Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Abort! Abort! Abort!

—Medical alert during the second attempt at creating a PsyNet island (19 October 2083)

FIVE DAYS LATER, and Remi's leopard woke up grumpy after another sleepless night dreaming of a woman who thought she could catch his tail that he most definitely could not trust. He was guzzling a giant mug of coffee when Lark—still chipper after her night shift—wandered over. "Wow, did you fall out of your aerie or something?"

"Didn't sleep much," he grumbled as he waited for the coffee to take effect. "That was a big rainstorm."

Chewing the bite of her breakfast bagel, Lark nodded sagely. "Uh-huh," she said after she'd swallowed the bite. "Not like you enjoy the rain or anything."

"Go away."

She smirked. "Worried about our resident-with-cub neighbor?"

He froze. "She's there?"

"Uh-huh. Arrived last night. Piloted in right before the storm broke. Smooth as silk." Lark grabbed coffee, then bumped her shoulder against his arm. "She's fine. Still way too pregnant to be up there on her own, but otherwise okay."

"Why the fuck is she so alone at this time?" Leopards could be loners, but pregnant packmates always had a support structure. Even if it was just friends who dropped off food while ducking the soon-to-be-mama's wrath.

"I dunno." Lark swallowed another bite. "I remember my cousin, Petunia, one time she said she wanted to claw off everyone's faces because they were all up in hers, so she banned visitors from her aerie for ten days. Only exception was her mate. Petunia threatened to shoot anyone else who came near her door. Maybe our neighbor visits the cabin when she's in one of those moods."

Somehow, Remi didn't think so. Auden Scott wore an air of aloneness that he found difficult to put into words. It wasn't the kind of contained isolation that he'd sensed in fellow loners when he'd walked that road himself; this was an aloneness so profound it made his soul ache.

Which was why, even though he barely knew her, he put together a package of food that wasn't as much about nutrition as it was comfort, then drove up as far as he could. It made sense with the food, and because he had multiple comm meetings today for which he couldn't afford to be late.

That included his monthly check-in with the alphas in this region, where they passed on relevant intel and shared news. None of the others were feline, and he actively disliked the pompous eagle wingleader, but changelings had learned how important it was to communicate after the Psy tried to play them against each other a while back.

So they gritted their teeth and kept any growls to a minimum. At least the closest wolf alpha wasn't an ass, and Remi genuinely appreciated the brash black bear alpha who'd once muttered that certain eagles should get their feathers plucked—this had been while only she and Remi had been on the call.

The fifth member of their group was from a herd of horses. Calm and even-tempered, and with enough grit to hold his own against a bunch of snarling predators. It helped that the entire group never met in person. Less chance of a personality conflict leading to posturing.

After that headache, he had a scheduled call with Aden. With the two of them so busy, he hadn't seen the Arrow leader in person for a couple of months, but they never let a week go by without speaking. Other than Angel, Remi considered Aden his closest friend. The other man was an alpha, too, albeit of a different kind—but unlike with the area group, Aden was an alpha with whom Remi had no trouble dropping his shields.

When they talked, it was the real deal, complete with hard edges and private worries.

Once he'd parked, he made his way to the cabin on foot—and wasn't the least surprised when a tiger prowled out of the trees to shadow him. "Shut up," he said to his best friend. "She's out here all alone. I'm just being a good neighbor."

The tiger made vocalizations that sounded suspiciously like choked laughter. You'd never know that Angel was one of the quietest members of the pack, the one who'd intended to be a loner all his life—until Remi talked him into being part of RainFire. Angel had only initially signed on for a year out of loyalty to Remi.

"I'll take off after," he'd warned.

But he hadn't left.

He'd committed. Even if he questioned his sanity in doing so at times, Angel never flinched from the duty he'd taken on. For one, Jojo and her posse often talked him into playing hide-and-seek and Angel would gamely pretend he didn't see their tiny butts sticking out of their hiding places, or pick up their scents, or see their tails swishing as they hid in the "bestest" spots.

It was to Angel's credit that he pulled it off with such aplomb that he was their favorite hide-and-seek playmate. Kids had a way of seeing right through his scowl to the heart of the boy who'd first become Remi's friend. Angel had survived hell, had once told Remi he'd lost his soul in the process.

He'd been wrong. Angel's soul might be scarred over, but it stood wild and strong.

This morning, Remi's best friend nudged at his legs in a silent question. "I don't know," Remi said. "But I don't think it matters whether we can trust her or not—we still have to look after her."

A human or Psy might not have understood, but they were changeling. More specifically, they were RainFire, a pack that held protecting the weak as a core tenet of their honor. Never would Remi's pack be like WhiteMountain, a noxious place that had seen nothing wrong with a fight-or-die mentality.

In the end, it had been the pack that had died.

If Auden didn't want company, he'd back off—but his people would continue to do discreet runs past her place, and he'd continue to drop off food. That was their way.

Growling an acknowledgement, Angel broke off to the left to complete his security sweep.

And Remi walked out into the clearing in front of the cabin. It was still damp from the night's rain, though the sun was starting to spear through the clouds. The soft morning light made Auden's skin glow as she opened her front door to step out and for a moment, he was stunned by her radiant beauty.

Then he saw her eyes. Frigid. Hard. Flat.

"What are you doing on my property?"

He went motionless at the unwelcoming question asked in a voice that was "off" in a way that made his claws prick at his skin. "Being neighborly."

"I have no need of company." She stared at him with an eerie lack of recognition on her face.

Spine locking as he thought of her vacant stare on their first meeting and of how she'd told him of a head injury, he said, "Do you know who I am?"

"I assume you must be a changeling to be so at home in these feral surroundings." She looked around, almost as if she didn't know what she was doing here herself.

Inside his skin, Remi's leopard opened its mouth, its incisors glinting. A reaction to her scent…to the teeth-aching metal in it.

Metal that hadn't been present the last time they'd met. It wasn't a contact scent, either. This was hers —except how could it be? A person's true scent—the one created of the total sum of their parts—didn't change in a matter of days. It wasn't like perfume that could be washed off or applied at will.

"Why haven't you left?" the woman with Auden's face demanded. "I've made it clear I don't want your presence on my land."

Every instinct Remi had screamed that something was wrong.

Holding up the cooler as he considered his next action, he said, "A gift from the pack, to establish friendly relations."

"I have all the nutrients I need, so I'm unlikely to consume anything within if the gift is of food, but I appreciate the gesture." Words so encased in frost that they raised the hairs on his arms—and made his leopard pace in dislike and confusion both.

Much as he'd prefer an easy explanation, this wasn't another woman, a secret twin. She did carry Auden's scent except that it was mangled and altered on a level he'd never before experienced.

Could the change be a sign of serious mental instability in Psy?

Hit by a sense of loss for something he'd never possessed, every muscle in his body threatened to turn rock-hard. "I'll leave it with you anyway. My cook included high-energy items that might come in useful if we get another storm and you run out of supplies." A total lie; he'd packed the cooler himself, and he'd brought treats for the vulnerable woman who carried aloneness in her skin, not useful items for this stranger.

"I'm leaving as soon as I can arrange it, so it will go to waste, but once again, I appreciate the gesture." Auden's doppelg?nger smiled…and it made him want to shake her, force her to divulge what the fuck she'd done to Auden.

Because that practiced curve of the lips complete with eyes that warmed? It wasn't an inept grimace made by a Psy trying to interact with a changeling. No, this smile would've passed as normal to most people.

It was as psychopathic in its smoothness as Auden had been awkward.

Remi's growl threatened to escape his chest. "Shall I place it inside your doorway? I won't have to step into the cabin."

"There's no need. I'll take it."

"It's pretty light," he assured her as he handed it over.

She gasped and swayed the instant her fingers closed over the handle, the blue of her eyes eclipsed by a wave of black.

···

—WARMTH , laughter—

—satiation—

—green-gold eyes, small paws—

—impatience—

—a big male hand, a sense of home—

The imprints burned into Auden's senses, shoved through her veins, her synapses sparkling fire.

Pregnancy intensifies our ability to sense imprints.

The imprints pulsed in a living beat within her, her skin feeling as if it rippled with fur.

"Auden?"

Only then did she realize she wasn't alone. She stared uncomprehendingly at Remi. "When did you get here?" Her eyes caught on the arm she'd raised in a startled motion…and she realized that not only was she standing in sunlight, but that her dress was blue. The last thing she remembered wearing had been black.

The cooler slipped from her grip. "What—"

Her eyes clashed into those of feline yellow-green. She noticed with some distant part of her brain that he'd caught the cooler before it hit the ground, put it aside. But his attention was on her. "Do you know who I am?"

Auden's mouth went dry that he'd even ask that. "Why wouldn't I? Remington Denier, alpha of RainFire. Remi."

He watched her with unblinking focus. "Do you remember what we were talking about just before?"

Her shoulders grew tight, her hands clammy all at once. She tried to speak, but her tongue was too thick in her mouth. It had happened again, and this time outside of the Scott compound, where it could be hushed up and forgotten.

"Of course I do," she said, hoping she could bluff her way out of the blank spot in her mind.

"Liar." A single soft word that crashed her world to her feet.

Emotion rolled over her in a wave of terror held back far too long, and suddenly, to her absolute horror, she was crying. Huge gulping sobs that wracked her frame and had her searching her PsyNet shields with manic desperation to ensure they hadn't fallen.

Officially, Silence might no longer be the Psy way, but emotion remained verboten in her family. A single hint that she'd broken the line, and she'd lose the little freedom she'd carved for herself.

Across from her, Remi seemed to lock up that big body, his hands fisted at his side. Growling deep in his chest, the sound rough against her senses, he said, "Come here. If you can handle the contact, come here."

She shouldn't. It went against every rule of the world in which she'd been raised. It also exposed her to this changeling who was all but a stranger to her, and who now knew that something was very, very wrong with the ostensible scion of the Scott empire. But she stumbled forward anyway, her cheek ending up pressed to the hard warmth of his chest, and her hands gripping the sides of his T-shirt.

He burned hot, his scent of the forest wild.

And his arms, when they came around her, were so strong that panic fluttered at her.

"Just say the word when you want me to let go." His voice was a rumble-growl against her, a vibration that comforted despite the danger of the creature she heard in his voice. "Skin privileges are just that, a privilege not a right."

Skin privileges.

The words penetrated the sobs wracking her, but she was too distraught to understand them. She could've blamed it on the imprints on the handle of the cooler—so warm, so joyous, so of family and of care —but she knew the truth.

This was the result of months of fear, months of "waking" to find herself somewhere totally different from where she last remembered being. Months of Dr.Verhoeven telling her that it was a lingering symptom of her neural scarring. But if that were true, it should have improved as she became more and more herself.

It hadn't.

It was getting worse.

Never before, however, had she done an act this reckless— flown the jet-chopper from the compound to this remote cabin. A flight of which she had only vague memories. Of last night, after her arrival, she had nothing .

Dr.Verhoeven had suggested that she might be having "invisible" micro seizures that were wiping out her memory. Charisma had confirmed much bigger grand mal seizures after Auden came to herself with severe bruising on various parts of her body.

What if that had happened while she'd been in the air?

She could've killed her baby.

"Shh, little cat. You'll make yourself sick." A deep purr of a voice that vibrated into her bones. "Listen to my voice, focus on it." He kept on talking, telling her about the kinds of trees prevalent in this region, which birds called it home, which smaller creatures shared this land with his pack.

It was a glimpse into a wondrous world far beyond her experience.

She did what he said, had to do what he said because she didn't know how to get herself out of this on her own. Remi was all she had, even though she was painfully conscious that he wouldn't have chosen this.

Auden knew who and what she was—a Scott. Feared by some. Hated by others. Remington Denier was the alpha of a changeling pack. He wasn't helping her because he liked her. No one liked Auden.

They tolerated her, or found her useful, or saw her as a means to an end.

Jerking back, she wasn't surprised when he let her go. Of course he would if he was trying to win her trust, trying to show her that he wouldn't betray her. She couldn't trust him. She couldn't trust anyone.

Her father had taught her that lesson with the biggest betrayal of her life.

Her fingers drifted to her temple, the scar just under her hairline a ridged reminder of the price of trust.