Slave to Sensation

“He hunts widely. Of the kills we’ve tracked, the first two were in Nevada, the third in Oregon, the remaining four in Arizona. The last was Dorian’s sister.” He would never forget the coppery smell of innocent blood, the darkness of the splatters on the walls, the metallic stink of the Psy.

“He left bodies to find?”

He sat upright, arms crossed over bent knees, one hand grasping the wrist of the other in a punishing grip. “The bastard takes them, tortures them, and then returns them to some place that should’ve been safe.”

“I don’t understand.” Sascha’s voice was nearer, as if she’d moved forward when he had.

Looking over, he met those night-sky eyes head-on. “He delivers the killing blows in a place familiar to the women. Kylie’s throat was slashed in her apartment.”

Darkness crawled across Sascha’s eyes, destroying the stars and almost succeeding in shocking him out of his fury. He’d heard that Psy eyes did that when they were expending huge amounts of Psy power but he’d never seen it happen. It was like watching the wings of the night close out the sun. The strange thing was, the hairs on the back of his neck weren’t tingling in awareness. If Sascha wasn’t using her powers, why were her eyes going midnight?

“He’s very sure of himself,” she said, shoving him back from fascination to fury.

“Of the other seven women,” he continued, “one was murdered in her home, one at her place of work, another in her family crypt.” Anger for each senseless death rippled through him. “The other four follow the same pattern.”

Sascha wrapped her arms around her knees. The panther noticed the mirroring and filed it away. “Why didn’t the other changeling groups do anything?”

“Several reasons, the major one being that this was buried so deep, no one had any idea it was a serial until we started digging.”

“The other reasons?”

“A combination of the choice of victims and Enforcement complicity. The first woman wasn’t part of a defined pack-her parents went to the authorities but got nowhere.” He knew exactly why. “The second two belonged to fairly weak groups. None are dominant in their area and they simply didn’t have the physical or strategic strength to push for answers when doors were slammed in their faces.

“The fourth was blamed on a rogue and since he was already slated for death by his pack, the case was termed to fall outside Enforcement jurisdiction and closed. The fifth and seventh were loners-there was no one left to fight for justice. The sixth victim was killed at the same time that a human serial killer was preying in the region and even her pack wasn’t certain she hadn’t been one of his victims. But when you set it beside the other Psy kills, there’s no question it’s the same predator.”

“Then came Kylie.”

“She was his first mistake.” Lucas felt his claws pressing against the inside of his skin. “The second we put together the pattern and unearthed the other forgotten women, we started to hunt. We also got a warning out to every changeling group we could reach.”

Sascha didn’t speak. Not quite sure why he felt the need, he turned his body until he was facing her, one of his legs behind her, knee bent. The other he dropped loosely to the ground, crossed under the raised leg, before picking up her braid to play with the end.

He needed touch. Contrary to what Sascha believed, not just any touch would do. Usually only packmates were able to give him the peace he craved. Usually. “We’re not weak,” he began, pulling off the tie that kept her braid together.

She blinked and her body tensed but all she said was, “No, you’re not.”

Was she trying to be gentle with him? He looked into those infinite eyes and wished he could read her mind. “And we’re not going to stop searching because the Psy want us to. Brenna will be saved and the killer will be executed. If DarkRiver is taken down, the SnowDancers will continue the fight. When they fall… there are others.”

The world was changing and sooner or later, the Psy were going to come face-to-face with their worst nightmare-the relegation of their emotionless race to nothing more than a footnote in the history of man.

“How can you be absolutely certain it’s a Psy?” she asked. “I won’t betray my race on the basis of a suspicion.”

Springy, silky curls began to overflow his hands as her braid started unraveling on its own. The panther was delighted by the texture and life in his hands. But it wasn’t enough to make him forget blood and death. “I was with Dorian when he got the feeling that something was wrong. We must’ve arrived at Kylie’s apartment on the killer’s heels.” What he’d seen there had been enough to make him believe in evil as a living, breathing entity. If Sascha wanted proof, he had it, seventy-nine precise pieces of it, all covered in blood and horror.

Those mysterious eyes looked at him with what he wanted to believe was sympathy. “That’s why Dorian is so damaged. He thinks if he’d only been that much faster…”