Allegiance of Honor (38 page)

From the private diaries of Father Xavier Perez

August 10, 2079

Nina,

The world is changing in drastic and perilous ways. My two friends are unafraid of meting out death in their quest to erase evil and bring freedom to their people. It disturbs me and I argue often with them, but I can’t sway them from their course—they believe the evil in the Psy race is too deeply rooted, that it must be excised with brutal force.

Only then can compassion have a chance to bud and bloom.

I’ve sat for hours in my church, praying for answers, for a way forward that won’t stain the world in red, but I hear only silence from the heavens. I wish you were here. My friends think me wise, but you were always the one who could see through to the heart of the most complex questions.

I miss you each and every day.

Xavier

SASCHA HUNG UP
the phone and turned to Lucas, worry gnawing her gut. “That was Sophie. Nikita’s still in pain, exhausted.” It didn’t surprise her that she hadn’t picked up Nikita’s exhaustion during their earlier comm call: her mother was a master at showing people only what she wanted them to see.

“Sophie says she barely rested for an hour before getting back to work.” The only concession Nikita had made to her condition was to remain in her suite and in bed, rather than returning to her desk.

Lucas joined her on the aerie balcony, the two of them having decided to work from home today. They’d both spoken to Bastien first thing this morning about the other man’s continued efforts to narrow down the individual who’d hired the captain to spirit away Naya.

“I’m getting close,” Bastien had said, the passion of the hunt in the green of his eyes.

Sascha had spent the rest of the morning in discussions with Ivy and other Es, while Lucas played with and took care of Naya. Then they’d switched off and she’d happily taken cub duty while Lucas had conversation after conversation to do with the “adjunct signee” status he’d suggested. After intense discussion within their own pack, SnowDancer had agreed to back him, so he’d made the call to send the proposal out to a wider—though still limited—number of people.

Despite vociferous disagreement from several parties, he’d held his ground, panther and man both having made the decision that this was the
only way Trinity could survive. Sascha had never been more proud of him. Because while her mate could act civilized, he was a dominant predatory changeling; to propose what he had meant fighting his most primal instincts.

Now, sliding an arm around her, he said, “The doctors warned that her recovery would take time, especially after her relapse.” He kept his voice low, his eyes on the little black ball of fur playing on the forest floor below. Sascha, too, was keeping an eye on their baby, though she was doing it mostly through their telepathic link.

“I just . . . I want to be there for her, Lucas.” Sascha leaned on the railing on this part of the balcony. “She shouldn’t be alone.” Taking a shaky breath, she tried to explain. “I’ve only recently realized how alone my mother has been her whole life. From the instant she learned she was carrying an empath—from the instant she decided to
protect
me, she’s walked alone.”

Sascha had thought her mother cold and heartless for most of her lifetime. As most recently demonstrated by the question Nikita had asked her about coercing humans into the PsyNet, her mother had a fluid concept of conscience at best.

Sascha was under no illusions about the woman who’d given birth to her.

What she hadn’t understood was that everything Nikita had done while Sascha was growing up,
everything
, had been to protect her daughter. “She built an empire so I’d be shielded by a wall of sheer power, and if she had to murder to get that power, she murdered.”

Sascha found that difficult to say, to admit, but she was fully cognizant of her mother’s dual nature. Nikita had done terrible things, unforgivable things. Yet she’d done them all with the sole aim of protecting her child. “I can’t accept the violence she did for me.” She wet a throat gone bone-dry. “But I think of what I did to those mercenaries who wanted to hurt Naya, and I can see it’s on the same continuum.”

Lucas gripped her jaw, made her face him. “Your mother went far beyond that.” His lips were a flat line. “I can’t judge her for protecting her child, but at some point, it became about power. Don’t take her actions on your shoulders. Got it?”

Sascha wished she could argue, but she couldn’t. Yes, she’d defend Naya to the death, but she wouldn’t massacre innocents in her daughter’s name. “Got it.”

“Good.” Lucas rubbed the pad of his thumb over her chin. “But yes, for all her sins, Nikita did make sure you survived to adulthood.”

“I think she did more,” Sascha said as they both turned to look over the railing again. Naya couldn’t go far, tiny as she was, but parental instinct was parental instinct. “I don’t think it was chance that put you and me together on that project.”

“I’ve had that thought myself.” He growled down to Naya when she growled up in hello.

Sascha sent her a psychic kiss at the same time.

Happy, their baby continued her solitary game, leopard enough to enjoy alone time and changeling enough to not want it always.

Sliding his hand around to cup her nape, Lucas returned to their conversation. “Nikita made sure you had significant and daily contact with me and the pack.”

“Do you think . . .” Sascha frowned. “But how could she know we were mates?”

Lucas shook his head. “I don’t think she did. No way to predict that. My feeling is that your mother was playing the odds.” He ran his thumb over her skin, petting her, loving her. Skin privileges between mates. Sascha slipped her own hand under his black T-shirt so she could touch the skin of his back.

That got her a feline smile and a lazy lick of a kiss that sent her heart thumping.

“She was Council,” Lucas said afterward, “had access to the old records. She must’ve known that changeling packs had a way of pulling people from the PsyNet. Why not put you in connection with changelings in case it was still true?”

“That sounds like my mother.” Sascha twisted her lips. “She did also probably want the deal. Two birds, one stone.”

Lucas kissed her again, tender this time. Old hurts soothed by his
love, Sascha glanced down at a bright mental touch.
Yes, you’re a brave explorer,
she sent to Naya.

Naya growled in pride before continuing her exploring.

“Let’s go see Nikita.” Lucas’s words had her attention snapping back to him. “Like I said, it’s a good time for Naya to meet her—while your mother’s defenses are down.”

Her heart thumped. “I don’t know if Vasic is free to do the teleport. I know he wasn’t at home when Ivy and I spoke.”

Lucas slid out his phone. “Let me give him a call.”

•   •   •

SEATED
on her bed with work spread out around her, Nikita wasn’t expecting the telepathic page from Sophia. She began to respond . . . but then there was no need to ask why her aide was getting in touch with her.

It didn’t matter how well Sascha shielded herself; Nikita always knew when her child was close. Before she could do much more than gather and put her work on the bedside table and push off the blanket, Sascha was walking into the room with her own child in her arms.

Nikita saw Sophia pull the door shut behind Sascha and her baby and then, for the first time, the three current generations of Duncans were alone in a room together.

“Don’t get up, Mother.” Not waiting for an invitation, Sascha pulled the blanket back up over Nikita’s legs before taking a seat on the bed.

The girl child in her arms stared wide-eyed at Nikita.

“I told you it wasn’t safe.” Nikita was already calculating how to mitigate the danger.

“No one knows we’re here,” Sascha interrupted. “Vasic teleported us.”

An Arrow. But an Arrow who’d previously worked with Anthony and who was mated to an empath as softhearted as Sascha. Since Nikita kept herself out of Arrow business, and the leader of the Arrows, Aden Kai, didn’t appear to want to grab at power, Vasic had no reason to leak news of Nikita’s physical condition.

Muscles easing, she allowed herself to look at the green-eyed child
with a wild tumble of silky black curls who Sascha had just placed on the bed, atop the blanket. Instead of clinging to her mother, the child continued to stare at Nikita.

“Your mate’s genes appear to have held sway.”

“Do you think so?” Sascha ran her hand over her baby’s back.

The child was clothed in a simple white sundress. She had tiny white sandals on her feet, the straps decorated with colorful designs.

“Look at the shape of her eyes.”

Nikita did, saw what she’d missed at first glance. The intense richness of the green might be from Lucas Hunter, but the tilt at the corners, the gentle upward slope, came from Sascha . . . from Nikita.

Now that she was searching, she found other small pieces of the Duncan line in this child who was both Psy and changeling. The fine facial bones. The skin tone that was a shade or two lighter than Sascha’s dark honey but still had enough brown in it to make it clear that Nadiya Hunter’s heritage was a complex one.

“She’ll be a striking adult.” Nikita could see the promise of an extraordinary beauty that spoke to a wide cross-section of the world. “Teamed with her mixed-race heritage, it’ll give her a useful advantage in business or politics.”

Sascha’s smile was affectionate, the hand she touched to Nadiya’s hair loving. “She’s going to grow up a good person. We’ll make sure of it.”

That, Nikita thought, was the difference between her and her daughter: Sascha thought in terms of goodness, Nikita in terms of advantages.

“Naya,” Sascha said in a gentle tone. “This is your grandmother.”

“Gram?” the child said with impressive enunciation for her age.

“Yes.” Sascha’s smile grew deeper. “Gram. She’s my mother.”

The baby stared at Nikita again for so long that Nikita felt the child was judging her, weighing up whether or not she was worth Nadiya Hunter’s time. Yes, there was definitely some of Nikita Duncan in this Psy-Changeling child. It would stand her in good stead in a harsh world. She’d be far more able to protect herself than her empathic mother . . . though Sascha
had
acted impressively against the mercenaries who’d attempted to take Nadiya.

Maybe Nikita’s child was finally growing claws of her own, now that she had a fragile new life to protect.

That was when the baby smiled, slapped its palms onto the blanket, and began to crawl up Nikita’s legs. Nikita went still as deep,
deep
inside her, awakened a memory. “You did this,” she found herself saying to the beautiful woman with cardinal eyes who’d once been her baby. “In the months after the birth, I was still . . . influenced by carrying an empathic child. I allowed you freedoms proscribed under Silence, allowed you to crawl where you wished when we were alone in my room.”

The day the technicians had informed her that the eight-month-old fetus in her womb showed signs of the E gene, she’d felt the stirrings of something even more primal than the maternal protectiveness that had awakened the day she found out she was pregnant. At that time, most mothers carrying empaths were never told the truth, were instead fed lies while the machinery behind the Council ensured those E-designation children were funneled into special early-conditioning classes designed to suffocate the E ability.

Nikita, however, had been the scion of a strong family group and a woman who showed significant promise in her own right. She’d been given the findings—and in the eyes of the technicians who’d informed her, she’d seen death for her child, seen judgment. They’d wanted her to consign Sascha to an institution where she’d be raised as a broken cardinal, no doubt after enough damage was done to her brain to make her pliable, thus ensuring a cardinal E remained in a PsyNet that needed those Es but had abused them for so long.

Her mentor at the time had wanted her to try for a more “perfect” child. A woman of her strength and potential, he’d said, shouldn’t be “saddled with the burden” of an E. Nikita hadn’t been able to do anything but keep Sascha then; she’d done so by flexing what power she had—and by convincing those more powerful than her, including her own mother, that a cardinal child, even one considered flawed, would be a symbol of Nikita’s strength.

She’d told them she would dispose of her child in an “accident” should Sascha prove problematic.

More than two decades on, Sascha lived and those technicians as well as Nikita’s once-mentor were long dead.

Nikita didn’t ever forgive those who threatened her family.

She hadn’t had to kill her mother—Reina Duncan had died a natural death, but even before that, she hadn’t interfered with Nikita’s raising of Sascha. Reina had signed what Nikita asked her to sign, requested regular updates on Sascha’s progress, and been content. Because, by then, everyone in the Duncan line knew it was Nikita who had the killer instinct, Nikita who’d take the family to
serious
power in the Net.

Nikita respected her mother for having understood that, for not getting in her way.

“I don’t remember,” Sascha whispered.

“Of course not. You were an infant.” Nadiya had crawled up to Nikita’s thighs.

Sascha reached out. “I’ll get her. I know your injuries—”

“It’s fine.” Well able to handle a toddler, even in her weakened state, Nikita sat her grandchild against her, one arm around Nadiya’s waist.

Content because she could see her mother, the child began to “talk.” One out of every seven words was possibly comprehensible. “She has excellent vocal skills for her age.”

“Yes, she’s a chatterbox,” Sascha said with a smile that exposed her heart.

Sascha’s gaze met Nikita’s when Nadiya fell silent, more interested in playing with the organizer Nikita had handed her. The child couldn’t do any damage, and the logic puzzle Nikita had pulled up for her to solve was all bright-colored blocks, a program still in Nikita’s archives from Sascha’s childhood.

“I’d like to remember.” There was a wistfulness to Sascha’s tone that once more betrayed the softness inside her that Nikita had spent a lifetime trying to toughen up. “I’d like to remember a time when you and I . . . were just us. No Silence. No rules.”

“It was never that way,” Nikita said curtly. “I was born in Silence.” And she’d been forged in a bloody battle for her child’s survival.

But her grandchild would grow up in freedom, and her daughter no
longer had to worry that someone would try to exterminate her for simply being herself. It was a victory. “Here,” she said, and opened the telepathic channel that existed between mother and child, a channel no one else could access.

It didn’t surprise her in the least that it was wide open on Sascha’s end.

Foolish, emotional child.

Bringing up memories of the times she and Sascha had spent in Nikita’s bedroom when Sascha was still young enough that Nikita could enclose her in her own shields and hide Sascha’s distinctive mental signature, she sent those memories to her daughter.