SLAVE TO SENSATION

Sascha waited until they were on their way to bring up the subject preying on her mind. “Have you learned more?”


Lucas didn’t try to pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about. His sudden fury was so pure and taut that she felt like she could reach out and touch it. What amazed her was that there was no confusion in that anger.

Lucas could think through his feelings, displaying a strength of will beyond anything she knew. She was barely skirting the edges of emotion and already it felt like a yawning abyss at her feet, ready to suck her in and spit her back out battered, bruised, and possibly dead.

“The SnowDancer he took is a twenty-year-old female. Brenna was on the way to classes at a private school at the time she was taken. When she didn’t arrive, a packmate in the same class sent out an alert.”

“What was she studying?” She filed away the data—she’d need it to narrow down the search parameters in the Net. At the same time, she reached out with her psychic senses and soothed the jagged edges of his anger. It was done so instinctively that she was barely aware of it.

“Repair and maintenance of computronic systems, concentrating on communication consoles.”

“Intelligent,” she muttered.

“Yes, that’s part of his pattern.”

“When?”

“It must’ve been around noon because that was the time Brenna would’ve been on the path from where she was taken—she usually cut through a small park in her neighborhood.”

“So someone could’ve picked up her habits?”

“Yes. But to abduct her in broad daylight speaks of extreme confidence. The park isn’t large or particularly wooded. He could’ve been seen from several angles.”

“Yet he wasn’t.” If he was Psy, then there were things he could’ve done to hide himself. “A Tk-Psy with the ability to teleport could’ve taken her out with him.”

“Tk?”

“Telekinetic.”

“How much power would that take?”

“More than most Psy have. I doubt it was done that way.”

“Why?”

“Strong telekinetics can transport themselves easily but taking along another person is difficult, especially if they won’t give you entry into their mind to ease the psychic transition.”

She’d learned all this during elementary school, when the different skills had still been in the same classes. Before the other cardinals had gone on to specialize and she’d been left alone to hone what pitiful skills she had, an embarrassment no one wanted to acknowledge.

“Could he have forced her mind open?” Lucas stretched out his legs and linked his arms around the back of the headrest. The lazy movement made her want to reach out and pet him . . . as she’d done in those forbidden dreams.





Clenching her hands on the wheel, she shook her head. “She’s a changeling. That immediately doubles the difficulty, and even for a cardinal, forcing open a mind is already one of the most difficult of tasks. If you don’t care about killing the victim, it can be done with a massive burst of power, but he wanted her alive.” So he could torture her.

Sascha took a deep breath and forced herself to continue. “Plus to do that and teleport her would’ve taken enough power to lay him up for days. I haven’t heard of any strong Psy in that condition. That sort of thing, a Psy flaming out, tends to create a buzz in the Net.” She tapped the wheel. “He could’ve just planned it carefully and had a vehicle nearby. A lot of human serial killers function that way.”

“That’s what the SnowDancers think. They’ve found a witness who saw an unfamiliar large vehicle with muddied license plates.” He rolled down his window as they entered a leafier part of the city. “Enforcement doesn’t know. Except for the detectives working underground, this time nobody’s even bothering to pretend to carry on an investigation.”

The conceit of whoever it was who was controlling Enforcement stuck a spear into the bubble of hope Sascha had been carrying around that her people were innocent. “Were you able to identify the owner of the vehicle?”

“No.”

“What was she wearing when she was taken?”

Lucas’s scowl sounded in his voice. “Why do you need to know that?”

“The PsyNet is full of information. Anything that helps narrow things down might be useful.” There was no way to explain the Net to those who hadn’t experienced it. It was a mass of data and the only controlling factor was the influence of the NetMind, which tried to make order from chaos. An entity that had evolved into its own separate sentience, it wasn’t alive but it thought in a way that took it beyond mere machinery.

“Blue jeans, white shirt, black sneakers.”

She shot him a glance. “I didn’t expect you to have that information at your fingertips.”