SLAVE TO SENSATION

It was ten at night. That meant she’d lost in excess of seven hours to unconsciousness. Frantic, she checked her shields. They’d held. Her relief made her aware of something else—the pain of the grief and rage that had been crushing her was gone. She couldn’t remember how she’d defused it and she didn’t want to think about it either. Didn’t want to think about anything.

A long shower took her mind off matters for a few minutes. She followed that by sitting still and trying to meditate herself into a trancelike state, unwilling to face up to what she’d learned that day. It had been one straw too many. Her brain was in danger of overloading. She did mental calisthenic after mental calisthenic.

By the time she made herself return Nikita’s call, she’d achieved a measure of outward calm. Her mother’s face flashed up on the screen. “Sascha. You got my message.”

“I’m sorry I was out of touch, Mother.” She didn’t explain where she’d been. As an adult Psy, she had the right to her own life.

“I wanted an update on the changeling situation.”

“I have nothing to report but I’m sure that’ll change.” Right now she was hanging on to her sanity by a thread and didn’t know what to believe.

“Don’t let me down, Sascha.” Nikita’s brown eyes probed her face. “Enrique isn’t happy with you—we need to give him something.”

“Why do we need to give him anything?”

Nikita paused and then nodded as if she’d decided something. “Come up to my suite.”




Ten minutes later, Sascha found herself standing beside her mother, looking out at the glimmering darkness of a city going to sleep.

“What does it remind you of?” Nikita asked.

“The PsyNet.” It was a very crude approximation.

“Weak lights. Strong lights. Flickering lights. Dead lights.” Nikita linked her hands loosely in front of her.

“Yes.” Sascha felt a slight pounding at the back of her neck, more irritating than painful. A leftover from whatever had happened this afternoon? If anything had happened. What if she’d imagined the entire psychic scenario? Perhaps it was a sign of her accelerating insanity. What proof did she have that she’d done anything other than collapse? Nothing.

The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that she’d constructed the entire episode in an attempt to explain the fragmentation of her psyche. There was no other viable explanation. What she’d imagined doing was like no psychic power she’d ever heard of.

“Enrique is a very bright light.”

She forced herself to pay attention. “So are you. You’re both Council.” Just like Enrique, Nikita was dangerous, the poison of her mind as lethal as the deadliest biological virus.

“Several other Councilors would gladly see me dead.”

“More than Councilors alone.”

“Yes. There are always aspirants.” Nikita continued to stare out at the night. “Allies are necessary.”

“Enrique is yours?”

“In a way. He has his own agenda but he watches my back and I watch his.”

“So we can’t afford to alienate him?”

“It would make things difficult.”

Sascha read between the lines. If Enrique didn’t get what he wanted, Nikita’s life might well be forfeit. “I’ll find some information for him. But tell him if I push, we might get nothing.”

“You sound very sure.”

“The first thing you can share with him is that contrary to popular Psy belief, changelings aren’t stupid.” No one who’d met the hard blaze of intelligence in Lucas’s eyes could ever believe anything that asinine. “They’re not going to open up to a Psy who’s clearly out to gather data. If I go softly, we’ll get more. We have months.”

But she didn’t. As today had demonstrated far too clearly, she was coming apart at the seams, breaking into a thousand pieces. She no longer understood her own actions. Right at that instant, she was standing there lying to her mother through her teeth, keeping everything she’d learned to herself. Why?

“I’ll tell him. Good night, Sascha.”

“Good night, Mother.”





Sascha couldn’t sleep. She’d tried every trick she could think of to put herself under and failed. After the lush dreams of the past few days, it was a rude awakening to reality. Ever since she’d met Lucas, the physical symptoms of her accelerating mental disintegration had leveled off. She’d become used to a good night’s sleep, free of night terrors or muscle spasms.

She finally gave up and began to pace up and down the confines of her room, back wall to front wall, front wall to back wall, side to side, left to right. And back again.

A serial killer . . . changeling women . . . metallic stink . . . the Council . . . psychopath . . .

In the hours since she’d spoken to Nikita, she’d used every electronic means at her disposal to secretly surf the human-changeling Internet. The murders had been reported. However, instead of being front-page items in major newspapers and magazines, they’d only gotten serious attention on fringe sites nobody really took seriously. That didn’t change the fact that the killings had occurred and been noticed.

Before mysteriously disappearing.

The killer is Psy and your Council knows it.