Page 37 of Primal Mirror

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.

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