Storm echo, p.6
Storm Echo, page 6
SOLEIL WAS ON the edge of a dark gray horizon, the light fading glimmer by final glimmer when it hit her. A demanding bolt of energy that jolted her entire body and turned the horizon to white fire.
A sharp gasp that almost hurt, cold air shards in lungs that had already been shutting down … and then her cat leaped. She didn’t know to where until she found herself with her claws hooked into a cool black space electric with silvery currents of energy that curved around her in a protective wall.
I know the scent of this place. Oh, it’s him. Of course it’s him.
Such an odd thought, one her wounded mind couldn’t hold.
Her cat wanted to bat its paws at the wild currents of silver, but it had to cling on, knew that to let go would be the end of everything. It would fall into the gray horizon. It would … die. The knowledge came not from the primal half of her nature but from the half that was human. It understood death, had seen far too much of it before her body fell under an unseen and vicious blow.
No.
A repudiation of death.
She had promises to uphold, that she knew, though she could no longer see the full shape of those promises, her mind dull and heavy as her body directed all its energy into keeping her alive.
I’m hurt bad.
A sluggish realization.
Fighting not to fall into the nothingness, she clung on to the electric space, allowed it to protect her, and as she did so, she saw flashes of a dingy room with dull-colored carpet, the deep blue waters of an ocean crashing against rocks, the elegant face of an older woman who had the eyes of an alpha, a pair of powerful hands with squared-off nails and cool white skin.
She stared at those hands, saw them flex inward, squeeze.
The image flashed out of existence, to be replaced by a glimpse of bodies in the snow. She jerked away from that, and to another face. This one of a young man with eyes the haunting shade of silvery morning light—the tilt at the corners gave him an almost feline appearance. Her cat liked that.
He was pretty. But kind. So kind that she felt it in her heart.
His black hair was straight and cut with neat precision. It suited his square jawline and high cheekbones. His expression was gentle and familiar, though she didn’t know him. She was certain of that.
Those hands once more, now sheathed in black gloves.
They flexed again, this time to pull a thin wire taut in between.
This one, he wasn’t kind. He was dangerous. A predator.
She should’ve been afraid. She wasn’t.
Now the image in front of her was of a small room with walls of palest green, a plant in the corner, and a desk set up by the window. On it lay a datapad that held equations from a child’s textbook.
Everything collapsed, highways of crystalline flowers exploding in her brain, their colors infinite. Beautiful. So beautiful. Her mind began to fade at the edges again, the flowers blurring, but this time, she knew the fading wasn’t death. It couldn’t be. Because when the cat released its claws and pounced back into the mind that was her own, it brought with it a shimmering necklace of crystalline lightning awash with colors beyond colors.
Wrapping that lightning around itself, her cat curled up inside her, ready to heal.
The lightning crackled a pure silver as it created a shield around her brain. She sighed as she fell into the dark. She knew he’d protect her. The man with death in his hands. He’d keep her safe.
Chapter 9
I’ve met someone, Farah. Someone wonderful.
—Soleil Bijoux Garcia to Farah Khan (5 February 2082)
EXHAUSTION HIT IVAN with the force of a tidal wave ten minutes after he left the site. And it wasn’t the bodily exhaustion of hard work; if he didn’t know better, he’d have said he’d maxed out his psychic power, was on the verge of a dangerous mental flatline. Except that made no sense—even the jolt he’d given Lei had used only the most minor percentage of his psychic reserves.
His state got so bad that he had to pull off the night-cloaked highway and intake three nutrient bars before he could function again. Even then, he knew he was unsafe to drive. He was as likely to crash the vehicle and kill himself as make it to the hospital.
Ivan Mercant did not nap.
He didn’t today, either. This sleep was demanding and too deep, left him feeling leaden and drugged when he finally clawed his way out of it some five hours later, the world yet dark. He was starving, hungrier than he could remember being since he was a child.
He ate and drank so many nutrients in the ensuing ten minutes that he cleaned out his entire stock and had to stop at an automated convenience store to pick up more. It was as if he were a bottomless void. The food just vanished into him and it wasn’t until a half hour later that he felt in any way stable.
He’d already called the hospital to check on Lei. They couldn’t locate her. Too many wounded coming in, he was told. Too much confusion. No matter. He’d find her when he got there.
He arrived twenty minutes later, walked straight into the patient area. It was amazing, the places you could get into if you simply acted like you belonged. No one asked him what he was doing there, and he was able to check every single room, put his eyes on every single patient.
He’d left his gift in the vehicle, knowing Lei couldn’t use it yet.
It was a dress he’d purchased after he spotted a clothing outlet in the small automated mall that housed the convenience store. Automations in that vein had never quite taken off as predicted—even in majority-Psy areas, which was interesting in itself—but they worked in lonely places like this, with passing motorists glad for a place to find essentials no matter the time of day or night.
The clothing store’s stock had been limited, but he’d managed to find an ankle-length dress in a bright lemon yellow that seemed as if it would speak to Lei’s sense of color and style. She was always bright, Lei. Sunshine in human form. He’d tried to replace her denim jacket, too, but the store didn’t have that in stock, nor anything else that might suffice, so he’d made a note to get that later.
As he went to check out, the automated service station had offered him a list of other suggested purchases, and he’d indicated yes to all of them. It had then presented him with a small box that was labeled as containing underwear, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a generic skin cream, and a small makeup palette for “midrange” skin tones. He’d figured she might be able to use the eye powder.
Lei liked putting sparkle on her eyelids.
Some might see his gift as a bribe, a way to nudge his way back into her life. It wasn’t. He’d do anything for her to choose him; to gain her attention by stealth, by taking advantage of her when she was hurt and defenseless … no, it would break him. He’d always know that it was all false.
Too soon. Too fast. But it had happened. He’d bonded to her with the same obsessive focus that had kept him functional and alive this long.
Now he had to learn to live without her.
As for the gift, Ivan simply valued the power of being clean and having clothes of your own. Those were the first things Grandmother had given him after she brought him home; he could still remember standing in front of the mirror after a bath, touching his hand carefully to the brand-new shirt that no one else had ever before worn—and that Grandmother had told him no one could take from him.
His, it was just his.
Even if Lei didn’t like the dress, it would give her some non-institutional clothing into which to change. But though he went through the entire multi-level hospital room by room, patient by patient, he couldn’t find her. There was no woman with her long limbs and specific pattern of injuries.
“We’ve been transferring a lot of patients,” a harried human nurse told him when he queried her, deep grooves marking the ebony skin of her face. The medical net she wore over the tight curls of her hair told him she must’ve just come out of a surgery. “Massive number of injured due to recent events.”
Though she was clearly tired, she went to a computronic monitor and said, “I can look up your friend for you.”
“She was brought in as Lei, last name unknown, from the site adjacent to the SkyElm ocelot pack. Identified as changeling, most likely ocelot.”
The nurse input the information, frowned. “I have a Lei here, but notes say she wasn’t ID’d as an ocelot. SkyElm alpha himself came in to ID the unknowns an hour after she was brought in, and he didn’t recognize her.”
Ivan tried to make sense of that; all he could come up with was that Lei had been passing through on her way home to her own pack and had stepped in to help. It was what she did, who she was. “Does it say where she was transferred?”
“It should.” A minute later, after bringing up multiple different pages one after the other, she sighed. “I’m sorry, it looks like someone screwed up and didn’t note the details of her transfer. We’re sending patients across the country—sometimes, in the rush to get a patient onto a jet-chopper, the record trail gets broken.”
The nurse brought up another document. “No female patients listed as DOA or expired in the past eighteen hours, so you don’t have to worry about that. She’s alive, just at another hospital. I’m sure she’ll get in touch with you as soon as she’s able.”
Ivan nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and called Canto the instant he walked out of the hospital and into the cold and dark gray winter light. If anyone could locate Lei, it was his eldest cousin; Canto had an intelligence network so vast it reached every corner of the globe.
But even Canto couldn’t follow an invisible thread. “Medical records are in chaos,” he told Ivan two hours later. “Malware attack attributed to a fringe group inspired by Pure Psy—it’s wiped a ton of data.”
Ivan was well aware of the pro-Silence fanatics. “Can it be retrieved?”
“Unknown. Depends on whether the organizations have uninfected backups. I’ll set up an automatic alert to scan for any patient who fits the description you’ve given me.”
Canto didn’t know the truth of who Lei was to Ivan; he believed Ivan just felt a responsibility for the woman he’d rescued. That wasn’t out of the ordinary for a Mercant. Legend had it they’d once been the loyal knights to a king—Mercants looked after the people under their care.
Canto’s scan, however, never bore any fruit. Canto was used to finding data, and he pushed the limits for Ivan, breaking into multiple secure databases. All for naught. “I’m sorry, Ivan,” he said weeks later. “The malware infection was so bad that many hospitals wiped their entire systems, then put up SnowDancer-DarkRiver-designed firewalls.”
The SnowDancer wolves and the DarkRiver leopards had within their ranks a team that built the best computronic shields on the planet. They were meant to be impregnable. And though Ivan knew his cousin was the best of the best, he still found other hackers to test those firewalls. Each and every one failed to get through.
Ivan had also activated his network of contacts, but they all came up empty. There were too many hospitals, infirmaries, and recovery centers in play. And those had never been his family’s specialty—they just didn’t have enough connections in the medical sphere.
Ivan continued to search—and the claw marks in his brain continued to throb. He needed to see that Lei was safe and well. He knew what it was to awaken among the dead. If he’d believed in hope, he’d have hoped that she had no memories of her time buried beneath those five bodies.
Weeks turned into months into a year, and still, he couldn’t find any trace of her. When he asked the RockStorm wolves if anyone had left a message for him with them, they answered in the negative. Lei could’ve found him if she’d wanted to—because he had to believe that she was alive and healed by now. That she hadn’t tried was a message all its own.
Ivan had to stop searching for her.
If he didn’t, he’d turn her into prey … and become as big a monster as those he hunted. It was time to let her go.
PRESENT DAY:
10 AUGUST 2083
SAN FRANCISCO
Chapter 10
Changeling law is clear. The penalty is death.
—Lucas Hunter, alpha of DarkRiver (June 2082)
SOLEIL TOOK CARE to keep her breathing even and her actions unremarkable as she walked through the colorful bustle of San Francisco’s Chinatown. It was difficult when the scents of predators far bigger and stronger than her surrounded her on every possible side. She’d known San Francisco was a leopard town, but she hadn’t actually understood until she set foot past its borders.
Beside her, Farah shivered. “My fur’s standing up.”
“Shh.” Soleil shot her best friend a quelling glance, even though, of the two of them, Farah wasn’t the one most likely to get them busted. “There’re sharp ears everywhere. Think human thoughts.”
Farah crossed her eyes at Soleil.
Soleil almost laughed, but her heart was beating too fast, fear a slick coat on her skin. The worst of it was that it wasn’t only the leopards she could scent all around her. Another scent—darker, heavier, with a different bite to it—wove through the air. Even though she’d never before scented its like, she knew it had to belong to the wolves. There were too many threads of it for it to be any other predatory changeling, and the leopards’ powerful alliance with the wolves was well-known in changeling circles.
Any other predatory changeling who dared cross the border into this territory without permission put their life on the line. While the wolves were said to “shoot first and ask questions of the corpses,” the leopards had a softer reputation—which only meant that they might give you time to answer one question before they shredded you with their claws.
The DarkRiver leopard pack took territorial boundaries extremely seriously. Humans and Psy unconnected to a changeling group weren’t subject to the same rules—because to the animal that lived within their changeling hearts, humans and Psy weren’t a threat. Not to territory anyway.
Soleil had the scars to prove that the other races could do brutal damage.
Farah’s understanding gaze, so wise and gentle. “It’s okay, Leilei. We made it this far, didn’t we?”
Throat thick as she looked away, Soleil said, “Yes.”
A powerful scent thread, one so dominant that it raised all the tiny hairs on her body. She covered her stumble by pretending it was a loose shoelace and going down on one knee to do it up. Her fingers trembled.
“Has to be the alpha’s scent,” Farah murmured, though Soleil could no longer see her. “Deadly, aggressive, a warning to outsiders.”
Lucas Hunter.
Soleil would be dead within a split second if she came face-to-face with him. As the few surviving members of her pack were dead, young and old and even the cubs. How did this alpha justify their executions to himself? It wasn’t as if they’d been a threat to him.
Farah’s hand on her shoulder, no weight to it. “Are you sure, Leilei?” Troubled concern. “This anger isn’t who you are.”
Eyes hot, Soleil rose to her feet without responding. There was no point. Farah was gone. Soleil tried not to think about that, tried not to know why Farah was there at times, gone at others. And why she always wore the same clothes. Soleil wasn’t insane. She knew the answer. But she didn’t have to accept it. Not yet.
It was instinct to scan the area, ensure that she remained unseen as a changeling. Almost no other predatory changeling could’ve pulled this off—but Soleil’s cat had withdrawn so long ago that she no longer carried its scent.
Human.
She smelled human.
Half a person.
Half a soul.
Her eyes locked with those of a man on the other side of the street. A striking blue—shards of paleness mixed in with vivid cobalt—his irises stood out against the barely sun-touched white of his skin, the black of his neatly combed hair the perfect foil.
Clean, sharp bone structure, square jaw, a height over six-two, he could pull off a suit as easily as he did the blue jeans, simple white tee, and black leather-synth jacket he was currently sporting.
And he was looking straight at her.
Her breathing hitched … as claws pricked against the insides of her skin, her cat jolting to a sudden and violent wakefulness. No warning, no reason. It was just there as it hadn’t been for over a year, baring its teeth beneath her skin and staring right back at the stranger who made her skin prickle, her breath catch.
Her eyes threatened to semi-shift.
“No, no, no,” she whispered even as another part of her sobbed at this sign that she wasn’t permanently broken.
One glimpse of her changeling status and it was all over. There were leopards on this street right now. She’d spotted at least two. They didn’t appear to be dominants, but that didn’t matter. They’d see her as a threat, immediately alert the closest dominant.
Who’d track her down with relentless dedication.
Later, she told her cat.
Ignoring her, it strained at her skin, wanting to pounce on the man across the street as if he were Soleil’s favorite cake: marbled strawberry vanilla with fresh cream. A man who looked less like strawberry and vanilla she couldn’t imagine. And yet she wanted to keep on staring at him, drink him in with an endless thirst.
Perhaps she needed to question her sanity after all.
Her cat snarled inside her.
“No,” Soleil muttered again.
Breaking the unwanted eye contact that threatened the only purpose she had left, she slipped to the left of a tall man in conversation with two women. None of them changeling and enough of a group to block the view.
Her heart thudded, her skin hot, her pulse a roar in her ears. And her cat extremely aggravated with her, even though she’d made the only rational decision. It was so insistent that they had to get back to the man that she had to grit her teeth and fight consciously—not just to keep her eyes human, but to not turn around and walk right up to him.
Now? she said to that primal part of her. You decide to wake up now?
Padding restlessly inside her, the cat lunged at her skin, almost initiating a shift.
A sharp gasp that almost hurt, cold air shards in lungs that had already been shutting down … and then her cat leaped. She didn’t know to where until she found herself with her claws hooked into a cool black space electric with silvery currents of energy that curved around her in a protective wall.
I know the scent of this place. Oh, it’s him. Of course it’s him.
Such an odd thought, one her wounded mind couldn’t hold.
Her cat wanted to bat its paws at the wild currents of silver, but it had to cling on, knew that to let go would be the end of everything. It would fall into the gray horizon. It would … die. The knowledge came not from the primal half of her nature but from the half that was human. It understood death, had seen far too much of it before her body fell under an unseen and vicious blow.
No.
A repudiation of death.
She had promises to uphold, that she knew, though she could no longer see the full shape of those promises, her mind dull and heavy as her body directed all its energy into keeping her alive.
I’m hurt bad.
A sluggish realization.
Fighting not to fall into the nothingness, she clung on to the electric space, allowed it to protect her, and as she did so, she saw flashes of a dingy room with dull-colored carpet, the deep blue waters of an ocean crashing against rocks, the elegant face of an older woman who had the eyes of an alpha, a pair of powerful hands with squared-off nails and cool white skin.
She stared at those hands, saw them flex inward, squeeze.
The image flashed out of existence, to be replaced by a glimpse of bodies in the snow. She jerked away from that, and to another face. This one of a young man with eyes the haunting shade of silvery morning light—the tilt at the corners gave him an almost feline appearance. Her cat liked that.
He was pretty. But kind. So kind that she felt it in her heart.
His black hair was straight and cut with neat precision. It suited his square jawline and high cheekbones. His expression was gentle and familiar, though she didn’t know him. She was certain of that.
Those hands once more, now sheathed in black gloves.
They flexed again, this time to pull a thin wire taut in between.
This one, he wasn’t kind. He was dangerous. A predator.
She should’ve been afraid. She wasn’t.
Now the image in front of her was of a small room with walls of palest green, a plant in the corner, and a desk set up by the window. On it lay a datapad that held equations from a child’s textbook.
Everything collapsed, highways of crystalline flowers exploding in her brain, their colors infinite. Beautiful. So beautiful. Her mind began to fade at the edges again, the flowers blurring, but this time, she knew the fading wasn’t death. It couldn’t be. Because when the cat released its claws and pounced back into the mind that was her own, it brought with it a shimmering necklace of crystalline lightning awash with colors beyond colors.
Wrapping that lightning around itself, her cat curled up inside her, ready to heal.
The lightning crackled a pure silver as it created a shield around her brain. She sighed as she fell into the dark. She knew he’d protect her. The man with death in his hands. He’d keep her safe.
Chapter 9
I’ve met someone, Farah. Someone wonderful.
—Soleil Bijoux Garcia to Farah Khan (5 February 2082)
EXHAUSTION HIT IVAN with the force of a tidal wave ten minutes after he left the site. And it wasn’t the bodily exhaustion of hard work; if he didn’t know better, he’d have said he’d maxed out his psychic power, was on the verge of a dangerous mental flatline. Except that made no sense—even the jolt he’d given Lei had used only the most minor percentage of his psychic reserves.
His state got so bad that he had to pull off the night-cloaked highway and intake three nutrient bars before he could function again. Even then, he knew he was unsafe to drive. He was as likely to crash the vehicle and kill himself as make it to the hospital.
Ivan Mercant did not nap.
He didn’t today, either. This sleep was demanding and too deep, left him feeling leaden and drugged when he finally clawed his way out of it some five hours later, the world yet dark. He was starving, hungrier than he could remember being since he was a child.
He ate and drank so many nutrients in the ensuing ten minutes that he cleaned out his entire stock and had to stop at an automated convenience store to pick up more. It was as if he were a bottomless void. The food just vanished into him and it wasn’t until a half hour later that he felt in any way stable.
He’d already called the hospital to check on Lei. They couldn’t locate her. Too many wounded coming in, he was told. Too much confusion. No matter. He’d find her when he got there.
He arrived twenty minutes later, walked straight into the patient area. It was amazing, the places you could get into if you simply acted like you belonged. No one asked him what he was doing there, and he was able to check every single room, put his eyes on every single patient.
He’d left his gift in the vehicle, knowing Lei couldn’t use it yet.
It was a dress he’d purchased after he spotted a clothing outlet in the small automated mall that housed the convenience store. Automations in that vein had never quite taken off as predicted—even in majority-Psy areas, which was interesting in itself—but they worked in lonely places like this, with passing motorists glad for a place to find essentials no matter the time of day or night.
The clothing store’s stock had been limited, but he’d managed to find an ankle-length dress in a bright lemon yellow that seemed as if it would speak to Lei’s sense of color and style. She was always bright, Lei. Sunshine in human form. He’d tried to replace her denim jacket, too, but the store didn’t have that in stock, nor anything else that might suffice, so he’d made a note to get that later.
As he went to check out, the automated service station had offered him a list of other suggested purchases, and he’d indicated yes to all of them. It had then presented him with a small box that was labeled as containing underwear, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a generic skin cream, and a small makeup palette for “midrange” skin tones. He’d figured she might be able to use the eye powder.
Lei liked putting sparkle on her eyelids.
Some might see his gift as a bribe, a way to nudge his way back into her life. It wasn’t. He’d do anything for her to choose him; to gain her attention by stealth, by taking advantage of her when she was hurt and defenseless … no, it would break him. He’d always know that it was all false.
Too soon. Too fast. But it had happened. He’d bonded to her with the same obsessive focus that had kept him functional and alive this long.
Now he had to learn to live without her.
As for the gift, Ivan simply valued the power of being clean and having clothes of your own. Those were the first things Grandmother had given him after she brought him home; he could still remember standing in front of the mirror after a bath, touching his hand carefully to the brand-new shirt that no one else had ever before worn—and that Grandmother had told him no one could take from him.
His, it was just his.
Even if Lei didn’t like the dress, it would give her some non-institutional clothing into which to change. But though he went through the entire multi-level hospital room by room, patient by patient, he couldn’t find her. There was no woman with her long limbs and specific pattern of injuries.
“We’ve been transferring a lot of patients,” a harried human nurse told him when he queried her, deep grooves marking the ebony skin of her face. The medical net she wore over the tight curls of her hair told him she must’ve just come out of a surgery. “Massive number of injured due to recent events.”
Though she was clearly tired, she went to a computronic monitor and said, “I can look up your friend for you.”
“She was brought in as Lei, last name unknown, from the site adjacent to the SkyElm ocelot pack. Identified as changeling, most likely ocelot.”
The nurse input the information, frowned. “I have a Lei here, but notes say she wasn’t ID’d as an ocelot. SkyElm alpha himself came in to ID the unknowns an hour after she was brought in, and he didn’t recognize her.”
Ivan tried to make sense of that; all he could come up with was that Lei had been passing through on her way home to her own pack and had stepped in to help. It was what she did, who she was. “Does it say where she was transferred?”
“It should.” A minute later, after bringing up multiple different pages one after the other, she sighed. “I’m sorry, it looks like someone screwed up and didn’t note the details of her transfer. We’re sending patients across the country—sometimes, in the rush to get a patient onto a jet-chopper, the record trail gets broken.”
The nurse brought up another document. “No female patients listed as DOA or expired in the past eighteen hours, so you don’t have to worry about that. She’s alive, just at another hospital. I’m sure she’ll get in touch with you as soon as she’s able.”
Ivan nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and called Canto the instant he walked out of the hospital and into the cold and dark gray winter light. If anyone could locate Lei, it was his eldest cousin; Canto had an intelligence network so vast it reached every corner of the globe.
But even Canto couldn’t follow an invisible thread. “Medical records are in chaos,” he told Ivan two hours later. “Malware attack attributed to a fringe group inspired by Pure Psy—it’s wiped a ton of data.”
Ivan was well aware of the pro-Silence fanatics. “Can it be retrieved?”
“Unknown. Depends on whether the organizations have uninfected backups. I’ll set up an automatic alert to scan for any patient who fits the description you’ve given me.”
Canto didn’t know the truth of who Lei was to Ivan; he believed Ivan just felt a responsibility for the woman he’d rescued. That wasn’t out of the ordinary for a Mercant. Legend had it they’d once been the loyal knights to a king—Mercants looked after the people under their care.
Canto’s scan, however, never bore any fruit. Canto was used to finding data, and he pushed the limits for Ivan, breaking into multiple secure databases. All for naught. “I’m sorry, Ivan,” he said weeks later. “The malware infection was so bad that many hospitals wiped their entire systems, then put up SnowDancer-DarkRiver-designed firewalls.”
The SnowDancer wolves and the DarkRiver leopards had within their ranks a team that built the best computronic shields on the planet. They were meant to be impregnable. And though Ivan knew his cousin was the best of the best, he still found other hackers to test those firewalls. Each and every one failed to get through.
Ivan had also activated his network of contacts, but they all came up empty. There were too many hospitals, infirmaries, and recovery centers in play. And those had never been his family’s specialty—they just didn’t have enough connections in the medical sphere.
Ivan continued to search—and the claw marks in his brain continued to throb. He needed to see that Lei was safe and well. He knew what it was to awaken among the dead. If he’d believed in hope, he’d have hoped that she had no memories of her time buried beneath those five bodies.
Weeks turned into months into a year, and still, he couldn’t find any trace of her. When he asked the RockStorm wolves if anyone had left a message for him with them, they answered in the negative. Lei could’ve found him if she’d wanted to—because he had to believe that she was alive and healed by now. That she hadn’t tried was a message all its own.
Ivan had to stop searching for her.
If he didn’t, he’d turn her into prey … and become as big a monster as those he hunted. It was time to let her go.
PRESENT DAY:
10 AUGUST 2083
SAN FRANCISCO
Chapter 10
Changeling law is clear. The penalty is death.
—Lucas Hunter, alpha of DarkRiver (June 2082)
SOLEIL TOOK CARE to keep her breathing even and her actions unremarkable as she walked through the colorful bustle of San Francisco’s Chinatown. It was difficult when the scents of predators far bigger and stronger than her surrounded her on every possible side. She’d known San Francisco was a leopard town, but she hadn’t actually understood until she set foot past its borders.
Beside her, Farah shivered. “My fur’s standing up.”
“Shh.” Soleil shot her best friend a quelling glance, even though, of the two of them, Farah wasn’t the one most likely to get them busted. “There’re sharp ears everywhere. Think human thoughts.”
Farah crossed her eyes at Soleil.
Soleil almost laughed, but her heart was beating too fast, fear a slick coat on her skin. The worst of it was that it wasn’t only the leopards she could scent all around her. Another scent—darker, heavier, with a different bite to it—wove through the air. Even though she’d never before scented its like, she knew it had to belong to the wolves. There were too many threads of it for it to be any other predatory changeling, and the leopards’ powerful alliance with the wolves was well-known in changeling circles.
Any other predatory changeling who dared cross the border into this territory without permission put their life on the line. While the wolves were said to “shoot first and ask questions of the corpses,” the leopards had a softer reputation—which only meant that they might give you time to answer one question before they shredded you with their claws.
The DarkRiver leopard pack took territorial boundaries extremely seriously. Humans and Psy unconnected to a changeling group weren’t subject to the same rules—because to the animal that lived within their changeling hearts, humans and Psy weren’t a threat. Not to territory anyway.
Soleil had the scars to prove that the other races could do brutal damage.
Farah’s understanding gaze, so wise and gentle. “It’s okay, Leilei. We made it this far, didn’t we?”
Throat thick as she looked away, Soleil said, “Yes.”
A powerful scent thread, one so dominant that it raised all the tiny hairs on her body. She covered her stumble by pretending it was a loose shoelace and going down on one knee to do it up. Her fingers trembled.
“Has to be the alpha’s scent,” Farah murmured, though Soleil could no longer see her. “Deadly, aggressive, a warning to outsiders.”
Lucas Hunter.
Soleil would be dead within a split second if she came face-to-face with him. As the few surviving members of her pack were dead, young and old and even the cubs. How did this alpha justify their executions to himself? It wasn’t as if they’d been a threat to him.
Farah’s hand on her shoulder, no weight to it. “Are you sure, Leilei?” Troubled concern. “This anger isn’t who you are.”
Eyes hot, Soleil rose to her feet without responding. There was no point. Farah was gone. Soleil tried not to think about that, tried not to know why Farah was there at times, gone at others. And why she always wore the same clothes. Soleil wasn’t insane. She knew the answer. But she didn’t have to accept it. Not yet.
It was instinct to scan the area, ensure that she remained unseen as a changeling. Almost no other predatory changeling could’ve pulled this off—but Soleil’s cat had withdrawn so long ago that she no longer carried its scent.
Human.
She smelled human.
Half a person.
Half a soul.
Her eyes locked with those of a man on the other side of the street. A striking blue—shards of paleness mixed in with vivid cobalt—his irises stood out against the barely sun-touched white of his skin, the black of his neatly combed hair the perfect foil.
Clean, sharp bone structure, square jaw, a height over six-two, he could pull off a suit as easily as he did the blue jeans, simple white tee, and black leather-synth jacket he was currently sporting.
And he was looking straight at her.
Her breathing hitched … as claws pricked against the insides of her skin, her cat jolting to a sudden and violent wakefulness. No warning, no reason. It was just there as it hadn’t been for over a year, baring its teeth beneath her skin and staring right back at the stranger who made her skin prickle, her breath catch.
Her eyes threatened to semi-shift.
“No, no, no,” she whispered even as another part of her sobbed at this sign that she wasn’t permanently broken.
One glimpse of her changeling status and it was all over. There were leopards on this street right now. She’d spotted at least two. They didn’t appear to be dominants, but that didn’t matter. They’d see her as a threat, immediately alert the closest dominant.
Who’d track her down with relentless dedication.
Later, she told her cat.
Ignoring her, it strained at her skin, wanting to pounce on the man across the street as if he were Soleil’s favorite cake: marbled strawberry vanilla with fresh cream. A man who looked less like strawberry and vanilla she couldn’t imagine. And yet she wanted to keep on staring at him, drink him in with an endless thirst.
Perhaps she needed to question her sanity after all.
Her cat snarled inside her.
“No,” Soleil muttered again.
Breaking the unwanted eye contact that threatened the only purpose she had left, she slipped to the left of a tall man in conversation with two women. None of them changeling and enough of a group to block the view.
Her heart thudded, her skin hot, her pulse a roar in her ears. And her cat extremely aggravated with her, even though she’d made the only rational decision. It was so insistent that they had to get back to the man that she had to grit her teeth and fight consciously—not just to keep her eyes human, but to not turn around and walk right up to him.
Now? she said to that primal part of her. You decide to wake up now?
Padding restlessly inside her, the cat lunged at her skin, almost initiating a shift.
