BRANDED BY FIRE

“What is it?”


“Am I out of the hole I dug myself with the last op?”

“Maybe.” But she couldn’t help it—he was so serious. Reaching across, she brushed her fingertips over his jaw, tenderness tugging at her very soul. It would, she thought, be so very easy to hurt this man and never know she’d done it, he held everything so close. “You’re out of that hole.”

He winced. “You found out.”

“How long did you think the mating dance was going to escape my notice?” She folded her arms, though she wanted only to stroke him.

“Can we talk about this later?”

“Hmm.” She glanced at the kit he’d put on the backseat. “After we drop off the samples.”

“I’ll get one of my men to take it up to Sierra Tech. Work for you?”

Mercy nodded. Most of the respected R & D company was commercial, but a small area had been set aside to research things the packs needed to know. Since DarkRiver and SnowDancer paid for that section out of their own funds, the minority shareholders weren’t bothered. And both packs had a place where they could get work done in efficient privacy. “Let me call Ashaya and tell her about the samples. She’ll probably want to head up.”

As she was finishing the conversation with the M-Psy, she remembered something else. “Did you manage to talk to Nash again?”

“Yes, but he wouldn’t share any details of his research over the comm link,” Ashaya replied. “I’m sorry—I know you need more to evaluate his protection needs.”

“Not your fault.” She leaned back against the seat. “Let me see if I can set up a face-to-face. Might get something that way.”

“Good luck.”


The NetMind came calling while Faith was sitting in the office Vaughn had rigged for her—an office she absolutely adored, because it was as wild as the man who was her mate, being situated in a hollow cavern off the spectacular main cave that Vaughn had made into a home. The walls in this cavern glittered with embedded minerals, setting off the glow in the thin tubes threaded through the walls of the entire “house.” Those tubes provided both heat and light in an eco-friendly way, leaving her cocooned in warmth.

It was, she thought, just one element in the whole that added up to a feeling of total safety. No one would dare touch her now that she belonged to Vaughn, but it was nice to be able to work without any worry whatsoever—the route to her and Vaughn’s home was booby-trapped in every way you could imagine, and some most people never would.

Lying back in her favorite easy chair, she began to go through the list of forecasts she’d been requested to make. She never made any business predictions alone, of course. There was always the potential for a Cassandra Spiral, the major mental cascade that could destroy her—the mating bond limited the danger, but neither she nor Vaughn wanted to take chances. Not when she was already so vulnerable to the dark visions, the ones that entered her mind without warning.

But even there, she thought with pride, she’d learned to use the mating bond to anchor herself so the nightmare didn’t take her over. In comparison, this—playing with the list, “priming” her brain—was utterly safe.

It was as she was going through the list for the third time that the NetMind “knocked.” She couldn’t really see it—had never been able to. She simply knew it was there, a vast, endless presence that was at once ageless and childish. Today she caught the tumble of roses it threw into her mind in its version of hello, and laughed.

Talking to the NetMind was difficult—it seemed to understand images better than words, and yet it was the librarian of the PsyNet, holding on to and organizing the billions of words that passed through the Net. And it was a sentience, one that changed with the Net. Now its roses were followed by torrent of images Faith could barely process.

Violence. Blood. Suicide. Over and over.

She showed the NetMind a hand, palm-out, their by-now familiar signal for “slow down.” It obeyed, though its version of slow was still almost too fast for her brain to process. But it was better than before. Catching the avalanche of images, she put them aside for later review, sensing the NetMind’s distress. Worried, she sent it an image of a woman colored in darkness.

The DarkMind.

It was the twin of the NetMind, created out of all the horror, the hurt, the badness that the Psy had Silenced. Faith knew from painful experience that the DarkMind was mute—but it had found a way to scream, to vent its rage through acts of violence committed by those fragile minds already predisposed toward darkness.

Now she asked the NetMind if its twin was behind the wave of violence.