Visions of Heat (Psy-Changeling 2)

Was that what Vaughn had been doing to her? Pushing her to make her show her claws? "Can you tell me the changeling definition of a mate?"

"It's more than marriage, and far, far more than anything the Psy know." Sascha's lips curved. With her hair braided tightly off her face, she was beauty cut in perfect lines. "It's everything I never dared to dream."

Faith wanted to ask so much more, but their time was limited - she had to be back inside the compound before dawn. "The darkness is continuing to hunt me."

"Hunt? An odd word to use."

"But correct in this circumstance. Psychically, it feels as if the darkness searches for and locks on to me."

"It almost sounds like a forced telepathic link, not foresight."

Faith nodded. "Yes, but it's not. I am seeing the future, but the visions are channeled through the murderer, so in actuality, I'm in two timestreams at once. In the mind of the killer as he plans and in the future where the actual events take place."

"Go on," the other Psy said after a long pause.

"Once it's - he's - locked on, and maybe there is a component of telepathic interference there," she admitted, "I can't find a way to break away, to end the vision. He decides when to release me."

"But?"

"Vaughn can pull me out. By touch." Memories of his lips on hers merged with the shock she'd felt at having his claws on the tender skin of her face. "There's something else." She wiped her hands on her jeans. "I think I was having fragments of the dark visions as a child, perhaps before I turned three. So young, the memories aren't reliable, but I believe it to be a strong possibility."

"Interesting." Sascha leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "The Protocol may begin from birth, but I've heard it said that it doesn't really 'take' until a certain point of psychological development - which point depends on the individual child."

"I read a similar report a year ago. They're searching for a method to counteract that flaw in the Protocol - the consensus is that it's that period that produces the adult defectives." Even as she said the word, she realized it had been used to define the woman by her side, a Psy who was anything but defective. Another lie. Another break in the wall of her confidence in her own people.

Sascha shook her head. "I don't think it can be fixed. Very young children are far closer to their fundamental animal nature. Nothing short of rewiring the brain itself can alter that."

"That was one of the possible solutions raised in the Psy-Med Journal." Even then, months before her mind had begun to go haywire, Faith had found herself intellectually repulsed by the idea. The brain was the single thing that remained sacred among the Psy. To rewire that would equal the erasure of the individual, making the PsyNet a true hive mind.

"I want to not believe you, I want to be surprised and revolted." Sascha forced her heartbeat to lower. After years of hiding everything, the freedom to feel sometimes had her tumbling headfirst into emotion. "But I know the Council too well to believe they'd stop at destroying children's brains in an effort to consolidate their power."

"The procedure hasn't been implemented. It's purely theoretical." The words were crisply factual, but Sascha could feel the other woman's horror, a horror so deep that Faith, caught in the talons of Silence, was unaware of the fury of it.

Sascha understood. In any of the odher races, even a theoretical idea like that would've been considered heinous, a fundamental breach of the trust between adult and child. "What's stopping them?"

"They're afraid of damaging potential psychic abilities." Faith's eyes were an impenetrable field of stars. "I can't see how they could possibly neutralize that issue."

Sascha wasn't so sure. "Silence, too, was once a theoretical idea." She'd unearthed a lot of information about her race's history in the past few months and the majority of her research had found success through the most unusual of avenues - human libraries.

Trawling through those libraries dismissed by the Psy as outdated and inefficient, she'd discovered handwritten letters and documents that told of the beginning of Silence. The real beginning. It hadn't been 1979 - Enrique had been wrong, his "tribute" of seventy-nine precise cuts on each of his victims, a mistake. And that made her delighted in a sense only her bloodthirsty new family could truly understand.

"I thought it was initiated by the Council in concert with our most noted Psy-Med researchers." Faith's voice drew Sascha back from the grim theater of memory.

"No," she replied. "It was initially raised by a cultlike group named Mercury."

No one had taken them seriously at the time. However, two decades after publishing their idea, Mercury produced their first successful subjects. The test graduates were only teenagers and the conditioning was prone to failure, but they were enough to change things. Mercury stopped being referred to as a cult by the majority and started being spoken of as a think tank.

It took one hundred years for them to morph into a group of visionaries, the saviors of the Psy. "The first pro-Silence Council was dominated by acolytes of Mercury. Two were graduates of their beta version of the Protocol."

"Sascha?"

Startled out of her painful thoughts on the high cost of such absolute Silence, she turned. Faith's hand was outstretched, a touch halted midthought. "You have to be more careful," she said gently. She had no desire to reinforce the straitjacket of Silence, but so long as the other cardinal was in the Net, she had to be hyperaware.