SLAVE TO SENSATION

None of them had to voice what that might mean. The Psy were more than capable of clouding human thinking and changing the course of an investigation if they were determined to do so. There were Psy scattered through every level of Enforcement, probably for that very purpose.

“From what Sascha let drop, I’m certain that the PsyNet isn’t equal opportunity,” Lucas told them. “Democracy bypassed their Council a few centuries ago.” He thought of his personal Psy shadow and wondered whether she had access to the core, whether she was guilty of covering up after a killer. Somehow, it didn’t fit with the image of the woman who’d let a baby leopard gnaw on her boot. Nothing about Sascha Duncan fit the Psy mold and that made her unique. A unique Psy was a contradiction in terms.

“I can’t find out any more information about that damn hive mind,” Dorian muttered from his seated position on the floor. “Not even the dope fiends are willing to talk and, Psy or not, they’d sell their mother if it would get them another fix.”

Lucas agreed. The Psy had the biggest drug problem on the planet. As long as they didn’t try to addict his people, he didn’t care how many of them killed themselves.

“I tracked your Psy’s mother.” Vaughn crossed the room and leaned against the wall by the door, his thick amber-gold hair gathered in a tie at the back of his neck. It was clear that he was a predator. What most people never guessed was that he wasn’t leopard but jaguar.

Adopted into DarkRiver over twenty years ago at barely ten years of age, he was Lucas’s closest friend and quite possibly the only male capable of holding the pack together if Lucas were killed, in spite of the fact that, to the leopards, he didn’t have the scent of an alpha.

The jaguar changelings had remained truer to their animal roots—they were solitary wanderers for the most part and didn’t need a hierarchy. But Vaughn had been raised as a leopard and Lucas thought of him as another alpha, one who’d given him his loyalty by choice. He was also one of the three sentinels who’d been there the night Lucas had turned the moon blood-red with vengeance. The jaguar had been seventeen at the time.

“I wouldn’t want to meet Nikita Duncan on a dark street.” The look in Vaughn’s eyes said he wasn’t joking.

Lucas raised a brow. “What did you find out?”

“She’s held on to her Council seat for more than a decade because other Psy, even cardinals, are terrified of her. The woman’s a seriously powerful telepath.” He folded his arms across his chest, the small tattoo on his right biceps clearly visible. An echo of the markings on Lucas’s face, it was a quiet statement of where his loyalty lay. All of the sentinels had followed the jaguar’s lead, though Lucas hadn’t asked it of them. Lucas’s own upper arm bore the image of a hunting leapard, the promise of an alpha to his pack.

“That’s not unusual enough to scare people,” Dorian pointed out. Nothing about him indicated that he was latent and people had learned not to taunt him, because when Dorian bit, you didn’t survive.

“No,” Vaughn agreed. “But her talent has a little twist. She can infect other minds with viruses.”

“Run that by me again?” Mercy sat up on one of the huge flat cushions that served as Lucas’s sofas and pushed back her thick waist-length hair. “A virus?”

“Apparently it’s like a computer virus but affects the mind of the person it’s directed at. The rumor on the street is that Nikita rose to the Council by quietly getting rid of the competition.” Steel lay beneath Vaughn’s deceptive drawl.

“Several cardinals suffered mysterious breakdowns or deaths around the time of her ascension. Nothing could be traced to her and the general consensus is that that only increased her cachet with the then sitting Councilors. Murder is an accepted part of Nikita’s arsenal.”

Lucas prowled around the room. “We’ve always assumed the entire Council was in on it, but even if we’re wrong and some members don’t know, Vaughn’s information makes it highly unlikely that Nikita doesn’t.”

And if Nikita knew, then it was almost impossible that Sascha, her cardinal heir, didn’t. He was having trouble accepting her complicity in the cover-up—the panther in him was captivated by her, and he didn’t want to be captivated by cruelty. “Sascha is our way in.”

Clay, who’d been sitting silently on a window ledge, finally spoke. “Can we break her?”

Lucas knew what the sentinel was asking. Nobody on the changeling side was willing to play nice anymore, not after eight of their women had been butchered in the most brutal way.

“We don’t torture women.” He made his voice a whip.

“I was talking about sex.” At thirty-four years of age, the dark-skinned sentinel was the only other packmate, aside from Nate and Vaughn, who knew the full details of that blood-soaked night that had turned Lucas from juvenile to alpha in everything but name. “Women are drawn to you. Can you use that against her?”