The work was hard.
Very, very hard.
Her mind felt as if it was caught in a vise. Only her unpolished, ungovernable emotional reaction, her fury at the darkness, and her hunger for vengeance kept her going. That and the need she had to make Vaughn proud of her, to be a woman worthy of a jaguar. Without that wild cauldron of emotional fire, she would’ve been crippled as she had been for so many years, dependent on others to pull her out.
However, none of her previous cascades—triggered by strong business visions—had ever been this severe. Never had she even touched the periphery of a Cassandra Spiral. A trial by fire, it threatened to engulf her in flames of poison, but Faith had no intention of being burned.
She worked with single-minded determination, and as each fracture healed, the psychic block bulged a little less. Oddly, it was her training for commercial forecasts that came to her aid at a critical moment, when exhaustion was starting to dull her mental muscles and she was in danger of making a fatal error. She fell back on the trick of locking her neurons into certain repeating patterns, a step by mechanical step use of her mind that required no conscious thought.
Leaving that pattern to repair the “easy” fractures, she focused her thinking self on fixing the almost invisible breaks in her innermost core. The next time she looked up, it was after she’d successfully rebuilt the core. The surface of her mind was peaceful, the darkness banished, the cascade subjugated. Tired but triumphant, she took a step back from the psychic plane and opened her eyes. She discovered herself cradled tight against Vaughn, the arms wrapped around her front pure immovable muscle.
“You were in trouble.” A rough accusation. “I could smell it.”
She tilted her head to look up at him. “I got myself out.”
His eyes were jaguar, but he wasn’t completely gone. “I knew you could.” Shifting to lie flat on his back, he curvedone hand over her bottom as she rearranged herself to lean up against his chest.
“Why didn’t you break it?”
“You knew what you were doing.”
Vaughn, she realized, would never let her shortchange herself. He’d always demand that she be all the woman she could be, even if that woman promised to make life more difficult for him. A stark contrast to the people she’d called family for so long.
Heart aching in an inexplicable way, she ran her palm over a jaw roughened by stubble. “Vaughn, when my mind was pure quiet at the end, I saw something.” Something so impossible that she wasn’t quite ready to believe. And yet . . .
“What?” His hand smoothed up her spine and little slivers of lightning danced through her bloodstream, sparked in her mind.
“Another bond.” She slid her hand down to lie against his shoulder. “Technically similar to the PsyNet link, but different in every other way. It’s wild. Like you.” Though she was no changeling to scent things, that bond had held Vaughn’s mental scent, a scent as familiar to her as her own, though she had no recollection of ever being in his mind. “What is it?”
“It ties you to me. Forever,” he said, his tone absolute. “You’re my mate.”
“Mate,” she whispered, considering everything she knew about changeling society, which wasn’t much. “Like Sascha and Lucas?”
“Yes.”
She could barely breathe. “Really?”
“Yes. It’s done. You can’t get out.” His fingers tightened on her hip.
“Get out?” She wanted to laugh, but couldn’t find enough air to make the sound. “Vaughn, I was scared I was imagining it because I wanted it so much.”
His fingers relaxed. “Good.”
“How does it work?”
“I don’t know. It’s the first time for me, too.”
“Oh.” That strange ache inside of her intensified.
“But I do know it’ll keep you alive after you drop out of the PsyNet.”
“One changeling mind can’t give a Psy brain the feedback it needs. Experiments have proven that conclusively.” She shook her head, nails digging into his skin. “I won’t kill you to keep myself alive.”
“Trust me?”
She did, so much. “Always.”
“Then don’t worry about it.”