And why couldn't she stop thinking about him?
Lucas met no one on his way home. Parking his vehicle in a distant spot, he ran the rest of the way on panther feet, feeling the pounding earth like an extra heartbeat. The climb up the tree to his lair was as easy as breathing.
What wasn't easy was coming back from the animal. He wanted to retreat into the panther's mind and wipe away the human's pain. The temptation was dangerous, a lethal seduction that could turn him rogue, unable to remember his humanity but retaining enough human intelligence to do far more damage than a normal leopard. That was why rogues were hunted down - they were far too dangerous to be left to roam. Often it was their former packmates who became their targets, as if some broken part of them knew what they'd once been... and could never be again.
Driven by his instinctive need to keep his people safe from harm, he pushed past the enticing voice of decades - old despair and gave his body the command to change.
Ecstasy and agony.
Part pure pleasure and part ripping pain, the change took only seconds but seemed to last forever. He knew that from the outside it looked like his body was turning into a thousand particles of brilliant light and re-forming itself into another shape. It was quite beautiful.
But from the inside it felt as if his skin was being torn from him as a new form tried to emerge. Melting heat sizzled through every part of him from fingertips to toes. When he opened his eyes, he was human again, his beast caged behind the walls of his mind.
Naked, he padded to the shower and turned it to cold. The brutality of the sharp needles succeeded in removing the last vestiges of temptation from his mind. Usually, he had no trouble switching between the animal and human parts of his psyche but today wasn't a good day.
Today, he could almost understand the Psy need to banish emotion. If he didn't feel, he wouldn't remember. If he didn't feel, he wouldn't mourn. And if he didn't feel, he wouldn't hurt with every beat of his very human heart.
Chapter 8
He was beginning to expect her in his dreams. When she touched his shoulder, he rolled away to look up at her. His intention had been to tell her that he had no heart to play with her tonight, but when he saw her, he stopped. Wearing what looked like old cotton pajamas, her hair in two simple braids, she appeared about sixteen.
That was when he realized that he was dressed in a pair of dark gray sweatpants identical to his favorite pair. "What's the matter, kitten?"
A kind of confused vulnerability swirled in her eyes. "I don't know." She wrapped her arms around herself.
Opening his own arms, he said, "Come here."
After a small hesitation, she laid her head down on his chest and stretched her legs out along his side. "I feel so... heavy." One fine-boned hand rested beside her head, palm-down on his skin.
"Me, too." The rock that sat on his heart would be gone by morning but its memory would linger.
Her hand stroked over his heartbeat. "Why are you sad?"
"Sometimes I remember that I can't always protect those I love." Under his fingers, her hair was soft and silky.
She didn't try to tell him that he wasn't God, that he couldn't protect everyone. He knew that. But knowing and believing were two different things. What she did say succeeded in stopping his heart. "I wish you'd love me."
"Why?"
"Because then maybe you could protect me, too." Haunting sorrow whispered through her tone.
"Why do you need protecting?" His male instincts were rising past the dark burden of memory.
She cuddled closer and he wrapped his arms tight. "Because I'm broken." Her hand kept smoothing over his heart and he could feel a melting warmth invade his body. "And the Psy don't allow broken creatures to live."
"You feel perfect to me."
No answer. Only that smoothing hand over his chest. With each stroke he felt more at peace. A different form of heaviness infiltrated his bones. It felt strangely as if he was going to sleep again. As darkness closed over him, her quiet statement circled his mind like an endless river.
Because I'm broken.
And the Psy don't allow broken creatures to live.
Sascha was waiting for him when he arrived at the office the next day. Troubled by the disquieting intensity of the dream, he tried to draw her into conversation but hit a brick wall. It was as if she'd retreated deep within herself, so deep that she'd almost ceased to exist.
"Are you all right?" He could feel the shadows around her, feel her... as if she were Pack.
"I'd like to suggest some alternatives to the materials you're planning to use," she said, instead of answering. "My research tells me this type of wood will weather better in the site environment." She slid across a sample and an accompanying inch-thick report.
Frustrated by her intransigence, he fingered the sample. "This stuff is cheaper.""That doesn't mean it's no good. Please read the report."
"I will." He put it aside. "You look like hell, Sascha darling." No way was he going to let her push him away, not after last night. She was Psy and he'd been dreaming some pretty odd dreams. He could do the math.
Her hands tightened on her organizer before she got herself under control. "I've been having trouble sleeping."
Every instinct he had told him it was time to press hard. "Dreams keeping you awake?"
"I've told you, the Psy don't dream." She refused to meet his gaze.
"But you do, don't you, Sascha?" he said softly. "What does that make you?"
Her head jerked up and he glimpsed something very lost in her eyes in the second's window before her computerized security-blanket chimed. "Excuse me." She walked out of the room and he knew it was because of him, not the call. He'd finally reached her. If that call hadn't interrupted them...
"Damn it." His claws sliced out of his hands, an indication of just how much control he'd lost. Forcing them back in, he went to hunt down his elusive prey.
She was gone.
Ria, his administrative assistant, gave him the message. "Said she had to leave to take care of something but that she'd be back for the two o'clock with Zara."
Lucas took the message with an ill-hidden frown. "Thanks." His tone said otherwise.
"Sorry. I didn't know I wasn't supposed to let her go." Ria screwed up her pretty human face into a scowl. "You're supposed to warn me about things like that." Mated to a DarkRiver leopard for the past seven years, she had no problem talking her mind with Lucas.
"Don't worry about it. She'll be back." Where else could she go? If he was right about her, then her very uniqueness might get her rejected by her own people.
What worried him was that rather than calculating how he could use her weakness to further his own goals, he was concerned for her. The unexpected development was enough to disturb both man and beast - how had one of the enemy gained a slice of his loyalty?
She didn't turn up for the meeting until a minute before two. "Shall we go in?" were her first words to him. Her suit was black, her shirt white, and her tone as chilling as the most brittle of frost.
In spite of his concern at what she made him feel, he wanted to reach out and kiss her until she purred. He'd seen beneath the shell and he was never going help her bury the woman he'd glimpsed. Sascha Duncan might be Psy, but he was a Hunter.
"By all means." He waved his arm, willing to let her believe she'd defeated him. Sometimes an unexpected ambush worked better than a full frontal attack. "Zara should be in there with Dorian, one of the other architects. Kit's asked to sit in. Fine with you?"
"Of course. I learned business the same way."
The second they walked into the meeting room, he knew there was going to be trouble. Dorian was standing with his back to the window, the lines around his mouth white with strain, his shoulders so taut that the muscles were almost vibrating.
"Kit." Lucas chose to greet the juvenile next to Dorian, giving the sentinel time to get himself under control.
"Hey, Lucas. I have the designs." Kit pointed to the pile of document tubes on the table, his gaze shifting to Sascha and then skating away.
"Where's Zara?" Lucas didn't take his eyes off Dorian - the other male hadn't stopped staring at Sascha since the moment they'd entered the room. Beside him, Sascha had gone preternaturally silent, as though she knew how precarious the situation was.
Kit pulled at the cuffs of his brown cable-knit sweater and shoved a hand through his hair. "She got delayed." His tone held a subtle appeal - he didn't want to discuss Pack business with an outsider in the room.
Lucas spoke without looking away from the lethal fury that was Dorian. "Would you give us a moment, Sascha?"
"I'll wait outside." She turned and walked out the door, pulling it shut behind her.
"What happened?" he asked.
The other man bared his teeth. "SnowDancer lost a female today."
Lucas felt rage arc through his bloodstream. "When?"
"Dorian said two hours ago." It was Kit who answered. "One of Hawke's lieutenants just called him."
"Which means we have a week before a body turns up." Dorian's voice was raw, his fists clenched so tight that the tendons in his neck stood out. "He'll keep her for that week and when he's finished doing whatever it is he does to them, he'll slice her up and leave her someplace that was once a safe haven."
Lucas didn't even try to soothe the other man. "Do they know anything?" Despite his rejection of torture as a way to find the killer's identity, a fury as cold as Dorian's had burned in Lucas's heart since Kylie's murder. She'd been under his protection, a juvenile not much older than Kit. What had been done to her had been inhuman and the panther in him craved justice.
"No." Dorian shoved both hands through his hair. "Why don't you drag your pet Psy in here and force her to tell us who he is?" His eyes held such pure menace that Lucas knew he couldn't be allowed anywhere near Sascha.