Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity #3)(10)

He hadn’t felt young since he put his big brother in the ground.

The E stepped inside.

Wolf acting nonchalant inside him, Alexei made a show of removing his sodden boots and socks and placing them to one side of the entrance. Only after he was done did he glance back. The E was staring at the door, which was beginning to close.

“Automatic timer,” he told her. “To stop the rain, wind, wild animals from coming in and damaging the equipment on the off-chance one of us forgets to close it.”

The door shut.

Her shoulders stiffened, her hands fisting bloodlessly tight by her sides. Panic beat against his skull, the weight of the spiny and discordant emotion a hammer. And how was she doing that in the first place? He knew Sascha Duncan had learned to unleash her empathic abilities against people of all races, used it as a defensive measure when under attack, but it had taken her time and effort to work out the technique.

No other E could assault changelings in such a way.

Most empaths could take away pain and soften the edges of emotional trauma in Psy, humans, and changelings, but drenching others in powerful negative emotion? That was a whole other story.

Yet this skin-and-bones E was blasting at him, no holds barred.

Shaking his head in an attempt to dispel the barrage, he growled loud enough to fill the space. The emotional storm screeched to a halt; the E froze, then sent him a wary glance . . . with an edge of that delightful fury he intended to stoke into a fire.

He pointed to the panel on the inside wall. “You have the key,” he reminded her. “Stop punching me with emotion or I might decide to eat you.”

From the way she stared at him, it looked as if she was trying to decide whether to take him seriously or not. Good enough for now. At least it had stopped the howl of panic and fear that’d caused his wolf to bare its fangs. “I’m going to see if I can find us dry clothes.”

He walked off—but his hearing was plenty sharp enough that he caught the click of the door opening only seconds later, followed by the rustle of the E slipping out. Cold and wet swept inside. He squeezed his eyes shut for a second and told himself to count to ten. “Calm,” he gritted out through clenched teeth. “Be calm.”

Regardless of his yearlong black mood—a mood that had led his denmates to get him a mug emblazoned with the image of a singularly unimpressed feline—he remained one of the most patient wolves in SnowDancer. However, even he had a limit—if the E went mad and decided to run off into the snow and rain, he’d drag her back in.

The idea of it made him want to kick the walls.

Caging a wild bird never had a good outcome. Either the bird would break all the tiny bones in its body crashing into walls as it attempted to get out, or it would stop flying and starve to death. A wounded wild creature had to decide to trust, decide to stay.

“You’re a goddamn wolf,” he grumbled to himself after the ten-second count was over, not that he was any less frustrated. “Most sensible people are scared of wolves. Let her be.”

Except that he’d rescued her, muttered the mutinous wolf inside him. Surely that should’ve shown the E that he wasn’t actually going to eat her. The wolf that was his other half growled at him for making that stupid threat and Alexei accepted he’d been an idiot. No more threatening the tiny E with his razor-sharp teeth.

He kept his ears open as he sent a quick message to Hawke to confirm they’d arrived safely; that done, he prowled around the substation. It had been a while since he’d been up here, but he remembered it well enough from when he’d helped with the initial setup. All of SnowDancer’s soldiers had a qualification aside from their physical dexterity, tactical ability, and strength training. Alexei was a sniper and trained others for the pack, but his civilian training was in computronic engineering with a focus on the tangible rather than the programming end of things.

These days, his duties as one of Hawke’s ten lieutenants—spread out across the pack’s massive California territory—kept him too busy to do much in that area, but he’d always liked putting puzzle pieces together to create something useful. When at his own satellite den, near the border with Oregon, he joined in with projects where he could. The den’s official computronic engineers were good sports about him nosing into their projects to put in the odd hour here and there.

It kept his skills sharp, and they never complained about his work, so he couldn’t be too bad. It had been some time since he’d done anything as complex as this substation, however. To his left was a bedroom with a couple of bunk beds for any technicians who had to stay the night. On the other side of the small hallway were the shower and toilet.

The kitchenette was at the opposite end from the entry. A locked door stood on the right side of the kitchenette area. All of the tech that ran the substation was in a climate-controlled room downstairs. The access he’d given the empath wouldn’t permit her to go into that section.

The wind cut off.

She’d finally shut the door again—and she was standing on this side of it. The look she shot him was defiant even though her bones rattled from her shivers. Alexei was fascinated by this small, angry woman who dared meet his gaze as if she were a lioness under the skin—female lion changelings had a reputation for being ornery and stubborn. Alexei had met three over his lifetime and all had proven that reputation to be well deserved.