Storm echo, p.23
Storm Echo, page 23
“Ivan! Wake up!” Then she reached for him in a way she couldn’t explain. It felt like she was punching her hand right into the core of his soul, gripping tight, then dragging him out from the suction of a malevolent force.
Ivan’s body went rigid before he took a huge gasp of air, both his arms snapping up to lock around her with such force that she should’ve been afraid. But she wasn’t. Not with him. Never with him.
She continued to hold on as he gulped in air, his body still too cool, but his heartbeat now rapid. “You’re safe.” Her cat butted up against the silver starlight of him in her mind. “I’m here.” She stroked her hand down his side, not the least surprised by the muscle of him. He moved with warrior grace, his body a fluid machine.
“Lei?” A rough sound, his arms yet locked around her.
But when she pushed up, he eased his hold so she could sit up and look down on him. His eyes were open but they were muddy, hazy—and she didn’t like that at all. Her cat was furious that he’d allowed himself to walk this close to the edge, but this wasn’t the time for temper so she throttled it back.
“Psychic burn?” she asked, once again taking his pulse.
He managed to give a nod.
“You need to replace that energy.” When she went to move away, however, his arm tightened a fraction around her waist. She could’ve broken his hold—he had no real leverage given his position—but she noted that his breathing had also speeded up, his pupils expanding.
Soleil understood fear better than most. She had a feeling her Psy had very little experience of it. Whatever had happened had shaken him. “Just need to grab something from my bag,” she said, and managed to reach out from the bed to drag it close.
Shifting so she had her feet on the floor without breaking the contact between their bodies, she dug inside the bag until she found the calorie-boosting sachets she’d thrown in there. Not as good for him as the nutrient packets designed for Psy, but energy was energy. His body would divert it to where it was most needed.
Having spotted a glass of water on the table, she poured two sachets in there and gently shook the glass to try to mix it in. He sat up, was ready to take the glass from her when she passed it across.
His throat muscles moved hard as he gulped it down in the way of young adults playing drinking games. Opening her bottle of water, she refilled his glass as soon as he was done, adding two more sachets to it. He finished that as quickly, then took the nut bar she handed him.
After finishing it, he took the other one she held out. “How did you know I needed an assist?” he asked after eating half that second one.
Soleil threw up her hands. “Of course I knew!” And, now that she could see he was safe, she gave in to the squeaking, excited bouncing in her heart and picked up the small cat planter she’d seen on the table when she’d picked up the glass of water. “I gave you this.”
He’d frozen when she touched it, now nodded. “Have you remembered?” Rough words.
“Pieces.” Pieces that made her ache with the hunger to know more. “Will you tell me what I’ve forgotten?”
Swallowing down the bite he’d taken, he gave a curt nod. “You walked out of the forest after I’d injured my leg, sewed me up, and told me not to be an idiot and rip it open again. Unable to forget you, I returned to the same spot until you came back. I showed you a cave. We had a picnic and played in the trees.”
Soleil’s mouth had fallen open partway through that military recitation, and the strange thing was, as flat and emotionless as it was, it made her cat run in excited circles, her heart sighing. Because all she really heard was “unable to forget you”—and that was all she needed to hear.
“You made a mushroom tart,” he added. “It’s not my preferred mode of ingesting nutrients.”
A smile in her very bones. Oh, he was adorable in how he was trying not to hurt her feelings by telling her he’d hated it. And she knew then exactly why she’d fallen for him—because the man behind the mask of cool steel? He was kinder than he would ever acknowledge or even truly understand, loyal, and wonderful.
Putting the cat planter carefully on the table, she pounced on him.
He dropped the energy bar to the bed, his hands coming to her hips as she straddled him.
“Hello,” she whispered, looking into those pretty, pretty eyes that fascinated her cat. “I can’t forget you, either.”
“I see you in my dreams.” His voice was like cool water, sliding into her veins. “Once, you were made of starlight.”
Flickers in her mind, half-forgotten ghosts of things past. “You were a boy last night in my dream.” She ran her fingers over the intricate lines and patterns on his chest. “This art is beautiful but it makes my heart hurt.”
“I’m afraid I’ll forget my life one day,” he said, grit in his tone. “So I carve memories into my skin.” Closing his fingers over her wrist, he moved her hand to a spot right above his heart.
When he released her and she lifted her palm, she sucked in her breath. Because there she was, a laughing woman almost hidden in the trees as she ran, her hair flying behind her and her face half-turned to look back, her long skirts tangled around her legs. All this time, he’d carried her in his skin. Over his heart.
Throat closing, she bent to press her lips to that spot.
The shudder that rocked him was a hard thing, but he didn’t try to stop her, and when she rose back up to look at him, his eyes were infinite black, a pool of endless darkness. There was so much she wanted to ask him, her desperation to know him a biting need.
But she was a healer first and foremost, so her first question was, “What happened today?” Terror crept a blanket of ice over her body. “You were so far away that I almost couldn’t find you.”
Ivan didn’t know how to handle the worry Soleil made no effort to hide, so he fell back on the technicalities of his inadvertent stay on the island, broke it all down for her. “I need to think about what to do next, before I contact anyone else. Right now—”
“Right now you’re close to a psychic flatline.” A glare. “You are not going to do anything. And if I understand it right, burning yourself out won’t exactly help those trapped minds.”
Ivan knew she was right … and he also knew he didn’t want to move from here, the weight of her on him a pleasure he’d never expected and now couldn’t surrender. “After you vanished, I thought I’d imagined you.” He rubbed his fist over the tattoo. “I half believed I was drawing a phantom.”
“I never vanished. Yariela had a heart attack the day I left. She’s as close to a grandmother as I have—the only family I have. I was like a child, unable to focus, unable to function.” Rapid-fire words, one tumbling out over the other. “My mind kept running a horrible loop of the day my parents died, ending my whole world, and now my Abuela Yari was sick.
“I ran home in a panic.” Her eyes shimmered wet. “I wanted to message you en route. I didn’t have your direct contact code, but I thought I might be able to find a number for the wolves online—and that was when I realized that in my rush to leave, I’d somehow forgotten my phone at my friend’s.
“It just made everything worse, because I couldn’t even get updates about Yariela. Then, after I got home, all my energy went into watching over her.” Her hands cupped his face as a tear rolled down her cheek. “The idea of losing her … my chest was so tight it felt as if I couldn’t take in air.”
Her breath hitched on the heels of those words as she relived the memory. “I don’t remember all of it, but I remember the morning of the massacre. Yariela was out of the woods—though nowhere near healthy. She should’ve stayed in bed, but you know what she did when all hell broke loose?”
Ivan didn’t have to pause to think of the answer. “She dragged herself out of bed and went to assist.” Because she was a healer.
Eyes wet, Soleil nodded. “But that morning, before the horror, it was the first time I’d taken a true breath. My plan was to contact the wolves and have them pass on a message to you. I knew you wouldn’t be angry with me. Not my Ivan. You’d understand. Because you knew I was yours.”
If she’d broken him by disappearing, she’d just shattered him into innumerable pieces with those words. “No, Lei,” he said roughly. “Don’t claim me. I’m not who you think I am.”
“It’s too late.” She ran her hands up into his hair. “I’ve never had many people who were mine, Ivan. I don’t let go of those who are. And you’re mine. You know it and I know it. It’s a wild song between us.”
He wanted to argue with her, but lying to her had never been an option. “What happened to your people?” he asked, drinking her in with a thirst that might never be satisfied. “To your pack?” He knew the final outcome, but not the road that had led to the devastation.
Dropping her hands to her lap, Soleil flexed then fisted them. “My mother was human, lost her parents as an adult, had no ties to any other living family and often told me she liked it that way. Said she’d been a loner even before her parents passed away, that it was just her nature and that we—my father and I—were the sole exceptions to her need for solitude. My father was a loner, too—but he was also the son of the alpha of SkyElm. My grandfather.”
As with the initial time she’d mentioned the man, back when Ivan had first fallen for her, he heard no respect or joy when she spoke of her father’s father, just pain and a kind of tiredness that was of the heart. He understood the latter not with his own empathy, but with hers. Her healer’s soft heart, so full of compassion—and yet even it didn’t have any softness for this man. “Tell me.”
A twist of her lips. “It’s nothing startling. He blamed my mother for ‘stealing’ my father away from his rightful place in the pack, because my father left with her after they met. And even though I was an ocelot, my grandfather saw my mother in me rather than his son, and he only took me in because I’d otherwise have been adopted into another ocelot pack—he couldn’t stand the public dishonor.”
A shrug. “Then he washed his hands of me, and the majority of his dominants took their cue from him and treated me like an intruder. Without Abuela Yari …”
He understood now, that Yariela was to her what Ena was to him: the foundation. “I will treat your abuela with all honor and respect.”
A sudden, dazzling smile. “I know.” Fingers brushing his lips. “As for SkyElm’s problems as a whole, it was long-term bad management. A kind of inward-looking xenophobia that led to too many elders and young, not enough trained dominants.
“We just didn’t have the strength to hold back the Psy.” She thrust a hand through her hair … and in his mind flickered the image of a stern older man with a white beard against brown skin.
“Who’s the man with the beard?”
Soleil didn’t look surprised at the question that should’ve made no sense. “My grandfather,” she said. “I don’t know if the rot started with him, but it was well set in before I came into the pack. It was just a damaged and toxic place.”
“An alpha can change the whole shape of a family.”
Soleil held his eyes. “Who’s yours?”
“My grandmother.”
“Will you tell me about her?”
“Yes. But before I do, you need to know who I am.” He squeezed her hips when she would’ve spoken. “You need to know who you’re claiming.”
Narrowed eyes, her gaze feline, but she didn’t swipe at him. Instead, she kneaded at his shoulders with the delicate little claws that had emerged from her hands. “Tell me then,” she ordered. “Tell me the truth of Ivan Mercant.”
Chapter 36
“He’s sad, Canto. I want to make him happy.”
“Sometimes, you have to let people be sad. At least until they’re ready to come out of that sadness.”
“His heart is all hurt.”
“I know, Arwen. I know.”
—Conversation between Canto Mercant and Arwen Mercant (circa 2060)
IVAN STOOD BESIDE the dead body of his mother. He knew she was dead because though he was only eight years of age, this wasn’t the first time he’d seen a dead person. His mother’s friends had a way of dying. And now she was dead, too.
He knew he should be sad or angry or worried, but even though he could only just fake Silence so they wouldn’t get caught, he found at that moment that he felt nothing. It was as if his brain had gone white, a buzz filling his head. He stood there and stared at his mother where she lay crumpled on the floor of the motel room.
All he could think was that she wasn’t even on the bed. She’d been on the bed when he went to sleep last night. She must’ve gotten out and maybe had wanted to sit on the brown sofa that had a big dent in the middle. Like a giant had sat on it. But she’d never made it there.
Clutched in her hand was a half-empty injector.
He knew from the human family dramas he watched while she slept that he shouldn’t know about injectors, but he’d seen them all his life. He knew how to prime an old one so it would work, and sometimes he did that for his mother when she cried for her medicine. Part of him felt bad letting her take her medicine. He wasn’t sure it was good for her.
“You’re only a baby,” she’d say. “Listen to your mama. She needs her medicine. Now be a sweetheart and fix this for me. Your little hands are so clever.”
As he stared at her, he wondered when they would come.
The people who checked on the dead always came. Only for the dead though, never for the live people like Ivan and his mother.
“We’re rejects from Psy society, my sweet boy,” she’d slurred one night. “They ignore us as long as we don’t make too many disruptions in the PsyNet. Quiet minds is all the fucking Council wants. We aren’t worth the bother to chase down for their precious Silence Protocol.”
She’d lifted a finger to her lips, made a shushing sound. “That’s why you have to be quiet, quiet on the Net. Got to have a good shield. Don’t let emotions drip out. They don’t know I have you.” A huge grin. “I hid you so good. You don’t exist.”
Ivan wasn’t sure he liked not existing. But he also knew he couldn’t believe everything his mother had told him. She used to tell him all the time that she was going to get a proper job so they could have a home all their own. Once, she’d even walked him past an apartment with pretty flowers in the window and said that would be their home soon.
Mind still a blank, he sat down next to her and waited for the people to come.
“Why do they come?” he’d asked once.
It had been one of his mother’s friends who’d answered him, a thin man with dark skin and lots of marks on his face. “No one’s allowed to just disappear from the PsyNet. The death guard come to make sure no one murdered us. Not that the Council cares about us riffraff, but it’s about power, see?” The man had tapped his temple. “Can’t let the humans or changelings think they’re stronger than Psy.”
Ivan hadn’t understood most of that, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
Hours passed, and no one came. He wasn’t surprised. He wondered if they had his mother’s name on a list somewhere, of people who weren’t important at all. Even when they were dead.
He was still wide-awake and staring at the door when the handle turned. If it was the death people, the manager would probably have given them a key. It was the first time in a long while that he and his mother’d had a room with a door that wasn’t broken.
When Mama dressed up and played her instrument, no one knew she was Psy. The humans and changelings thought she was human, and they gave her money as they did to other humans. Ivan thought it would be nice to be human. They were allowed to love music and to dance.
Two men walked into the room, both of them dressed in black.
“… a Jax user,” one of them was saying as he entered. “Shouldn’t—” He cut himself off when he realized it wasn’t only a woman’s body on the floor.
Turning to the man who’d entered behind him, he said, “Did she have a child listed on her record?”
His partner pulled up the information on a small datapad, said, “Yes, but the child was meant to have died at birth. Her record is sketchy at best, but it does say she worked in computronic security once—must’ve had the skills to hide him. No one’s going to notice one extra mind in the Net if they don’t know he exists.”
They were talking about his mother as if she were a thing, not a person. But Ivan still wasn’t angry or sad or anything. His mind remained white. He just stared at these men, wondering if he would be killed. His mother had always been afraid that they would come for her.
“I’m a rebel, sweetie,” she’d say. “I don’t follow their stupid Silence rules.”
Maybe, a long time ago, he’d thought that was interesting and exciting. That was before he saw his first dead body, before he began to understand that what she was doing to herself wasn’t rebellion but the opposite: even at eight years of age, he understood that his mother had given up. She’d chosen her medicine over fighting. And now she’d chosen to leave Ivan.
“The child is listed as being born in an approved birthing facility,” the second man said, “and as dying at home. No investigation listed. Then she drops off the grid.”
“At least he’s still young enough to be molded into a useful citizen.” Striding toward him, the man looked down on him from his tall height. “What is your name, child?”
He thought about what to say, and something in the whiteness of his mind, the blankness of it, gave him a razor-sharp focus. And even though his mother had only said the name of her family once or twice, he remembered it. “Ivan Mercant,” he said.
The man stared at him. “That’s a very unusual family name.”
Ivan stayed silent, not sure what the man wanted him to say.
“Where did you hear it?” the man demanded, then waved it off. “Ridiculous, to think that a Mercant child would be in a place like this. That family looks after its own.” He bent to run a scanner over Ivan’s mother’s body. “Dead,” he pronounced. “Has been for quite some time.”
