Kiss of Snow

“Yeah. Side effect of Nikita deciding she no longer supports Silence.” Not out of the goodness of her heart, but simply because it made the most political sense. Sascha’s mother was one cold bitch. “They causing trouble?”


“No, quiet as church mice.” Elias fell into step beside him as Hawke began to make his way to the training run. The obstacle course would give him a much-needed physical outlet before he headed inside to talk to Tomás about a couple of people Hawke wanted to send to the lieutenant for training.

“But with so many of them coming in,” Elias continued, “it’s hard to pinpoint the friendlies from the others.”

Hawke had raised the same concern with Lucas not long ago. “The Rats,” he said, referring to the small changeling group that ran a very effective spy network, “know to keep an eye out for any unusual Psy activity, but I’ll have Luc talk to them, have them amp up their efforts.” He trusted Elias’s instincts. The soldier was one of his most capable men, not dominant enough to be a lieutenant, but smart and experienced—and more important, he had a head as stable as Riley’s.

“Thanks.” Elias looked at the training run, blew out a breath. “Jesus, Riaz is a sadist. What the hell are those spike things? They weren’t there last time.”

“Time me.” Hawke’s wolf bared its teeth in anticipation. Riaz had outdone himself this time. As Hawke ran up the first incline, he hoped like hell that Elias’s gut was wrong for once, but given the events of the past few months—and the fact that every F-Psy on the planet was apparently forecasting war—he knew that to be a bleak hope.





WALKER went to retie the ribbon around his daughter’s ponytail, playing a game with her on the LaurenNet as he did so. She was fascinated by the unusual twisting motion at the center of the mental star that was his mind, and kept getting distracted.

He’d been something of a puzzle to the staff at the Psy-Med hospital, too. No one had ever been able to explain the reason for the odd moving helix that had become apparent long after he was past childhood. There had been discussions about studying it further, but when it became clear the twist neither detracted from, nor added any strength to his already strong telepathic range, the issue was put aside.

It had, however, proven an excellent gauge of a child’s psychic development—to the extent that Walker had come to believe that to be the reason for it. Since his telepathic touch worked particularly well with the young and the helix had developed soon after he began teaching, it made sense. As it was, while Toby had matured to the point where he could ignore the distraction of the motion, Marlee hadn’t.

Almost, he encouraged on the psychic plane as the ribbon slipped out of his grasp on the physical. Picking it up, he said, “You know I’m not good at this.” His hands were too big, too clumsy for such a delicate task. “Why didn’t you ask Sienna?”

Waiting until he finished and moved around to crouch in front of her, she wrapped an arm around his neck. “I like it when you do it.” A wide smile.

In the three years since their family had defected from the PsyNet, Walker had learned many things—how to live in a world without Silence, how to manage the dominance challenges within a wolf pack, how to look after Marlee and Toby in a way for which he had no template. But the one thing he still hadn’t learned was how to handle the overload of emotion caused by his daughter’s smile.

When she threw both arms around his neck in a spontaneous embrace, it only caused the tightness in his chest to grow—until it filled every part of him. Wrapping his own arms around her, he rose to his feet. She made a startled sound. “I’m too big!”

“You’ll always be my child.” He wished he could say the soft, sweet words he heard changeling parents say constantly to their children, but he’d been an inmate of Silence for four long decades. The words were hard to form, to get out. But it was incredibly easy to lift his hand, to stroke away the baby-fine strands of hair that had escaped Marlee’s ponytail, to press a kiss to her temple.

When she said, “Can we go see if Toby’s volcano is ready?” he could no more deny her than he could stop breathing.

It was another punch to the heart to walk into the large rec room near the family quarters to see Toby and Sienna with their heads bent together over a lopsided volcano. This, he thought as Marlee wiggled out of his arms to join her cousins, all of them frowning over the lack of symmetry, this was why he’d survived defection from the PsyNet.

To watch over his daughter and the son of a sister he’d never been allowed to love. And Sienna, too, for all that she’d been forced to be an adult before she’d ever been a child. They were his reason for being, for existing. As for the kiss that had threatened to make him forget the rest of the world for one blinding, pleasure-drunk moment . . . he’d made the right decision.

Even if the sensations from that single searing contact continued to haunt him two long months later.