Chapter 13

“We can bandage up his physical wounds, but it’s the damage done to his heart and his mind that’ll scar him.”

“My gentle, sweet boy. What will this do to you? Who will this make you?”

—Jerard and Leah Knight on their son, Bowen (13)

BO THOUGHT OF the plate of Scott’s favorite food, of the cane thrust under his hand, of a room made warm so he could sleep comfortably and wondered how Kaia expected him to believe she just shrugged off the deaths of her pets.

“I was thirteen when my pet hamster died,” he found himself telling her. “I cried for a week at night, when no one else could see me.” It had happened four days after he killed in desperate defense of himself and his best friend, four days after his mind was violated so badly that he’d still been suffering ice-pick migraines, blood vessels bursting in his eyes from the pressure.

Kaia’s expression stilled. “That’s not a very macho admission.”

“You’ve seen me flat on my back in bed, a million wires coming out of my body,” Bowen said with a shrug, though he could feel a dark flush creeping onto his cheekbones. “I figure that ship has already sailed far, far away.” Unfortunately.

“What was your hamster’s name?”

“Toric the Destroyer.”

A twitch of Kaia’s lips. “Did you ever get another hamster?”

Bo deliberately forked up a bite of food, took his time chewing then swallowing. “No. Guess I grew out of it.” He’d buried Toric in his parents’ back garden and planted a tree over his small body.

That tree now provided a home for birds, and shade on a sunny day. And it reminded Bo of the boy he’d once been, a boy who’d held long conversations with his pet about the best way to lay siege to the ogre’s castle in his favorite game. That boy seemed a mirage of the past now. A ghost who had never really existed.

“No, you didn’t.” Kaia looked at him with a disturbing intensity. “You were too sad to get another pet.”

How could he explain to her without tearing open scars he’d spent a lifetime ignoring? “Some things were for the boy I was,” he said at last. “The man has other priorities.”

A sudden blink . . . and a stiffening of her features. “Why are you pursuing a friendship between humans and water changelings? It’s not like we often cross paths.”

“Water changelings do live on land,” Bo pointed out. “Generally near lakes and rivers and the ocean, but they have definite land-based residences. Including many in my home base of Venice.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, our paths don’t often intersect,” he admitted. “Water changelings tend to stick pretty close to their own.” It was rare for them to even make contact with other changeling groups, far less humans. “How’s the alliance with the leopards and wolves working out?”

“The wolves upgraded all the lighting in the station.” Kaia pointed up. “We didn’t have the simulated sunlight and moonlight till then.” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and released it with pleasure. “That’s the one thing I used to miss about the surface—the light.”

Bo had gone motionless the instant she raised her face, the softness of her catching him in its steely grasp. So much pleasure in such a simple act, her entire body worshipping the glow of sunlight. “What did you think of them?” he asked when she returned to her recipe.

“Engineers are engineers everywhere, but I’ve never seen such powerful dominants go so green.” Laughter in the backs of her eyes. “Station commander says they set a speed record with the installation, they were so antsy to leave.”

“Yeah.” Bo found wonder in being down in the deep, and he had no claustrophobic tendencies—but he was also very conscious that it’d be nearly impossible for him to leave without BlackSea cooperation.

He had only a single ace to play: Kaleb Krychek.

Of course, calling the cardinal telekinetic for an assist would put the Alliance in debt to the Ruling Coalition of the Psy—which made his ace useless. “Humans and water changelings have a lot in common.”

Kaia’s scowl was a storm cloud. “Oh?” She put a jar of walnuts on the counter.

“What are those for?”

“Walnut coconut snowballs. The orcas like them and they haven’t broken anything this week.”

Orcas, sharks, women with tentacles who purred suggestive promises at him across the room, it all sounded like a drug-fueled dream. “They the bull-in-a-china-shop of the sea?”

“Walruses hold that title. Mostly because they’re too bad-tempered to watch where they’re going.”

Bowen couldn’t help but think of the mustachioed male who’d seemed ready to pound him into paste in the atrium. If anyone should be a walrus, it was him—especially with that mustache. “Do you want me to chop up the walnuts for you?”

Kaia passed him the jar along with a knife and a wooden cutting board—and when their fingers brushed, she drew back with jagged speed. “Unless you can swim underwater for hours, I doubt we have anything in common.”

Heart thundering, Bo began to twist open the jar. “We’re spread out across the world.” It was hard to focus when his fingers burned with an echo of sensation, but he had to make her listen; only then might he get an answer on the cause of her anger and that of the man in the atrium. “It makes us less able to defend ourselves.”

Jar open, he picked out a nut and crunched it between his teeth. “The DarkRiver leopards, for example, have well-defined and comparatively compact territorial borders they defend with blood and fury. Same with the StoneWater bears—huge territory but defined down to the wire. Cross their boundaries at your own risk.”

Kaia crouched down to look for something in a lower cupboard. “What do you know about the bears?”

“One of my cousins just mated into StoneWater.”

Kaia popped up from her crouch so fast she almost hit her head on the edge of the counter. “You’re making that up.”

Bo didn’t take her disbelief personally. “I nearly fell down when Phoenix told me. He’s so shy he couldn’t even approach a gazelle changeling.”

“A shy human with a StoneWater bear.” Kaia sounded like she was being strangled. “Is he still alive?”

“Not only alive but deliriously happy.” In love in a puppyish way Bo simply couldn’t imagine. To trust that deeply, so without fences or walls, to let yourself fall . . . he wasn’t capable of it.

He’d seen masks on too many faces, had learned too well never to trust based on instinct alone. It had begun at thirteen, in an act of boyish trust that had almost cost his best friend his life and turned Bo into a killer.