He walked over to take her into his arms. "Shh, we've got him now."

"I'll gut anyone who tries to bruise this boy again." She tucked her head under his chin, letting him soothe her. "I don't know who Ashaya Aleine is, but she did something good in getting him out."

Dorian's heart kicked.

I saved two innocent lives. You won't kill me.

"Is Sascha on her way?" he asked, ignoring the flicker of memory. It was far harder to erase the image burned into his brain - of an icy stranger silhouetted against the night sky.

"She should be arr - " They both heard it at the same time. The sound of a car coming down the drive. "That'll be her."

"Hope she can help the kid cope." It wasn't a vain wish. While Tammy was a healer attuned to changeling leopards, Sascha was an E-Psy, an empath, born with the ability to sense and heal emotional wounds.

Tammy drew back, kissing him on the cheek in thanks. "Sascha said he's connected to you. How?"

Dorian had been thinking about that. He raised his hand and showed Tammy the cut on his palm - it was already close to healed. "Blood oaths are powerful things and I promised him he'd be okay. Maybe because of that, when my blood mixed with his, it gave him a choice as to where he wanted to go." And he'd chosen to trust Dorian. It was a trust both leopard and man intended to honor.

Sascha came in at that instant, tall and with worry in her cardinal eyes - white stars on black velvet. "That's as good a guess as any," she said, walking over to stroke her hand gently over Keenan's brow. "He's in the Web, but only through you. You're his lifeline."

Dorian's protectiveness toward the boy intensified. If he had a weakness, it was for the vulnerable, for those who couldn't fight the monsters on their own. "He'll be scared when he wakes." He could still feel those fragile bones trembling as the boy tried to hide his excruciating fear.

"He'll sleep awhile yet." Sascha sent Dorian a worried glance as Tammy excused herself in order to pack for her cubs' stay with their grandparents. "Why don't you go for a run? It's been a hard day." There was a question in her eyes that he read loud and clear.

"No need to worry, Sascha darling." He smiled at her chiding look, knowing full well she had a soft spot for him. "I'm not going to lose any sleep over taking those shots today - they were holding a child hostage." His leopard growled inwardly at the memory of the blood on Keenan's wrists.

Sascha seemed satisfied with that, her attention shifting back to Keenan. "He'll be safe now." Her voice caught and he wondered what emotions she'd sensed around the boy. "Protected."

"Thanks to his mother." Dorian's thoughts turned to Ashaya Aleine, a woman he'd seen as a shadow in the darkness two months ago... and hadn't been able to forget since. "You think she can get out?"

"I have my doubts." Sascha closed her hand around one of Keenan's. "From what Judd shared, the Council needs her. And it has a way of getting what it wants."

"I think you're underestimating her." Dorian recalled the freezing tones of Ashaya's voice, recalled, too, how hard and low that voice had hit him. Fucking two-fisted punch to the gut. If -

The trapped leopard inside of him snapped its teeth when he bit off that thought, but the human half was in no mood to listen. "So far, she's managed to get three children out of potentially fatal situations - Jon, Noor, and now, Keenan." The woman might be cold enough to give him freezer burn, but she was also smart as hell.

Sascha nodded. "The trouble is, we have no clue as to her motivation. I want to believe that she did it out of love for her son... but we both know mothers don't always protect their own in the Net."

Dorian couldn't argue with that. Ashaya was Psy. Psy didn't feel. So why had the Council been able to use Keenan as leverage to ensure his mother's good behavior? It made her a mystery. Dorian had always liked mysteries. What he didn't like were Psy in the Net, Psy who worshipped the cold, unfeeling God of Silence.

Psy like Ashaya Aleine.

His blood thundered with a tidal wave of black rage. It was a familiar feeling - one of the Silent, a cardinal telekinetic named Santano Enrique, had butchered Dorian's sister, using her as a canvas on which to carve his sick fantasies. Dorian had torn the killer apart with his bare hands, but that hadn't quieted the rage in his animal heart, the torment in his human soul.

Kylie's body had still been warm when he reached her.

"Dorian." Sascha's voice cut through the miasma of pain and rage. "Don't."

Don't punish yourself for a monster's crime; don't let him kill you, too. It was what she'd said to him in the months after Enrique's execution, and Dorian had tried to listen. For a while, he'd thought he'd conquered the anger, but it had only been in hiding. Now, it came to pulsing life, triggered by the remembered sight of the blood on Keenan's wrists... triggered, too, by the memory of Ashaya Aleine's blue ice of a voice.

He got up. "I'm going for that run. Look after Keenan." Even Sascha, with all her gifts, couldn't erase his guilt. Because that anger, it wasn't all directed at the Psy - he'd failed Kylie, failed his baby sister. If he could've split a vein, torn out his heart, given up his soul, and known it would bring her back, he'd have done so in a heartbeat.

But he couldn't, so he'd learned to live with the grief, learned to live despite the guilt, had even fooled the pack into thinking he was getting better. Perhaps even fooled himself. Until her.

He'd almost shot Ashaya Aleine at first sight.

Not because she was evil. Or because he'd considered her a dangerous wildcard. No, the sole reason he had almost put a bullet through her was because the instant he'd caught her scent, his cock had gone as hard as fucking rock. The unexpected and unwanted reaction had ratcheted up the raw, angry fury of his guilt until it was an ever-tightening noose around his throat, a burning in his heart. All he'd wanted to do was destroy the cause of his shattering betrayal to Kylie's memory.

Attracted to one of the Silent?

His mouth set in a grim line. He'd cut off his own balls before he accepted that.

Chapter 4

He haunts me. The sniper. In my dreams, he is a black shadow with his eye focused on the scope of a rifle. Sometimes, he puts down the weapon and walks toward me. Sometimes, he even touches me. But most times, he presses the trigger. And kills me.

-  From the encrypted personal files of Ashaya Aleine

Ashaya returned to consciousness with the realization that something had gone very wrong. Her mind was functioning, but her body wasn't. She was paralyzed. A human or changeling, creatures of emotion, might have panicked. Ashaya lay in silence and thought through the situation.

Unless she had gone blind, her eyes were closed, possibly taped shut, though she didn't have the senses to verify that. Closed eyes meant a medical facility of some kind, either a clinic room or the morgue.

Her body wasn't picking up the sensation of cold or warmth, so she couldn't verify that either.

Her hearing wasn't working.

Her nose wasn't working.

Her mouth wasn't working.

That was when claustrophobia nibbled at the edges of her consciousness. She was buried in the most final way - inside her own body. Her limbs were all completely useless, making escape impossible. No, she thought, dragging her thoughts back under control before they eroded the cold Silence that had kept her alive this long. She wasn't human or changeling. She had another world open to her. Inside her mind, she felt for the link to the PsyNet. There it was, strong and unwavering. Whatever had gone wrong, it hadn't affected her psychic abilities.

Following the link, she cautiously lowered her shields and swept her psychic eye across the area she now occupied. Familiar minds began to appear within seconds. She withdrew at once. That was the problem with the PsyNet. Though her initial position was based upon her physical location, because the PsyNet was a psychic construct, the instant she lowered her shields, it began to shift to accommodate her - as if each version of the Net was unique to the individual.

It made no logical sense because the PsyNet followed no laws of physics or math. No one had yet found out what rules it did follow, but one thing was clear - Ashaya couldn't venture into the Net again without taking precautions to ensure none of her "knowledge" of others leaked out. She knew it could be done, even knew some of the mechanics of how - Amara had taught her.

She began moving and shifting her mental shields, devising fail-safe upon fail-safe. The next time she opened her psychic eye, she saw everything through a dull haze. Her shields were so bulky as to hinder any attempt to actively surf the Net, but that was fine. Right now, it meant she was an invisible dot among millions of other dots. If she "knew" no one, no one knew her.

Taking a chance, she slit a tiny gap in her shields and listened to the chatter of the Net. Thousands of pieces of information filtered through, but as none of it was relevant, she forced herself to return to the shell of her mind, the claustrophobic prison of her body, wondering how much it would hurt when she ripped the tape off her eyes. Pain was a relative concept. Losing Keenan had taught her that more clearly than even Amara's cruelty.

Tape.

She could feel it now, sticky and abrasive on her lids. Focusing, she began a step-by-step checklist of her body. On the first pass, she found her feet dead but her calves waking up, while her torso remained numb. By the second pass, both her legs were cramping excruciatingly and her stomach felt as if it was trying to crawl out through her throat.

The third pass - her entire body a mass of searing pain.

Agony sloughed away the lining of her gut, flayed the skin from her flesh. And still she forced herself to lie unmoving. She wasn't a trained soldier, hadn't been tortured so she could learn to withstand pain. She lay frozen for one single reason - she wanted to see her son again.

Because if she was alive, then there was a chance that Keenan, too, had made it out alive.