Chapter 27

Chapter 27

Jem57: Which changeling species do you think produces the most patient lovers? I'm partial to a nice gentle nonpredatory myself.

H2Imhot: I keep telling y'all you're missing out by discounting the snake option. Smooth, slow, have alllllll the time in the world.

WildestW: I'm starting to worry about your snake fetish, H2Imhot. But since you're here…how about the cold blood? I mean, what's that actually like?

4cubs: I'm biased toward tigers (obvs), but I feel like I can categorically say that felines have all the moves. That prowliness translates into slow and lazy intimate skin privileges that last hours .

— Wild Woman Forum

"WE'LL START EASY," he said, the purr back—and louder, until it vibrated through her bones. "You have any oil, even moisturizer I can use?"

"Yes. In the bathroom." Dr.Verhoeven had given it to her to help prevent stretch marks, and she'd followed the regime mostly because she enjoyed having the chance to stroke her baby. That the oil had worked as advertised was a bonus.

Remi's weight vanished from the bed, only to return moments later. "Got it. I'm going to push up your sweatshirt so I can touch skin, all right?"

Auden somehow managed a jerky nod.

His fingertips on her lower back creating the gentlest pressure.

The shock of contact was so intense that it took her at least a minute to think through the roar of sensation. "Harder," she whispered at last. "That's too gentle."

"That's it," he praised again. "Tell me exactly what you need." He dug his fingers in, and the pressure was so intense and so painfully pleasurable that she cried out.

He halted.

"It's good," she gasped. "Please."

A chuckle, before he began working the muscles of her back. Then he began that purring sound in his chest again, and it did vibrate right through his hands and into her back and oh, oh . Every part of her resonated on the same wavelength, her entire body relaxing muscle by muscle as his purr entered her very bones to melt her from the inside out.

···

REMI'S cock was rigid, but he didn't do anything other than keep up the massage. Seeing Auden's tension melt away, hearing the little sounds she was making without realizing it, it was the best aphrodisiac on the planet. As was the fact that she'd sneakily scooted close to him.

He rumbled in his chest, his leopard very close to his human skin right now, felt her shiver…and the excited beat of a second heartbeat from inside Auden.

He smiled. Yes, the cub knew him, too.

"How does she know you?" Auden whispered just then, the curve of her butt pushing into his knee because she kept on backing up to him.

"All cubs know their alpha's voice."

A sucked in breath, a pause, before Auden said, "Remi, I need to ask you something."

His fingers stilled. "What, little cat?"

Shifting, she tried to sit up. He helped her until she was leaning against the headboard. And even though he'd just spent pleasurable minutes kneading the tension from her, she was stiff, lines of strain around her eyes and mouth.

When she spoke, her words had his claws slicing out. "I'm going to ask you the biggest favor of my life." Those haunted moonstone eyes held his, potent in their pain. "Do you think RainFire can give my baby sanctuary?"

"Yes," Remi said without hesitation.

"It'll be dangerous for your pack," she said. "But I have money. My father left me an enormous trust fund, and no one in the Scott family seems to know about it. It can buy you help, protection."

Remi sliced out a hand. "You don't have to worry, Auden. One of my best friends is an Arrow. No one will touch your baby or my pack."

Remi and RainFire were very careful never to take advantage of the squad, their relationship built on a foundation of mutual respect and trust. But for a cub? Remi would ask and the entire squad would say yes. Because none of them would ever abandon a child at risk.

Auden's eyes flared wide, and he could all but see the flames of her curiosity. But she seemed to shove that curiosity aside with a conscious hand to say, "I have to make a plan, because I might not be able to do it later, and my baby needs to be protected from whatever it is my mother set in motion before her death. Because there is something very, very wrong with me."

Remi wanted to argue with her, but he knew they had to face the cold, hard facts. Rising off the bed, he paced around the room. "The scent and personality changes."

Auden's nod was hard, her breathing erratic. "Memory issues, too. Periods of lost time." She exhaled. "All I know of what was done to my brain is that it involved a biograft that malfunctioned. Sometimes, I dream of fire engulfing my brain."

Her fingers lifting to her temple. "The lesions are still there—my brain has apparently learned to work around them, but they didn't just vanish. And there's external evidence of things I did at points where I had to be lucid, and yet I recall nothing. Not just me managing to pretend for a couple of minutes on my better days. I pulled off a meeting with Kaleb Krychek , for one."

Remi didn't interrupt, a low-level rumble deep in his chest. The same instinct that made him a good alpha told him that what she was saying was important, and that she needed him to listen .

"I also have no memory of signing a fertilization agreement with another Psy family. But there's a recording of me having a full contractual interaction with the other family." She spread her fingers over her belly. "I'm speaking in a crisp and clear manner, negotiating the fee, and watching as the donor signs away all rights to the resulting child."

Remi knew Psy did things that way, though his changeling mind struggled to accept it. He also knew that the woman in front of him was a creature of emotion. "You think like that, Auden?"

" No . I never have. That was my mother's problem with me." Her throat moving, her eyes shining. "My father didn't mind that I was a psychometric and what that entailed, but I was never Silent enough for Shoshanna—except that I was on that video."

Remi was caught by something else she'd said. "Why are you with your mother's family if you were closer to Henry?"

Shadows across her face. "My father didn't want me after I was damaged. The terrifying thing is that Shoshanna shouldn't have, either. She kept me alive for a reason—because per her worldview, I should've stopped existing when I stopped having value to the family and became a drain on their resources instead.

"It wouldn't have been hard for her to pull off. She was a Councilor at the time, and she had Dr.Verhoeven's unconditional loyalty. A single injection and I'd have been gone, the death labeled as natural. But she didn't do that. That is the scariest thing in all this— what did my mother want with me that she kept me alive ?"

Rage scalded Remi's veins at the idea of Auden's light being snuffed out with such callousness.

"I hero-worshipped him, you know," Auden added softly before he could respond. "My father. I thought he was such a good man for a long, long time. He was kind to me, often personally gave me the lessons I needed as his heir-in-training."

Her voice faded on her next words. "I was fourteen when I got the freedom to explore the PsyNet without babysitters—though I'm guessing those babysitters were still there, just well hidden. I started to hear things about my father, started to learn things. And still I wanted to believe in him. Then…"

Her fingers lifted to her temple. "He let Shoshanna do this to me."

"You sure he was aware what she intended?" Remi said, not because he thought Henry Scott anything less than a psychopath, but because he couldn't quite see a father who had a happy, bright child he was raising as his heir agreeing to an experiment that would cause her harm.

"Maybe not." Auden shrugged. "But, you see, it doesn't matter—because he chose to give me up after the brain damage." Her face twisted. "I read the document. It's all spelled out. I was created as the heir to the Jackson empire, but the Scotts didn't have to compensate them for taking me because I was ‘of negative value' to the Jacksons by then."

Remi released his growl. Walking over, he sat on the side of the bed and twisted so that his hands were on either side of Auden's head on the headboard he'd put together for her. "They didn't break you," he growled, eye to eye with her. "You're still standing."

"That's just it," she whispered in a husky tone, "I'm not sure I'm still standing." One small, cold hand against his chest. "I'm acting in ways that aren't me. I have knowledge that isn't mine. I know passwords I never learned."

A chill passed over Remi's skin. "Auden," he began.

But Auden spoke over him, needing to get this out. "I'm starting to believe that my mind has split into two or even more fragments." It was a truth she'd been avoiding since the day on the doorstep to this cabin when he'd said she didn't know him.

"No one can fix that. It's one of the worst mental afflictions a Psy can have—a psyche so broken that it literally becomes more than one person. Only a partial fragment inhabiting the body at any one time."

Remi's frown was dark.

She kept on speaking before he could say anything. "It's called dissociative identity disorder and it exists in all the races, but for Psy, there's an added layer. Our personalities don't fully splinter, you see. All Psy are telepaths—it's necessary to be one to attach to the PsyNet."

His frown grew heavier. "I never picked that up from my friends."

"I suppose we don't talk about it because it's a given. Like the fact you can shift is a given—an indelible part of being changeling." Her fingers curled into the muscled heat of his chest. "From what I remember of my elementary school lessons, I'm pretty sure Gradient 1 telepathy is the prerequisite. Any lower than that and you might have psychic abilities, but you aren't considered Psy on a neurological level."

Remi's eyes shifted to human in front of her, but his arms still bracketed her, the warmth and scent of him a haven. "How does the telepathy impact the splintering?"

"Bleedover." A rapid inhale, a sharp exhale. "I think in the other races, the separation is much more significant. One personality won't know what the other is doing, that kind of thing. I don't either…but there is bleedover. That's the only way I can have all this knowledge. One part of me was told or taught it."

Remi's body was rigid with tension around her, in front of her. "Could there be any other explanation? Someone trying to mind control you?"

Auden flinched, her fingers wanting to touch the scar at her temple again. "There's no one with that kind of power in our family home. My mother was the most powerful telepath I've ever known and even she had difficulty maintaining mind control without technological assistance."

Only when she rubbed her scar did she realize she hadn't been able to fight the compulsion to worry at it.

Taking her hand, Remi brushed away the baby hairs from that spot. "The biograft?"

"Yes. Removed after the failure of the experiment, but the scars remain—inside and out." Auden found herself stroking the hair-roughened skin of his chest. "Will—" A violent wrenching pain in her abdomen, a sudden wet heat on her pants, her baby's mind screaming in distress. " No ."

Remi's nostrils flared in front of her. "You're bleeding."

Panic shrieked warnings in Auden's brain. Her baby was coming too early! "They'll find me! They'll take her!"

"No one's taking anything." Remi's gritted-out voice, his hands cupping her face as he made her look into his eyes. "Breathe, little cat, breathe ."

"My baby," she sobbed, her emotions huge and violent. "I can't let them know!"

"Can you hold on to your shields?"

"No," she admitted, the surge of emotions inside her so intense that she'd never felt the like. "They'll fall in minutes."

"I'll get you help." He moved away from her with a speed that felt impossible to her Psy vision, was out the door before she realized he had left.

He'd come back with help. Auden believed that with everything in her.

"A little longer," she begged her body. "Please hold her inside a little longer."

The first contraction hit. Not a big one. Small. But dangerous. "No, no, no."

Remi ran back inside, a phone to his ear, and sat back down on the bed. She gripped his hand, panic a drumbeat in her skull.

Through the roar inside her head, she caught only snatches of what he was saying. "…shield…help…premature baby…pick up Finn. Anything he should know for a Psy birth? What? I'll send you the image now."

A snapshot being taken with the phone, Auden's brain too full to process why until the air shimmered at the end of the bed moments later.

A petite woman dressed in the stark black combat uniform of the Arrow squad, her hair short and feathered, stood with a tall man with sandy hair and eyes of leaf green. He wore a checked red shirt, and his face…it held a gentleness innate.

The Arrow vanished a heartbeat later, but the man snapped into action.

Putting down his small case, he came over to take her hand. "I've got you, sweetheart. Finn. RainFire healer. Remi briefed me on your ability—all the medical tools I've brought, only I or my nurses will have handled."

Auden squeezed his hand, sobs tearing at her chest. " My baby ."

"I know, sweetheart. Let's see what's happening—and don't you worry." He thrust a thumb in Remi's direction. "You want him here or out?"

Even in her panic, Auden knew this procedure was too intimate to ask Remi to stay…and yet she still met his eyes and said, "Please stay."

"You couldn't make me leave," he growled out, then shifted so that he faced her fully, while giving Finn his back—and her some privacy as Finn quickly cut off the clothes on her lower body. "Finn," he said out loud, "I have Dr.Bashir on the phone. He's spoken to an obstetrician colleague since your last conversation and can confirm the process is the same physically. It's the psychic that's different."

"Got it. I've delivered many a cub in my time, so this'll be child's play." Words warm and calm that gave Auden confidence. "I'll put this sheet over your thighs. There, that's better, isn't it?"

Auden appreciated this kind, gentle man so much. Tears hot in her eyes, she nodded.

Remi's gaze held hers after he hung up on the doctor he'd mentioned. "You know what to do?"

Auden made herself breathe, think. "Yes. I have to calm the child on the psychic level."

Which was when it hit her—her shields had become a formless and unbreakable black. "My shields. Who?" Who would she owe after this was all over?

"That friend of mine I mentioned," Remi said, even as he made a second call and asked whoever it was to be on standby. "No one will get through that shield, little cat, so just worry about your baby."

Auden knew favors were a currency and those in debt were always the losers, but today, all she cared about was her child. Sweat beaded on her brow, her abdomen rippling as another contraction hit on a wetness of rich iron. "I'm bleeding too much," she whispered. "My baby is weak. Her mind is fighting but she's so small, not yet ready to leave the womb."

"Don't think about that." Finn's voice was firm and comforting, something about him inspiring trust even though he was a stranger. "You just do your job, mama, and let me worry about the rest. Your cub's had over eight months inside you. She'll be fine. Now, I need you to push."

So she did, her hand locked with Remi's and her mind surrounded by a shield so deadly she should've been terrified. But her terror was reserved for her child's fragile mind, so young, too young. Shoving aside her fear, Auden concentrated on enfolding the baby's mind in psychic arms, comforting and calm.

The baby's mind hiccuped, settled.

Shh , Auden whispered to her child, I have you. I'll never let anyone hurt you.

Filaments of blue spidersilk swirled between them, her baby's mind reaching for a filament even as pain wracked Auden's physical body. Pretty, so pretty , she said, her focus absolute. There's nothing to fear. I have you. Mama has you.

A wrenching in her womb that was pure agony.

Auden couldn't keep her baby inside anymore, her body ejecting her precious child when all Auden wanted to do was hold her inside, where she could protect her.

It was no use, the violent contractions of her body not in her control. "Promise you'll keep her safe if I can't?" Her words came out in a sob, her nails cutting into Remi's skin as well as her own.

She tried to stop the spasm, ease her grip, couldn't.

"I promise," he said without hesitation. "Don't you worry about that, Auden. Your cub is one of mine now."

Their mingled blood seemed to glow to her panicked brain.

She gave birth on a piercing scream, the agony of it nothing compared to hearing her child's mind stutter. She enfolded her in love, in calm, her own screams nothing but stifled echoes in the background.

Stay, my baby. Mama has you. Stay.

The spidersilk escaped her dreams to float outside her mind, the fine blue filaments hitting the black shields that protected her from exposure. Right as she felt her child leave her body on another gush of blood.

Auden's mind faded, her hand going limp in Remi's.