CHAPTER 22
No!
It was a shout from a section of her mind she’d never before seen. Stubborn and rebellious, it slapped her back to her senses and told her to pull out. Now! If she didn’t, the Council, the M-Psy, the PsyClan, they all won.
The violence worked. Her mind’s eye watering with the strength of the emotional slap, she shook off her panic and began to find reason again. She refused to let them win, refused to have Vaughn feel that he’d taken a weak woman as his lover, someone who’d constantly need rescue.
Layered in determination born out of a lifetime of withheld rage, she threw a solid psychic block across the cascade.
The Cassandra Spiral wasn’t so easily escaped.
It shoved at the block with such force that the wall bulged outward.
But it didn’t break—she had an excruciatingly small window before the avalanche hit.
Not allowing herself to focus on that, she began to repair the cracks that had led to the cascade in the first place.
The work was hard.
Very, very hard.
Her mind felt as if it was caught in a vise.
Only her unpolished, ungovernable emotional reaction, her fury at the darkness, and her hunger for vengeance kept her going.
That and the need she had to make Vaughn proud of her, to be a woman worthy of a jaguar.
Without that wild cauldron of emotional fire, she would’ve been crippled as she had been for so many years, dependent on others to pull her out.
However, none of her previous cascades—triggered by strong business visions—had ever been this severe. Never had she even touched the periphery of a Cassandra Spiral. A trial by fire, it threatened to engulf her in flames of poison, but Faith had no intention of being burned.
She worked with single-minded determination, and as each fracture healed, the psychic block bulged a little less.
Oddly, it was her training for commercial forecasts that came to her aid at a critical moment, when exhaustion was starting to dull her mental muscles and she was in danger of making a fatal error.
She fell back on the trick of locking her neurons into certain repeating patterns, a step by mechanical step use of her mind that required no conscious thought.
Leaving that pattern to repair the “easy” fractures, she focused her thinking self on fixing the almost invisible breaks in her innermost core.
The next time she looked up, it was after she’d successfully rebuilt the core.
The surface of her mind was peaceful, the darkness banished, the cascade subjugated.
Tired but triumphant, she took a step back from the psychic plane and opened her eyes.
She discovered herself cradled tight against Vaughn, the arms wrapped around her front pure immovable muscle.
“You were in trouble.” A rough accusation. “I could smell it.”
She tilted her head to look up at him. “I got myself out.”
His eyes were jaguar, but he wasn’t completely gone. “I knew you could.” Shifting to lie flat on his back, he curved one hand over her bottom as she rearranged herself to lean up against his chest.
“Why didn’t you break it?”
“You knew what you were doing.”
Vaughn, she realized, would never let her shortchange herself. He’d always demand that she be all the woman she could be, even if that woman promised to make life more difficult for him. A stark contrast to the people she’d called family for so long.
Heart aching in an inexplicable way, she ran her palm over a jaw roughened by stubble. “Vaughn, when my mind was pure quiet at the end, I saw something.” Something so impossible that she wasn’t quite ready to believe. And yet . . .
“What?” His hand smoothed up her spine and little slivers of lightning danced through her bloodstream, sparked in her mind.
“Another bond.” She slid her hand down to lie against his shoulder.
“Technically similar to the PsyNet link, but different in every other way. It’s wild.
Like you.” Though she was no changeling to scent things, that bond had held Vaughn’s mental scent, a scent as familiar to her as her own, though she had no recollection of ever being in his mind. “What is it?”
“It ties you to me. Forever,” he said, his tone absolute. “You’re my mate.”
“Mate,” she whispered, considering everything she knew about changeling society, which wasn’t much. “Like Sascha and Lucas?”
“Yes.”
She could barely breathe. “Really?”
“Yes. It’s done. You can’t get out.” His fingers tightened on her hip.
“Get out?” She wanted to laugh, but couldn’t find enough air to make the sound. “Vaughn, I was scared I was imagining it because I wanted it so much.”
His fingers relaxed. “Good.”
“How does it work?”
“I don’t know. It’s the first time for me, too.”
“Oh.” That strange ache inside of her intensified.
“But I do know it’ll keep you alive after you drop out of the PsyNet.”
“One changeling mind can’t give a Psy brain the feedback it needs. Experiments have proven that conclusively.” She shook her head, nails digging into his skin. “I won’t kill you to keep myself alive.”
“Trust me?”
She did, so much. “Always.”
“Then don’t worry about it.”
“You can’t provide the necessary biofeedback,” she insisted. “It’s psychically impossible.”
He kissed her. “Trust, Red. Trust doesn’t have any logic or sense.”
“I trust you with my life.” Placing a kiss on the hard angle of his jaw, she raised her lashes to meet his eyes. “But I’m not sure I trust you with yours.” Because she knew how protective the cat was, how possessive.
A slow smile curved over his lips. “Oh, no, Red. I’m planning on living a long, long time now that I’ve got me a mate who’ll satisfy my every need.” His fingers lingered on the swell of her buttocks, that wicked smile accompanied by images of—
“Not on my knees,” she said, more to tease than anything.
“What if I licked you into submission?” His fingers dipped to stroke lower, hotter places. “Would you go down on your knees then?”
“Perhaps.” She felt her breathing start to alter. “You’re trying to distract me from the point.”
“No, Red. I’m trying to make you see.” He stopped teasing her with his fingers. “If I die because of the feedback, then so will you. I’m not letting that happen.” Grim determination in every word.
“The protections are holding. I could stay linked and download more data.”
“Don’t be scared of letting go.”
She drew circles on his chest. “The PsyNet is so beautiful, so alive.”
“But it’s time for you to cut away from it. You know that.”
“Yes.” The second she was found missing, NightStar guards would be sent to locate her on the psychic plane and haul her back in. Whatever it took. That was if the Council didn’t decide to do the job itself—she hadn’t forgotten those cloaked martial minds.
Arrows.
Assassins.
In her case, they’d probably attempt containment. But she’d rather die than be incarcerated.
“I’ve got you.” A callused hand pushed strands of hair off her face to cup her cheek.
The unexpected tenderness wrenched at the heart of her, and deep within her mind, she saw the bond pulse. But then it stopped. A frown forming before she could Silence it, she looked inward. “I can’t experience the bond in its entirety until I cut the Net link.”
“I thought you were unconsciously jamming it.” He scowled. “Unless . . . Usually, both sides have to deliberately accept the bond for it to come into complete effect. I thought we’d skipped that stage.”
“I’m not doing anything. I didn’t even know it could be.
” She paused. “It must be an automatic mental process. It makes sense that only one deep link can be functional at a time. Otherwise, the risk of overload would become unacceptable. But the mating bond is functioning to a certain extent.” She could see the images he sent.
He could feel when she was in psychic trouble.
Vaughn kissed her hard on the mouth. She gasped and stared.
“You can analyze the bond all you like. After you’re out.” A demand. “I don’t like you being open to Council attack.”
“Vaughn.” She felt things for him she couldn’t even have imagined feeling mere weeks ago. “My sister.”
“Do you think you have a real chance of finding the killer through the Net?”
She took her time to answer, to order her thoughts. “The visions are the single link and they come through the channels of my mind. I haven’t found anything on the Net.”
“Then do it now, Faith. Before they realize you’ve come over to the side of the damn troublemaking animals.”
A small laugh bubbled out of her. It was over before it began, but it had been spontaneous and it had been very real. “Hold me.”
“Anytime.”
Laying her head on his chest, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
Pain squeezed her heart. It was almost a compulsion to step out into the PsyNet for one last look at the magnificent world that was about to be lost to her.
But she couldn’t. Too much was at stake.
The mating bond tied Vaughn to her—if she were ambushed or erased, who knew how it would affect him?
And he was more important to her than anything.
She did, however, regret that she wouldn’t have a chance to say good-bye to the one entity within the Net that wasn’t broken, wasn’t twisted.
It was her hope that the NetMind would understand what she’d done and why.
Drawing in the scent of her mate, she went deep, deep inside herself, past every shield and block, past reason and cognition to the primitive nucleus—because the link to the PsyNet was powered by instinct and made at the instant of birth, the one thing about her race that wasn’t controlled or manipulated.
And there it was, in the absolute and utter center.
She’d thought she’d linger over this, but she couldn’t. It hurt too much. Saying a soft good-bye, she reached out and sliced through it in a single fatal stroke.
Everything ended.