VISIONS OF HEAT

“What would that control mean for the PsyClan?”


“It would contribute to a considerable rise in income,” she said. “I could produce on command—there’d be no chance of my having a vision during sleep or in any other situation where my recall could be compromised, as sometimes happens now. So their not teaching me control, if they know how to accomplish it, makes no sense.”

“Faith, why do you live in this house surrounded by sensors?”

She didn’t want to answer and the impulse was so against any kind of rational behavior that she knew she couldn’t give in to it. “Sometimes the visions are hard on my body and mind. I need to be monitored in case I need assistance.”

“And if you could control the visions, then you could contain them until you reached a safe location. There would be no need for you to be caged up here.”

Faith slowly drew her hands away from his body. “You want me to say they don’t teach me control because this way I’m dependent on them, my ability at their beck and call. I have no choice but to forecast.”

“What I want is for you to use that sensible Psy brain of yours—if they can train your visions to be lucrative and business focused, don’t you think they could train you to decide whether or not you wanted to give in to a vision at any particular moment?”

For a member of a race notorious for acting first and thinking later, he made far too much sense. “Be that as it may,” she said, instead of confronting his irrefutable logic, “I can’t control them now and I absolutely cannot control the dark visions. Neither can I risk betraying the degradation of my conditioning by asking for further training.”

“You’re a cardinal.” Vaughn tipped up her chin until she could no longer avoid meeting that wild gold gaze. “You don’t need anyone to hold your hand.”

“But I do need someone to hold back the darkness.” There was no way she could become proficient enough at control, if control was even possible, soon enough to fight its growing power. “I can’t break its grip when it hooks into me.”

“Maybe because you’ve locked away what you need to fight it.”

She pushed off his chest and slid down to kneel beside him. “Emotion.”

He stretched out onto his back, acting as if this were his territory. She’d read about the way predatory male changelings liked to claim territory, be it land or sexual mates. Flames raced through her, a memory of the earlier lightning storm.

“Fire to fight fire, Red.”

The echo of her thoughts might’ve startled her if she hadn’t been concentrating on keeping her eyes from moving over the body lying so carelessly on her bed. Big and dangerous, there was at the same time something ultimately strokable about Vaughn.

“I can’t.” She shook her head to dispel the strange compulsion. “You don’t understand the extent of the madness that infected the F-Psy before the implementation of the Silence Protocol.” She’d seen the records, records no one could’ve doctored. “My own family records show generation upon generation of mad ones.”

“How many in a generation?”

She triggered the memory files in her mind. “At least one.”

“How many F-Psy in each generation?”

“The NightStar PsyClan has always produced an unusually high number of the F designation. Each generation has had at least one, but sometimes two, F cardinals and around ten lower-Gradient foreseers.”

“One in eleven or twelve sounds like pretty good odds compared to what you’re facing now.”

Certain madness in twenty or thirty years if she was lucky, sentenced to spend the next five or six decades locked in the hell of her fragmented mind. “But the ones who went mad before—they were young. What if I’m the flawed one in this generation? If I break Silence, I’ll fall.”

“And if you don’t break it, you’ll spend your life in a cage.”

“It’s so easy for you to say.” She shook her head. “You grew up on the outside, feeling and experiencing everything. You can’t begin to imagine what you’re asking me to consider.”

A big hand flattened on her back, bare inches from the curve of her bottom. “Look at me, Faith.”

She turned her body until her toes almost brushed his jeans at the thigh, her eyes on his face. He was nothing tame and she was drawn to that. But she was different. “All my life that I remember, I’ve lived in this compound. Even the freedom of the PsyNet was almost closed to me by some very delicate conditioning.” Conditioning she’d broken on her own, she realized with a warm glow she couldn’t fully explain. “I’m changing that. I’m going out into the Net and seeing the information it has to offer.”

“None of that involves leaving your safe little cocoon.”

It was the blunt response of a man whose animal side clearly saw no reason for lies.

“You think that makes me a coward, that I should go out there and experience the world. What you don’t understand is that the world might kill me.”