Slave to Sensation (19 page)

“So someone could've picked up her habits?”

“Yes. But to abduct her in broad daylight speaks of extreme confidence. The park isn't large or particularly wooded. He could've been seen from several angles.”

“Yet he wasn't.” If he was Psy, then there were things he could've done to hide himself. “A Tk-Psy with the ability to teleport could've taken her out with him.”

“Tk?”

“Telekinetic.”

“How much power would that take?”

“More than most Psy have. I doubt it was done that way.”

“Why?”

“Strong telekinetics can transport themselves easily but taking along another person is difficult, especially if they won't give you entry into their mind to ease the psychic transition.”

She'd learned all this during elementary school, when the different skills had still been in the same classes. Before the other cardinals had gone on to specialize and she'd been left alone to hone what pitiful skills she had, an embarrassment no one wanted to acknowledge.

“Could he have forced her mind open?” Lucas stretched out his legs and linked his arms around the back of the headrest. The lazy movement made her want to reach out and pet him . . . as she'd done in those forbidden dreams.

 

 

Clenching her hands on the wheel, she shook her head. “She's a changeling. That immediately doubles the difficulty, and even for a cardinal, forcing open a mind is already one of the most difficult of tasks. If you don't care about killing the victim, it can be done with a massive burst of power, but he wanted her alive.” So he could torture her.

Sascha took a deep breath and forced herself to continue. “Plus to do that
and
teleport her would've taken enough power to lay him up for days. I haven't heard of any strong Psy in that condition. That sort of thing, a Psy flaming out, tends to create a buzz in the Net.” She tapped the wheel. “He could've just planned it carefully and had a vehicle nearby. A lot of human serial killers function that way.”

“That's what the SnowDancers think. They've found a witness who saw an unfamiliar large vehicle with muddied license plates.” He rolled down his window as they entered a leafier part of the city. “Enforcement doesn't know. Except for the detectives working underground, this time nobody's even bothering to pretend to carry on an investigation.”

The conceit of whoever it was who was controlling Enforcement stuck a spear into the bubble of hope Sascha had been carrying around that her people were innocent. “Were you able to identify the owner of the vehicle?”

“No.”

“What was she wearing when she was taken?”

Lucas's scowl sounded in his voice. “Why do you need to know that?”

“The PsyNet is full of information. Anything that helps narrow things down might be useful.” There was no way to explain the Net to those who hadn't experienced it. It was a mass of data and the only controlling factor was the influence of the NetMind, which tried to make order from chaos. An entity that had evolved into its own separate sentience, it wasn't
alive
but it thought in a way that took it beyond mere machinery.

“Blue jeans, white shirt, black sneakers.”

She shot him a glance. “I didn't expect you to have that information at your fingertips.”

“An alert's already gone out to every changeling clan in the region, friendly or not, warning of the killer's proximity and asking for assistance. This is Brenna's photo.” He slid the glossy hard copy out from the pocket of his jacket but waited to hand it to her until she'd pulled up at a stop-light.

She took it with a feeling of inexplicable dread. The woman was laughing in the picture, her brown eyes brilliant with amusement, her head thrown back. Sunlight glinted off the pure blond strands of her straight hair and highlighted the curves of her body. She was short, perhaps five-four, but there was such life in her that she seemed to dwarf the two men in the photo with her.

“The males are her older brothers—Riley and Andrew,” Lucas said when she handed back the picture. “According to the SnowDancer alpha, they're homicidal.”

The light changed as she tried not to give in to the despair she'd felt from touching that photo. It was as if Brenna had reached out and pulled her into the hell she was undergoing.
Brenna
. A name. A face. A sentient being. “He wants to steal her life,” she whispered.

“After torturing her.”

“No, that's not what I mean.” She turned down the leafy lane that would eventually lead to Tamsyn's home.

“What, then?”

“She appears so vibrant, so full of joy and
life
. He wants to take that from her, wants to keep it for himself.”

Silence in the car.

“I don't know how I know that. I just do.” She came to a stop outside the sprawling house she'd visited once before. “He must be driven by the most poisonous rage.” She hadn't felt any such emotion in that odd, fleeting moment when she'd seemingly been sucked into Brenna's world, but what else could drive one being to so savage another?

“He doesn't know what rage is.”

She turned to look at Lucas, not frightened by his open blood-hunger. There was something clean about it, something real. “No one who feels the dark things he must is going to be able to hide it forever. He's going to break sooner or later.”

Lucas's eyes were hard green crystals. “For all our sakes it better be sooner. The clock is ticking.”

 

 

Tamsyn was edgy. “I miss the cubs,” she said to Lucas the second he walked in.

Hugging her, he tried to lend her some of his strength. Sascha stood quiet beside him but he felt the stirring at the base of his nape. It was, he realized, an almost constant feeling around her, so constant that he'd hardly been noticing. Something about Sascha gave off a low-level indication of Psy power in continual use.

Exactly what the heck was his Psy up to? Despite her unsuccessful attempt at betrayal, he wasn't immediately suspicious. The panther said that she was safe and the panther 's instincts had never been wrong. Tamsyn took a deep breath and let go of him after several minutes.

“Better?” he asked, brushing her hair off her face. Every time he looked into those healer's eyes, his heart broke a little and then rejoined. She was a persistent reminder of the mother he'd lost but she was also a reminder of the goodness Shayla had been.

She nodded. “I made Nate go to work. Stupid.” With that, she turned to head to her domain—the kitchen.

Sascha waited until Tammy was out of earshot. “If having the cubs away from her makes her this anxious, why did she let them go in the first place?”

“Overprotectiveness isn't good for predatory changelings.” He'd been guilty of making that mistake, especially in the months after Kylie's death. His need to keep his people safe, to not lose anyone ever again, had threatened to suffocate them. He'd caught himself before he'd caused irreparable damage but it was a fault he had to guard against day in and day out.

“Tammy didn't appear overprotective. In fact she seemed very open to letting them explore by themselves.”

“You've only seen her with them once.” But she'd guessed correctly. Tammy was the one who'd ripped into him for his behavior toward the juveniles. However, he couldn't tell Sascha that. It was one thing to trust his instincts about her, quite another to place the lives of others' cubs in her hands. That was a trust she hadn't yet earned.

It was the right decision for an alpha but maybe it was also made because he was still fuming over the betrayal she'd contemplated. “What smells so good?” he asked, walking into the kitchen.

Tammy finished setting the places. “Chicken pot pie with strawberry tarts to follow.”

“You didn't have to go to so much trouble,” Sascha said, and though the words sounded stilted, Lucas knew the sentiment was genuine.

To his surprise, so did Tamsyn. She touched Sascha's hand in fleeting reassurance. “Cooking relaxes me—maybe it's part of being a healer. If you don't help eat my efforts, Nate's going to start accusing me of trying to fatten him up.”

Lucas pulled out a chair. Instead of taking it, Sascha went to the other side and pulled out her own. Stubborn woman. “You eating with us, Tammy?”

“Yup.” She took off her apron and came to sit at the head of the table, Lucas to her right and Sascha to her left. “I feel strange sitting here—this is Nate's seat.”

That was why Lucas hadn't taken it. He might be alpha but this was a packmate's home and in here, Nate believed that he was alpha. Tamsyn might disagree, Lucas thought with a hidden smile, but she let Nate think what he liked because she loved him.

As they began eating, the healer started talking. “I can't stop thinking about that poor girl—Brenna.” She put down her fork. “He's probably hurting her right now. And we're sitting here doing nothing.”

It was Sascha who said the right thing. “If you think so negatively you'll make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Look past the anger and pain and think. Perhaps you'll discover a way to help her.”

Tamsyn looked at her for a long moment. “You're more than you appear, aren't you, Sascha?”

“No, I'm not.” Sascha stared at her food.

“The word is that the SnowDancers are skating the edge,” Tamsyn commented, her eyes still on Sascha. “I heard her brothers had to be restrained until they came to their senses and stopped speaking about taking off Psy heads.”

Neither of them mentioned Dorian. After his wild breakdown, he'd been acting almost spookily normal. Everyone was afraid that he was going to snap when they least expected it.

“What did they hope to achieve?” Sascha raised her head to meet Lucas's gaze. “Two changelings against the entire Psy race? It would've been suicide.”

“Logic and love don't necessarily coincide,” he said, watching her eyes trace the clawlike lines on his face. Unlike many a nonchangeling, she'd never appeared put off by the violent-looking markings. He'd caught her staring at them as if fascinated more than once. Nor had he forgotten the way she'd caressed them in his dreams. “They were hurting because they couldn't protect their sister—their need to strike out is understandable.”

Lucas appreciated their position as only someone who'd once been in that very place could. The years of waiting for his body to grow strong so he could claim vengeance had been torture of the most excruciating kind, slow and seemingly endless.

“What would Psy do in the same situation?” Tamsyn asked.

Sascha took long moments to answer. “There is no love in the Psy world, so logic would prevail.” Her words were crisp but her eyes gave her away.

Somehow, he'd learned to read those night-sky eyes, learned to interpret the haunting sadness that flickered over them for barely a millisecond before she asked, “Tamsyn, may I use your home for a few hours this afternoon?”

Lucas pushed away his plate, excitement churning in his gut. Sascha was going to surf the PsyNet.

“Sure. People might drop by, though.”

“I need a room where I won't be disturbed.”

“You can use one of the upstairs guest rooms. Most visitors tend to hang around downstairs.” Tamsyn rose to get the tarts. As she placed them on the table, the doorbell chimed. “I'll go see who that is.”

Lucas touched Sascha's hand after Tammy had left. “You're going to try and search the Net?”

She nodded and slowly slid away her hand. “You can't be here.”

“Why not?”

“Because your presence distracts me.” The look on her face dared him to make anything of that.

The panther in him growled, smug. The man wasn't so easily appeased. “I'm not going to leave you unprotected.”

“If I trip some silent alarm, you won't be able to protect me,” she said, not skirting around the truth. “My mind would be jelly before you knew anything was wrong.”

His jaw set. “Then you don't go in.” The answer was instinctive—he wasn't even thinking of the lost SnowDancer.

“Don't worry. I'm only going to search the public archives. Nothing will happen.” She looked over his shoulder as Tamsyn walked back into the room.

“I don't think you two have officially met,” the healer commented. “Rina—Sascha. Rina is Kit's sister.”

When Lucas turned, he saw Rina nod a wary hello to Sascha before the curvaceous blonde walked over to hug his neck from behind. Her cheek rubbed against his. Though Rina was a highly sexual female, her caress was asking for comfort. She'd never tried to come on to him, being young enough, now twenty-one, to have always treated him as her alpha rather than as an attractive male.

Moving his head, he kissed her on the lips, running his hand up her arm in a soothing gesture. It was a small thing but it helped her. She let go and sat in the chair beside him. Lucas glanced at Sascha to see how she'd handled the contact. Her face was expressionless, so much so that he knew she had to be hiding something pretty intense.

He bought his attention back to Rina. “What's wrong?”

“Kit's gone missing.”

“What?”
The killer had never taken a male before.

“No, no, it's not like that,” Rina protested. “He's just taken off on some joyriding trip to Big Sur with a couple of the other juveniles and I can't get in touch with them. I think it's Nico and Sarah with him.”

“When did they leave?” A ban on nonauthorized travel had gone into effect early that morning.