know loneliness, would never be treated as disposable, would never wonder why she wasn’t good enough. She’d grow up loved—by an entire pack, but most of all, by the man who owned Auden’s heart.
At times, she could feel claws against her shields, his leopard wanting to enter. She wasn’t holding him back, didn’t have the power. Her mind was just broken, the shields that held him out the final desperate act of a psychometric bent on survival. Thick, almost tactile shields that had gone up the instant she began to slip into unconsciousness.
The thought started to whisper out of her grasp almost before it had formed, another wave of exhaustion rolling over her. Driven by a sense of vital urgency, she’d struggled against the waves at the start, only to find it tired her out and led her to sink even deeper into the dark, into a place where she could sense nothing.
Now she let the waves sweep her along, and she slept.
She had no idea for how long, but she knew Remi was there when she surfaced. His voice vibrated in her bones and made her want to curl up against his body so the sense of him could cover her all over. And then…Oh, my baby. Love poured out of her, rising through the dark to encompass the child Remi had placed against her chest.
Liberty’s tiny hands flexed against the shield, but that shield wouldn’t open even for her.
Auden cried inside, wanting to hold her baby close, but knowing her mind wasn’t a safe place for Liberty. Too many shattered and sharp edges, too many tangled threads. I love you so, my baby.
A brush of a rough hand on her cheek, cupping her face with protective warmth.
Her chest swelled with love as ferocious as the leopard who was hers.
She knew he was speaking to her, but couldn’t make out the words through the thickness of cotton inside her mind. And that mind, it was fading again even as the urgency pounding at her got louder and louder.
A faint voice that wasn’t a voice—not her own, not her mother’s ghost—was pleading with her to wake. It didn’t have words, didn’t speak, but she understood that it was dying and it needed her to wake. Auden tried but her bruised and battered mind couldn’t hold on, not even when the entity that spoke to her tried to offer her its very life in exchange for the unknown thing it needed from her.
The next time she “woke” it was to the awareness of a stranger nearby. An odd stranger. One who didn’t trigger any of Auden’s defenses when she inserted a thread into Auden’s locked-down mind. A touch that—how extraordinary—didn’t feel invasive but warm and considerate and wanted only the best for her.
On the structural level, the probe reminded her of her own ability. A psychometric? No, it couldn’t be. Psychometrics didn’t work with living beings.
Empaths do, murmured an undamaged corner of her mind. Psychometrics are the physical mirror to empaths.
When the probe began to withdraw, Auden halted it by wrapping a tendril of emotion around it. A hello. As quickly, she released her tendril to set the empath free. She’d never cage another creature, no matter how lonely she was inside the shell of her mind.
The empath halted…and then she began to drop sparks of emotion in a starlit highway. Auden looked at the lovely construct and, with urgency a thrumming beat in her blood, took a step forward, picked up a star.
Primal fury, raging anger, and pain. Oh, such pain.
Auden’s protective instincts surged. Who was hurting Remi? She’d kill them. And she realized she was running, gathering star after star in her arms. Sensing her baby’s confusion and grief at missing her mama alongside Remi’s pain, and Finn was there, too. He was so sad. Oh, and Rina, Rina had cried for her.
The stars overflowed her arms, but she kept on picking them up, until at last there were no more, and when she looked back, she saw that she’d run right through the survival shield her mind had thrown up to protect her. It fell away in front of her eyes, a parting curtain that revealed a mind riddled with a glittering blue spiderweb.
Oh.
A growl.
She turned, looked forward, laughed, and ran straight toward the crouched leopard who was snarling furiously at her for making him wait so long. She smashed into him with unstoppable force and he was primal heat in her mind, devotion unending, and loyalty boundless.
Remi, my Remi.
Her mate had a heart bigger than the sun, his love for her and her child—their child—a thing enormous, and his love for his pack a vastness no one but an alpha or an alpha’s mate could ever understand.
She fell even deeper into him, saw the passion and the need, the fantasies of limbs entwined and his hand around her throat, her body riding his, his mouth between her thighs. Strong hands holding her hips as he drove into her, gentler hands as he petted her down after a peak, kisses along her spine and on her throat.
