As a result, it took no time for them to join in the games already in progress.
The squad currently had no child as young as Naya, and her usual two-year-old pack playmate had a checkup with their healer today. But Sascha's baby was never alone. The kids took turns pushing her, and a sweet three-year-old child Arrow with chubby red cheeks and light brown curls scrambled into a neighboring swing with Vasic's help, then seemed to fall into an earnest conversation with Naya.
Sascha could feel her cub's happiness. Naya soon tried to reach out to her new friend using her telepathic abilities, but Sascha gently reminded her to ask permission first, then showed her how. Even as she did that, she was monitoring the other children under their care for any signs of distress. Not just in terms of an accidental psychic hurt, but because she was an empath, she could no more stop watching out for their emotional well-being than she could for their physical health.
It was ten minutes later that she became aware of a kerfuffle in the football game in progress on the field next to the play equipment.
A cub in leopard form had apparently nipped the butt of an Arrow child, who must've struck out psychically, from the way that Arrow child suddenly stilled and looked pale-faced toward the young Arrow who must've contained the strike before it did any damage.
Abbot's blue-eyed gaze met Sascha's and Ashaya's in turn. What do I do now? he seemed to ask.
"I've got this." Ashaya strode over to the two miscreants and pointed to a spot under a tree.
Both children trudged over, heads down. Ashaya made them sit there, away from the games, with only each other for company, for fifteen minutes.
Then she made the cub say sorry for biting--after asking him to shift so the Arrow child could understand him.
"That's okay," the Arrow boy said with a generosity that immediately caused the DarkRiver cub to smile. "I should've thought before I acted. That's what the teacher says to do. I could've hurt you."
"I'm not supposed to bite," the cub confided in a shamefaced whisper. "My teeth are really strong."
The Arrow boy nodded, clearly seeing the parallel.
"Good boys." Ashaya hugged them both before setting them free to join in the play--which they did together.
Meanwhile, Naya was having fun telepathing her vocal new friend, while Faith and Vasic pushed them on the swings. The teleporter, who'd lost his left arm after a failed biofusion experiment, appeared to be testing a new prosthetic. Its gleaming metal finish fascinated the children, with Vasic often hunkering down so they could touch small hands to the metal, patting at it curiously and asking him questions.
How many is that now? Sascha asked when he bent down for a curious cub, aware the brilliant engineer behind the prosthetic was obsessed with finding one that worked with Vasic's damaged systems.
This one doesn't count--it's a piece Samuel uses to test different components, the teleporter told her as he rose back to his feet and continued to push Naya, who was nowhere near tired of the motion yet. This time, he's checking a computronic mechanism that he hoped would fix a heat buildup issue.
Is it doing what it should?
A shake of Vasic's head, his handsome face expressionless but not cold. I can already feel the heat levels rising at the point of the join. In fact, can you and the others handle shields while I leave to remove it?
Of course. With Judd, Faith, Ashaya, Sascha, and Abbot, they had plenty of psychic power at their command.
Vasic had only been gone about a minute, and Sascha was giving a thirsty child a cup of water from the supplies Faith had brought with her, when she caught sight of Roman about to fly off the top of a climbing frame.
"No." She knew he was going to hit wrong, would probably break his arm . . . but he shifted midfall, landing in a roll that knocked the air out of his feline body but didn't otherwise do any damage.
Heart thudding, Sascha stopped herself from rushing over. Leopard cubs needed independence, she reminded herself for the thousandth time. But she watched him until she was sure he truly hadn't hurt himself--a fact that became obvious when he sauntered off, tail proudly up and a smug expression on his gorgeous little face.
That's when she noticed that Naya's attention was riveted on the older cub.
She managed to contain her groan until the child who'd come over for a drink ran back to join his playmates. "Naya's going to start jumping off high perches soon, isn't she?"
Ashaya patted her hand. "She'll survive. Keenan's fine and he's not a cat. In the interests of transparency, he did fracture his arm the first time his leopard friends tried to teach him the tree road, but it was a one-off."
"That's not very reassuring," Sascha said darkly.
Laughing with a warmth that belied the years she'd spent trapped in chill Silence, the other woman pushed up the sleeves of her sweatshirt, the temperature in the forest relatively cool despite how close they were to summer. "I'm looking forward to seeing what tricks a Psy-Changeling child will come up with."
A Psy-Changeling child.
Yes, Naya was that. Unique . . . and hunted because of it.
Chapter 2
HAVING BEEN CAUGHT in a sudden traffic jam caused by a delivery truck that had spilled its load across the road, Lucas and Clay were still ten minutes out from reaching the piers. It was frustrating when the point of taking the car had been to speed things up, but Jon and his friends had promised to stay exactly where they were until the two of them arrived.
"Can you talk to Teijan?" Lucas asked as he picked up the sharp scent of brine, the water close now. "Brief the Rats to keep their ear to the ground for any mentions of Naya outside DarkRiver and SnowDancer. Even things that seem benign."
The Rats, only four of whom were actually changeling--three adults and one child--chose to live in the disused subway tunnels beneath San Francisco, but they had the ability to blend into the woodwork in every part of the city. It made them a highly effective spy network--and while that network didn't work for DarkRiver, the pack had an agreement with the Rats that meant Teijan would pass on any important information.
In return for that loyalty, DarkRiver permitted the far less powerful pack to live in its territory without fear when, as the dominant predators in the region, DarkRiver would've been justified in forcing the Rats out. With brutal violence, if need be. A harsh law, but it kept peace between the predators.
As it was, Teijan and his Rats had pledged loyalty to DarkRiver, and the intelligence that flowed to DarkRiver from the smaller group was invaluable. If any of that intel resulted in business deals, DarkRiver passed on a percentage of the income. Over time, the businesslike arrangement had changed into something that wasn't an alliance . . . but was perhaps as close to it as could happen between two groups with such a wide power differential.
Instead of cowering in their tunnels, the Rats had fought for the city when San Francisco was attacked.
Lucas would never forget that.
"Consider it done." Clay slowed the car to permit a pedestrian who'd miscalculated the light change to cross safely onto the sidewalk. "You want to feel out some of your Trinity contacts, too? Ask them to keep an ear open?"
Lucas scowled, his arm braced on the window frame and his eyes taking in the vibrant life of San Francisco. "I'll think about it, but right now, I only truly trust a tiny minority of those who've signed the accord." All were people he'd known and trusted prior to the formation of the ambitious cooperation agreement.
Lucas wanted the Trinity Accord to succeed, probably more than any other individual in the world aside from Sascha, but at this point, it was far too new and untested. "Trinity has two major issues," he said to Clay. "The first is how to confirm the sincerity of those who sign it and want to be part of any Trinity-wide discussions. Consortium plants as well as others who have their own reasons to want the accord to fail are a certainty."
Peace wasn't good for everyone, including those who manufactured weapons and made their money off the misery of others. Post-Trinity, peop
le had stopped blowing one another up, and, inside the Net, the civil war was apparently at a truce that was holding. The pro-Silence faction hadn't disappeared, but according to those who understood the complex political situation in the Net, the rise of the empaths had shaken it to its core.
Designation E had been crushed under Silence, their ability to sense emotions and heal wounds of the heart and the mind considered unnecessary in a race that had outlawed emotion and that punished any deviation from the status quo with vicious psychic brainwipes. Yet this past winter, the empaths had categorically proven that they were very much necessary.
Without the Es, the PsyNet would've collapsed--would still collapse should they be taken out of the equation.
And without the biofeedback provided by the PsyNet, those of the Psy race would die horrifically painful deaths in a matter of seconds.
It left the most well-known pro-Silence groups in a quandary: How could they re-create a society without emotion when a vast majority of the linchpin members of that society were empaths, emotion their lifeblood? As a result, they'd stopped their vocal protests while they debated the issue; even the unstable fringe elements had halted their spate of bombings and shootings, though no one could predict how long that would last.
Of course, the Trinity Accord wasn't behind either of those outcomes, but it was currently the focus of the world's attention. Including that of the malcontents from all three races--everyone was waiting to see what came next, whether Trinity would become a powerhouse or fall flat.
However, it wasn't just the weapons makers who had to be unhappy with Trinity's flow-on effects. There were no doubt business owners--Psy, human, and changeling--pissed off because Trinity had facilitated an explosion of cross-racial business networks. Great for the clever operators who were good at what they did. Not so good for those who'd been coasting by with substandard work because the competition wasn't as accessible to their clients.
Even powerful families with links to large medical corporations had to be looked at with a suspicious eye, because in times of peace, certain types of medicine were either no longer needed--or no longer profitable. "It's a crapshoot as to who's sincere and who's not," Lucas added. "That's going to be a long-term issue."
Clay's hand moved smoothly on the manual controls. "Ming LeBon really requested to sign the accord?"
"Just to screw things up even more." Lucas didn't bother to contain his growl this time. "Hawke might have held off on killing the son of a bitch, but SnowDancer will pull out of Trinity the instant he's permitted to sign, and so will we." The wolf pack and DarkRiver were blood allies and Ming LeBon had threatened the life of Hawke's mate among his other murderous crimes.
"The Forgotten will also leave." Founded by rebels who'd defected from the PsyNet at the dawn of Silence over a hundred years earlier, the Forgotten--who'd intermarried with humans and mated with changelings--were beginning to show unique new abilities unseen in the "pure-blooded" Psy population.
Ming Lebon wanted access to those abilities, had been behind the abductions and deaths of a number of Forgotten children.
"Arrows will go, too," Clay pointed out.
"No question." Ming had been the squad's leader for a long time, but from what Lucas had picked up, the ex-Psy Councilor had treated the men and women under his command as disposable pawns, signing kill orders for "malfunctioning" Arrows and using the squad as his personal death army.
Aden might've initiated the accord, but Lucas had the feeling the other man--and his squad--would rather rebuild alliances from scratch than be linked to Ming LeBon again in any way, even through the gossamer-thin bonds of Trinity. "And," he added, "the second DarkRiver and SnowDancer leave, we take a large number of packs with us." People who might not be allies but who were friends or who trusted the two packs to assist them should they have need, far more than they did strangers in a nascent accord.
There was an unexpected smile in Clay's voice when he spoke again. "Maybe proof of membership in the 'Ming LeBon Should Die' club should be a prerequisite for signing the accord."
"Funny." Eyes focused straight ahead but mind on this mess of a situation, Lucas shook his head. "The problem is that certain minority members want Ming to be part of Trinity--and fuck, I see their point." The ex-Councilor was currently the reigning power in a significant portion of Europe. "It might be better to have him in the fold so we could monitor him a little more closely."
Clay growled. "He'd still be poison."
"Yes." Lucas had the ability to see the other side's point, his disciplined temper the reason he'd been nominated to speak for so many changeling packs on anything to do with Trinity, but he wasn't ever going to agree on the Ming issue. "I wouldn't trust any discussion in which he had a part; we'd always be waiting for him to stab everyone in the back--Ming only cares about Ming."
Eyes narrowed at the thought of the ex-Councilor, Lucas was stretching out his denim-clad legs when a couple of men on the sidewalk caught his eye. "Jamie looks like he's over his jetlag." The senior soldier had flown home straight from the Solomon Islands, the distant country the last stop on his roaming of the world.
Nearly every cat roamed at some point in his or her life. Some for weeks, others for months, a rare few for years. It was part of their nature, part of what made them as feline as they were human. That time exploring the world helped them grow, helped them settle into their skin. Almost all returned home, however, their humanity tempering the more solitary inclinations of the leopard within.
In the thirteen years he'd been alpha, Lucas had lost only three of those who roamed. One in an accident that could've happened anywhere in the world, two others in much happier circumstances: they'd found their mates in different corners of the globe, decided to stay. In doing so, those two had connected DarkRiver to a pack in India and one in Botswana.
"I saw him this morning," Clay replied. "He's asked Nate to put him back on full active duty, and he's back to his tech position at CTX."
"Tech" was a broad shorthand term used by any number of specialists. In point of fact, Jamie was a highly qualified sound and holo-imaging specialist. First, though, he was a DarkRiver dominant and trusted senior soldier on the cusp of becoming a sentinel. Walking beside him had been a younger packmate who held incredible promise.
Lucas didn't think it was chance that Kit was talking to Jamie.
"The Ming situation." Clay bared his teeth at a double-parked car in front of them, before managing to swing around it. "Is it going to be majority rules?"
"Trinity has no official voting system." One of those things that had been skipped over in the rush to create a united front against the Consortium. "Those of us Aden pulled in right at the start, we didn't consider that we might want to keep people out of the Trinity network. Discussions were all about how to convince people to have faith in it."
Lucas often wondered why the hell he'd volunteered to be the first point of contact for overall Trinity business for more than twenty-five packs and counting . . . and then he'd remember Naya. His and Sascha's smart, funny cub who'd smacked big kisses on his face today before he left the aerie, and who collapsed into giggles when he tickled her. Half Psy, half changeling, all mischief--and as Aden's intel had put into sharp focus today, a threat to those who abhorred change and wanted to freeze the world in time.
His gut tensed again, claws shoving at his skin. He'd permit no one to dim her light.
He also wanted her to grow up in a united world, not a divided one. Naya should never have to choose between the two sides of her heritage.
Lucas would fight to his last breath to make that happen.
"What's the second problem?" Clay brought the car to a stop in front of an Embarcadero warehouse owned by DarkRiver. "You said two."
"Let's walk and talk," Lucas said. "You might still make the site in time."
Stepping out into the salt-laced air of the waterfront after putting up the passenger-side window, Lucas shut the door, then joined Clay as the other
man headed in the direction where the boys were waiting. The sun rained down on them out of a cloudless blue sky, the winds light. Lucas could hear the faint buzz of voices in the distance, feel the vibration of the vehicles on the road, smell the saltwater taffy made fresh in a nearby boutique candy shop.
The sunshine made the panther within Lucas stretch out into a lazy sprawl; he had to resist the sudden temptation to shift and sun himself on the pier. That was not alpha behavior--on the other hand, it would be amusing to see people's reaction to a black panther in their midst, especially if he walked into a butcher's and pointed to a prime cut of meat.
Changeling cats being bigger than their wild counterparts, he'd make quite an impression.
"Gotta love this sun," Clay said right then. "Makes me want to curl up and go boneless like that tabby over there."
Grinning, Lucas told the sentinel what he'd been thinking. Clay's smile was slow, deep. "Let's do it for Halloween. Give the tourists a shock. We can chase the ones who are mean to the shopkeepers."
Deeply amused in a way only a feline could be, Lucas skirted a tiny yapping dog on a leash that thought it was a mastiff. A single hard glance from Lucas would've shut him down, but why spoil a tiny dog's dreams of glory?
"Second issue is connected to the voting situation," he said as they walked. "It all arises from the lack of a governing charter or constitution." Something that was deeply necessary to the success of such a diverse body, one with members scattered across the world.
Right now the accord was an agreement to communicate, and they had vehicles in place for that. But to become a truly stabilizing force that would lead to the United Earth Federation, it needed to become far more cohesive. Especially since trust remained a huge, complicated question for the entire membership.
"There are the boys."
Lucas nodded, having already caught their scent, recognized them as pack. Shoulders tensed and legs bouncing nervously on sneakered feet, the four teenagers were huddled in a small group, their faces unusually solemn.
Spotting Clay and Lucas, Jon said something and the boys jogged across to meet them in the middle of the pier. The four sixteen-year-olds were dressed as boys their age currently dressed--white T-shirts under open shirts of various hues and types, atop baggy board shorts that reached past their knees, and brightly colored sneakers they'd all personalized.