Storm echo, p.3
Storm Echo, page 3
Just him. No mask. No sophistication. No Mercant power. Just Ivan.
“I can’t come tomorrow night,” she told him at the end of their time together, her teeth sinking into her lower lip. “I promised my friend I’d spend the time with her.”
That—the importance of keeping promises—was a thing Ivan did understand. “Do you have time in the afternoon?” It was easier to ask this time, with less risk of rejection. “I only have half a session tomorrow.” The morning was meant to be brutal, the afternoon intended for rest and repair.
That dazzling smile that did things to him that should’ve been impossible. “Yes. I was just going to forage for wild herbs to make a special oil. I could do that another day.”
“We could do that together.” Ivan just wanted to be with her; the activity was irrelevant. “You can teach me what to look for.”
That strangely familiar tilt to her head, a sparkle in the eyes he could see in the glow thrown off the flashlight. “Meet me at two thirty, then … cutie pie.” She was gone the next second, her laughter lingering behind her.
He dreamed of her that night, woke sweat-slick and with a racing heart at the thought that he’d imagined her. It took pulling up his sweatpants to look at his stitches to convince himself that she wasn’t an illusion. She existed … and she liked him. Enough to spend time with him.
Would she still like him if she knew what he was? If he told her of the thing that lived in his head? Of the damage done to his neural pathways that meant he’d never quite be “normal”?
Chapter 4
User 231i: No one goes after a Mercant and survives. Even if the assassin succeeds in eliminating the mark, the rest of that family would then hunt the assassin with unremitting focus, make their life a constant race for survival. Only an idiot would target them.
User 47x: Can confirm. Remember user 6nvy? Some CEO wanted Ena Mercant out of the picture and 6nvy decided to ignore our advice. Ena is still alive and kicking. Can’t say the same for the CEO, and 6nvy has never again posted here after taking that job. My guess is that they’re six feet under in some remote location, never to be discovered.
—Conversation on anonymous bulletin board reputed to be utilized by mercenaries and assassins (unconfirmed)
WOULD LEI STILL smile at him if he showed her the truth of himself?
Ivan stared at the wall in front of him, his gut tight as he pushed aside the question. He knew the answer and he didn’t want to face it. So he didn’t. Not today. But driven by his increasing panic at the inevitable—because not telling her the truth wasn’t an option—he aced the session that morning, which was about hand-to-hand combat with a highly trained changeling armed with claws and teeth.
He’d watched the wolves the entire time he’d been with them, learned how fast they could move, how flexible they could be—and he utilized all his knowledge against his opponent. When that opponent shifted without warning, coming at him in full wolf form, he handled that, too.
The wolf—Flint—clapped him on the back in the aftermath. “Bloody hell, Ivan. You ever want to join a pack, I think our alpha would happily accept you as a lieutenant.” He wiped off the blood at the corner of his mouth, winced. “At least I got a few claws into you.”
Ivan touched his aching ribs. “More than a few.” It had been far from an easy battle.
Flint’s teeth gleamed, the predator in his eyes pleased. “We’ll do it again in a few days. I’ll be more prepared next time.”
Ivan had zero doubts about that. This was why he was doing the training. Because the teachers were good and pushed both themselves and their students. But he was glad to be away in time to shower, then make his way to the forest clearing to meet Lei.
He wished he’d brought more sophisticated clothing so he could look better for her, but aside from a rough winter jacket, all he had were pairs of basic combat pants, T-shirts, and two sweaters of fine wool.
Not that Lei seemed to notice anything about his clothing when she walked into the clearing. A scowl immediately hitting her face, she put down her basket and ran over to him. “What have you done to yourself?”
He’d forgotten about the black eye until that moment. And the cut on his cheekbone. Oh, and he’d caught a swipe of a claw across his throat now that he thought about it. “Hand-to-hand combat,” he said. “Training.”
“Training?” She sounded like she was gritting her teeth. “You did this on purpose?”
“I need to learn how to handle myself against changelings.”
Shoving back the sleeves of her navy blue cardigan, she put her hands on her hips, against the deep pink of her dress, and glared at him. “Tell me who did this. I want to talk to them about their training methods.”
He had the strange sense that she’d do exactly that, march up and tell Jorge off to his face. So whatever animal she was, it wasn’t one that was scared of wolves. Or of dominants. But he didn’t get an impression of dominance off her—now that he’d been around the wolves long enough, he’d begun to intuit the power differentials. It wasn’t obvious to him as it clearly was to changelings, but it wasn’t opaque, either.
So he could tell that Lei wasn’t a dominant. But neither did she radiate the same feel as a submissive. He’d only met one submissive to date, as the wolves were incredibly protective of their more vulnerable packmates, and this submissive had just been dropping off Flint’s phone, which he’d forgotten at home. But that young male hadn’t met Ivan’s eyes except in short bursts. He had met Flint’s gaze, however, the deep trust between them obvious.
Lei, on the other hand, had never hesitated to look Ivan in the eye. “I’m okay,” he said to her. “It’s all surface wounds.”
Folding her arms, she tapped her foot. “What about the gash on your leg? Did you tear that open?”
He was very glad to be able to say, “No. I got it sealed.” A RockStorm nurse had turned up and done the repair, while marveling at Lei’s neat stitching. “The nurse was very complimentary of your skills.”
She sniffed, her nose a little up in the air. “Hmm.” Then she picked up her basket and they went herb hunting, while the frost of her temper lingered in the air.
Since Ivan had no idea what he was doing, mostly he just watched and listened to her. When she showed him a plant, he looked for it, and had a hundred percent success rate with identifications.
“That’s amazing,” she said an hour later, the frost long thawed. “Your memory must be incredible.”
“Just trained,” he said. “Memory skills come in handy in a family of spies.”
A burst of startled laughter. “Really? A family of spies?”
“Intelligence is our business,” he said. “Might as well be our family motto.”
“Do you have one? A family motto?”
He didn’t hesitate in answering. This was no secret he was bound to keep. It just wasn’t well-known. Dig deep enough, far enough back, and you’d find it. “Cor meum familia est. My heart is family.”
She sat back on her heels, her eyes shining. “Oh, how wonderful.” Hands fisting on her thighs, she said, “But isn’t that against the rules with Psy? I don’t know too much about your people but I’ve picked up bits and pieces, and that motto … well, it’s so poignant.”
“Yes, it’s against the rules—or was before the recent change in our leadership,” he said, the fall of the emotionless Silence Protocol yet too new for the knowledge to have settled inside him. “Too much inherent emotion.”
“So how did it survive?”
“Ancestors took it off public-facing buildings and off the crest that goes on outward-bound items, and the rulers of the time thought that meant we got rid of it.” He found a clump of an herb she’d wanted. “Stupid, really. Should’ve been obvious the family was as tight as before.”
Lei’s lips curved as she accepted the herbs he’d picked for her. “I like your family already. My parents were like that with me—just all in, you know?”
He’d caught the past tense, probed with all the gentleness he had inside him—and when it came to Lei, he had unexpected depths of it. “They’re gone?”
She nodded. “A long time ago. We were caught in a hurricane. The winds flipped my father’s car while he was trying to drive us out.”
Ivan would’ve frowned if he hadn’t long ago learned to control external indications of his internal responses.
Weather tracking had advanced to the nth degree since the ravages of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Hurricanes and cyclones were now often accurately predicted a considerable time out from the event, and all cities had structures built to act as shelters for massive numbers of people, since authorities had realized it made more sense to ride out the situation in place than try to evacuate millions of people, many of whom had nowhere to go. The shelters were built to withstand even the most deadly categories of storm—and had done so multiple times.
Even those who chose to remain in their homes had plenty of time to prepare.
Fatalities from being caught out in the elements during a storm were extremely rare. But he didn’t ask why her family had been driving on the road when everyone else was hunkering down. He knew the answer. He’d lived the answer. A minority of people always fell through the cracks, either because society forgot them, or because of unforeseen circumstances—or because they weren’t capable in a way that couldn’t be predicted or ameliorated.
Ivan’s mother wouldn’t have had the capacity to get him to a shelter had the news of a storm broken while she was walking the petals of the crystalline flower. He’d have stayed where he was, a child with no knowledge of the storm winds about to smash the city.
Instead, he focused on the rest of her words. “You had a good childhood?”
“A happy one,” she told him, the sadness of her old and faded. As if she’d come to terms with the loss long ago. “My papa spoke fluent Spanish and English, while my mama was only fluent in English—but she’d retained just enough knowledge of French that the three of us spoke in a mishmash of French, English, and Spanish. And every so often, she’d add in a Māori word she’d learned from her grandma before she passed away.”
A smile breaking through the sadness. “It was like a secret language all our own. My father would say ‘te amo, my belle’ to my mother, and she’d pretend to swoon, then call him by a funny French endearment, like ‘my little quail.’ I have terrible Spanish grammar because I keep trying to mix it up.”
From the light in her gaze, it was clear to Ivan that she didn’t care about her imperfect language skills. “We traveled a lot. I’d been to most corners of this continent by the time I was ten.”
“Your pack didn’t mind?”
A slight fading of her expression, her attention suddenly tightly concentrated on the herbs she held. “My mom and dad were loners. Two loners who fell in love and had a baby. Pack life wasn’t for them.”
But what about their child?
Ivan didn’t ask that question, either. He knew exactly how hard the loss of her parents, her only foundations, would’ve been for Lei. “My father was never in my life—I don’t even know his identity,” he said, telling her a fact that would get him blacklisted among the vast majority of Psy families should he go looking for a genetic match for a procreation agreement.
It mattered nothing to him, since he had no intention of passing on his genetic material. “I was raised by my mother as a child. She died when I was eight.”
Her fingers flexing open as if without her conscious control, Lei dropped the herbs in her hand. “Oh.” A softness to her as she turned to look at him, she said, “Then you know.”
“Yes.” He’d never forget that sensation of being moorless, without even the fragile and fractured anchor that had been his lifeline. “What was your favorite place to travel to that you remember?”
A frown, then she clicked her fingers. “The Amazon rain forest. We had to get permission from the local packs to travel there—but wow, I’ll never forget it. A kind of green that’s so rich it’s beyond description, the songs of the birds, the sounds of the other animals. We shifted and ran and ran, so many scents in the air.”
As he listened, she told him more stories of her family’s adventures, of hours and days on the road, of nights spent under the stars, of vistas endless and breathtaking. No mention of anyone else. Not even friends met and made along the way. Only Lei’s parents and Lei.
“They left you with extraordinary memories,” he said after she finished a story about a winter trip where her father had built a snow cave for them to spend the night in.
“Yes.” A pause, her voice quieter when she said, “I just wish they’d planned better for what would happen if they weren’t there one day.”
So much pain in those words that even his stunted emotional core hurt. “Did you end up in foster care?”
“A short time.” A tight smile. “Then my grandfather came for me.”
It was clear from her tone that her experience with a grandparent hadn’t been the same as Ivan’s. He didn’t want to cause her more pain, so he didn’t ask why. Rather, he let her choose the route of their conversation, and what she chose was to get up. “I want a reed that usually grows near waterways. I think I hear a stream.”
Ten minutes later, Ivan was looking carefully for that reed when flecks of water hit the side of his face. He glanced up, saw she was intent on her own search, and realized she must’ve flicked the water on him by accident somehow.
Wiping off the small droplets, he returned to his search.
More water hitting the side of his face.
He turned … to see her looking innocently at a stone she’d picked up from the stream. “Isn’t this pretty?” she said, holding it to the light.
Ivan didn’t say anything, but he watched her out of the corner of his eye as he pretended to return to his search. She put the stone down, seemed to be looking for the reed again … then glanced over with a grin and flicked him again.
He snapped his head toward her and leaped.
Giving a laughing scream, she abandoned her basket and ran, her hair streaming behind her and the skirts of her dress a dazzling flag of color through the trees. He was highly trained and extremely fit, and he took the obstacles in his path with ease—but she was a changeling, this her natural ground.
It ended up an even match, until the two of them stood on opposite sides of a tree, each moving left and right as they attempted to outsmart one another. He jumped to the other side. But she’d already done the opposite and they were back in their same positions.
Her grin was wild and not at all human or Psy. It was changeling. Primal and full of delight. And he realized this was play. She was playing with him. He’d never believed he knew how to play, though he could fake it, but this felt as natural as his skin and his breath.
This time when he jumped, she was laughing too hard to avoid him, and he could’ve grabbed her … but he paused only inches from her, a sudden awkwardness between them as they stared at one another. A pulse beat in the hollow of her throat, a rapid little butterfly that echoed his own erratic heartbeat.
Heat made her skin glow, and he wanted badly to touch, wanted badly to have that right. But the frozen moment went on too long, until she looked down and brushed off her skirts. “I should get home.”
Clouds blotted out his private horizon, but he walked back with her and picked up her basket. “Will you come tomorrow?” he asked, even though all he wanted to do was grab hold of her and make her stay.
Not rational, that wasn’t rational. It would also scare her.
A look from below her lashes as she accepted the basket. “Evening picnic?” It was a husky question. “It’ll be dark, but I can borrow a string of charged solar lights from my friend. And you can try my mushroom tart.”
He nodded. He’d have said yes to anything she suggested. “What shall I bring?”
“Just yourself, cutie.” That tilt of the head again, her smile secretive. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” A quicksilver movement that caught him by surprise, her lips brushing his jaw in a fleeting kiss before she was gone in a waft of the most delicate perfume, a wild creature he couldn’t hold.
Shaken, he raised a hand to the place she’d touched, hovered over it. He didn’t know what was happening to him, how she’d walked right inside his defenses and made a place for herself … but it was done and he wasn’t sorry. What he had to do now was figure out how to make her stay even after she knew all he’d done and all he was: a predator whose mind ate the souls of others, leaving them empty, dead husks.
Chapter 5
Your neurological profile remains unchanged from earlier scans. The abnormal variation in your pattern appears to have settled into its adult form.
—Dr. Jamal Raul to Ivan Mercant (2 January 2071)
ARWEN WAS WAITING outside Ivan’s cabin when he reached home early that evening, having called up Flint for a couple of hours of extra hand-to-hand training. Not a fight this time, rather a slower exploration of the differences between Psy and changeling in this context. The often amused wolf had been as interested as Ivan, the two of them oddly well suited as training partners.
“Finally!” Arwen rose from the rickety bench on the porch, settling the cool gray of his perfectly fitted suit jacket around himself. “I thought you’d never get back.”
Ivan wasn’t the least surprised to find his cousin haunting his doorstep. Ivan had been out of touch for over a week. His entire family was made up of fiercely independent individuals, but they were powerful because they were also a unit. As such, they kept in regular contact—or as Canto termed it, provided “proof of life.” Especially when they were on their own in unfamiliar surroundings.
Most people, however, would’ve just given him a call or sent him a message.
