Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity #3)(41)

Another, infinitely colder presence immediately attempted to enter and was blocked by Sascha.

“Amara,” said the woman who’d been silent until now, the woman who must be Amara’s twin—Memory couldn’t afford to take her eyes off Amara long enough to check their visual similarity.

Amara shrugged. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.” A flick of her eyes in Sascha’s direction. “You’re incredibly skilled in shielding.”

“Sascha?” A dangerously cool question from Alexei, who stood with his back to the wall beside the open door.

“We’re fine,” Sascha reassured him before looking to Memory. “Are you ready?”

No, she’d never be ready. “Yes,” she said aloud.

Amara held out her hand, the look on her face impossible to describe without using emotional words such as “intrigued” and “fascinated,” though Memory knew without a doubt that Amara felt nothing as she or Sascha or Alexei would understand. Where emotions—or the capacity for emotion—would be in another individual was a black hole, a rapacious abyss.

She could sense nothing of the emotional growth Sascha had mentioned.

Memory girded herself to touch the darkness. Renault had never given her a choice; it was difficult to resist a Gradient 8.7 Tk when he wanted you to sit in place so that he could make physical contact.

The only thing resistance had gotten her was severe muscle bruising. Not that it had stopped Memory from fighting. To give up would’ve been to betray her mother’s desperate attempts to save her life.

Diana Aven-Rose had fought to the very end.

So Memory had resisted, again and again. And even as a child, she’d understood instinctively that her freedom hinged on her continued rebellion. Because the instant she decided it’d be easier to cooperate, that would be the end. Even if she walked out of the cage one day, she would do so as Renault’s creature. As a result, today was the first time in her life that she’d be entering the abyss by choice.

A deep breath, a slow exhale . . . and she took Amara’s hand in her own. The black hole inside the other woman sucked her into a rushing vortex of sheer emptiness. As a child, Memory had screamed when Renault dragged her under, but she hadn’t been a child for a long time. She stood rigid in the center of the emptiness as it took and took from her.

Once inside the void, she couldn’t stop it from draining her.

She could feel herself shriveling as Amara fed off her, though she knew that in the physical world, her body wouldn’t have changed. A little lost weight, but that was it. The sensation of being drunk dry, of having her bones turned to dust, it was an illusion her mind created to make sense of what was happening.

There, the stunted emotional awareness in Amara that Sascha had sensed. It was the merest flicker, and perhaps it was a hopeful thing for Amara’s twin, but for Memory, the tiny flicker of warmth only emphasized the rest of Amara’s cold psyche. A psyche that was attempting to bleed her to utter emptiness.

Used to gritting her teeth and riding it out, Memory didn’t realize the danger until it was too late. After the first time, when Renault put her in a coma from which she’d nearly not emerged, he’d learned to stop the transfer after a strictly defined period. Memory had been too young and far too traumatized to do anything to protect herself. She figured he must have built a mental timer that caused the connection between them to short after a certain interval.

Willpower didn’t come into it; the nothingness just wanted to feed.

The vortex of Amara’s mind was blinding. Sascha had told her the scientist’s Gradient level was 9.9. Memory hadn’t worried because Amara was an M-Psy, an ability not considered aggressive—medical Psy worked in science, in medicine, in research labs. Only now did she realize the type of ability didn’t matter here, only the Gradient level. The nothingness was a violence around her, threatening to erase her psyche.

Pulse racing so fast she thought her heart would burst, she made herself think. She had no psychic defenses . . . but Amara wasn’t a telekinetic. Alongside her 9.9 strength as an M-Psy, she had a number of other minor abilities, but none of them were on the Tk spectrum. She couldn’t force Memory to sit in place, maintaining physical contact. Amara also hadn’t had Memory since she was a child; the other woman had no direct access to Memory’s mind.

Memory tried to tear her hand from Amara’s grip.

The scientist hung on with vicious strength.

Memory couldn’t speak, not while caught in the center of the abyss, but she tried to wrench her hand away from the other woman a second time. Amara’s body came up out of the chair as she fought to hold on.

Two large male hands gripped Amara’s wrists, breaking the connection with brute force.

Amara sat back down, hard, not even seeming to notice Alexei’s looming presence. Her eyes were obsidian and fixed on Memory. “I want to own you,” she said breathlessly, then smiled with a brilliant delight that transformed her from striking to stunningly beautiful. “This is wonderful.”

As Memory shivered, Amara turned toward her twin. Following her gaze, Memory blinked. Her mind took a second to correct the hiccup at seeing two such identical faces in one glance. Ashaya Aleine wore her hair loosely pinned up with combs, curls escaping every which way, but hairstyles aside, the two were indistinguishable.

The same remarkable eyes—shards of blue coming in through the gray to touch the jet-black pupil—the same skin, the same bone structure. Yet Memory would never, ever mistake one for the other. Ashaya Aleine was whole, didn’t have the howling nothingness at the core of her soul.