MINE TO POSSESS

At the time, he’d been the lone predatory changeling under long-term incarceration—changeling packs usually dealt with their own without Enforcement involvement. But not only had Clay not had a pack, he’d crossed a racial boundary in his crime. Orrin had been human.

Yet instead of subjecting him to hard study and learning things—things that could have given the Psy Council an edge in the cold war it was currently waging against the changelings—the Psy had treated him as a curiosity, an animal behind bars. It was the animal who had watched and learned. Now he watched as Talin shifted from foot to foot before folding her arms around herself again.

“I work with kids in San Francisco,” she said without warning. “I’ve been doing it ever since I graduated. But not here. I was in New York until the start of this year.”

“Is one of them in danger?” He felt the embers of his fury flare into life at the realization that she’d been in his territory for close to three months. All those times he had caught a hint of her scent in Chinatown or down by Fisherman’s Wharf, only to find himself trailing a stranger; he’d thought it a sign he really had gone over the edge.

“Not like that.” Dropping her arms, she looked at his eyes, which he’d allowed to go night-glow. “Clay, please. Stop doing the cat thing and come out so I can see your face.”

“No.” He wasn’t ready to show her anything. “Did you know I was in the city?”

“Not at first. I had no way to track you after you got out of juvie.” She kicked at the grass. “Then one day, a few weeks ago, I thought I saw you. Drove me crazy—I thought I was hallucinating, making up fantasies of what you would’ve looked like as an adult.”

He didn’t respond, despite the near-echo of his earlier thoughts.

She blew out a breath. “I swear—” The abrasive sound of teeth grinding against each other. “I went back to where I thought I’d seen you, realized it was the DarkRiver business HQ, and looked them up on the Internet. I still wasn’t sure—there was no photo and you changed your last name to Bennett.”

It had been a way to drop off the face of the world, to lose any simmering media attention. But over the years, it had become his name. “We’ll talk about you tracking me later,” he said, cold fire burning a hole in his gut. “First, tell me why you need my help.”

“If you’re trying to scare me, it’s working. That doesn’t mean I’m going to cut and run.”

In that bravado-filled challenge, he caught another fleeting glimpse of the girl she’d been. The day they had met, she’d sat there beside him, wide-eyed and terrified to her tiny toes, but stubborn enough not to leave till the paramedics came. “Why not?” he said, shifting his anger into sarcasm. “You’re real good at it.”

She raised her face to the canopy and took a deep breath, as if trying to hold on to her temper. He wondered if she’d succeed. His Tally had always been very quiet … except with him. He alone had known that she was neither shy nor particularly calm. The girl had a temper like a stick of dynamite. Quick to heat, quick to blow over.

“Kids are disappearing, not only here but across the country,” she now said, her anger red-hot, but no longer directed at him. “At first, they were labeled runaways, but I knew some of them. They weren’t that kind.” Her shoulders drew up. “Now I have proof I was right, and I wish every night that I didn’t.” Her voice broke.

“Talk to me.” He didn’t like seeing her in pain, never had, probably never would. This familiar stranger, this woman who saw him as a monster, was his one fucking fatal weakness and didn’t that just suck?

“They found Mickey’s body two weeks ago.” A tear streaked down her cheek. She dashed it away with a furious swipe. “He was eleven years old, bright, so bright, could remember everything he’d ever read.”

“Like you.”

“Yeah. Except instead of being abandoned as a baby, he had the bad luck to live with a mother who always chose abusive men.” She gave him a smile but it was nothing happy. “He was mine, Clay. I promised him safety and in return, he went to school every day.” Tremors shook her frame, whitened her knuckles. “Someone beat him to death. Everything was broken. The bastards pulverized his face—like they were wiping him out!”

Anger shot through his bloodstream. He thought of the children in the pack, of what he’d do to anyone who dared harm them. “One of his mother’s men?”