Page 28 of Storm Echo

“Ivan.” A man with a nightmare in his head and one who’d just realized he’d permit her to claw him, permit her to mark him.

As she’d already marked him that cold day among the dead, the bruise not a bruise at all, but the swiping marks of a cat’s claws. “What’s your name?” he asked, because to call her Lei without introduction would give away far too much.

“Tell me what happened that day,” she said instead of answering, slicing back her claws but continuing to stare at him with eyes that were hauntingly beautiful. “I need to know.”

Undone by the stark request, the ground shaky under him, he told her all of it. From the moment he’d found her, to the moment he’d “crashed” her mind with his own, jolting her to life.

“My cat knows you,” she said. “As if you’re inside me.” Another scowl, her hand going up to her temple before dropping back down. “Did you leave something inside me?”

“Psy can’t influence a changeling in such a way—and if I left something, I would’ve been able to track it, find you.” Instead of being haunted by dreams of an ocelot prowling through his world.

Narrowed eyes. “Something happened that day.”

“Yes.” Impossible to ignore that when it was taking all his will not to touch her. “But I can’t tell you what—though I do think you have it the other way around.”

Taking a box of energy bars offered by a shopkeeper who was handing them out to all the rescuers, she opened it and put several bars in his lap. And he thought of their starlit picnic and the food she’d made him try, a moment he’d gone over so many times that the memory was frozen in a glass bauble in his mind.

“Other way around?” she muttered when he didn’t continue. “What are you talking about?”

“I think you left something inme.” A thing of fur and teeth that had haunted him each day since.

Chapter 14

Incidents of Scarab Syndrome continue to rise in the general population.

—Address by Dr. Maia Ndiaye, PsyMed SF Echo, to virtual assembly of medical professionals from the Pacific Islands’ United Medical Corps

The Consortium can’t function as a cohesive unit without solid leadership. Where is the Architect who sold us this bill of goods?

—Priority question from a member of the Consortium (unanswered)

THE ARCHITECT WHO had become Queen of the Scarabs was pleased. “You have done well,” she told those of her children whom she had selected for this task.

They didn’t respond, couldn’t respond, their minds too busy undertaking the work she’d assigned them. She had her own task, too, the most critical one of them all. Settling back in her office chair on the physical plane, she unleashed the full power of her mind on the psychic one.

And this time, none of the Psy, that old and weak race, could see her.

Chapter 15

Psy, human, changeling, all three races spend their lives searching for and highlighting differences, when the truth is that we are far more alike than we are not.

—Excerpt from “Reflections on Identity” by Keelie Schaeffer, PhD,Anthropology and Psychology Quarterly(March 2074)

“WE ALL KNOW healers have an ability analogous to a psychic one.”

Soleil stared at him, at this beautiful stranger who’d allowed her to touch him in a way that was far too intimate between people who’d only met once before—while one of them had been unconscious. Contrary to what her cat might believe, that didn’t count as a relationship.

Nose in the air, her cat twitched its tail.

“It’s Psy that play with minds,” she said, and made herself look away from the striking blue of his gaze. “Don’t try anything.”

“If I could have, I’d have found you,” he said again. “I looked for you, but you’d been transferred with no forwarding record. And you weren’t listed as a SkyElm ocelot. Were you visiting family there?”

The strange joy of finding out why he felt so familiar shattered as things spiked and twisted inside Soleil. She couldn’t answer, her cat, too, going mute within. This was a pain for which neither part of her had any words. It was one thing to know you were unwanted by your pack, another to be so viciously rejected.

Her alpha had disavowed her while she was helpless and broken.

A stir next to her that was electricity in the air. “You need to eat.”

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