Wild Embrace
Authors: Nalini Singh
“The alpha author of paranormal romance.”
â
Booklist
(starred review)
“A must-read for all of my fans.”
âChristine Feehan, #1
New York Times
bestselling author
“Nalini is brilliant.”
â
USA Today
“Complex psychological changes are balanced by deep love . . . Outstanding.”
â
Publishers Weekly
“Remains among the best . . . Sweepingly romantic and sizzlingly sensual . . . [The] tapestries she weaves are sophisticated, elaborate, and compelling.”
â
Kirkus Reviews
“Deft and ingenious . . . The payoff was nothing short of epic . . . I had no choice but to surrender.”
âSmexy Books
“Scorching hot.”
âDear Author
“I don't think there is a single paranormal series as well-planned, well-written, and downright fantabulous as Ms. Singh's Psy-Changeling series.”
âAll About Romance
“A fast-moving, heart-pounding, sexy-as-hell thrill ride.”
âJoyfully Reviewed
“Sheer genius.”
âThe Romance Reviews
*Maya Banks, #1
New York Times
&
USA Today
bestselling
author
Psy-Changeling Series
SLAVE TO SENSATION
VISIONS OF HEAT
CARESSED BY ICE
MINE TO POSSESS
HOSTAGE TO PLEASURE
BRANDED BY FIRE
BLAZE OF MEMORY
BONDS OF JUSTICE
PLAY OF PASSION
KISS OF SNOW
TANGLE OF NEED
HEART OF OBSIDIAN
SHIELD OF WINTER
SHARDS OF HOPE
ALLEGIANCE OF HONOR
Guild Hunter Series
ANGELS' BLOOD
ARCHANGEL'S KISS
ARCHANGEL'S CONSORT
ARCHANGEL'S BLADE
ARCHANGEL'S STORM
ARCHANGEL'S LEGION
ARCHANGEL'S SHADOWS
ARCHANGEL'S ENIGMA
Anthologies
AN ENCHANTED SEASON
(with Maggie Shayne, Erin McCarthy, and Jean Johnson)
THE MAGICAL CHRISTMAS CAT
(with Lora Leigh, Erin McCarthy, and Linda Winstead Jones)
MUST LOVE HELLHOUNDS
(with Charlaine Harris, Ilona Andrews, and Meljean Brook)
BURNING UP
(with Angela Knight, Virginia Kantra, and Meljean Brook)
ANGELS OF DARKNESS
(with Ilona Andrews, Meljean Brook, and Sharon Shinn)
ANGELS' FLIGHT
WILD INVITATION
NIGHT SHIFT
(with Ilona Andrews, Lisa Shearin, and Milla Vane)
WILD EMBRACE
Specials
ANGELS' PAWN
ANGELS' DANCE
TEXTURE OF INTIMACY
DECLARATION OF COURTSHIP
WHISPER OF
SIN
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
This book is an original publication of Penguin Random House LLC.
Copyright © 2016 by Nalini Singh.
Excerpt from
Allegiance of Honor
copyright © 2016 by Nalini Singh.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
BERKLEY® and the “B” design are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
For more information, visit
penguin.com
.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Singh, Nalini, (dateâ ) author.
Title: Wild embrace : a Psy-Changeling collection / Nalini Singh.
Description: Berkley trade paperback edition. | New York : Berkley Books, 2016. | Series: Psy/Changeling
Identifiers: LCCN 2016001374 (print) | LCCN 2016005066 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781101989715 (softcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781101989722 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychic abilityâFiction. | ShapeshiftingâFiction. | Paranormal romance stories. | BISAC: FICTION / Romance / Paranormal. | FICTION / Romance / Short Stories. | FICTION / Fantasy / Paranormal. |
GSAFD: Romantic suspense fiction. | Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PR9639.4.S566 A6 2016 (print) | LCC PR9639.4.S566 (ebook)
| DDC 823/.92âdc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016001374
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / August 2016
Cover art by Tony Mauro.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
Welcome to
Wild Embrace
, a collection of Psy-Changeling stories. If this is your introduction to the Psy-Changeling world, I hope you enjoy the journey! You don't need to have read the prior books in the series to dive into the stories within.
If, however, you're a long-term reader of the series, the stories in
Wild Embrace
provide more depth and nuance to facets of the Psy-Changeling world. I wrote each one because I felt that even though these stories take place away from the main story line, they're important to the worldâthe characters all contribute to the richness of the Psy-Changeling tapestry, even if we only glimpse them in passing in the full-length books.
It's the same reason I write the free “slice of life” vignettes for my newsletter. I want to know about every tiny corner of this world, want to see what the characters are up to even when they're not in the spotlight. (If you aren't yet a subscriber to my newsletter, you can subscribe quickly and easily at nalinisingh.com.)
In terms of the series timeline, each story in this collection falls at a different point. “Echo of Silence” occurs after
Visions of Heat
, while “Dorian” spans a number of years, with the final part of the story set in the months after
Hostage to Pleasure.
The novella “Partners in Persuasion” begins toward the end of
Tangle of Need
. Last but not least is the mystery in “Flirtation of Fate,” which takes place near the end of
Heart of Obsidian.
Whichever order you choose to read the stories, I hope you love traveling through different areas of the Psy-Changeling world and into the smaller, more intimate worlds inhabited by each of these characters.
Take care and happy reading,
Nalini
The year 2079
has been a year of change, of disruption. The Psy, long considered the most powerful race on the planet, their telepaths and telekinetics, foreseers and psychometrics gifted and feared, are starting to fracture.
The Silence Protocol has begun to be questionedâone hundred years after that protocol was put into place in an effort to fight the madness and insanity that is the flip side to the Psy race's powerful gifts. Now the Psy, conditioned to be as cold and emotionless as the changelings are untamed and passionate, have begun to question . . . to
feel
.
Two cardinal Psy have defected, shaking the status quo. But despite the changes, the fractures, the two are outliers. Millions of Psy remain locked in Silence, for to break Silence is to sentence yourself to a horror worse than death, the total psychic brainwipe of rehabilitation leaving behind only a shambling shell that is little more than a walking vegetable.
For these millions, life continues as it has done for the past hundred years.
A life without love, without laughter, without pain, without sadness, without misery, without heartbreak, without . . . just
without.
Thousands of meters
below the surface of the ocean, in the depths of the Pacific and not too distant from the Mariana Trench, Tazia Nerif looked out the window in the control room of the deep-sea station Alaris, and wondered if there really were changeling sharks.
Andres, the junior geological oceanographer, had just spent ten minutes trying to convince her of that fact. “The next time you're prancing around naked in your quarters, have a look outside the windows and see what's looking back.”
Since Tazia was an engineer who lived in grease-stained blue coveralls and had never pranced in her life, that wasn't going to be a problem. But still, the idea of changeling sharks intrigued her.
If
Andres wasn't trying to pull one over on her. Fiddling with her electronic wrench to calibrate it for her next task, she decided to do some research on the subject so she could beat him at his own game.
“Ms. Nerif, is the life-support system back to full strength?”
Her heart slammed into her throat.
As usual, she hadn't heard Stefan approach. Tall, with dark hair, and highly intelligent, he walked with the tread not of a sailor, but of a Psy. He was a Tk, a telekinetic, and fully enmeshed in the emotionless existence that was the Psy way.
From the fleeting but telling references in the dusty old history book Tazia had found in an antique shop on her last trip upside, she'd worked out that the Psy race had once felt the same emotions as humans and changelings. But something had changed long enough ago that in the present, it seemed as if they had always been formed of ice.
Brilliant at business and at science, the Psy race knew nothing of sorrow or love, joy or hate; they created no art, wrote no music, felt no passion.
Not that Tazia knew much about that last, either.
“I'm finished.” Sliding the wrench into her tool belt, she picked up and slotted in the cover of the panel she'd been working on, safely concealing the complex computronic systems beyond. “You can boot it up and switch off the backup system.” It had been a routine inspection, something she was fanatical about. Her type-A, check-every-nut-and-bolt-twice personality was why she'd won the coveted position on Alaris. This far below the surface, no one wanted an engineer who wasn't obsessively precise.
Stefan, of course, took precise to the next level. If Alaris had been peopled solely by Psy, nothing technical would have ever gone wrong. But of course, most Psy didn't see the point in exploring the deep when there was only a slim chance of discovering anything that could lead to financial gain. Which was why Alaris had humans like Tazia holding it together, along with the odd changeling who could stand being shut up inside the stationâor who had the capacity to survive in the mysterious dark water beyond the windows.
There were several sea-based changelings on station courtesy of the fact that Alaris was funded in large part by a worldwide water changeling organization named BlackSea. Tazia didn't know too much about BlackSea, but she knew a number of the sea changeling station personnel very well.
Andres was a sea snake in his animal form. He'd shifted for her once in a sparkling shower of color and light.
Beautiful.
His snake form was big, shiny, and capable of sneaking around parts of the station she'd never be able to access without using the miniature maintenance bots she'd built after realizing the need. When he was in a good mood, he sometimes checked the ducts for her.
“Everything looks operational.” Stefan entered the final command on the razor-thin computer screen mounted on the wall, then put his eye to the biometric reader to confirm the authorization.
The systems switched over with no appreciable delay.
Stepping back from the computer, Stefan scanned her face. Sometimes, she wanted to tell him nothing had changed since the last time he'd subjected her to an inspection. She still had black hair, worn in a rough ponytail to keep it out of the way, and streaky brown eyes set in a face covered in light brown skin. The end.
“You have grease on your cheek.”
She fought her blush and the urge to wipe at her face with the sleeve of her coveralls. “What else is new?”
“The mail.”
“The mail?”
“It just arrived.”
Her smile was instant. “Oh!” Grabbing her tool kit, she went to walk past him.
He stopped her, his hand on her arm.
Startled at the strange behaviorâStefan didn't touch anyone unless absolutely necessaryâshe froze. “What?” she asked, tilting back her head to look up at him, his scent in her every inhale.
Stefan always smelled crisp, clean, distant. No grease on his cheek and certainly no dirty work coveralls. On duty or off, he always wore the uniform of the station commander, the collar of his military-style fitted jacket rising partway up his neck and fastened to the side by
a simple silver stud that denoted his rank. Everything else was stark black, from his boots to his pants to, she assumed, the shirt he wore under his jacket. She didn't know, had never seen him with the jacket open.
Now his dark gray eyes focused on her. “It is not there.”
Disappointment uncurled in a leaden wave in her stomach, wiping away her surprise at his touch. “Are you sure?”
“I checked all the return addresses on the letters and packages.”
She swallowed, nodded. “Why?”
“Because every time the mail comes and your package doesn't arrive, you give in to the human failing of disappointment, which leads to at least two days of depression during which you don't function at optimum levels.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Ah, so it was concern for my well-being, then?” She snorted and tried to shrug off his hand. “I function perfectly fineâeverything gets done, doesn't it?”
“Yes.” He didn't release her. “But you have a tendency to snap at anyone who comes near you.”
“What do you care?” she asked, feeling cornered and sad and angry at him for being the bearer of news she didn't want to hear. “Emotion makes no difference to you.”
“The humans and changelings care.”
That made her face heat up. Stefan ran the show, contracted to manage Alaris at what had to be an exorbitant fee. If he said people were complaining because she got a little down a couple of days a month, then people were complaining. “It won't happen again.”
“Of course it will. Unless you stop waiting for a package that will never arrive.”
It was a stab to her soul, a blade made of ice that broke inside her as she bled. “Let me go.” Wrenching herself out of his hold, she walked quietly out of the control room and headed down into the
true guts of Alaris, where no one else ever ventured. Only when she was sure he hadn't followed her did she curl up in a corner and put her head on her knees.
No tears.
Tazia had stopped crying a long time ago. But the sadness was a crushing weight, a brick on her heart. She'd truly believed that the passage of time would soften her parents' anger, bring forgiveness. But it had been five years since she'd walked out on her arranged marriage, and still her family shunned her.
A year ago, when she'd won a place on Alaris's first mission team, she'd written to them. It was an honor to be on the deep-sea station.
Surely
they would forgive her now that she'd brought such acclaim to the Nerif name, now that she'd become more than the daughter who had not followed the wishes of her elders.
The first month on board, she hadn't been too disappointed at the lack of a response. Her parents lived in a remote region of desert and wind, a region their people had chosen to keep deliberately untouched by technology except that which was needed to assure the safety of the settlement. They also didn't believe in wasting money on costly transportation when other, more economical methods were readily available. Their reply would come slowly, via camelback until it reached the nearest major city.
The second month, she'd told herself there must've been a storm to delay things. That happened at times, the wind howling across the desert to create sand devils that could strip the skin right off anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the center of one.
The third month, she'd blamed it on her name. People were always getting her mixed up with Nazia, who worked on Alaris's surface base. No doubt Nazia would forward the letter with the next mail drop.
The fourth month, a knot grew in her stomach.
And kept growing.
A year and still no reply, no message. She would've worried about their well-being, but she knew they were safe. She still had one friend in the village. Busy with two young children, a demanding husband, and elderly in-lawsâand utterly delighted to be in the center of that cheerful chaosâMina wrote to Tazia when she could, gave her the news.
Tazia's brother had found a “pretty and shy” bride, his marriage celebrations followed nine months later by a healthy son.
Tazia's mother was no longer coughing; Tazia's father had taken her to be seen by the city doctor who'd settled permanently in the village and who was happy to barter his services for a good, home-cooked meal and a little company, his wife having passed on.
Tazia's father was enamored of his grandson and spoiling the boy terribly (“as a grandparent should,” Mina had added).
Tazia's parents had given the money Tazia had sent them to the holy man.
She knew. Of course she knew. In her heart she knew she would never again drink her mother's sweet milk-tea or hear her father's gravelly voice. She would never again laugh with her brother, never meet his bride or her nephew. And she would never again feel her beloved
teta
's kisses and hugs, her grandmother who had so patiently brushed her hair the many times Tazia had returned with tangles after a day of scrambling up trees and rolling down sand dunes.
She knew.
She knew.
â¢Â   â¢Â   â¢
Next
mail drop, she ensured she was fixing a hydraulic lift on the lowest floor of the station, where no one would come looking for her and where she didn't have to hear the excited cries and see the
beaming smiles of her colleagues as they received care packages or unexpected gifts, or letters that made them shed tears of joy.
“Great,” she muttered when the relay tube turned out to have a hole in it.
“A problem?”
Her back stiffening where she crouched in front of the exposed inner machinery of the lift, she glanced up at Stefan. “Can't you wear a bell or something?”
“No.”
Of course he didn't have a sense of humor. Psy never did. She still couldn't get her mind around the fact that two powerful cardinal Psy, including a gifted foreseer, had recently defected into a changeling pack. How could that possibly work? Changelings were as primal as Psy were cerebral. Like Stefan with his remote gaze and cool words.
“The tube is busted,” she told him. “I missed the last equipment request, so we'll have to wait till next month.”
“Is it urgent?”
She considered it, aware Stefan was a teleport-capable Tk. He could bring in emergency equipment in the space of mere minutes if not seconds, his mind reaching across vast distances in a way she could barely comprehend, but the unspoken rule was that the rest of the station personnel didn't ask him for anything that wasn't critical. Everyone knew that if Alaris sprang a fatal pressure leak, they'd need every last ounce of Stefan's abilities to get them to the surface.
“The other lift is still functional,” she said, hooking her spanner into her tool belt and tapping in the code that meant the computer would bypass this lift until she recorded it as being back online. “We can survive a month.”
He nodded, his dark brown hair military short. Since he wasn't
part of the Psy race's armed forces, she thought it was because he had curls; Psy hated anything that was out of control. When he continued to loom over her, she rubbed her hands on her thighs and stood up. That didn't exactly even things out since he was so much taller, but it made her feel better.
He reached out and gripped a lock of hair that had escaped her ponytail. “Grease.”
Rolling her eyes, she pulled it out of his grasp. “Was there anything else you wanted?”
“It appears I made a mistake last month in telling you no letter or package would come.”
Pain in her heart, her throat. “No, I needed to hear that.”
“However, instead of having you snap at everyone for two days a month, you're now so quiet that people are becoming concerned.”
Tazia remembered how Andres had been poking at her this morning, trying to make her smile with those silly jokes of his. But he was her friend. Stefan was nothing. “I'm not Psy,” she said point-blank. “I can't ignore hurt or forget that my family hates me.”
He didn't flinch. “You knew that before. What changed?”
“You took away my hope.”
There was a small silence that seemed to reverberate with a thousand unspoken things. For a single instant captured in time, she thought she saw a fracture in his icy composure, a hint of something unexpected in those eyes she'd always thought were beautiful despite their coldness.
Then a tool fell off Tazia's belt and she bent to grab it off the floor. By the time she rose, Stefan was gone. Just as well, she thought, though there was a strange hollowness in her stomach. She wasn't some bug under a microscope for him to study. She was a flesh-and-blood human being with hopes and dreams and emotions. Maybe those emotions made her heart heavy with sorrow and her soul hurt,
but she would never choose to erase them in the way of Stefan's people.
What use was it to have such power if you saw no beauty in a child's smile or in the sea's turbulent moods? If you didn't understand friendship or laughter? No, she'd rather feel, even if it hurt so much she could hardly breathe through it at times.
