The Psy-Changeling Series, Books 6-10 (125 page)

Nikita agreed.
Ming is ambivalent.

Nikita didn’t mention the conversations she’d had with Anthony.

And you
, she asked the most dangerous Tk in the Net.
What is your true allegiance?

“It seems we are at an impasse.” Anthony’s intelligent voice. “It would be best,” he said to Henry, “if you made it clear to Pure Psy that their ambitions of a coup d’etat would be better to be swiftly surrendered.”

“And inform any members in my city,” Nikita said, “that they have until the end of this meeting to leave. Or I’ll eliminate them myself.” She’d killed. Many times. And she’d do so again. Self-interest, she told herself. It had nothing to do with the fact that Pure Psy had tried to target her daughter, her unborn grandchild.

“One more thing—Henry?” she said, focusing on the other Councilor. She had a thousand strains of viruses in her head. One of them, she thought, would penetrate his shields. And she’d find it, no matter how long it took. “The next time you decide one of my people is flawed and order a rehabilitation without my consent, I might not act in so civilized a fashion. In fact, it might be better for your . . . health if you didn’t set foot in my territory again.”

“What of your pet J?” Tatiana asked, her tone silky smooth. “There is something severely wrong with her. Her shield is nothing ordinary.”

“Is being extraordinary now a crime?” Nikita had survived in the Council far longer than Tatiana. If the younger woman had forgotten that, she’d get a lethal surprise one quiet day, when she thought herself safe. “She is one of my people—just like every other Psy within my territorial borders.” The implication was clear.

“So.” Shoshanna. “You’re protecting the broken ones now. I suppose blood will tell.”

Nikita didn’t engage with the Councilor who’d made the fatal decision to stand by Henry. “I’ve said what I have to say.”

The meeting ended less than a minute later. Nothing seemed to have been resolved, but Nikita knew that was a thinly veiled fantasy.

The Council had split in two.

 

Kaleb had attended the meeting standing on the deck of his Moscow home. Now, he turned to go back inside, to consider his next move—and to return Max Shannon’s call, the message having come in just as the meeting began.

That was before he saw the package sitting in the center of his desk.

It hadn’t been there when he’d walked out onto the deck.

Only one group of people had the skill to have breached his internal security without setting off the alarms.

Picking up a silver letter opener he’d been given by a human business associate, he slit it open. It held a wooden box. That box contained a pristine patch, such as might go on a uniform. The patch bore the image of two snakes in combat—Councilor Ming LeBon’s personal emblem. But piercing the fabric was a small, perfectly formed black arrow.

The Arrow Squad, it seemed, had decided to terminate their allegiance to Ming.

Kaleb didn’t make the mistake of thinking that allegiance had now shifted to him. No, this was a warning and an invitation in one. Removing the Arrow, he placed it on his desk. Then he put the patch back in the box, and teleported with it to an extremely secure location, ’porting out almost as soon as he arrived.

Two Arrows glanced up at once at the slight sound of something settling on the table to their right, a table that existed deep within the Arrow Squad’s Central Command, and was known
only
to other Arrows. Neither man said a word, but they began working as one to dismantle the box and destroy the patch.

There would be no evidence for Ming to find, not until it was too late.

Sophia sat across from Nikita, conscious of Max’s restless presence on the other side of the door. Three days had passed since he’d found out about his father, since they’d made their plan, and Max had spent most of those seventy-two hours in different parts of the country, talking face-to-face with parents whose lost daughters were now being found, thanks to the coordinates Kaleb Krychek had ripped from Gerard Bonner’s dying mind.

“I’m not leaving you alone,” he’d said after the information came through.

Sophia had shaken her head. “Your friends in DarkRiver will watch over me. Go Max, they hold a piece of your heart, each and every one.” And that was okay with her, more than okay. Max remembered those lost girls, would always remember. “Go and tell their families they’re coming home. It’s
important
.”

His eyes had filled with an angry protectiveness even as he nodded, and she’d known he’d heard the echo of the eight-year-old girl she’d once been. As a result, she’d spent the past seventy-two hours with a changeling in her living space—Desiree was smart and funny, Clay quiet, and Vaughn still made every hair on her body rise. It was as well that Faith had come with her mate.

Sophia’s own mate, her Max, had returned exhausted an hour ago, with the news that while he’d been getting in often painful personal touch with the parents and relatives of the victims, the forensic teams had located each and every girl. “It’ll take weeks to fully process the scenes, but the remains are in the morgue,” he’d told her. “I’ll go back when the parents have to come in to pick up their girls, but everyone’s holding on to family right now. They don’t need me—you do.”

So now, dog-tired but determined, he stood outside the door while she sat a dangerously short distance away from a woman who had the ability to kill without remorse, without pity. But Nikita Duncan was also a woman who understood business, understood how to weigh costs against benefits. Sophia met her gaze. “I need a job.”

“You’re a J.”

“Js have very short life spans.”

Almond-shaped eyes filled with speculation. “I am missing several advisors as you’re aware, but unlike Detective Shannon, you have no skills I can utilize.”

“I have contacts across the Net.” Js saw everything. And they talked to each other, because only another J understood the broken pieces within them. “As the situation with Quentin Gareth proved, you have a critical gap in your organization. I can fill a large part of it, organize a team that will round out the other aspects.”

Nikita leaned back in her chair. “Is Detective Shannon part of the deal?”

“No.” Sophia held the Councilor’s gaze. “To be quite blunt, you don’t want him working for you if he doesn’t want to be here.”

“No.” Nikita was silent for several minutes. “Can you be discreet about your unorthodox relationship with him?”

Shock held Sophia silent for several seconds. Scrambling to make sense of the question, she decided to alter the plan and take the biggest gamble of her life, one that could put her back on the rehabilitation watchlist. “Yes, in public. However, I plan to marry him.”

Again, Nikita didn’t react as predicted. “Do it in private, file the legal paperwork through the slowest court system you can find—as a J, you should know precisely which one will fit the definition. Under no circumstance can anything you experience leak out into the Net. If it does, the Arrows will strike.”

“My shields are impregnable.” Sophia looked at the Councilor, suddenly aware that she had more of a capacity to understand this powerful woman than most. The darkness in her recognized the same in Nikita. “What’s happening?”

“Change.” Nikita rose to her feet, walked to the plate-glass wall that looked out over the city. “But change takes time, and always claims victims.”

Sophia wouldn’t ever again be a victim. “I will never like you,” she said to the Councilor’s back. “But I will never lie to you either. I think you could do with an advisor who’s not afraid of you.”

“Normal Psy do not feel.”

Sophia said nothing. Not on that. “I’ve thought and thought about why you might’ve asked for me on this assignment, and I can only come up with one answer.” And it was an answer beyond Silence, an answer to do with mothers and daughters, redemption and forgiveness. “But I can’t make myself believe it. Not of you.”

Nikita took five long minutes to respond. “Pick up the standard employment contract on your way out. And Ms. Russo?”

“Yes?”

“You should be scared of me.”

“Perhaps.” Sophia rose. “But once you’ve seen what I have, once you’ve lived in the abyss for that long, fear becomes nothing but another cage.” Then she walked out and into the arms of a cop who waited only until they’d closed the door to his apartment behind them before crushing her into his arms and taking her mouth in a kiss that
demanded
.

She felt the lingering pain in him, the heavy sorrow of all those families, and gave him what he needed. Everything.

He ripped open her jacket, shoved up her skirt with rough, hungry hands that licked fire across her skin. “Stop me, Sophie.” A harsh whisper. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“It’s okay.” She pushed off his own shirt, baring the sleekly muscular beauty of his chest. “I missed you until I couldn’t breathe. Come inside me.”

Her panties were torn off her, his fingers urgent as he tested her slickness. Lifting a leg, she wrapped it around his hip. He swore, lowered the zipper on his pants, and then the hot, hard heat of him was thrusting into her, pinning her against the wall. She cried out, holding on, holding him tight.

The pleasure was a firestorm that erased the pain, wiped away the sorrow, left her limp, his face buried in her neck as that muscular back gleamed with perspiration. “Hello, my Max,” she whispered.

“Hello, my sweet, sexy Sophie.”

 

Later that day, after they’d spent most of it tangled up skin to skin, sleeping and loving and holding each other, Sophia took a deep breath. “I did some in-depth investigation of my new shields while you were away—I think I know their origin.”

Her cop stroked her hair off her face, his expression intent. “Tell me.”

“Part of this is because I’m an anchor, but part of it is because my mind is . . . unique.” It had survived by doing the extraordinary. “You know about the NetMind?”

“I’ve heard rumors it’s some kind of psychic entity that organizes the Net.”

“Yes. The thing is, there’s a DarkMind, too.” She’d searched, dug deep to find confirmation of her suspicions. “It’s made up of all the emotions my race has rejected, and it’s so angry, so scared, and so very, very lonely. I think . . . it’s also a little insane.”

Max didn’t ask what others might have. He asked only the critical question. “This DarkMind is protecting you?”

“They both are in a sense.” She took a shaky breath, swallowed. “At first I thought my shields were a psychic extension of the Net, that for some reason, the Twin-Minds had decided to look after me, but while that made sense with my Net shields, it didn’t explain my telepathic protections—those
have
to come from within. Then I realized it’s me.” She hesitated.

“It’s okay, sweetheart.” A kiss on her forehead, arms that held her close. “No matter what, you’re still my Sophie, still my J.”

Her heart settled, quiet, content. “
I
am a living, breathing extension of the Net, Max.” The tendrils snaked through her mind, fine threads, and not the dark alone. The light was there, too, simply less obvious to the casual eye. “I’m not just an anchor any longer—I’ve become some kind of a focus.”

Two hours later, she shared the truth about her shields with Sascha Duncan over a secure comm link. The empath’s face held no rejection, only concern. “But Sophie, the Net is going mad. If it’s inside you on that level . . .”

“There’s hope, Sascha.” A blinding, beautiful hope. “As the Net passes through my anchor point, the light and the dark come together if only for a fraction of a second.”

Comprehension dawned in a fracture of color in Sascha’s cardinal eyes. “And for that instant, they’re sane?”

“Yes.” Her throat locked. “I may be the sole anchor who can give them that peace. And that’s not right.” Because outside of the tiny oasis of her mind, the Net
was
going inexorably mad, a dark rot seeping through its very fabric—parts of the PsyNet were already dead, places where neither the DarkMind nor the NetMind could go.

Sascha’s own eyes shone wet. “No, they should’ve never been split in two, but their sentience is formed and shaped by the Net. They can’t, won’t merge until Silence falls.”

And that, they both knew, might take an eternity . . . and a war that could devastate their world. “Things are changing,” Sophia whispered, holding the empath’s gaze. The NetMind loved Sascha. The DarkMind knew the empath could give them something, but it didn’t know how to shape its request, how to even convey its painful need. “You’ve felt it.”

“Yes.” A solemn gaze, but it held hope, the determination of a Psy willing to fight for her people. “Are you sure you’re safe, Sophia?” So much care, the empath’s huge heart there in the timbre of her voice, in every part of her.

At that moment, Sophia understood some of what the crippled, voiceless DarkMind was trying to tell her, understood that the Es
had
to be reawakened if the Net was to survive.

“I understand why it does what it does,” Sascha continued, sorrow erasing the stars in her eyes, “but the Dark-Mind’s need for vengeance has pushed it to spawn terrible crimes.”

Sophia wrapped her arms around Max’s waist, laying her ear against the solid pulse of his heartbeat, the warmth of him her own personal anchor. “In my mind, they’re one.” They were whole. As she was finally whole.

“They balance each other.” Sascha’s voice turned soft, thoughtful. “Yes, of course.”

“And . . . I accept the DarkMind,” Sophia said, hiding nothing of who she was, the darkness that had shaped her. “It has no need to scream, no need to fight to be known, to be remembered.” She would never shut it away, never force it to be Silent.