Page 111 of Primal Mirror

The action would haunt him all his life, but to take any other course would be to spit on her courage and love for her daughter.

He stood, Auden’s now limp body in his arms, and headed for the second bed.

Two beds. One for Shoshanna. And one for the baby meant to be hooked up to her by methods unimaginable so she could rape that tiny and vulnerable mind.

“Right, right.” Dr. Verhoeven followed him.

Though Auden was limp, her eyes moved rapidly under her eyelids. The echo of Shoshanna’s dying body sent ice through his veins, but her scent…it was still Auden.

Until it wasn’t.

Back again.

Lost.

Back.

Fighting, he realized, she was fighting a battle to hold on to her own mind, her own sense of self. “You can make it,” he said, not caring if the doctor heard—the other man would no doubt believe he was talking to Shoshanna Scott. “Think of the future.” Think of Liberty.

Removing the tiny knit cap from his pocket while everyone else was distracted, he placed it in her flexed open hand.

It clenched instinctively around it.

* * *

• • •

AUDEN was no combat telepath. She wasn’t a powerful telepath at all. She didn’t have the weapons to battle the psychic tendrils her mother had shot and somehow hooked into her mind in her dying agonies. She had no blades to cut her off, no acid to burn them aside. And fuck if she’d ever reach for her baby’s nascent powers.

Never would anyone use her little girl.

She leaned on what she did have—a ferocious love and a vicious anger—and the awareness that they made her stronger than her weakened mother. Instead of fighting Shoshanna’s blows, she blanketed Shoshanna in her rage, a rage with a near-viscous quality that was a thick net stifling Shoshanna’s strikes.

Auden hadn’t known her mind could do that, but she was a psychometric. She touched emotion every time she felt an imprint. It made sense that the same emotions could come out of her in this strange and almost tactile way.

Her friends on the forum would be happy. She could tell them that there were such things as killer psychometrics. Auden intended to be one.

Stop this! You know you’ve lost!

Ignoring Shoshanna’s order, Auden continued to pump out rage. She could’ve used love, too, but she wasn’t about to waste that precious emotion on this woman who had never been a mother to her except in biological terms.

At the same time, she made a strategic shift that meant her power would encircle Shoshanna’s, creating a suffocating trap. A chill in her heart. This kind of strategy wasn’t in her bailiwick. This was part of her mother’s skills.

Bleedover.

Auden steeled her heart. She couldn’t panic, couldn’t rail against what had already happened. And whatever her mother had left in her during the earlier attempted transfers, that part was no longer Shoshanna. Because if it had been, it would’ve been trying to derail Auden.

Instead, every part of Auden—even the cold and strategic element introduced into her by Shoshanna—was fighting to protect Liberty…and get back to Remi, this man who had taught her what it was to trust.

He’d kept every promise, never let her down, was fighting for her even now.

A ferocious kind of power waited on the periphery of her mind, ready for her to open the door so it could prowl in.

Remi.

She couldn’t open that door. Not when there remained the merest drop of a chance that her mother would find a way to slip through, infect with her frothing insanity the wonderful group of people who had kept Auden safe—and who were now ready to uproot their entire pack for her baby’s life.

You are weak! You stand no chance! Stop this foolish game. It is annoying. Sharp telepathic blows against Auden’s shields…but the blows snagged on the tactile thickness of emotion inside her mind, and what got through were dull thuds at best.

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