Page 20 of Storm Echo

Now? she said to that primal part of her.You decide to wake up now?

Padding restlessly inside her, the cat lunged at her skin, almost initiating a shift.

Soleil didn’t swear. Yariela had brought her up to be ladylike, but she was swearing a blue streak inside her mind—even as she ran frantically through the known nonleopard members of DarkRiver. The blue-eyed man hadn’t been changeling, of that her cat was certain.

Psy or human, then.

But not a person who’d been identified as part of DarkRiver by the media. That didn’t mean much. While Lucas Hunter was visible in his position both as the head of the pack and as a changeling representative on the Trinity Accord, most of the cats kept a low profile.

The back of her neck itched; she knew that the blue-eyed man who’d awakened her cat was following her. He might have scrambled her neurons, but she had to shake him loose, or it was all over. The only way she could win against DarkRiver was by stealth—alone, she had nowhere close to the strength required to get to the alpha, take her vengeance.

He’d murdered her packmates, destroyed what little had been left after the Psy outbreak. He had to pay.

“Leilei,” Farah murmured in her ear. “You know you can’t kill. That’s not who you are. It’ll drive you to madness.”

I’m no one, she said silently, even as tears threatened.Madness would be better than this.Soleil was all alone, the sole survivor of a pack once called SkyElm.

But Farah wouldn’t let her be. “You’re my best friend. You wear the brightest colors in the world, laugh until everyone gets the giggles, and cuddle so fiercely that it’s a gift. You’re not a murderer.”

Throwing a glance over her shoulder as Farah’s words tormented her, she saw that the blue-eyed man remained on the other side of the street—but he was pacing her.

Her cat stretched in readiness to shove out of her skin, forcing the shift in a way it had never before done. It wanted to go to him with a feral desperation. “No,” she said under her breath, her hands fisted to bone whiteness. “Not until—”

That was when the world went to hell, screams splitting the air as people fell to their knees or straight down onto their faces. Bones snapped, blood spilled, and chaos reigned.

IVAN crashed to one knee on the hard asphalt right as he went to cross the street, follow a ghost. The only thing that saved him from a cracked kneecap was instinct born of years of training; he’d slammed his hand against the faux-adobe wall of the café he’d been passing and THROWN his body weight that way, absorbing most of the impact with his shoulder, arm, and upper body.

He’d be bruised, but nothing was broken.

All of that had happened in the space of split seconds, his vision going hazy at the same moment. Then his mind began to slide away into a black nothingness that chilled his blood.

He knew what this was: a major PsyNet rupture.

And his mind was caught on the cliff edge. If he didn’t anchor himself, he’d slip and fall, his connection to the PsyNet severed with brutal efficiency. At which point, he’d die.

Psy did not survive without a connection to a psychic network.

And reconnection was only possible should the psychic pathways in the brain remain undamaged. Such a violent separation would twist them to unusable knots, brain cells dying in a massive shock wave.

Teeth gritted, he shot out telepathic grappling hooks into the fabric of the PsyNet. Canto had taught him that. His older cousin was an anchor—one of the foundational elements of the PsyNet—and he’d made it a point to teach all his cousins “emergency first aid.” Once it became clear it worked, the anchors had disseminated that same information freely out into the PsyNet.

The first rule was to doanythingyou could to hold on.

Ivan wasn’t as psychically powerful as his cardinal cousin, but he hit 8.9 on the Gradient on his particular—and eerie—psychic ability. His secondary telepathic ability was a respectable 6.1. When he used the latter to look at the psychic plane, all he saw was horror. The PsyNet was fraying around him, minds blinking out at the speed of light.

Life after life. Gone. Erased.

This wasn’t a rupture.

It was too deep, too black, too endless.

No chance of survival or reconnection.

Grabbing another falling mind with a psychic hand in an effort to save it, he channeled even more energy into the grappling hooks … and then he felt it. Something—someone—had grasped his hooks and pulled them into such a deep part of the PsyNet that Ivan couldn’t even see it.

Anchor.

Not Canto. Not Payal. Not anyone he knew. Just an anchor who’d recognized what he was trying to do and helped him.

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