Page 18 of Storm Echo

Though she was clearly tired, she went to a computronic monitor and said, “I can look up your friend for you.”

“She was brought in as Lei, last name unknown, from the site adjacent to the SkyElm ocelot pack. Identified as changeling, most likely ocelot.”

The nurse input the information, frowned. “I have a Lei here, but notes say she wasn’t ID’d as an ocelot. SkyElm alpha himself came in to ID the unknowns an hour after she was brought in, and he didn’t recognize her.”

Ivan tried to make sense of that; all he could come up with was that Lei had been passing through on her way home to her own pack and had stepped in to help. It was what she did, who she was. “Does it say where she was transferred?”

“It should.” A minute later, after bringing up multiple different pages one after the other, she sighed. “I’m sorry, it looks like someone screwed up and didn’t note the details of her transfer. We’re sending patients across the country—sometimes, in the rush to get a patient onto a jet-chopper, the record trail gets broken.”

The nurse brought up another document. “No female patients listed as DOA or expired in the past eighteen hours, so you don’t have to worry about that. She’s alive, just at another hospital. I’m sure she’ll get in touch with you as soon as she’s able.”

Ivan nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and called Canto the instant he walked out of the hospital and into the cold and dark gray winter light. If anyone could locate Lei, it was his eldest cousin; Canto had an intelligence network so vast it reached every corner of the globe.

But even Canto couldn’t follow an invisible thread. “Medical records are in chaos,” he told Ivan two hours later. “Malware attack attributed to a fringe group inspired by Pure Psy—it’s wiped a ton of data.”

Ivan was well aware of the pro-Silence fanatics. “Can it be retrieved?”

“Unknown. Depends on whether the organizations have uninfected backups. I’ll set up an automatic alert to scan for any patient who fits the description you’ve given me.”

Canto didn’t know the truth of who Lei was to Ivan; he believed Ivan just felt a responsibility for the woman he’d rescued. That wasn’t out of the ordinary for a Mercant. Legend had it they’d once been the loyal knights to a king—Mercants looked after the people under their care.

Canto’s scan, however, never bore any fruit. Canto was used to finding data, and he pushed the limits for Ivan, breaking into multiple secure databases. All for naught. “I’m sorry, Ivan,” he said weeks later. “The malware infection was so bad that many hospitals wiped their entire systems, then put up SnowDancer-DarkRiver-designed firewalls.”

The SnowDancer wolves and the DarkRiver leopards had within their ranks a team that built the best computronic shields on the planet. They were meant to be impregnable. And though Ivan knew his cousin was the best of the best, he still found other hackers to test those firewalls. Each and every one failed to get through.

Ivan had also activated his network of contacts, but they all came up empty. There were too many hospitals, infirmaries, and recovery centers in play. And those had never been his family’s specialty—they just didn’t have enough connections in the medical sphere.

Ivan continued to search—and the claw marks in his brain continued to throb. He needed to see that Lei was safe and well. He knew what it was to awaken among the dead. If he’d believed in hope, he’d have hoped that she had no memories of her time buried beneath those five bodies.

Weeks turned into months into a year, and still, he couldn’t find any trace of her. When he asked the RockStorm wolves if anyone had left a message for him with them, they answered in the negative. Lei could’ve found him if she’d wanted to—because he had to believe that she was alive and healed by now. That she hadn’t tried was a message all its own.

Ivan had to stop searching for her.

If he didn’t, he’d turn her into prey … and become as big a monster as those he hunted. It was time to let her go.

PRESENT DAY:

10 AUGUST 2083

SAN FRANCISCO

Chapter 10

Changeling law is clear. The penalty is death.

—Lucas Hunter, alpha of DarkRiver (June 2082)

SOLEIL TOOK CARE to keep her breathing even and her actions unremarkable as she walked through the colorful bustle of San Francisco’s Chinatown. It was difficult when the scents of predators far bigger and stronger than her surrounded her on every possible side. She’d known San Francisco was a leopard town, but she hadn’t actuallyunderstooduntil she set foot past its borders.

Beside her, Farah shivered. “My fur’s standing up.”

“Shh.” Soleil shot her best friend a quelling glance, even though, of the two of them, Farah wasn’t the one most likely to get them busted. “There’re sharp ears everywhere. Think human thoughts.”

Farah crossed her eyes at Soleil.

Soleil almost laughed, but her heart was beating too fast, fear a slick coat on her skin. The worst of it was that it wasn’t only the leopards she could scent all around her. Another scent—darker, heavier, with a different bite to it—wove through the air. Even though she’d never before scented its like, she knew it had to belong to the wolves. There were too many threads of it for it to be any other predatory changeling, and the leopards’ powerful alliance with the wolves was well-known in changeling circles.

Any other predatory changeling who dared cross the border into this territory without permission put their life on the line. While the wolves were said to “shoot first and ask questions of the corpses,” the leopards had a softer reputation—which only meant that they might give you time to answer one question before they shredded you with their claws.

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