VISIONS OF HEAT

“F-Psy used to.” Vaughn’s voice was a deep purr that rubbed against her insides in a way that was disturbingly intimate. “They used to see disasters and murders, pain and horror.”


She finally looked at him. “No wonder they went mad.”

“Only some of them.”

But these days, all F-Psy eventually faced that fate. She saw what he was trying to say, but couldn’t accept it. Too much. It was far too much. “I need time to assimilate everything.”

She expected him to push her as he’d been pushing her since the instant they’d met. But he nodded. “Go on.” He jerked his head toward the door. “Sascha’s making up a bed for you in one of the rooms.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Ask.”

“Sascha and Lucas—how?” She couldn’t fathom how a cardinal Psy could’ve survived the severance of the Net link, much less entered the changeling world.

Vaughn’s face underwent a subtle shift. “Do you see this?” He lifted his right arm and she saw the tattoo on his biceps for the first time. Three jagged slashing lines, they were reminiscent of the markings on Lucas’s face. “I’m a sentinel. My loyalty is to Sascha and Lucas. And you might yet be a threat.”

She wondered why that caused an odd sensation in her chest. “You really would kill me if necessary.”

“Yes.” Those cat eyes seemed to glow in the darkness. “So play nice.”

“I don’t know how to play.” She couldn’t ever remember doing such a thing. “I’ve been working since I could form any kind of understandable sentence.”





CHAPTER 6





Vaughn’s beast scratched at the walls of his mind, wanting a closer sniff of Faith, as she walked past him and into the cabin. He leashed the cat this time. Faith was hanging on by the thinnest of threads. He had no desire to push her over the edge and snap that thread completely.

Because the truth was, he wasn’t certain he could kill her without hesitation. And that made him wary. Psy weren’t all gentle and empathic like Sascha. Some of them were cold-blooded killers. DarkRiver knew that too well—they’d lost a young female named Kylie to a Psy serial killer less than a year ago and their blood allies, the SnowDancer wolves, had almost lost a female of their own.

Brenna, the SnowDancer who’d been kidnapped and tortured, remained deeply damaged despite everything Sascha and the healers had done to help her. Vaughn could guess why—as one of the hunters who had tracked down and executed the killer, he’d seen the face of the evil that had touched her, knew exactly what kind of atrocities the Psy were capable of committing.

Faith could turn out to be nothing like she seemed. Until they knew for sure, Vaughn had to distrust his reactions around her. While it was true that Psy generally had difficulty manipulating changeling minds, Sascha was proof that nothing was impossible. And notwithstanding the training he’d received from his alpha’s mate, he wasn’t Psy, while Faith was a cardinal.

Following his quarry into the house, he watched her and Sascha meet in the middle of the living room. His hand rose to rub over the tattoo on his arm—his loyalty to DarkRiver stemmed from an act of the most cruel betrayal and was set in stone.

It was the leopards who’d come to his aid at a time when he’d lost everyone and everything that mattered. And it was Lucas who’d extended the hand of friendship that had brought him back from the savage edge of an all-consuming rage. He’d lay his life down for his alpha and until this moment, nothing and no one had ever threatened to shift the intensity of that focus. That Faith was doing so after only a few hours made him more than suspicious of the reality of his response.





Faith fell asleep seconds after her head hit the pillow, body and mind both worn out. But that didn’t stop the visions. Nothing ever stopped them when they were determined to find her.

Darkness brushed her consciousness. Her heartbeat accelerated. She recognized this darkness. It wasn’t friendly, wasn’t something she wanted to see. But it wanted her to watch. There was a twisted pleasure in it, pleasure she understood because it wasn’t her own but generated by the darkness. During these visions, she was the darkness and if she’d felt fear, that fact would’ve terrified her. But of course she wasn’t scared—she was a product of Silence.

It wasn’t crushing yet, the darkness. It felt . . . satisfied. Its needs had been fulfilled for the time being and it was relishing the bloody rush. But then it showed her a glimpse of the future. A future she could no more not see than she could stop breathing.

Suffocation.

Torture.

Death.