Page 4 of Storm Echo

A snort. “Try not to split it open.” Spinning on her heel, a whirlwind of color and life, she began to walk away.

Ivan called after no one. Asked no one for anything. But he said, “Wait! What’s your name?”

A look over her shoulder, her eyes liquid pools of mystery. “You can call me Lei.”

Then she was gone, moving so fluidly into the forest that he had no chance of tailing her, not in his current state. Changeling, definitely changeling. But after Ivan made it to the end of the course—because apparently hewasan idiot—the wolf lieutenant in charge of him had no idea who Ivan was talking about when he mentioned Lei.

“A paramedic?” Jorge Herrera frowned. “None of our healers or other trained medical personnel match your description. And RockStorm’s small enough that I’d know if we had a lovely dark-eyed visitor.” A grin. “I’m single and in my prime, after all.”

“I’m certain she was changeling.”

Jorge rubbed a jaw heavy with dark stubble against brown skin. “Yeah, she might be. The part of the forest you were in at the time is public land outside our pack’s territorial boundaries. Open for everyone to use. No other packs real close to us, though, so I’m guessing she’s probably visiting a human friend or family member.”

The wolf lieutenant shrugged. “Guess she’ll have to be a mystery, your nurse.”

Ivan said nothing, but he was a Mercant. Information, data, connections, those were the foundations of his family. He’d find her.Hadto find her, the compulsion to see her again a pulsing beat in his blood.

For the first time in his life, Ivan Mercantwantedsomething … someone.

Chapter 3

The neurological changes are permanent. Long-term effects remain unknown.

—Private report by Dr. Jamal Raul on Ivan Mercant, age 17 (8 August 2068)

IVAN KNEW HE was spoiled when it came to access to data. Side effect of growing up in a family of spies. Grandmother did not approve of Ivan and his cousins’ use of that term, far preferring to state that their family was in the business of intelligence.

In other words, a family of spies.

However, given the limited information he had on Lei and the large areas changelings could traverse on foot, pinpointing her identity was proving to be difficult. Changelings were more off-grid than humans or Psy, so he couldn’t even look through lists of changeling healers in an effort to narrow down the possibilities.

The packs just didn’t put that type of information online, and as those of Ivan’s race had long ignored the changelings, there was no information floating around in the PsyNet for him to mine.

He still couldn’t stop looking. He took on the task with the same obsessive attention that had left him with multiple complementary skill sets. Complementary to his mind, anyway. Being a dead shot with any handheld weapon on the planet was as critical to him as knowing how to take apart a computronic or mechanical device to diagnose a problem.

The world was a place where things cracked and shattered—and where bad people existed. Those like Ivan were born to eliminate the others from the board so the softer, gentler creatures could exist. Creatures like her.

Cutie pie.

Grumpy.

Try not to split it open.

Their short conversation ran over and over in his mind, until he did the only thing he could—he missed a day of training, which was out of character for him in the extreme, and went back to the spot where he’d met her. Ridiculous to assume it would work when the forest was a sprawling wilderness that went on for miles, but he had to try.

He put his nascent forest tracking skills to use and tried to follow her path, but she’d been too light on her feet, had left no real mark that he could discern. Halting in the center of a small clearing when it became clear he’d never be able to track her, he looked around … and saw mushrooms exactly like the ones she’d had in her basket.

He crouched down, touched his finger to one.

Would Lei come back for more?

Since it was all he had, he settled in to wait, back against the trunk of a large tree and eyes on the myriad greens and browns of the forest. Ivan could be patient. According to his grandmother, he had the gift of quiet.

He’d never told her how he’d developed it, all the hours he’d spent in lonely silence while his mother “rested,” hadn’t even spoken of it to the PsyMed specialist Grandmother had handpicked for him, but he thought she’d guessed. It wasn’t a difficult thing to deduce once you knew his history.

He supposed it was the one good gift his mother had left him.

Nowhere near enough to balance out the far more twisted gift inside his mind, but something at least.

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