Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity #3)(33)

The wolves around her nodded.

“There.” Alexei scratched Lucy behind her ear in that one spot no wolf could seem to reach for themselves. “Good running.”

Lucy loped off into the trees. The E with a face that hid nothing—the E who had the ability to crack the shell Alexei had put around himself—watched after her until she disappeared from sight. She exhaled, one hand on her upper chest.

“Come on, lioness.” Alexei opened the passenger-side door. “Let’s get you to the compound.”

The two left soon afterward, Alexei taking the vehicle into hover mode.

As the sound of the SUV faded into the distance, Sienna looked to where her mate stood under the haze of the silent rain. Hawke held out a hand.

Stepping out, she met him in the middle of the field. “Hey, you.”

She touched her free hand to his jaw. His skin was bristled, his eyes wolf. His irises were an unusual pale blue in either form, but she knew her mate, knew it was the wolf who was riding ascendant today. The rain fell soft and cold on them, but she made no move to get under cover. Hawke needed to be outside, in the wild.

One hand closing around the back of her neck, he lowered his mouth to her own. His kiss, it was fire and it was the wild, and it was home. She sank into it, into him, into the heat and the strength and the trust. Hawke could rip out her throat and she could turn this entire forest into blazing death, but together, she and her wolf were one.

When the kiss ended, she rose up on tiptoe and bit at his lower lip. He growled at her, while a primal “kiss” came through their mating bond. She smiled and kissed his jaw. And knew they’d be okay, even as they walked back into the nightmare that had made Hawke an orphan. The Psy scientists might’ve only experimented on Hawke’s father, but they’d destroyed his mother exactly as if they’d taken a psychic hammer to Aren Snow’s mind.

The two of them began to walk through the whispering rain. Wolves flowed out of the trees to surround them, large and strong and changeling. Then came the smaller wild wolves, flanking their more powerful brethren. Yet those brethren parted for the wild wolf alpha. That alpha came to take his place by Hawke’s side, and the three of them led their packmates through the snow and into the past.





Chapter 16


Silence is our only solution for a lasting peace. Our people are going mad, killing themselves and each other with murderous rage. We must embrace a world without emotion, a world of perfect rationality and razor-sharp psychic discipline. We must embrace the Silence Protocol.

—The Psy Council (1979)


MEMORY HAD NEVER been around so much green, the trees giants that soared to the heavy gray sky, their tips frosted a wintry white. Space and freedom and air, no hard edges, no traffic noise, no mass of humanity crushing her with their emotions. “Renault only ever took me into cities,” she found herself saying.

“You want to talk now? I thought I was being ignored,” said the golden wolf in the driver’s seat. “I’ve never been ignored by a short-tempered lioness before.”

Her sense of melancholy stood no chance against her renewed surge of irritation. “Three biting insects.”

“Mean, mean Memory.” A shake of his head that made the damp strands of his hair slide forward. Shoving them back with one hand, he said, “Tell me what this Renault asshole did to make you cooperative in public.”

A scream building up inside her, Memory leaned her head against the window and watched the tiny droplets of rain settle against the windshield. The gloom of the world suited her; she was no creature of light. “It doesn’t matter what I say. You won’t believe me.”

A growl filled the vehicle, a loud and primal sound that rubbed against her skin like sandpaper but didn’t hurt. “Try me.”

“Stop growling at me.” She folded her arms across her chest and, lifting her head away from the window, glared at him. “It’s rude.”

He snapped his teeth at her.

Ugh. Wolves. Except she didn’t want to scream anymore and could talk about the horror. Not that she would tell the aggravating wolf that; he’d take it as encouragement to keep on being a provoking demon.

“At first, when I was young, he controlled me with fear.” Memory had only achieved Level 3 beginner status in Silence at the time of her mother’s murder—she’d been behind her age group and in remedial Silence lessons after school. Ironically the very lessons from which her mother had picked her up that last fateful day before Memory’s world ended. Whatever fragments of Silence she’d attained, she’d lost it all in the hallway where her mother gasped her last, frantic breaths.

Emotion had become her enemy and her leash.

“He couldn’t threaten anyone I loved, because I had no one left.”

“Your father?”

“It was a standard fertilization agreement, done for a fee.” Psy took genetic lines seriously, and while Memory would always have access to her paternal line’s medical and genetic information to ensure her health—and to keep her own genetic history unbroken—that was the extent of their contact.

“Neither my mother nor my paternal donor wanted a joint-parenting agreement. It was a strictly transactional relationship.” Old enough to understand how Psy agreements worked, Memory had never expected her father to come for her. “It was worse because Renault blanketed my mind with his own soon after my abduction, cutting me off from the PsyNet. It felt like no one else even knew I existed.” She’d felt so alone.