Page 63 of Storm Echo

A sudden heaviness to his features, the folds of his face drooping. “If only I’d been born a few decades later …” Looking up, he pinned Ivan with a gaze far too powerful for a man this emaciated and tired. “Don’t waste this chance, young man. You have what I could’ve only imagined—the freedom to build bonds, to be more than a lone star in the dark.”

With that, the old man—who wasn’t so old after all—shuffled away, going to sit in a lounger next to someone who was clearly still addicted. With her layers of clothing and her treasured cart of belongings next to her, the woman looked like any of the homeless. What gave her away as Psy was the obsidian of her eyes.

Most Psy eyes only did that in the throes of a huge use of power—or under great emotion. But with the Jax-addicted, it could become a permanent state. It wasn’t common, and it didn’t appear to affect their vision, but it was a strange and eerie thing even for a man who’d seen his own eyes do that while looking into a mirror.

No light would ever again fill the addict’s eyes, not even if the therapists managed to wean her off the drug. From what he’d learned since he’d found out about this place, that was unlikely to happen. Another resident had told him that ten people in the local population had eyes of permanent black. Only one had been open to rehabilitation—and though he’d gone through the full program and was holding on to his sobriety, his eyes remained obsidian.

Another shuffle, this one more stealthy, one of the users sidling up to him. “You looking for a hit?” It was a low murmur, the eyes that flicked up at him rimmed in red. “I got extra.” Then he named a price that was double the street price.

Ivan could’ve ended this man then and there, but all that would’ve done was eliminate a user. This man was just trying to make a quick buck so he could then go and buy more of his poison of choice. Ivan’s targets were those who produced the poison and spread it out.

“No,” he murmured. “I’m looking for a lot more than that. Finder’s fee involved.”

The user’s eyes grew bright. “I knew it,” he hissed. “I knew that you shiny ones must be using. Life is nothing without the light it gives.” A shudder of purest pleasure, an awful, terrible thing to witness. “You just have the money to look better. Look like you’re not inside the flower.”

Ivan let the man have his delusions; it was all some of these people would ever have. “Do you know anyone who can hook me up or shall I talk to someone more connected?”

As expected, the junkie bristled. “Hey, I found you. This is my score.” He leaned closer in a waft of odor—unwashed flesh and the miasma of the streets—that threatened to send Ivan back to his childhood. “What’s the finder’s fee?”

“Whatever I pay the dealer, I pay you ten percent of it.”

He could see the man attempting to do the math, fail, his pathways too degraded. So he gave him an exorbitant number. When the time came—ifthe time came—he wouldn’t give this junkie that money. Because to give him money would be as bad as feeding the poison into the junkie’s veins himself. Instead, he’d transfer the money into the accounts of the halfway house, as he’d always intended.

The junkie’s eyes were hot little spotlights in his shrunken face. “Deal,” he said. “Deal.” He scratched at his arms. “I’ll speak to the one who can provide. I’ll find out how much he can get you.”

“Remember, you never saw me,” Ivan ordered. “You don’t know who I am. Just one of the shiny ones trying to get a big score for his friends.”

A gleam of a feral kind of intelligence, that of an animal starving for food. “How much is that worth to you?”

This time, the stare Ivan gave him was the flat, dead one that so worried his grandmother. The junkie shriveled away. “Okay, okay.” He threw up his hands, the palms pockmarked with scabs where he’d dug at his own skin. “Was just asking. Where do I find you?”

“You don’t,” Ivan said. “I’ll find you.”

Then he walked away and over to the shadows on the far side of the encampment, knowing the junkie would be anxious to track down the dealer, make his money. Ivan didn’t particularly care about the dealer, either—oh, hewouldkill the man, take him out of circulation, and he’d feel no guilt about it. But first, he’d get from him the name of the one higher up the chain, and he would do that again and again until he got to the person at the very top.

“You’ve walked here nearly every night since you’ve been in the city,” said a deep and smooth male voice at his side.

Chapter 31

“Do not steal from empaths. I find any of you doing that shit, we’ll be having a long private conversation in the dark.”

“But what do we do if they just give us stuff? My neighbor E actually full-on threw a sweater at me because it was cold!”

“Yah, man. The other day, this E just stopped me in the street and told me he was taking me out to eat because I needed some TLC. I couldn’t even say no, he had such, like, soft eyes. It’s like they’re witches. Only the kind that isn’t evil.”

—Conversation between gang members caught on Enforcement

surveillance (New York, April 2083)

IVAN DIDN’T STARTLE at Vaughn’s comment; he’d sensed the DarkRiver sentinel prowl up to him, had known something was coming. “No crime in that.”

Vaughn D’Angelo slid his hands into the pockets of the black cargo pants he was wearing today, his upper half clad in a simple olive green T-shirt that hugged his biceps. Lucas Hunter’s right-hand man, Vaughn had hair of amber-gold that he tied back in a queue, and eyes so close to gold that Ivan wondered if they changed when Vaughn shifted form; the sentinel was as lethal a predator as the DarkRiver alpha. Only Vaughn wasn’t a leopard.

That particular fact wasn’t common knowledge, but neither was it a secret. So Ivan’s family knew that Vaughn was a jaguar, one who’d been raised in DarkRiver. “What was it like,” he found himself asking Vaughn, “being a jaguar in a pack of leopards?”

“Worried about our new healer, are you?” Vaughn’s voice held no amusement or open interest, but Ivan didn’t make the mistake of assuming that the man had no strong feelings on the point.

“News travels fast,” he said.

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