Visions of Heat

Soft woman scent.



His beast went into a hunting crouch. Because unlike the guards who had blanketed the area around her home in their distinctive scent, Faith didn't smell Psy. Just like Sascha. Most of the psychic race gave off a metallic stink that repelled changelings, but nothing about Faith repelled him, though neither man nor cat liked her coldness. The lack of the distinctive smell could be coincidence. On the other hand, it could be an indicator of those Psy who hadn't given in completely to the inhumanity that was Silence.



Curious, he found himself leaning over to take another sniff. She went even more stiff and Sascha looked around to glare at him. He smiled. Shaking her head, she turned back. Sascha was learning that sometimes, cats would do what they'd do.



"Why do you think your gift is mutating?" he asked Faith, shifting to sit closer than he knew she would've liked.



"I forecast for business. That's what I'm trained for and what my ability has always manifested itself as."



"Always?"



She turned her head, though she couldn't see him. "Why do you sound unconvinced?"



"The Psy have a way of training away powers they don't like." The cat in him was fascinated by the beauty of her skin. It was so rich and luscious he almost thought it might taste of cream.



"You can't train away foresight."



"No, but maybe you can channel it." This came from Sascha. "Tell a child something often enough and she starts to believe it."



Lucas stroked his fingers over his mate's cheek and Vaughn wanted to do the same with Faith. Delicate, icy, she was hardly the type of woman who usually attracted him, but there was something fascinating about her, something compelling.



"How old were you when they started training you?" he asked his Psy. He'd found her first. Therefore, she was his. It was the cat talking and Vaughn didn't feel like arguing.



"I was placed in the care of the PsyClan at three years of age."



"What does that mean?"



"Most children are raised by a parent or parents. I was raised by the PsyClan's nurses and medics. It was for my own good - F-Psy need isolation or they go clinically insane."



His beast clawed at the walls of his mind. "Three years old and you were isolated?" This time he did reach out and slide strands of her hair through his fingers. She didn't react in any obvious way, but he could feel her tension. Good. He wanted her disturbed - that damn shell she had around herself irritated the hell out of him.



"Yes." She moved, causing her hair to slip out of his fingers. "I had the necessary teachers and trainers, but they all came to me. I rarely left the compound as a child."



"I didn't know they did that," Sascha whispered from the front. "How did you survive?"



"It was for my own good." There was something almost childlike in the staccato rhythm of Faith's voice, as if she was repeating something that had been pounded into her.



It made Vaughn want to hold her.



His thoughts slammed to a halt at the alien urge. Drawing back to his side of the car, he armed every one of his protections and reminded himself that, blindfolded or not, Faith was a cardinal. And cardinals didn't need to raise a hand to incapacitate their prey.



They could manipulate or kill with a single thought.



Chapter 5



Faith felt Vaughn move away and breathed a soft sigh of what some might have called relief. He was too big, too intimidating, though she'd never admit that out loud. Without having seen him, she already knew what he was built like, all lean muscle and fury. Part of her, the same part that had walked into a dark forest without stopping and then stepped out in front of a huge hunting cat, was fascinated by him.



Of course the fascination was purely intellectual, but that made it no less unwelcome. Apparently there was a streak of idiocy in her mental makeup that had survived conditioning, a streak that delighted in sticking its hand into the fire and waiting to see how badly it burned.



Added to the stress of their questions about her childhood, it was too much. She could feel herself reaching her mental limits. She'd rarely interacted this much with anyone and never with people who hid nothing of what they felt, who touched and spoke with the most unacceptable degree of emotion.



What if her shields cracked? Going into a seizure could cause major damage to her brain and leave her exposed in the most intimate sense. In the recording she'd seen, the F-Psy in question had almost bitten off her tongue. She'd also lost control of her mental processes for the duration of the seizure - even her shields against the vast public spaces of the PsyNet had come down. Faith couldn't imagine anything worse. Every day of her life, the visions forced their way into her mind. She needed some sense of control, some sense of safety, some sense of being alone within the walls of her psyche, if nowhere else.



"Why did your parents let them take you away?" Sascha's voice cut through the silence.



Faith didn't want to talk about her past anymore. But that was irrational and she wasn't an irrational individual. "Night-Star has a long history of producing F-Psy. They knew I wouldn't survive in a normal environment."



"Or maybe that's what it was useful for them to tell you." Vaughn's voice was a rough scrape over her skin. Impossible. Such an effect had no basis in the physiological responses of humanoid species.



"My family had, and still has, nothing to gain by lying to me."



"Tell me, Faith, how much do you earn for the PsyClan?" Sascha's voice was somehow different from every other Psy voice Faith had ever heard. It seemed to effect calm without the application of any discernible psychic pressure.



"I don't keep records." But she knew. "My family ensures I have everything I need."



"I have some idea," Sascha said. "You're worth millions. And you've been worth millions since the first day they started training you to give them what they needed -  forecasts in the lucrative field of commerce."



"The visions can't be halted."



"No. But like Vaughn said, maybe they can be channeled." Faith didn't answer and nobody said another word, but she heard their silence. No matter how hard she tried not to hear anything.



Vaughn felt irritable, as if his fur were being rubbed the wrong way. He glanced at the blindfolded woman less than an arm's length away and knew she was to blame. But having checked his mind for possible traps - a trick Sascha had taught all the sentinels - he was sure that Faith wasn't using any Psy powers on him.



The cat figured that made it okay to indulge.



He raised his hand to finger a strand of her hair where it lay against the back of the seat. Once again, he felt her go in-finitesimally quiet. He frowned. Psy weren't known for being that sensitive to physical stimuli, which only made Faith more interesting.



The car slowed.



Moving with catlike speed, he was out almost before it stopped moving. "We're here." Though he opened her door, he let her exit on her own.



Her movements were hesitant, but she was soon standing beside the door, back held in the poker-stiff posture patented by her race.



"Don't," he ordered when she began to raise her hands. Reaching around, he undid the scarf himself. The cat took the chance to roll in the rich sweetness of her scent, but the man remained on guard.



She blinked against the light coming off the porch -  Lucas had turned on the single bulb - and he saw her eyes for the first time with the sight of a man and not that of the beast. They were just as unearthly, just as beautiful. Two pieces of captured night sky.



Faith looked up. And up. As she'd guessed from the feel of him at her back, the jaguar was tall in human form. His hair was a thick amber-gold, long enough to brush his shoulders, and his eyes ... they were an odd almost-gold, the eyes of a cat made human. There was nothing soft about him, nothing tame. Yet she, a woman who'd never before understood the concept, found him beautiful. It was an inexplicable reaction, one her brain couldn't accept, going as it did against every rule of Silence.



Her breath caught in her throat and she started to breathe faster than was optimal. She knew she was having a stress reaction, but she couldn't stop it. Her heart rate started to speed up a second later. Remembering a simple anchoring technique, she clenched her hand on top of the open car door and squeezed. But the physical action had no effect.



Suddenly, there were big hands on her face forcing her to look up and meet those odd eyes. "Stop it."



She lifted her own hands and tried to pull his off. Didn't he know that he was making it worse? The pressure had increased a thousand times at the skin-to-skin contact. Heat, sensation, power, everything that was him seeped into her and threatened to short-circuit her already overstretched mind.



"Vaughn, let her go." Sascha's command was a gift. "She can't handle that much sensation."



"Yes, she can." Those cat eyes stared down into hers.



She wanted to fight him, but had no idea how to use her abilities in a nonfatal attack. Starting to feel dizzy, she swayed. Her eyes locked with his. "I'm going to lose consciousness." Starkly aware of the possible danger to her PsyNet shields, she was numb to the physical agony of nerves going haywire.



"No, you're not. If you do, you'll be helpless." Vaughn didn't loosen his hold. "Do you want to be at my mercy?"



She tried to tell him it wasn't a choice she could make.



Her body was shutting down. And then the last neuron flickered and went out.



Swearing, Vaughn caught Faith's body before she fell and hurt herself.



"Damn it! Why didn't you let her go when I said?" Sascha ran to cradle the face of the woman in his arms.



"She's too scared of everything." His beast was driven by instinct and it said that what he was doing was right. "We can't afford to baby her."



Sascha looked like she wanted to argue, but then Lucas stepped up beside her. "He's right. Faith has to learn to deal - if she can't handle touch or normal human interaction, how the hell's she going to learn to handle those visions she says she's been having?"