Visions of Heat

CHAPTER 9

It was as if the darkness knew when she was alone and at her most helpless. Like some vicious beast waiting in the shadows for its prey to drop its guard, it crept in through the vision channels and seized control of her senses. And then it—he—forced her to watch what would come to pass if he wasn't stopped.

Blood, so much blood on his hands, in his hair, on his skin. The pale fragility of his hand was almost invisible under the rich, dark coating—wait. He was older than this, decades more experienced than the slender boy drenched in blood. But it was the same darkness, the same evil. She understood what she was seeing, though this had rarely ever happened to her.

An unexpected expression of the ability of foresight was backsight, the ability to see the past. F-Psy who primarily saw the past were very, very rare. Faith could think of none in the last fifty years. When they did appear, they tended to head into Enforcement. But most active F-Psy usually had one or two flashes of backsight during the year. In her case, she'd always caught innocuous images connected with the future she was trying to glimpse.

Never had she been so covered in blood that she was sticky with it, the iron-rich metallic scent drawn in with every breath. Her eyelashes were crusted with the dried fluid and the blood under her fingernails was so dark it was almost black. The imprint of her footsteps had started to set as the blood on the floor congealed. The knife she'd used was in one hand. When she raised it, the light from a torch glinted, off it.

A torch?

Turning, she found herself surrounded by a dozen black-suited men. The vision flash-fractured and the next time she opened her eyes, she was in the confines of a white-on-white room. Bloodlust roared in her veins and she realized she was older, years older. And hungry. So hungry. For human prey.

Another violent jerk along the timeline. She was with the dark-suited men once again. They set her free at the start of a maze and she started hunting. The fear she sensed in her prey drew her like a drug. She ran on strong feet, knowing they'd have chosen a suitable sacrifice. They always did.

Her hand clenched on the knife. She spied the vulnerable nape of the girl who'd stumbled onto the hard ground. A smile cracked the anticipation on her face. This would be so much fun.

No!

Faith ripped herself from the vision so violently that she fell to the floor. Curling up into a fetal position, she tried to stifle her whimpers, tried to wipe the taint of blood from her brain. For those long moments she'd become the killer, become the very evil that had taken her sister's life. That was what had brought her back to herself—the knowledge that if she let it continue, she might just feel her own hands slide around her sister's throat.

The bedside comm console chimed. They'd heard her fall of course. The outside sensors were very sensitive and she'd made a great deal of noise. Forcing herself to get up, she answered without visual. "I tripped on something."

"Are you injured?"

"No. I'm fine. Please don't disturb me till morning." She cut off the communication with that bare statement, aware her vocal mask was about to crack. Her voice wanted to tremble, wanted to cry.

Step two in the inevitable road to F-Psy insanity.

She had to get out of this claustrophobic compound. But she couldn't leave. Not now. Everybody was too aware of her wakefulness—they might even try to contact her again despite her orders. The urge to flee was so strong, it felt as if her skin had been drawn taut over flesh on the verge of explosion.

She couldn't satisfy the urge, couldn't run free, couldn't walk out to safety and toward the night-glow eyes of a predator so lethal that she shouldn't have thought of him in the same breath as the word safety. He was out of her reach anyway—she was a prisoner in this place everyone called her home. Would it one day become her tomb?

Shivering at the morbid thought, she crawled back into bed and lay there, staring up at the ceiling, memories of blood and horror her only companions. And though she refused to admit she felt anything, loneliness had a claw grip around her heart.

It hurt.

Faith woke the second someone whispered a breath against her neck. Her heart kicked into high gear. She knew that masculine scent, but its presence here was impossible. Thinking it an illusion of her stressed mind, she opened her eyes and found herself looking into the face of a human jaguar. He was lying alongside her, head propped up one hand.

"What are you doing in my bed?" she asked, too surprised to suppress the question.

"I just wanted to know if I could do it." He'd left his hair undone and it flowed over his shoulders in an amber-gold wave that shone, though the only light came from a small night-lamp.

That tiny lamp usually helped her delineate the line between waking and dreaming, but right now she wasn't certain where she stood. Raising a hand, she touched his hair. Warm strands slid through her fingers. The unexpected shock of sensation had her snatching back her hand. "You're real."

The smallest curving of his lips. "Are you sure?" He brushed a kiss over her mouth.

It was the most fleeting of touches but she felt burned. "You're definitely real." An accusation.

He chuckled, completely unrepentant.

"Don't make any loud sounds," she cautioned. "This room and my bathroom are private but everything else is monitored. Did you—?"

"They don't know I'm here." He looked up at the roof, at the skylight no one should've been able to open. "Psy don't monitor danger from above."

She couldn't figure out how he'd done it, but that didn't surprise her—he was a cat, after all. "Did Sascha send you?"

"Sascha thinks I'll eat you up if given the chance."

"Will you?" She wasn't sure about Vaughn, about the jaguar that prowled in the darkness behind the beauty of his eyes.

A finger trailed down her face and she forced herself not to move. She was strong and she would get past this block. Her fingers tingled with the sensory memory of Vaughn's hair and she wondered what his skin would feel like.

"Come closer and find out." His voice had gone rough, but there was nothing threatening about it. It was almost...

She searched the dictionary in her mind and found the answer. "You're trying to coax me." No one had ever before done such a thing. They'd demanded, ordered, asked in pandering terms, but never had anyone coaxed.

He was nearer to her, though she hadn't noticed him move. But he remained atop the sheets while she lay below. Why then could she feel the heat of his body, almost as if he burned hotter than her?

"Maybe."

It took her a second to remember her question. "Why?" Her hands were on top of the sheets, a hairsbreadth from the bare skin of his chest. Her eyes widened. "Are you naked?"

"Unless you have some clothing to give me, yeah." He sounded entirely too comfortable with that fact.

"You can't enter a woman's bedroom naked." That wasn't acceptable behavior in any race.

"I was clothed when I entered ... in my fur." He was all golden eyes and gleaming skin above her, a male so beautiful that she wondered at his existence in the same world as her. "I can shift back if you'd like."

It was a dare. "Fine." She wasn't going to let him think he could get away with anything he wanted.

"Are you sure you want a jaguar in your room?"

"I think I already have one." But something in her wanted to see the change, the same something that knew Vaughn was beautiful, though she shouldn't have had the capacity to recognize male beauty.

"Don't move, Red."

The world turned into a rainbow-bright shimmer around her. She froze at the utterly unexpected sight. She'd thought the change would be painful for him, hadn't really expected him to do it. But nothing about this spoke of pain, only of awe.

A heartbeat later, the shimmer was gone and she found herself lying next to a jaguar who had very sharp teeth and eyes exactly like those of the man who'd occupied the space moments ago. She swallowed. She was Psy—she felt no fear. But it was practical to be on guard with something this lethal.

The jaguar opened its mouth and growled almost below the range of her hearing.

"Was that a question?" she ventured. "Because I don't speak jaguar." Where had that come from? It was a completely illogical statement—of course she didn't speak jaguar.

The jaguar lowered its head and nuzzled at her throat. Her heart threatened to rip through her skin and to the outside. "I'm stronger than this," she whispered, and forced herself to lift one hand around and over the jaguar's head until her fingers closed on the ruff of his neck. She tugged. He refused to move. She tugged again, harder. A growl that vibrated in her bones.

"Stop it, Vaughn."

Without warning, the fur disappeared from under her hands, the incredible softness shimmering into rainbow-bright sparks that ended with a naked male above her. Her hand was now clenched in amber-gold strands of hair. "So you'll touch the cat, but not the man?"

"I was trying to get you to move." She didn't release his hair, found she couldn't. His scent was everywhere in the air, his skin golden and close enough to touch, his smile pure cat.

"Where would you like me to move, little darling?"

She knew he'd added the "little" on purpose. "Away from me."

"Are you sure?" His smile turned wicked. "If I move, you might see more than you bargained for."

"I know this kind of behavior isn't acceptable among leopards." Technically speaking, she knew no such thing. It merely seemed the sort of thing that ought to be true. "How would you like it if an unknown male came into your sister's bedroom in this manner?"

All amusement was suddenly wiped off his face. He went still, so completely still that it was as if he were made of stone. The part of her that had been deriving considerable intellectual stimulation from pitching her wit against his went silent, aware she'd awakened something very dangerous.

"Let go of my hair, Faith. And close your eyes. By the time you open them, I'll be gone."

She'd spent the past minutes trying to convince him to leave and now that he'd agreed, she found she didn't want him to go. For the first time, she was with someone who'd come to see her. Just her. Not Faith NightStar the F-Psy, but Faith, the individual apart from her gift.

"I am sorry," she said, hesitant. She knew nothing about changeling interaction, but she understood she'd caused him hurt. It had been part of her training to learn to recognize emotion in order to banish it. That was why she knew. It had nothing to do with the odd sensation in the vicinity of her heart. "If I offended you, I am sorry. I meant to ... play."

Vaughn was caught completely off guard by that last word. His muscles relaxed without his conscious control. "Changed your mind, Red?"

"I'm not sure." She released her hold on his hair, but then began to stroke through it. "You're nothing I've ever experienced. The rules don't cover situations such as this."

"Rules?"

"The rules of Silence." Her fingers brushed the skin of his shoulders. She withdrew as if she'd been scalded, her hand dropping to lie against the pillow. "Why did my question offend you?"

Vaughn didn't talk about his past with anyone, but he found himself answering Faith—it was almost a compulsion, one neither man nor beast could fight. "My sister died when I was ten years old."

Skye had been so fragile, so weak at seven years of age that she hadn't been able to survive even in jaguar form.

He'd brought her food, given her everything he had, but Skye had given up fighting the instant she'd realized that their parents weren't going to come back for them. It was as if her soul had flown away and nothing he'd done had tempted her to return. She'd stopped eating, stopped drinking, and soon, she'd stopped breathing.

Vaughn had almost died then, too, because Skye had lived in his heart like no one else. She'd followed him around since before she could walk, a constant buzz of activity and energy. He hated his parents with a vengeance, but it wasn't because they'd abandoned him. No, it was because they'd broken Skye's heart.

"I can't understand what she meant to you," Faith said, her voice holding a quiet gentleness he'd never have expected from one of the Psy, "but I can guess. You mourn for her."

"Do you mourn for Marine?"

The quicksilver lights in her eyes dimmed until they were dull echoes against the darkness. "Psy don't mourn. To mourn requires feeling."

"And you don't have any."

"No."

"Are you sure?" Dropping his head, he bit her earlobe with sharp teeth and caught her resulting cry with the palm of his hand.

"What are you doing?" she whispered, pushing away his hand.

"Your body feels, Faith. Your body hungers." He spoke against her ear. "The body and the mind can't be so far apart. Can they?"

She didn't answer. He heard the rapid beat of her heart and knew he'd pushed her too far. But it wasn't far enough. She had to go further, had to understand more. It was imperative. The jaguar knew why, but the man wasn't ready to listen.

"And the answer to your question is that if I'd found a strange man naked in my sister's bed, I'd have ripped him to shreds." He ran his lips down her neck and tasted the fury of her pulse before lifting his head to look down into her face. "I'll do the same to any other man I find in your bed."

Faith blinked and by the time her lashes lifted up, Vaughn was a shadow sliding out of the skylight. But nothing could erase the scent of him on her sheets, on her skin. The feel of his lips on the suddenly sensitive skin of her neck had her clenching her hands in an effort to find control where there seemed to be none. How could he do this to her? How?

Her strength lay in Silence, in holding her emotions in a stranglehold. If she let go, what other sensations might her jaguar introduce her to? Her brain revolted, insisting on showing her images of her aunt's lipless face and rabid eyes. It was the bluntest of reminders—she had to regain control of her malfunctioning psyche or the visions would take her over as they were even now threatening to do. The logical course would be to go to the M-Psy, admit her conditioning was breaking down, and ask for retraining.

But would they give her what she wanted, or would they use it as an excuse to put her someplace "safe," a location from which she could make predictions without causing them any of the inconvenience she now did by asking for occasional moments of privacy?

It didn't matter what the M-Psy would do, because she wasn't going to go to them. She was going to make a choice where there was no choice; she was going to act in a way that might leave her wide open to the very madness she wanted to escape. That strange, unknown awakening part of her didn't want to stop being fascinated by the jaguar who touched her as if she belonged to him, as if she'd already said yes to his every demand.

Careful, Faith. It was a soundless whisper. He won't stop when you tell him to. Because he wasn't Psy, wasn't someone who'd follow her every command, wasn't a man who'd follow any commands he didn't want to. And still she wasn't going to keep her distance.

What better proof was there of her accelerating decline?

Vaughn entered his lair deep in the forests to the east of Lucas's aerie and padded up the natural stone steps that led, eventually, to the true entrance. His home was accessed through a warrenlike cave system that acted as his defensive perimeter. His living space was in the central core, brightly lit during the daytime by a clever use of several natural vents and low-tech mirrors.

From above, his lair looked to be nothing but a hill in danger of being taken over by the forest. To date, no one had stumbled upon it either by accident or design. His closest friends alone knew where he lived and how to negotiate the traps in the outer caves. Those who didn't know... well, jaguars weren't famous for their kindness.

Reaching the core, he padded through the living room to his bedroom, where he shifted back to human form. Naked, he stretched his arms above his head before walking into the shower, which seemed to be a waterfall cascading from the stone wall. He'd spent hours creating the illusion because his beast wasn't happy in any place that looked too human, too civilized.

But both man and jaguar enjoyed sensation and pleasure. And water. So his home had a waterfall, as well as lush carpets he'd collected year by year on which his paws or feet made no sound. The walls were hung with handmade tapestries finer than those seen in many museums. Not only objects of beauty, they acted to contain the warmth in winter—when he used eco-generators to heat water in the fine tubes that ran throughout his home. That warmth became particularly useful during those times when he worked through the night on a piece that required a lot of contact with cold chisels and hard edges.

His armchairs were comfortable, his bed big enough to sprawl in, and more than big enough to entertain a lover no matter how energetic he was feeling. But he'd never once brought a woman here. However, today, he could imagine dark red hair against the pillows, creamy limbs against the thick blanket. Faith would look like an exotic jewel laid on a bed of the finest black velvet.

A growl rose up in his throat as arousal caught him in a vicious grip and shook him hard. He could've eased the physical ache himself, but he didn't want to. He wanted the Psy he could still smell on his skin. The man advised caution, told him to wait to be certain she wasn't playing with his mind, wasn't a mole sent in by the Council to cripple DarkRiver from within, but the cat lived by instinct and it said Faith was his to take.

For many changelings, the human half would probably have won. But Vaughn's animal half was stronger than that of most others. Stepping out of the waterfall, he took a deep breath. The air should've smelled of the earth and the forest, but instead held teasing hints of fire and woman.

Pushing his hair out of his eyes, he stood there and considered his next step. Faith had come a long way since their first meeting. She could bear small touches, hadn't been made unconscious by his fleeting kiss, had reacted to his nakedness but in the same way any other woman would've reacted. He smiled at the memory. Faith wasn't cold, no matter how much she might try to pretend otherwise.

But all that didn't negate the fact that she was a long way from accepting the kind of touch the cat craved. He wanted to lick her from head to toe, with lingering stops in soft feminine places that drew him like a drug. However, the second he asked more of her than her mind was able to handle, he might lose her. And that was unacceptable. So, where did that leave him?

"Step by step," he murmured under his breath, body taut with expectation. Faith NightStar was about to be hunted. He had no intention of harming her and every intention of breaking down the sensual walls that separated them. By the time he finished, Faith would be enslaved by her body's hunger, the woman core of her screaming out for him.

It would take patience, but Vaughn was used to stalking prey without break for hours, days ... weeks.