The Psy-Changeling Collection (300 page)

CHAPTER 14

I can only show you what the defendant did in that room ten months ago. To ask me whether or not he is a monster is to presume I have an intimate knowledge of monsters.

—
Response by Sophia Russo (J) to a question posed by the
prosecution in case 23180: State of Nebraska v Donnelly

Mouth a grim
line, Max brought the vehicle to a stop in the half-empty car park of a restaurant that hadn’t yet opened.

Listening to his end of the conversation, she’d divined the reason for the call by the time he hung up. “Bonner wants to talk to me again.” The thought of trawling through that mind full of malice made her entire body stiffen in revulsion.

Better to kill him
.

Because he might just be the final weight, the one that would cause her shields to shred beyond any hope of repair. And Sophia wasn’t ready to have her brain crushed, her psyche, her personality, wiped from existence. Not when she’d just found Max, found this man who made the cold, dark places fill with light. Clenching her fingers on her organizer, she fought past the whispers of vengeance that seemed to originate in the dark tendrils snaking through her mind and soothed the otherness back to sleep.

“Bastard says he’s got something to share, some memory he’s apparently been able to dig up.” Max braced his arm on the back of her seat, playing with a strand of her hair as he’d done in the apartment.

She didn’t pull away. They had trust between them now, a fragile thing born in the electrical storm of their first real touch. “I suggest that this one time, we let him play his games.” No matter her hunger to
live
, to steal and claw every extra day she could out of this life, she couldn’t walk away from Bonner’s evil. Not when the cost of protecting herself would be to abandon those lost girls, leave them buried and forgotten in the dark. No one should be forgotten.
No one
.

“If we play it right,” she said, remembering three other young lives that had been willfully erased from every mind but her own, “it’ll only increase his frustration, make him more malleable.”

Max’s eyes filled with raw, edgy emotions she’d never get the chance to study, to truly know. Not in this lifetime. So she asked, “What are you thinking?”

“That it’s a pity torture is illegal.” A visceral anger in every world. “We’ll set up a comm-conference. We’re not traipsing up to him so he can have a convenient memory lapse.”

“The comm systems at our apartment won’t have the necessary encryption.” Sophia’s own anger was a colder thing, a thing that saw nothing wrong in taking an eye for an eye, a life for a life. “We could ask Enforcement if they have a secure link.”

“Their system was pretty good last time I was here.” Releasing her hair with a little tug that made her scalp prickle with sensation, the ice thawing in a flare of white-hot heat, he rubbed at his jaw. “But they have leaks.”

“There are leaks in every Enforcement building.” Facilitated, in most cases, by the Psy.

“I think I know someone else who’ll have a secure link.”

So it was that half an hour later, Sophia was ushered
into a small conference room in the medium-sized office building that was the DarkRiver leopard pack’s city HQ. “They’re not worried?” she asked after their escort—an auburn-haired young male—withdrew from the conference room. “The changeling distrust of Psy is well-known.”

“This is where the cats do business,” Max replied, setting up the comm-conference using the touch pads. “Some of that business is with Psy. And don’t forget—DarkRiver has several Psy defectors in its ranks.”

“This building is full of changelings.” The statement of the obvious slipped out.

Max turned to pin her to the spot with his eyes. “Are you having trouble?”

“No.” She tugged her gloves more securely over her wrists and snugly below the cuffs of her white shirt, the action more of . . . comfort, than necessity. “Changelings are actually restful.”

A raised eyebrow, those solid shoulders relaxing as he returned his attention to the comm controls. “Not many people would describe them that way. They tend to have this wild energy below the human surface.”

She wanted to point out that he burned with that same wild energy—though in his case, it was contained so well, most people would never guess at it. All those women who wanted to own him, she thought, they didn’t understand what it was they dared attempt to harness. But she knew. And she wondered what it would be like to stroke that sleekly muscular body with her bare hands.

He looked up, caught her watching him. “When we’re alone.” A tease . . . and a warning.

Closing her hand over the arm of her chair, she jerked away her head. “Changelings all have natural mental shields.”

“So why are you tense enough to snap?”

It was impossible not to glance back at him, to watch him as he rechecked the encryption, lines of concentration across his brow. At that moment, the leash slipped free, the reins broke, and everything disappeared but the promise
and the danger that was Detective Max Shannon—she wanted to touch the skin exposed at his nape, wanted to know if it was soft or rough, wanted to strip off his shirt and rub her lips over the muscles that shifted beneath that honey-colored skin, wanted to stroke and know and possess. She simply
wanted
. “Changelings like to touch.” It came out soft, husky.

Max’s shoulders grew tight, but he didn’t turn. “I asked Clay about that while you were in the bathroom just before. They don’t presume skin privileges, so you’re safe.”

“Skin privileges.” She tested the unfamiliar term, gleaning its meaning from the context. “And you, Max?” Thought translated into words so fast, she had no chance—or will—to hold them back. “Are you easy with skin privileges?”

Max moved to brace his hands on the back of her chair, leaning down until his lips threatened to brush the tip of her ear. “It depends on who’s asking.” The scent of him surrounded her as he placed his hands on the table on either side of her. A sensual trap. “But if you’re talking about a certain J, well, for her, I might be very, very easy.”

A tight kind of heat bloomed in Sophia’s stomach, a strange fire that burned even the darkest, most secret part of her. “Max.” She didn’t know what she was asking for, her heartbeat an erratic tattoo against her ribs.

Max pushed off the table with a groan. “We can’t do this here. It’s almost time for the conference.” A light touch on her shoulder, holding a protectiveness that shook her, disarmed her. “You ready, Sophie?”

His voice, his presence, his willingness to be her shield . . . it shook her, but she nodded. “Yes.” This had to be done—those girls had to be brought home.

Even a Psy without any family of her own understood the importance of children, the ties of blood. To lose a child in the Net was to lose not only your immortality, but also your chance to gain the unqualified loyalty of at least one individual. Unless, of course, you were young enough to sire or carry other progeny.

Sophia’s parents had been in their early thirties the summer she turned eight and everything fractured. They’d gone on to have two more children—both with each other. Their genes, after all, had already proved a complimentary set. Her siblings, too, were high-Gradient telepaths. Not as strong as her. But they weren’t broken.

Bartholomew Reuben’s face appeared onscreen at that moment, slicing away the heart pain of the past with the sadistic evil of the present. “Max, Ms. Russo, good to see you. You’ll be transferred to Bonner in a few seconds.”

“You flew there, Bart?” Max asked. “Waste of time.”

“No, I’m in another prison.” The prosecutor’s lips curved in a humorless smile. “Bonner’s not going to be pleased we didn’t all start running when he said fetch.”

A warning countdown appeared in the corner of the screen.

Ten
.

Max snorted. “I’m not exactly worried about pleasing the bastard.”

Nine
.

“I’ll be hooked into the comm-conference—”

Eight
.

“—but Bonner will see only Ms. Russo.”

Seven
.

The scrape of a chair.

Six
.

“I’ll move a little,” Max said, “make sure I’m out of the shot.”

Five
.

“You good, Sophie?”

Sophie
. Tenderness in the way he said that name, making it something special between them, a gift.

Four
.

“Yes.” She held his gift tight to her heart.

Three
.

“Instant you want out—”

Two
.

“—say the word.”

One
.

Reuben’s face disappeared, to be replaced by the gilded blond looks of a killer so vicious, the tabloids had fought to tell his story. He was a megastar in the shadowy underworld of serial-killer groupies, his “authorized biography” read with religious fervor. She wondered how many of his fans realized the book was mostly fiction.

Bonner was incapable of truth.

“Ms. Russo.” That charming smile, but there was an edge to it. “I was so looking forward to seeing you in person.”

“That would have been an inefficient use of my time,” she replied, keeping her hands loosely in her lap.

“But how will you take my memories if you aren’t nearby?” A slow raising of his shoulders. “I’m afraid my mind isn’t cooperating with my need to share.” Deep blue eyes filled with rueful laughter, the charming apology of a man who’d done something a little naughty.

It would, Sophia thought, be so easy to kill him. She’d just have to be in the general vicinity. Her telepathic reach was long enough—she could make him suffocate himself with a pillow, maybe beat his skull against a wall until pieces of bone pierced his brain. The terror would make him mindless.

A tap on the table to her left.

Max
. The reminder of the gift she’d been handed, the gift she was determined not to lose, made her snap back to attention, the otherness retreating in the face of her resolve. “The prison officials stated that you’d remembered a place we’d be very interested to learn about.”

Bonner displayed his teeth in a smile that could’ve graced a toothpaste commercial. But his eyes. Reptilian eyes. She’d seen eyes like that before—on the powerful in the Net, men and women for whom the sanctity of life meant less than nothing.

The man who’d done her last childhood evaluation—making the final call on whether she was useful enough
to be saved or should be put down—had had eyes like the Butcher of Park Avenue. “Mr. Bonner?” she prompted when the killer didn’t reply.

“The memory seems to have faded away.” A disappointed sigh. “I know it had something to do with trees, but . . .” Another shrug. “Maybe if you came here, used your abilities to jog my recall . . .”

“It seems even this was a waste of time.” Glancing to her left, she gave a curt nod. “Cut the connection.”

Bonner’s face twisted to reveal the monster within for one violent second. “Ms. Russo, I don’t think you realiz—” The empty slate of a blank screen.

“I want to kill him with my bare hands,” Max said in a voice so calm it made every single hair on the back of her neck rise in warning. “It’s not a need for justice or anything pure. I want vengeance. I want him to suffer as those women—those
girls
—suffered.”

“We all have the capacity to kill,” Sophia said, telling herself to stop, but unable to keep quiet—she needed to know what he thought of the broken part of her that knew only the most lethal kind of justice. If he was going to reject her, better that it be now, when she’d only touched the wild heat of him once, when she’d just begun to learn him . . . when she might survive the denunciation. “The lines are simply different for everyone.”

Max’s eyes met hers, piercing in their intensity. “And yours involve children. Sometimes women, but most often, children.”

Sophia swallowed, uncertain how to answer, uncertain how to read
his
answer.

Bartholomew Reuben’s face reappeared on the comm screen at that moment. “He’s pissed. Never saw that ugly face of his until today.”

“Not even at trial?” Sophia asked, her confused terror translating into a rigid composure.

“Cool as a cucumber, that one,” Reuben said. “Smiled at the jurors, flirted with the gallery. If we hadn’t had airtight
evidence, he might well have charmed himself out of a conviction.” A small pause. “Please be careful, Ms. Russo. Bonner is under constant supervision, but he does have rabid fans. If he manages to get out a message to one of them, you could be in danger.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Reuben.” Sophia took the small, folded note Max passed her under the table. “Right now, he needs me alive. He wants to awe me with his brilliance.” After that . . .

Max felt his
gut grow painfully tight as he thought back to the expression on Sophia’s face before Bart signed off. He’d known exactly what she was considering, his complex, dangerous J, knew, too, that he couldn’t let her do it. But they were geographically far enough from Bonner right now that Sophia’s tendency to hurt nasty people in creative ways was something he had time to deal with.

He knew it wouldn’t be easy. Not when her actions—and the crimes of those she’d punished in that peculiarly J way—all added up to a past that spoke of a brutal kind of hurt. Those scars, he thought, were invisible. But they were far more important than the thin lines that marked her face.

“Max,” she muttered under her breath as they headed up to Nikita’s office.

He knew why she was giving him that perplexed look—and it soothed him to know the ploy had worked, drawing her back from the edge of the void. “Hmm?”

“You can’t write me notes like that.” It was a hissed order as the elevator doors opened on the correct level. “What if someone had seen?”

Max shot her an innocent look. “I just asked a simple question.”

“
What do you think of boardroom sex?
” A raised eyebrow. “That is not—”

“Well, since you asked,” he interrupted, walking into the outer section of Nikita’s office, “I vote in favor.”