Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity #3)(63)

Sincerely,

Confused Human

Dear Confused Human,

Sit down, dear. I have some news for you.

—From the October 2078 issue of Wild Woman magazine: “Skin Privileges, Style & Primal Sophistication”


MEMORY’S PLAN TO sear off Alexei’s fur hit a snag out of the gate: the damn wolf was suddenly never around when she had free hours in her intensive training schedule. Oh, she knew he kept an eye on the compound, could taste him in the air, but he was avoiding her.

It didn’t take much work for her to find his comm code. Three days after their last encounter, she was standing in front of the comm, about to call him, when she thought about what she was doing. Was Sascha right? Had she imprinted on Alexei because he’d pulled her to freedom?

Every cell in her body rebelled against that idea.

“But that’s not enough,” she said aloud. “You have to prove it to yourself and to him.” Otherwise, she might cause her wounded wolf even more pain, and that was unacceptable.

Clenching her jaw, she deleted his comm code from her system, then strode outside, off into the trees. When a black-clad form appeared a short distance from her without warning, a phantom she hadn’t detected with her empathic senses, she froze.

Her mouth went dry.

Yuri, that was his name. A man with rough-hewn features and strands of silver in his chestnut hair, his jaw always clean-shaven in the morning but dark with shadow by the end of his shift. A tiny detail that had made him seem more approachable to her, but she’d never actually spoken to him. And now, alone in the trees with him, she saw only the deadly assassin who was part of the Arrow squad.

“You’re aware of the perimeter limits?” His voice was ice—not because of the nothingness, but because of Silence. In his late forties, Yuri was the oldest Arrow in the security team, had spent too long under the Protocol to emerge unscathed.

“Yes.” She rubbed her hands down her sweatshirt-covered arms.

“I apologize. I am causing you discomfort.” He began to fade into the trees.

“No,” Memory blurted out, infuriated by her reaction to this man who had done nothing to hurt her. “I’m just not used to many people yet.” All the myriad personalities, all the different levels of lingering Silence.

“I felt the same,” Yuri said unexpectedly, his hands behind his back. “But now I have a family, and it is good.” A moment of eye contact, his irises a dark hazel against weathered skin that didn’t hold a tan but was marked by tiny lines at the corners of his eyes—and what appeared to be a knife scar on his left cheekbone. “Do not allow the past to shape your future.”

It was another version of what Ashaya had said to her. If the universe was sending her a message, it wasn’t being subtle about it. “I won’t,” she promised him, and when the next day dawned, she made a deliberate effort to talk to him again.

As the days passed, they began to walk together. Yuri’s energy was as calm and patient as Alexei’s was wild and turbulent. Her reaction to Yuri was different, too. She felt no urge to antagonize the quiet, contained male who had lived so long in the shadows that sunlight had once seemed an enemy.

“Now, I sit in the light with the youngest and most innocent of us all,” he told her one day as sunset drenched the compound in myriad hues of orange and gold. “They ask me to tell them stories, so I’ve had to learn human and changeling tales for children. I hope they’ll never have to know the blood and pain that is the history of every adult Arrow.”

Caught by the touch of melancholy he permitted to escape, she said, “Why are you worried? Arrows are free now, too.” He’d told her why the squad had first been formed and what it had become, how good men and women had been used by power-hungry Councilors for their own ends.

“Arrows are Arrows for a reason,” he said to her. “The children . . . they have deadly abilities. All we can do is care for them, teach them to use their strength in the pursuit of good.”

“I think they’re lucky to have you,” Memory said honestly, and though Yuri didn’t smile—she hadn’t ever seen his lips curve—she thought he was pleased. She liked him so much, was glad he seemed to consider her a friend, too, but never did she feel any compulsion to know him as a woman knows her man.

But this relationship, their friendship, she treasured it in its own right.

She made herself get to know the other Arrows, too, as well as her fellow empaths—and even the leopard and wolf soldiers who swung by the compound every so often on their patrol routes. She had to understand her own heart, had to know if the fact she dreamed of Alexei night after night was more than a thing of happenstance.

In those dreams, she felt the hard muscle of his body against her, shivered at the rasp of his stubble, gasped when he bit her. Each morning she woke frustrated and alone, she glared another hole in her mental photograph of a certain golden wolf. Then one day, she opened her door and found a small sealed box outside.

Eyes narrowed, she scanned the dawn-quiet compound, but found no grouchy wolf hanging around. She took the box inside before opening it . . . to find it full of granola bars. Dark cherry with white chocolate. Salted caramel and almonds. Apricot and mango. Walnuts with nougat.

Memory emptied out the box, but there was no note. Not that she needed one.

Scowling, she put all the bars back in the box. Then, at mid-morning, she took the box around the entire compound, offering the bars to the other Es, the Arrows, and especially a couple of SnowDancers who’d dropped by. The dark-haired one, who’d introduced himself as Riaz, accepted a bar with a gleam in his eye, and she knew he’d scented Alexei all over the box.