Tangle of Need (39 page)

Ending up on her forearms, she shot him an amber-eyed look over the shoulder he’d bitten, her eyes hazy. That’s how he wanted her today. Pleasured and marked and knowing exactly who held the reins. Because while Adria was a dominant, she couldn’t be one in this bed. It would never work, not for either of them.

Fisting his hand lightly in her hair, he held her gaze as he pulled out, thrust again. And again. And again. Until she screamed and orgasmed so hard around him that her entire body trembled. Only then did he surrender, the orgasm all but ripping him in two.

HAVING
left Naya with Lucas at the Chinatown office, Sascha glanced at the jaguar who’d driven her up when he brought the SUV to a stop near the den at around a quarter to six that night. “I think,” she said, “we all agree I no longer need a bodyguard here.” It was an implied question.

“It’s not about trust,” Vaughn responded. “It’s about showing strength. Our alliance doesn’t change the fact that we’re two predatory changeling packs.”

Sascha felt her lips curve into a rueful smile. “Just when I think I know everything there is to know about changelings.”

The amber-blond male wasn’t one of the more tactile sentinels, his reserve part of his nature, but now he rubbed his knuckles against her cheek. “Don’t worry, we won’t take back your pack membership.”

Laughing at the sly feline humor, she got out of the vehicle, her telepathic senses alerting her to the fact they were being watched the en-tire way to the den. Another show of strength, a quiet reminder that
SnowDancer had its lethal reputation for a reason. Lara met them at the entrance, her corkscrew curls in a ponytail, the pale lemon yellow of her shirt skimming the curves of her body. “It’s good to see you.” The healer embraced Sascha with a warmth that was genuine.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to make it earlier.” An issue had arisen with a juvenile, something she’d had to handle in her position as mate to the alpha. “The spike in Alice’s level of consciousness?”

“Slight but holding.” Stepping back, Lara smiled at Vaughn, the fox brown of her gaze warm in the way of healers—of all the people in a pack, they were the only ones who had no trouble interacting with, or being welcomed by, other packs, even those who might otherwise be the enemy. “Hello, Vaughn. How’s Faith?”

“She wanted me to thank you for the photos you sent.”

Lara waved away his words. “She saved the lives of those pups with her prediction—she’s got a claim on them now.”

A quiet nod from Vaughn.

“Do you want to come with us, or head out to catch up with the soldiers?”

“I’ll come.”

Nodding, Lara led them to the infirmary, updating Sascha on Alice’s most recent readings as she did so. “The single bit of good news,” she said as they walked into the infirmary, “is that minor shift in her level of consciousness, but it
is
so small we have to accept it could be a natural fluctuation.” She gestured to the open door of a patient room. “Alice’s.”

“I’ll wait here,” Vaughn said, taking a watchful position outside the door.

Leaving the jaguar to his post, Sascha followed Lara inside. As always, Alice lay silent, her body covered by a soft sheet, her skull by a fine computronic skullcap that monitored her cerebral functions, while a number of other thin tubes ran out of her body. However, she was breathing on her own, her chest rising and falling in so gentle a rhythm, it would’ve been easy to miss had the rest of her not been so very motionless.

Sascha’s attention locked on the fine bones of Alice’s face. Marked by faint lines of tension, that face wasn’t peaceful in repose, as if Alice was
fighting from within, struggling to get out. “I can sense her. The emotional resonance is faint, but it
is
there.” Sascha intended to strengthen it even further, having been mentally honing her ability to amplify, after reading about the technique in the groundbreaking book Alice had written more than a hundred years ago.

One of the strongest and most unique gifts of a cardinal empath is the ability to dampen emotions. This study has briefly mentioned how that ability can be—and has been—utilized to control riots, but the same skill can be used in reverse to heighten emotions. However, the latter usage has the effect of draining the E, and even cardinals can only actively maintain it for a span of minutes, ranging from three to seven.

Alice hadn’t described
how
E abilities worked on the psychic level, the thrust of her thesis more an anthropological study on empaths as a designation. As a result, Sascha had been left with tantalizing clues but no practical guidance. When she had first tried to control a volunteer “crowd,” she’d exhausted herself in minutes.

Only later had she realized she’d actually been attempting to force emotion into the crowd rather than dampening their own. It had been a start. While she still hadn’t cracked how to dampen emotions, she did think she could heighten them. “I wish I had a teacher instead of stumbling about in the dark.” It frustrated her at times like this, the power within her that she had no idea how to shape.

“You already know more than any other E-Psy on the planet—give yourself a little more time.” Squeezing Sascha’s arm, Lara moved to the control panel at the end of the bed. “The readings don’t show any problems. You can start whenever you’re ready.”

Exhaling quietly to center herself, Sascha took one of Alice’s thin, pallid hands in her own and closed her eyes. However, before she could begin, she had to identify the other emotions that lingered in the vicinity so she could establish a baseline: Lara’s intense focus, her concern; Vaughn’s alert watchfulness and curiosity; the tenor of a deep friendship emanating from two changelings in another patient room.

Baseline laid, she narrowed her attention to Alice.

Frustration.

Clean, clear but so faint she had to strain to sense it. Isolating the emotion with meticulous care, Sascha began to do what she’d theorized. Instead of bluntly pushing emotion into Alice, she instead “hummed” an emotional note that resonated with Alice’s frustration.

If it worked as she thought it should, it would change the depth of Alice’s frustration, bring it to the surface of her consciousness. Once there, it should continue to resonate at the higher frequency, stimulating Alice’s mind until the human woman had the strength to break free. Sascha didn’t know how long she’d been humming the note, changing the psychic range to find the perfect pitch, when something “clicked.”

“I’m seeing a blip.” Lara’s quietly excited voice came from a distance. “I think it’s working.”

TWO
days after their return from Venice, and Adria had no idea what she was doing about to walk into the Delgado house in San Diego. Riaz had caught her around four that afternoon, just after she’d completed her second session with a unit of Indigo’s novices who wanted to learn the style of martial arts at which Adria was proficient. Sienna Lauren, who’d been the first to sign up, was turning out to be well suited to the discipline.

“It’s the underlying order of it,” the young woman had said. “I like the fact the entire art is built on a base of hundreds of set moves that the fighter puts together in unexpected ways.”

It was Sienna she’d been chatting with when Riaz appeared on the edge of the outdoor training area. “I managed to get two tickets on the high-speed train to San Diego,” he’d said when the younger woman had taken her leave. “Departing in two hours.”

Startled, it had taken her a moment to figure out what he meant. “We can’t take off again so soon after Venice,” she’d said, heart in her throat.

“Return trip tonight—we’ll get back into the den around two a.m. You’re done for the day, right?”

“Yes, but I was planning to catch up on some paperwork.” Like all
dominants in charge of minors, she made sure to keep their parents updated with weekly reports.

“Do it on the train.” He’d tapped her cheek with his finger. “Come on, Empress. I want you to meet my family.”

She’d been hit sideways by the emotional import of the request—the fact Riaz had invited her so close to the heart of his personal pack … it made a thousand butterflies awaken in her stomach.

“The gardens are stunning,” she commented now as they stepped out of the taxi, one hand unobtrusively on her abdomen in an effort to soothe the fluttering within.

“You have wonderful taste, dear!” The same small, curvy woman she’d seen at Hawke and Sienna’s mating ceremony appeared unexpectedly from around the side of a sprawling rosebush, hands held out and a huge smile wreathing her face. “I’m so glad to meet you, Adria.”

Adria leaned down to accept Abigail Delgado’s hug, the scent of her a mix of spices she couldn’t name and a sweet floral note. “Me, too,” she said, suddenly tongue-tied.

When Abigail stepped back, Adria looked up to see Riaz, dressed in jeans and a chocolate dark shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, being hugged by a tall man who had such strikingly similar features it was clear they were father and son. The only difference was that the thick black of Jorge Delgado’s hair was faintly threaded with silver, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth adding a quiet depth of character. “God,” she said without thinking, “Riaz is going to get even more beautiful as he grows older.”

Abigail’s delighted laugh made Adria color, but Riaz’s mother tucked Adria’s arm into her own and squeezed. “It’s a terrible cross we have to bear, sweetheart.”

Meeting those twinkling eyes at the whisper, Adria burst out laughing, the butterflies taking flight to leave her wolf happy on an elemental level. Later that night, when Riaz tucked her to his side as the train punched through the opaque veil of night, she knew the dinner had been akin to the possessive dominance of his loving after Venice—her lone wolf was claiming her in his own quiet, determined, and inexorable way.

Her heart stuttered, jubilant and terrified in equal measures.

Chapter 47

KALEB FOUND HIMSELF
at a dead end in the Net, but instead of backing away and attempting to navigate around the section, he examined every aspect of the blockade. It was a black wall. No fractures, no data. Dead space, the Net truncated.

Such barricades formed naturally in areas with low population densities. The NetMind shunted the individuals in the zone into the nearest active channel in an exercise in efficiency most people never realized—because the NetMind augmented the Net link of the affected to ensure those men and women felt no strain at being psychically positioned outside their geographic area.

The problem with this truncated section was that it was
almost
but not quite far enough away from a relatively dense population matrix. Any gain in efficiency resulting from shifting the minds in this sector wouldn’t have been enough to justify the NetMind’s output.

Which meant the neosentient entity hadn’t created this roadblock.

It took him three hours to wedge open a small doorway in the wall of black without tripping the inbuilt alarms. Slipping through, he closed it behind himself, concealing the doorway for later access. The barricade proved to have been nothing but a firewall meant to discourage anyone from continuing to follow the trail—because it was hot again on this side.

Even as he swept through the slipstream in search of his target, part of his brain continued to sift and sort the millions of pieces of random data that floated past. Rumors, whispers, business information, snippets
of fading conversation, it was all filtered out so it wouldn’t clog his mind. Until a single fragment made him pause.

…pushed the anchor down the steps, but his death…

Not halting his psychic pursuit, he touched the NetMind’s curious presence, asked it to follow the fragment. The vast neosentience returned to him in a split second with the report that the fragment was all that remained. The rest of the conversation had degraded, its energy absorbed back into the Net.

Regardless, only one anchor had died in that manner in the preceding weeks. And since the mode of his death had not been made public, the fragment appeared to infer the male had been murdered. What Kaleb couldn’t reason out was why. As he and Aden had discussed, the death of an anchor offered no one in the Net any advantage.

Following that logic, it was likely the murder was tied to something that had nothing to do with the victim’s position as an anchor. That other reason was often cold, rational money—the anchor’s heirs might simply have wanted to hasten the speed of their inheritance.

Kaleb sent Aden a telepathic message, taking care not to disturb the trail in front of him. It glowed a faint silver to his psychic senses, and he was almost certain this was it … when it disappeared with total abruptness.

I’ll follow up.
Aden’s telepathic voice.

Kaleb responded automatically.
Contact me as soon as you discover anything.
He scanned his surroundings for any hint of the silver thread. But it was gone as if it had never existed.

Chapter 48

FIVE DAYS AFTER
the visit to his parents, Riaz watched Adria jog past with a small group of her kids. Perched as he was on top of the jungle gym part of the training run, he had an excellent view, knew she was teaching them one of the emergency evacuation routes they might one day have to utilize to protect the pups, should all the dominants be needed to hold back an invading force.

Man and wolf both stopped what they were doing to watch the woman who, he was slowly beginning to see, was as much a nurturer as an aggressive protector. An unusual combination, rare in the hierarchy. While she was undoubtedly a dominant soldier with impressive offensive capabilities, there was a gentleness about her that was more akin to that of the maternal females. It was an aspect of her personality he’d brushed up against more than once without realizing it—and it made his protectiveness toward her intensify, until he knew he’d have to be careful not to cross lines that would most definitely annoy his amber-eyed wolf.