Page 118 of Primal Mirror

He and Angel, they’d pulled off plenty of ops when they’d been out on their own, barely needed to communicate to understand what the other wanted in the heat of a fight. But this, they’d discussed down to the minutest detail, because Angel wouldn’t otherwise be familiar with the layout of the compound.

As Remi watched, his best friend streaked into the lights, deliberately allowing himself to be seen by the guards who monitored the external feeds. He moved so fast that it appeared multiple tigers were prowling the compound.

Auden’s changelings on the attack.

The guards boiled out of the house, shouting orders and reaching for weapons.

He counted. Idiots. They were all outside. He knew that because Angel had organized a surveillance crew to keep an eye on the place since Auden was hurt. All of them understood that the Scotts were snakes, and snakes had to be watched.

For all her psychopathic faults, Charisma Wai would not have hired imbeciles like this.

As a result of their incompetence, Remi was able to run straight through to the house while every single guard was distracted hunting the tigers that appeared and vanished before they could get off a single shot. Angel growled several times right as Remi ran, once again capturing all their attention.

A heartbeat later and Remi was climbing up the outside of the house. Psy just didn’t think about changelings when they built. This house had so many hand- and footholds—and so many shadows of which a cat could take advantage.

All the security lights pointed outward, leaving the walls of the house itself dark.

Having aimed himself at the floor that held the family’s rooms, he now hauled himself in through an open window. He’d been prepared to break one if needed, would’ve just waited for the next burst of noise from the guards as Angel ran them ragged. But once again, the Psy sense of arrogance came to his rescue. They didn’t expect entry from such a high point.

He landed on the carpet with feline stealth before making his way down a hallway swathed in shadows. In his hand was a blocker that hid his progress from the cameras, because—if the Psy staved off their oncoming apocalypse—Remi wasn’t going to play into the desire of certain Psy families to start an interspecies war.

No one would ever have any proof of his presence here tonight.

Less than thirty seconds after he’d entered, he knocked on Hayward Scott’s door, the rap a firm one. “Sir.”

Rustling, as the man inside moved to unlock his door. “What is going—”

His words ended in a gasp as he came face-to-face with Remi—and the fast-acting sedative in the auto-injector in Remi’s hand. Psy didn’t do well with drugs, but he’d checked with Dr. Bashir about sedatives. The doctor, believing Remi was thinking about Auden’s possible future need for them, had given him a short list of fast-acting agents that would knock a Psy out almost at once.

“The problem will be at the other end,” Dr. Bashir had said. “When the patient wakes. Their psychic senses will be tangled, take time to unravel. However, with the ones I’ve listed, there’s no chance of a permanent injury.”

Dr. Bashir hadn’t been overselling how rapidly this stuff worked.

Hayward Scott slumped forward, unconscious almost before Remi had pulled the injector away from his neck. Remi was confident it had all happened too fast for him to scream for help on the telepathic plane. Throwing the older man over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, he walked down the stairs, sticking to areas in a surveillance shadow because there was no point in being arrogant and relying only on the blocker.

The house was more active now—he could hear movement, see lights at several corners. But it was a big house, and the entire group in residence was focused on the area Angel had turned into a circus. Remi heard a scream at that instant, knew his friend had taken one of them down to ensure they saw him as a continued and deadly threat.

Smile cold, Remi slipped out of the house right under the noses of the guards. Even if they spotted him in the external lights, none of them could match his speed. On their cameras, all they’d see was a human form racing away with one of their own.

As for Angel…well, there was no tiger pack in the country. Only friends and packmates were aware that Angel was a tiger, not a leopard. Remi could deny sending an assault force of “tigers” with a straight face.

He’d sent only a single highly intelligent tiger.

Who joined him at their vehicle ten minutes later, jumping into the back seat beside their package before Remi drove out. No one sought to stop them. If Remi had to guess, the guards were still hunting ghost tigers.

A shimmer of light in back.

“That was fun,” Angel said with a rare grin Remi saw in the rearview mirror. “I got four of them. Left them alive, but nicely mauled.”

Remi’s own grin was vicious. “We have to keep this asshole drugged until the Scotts decide to toe the line.”

“We could send the family his pinky finger in a lined box as further incentive.”

“You’re terrifying sometimes, my angelic friend.” Because he knew Angel—protective and fiercely loyal Angel—had meant that.

A shrug he heard in the rustle of the clothing Angel was pulling on. “Sometimes, you have to play with bastards on their own level.”

It was at times like this that Remi wondered about the lost years of Angel’s childhood, the ones about which he refused to talk even to Remi. “Scotts are about bloodlines, and they have no one else suitable of age if Hayward vanishes.”

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