“Until I get hungry for you again.” He wrapped the towel around his hips. “Which could be anytime soon.”
His delectably slow kiss was welcome. “You’re insatiable.”
“Just for you.” He tapped his finger on her nose and the gesture was so silly, so tender, so unbelievably heartbreaking.
“Why don’t you smile more?” She liked his smile, liked seeing such uncomplicated happiness on his face.
“Never had much to smile about.”
Looking into that smile, Faith gave up her last hazy dream of somehow returning to the only world she’d ever known. “I’m never going back.”
The smile faded and something darker whispered into his eyes, something wild and savagely possessive. “Good. Because I wasn’t planning on letting you go.”
She laughed and it was the first time in her life she hadn’t been afraid. Silence had numbed her, but what she finally understood was that it was a numbness caused by fear. Her race was so afraid of their own talents, their own unique minds, they’d crippled themselves. But she was no longer in bondage.
Throwing her arms around Vaughn’s neck, she let him pick her up and spin her around in a circle. They’d talk about his stubbornness, his liking for getting his own way, but not now. Not in this perfect moment.
Perhaps her newfoundhappiness was why she made the mistake, why she forgot that there were things hunting her that didn’t live on the PsyNet, things that had direct accessto her mind. She went to sleep in Vaughn’s arms, but woke to find herself in the grip of malignant darkness. She knew she could move, could alert Vaughn, and he’d probably be able to bring her out of it.
But with the fire of Vaughn’s chest pressed to her back, she knew where she was,whenshe was. Her shields against the visions might’ve burned out, but her emotions were wide awake. And though those emotional muscles were unfamiliar, she was confident she could use them if the need arose—they were as natural a part of her as Silence had been unnatural. It would be hard, but not impossible to break out of this vision.
Decision made, she let the vision sweep her under in an ebony wave of malevolence, let it swirl around her, let it show her.
Vaughn knew Faithwas having a vision. Beneath closed eyelids, he could see her eyes flickering in rapid movements that were not those of deep sleep. He’d awakened when the cat had sensed a change in the rhythm of her heart rate. Now her scent, too, changed.
There was something not quite right about it, a sick miasma that made it seem as if she’d been infected by something vile. The beast raged to tear her from the grip of the vision, but Vaughn forced himself to think. Maybe Faith didn’t want it to stop—he’d thought she’d been awake and aware when it started. Able to make a choice.
He never wanted to stifle her gift as Silence had, but fighting the beast was hard, especially when the man had the same protective instincts. The urge to shake her awake intensified when he glimpsed the hovering edges of a physical darkness above her. It couldn’t get in, but circled like a vulture just waiting for a vulnerable spot.
Growling low in his throat, he held Faith closer. Butironically the sight also calmed him—it hadn’t fully clawed into Faith, which meant she could break out on her own. If he made the decision for her, he might steal from her a chance to avenge her sister’s death. And the need for vengeance was something both parts of his self understood.
“I’m here,” he whispered in her ear. Then he settled down to keep watch over her and hold back the darkness. It didn’t matter that a psychic phenomenon should have had no physical form. He knew it existed, he saw it. And he would not let it touch Faith.
Even in thedepths of the vision, Faith was aware of Vaughn beside her, a wall of pure fire between her and the ugly menace that awaited. That was unusual enough to have broken her concentration had she not already made the decision to complete this. The darkness would never again steal a life.
Even if Faith had to end his.
The vision began to change from the unclear mix of emotion that had first roiled around her, the curtains of darkness parting to once again show her the face of the woman he meant to kill. The scene was clean—part of the stalk, not the kill—which left her free to concentrate on details that might identify the target rather than battling her own fear responses. By the time the vision faded, she thought she had what she needed. She was about to pull out when she felt a tug that signaled more was to come.
Calm from the lack of brutality in the opening scenes, she let the next phase roll over her. Blood dripped down pale green walls, soaked into the slightly darker carpet, splattered the comm console. A charnel house she could smell—hints of putrid death hidden in the iron-rich taint of blood. Revolted, she could do nothing as he walked farther into the room, placing his feet in the dark red liquid that had once runin a living being’s veins. The blood in the bathroom had had nothing to soak into. His feet slapped into it with a splash.
Her mind shuddered under the overload. The carnage, the smell, the sporadic flashes of backsight that had her hearing screams of such terror that her bones chilled, it all smashed into her with the force of a truck going a hundred miles an hour. That was when she realized shehadn’tsurvived the sexual heat with Vaughn.
The earlier cascade had fractured her mind on the deepest level. It had no ability to withstand the fury of this blood-soaked vision. She felt herself start to cascade again but this time, it was nothing survivable—the Cassandra Spiral. A silent scream tore free from her psyche. The Cassandra Spiral was the worst grade of cascade, turning victims into mute vegetables without reason or sentience.
No one survived without rapid M-Psy intervention.
But there were no M-Psy here and she was drowning, sinking so fast that soon she wouldn’t be able to breathe. The blood was creeping up her body, coating her feet, her legs. . . .
CHAPTER 22
No!
It was a shout from a section of her mind she’d never before seen. Stubborn and rebellious, it slapped her back to her senses and told her to pull out. Now! If she didn’t, the Council, the M-Psy, the PsyClan, they all won.
The violence worked. Her mind’s eye watering with the strength of the emotional slap, she shook off her panic and began to find reason again. She refused to let them win, refused to have Vaughn feel that he’d taken a weak woman as his lover, someone who’d constantly need rescue.
Layered in determination born out of a lifetime of withheld rage, she threw a solid psychic block across the cascade. The Cassandra Spiral wasn’t so easily escaped. It shoved at the block with such force that the wall bulged outward. But it didn’t break—she had an excruciatingly small window before the avalanche hit. Not allowing herself to focus on that, she began to repair the cracks that had led to the cascade in the first place.