Chapter 65

D, I’m sorry for taking so long to reply.

The truth is, I miscalculated my ability to handle continued communication from you. I cried from missing you while reading the article you sent, and Neiza saw me. She’s still so young, her mind so malleable. She was sad for me, when it’s my duty to teach her not to feel emotion at all.

I don’t think that Silence can ever teach me not to love you. That bond is too deep in my heart. But I have to learn not to live that love. I have to learn to let you go.

This will be the last time I ever send you a communication. Please help me protect my baby from her own powerful mind by never again contacting me. This, big brother, is the last thing your little sister will ever ask of you.

Good-bye, D.

Hien

—Letter from Hien Nguyen to Déwei Nguyen (2 April 1982)

PAX JUMPED INTO action.

He couldn’t reach Theo with his mind. So he’d go to her. Never again would he stand by helpless while someone tried to separate them.

Teleport. Now! A telepathic order barked at the very expensive teleport-capable Tk he’d hired on a personal contract. At 7.9 on the Gradient, Octavio had no doubt been part of a Council unit at some point, but he was now an independent. His head might be shaved but he was no clean-cut soldier these days. Tattoos snaked up his arms and along the back of one leg, and he’d grown a beard thick and dark.

The most important thing about Octavio was that he had zero interest in politics or playing shadow games. “Had too much of that in my past” had been his clipped answer during their interview.

He also didn’t want to be friends, or to bond in any other way.

To him, Pax was just a job. Exactly as Pax wanted it.

At his Gradient level and specific Tk ability, the muscular Sudanese man couldn’t crisscross the globe at will, but he was plenty powerful enough for the transports Pax usually needed. San Francisco to Moscow wouldn’t strain his psychic muscles.

By the time Pax ran out of his bedroom dressed only in the thin black sweatpants in which he’d fallen asleep, the teleporter was standing ready in the apartment hallway: the designated teleport meeting spot when Pax didn’t give him any other direction. “My sister. Lock on her bracelet.” That dull piece of jewelry that she never took off and that was marked with a unique design she’d done herself.

It had been the very first and remained the most important reference image Pax had given Octavio.

The Tk shifted until their shoulders touched, and then the world went sideways.

When it settled, Pax found himself in a small room, Theo lying at his feet. Blood coated her throat, soaked her chest. Dropping to his knees, he clamped his hand over the wound in a futile attempt to stop the flow.

His internal scream locked in the ice that was the only way he survived in the world, he went to order Octavio to take her directly to any medical facility to which he had a teleport lock, when he saw the bear who lay mere feet away. His claws were out, had cut bloody furrows into the opposing hands as he struggled against the ropes that bound him.

There was another woman, too, her face smashed up and bloody.

All three were unconscious, but while the women were obviously critically wounded, he couldn’t see enough of the bear to work out his injuries.

Theo’s bear.

Pax had to help him.

His entire hesitation took a second at most, but there was a flash on the edge of his vision before he could give Octavio any order at all. Octavio went for his gun, but Pax knew it for a useless piece of plas the instant he laid eyes on the man who’d just ’ported in.

Kaleb Krychek.

At his side was a tall and curvy woman in an incongruously cheerful skirt of bright yellow, paired with a white shirt and yellow high heels. Her glossy black hair curled into a flip at her shoulders, her eyes a primal amber.

“Kaleb, my sister is dying,” Pax said, because he had no pride here, and this was the most powerful man in the PsyNet. If anyone knew how to save Theo, it would be Kaleb. “I’m trying to feed her power, but it’s not working.” As if Theo’s mind had already begun to shut down.

That was when the woman in yellow rushed over and literally shoved Pax aside. “Healer,” she muttered in explanation when he resisted. “She’s bonded into the clan. Let me work!”

Hands sticky with blood, Pax went to Theo’s bear and began to undo the ties around his wrists.

All the while, he talked to Theo. Wake up, Theo. Please wake up. I have no one else if you’re gone. No one. Not a single living being who he could trust and who trusted him. Just her. Only her. Theo, don’t go. I won’t make it if you go. It would be one blow too many.

The bear groaned awake just as Pax undid the final knot in the ropes.

“Theo?” A rough word, before the bear was right next to Theo and the healer, his hand gripping her bloody one as he said, “Come on, pchelka, don’t you give up now! You fucking hold on with all your rage, all your fury.” His voice was thunder deeper than that which crashed above the house.

Rain shattered against the windows a second later.

The bear was so focused on Theo that he didn’t see the other woman stir, the one who looked so much like Theo. But Pax did. Having already decided that she was the one most likely to have hurt Theo, he knocked her back out with a vicious telepathic blow.

She was lucky he didn’t kill her.

The only reason he didn’t was Theo. Instinct told him the woman was important, and that instinct had to be coming from Theo. Inside his mind, other voices whispered, summoned, but though Theo wouldn’t speak to him, she remained the most powerful presence.

Holding them all back. Keeping him from falling into the abyss.

Theo, please.

His mental plea echoed the bear’s spoken demand as he shifted to cradle Theo’s head in his lap while the healer worked on her with hands that shouldn’t have been able to fix a Psy. But—“She’s in my head,” Pax said to the bear, because the bear was Theo’s and so that made him important to Pax. “She’s not gone.”

“I know.” The bear’s amber gaze met Pax’s, a moment of furious understanding passing between them. “I can feel her right here.” A fisted thump to his heart.

That was when Pax knew what had happened.

Theo had mated.

Which meant she had the entire StoneWater clan behind her, a primal rush of wild changeling energy pouring into her from the practiced hands of the healer.

His sister would never again be alone.

Pax didn’t care that the new bonds in her life would take her further from him. Didn’t even care that the bears would likely shun him. He just cared that she was safe. The bears would keep her safe long after he was gone.

A sudden gasp, Theo’s eyes snapping open.