Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity #3)(2)

Those, too, disappeared not long afterward.

It could get bitingly cold at this elevation even in the summer months, the mountains less than hospitable to large foliage. But they’d had an unseasonal warm snap over the past two weeks. Grass had begun to poke its sharp blades through the snow, and in between the huge shattered rocks that thrust out of the mountain, he spotted tiny rain-bedraggled wildflowers that would raise their hopeful faces to the sun after the storm was past.

The wind slapped at his skin and the icy rain ran down his back, but he didn’t slow, driven to find the empath suffering so terribly that she was threatening to crush his heart.

She.

Yes, the “taste” of the presence he could sense was categorically female. It was as if she were broadcasting part of herself with her pain. As if the slamming waves of emotion held a scent his wolf could catch.

His heart thundered, his lungs expanding and collapsing in a harsh rhythm. Inside him ran the wolf that was his other half—a half without which he could never be whole. Alexei and his wolf, they were one . . . even when it came to the curse that haunted his family and had taken his brother. Primal wolf and changeling heart, Alexei accepted who he was—and the price it demanded.

He ran on, the hunt in his blood.

His packmates didn’t often wander this way—the power substation he’d promised to look in on during this run was a half hour to the west and could be approached from multiple other directions. It was possible no one had spent time up here for months, maybe longer.

In any other part of the pack’s territory, such a gap would be highly unusual. SnowDancer as a pack didn’t take territorial security lightly—but things got complicated in this particular section of their land. When Alexei had mentioned his intended route to his alpha, the other man had narrowed his ice-blue eyes. “I haven’t been through there in too long.” A tension in Hawke’s muscles, his jaw working. “My wolf’s fur always stands up the wrong way there.”

Alexei’s claws had pricked the insides of his fingers at the unspoken reference to the nightmarish past. Hawke had been a child of twelve, Alexei barely four when the Psy attempted to savage the pack with cowardice and stealth. A fringe group of scientists had abducted wolf after wolf, then broken their minds and souls beyond repair, the scientists’ aim to poison the pack from within.

Hawke’s parents hadn’t survived.

His strong, highly trained father had gone missing up here during a routine patrol. Tristan had been found a week later, badly wounded from an apparent fall. No one knew the Psy had twisted his mind until it was far too late and he lay bleeding out on the snow.

Hawke’s gifted artist mother, Aren, had tried to hold on after Tristan’s death, but her heart had been broken into so many pieces that she couldn’t put it back together again; she’d simply gone to sleep one day and never woken up.

It was hardly surprising that Hawke preferred not to roam here.

Odd, however, that other packmates avoided it, too. Even pragmatic Elias had shuddered when he ran into Alexei as Alexei was about to leave that afternoon. “Area gives me the creeps,” the senior soldier had muttered. “Can a mountain be haunted? ’Cause I’m pretty sure that particular section is.”

The E’s grief was a crushing vise around his heart by this point, nails that threatened to puncture his lungs. Gritting his teeth, he continued on, uncaring of the sharpness of the rain, the danger of the uneven and rocky terrain. He was a wolf. He was a lieutenant. He was a SnowDancer. And this was wolf land.

The grief reached a screaming crescendo . . . only to begin to fade as he ran on.

Halting, he backed up until the pitch grated and scraped and told him he was right beside her.

Only there was no one within sight or scent. Rain or not, his vision was acute enough that he could see a hell of a long way at this treeless elevation. The only things in his line of sight were patches of snow, exposed juts of rock, the odd area of grass-speckled earth revealed by the recent warm spell, and, over in the distance, a falcon riding the powerful wind.

A changeling bird. It was too big to be a natural falcon.

But the falcon was no concern. The WindHaven falcons had an agreement with SnowDancer that permitted them flight paths over SnowDancer land. Plus, the falcon was far distant and heading in the opposite direction, nearly a dot by now, yet the pain, the pain, it continued to rise and rise and rise.

Her heart, it was breaking.

His wolf clawed at the inside of his skin. The primal urge rippling through his blood, Alexei’s human hands sprouted claws as he began to hunt among the nearby rocks, on the impossible chance that she was curled up hiding behind one. Impossible because there weren’t many rocks large enough. And because how could she be here? This area was so deep in SnowDancer territory that you’d have to be a teleporter to get in without being spotted.

A teleport-capable empath?

Alexei had never heard of that combination of psychic abilities, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t exist. There was a lot changelings and humans didn’t know about the Psy. The psychic race had kept a wall of cold Silence between themselves and the rest of the world for over a hundred years.

The protocol that had stifled emotion among the Psy race had also severed their bonds with those outside the PsyNet, the sprawling psychic network that connected all Psy on the planet but for the defectors and renegades. For more than a century, the Psy had focused on icy perfection. They had regarded the other races as lesser, as primitive beings driven by basic animal urges.