He meant to go gently, but she wouldn't wait, pushing down hard and taking him into her body like the most perfectly crafted glove. He held her tight and flipped them over, her body lush and welcoming under his. Bracing himself above her with one arm, he used the other to grasp her hip.
"Faith." It was a warning she responded to by dragging her nails down his back and biting hard on his shoulder.
Growling low in his throat, he thrust into her. Deep. And again.
She was liquid fire in his bloodstream, sheer woman heat, and when her closed eyes flashed open, he saw jagged sparks of white lightning.
Faith lay in Vaughn's arms and listened to his heartbeat. Real, true, steady, it anchored her. But despite that and the fact that it was close to dawn, her mind continued to race. She had to see the new world in which she lived. Unlike for the changeling who was the most important being in her life, the mental plane was as much a reality for her as the earth and the sky, the trees and the forest.
She'd rather know now whether that plane was barren, and she'd do it while Vaughn was asleep. She didn't ever want to hurt him by intimating that it wounded her to not be part of the PsyNet, cut off from a facet of her existence that was central to her identity as a Psy.
Closing her eyes on one plane, she opened them on another. But she couldn't step out, couldn't bear to face the endless darkness.
"Open your eyes, Faith. Look at the Web of Stars."
How had he known what she was doing? He wasn't Psy. But he was her mate. "The Web of Stars?" she asked, standing poised on the doorstep of her mind. His answer was a kiss placed carefully on the pulse at the curve of her neck.
Finding strength from the power of that simple caress, she took the next step and looked. There were no stars on black velvet, no isolated lights burning like blades, no black spaces. Her breath rushed out of her. Not because this place was barren, but because it wasn't. There was color everywhere, multicolored sparkles that flickered rainbow-bright and teased the eye with quicksilver speed.
Heart thudding, she looked past the stunning beauty that threatened to hold her spellbound and found Vaughn's mind. He was cardinal bright but hot and golden, wild and passionate. A fragile-seeming gold thread linked her to him, but she knew it to be unbreakable. When she looked further, she saw that he was linked to a central mind by another thread, but that thread was different from the bond that tied the two of them together.
Her Psy mind was at home here. It somehow understood that the other bond could be broken. That it wasn't, was its strength. More minds linked out from the core. Not many, but enough to sustain her without draining anyone. More than enough. These minds sparked with so much energy, it was as if each was more than it seemed. Tears falling inside her most secret heart, she searched for the source of those brilliant, beautiful sparks that she, a child raised in the dark, had never imagined might exist.
She found it shielded below the central mind, as if the unique sentience that created such beauty needed more protection than others. Perhaps it did. Even with a single glance, she knew that this mind was incredibly gentle, that it would never do any harm, never kill.
Astonished by the explosion of color and life in her new psychic world, a world that for all its small size would never bore, never grow stagnant, she withdrew and opened her eyes in the physical world. "The colors. It's Sascha, isn't it?"
"I can't see what you see, Red," Vaughn pointed out. "But she's an empath."
"I don't know what that is." But she had a lifetime in which to find out. "Vaughn, how can this Web exist? The other minds I saw except for Sascha were changeling." And Psy knowledge said that changelings didn't have the capacity to maintain psychic links. Of any kind.
He nuzzled at her before kissing her again. She wasn't averse to him indulging himself. Not when she remained shell-shocked from the Net separation.
"It has to do with the blood oath the sentinels take. We don't know how it works - we'd forgotten it even existed."
Vaughn had never been this content. It was as if a missing part of him had come home, a part that he'd been functioning without but, now that he'd found it, the loss of which he'd never survive. Faith was inside of him, held in the core of his animal heart, protected with every ounce of strength he had. If she saw their bond on the level of the mind, he saw the physical reality of it, the strength and the purity.
She ran a hand through his hair and he purred against her, asking for more. She complied, understanding him without words. It was part of the bond, but it was also because she wanted to know, wanted to please him. And that gave him more pleasure than anything else.
Yet a sadness lingered in her and he knew why. "You're thinking about Marine."
"We have to stop him."
"I'll call Pack."
"Pack?"
"You're one of us. They'll want to help."
"Even a Psy?"
"You're my Psy now."
His possessiveness was welcome, but it set off a less joyful thought. "The Council isn't going to let me go without a fight."
"Leave that to me. You think about how to catch this killer and I'll work out a way to keep you safe."
"Alright." Trusting Vaughn was easy. He'd never made a promise he didn't keep.
Faith wasn't surprised when Vaughn drove them to the now familiar wooden cabin for the meeting with his pack-mates. She had a feeling her jaguar didn't like too many people in his home territory. Exiting the car, she straightened her spine and began closing the distance to the porch. She didn't want to look weak in front of these people who mattered to the man who meant everything to her.
However, it wasn't only Sascha and her mate waiting for them, but also a stranger dressed in black.
"This is Judd Lauren," Sascha said, from her chair beside Lucas's.
Faith nodded, conscious of the sudden rise in Vaughn's aggressiveness. Lucas didn't look too happy either. The truly peculiar thing was that the silent stranger triggered her internal alarms as well. She couldn't reason why. What she did know was that for all his icy masculine beauty, he was deadly. But then so were the two changelings.
Aware she was being rude, but unwilling to let it go, she continued to stare at him where he leaned against the outer wall of the cabin. "I've seen you before."
"No." His expression betrayed nothing, not even by the flicker of an eyelash.
No one was that controlled. No one but a Psy. But of course Judd wasn't one of her race. "No," she agreed. "But I've seen others like you." He inspired the same primal fear response as those cloaked guards who'd escorted her to the candidacy meeting.
Judd was hardly likely to be one of the almost mythical Arrows, but he made her very uneasy. And if that wasn't enough, another male who set off her defenses appeared that second from around the corner of the house. He prowled to lean against the railing a small distance from the others, his green eyes watching her with the unblinking stare of a predator sizing up prey. She was extremely glad Vaughn was beside her.
Lucas jerked his head at the new arrival. "Clay, I thought you were bringing Tammy."
"Cubs. Rosebushes. Thorns," came the truncated reply.
Everyone but her seemed to understand. Sascha shook her head, a small smile on her lips. "Are they okay?"
Clay nodded.
Feeling out of the loop, she leaned her back against Vaughn's chest. White fire licked up her fingertips where they touched his jeans. He seemed to freeze and then reawaken, his hand never ceasing its soothing strokes down her arm. "You all know why we're here."
"To locate the man who murdered Faith's sister," Sascha said. "But I thought you didn't know enough."
"Red?"
"At first," she began, "all I saw was her, the intended victim - very pale skin, white-blonde hair, blue eyes. Unusual looks for a Psy, but not a practical way to track her." She forced herself to go back into the evil of the visions. "Then I started to get more - "
"Because he's stalking her?" Sascha interrupted.
"At the time, it was because he was going to stalk her."
Everyone went silent as they digested the reality of her life. Lucas was the first to shake himself out of it. "How far gone is he?"
"In the final stages. The visions I'm seeing now are of blood." Vaughn's arms came around her though she'd betrayed nothing by either gesture or tone - being unemotionally Psy was a form of protection against these predators, not all of whom were in her comer. "We have to stop him at the kidnapping because I know the location and I even know the time."
"How?" It was the dark-skinned male called Clay.
She had to force herself not to press closer into Vaughn. "There were time markers in the last series of images, things that let me place a vision in the correct time frame. Some markers are hard to spot, like seasonal changes or the color of the sky, but these were unmistakable."
No one spoke so she continued, grounding herself in the muscled heat of the body surrounding hers. The embrace was a silent statement of his loyalty, she knew that much. "I saw a datebook open on her desk as well as the face of an electronic clock. Both the same." Time markers didn't get much clearer than that.
Then she revealed something she'd told Vaughn in the car after unraveling all the other markers. "We have one day." Too close for comfort, far too close. "If we don't get him... it's likely we won't save her. He feels" - she searched for the right words - "full, full of anticipation, of need. He doesn't keep and torture his victims, either. While stalking his intended victim excites him, his biggest thrill comes from the actual kill." Like when he'd killed Marine. Once again, her heart clenched and now she knew what to call it: a mixture of pain and grief, sorrow and loss.
"Where?" Judd asked, his voice utterly toneless.
"You're Psy." She was suddenly positive beyond any reasonable doubt. "Only Sascha is supposed to be outside the Net."