Storm echo, p.9
Storm Echo, page 9
“Good,” she said after a cough, while her cat licked its paw in lieu of licking him. “If I didn’t already know the solution, I wouldn’t have been able to answer that one without a calculator.”
“I appreciate the concern,” he said in a way that was so devoid of emotion it would’ve been easy to dismiss it as meaningless … but she could still feel his eyes on her. Like lasers burning into the side of her face.
“Just doing my job as a healer,” she said, her voice a rasp, then shifted to collapse against the wall next to him, their shoulders separated by a bare few inches. Just close enough that she could breathe in his scent. Sniff him.
And oh he smelled good.
SHE didn’t know him.
And he hadn’t made a mistake. This was Lei. Ivan would never mistake those clever eyes, the curve of her lips, the shape of her face, but most of all, the gentle way she had when she helped someone who was wounded.
Ivan didn’t need the confirmation, but he could see her scar now, too. She’d covered it up with makeup for reasons of her own, but that makeup had worn off under the stresses of the hours past, revealing the familiar ridged line that marked her skin.
It wasn’t pretense, her lack of memory. No one was that good an actor. This was trauma. Could be either physical or mental. Her injuries had been catastrophic, and it wasn’t unknown for a survivor of such terrible wounds to have no memory of events that had occurred in the weeks leading up to their injury.
Ivan didn’t even exist as a ghost for Lei.
The heart he’d thought he’d cut out and buried when she left him wrenched into a warped shape, twisted and broken. It was all for the good, he told himself. He was no longer the man he’d been when they met, could offer her nothing other than a descent into the darkness.
Yet he couldn’t stop himself from tracing the outline of her profile, drinking in her presence with a voracious need that was oh so dangerous. Scored by exhaustion or not, her shoulders slumped, Lei had an undeniable and marked presence. But her injuries and their aftermath had left a mark—and those marks weren’t only physical.
The Lei he’d known had … sparkled.
This Lei was … curled inward, all her light hidden from the world.
His hand remained unfisted, flat, but inside, the spider flexed outward in a cool, dark anger. There was so much he didn’t know about Lei, so much she’d never told him before she decided that she didn’t want him after all, but one thing he’d learned today as he’d watched her move.
“Ocelot,” he said, because he had to start somewhere on the feline family tree.
Her head snapped toward him so fast that it was inhuman—feline—and her eyes, they weren’t deep brown any longer. Slightly elongated black pupils against pale irises of tawny brown surrounded by a ring of golden light looked into his own, the animal who was her other half rising to the surface. He wanted to believe that the cat knew him, remembered him, but that was magical thinking—and no one had ever called Ivan anything less than harshly practical.
Eyes going wide, her breath catching … then a smile so dazzling it punched him in the gut. A hard shake of her head … before she lifted her hand to his face.
The spider froze.
So did Ivan.
He allowed her to touch her fingertips to his cheek, punch sensation through him with the force of a bullet fired at point-blank range. Despite the chaos within, he stayed motionless, because to react would be to break the chains keeping him in check.
“I know you.” A feline rumble, her claws slicing out to lie against his skin. “Oh, I should’ve listened to my cat!” Dawning realization, the fleeting emergence of the vibrant colors of her. “Stars in the darkness. Silver threads in my mind. It’s you.”
The bruise inside his brain that had never quite healed pulsed anew, but it didn’t hurt. It … ached. For her. He wanted to believe she’d remembered everything, and that she’d always meant to come back to him, but she wouldn’t be looking at him with such innocence if she knew all of him.
It was better this way, he reminded himself. Far better.
Things had changed for the worse since the kiss that had forever altered him. He was no longer the man who’d dared dream those dreams. No, he was now a monster barely leashed, his time as the Ivan his family knew—and the Ivan that Lei had once known—in a sharp countdown to the end.
But he saw no harm in telling Lei one thing. It might lead her to trust him. Then he could help her, look after her. Because it turned out that not even the monstrous spider inside him could bear to see her suffering.
“I found you in the snow,” he said, his voice rough.
What he didn’t say was that he’d then lost her. But she was alive, and that was what mattered. She breathed, she existed. And she’d just smiled at him as if he was the most wonderful thing she’d ever seen.
It was a beautiful lie, formed on the foundation of memories lost, bloodstains forgotten, but Ivan wasn’t about to reject it. Not when he had so little time left as Ivan, as the man Lei had met in a forest well over a thousand miles from this street. Where she was concerned, he’d take the scraps, hold them as close as a miser with his coins.
“Does your leg cause you pain?” he asked. “It was badly shattered.”
“In the cold.” Claws brushing against his skin, her breath soft as she leaned toward him … before she jerked back with a scowl. “Who are you?” A demand.
“Ivan.” A man with a nightmare in his head and one who’d just realized he’d permit her to claw him, permit her to mark him.
As she’d already marked him that cold day among the dead, the bruise not a bruise at all, but the swiping marks of a cat’s claws. “What’s your name?” he asked, because to call her Lei without introduction would give away far too much.
“Tell me what happened that day,” she said instead of answering, slicing back her claws but continuing to stare at him with eyes that were hauntingly beautiful. “I need to know.”
Undone by the stark request, the ground shaky under him, he told her all of it. From the moment he’d found her, to the moment he’d “crashed” her mind with his own, jolting her to life.
“My cat knows you,” she said. “As if you’re inside me.” Another scowl, her hand going up to her temple before dropping back down. “Did you leave something inside me?”
“Psy can’t influence a changeling in such a way—and if I left something, I would’ve been able to track it, find you.” Instead of being haunted by dreams of an ocelot prowling through his world.
Narrowed eyes. “Something happened that day.”
“Yes.” Impossible to ignore that when it was taking all his will not to touch her. “But I can’t tell you what—though I do think you have it the other way around.”
Taking a box of energy bars offered by a shopkeeper who was handing them out to all the rescuers, she opened it and put several bars in his lap. And he thought of their starlit picnic and the food she’d made him try, a moment he’d gone over so many times that the memory was frozen in a glass bauble in his mind.
“Other way around?” she muttered when he didn’t continue. “What are you talking about?”
“I think you left something in me.” A thing of fur and teeth that had haunted him each day since.
Chapter 14
Incidents of Scarab Syndrome continue to rise in the general population.
—Address by Dr. Maia Ndiaye, PsyMed SF Echo, to virtual assembly of medical professionals from the Pacific Islands’ United Medical Corps
The Consortium can’t function as a cohesive unit without solid leadership. Where is the Architect who sold us this bill of goods?
—Priority question from a member of the Consortium (unanswered)
THE ARCHITECT WHO had become Queen of the Scarabs was pleased. “You have done well,” she told those of her children whom she had selected for this task.
They didn’t respond, couldn’t respond, their minds too busy undertaking the work she’d assigned them. She had her own task, too, the most critical one of them all. Settling back in her office chair on the physical plane, she unleashed the full power of her mind on the psychic one.
And this time, none of the Psy, that old and weak race, could see her.
Chapter 15
Psy, human, changeling, all three races spend their lives searching for and highlighting differences, when the truth is that we are far more alike than we are not.
—Excerpt from “Reflections on Identity” by Keelie Schaeffer, PhD, Anthropology and Psychology Quarterly (March 2074)
“WE ALL KNOW healers have an ability analogous to a psychic one.”
Soleil stared at him, at this beautiful stranger who’d allowed her to touch him in a way that was far too intimate between people who’d only met once before—while one of them had been unconscious. Contrary to what her cat might believe, that didn’t count as a relationship.
Nose in the air, her cat twitched its tail.
“It’s Psy that play with minds,” she said, and made herself look away from the striking blue of his gaze. “Don’t try anything.”
“If I could have, I’d have found you,” he said again. “I looked for you, but you’d been transferred with no forwarding record. And you weren’t listed as a SkyElm ocelot. Were you visiting family there?”
The strange joy of finding out why he felt so familiar shattered as things spiked and twisted inside Soleil. She couldn’t answer, her cat, too, going mute within. This was a pain for which neither part of her had any words. It was one thing to know you were unwanted by your pack, another to be so viciously rejected.
Her alpha had disavowed her while she was helpless and broken.
A stir next to her that was electricity in the air. “You need to eat.”
Soleil’s fingers clenched on the cool red of the energy bar she hadn’t opened, her eyes on the vista in front of her. Defeat was a hammer coming down on her shoulders. There was no way she could sneak out of this street, far less sneak up on Lucas Hunter.
Paramedics swarmed the area, as did civilians … and many, many members of DarkRiver.
“Oh, Leilei,” Farah murmured from beside her. “You know you were never going to spill his blood. You heal. You don’t murder.”
It was my duty as the sole survivor, she wanted to say, wanted to argue. There’s no one else left to take vengeance, get answers. But she stayed silent—talking to invisible people was something she usually saved for the third date.
Farah laughed—because that was just her kind of humor.
Stifling a strangled laugh-cry, Soleil swallowed the anguish tearing her apart and forced herself to rip open the wrapper of the energy bar. Forced herself not to think about her best friend’s enormous laugh, or of how she’d never again look out from her aerie to see Farah, small and smart and fast, running over to share a piece of wicked gossip.
“Staring at it won’t get energy into your body,” Ivan said.
Soleil’s shoulders stiffened. “Neither will stuffing it someplace small and sunless in yours, but I’d sure feel good after.”
Ivan turned to look at her, his gaze unblinking.
Her cat, meanwhile, was cackling. The human side of Soleil was by turns astonished and aghast. She did not go around saying that kind of thing—though she had always had a quick-fire temper when someone pushed her buttons. But … that temper had gone into deep freeze the day her world fell.
Except, it appeared, for this stranger who’d saved her life.
She probably should have apologized. In no mood to do so, though she knew he’d said nothing that deserved such a scathing response, she took a giant bite of the energy bar, chewed.
Ivan returned to his own bar, his focus on getting it down methodical. She tried not to watch him out of the corner of her eye, but it was impossible. She was aware of his every slight move—from the way his eyes tracked their environment, to the way the strong muscles of his throat moved as he swallowed.
Flickers of stars in her mind, streamers of silver that made her cat pounce.
Whatever he’d done that day on the field, it had linked them in some way. He was difficult to read, but instinct—and common sense—told her he hadn’t done it on purpose. What reason would a powerful Psy have to attach himself to a broken changeling?
No matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t find a rational answer to that question.
And she realized she was staring at him again, as if he was her personal North Star. His cheekbones were knife blades against the cool white of his skin, his cheeks hollow. His eyes glittered. It would take more than a few nutrient bars to make up for the steep physical price he’d paid to do whatever it was that he’d done.
“How did you keep so many people alive?” she asked.
“Grabbed and threw them back into a stable part of the PsyNet, away from the part that was collapsing under us.”
A simple but precise explanation. A Psy on a news show had once described the PsyNet as an endless black sea filled with stars. Today, the stars had screamed as they fell into an abyss.
It was a horrifying image.
He turned to pin her with that icy gaze that made her insane cat want to lick him. “You never told me your name.”
“Soleil Bijoux Garcia,” she said, because the time for stealth tactics was well and truly over. “My friends call me Leilei.” She pointed at him. “You can call me Soleil.” Whatever this was, it wasn’t friendship.
“Soleil Bijoux,” Ivan said, as if testing out the name. “Treasure of the sun?”
A stab inside her, her mother’s accented voice singing her a lullaby.
“I’ll call you Lei,” he said.
Her mouth fell open. “You will not. Nobody calls me Lei.” But she frowned, angled her head, almost able to hear the faint echo of a voice that had called her exactly that. It stayed frustratingly out of reach, a phantom memory she couldn’t capture, part of the monthlong black gap in her mind that she hadn’t been able to fill.
If Melati hadn’t told her that Soleil had been visiting just before the massacre, Soleil would’ve never known. But though her friend—a friend she’d made when she was nine and somehow managed to nurture to adulthood—had shown her photographs from that visit to Melati’s Texas town, Soleil’s brain stubbornly refused to remember.
At times, Soleil could swear that her mind didn’t want to remember, as if what had happened during that time would hurt her. Yet that made no sense. Melati had said they’d had a fun time together, though she hadn’t been able to fill in the hours they’d spent apart while Melati put in a little time on her small business.
Was it Soleil’s childhood friend who’d shortened her nickname?
Her cat growled in disagreement.
Frustrated, she left it for now and glanced back at Ivan. “Soleil,” she said again, her eyes narrowed. “You will call me Soleil.”
No shrug from him in answer to her statement, but he might as well have made the motion, the way his expression shifted with utmost subtlety to tell her he wasn’t budging. But what he said had nothing to do with her name. “It looks like DarkRiver’s alpha has arrived.”
“I know.” Soleil had sensed Lucas Hunter long before Ivan spotted him, the animal within her responding to the violent power of a man built to lead a pack. Every tiny hair on her body was standing up, her gut a clenched ball.
Then there he was.
Lucas Hunter, killer of the last surviving members of her pack, crouched down in front of her, his skin a muted gold and his white T-shirt stretched across wide shoulders. His thighs pushed up against the faded blue of his jeans, the black of his hair touching his nape. Eyes of panther green scanned her, the light catching on the clawlike markings that scored the right side of his face. Those markings branded him a hunter, a man designed to bring down even other predators.
That was the moment Soleil accepted that she could’ve never taken him down, that driven by maddened grief, she’d given no thought to harsh reality.
Lucas wasn’t Monroe, weak and selfish and soft from lack of training. Lucas was the epitome of a ruthless alpha. He’d have broken her neck before she put a scratch on him. Because this had never been about a shot in the back—no, she’d wanted to confront him, wanted him to tell her why he’d done a thing so shameful and pointless.
“How badly are you drained, healer?” he said in a deep voice that reached to the innermost core of her changeling heart. “What do you need?”
Her cat couldn’t resist the compulsion that was an alpha’s power. “Flatline,” she ground out.
He wasn’t her alpha, but he was still an alpha, his dominance brutal. She could have resisted had she been bound to another alpha, another pack. But she wasn’t. She was on her own. And a healer on her own could never stand up against an alpha of his strength.
To compare him and Monroe was laughable.
His eyes narrowed, his gaze locking with hers. She wondered if he knew her animal—was that instinct in an alpha? But he didn’t ask her that question, just said, “I can’t transfer pack power to you without a blood bond.”
“I know.” That was one of the gifts of being a healer in a pack—the alpha could speed up a healer’s recovery by sharing with her the power of the pack, a power that flowed in the veins of an alpha.
Yariela had told her about the energy transfer when Soleil first became her apprentice. “You’ll be asked to accept a blood bond when you turn eighteen,” she’d said, her face seamed with the lines of a life well lived. “You can refuse, of course, but why would you when it can help you heal?”
But Yariela had stopped mentioning the bond by the time Soleil hit eighteen years of age. They’d both known by then that Monroe wanted her gone. The only reason he’d allowed her to remain was because it mattered to Yariela. And the only reason Soleil had stayed was because she loved Yariela and others in the pack more than she hated Monroe.
But Soleil’s adoptive grandmother, her beloved Abuela Yari, was dead now. Lucas Hunter had murdered her. She’d been old, tired, a healer who’d lived her life in service to her pack. What threat could she have possibly posed to this leopard, powerful and deadly?
