SLAVE TO SENSATION

She wanted to scream in frustration. Something deep within her flexed its claws and it felt good. Right at that instant, she itched to tear into Enrique’s interfering arrogance, arrogance that might cost Brenna her life.

He didn’t contact her when he reached her, not seeing her presence on the Net. Instead, he examined the manufactured flaw with the utmost care. Sascha wondered whether he even understood what he was looking at.

She’d have suspected him for the murderer, except that she knew there was no emotion in Enrique. None. Even for the Psy, he was the coldest creature she’d ever met. Nothing in her empathy reacted to him. That, she realized at last, was why he’d constantly rubbed her raw.

Her mother was cold, but Sascha’s senses had always picked up a low-level emotional feedback from her, as they did from other Psy. Her race might’ve buried their emotions but they were there. In Enrique’s case, there was nothing to indicate he’d ever had the capacity to feel.

“Sascha.” A polite telepathic page.

She became the mask. “Sir.”

“Your shield is fractured.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ve already begun repairing it. It isn’t anything major.” So why had the Councilor bothered to tell her about it? Her mother, she could understand. Nikita had a vested interest in ensuring Sascha’s secret never got out—it would undermine her own position.

Which made Sascha wonder why she’d been allowed to live in the first place. Wouldn’t it have been simpler to terminate her once it had been discovered that she was flawed? Or were not even the Psy capable of killing their young? Then she remembered Marlee and Toby and that hope collapsed.

“You have some very unusual thought patterns.”





CHAPTER 25





“Some of my talents are rather unusual, sir.” That told him nothing. Her hidden talents could include a degree of foresight she didn’t want competitors to know about or a hundred other things.

“I always knew you were an interesting woman, but I never guessed you were so perfect.”

In the dark velvet night of the PsyNet, Sascha felt shivers crawl along her nerves. Perfect. What was she perfect for? “A high compliment.” She couldn’t move. Enrique’s power was everywhere—he’d surrounded her as stealthily as a hunting leopard.

“I thought you were like me,” he said, his tone shifting to something so polite it was a mockery. “But you’re something else altogether.”

If she hadn’t intended to drop out of the Net, she would’ve panicked at the way his shields had spread to encompass her star. Because this was a trap. Nikita had taught her this variation long ago. Sometimes it paid to have a mother whose power lay in murder and poison.

Enrique believed her to be telepathing. Once he’d finished encircling her star, he’d lure her out into the PsyNet. The instant she emerged, he’d lock a shield around the partial “self ” she’d send out to meet with him. For the first milliseconds after a Psy manifested on the psychic plane, he or she was vulnerable. It took that long for the mobile firewalls to rise. Almost no one had the power to spring a trap in that infinitesimal amount of time.

However, Enrique was no ordinary Psy—he could possibly pull it off. If he succeeded, he’d cut off the roaming part of her psyche from the rest. A successful capture was one of the more brutal ways to paralyze the physical body of a Psy. If the paralysis was maintained too long, the underlying connection between self and mind snapped, the two parts of the psyche unable to survive the separation.

The result was death and the absorption of that roaming part of the victim’s consciousness into the vastness of the PsyNet. Some theorized that that was how the NetMind had begun—with the lost minds of Psy who’d been am-bushed or otherwise lost in the dark skies of the Net.

“I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”

“I think it’s time we discussed this, Sascha.” He was everywhere. Cold and focused like the finest of lasers.

“I’m in a meeting.”

“Cancel it.” The walls around her began to constrict.

“Mother has given me instructions to close this deal.” This was bad, very bad. What she couldn’t understand was why Enrique was coming after her.

There was nothing overtly “wrong” about the patterns she was leaking. The traces were both very faint and came from a deep part of the changeling consciousness that Psy couldn’t usually access, not without ripping open minds. Only a Psy who’d done that would understand what it was that he was seeing.

“I’m tired of waiting for you to make time. Unless you want to find yourself pulled up before the Council, I want to see you. Now.”

“On what basis would you call me before the Council?” She filled her mental tone with the confidence of someone who’d been born a cardinal, someone whose mother was a Councilor.