Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity #3)(115)

Smile fierce, Memory turned and pressed her lips to his palm. “You won’t go rogue, Alexei. I work with the worst kind of darkness and you have nothing even remotely similar to that kind of damage inside you.” She saw from his grim expression that he didn’t believe her; that was all right—she could be as stubborn and she was inside him now, as he was inside her.

Another worry continued to niggle at her, however. “Are you sure your pack wants me in the den?” she asked. “I’m still in the PsyNet.”

“You see us there?” Alexei asked, a deeply wolfish curiosity in his eyes.

Memory looked and felt her breath catch, her heart stop. “Yes,” she whispered. “We’re connected by a bond of wild amber.” Aggressive, primal in a way that would probably fascinate and terrify in equal measure, it was a bond with teeth and claws. “But you’re not in the Net.” Her brain couldn’t make sense of it. “The bond disappears at a certain point, but I know you’re at the other end.” She poked at the stunning wild amber of their bond.

A growl from Alexei. “Whatever you’re doing, it’s making my wolf snarly.”

Laughing, Memory deluged him with flowers and rainbows. He groaned. “I’m a big, scary wolf. Have some respect.”

She laughed and blew him a kiss.

Brows heavy, he scratched his jaw. “You’ve met Mercy, right?” At her nod, he said, “She’s mated to a wolf and their bond does the same thing. Connects them across the DarkRiver and SnowDancer networks.”

All at once, Memory remembered an article she’d read in Wild Woman. “Silver Mercant’s bond with her bear mate does the same thing! Everyone’s theorizing it’s because Silver’s too important to the PsyNet for it to let her go.”

“There you are, then.” A tug on her curls. “PsyNet’s definitely not willing to let go of any more empaths.”

Memory pressed the heel of her hand over her heart. “It’s bad, Alexei.” Ripples from the latest collapse continued to rock the Net. “Hundreds dead despite an immediate emergency response. I wish I could help.”

Enclosing her in his arms, Alexei rubbed the bottom of his jaw over her hair. “You help by being an E, by being strong and a fighter.”

Biting down on her lower lip, she admitted the shameful truth. “All the other Es are nodes in the Honeycomb. Even the trainees—they all link into and feed the Honeycomb, keep it strong. I’m the only one just kind of floating inside the network.” No one knew why.

“Is it hurting you?”

Memory shook her head. “I just . . . I’m not giving anything back. Only taking.”

“Never say that about yourself.” One hand in her curls, he pressed his forehead to her own. “You’re a new sub-designation. No one knows all the answers of you. Have faith.”

Memory held on to the confidence of his wolf, her own shaky on this point. “I can do that.”

“Good. Now, let’s get you packed, so I can take you home to the den tomorrow morning.” A possessive kiss. “Because yes, I’m sure. My entire pack is sure. Mating is the first loyalty, the loyalty on which a pack is built. Welcome to SnowDancer, lioness.”

“My wolf,” Memory whispered, seeing the apprehension he hid deep inside, the fear that stole his breath in the midnight hours. Alexei was so afraid he’d hurt her that he was hurting himself.

Well, it was time he stopped.

She set her jaw. She’d find a way to be the wolf—and tear out the throats of Alexei’s demons.





Chapter 54


Fractures. Cracks. Scars.

We are all broken eggshells sewn back together.

In a madness of courage.

—Adina Mercant, poet (b. 1832, d. 1901)


HE STARED AT the carnage in the area of the PsyNet rupture.

Powerful and highly trained, he’d responded to the emergency, but even as he finished helping to suture the Net back together, he considered causing a deliberate rupture to break off part of the Net, a section free of empathic influence. It’d allow him to return to Silence, reverse his increasing instability.

Then, however, he’d be stuck in a small psychic network without access to the huge dataflows and connections of the PsyNet—and every piece of data he’d been able to unearth backed up the Ruling Coalition’s insistence that without empaths, the Net went mad. There was no way to maintain a sane Psy system with no empathic influence.

That was when it struck him that he was acting mad, thinking about breaking off a piece of an already badly damaged psychic network. Dropping out of the psychic space after completing the repair, his brain tired from the work, he shoved up the sleeves of his gray sweatshirt and stared out at the rainy skies beyond.

Madness howled at him from every side, no answer in sight. The only “bright point” in the situation was that he’d begun to remember some of what he’d done. He’d attacked the Arrows. It was the most dangerous and frankly ill-advised thing he could’ve ever done—the squad would never stop hunting him. Never.

Especially if his memory of an Arrow shooting himself in the head to avoid the compulsion to kill empaths was correct.

Finding information about the squad was all but impossible, but he’d had a stroke of luck. The doctor who’d done his neural scans was a world-class neurospecialist. Said doctor also happened to be in a great deal of hidden debt. Enough debt that it created a hole in his ethical boundaries and cut through his fear of the squad.