Chapter 5

“ALICE?” THE HUMAN scientist had been put into cryonic suspension by unnamed parties over a hundred years ago, and now lay in a coma in SnowDancer’s infirmary. Inside her mind were secrets that might further help Sienna understand her abilities, but whether that mind would ever wake, ever function as it should, was an unanswered question.

Lara fisted her hand on his chest, shuddered. “I can’t reach her, no matter what I try.” Not only frustration, but pain. “She doesn’t deserve to die without ever living. I found out today that she was my age when they took her—she never had a chance to complete her work, fall in love, have children. The bastards stole that from her.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I want to give her life back to her, but I can’t!”

He gathered her closer to his warmth. “You know what was done to Alice was a high-risk, experimental process—the fact you’ve managed to keep her alive is an indication of your skill.”

“Logic won’t help, not when my wolf just wants to heal her.”

Helpless, he realized, that’s how she felt. And for a woman as strong and as dedicated to healing as Lara, that would be a terrible blow. Alice was likely never far from her thoughts, and source of intense stress though it was for her, that was nothing he could or would change about Lara—because her ability to care was at the very core of who she was as a person.

“Tell me,” he said, and then he simply held her and listened.

Much later, after they’d made their way back to the den and to bed, she nuzzled a kiss into his throat. “Thank you for listening.” Another soft kiss, her fingers petting his chest, her legs intertwined with his. “I’m here anytime you need the same.”

He’d never shared his day-to-day worries with anyone—he was the head of the family, used to being looked to for advice, and it wasn’t a role he resented. No, it fit him. But that wasn’t the role he occupied in Lara’s life, wasn’t the role he wanted to occupy.

“I’m meeting with Sienna tomorrow,” he said, and it felt as if he’d taken an irrevocable step on this new road he walked with a woman who had never accepted that he was forever broken. She’d taken him scars and all, and in so doing, taught him he could be far more than he’d ever believed. “I worry about her.”

•   •   •

HIS conversation with Lara was still vivid in his mind early afternoon the next day, when he took a seat across from Sienna in a small, isolated clearing. The two of them had discovered this spot—complete with the stumps they used as seats—six months after they first joined SnowDancer. Over the years, it had become an unofficial meeting place for family discussions.

A polite mental knock broke into his thoughts.

Answering it, he heard Judd’s voice in his mind. Running late. Be there in fifteen.

“I’m surprised Hawke isn’t with you,” he said after answering his brother. “Especially considering the subject matter.” So soon after Sienna’s brush with death, the wolf alpha was violently protective of her.

Eyes pensive, Sienna fixed the tie at the end of her braid. “He can’t disappear from the den right now, with how unsettled everyone’s still feeling.”

Hawke’s presence, Walker realized, was helping to soothe their packmates on the most primal level. “You two won’t have had much time alone together.” It concerned him—the alpha and Sienna both needed an opportunity to decompress, take a breath.

Sienna’s gaze met his, and he knew she recognized his worry, even before she said, “It’s okay. Hawke is certain it’ll only be another week or so before things return to normal.”

Conscious of Hawke’s instinctive ability to read the pulse of the pack, he nodded. “How are you?”

“Stable.” Teeth biting down on her lower lip. “As far as I can tell.”

Walker knew why she couldn’t give him an absolute answer. Sienna had lived her whole life fearing the rage of power that lived inside her—the fact it was no longer wholly uncontrollable would take time to sink in. Looking into the mental network that connected them, he focused on Sienna’s mind. It glowed crimson gold with a beautiful, deadly power that then shot down the familial bond to Walker, feeding into the twisting vortex at the center of his own mind.

Until the battle, none of them had understood the reason for the formation of the vortex. Now it was clear it acted as a filter for Sienna’s power, stripping her energy of its destructive potential. “There are no signs of a hazardous buildup.” Of the deadly synergy that could turn her into a bomb of catastrophic potential.

“I initiated a massive discharge of power not long ago,” Sienna said in so quiet a tone that he had to concentrate to hear her, her eyes midnight with tautly held emotion. “According to my estimates, we can’t do a proper analysis until at least the six-week mark post-release.”

“Agreed.”

“And I’ll have to continue to monitor the cold fire long-term.”

“Of course.” He captured her startled gaze when she jerked up her head, this girl who was as much daughter to him as Marlee. “Any Psy with a high-Gradient ability has to do the same—you know Judd is always aware of the exact level of his telekinetic strength.” The act was no longer a conscious one for his brother, but a near-autonomic response. “It negates the risk that he’ll cause an inadvertent injury.

“A Ps-Psy,” he continued, seeing he had her attention, “has to learn to block his psychometry on a day-to-day basis to ensure he doesn’t drown under the influx of other people’s memories and emotions.” Ps-Psy had diverse specialties within their designation, but the foundation of their power was the ability to pick up “memory echoes” left on physical objects, from a doorknob to a button.

He switched from verbal to mental speech for his next example. A telepath maintains a shield against extraneous “noise” every instant of his or her existence—you learned to do it as a child.

Sienna blew out a breath, her eyes no longer solid black. “That makes it sound so…normal.” When her X ability had never been in any way normal. “I’ll have to maintain a conscious watch until my mind learns to do so automatically.”

“It already is automatic.” The cold fire had branded her from the day the X marker first went active, becoming the central fact of her existence. “What you need to learn is how to push that awareness into the background, so it doesn’t dominate your thoughts except when necessary.” She deserved a life free of fear, and he would do everything in his power to make certain she reached for it.

Never again did he want to see the girl he’d seen after her mother, Kristine’s death. Sienna had been taken for “training” by Councilor Ming LeBon at age five and allowed no familial contact except for limited time with her mother. After his sister’s suicide, the only way Walker had been able to get in to see Sienna had been by using the most cold-blooded and mercenary of rationales—that the young girl was genetically a Lauren and her abilities belonged to the family unit. As the executor of Kristine’s estate, which included her genetic legacy, Walker had rights of access.

For Ming to deny his claim would’ve breached laws that lay at the bedrock of Psy society. And at that point, the Councilor had still worn his mask of civility; Walker had been granted permission to meet with Sienna, albeit under tightly controlled circumstances, but the girl who attended their first meeting was a twisted shadow of the vibrant, mischievous infant he remembered.

Her gaze had been cold, flat, her voice toneless…without hope.

If it hadn’t been for Judd’s ability to teleport in for far more clandestine visits, paired with Walker’s skill at creating telepathic vaults that allowed Sienna’s mind privacy from Ming’s constant surveillance—a skill Judd had learned, then passed on to Sienna—they might never have reached beyond the dull shell she showed the world.

“The cold fire,” he said now, wrenching his mind back from the past and the icy rage it continued to incite in him, “is a part of you but no longer the most important facet of your existence.”

“No,” she whispered, a dawning wonder in her expression, “it isn’t, is it?” Her mouth curved, a burst of delighted laughter escaping her throat…and his mind filled once more with images of the infant she’d been, a sparkle to her eye that had captured him from the instant he first met her, mere days after her birth.

“If anything happens to me”—Kristine’s fingers so gentle as she tucked the blanket around the tiny body in Walker’s arms, a silent indication of her imperfect Silence—“you will watch over her?”

“To my last breath.”

When Sienna, her smile lingering in her gaze, stood and took a step toward him, he rose, opened his arms, and held her close as he once had the babe his sister had borne. You’ll fly, Sienna, he said, his heart aching that Kristine wasn’t here to see the incredible woman her daughter was becoming. Higher and stronger than those who would’ve caged you could ever imagine.

•   •   •

LARA’s wolf was padding happily around her skin after a quiet pulse along the mating bond that was Walker’s touch, when her eye fell on the glass spiral of blue and green he’d repaired for her after it shattered.

“It’s fixed. As long as you don’t mind more than a few scars.”

Her chest grew tight as it always did at the memory. That was the thing with Walker—he didn’t say a lot, didn’t make big gestures, but when he did speak…“I am so in love with you,” she whispered, thinking of the way he’d held her, listened to her, spoken to her in the intimate dark of their bed.

Her quiet, strong, intensely private mate was coming to her, one step at a time.

If only patience would reap the same rewards with Alice. The human scientist lay unresponsive under Lara’s hands as she checked the woman’s vitals, her flesh pallid, her bones far too close to her skin. Lara continued to seek answers for the other woman, but having been able to unload her frustration had helped put her back on an even keel, and she was able to nudge Alice from her consciousness once she left the patient room.

She and her nurse, Lucy, had decided to use the respite provided by the current healthy state of the pack to tackle a number of practical tasks, with Lucy volunteering to set the storeroom to rights. The chaos of battle had left little time for niceties like neatness and logging supplies, and the pre-battle inventory was woefully out of date.

Lara, by contrast, was in the process of updating patient records. The fact was, she didn’t have to record anything. She had the encyclopedic memory of most healers, could recite every injury or illness that had ever befallen one of her patients. But, she had to think of the future, of the person who would take her place were she incapacitated or otherwise out of the picture.

Two hours into it, eyes dry and fighting a jaw-cracking yawn, she looked up to find Riordan hovering in the doorway of her office. The young male was cradling his arm in a very familiar way. Boredom vanished under concern. “Broken?” she asked, already around the desk.

Deep red under his skin. “Not really.”

“Not really?” Having reached him, she could see significant swelling and bruising. “So your arm is just kind of broken?”

He ducked his head.

Surprised—Riordan had the usual youthful cockiness—she shepherded him into the infirmary proper and had him take a seat on a treatment bed. “You want to tell me about it?” she asked, ignoring the technical equipment to run her hands over his injury. As a novice soldier, Riordan needed to be fully functional as soon as possible.

“No.”

Her abilities told her it was a bad break. Frowning at the jagged edges she could sense, she bade him to lie down flat on his back. He resisted until she raised an eyebrow in a silent threat. They both knew she outranked him.

“I’m going to have to straighten this,” Lara said once he was in the position she’d requested, then punched in a strong painkiller through his skin before he could argue against it. The dominants—young or old—were always the worst. The last time Indigo had been injured, Lara had had to threaten to bring the lieutenant’s mother into it before the long-legged woman would cooperate.

Riordan winced at even the slight pressure of the dermal injection, which told her exactly how badly he was hurting. Conscious of his pride, she used her abilities to further dampen the lingering pain. Only when the tension leached out of his body did she run her hands over the arm again, confirming the position and seriousness of the break.

“Is it like seeing a scan inside your mind?” Riordan asked, sounding more like his normal self.

“Hmm?” This was an unusual injury—almost as if the bone had been crushed. Had Riordan not been changeling, with their race’s greater bone density, she’d likely have been dealing with a mass of splinters instead of pieces of solid bone.

“I always wondered, when you do your healer thing, what do you see?”

“It’s not like a scan,” she murmured, fixing the damage points in her mind, “not that visual.” M-Psy, by contrast, did see things in that fashion—Lara knew because she’d had the chance to have long discussions with a number of them in med school.

It was largely as a result of those interactions that she’d had a more nuanced view of the Psy even before the Lauren family defected to SnowDancer. The Psy students she’d known might have used strictly technical language rather than emotive terms, but they’d all had a dedication to helping the sick and the hurt, a dedication that meant the M designation was the most well-known and accepted of all designations among non-Psy.

“It’s more a ‘sense,’ I suppose,” she continued. “Hard to describe, but it’s almost as if I become part of your body for an instant, able to pinpoint every fragment of hurt.”

Riordan looked down as she straightened his arm. “Whoa, that is so weird,” he said, happily buzzed from the meds, “how it doesn’t hurt, even though I know that’s my arm.”

She kept a constant eye on his veins and fine blood vessels as she performed the maneuver, not wanting to nick or otherwise cause further damage. “This is a very severe break, Rory.”

He made a face. “Shh.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “My friends have forgotten that baby name. Mostly.”

Lips twitching, she said, “I won’t remind them if you tell me how on Earth you managed this.” Riordan wasn’t one of the more accident-prone people in the den.

Color kissed his cheekbones, his gaze darting to the doorway. Lara went over and shut it before returning to work on him. As she did so, she counteracted the more heady effects of the medication, so he could think clearly but without pain.

It took him almost five minutes to speak.

“It was a dumb mistake,” he muttered. “Nothing spectacular. I was in the smaller gym, doing some weights. Strength training.”

She kept her tone easy, nonjudgmental. “Okay.” Larger bone pieces in alignment, she worked at repairing the worst of the damage, which included removing any bone chips so that the shards wouldn’t turn into shrapnel in his bloodstream. Her ability allowed her to coax those chips to the surface, but she had to use fine surgical tweezers to pluck them out.

Riordan groaned.

“Don’t look.”

“I can’t help it.” It sounded like he was gritting his teeth. “So will I be missing pieces of bone now?”

“No, I’ll stimulate your body into fixing itself.” Not quite correct, as she was the primary source of energy, but close enough. “It’s why you’ll be hungry after. Make sure you eat a high-calorie meal.”

“Okay.”

Satisfied every tiny, dangerous fragment was out, she moved on to the task of healing the most severe breaks. “You were telling me how you did this.”

Another heavy silence before he finally said, “I decided to up the weights a level, except I must’ve pressed the wrong button and suddenly the thing weighed a ton. It tilted sideways at a really bad angle—I had the choice of letting it crush my chest or my arm.”

Lara frowned as she realized he was talking about the bench press. “Why were you working out alone?” Spotters were mandatory on the bench press, and Riordan had more sense than to flout that rule.

“I needed to think.” Tight words.