"No coffee for me."
"Why?"
"I don't... require it."
"Water?"
"Thank you."
As he poured the coffee, he thought back over that small hesitation. Had she been about to say that she didn't like the taste of coffee? Or was he trying to convince himself of things that didn't exist in order to justify this inappropriate attraction?
He was alpha, used to putting the pack above everything. This hunger for Sascha was a threat to that loyalty, a temptation that might lead to sleeping with the worst sort of enemy. But walking away wasn't an option - he'd never been a quitter and he was determined to find out what lay beneath that hard Psy shell.
All their lives might depend upon it.
Sascha was sitting in the same position when he returned. Putting her water and his coffee beside the pizza, he took a slice and deliberately collapsed on the same sofa she'd chosen, letting his body lie loosely against the cushion a scant couple of inches from hers. "Give it a try." He raised the slice to her mouth.
She hesitated and then took a small bite. "What flavor is this?"
He shrugged. "Mexican, I think." Taking a big bite, he watched her face as she analyzed the textures. Or was she savoring them? He raised it to her mouth again. "Bite."
Those eerie eyes seem to flash. "I'm not one of your pack to be given orders."
Temper, temper, he thought, the panther in him intrigued by that hint of fire. "Please."
After another small pause, she leaned forward and bit. This time she took more... and confirmed every one of his beliefs about her. Demolishing the rest of the piece, he picked up another one. She ate a good third.
"Enough?"
"Yes, thank you." She reached for her water. "Do you want your coffee?"
"Thanks." The mug was warm in his hands but it was the heat of her that he could feel most strongly. Her body was alive. Her body felt. Her body knew sensation. The crucial question was, was her mind strong enough to overpower her animal instincts?
They sat quietly until Sascha put down her water and turned to him. "Tell me about the murders."
A chill cooled the heat of his body. Getting rid of his own empty mug, he dropped his head against the cushion back. "We've tracked down seven confirmed victims in the past three years. Kylie was number eight. And Brenna, the SnowDancer who was taken, will be the ninth if we don't find her in time."
"So many?" It was a whisper.
"Yeah. But my gut says we haven't tagged all of his past kills - he's too good at this."
"Are you sure it's a man?"
He clenched his fists hard enough to hurt. "Yes."
"Why haven't you done more to track him down?"
"Kylie was murdered six months ago. At the time, we didn't know it was a serial and, given the clear evidence of Psy involvement, we thought Enforcement would quickly close the case. We gave them no problems regarding jurisdiction - we wanted blood but we didn't want war with the Psy.
"We were willing to settle for an Enforcement prosecution." It had nearly ripped the hearts out of them but they'd done it for the sake of their young. Dorian's rage hadn't been so great that he'd forgotten the vow he'd made simply by being born - to protect the vulnerable. "We understood that one monster didn't define a whole race. Even changelings sometimes spawn serial killers." Though they had them in the fewest numbers of the three races.
"Everyone believed the Council would launch a hunt on the PsyNet and hand over the culprit. With your psychic skills, there'd be no question of his guilt. Until then the Council had done some questionable things, but no one thought they'd protect a killer."
Sascha's body seemed to curl up further, as if she were trying to hug herself. "What have you learned about him since you started searching?"
"He hunts widely. Of the kills we've tracked, the first two were in Nevada, the third in Oregon, the remaining four in Arizona. The last was Dorian's sister." He would never forget the coppery smell of innocent blood, the darkness of the splatters on the walls, the metallic stink of the Psy.
"He left bodies to find?"
He sat upright, arms crossed over bent knees, one hand grasping the wrist of the other in a punishing grip. "The bastard takes them, tortures them, and then returns them to some place that should've been safe."
"I don't understand." Sascha's voice was nearer, as if she'd moved forward when he had.
Looking over, he met those night-sky eyes head-on. "He delivers the killing blows in a place familiar to the women. Kylie's throat was slashed in her apartment."
Darkness crawled across Sascha's eyes, destroying the stars and almost succeeding in shocking him out of his fury. He'd heard that Psy eyes did that when they were expending huge amounts of Psy power but he'd never seen it happen. It was like watching the wings of the night close out the sun. The strange thing was, the hairs on the back of his neck weren't tingling in awareness. If Sascha wasn't using her powers, why were her eyes going midnight?
"He's very sure of himself," she said, shoving him back from fascination to fury.
"Of the other seven women," he continued, "one was murdered in her home, one at her place of work, another in her family crypt." Anger for each senseless death rippled through him. "The other four follow the same pattern."
Sascha wrapped her arms around her knees. The panther noticed the mirroring and filed it away. "Why didn't the other changeling groups do anything?"
"Several reasons, the major one being that this was buried so deep, no one had any idea it was a serial until we started digging."
"The other reasons?"
"A combination of the choice of victims and Enforcement complicity. The first woman wasn't part of a defined pack - her parents went to the authorities but got nowhere." He knew exactly why. "The second two belonged to fairly weak groups. None are dominant in their area and they simply didn't have the physical or strategic strength to push for answers when doors were slammed in their faces.
"The fourth was blamed on a rogue and since he was already slated for death by his pack, the case was termed to fall outside Enforcement jurisdiction and closed. The fifth and seventh were loners - there was no one left to fight for justice. The sixth victim was killed at the same time that a human serial killer was preying in the region and even her pack wasn't certain she hadn't been one of his victims. But when you set it beside the other Psy kills, there's no question it's the same predator."
"Then came Kylie."
"She was his first mistake." Lucas felt his claws pressing against the inside of his skin. "The second we put together the pattern and unearthed the other forgotten women, we started to hunt. We also got a warning out to every changeling group we could reach."
Sascha didn't speak. Not quite sure why he felt the need, he turned his body until he was facing her, one of his legs behind her, knee bent. The other he dropped loosely to the ground, crossed under the raised leg, before picking up her braid to play with the end.
He needed touch. Contrary to what Sascha believed, not just any touch would do. Usually only packmates were able to give him the peace he craved. Usually. "We're not weak," he began, pulling off the tie that kept her braid together.
She blinked and her body tensed but all she said was, "No, you're not."
Was she trying to be gentle with him? He looked into those infinite eyes and wished he could read her mind. "And we're not going to stop searching because the Psy want us to. Brenna will be saved and the killer will be executed. If DarkRiver is taken down, the SnowDancers will continue the fight. When they fall... there are others."
The world was changing and sooner or later, the Psy were going to come face-to-face with their worst nightmare - the relegation of their emotionless race to nothing more than a footnote in the history of man.
"How can you be absolutely certain it's a Psy?" she asked. "I won't betray my race on the basis of a suspicion."
Springy, silky curls began to overflow his hands as her braid started unraveling on its own. The panther was delighted by the texture and life in his hands. But it wasn't enough to make him forget blood and death. "I was with Dorian when he got the feeling that something was wrong. We must've arrived at Kylie's apartment on the killer's heels." What he'd seen there had been enough to make him believe in evil as a living, breathing entity. If Sascha wanted proof, he had it, seventy-nine precise pieces of it, all covered in blood and horror.
Those mysterious eyes looked at him with what he wanted to believe was sympathy. "That's why Dorian is so damaged. He thinks if he'd only been that much faster..."
No longer surprised at her understanding of the emotions that drove people, Lucas nodded. "When we got there, Kylie's body was warm to the touch but she was gone and so was the killer. However, he'd left behind a scent, one that's unmistakable to us."
He'd also left behind a faint psychic vibration in the air, something that Lucas alone had picked up. He knew the ability stemmed from the same sense that warned him when Psy power was being used. It wasn't something he was ready to share with his Psy, though he was almost certain that she was far more akin to him than she was to the people she called her own - almost wasn't good enough for an alpha.
"Is that the best evidence you have?"
He stopped playing with her curls. "He cut her. Precisely. Neatly. No mistakes. No hesitations. No cut deeper or shallower than the others. No cut shorter or longer. He cut her exactly seventy-nine times."
"Seventy-nine?"
"Just like in the last four kills." The Psy had been unable to bury that fact, because though the Arizona medical examiner was human, one of her older cousins was married to a changeling. They were a very close-knit extended family - something the Psy hadn't taken into account, crippled as they were by their inability to understand the bonds of blood. Dr. Cecily Montford had been so disturbed by the careless way her reports were being treated that she'd been more than willing to break confidentiality and talk to DarkRiver.