Chapter 43
Fear is a thief that comes in the bright light of day, an intruder arrogant and assured.
--Unknown philosopher (18th century)
"YOU'RE HAUNTED BY what you did," she whispered, her night-glow eyes stunningly beautiful.
"Not by the killing. That was in self-defense." He'd never suffered any guilt over the actions of that thirteen-year-old boy, or over what had followed. His parents burning down the barn after burying the telepath where no one would ever find her, and the disappearance of the neighbor girl.
A Psy squad had responded to the telepath's sudden disconnection from the PsyNet, but they'd been hours too late. Either the telepath hadn't been important enough to rate an immediate response, or she'd been a disposable pawn. One who could be shrugged off while leaving her masters with plausible deniability.
As for the neighbor girl, nobody in Bowen's family had touched her; she'd come into the barn seconds after Bo drove the pen into his attacker's carotid. Whatever she'd seen on his blood-splattered face had made her run. Bo had a feeling she hadn't lived a very long life after that--the kind of people for whom she'd worked rewarded success, not failure.
"That feeling of being under someone's control," he said, "having a stranger's psychic touch forced into me--" He gripped his knee hard enough that the skin of his hand went bloodless. "I still wake with nightmares where I can feel her fingers crawling in my brain, in my memories, in me."
"Here." Kaia held Hex out to him after coaxing her mouse from his perch. "Pet Hex. It's good for stress and he likes you, so it won't stress him."
Feeling naked and vulnerable and fucking scraped raw, Bo lifted his hand, palm open.
"I'll ask Attie to tell Ashaya not to come," Kaia said after transferring over an agreeable Hex.
"It had nothing to do with you." Bowen needed her to understand the truth on a level that would forever erase the pain he'd inflicted. "I was angry because I thought you were deliberately keeping a secret from me, but the rest of it--"
"I know." Kaia's fingers on his cheek, her tenderness giving him a reprieve from once more acknowledging the fear that was a shadow he'd never been able to shed.
Shuddering, he sat down fully on the grass, his back against the bench. When Hex ran down his leg and onto the grass, he let the mouse explore. Hex stayed close, as if simply stretching out his tiny legs. "Don't you want to use it?" he asked after a while with a frown. "You said it's like an arm or a leg, but you never get to stretch those muscles. That doesn't seem right."
"You're a strange man, Bowen Knight." A touch on his hair, the caress featherlight. All his muscles bunched. The touch grew firmer, Kaia's fingers stroking through his hair in a way Bo wanted to see as possessive. He wasn't a man who touched often, and in the months before the assassination attempt, he hadn't really had contact with people beyond the hugs he gave Lily.
It hadn't been a conscious choice.
So many years and all his attention, all his focus, all his energy had gone into the Alliance. But when Kaia touched him, he knew he'd never again be satisfied living a monastic life devoid of her laughter, her caresses, her joyous playfulness.
* * *
*
"NOW you want me to use my telepathy?" Kaia asked with a tug at Bowen's hair.
"It's part of you." Unsaid was that he accepted all of her--even when her gift was entwined with his greatest nightmare.
Fury raced through her like a lightning storm at what the unscrupulous telepath had done, the damage she'd caused in the heart of the boy Bo had once been. "I suppose if I'd grown up using it and then suddenly had to stop, I'd miss it," she said, answering his question because she understood his hunger for knowledge now, maybe better than he did himself.
If he knew enough about telepathy, perhaps the fear would stop tormenting him deep in the night when he should be able to lower his shields and rest. "But I grew up around changelings with solid shields."
"What about your own shields? How did you learn to create them? I've heard telepaths can become overwhelmed by the noise of the world."
Kaia paused. "I've never thought about that." But the answer was obvious. "I must've learned by running up against changeling shields. Baby see, baby do, so to speak." She'd had a powerful shield against unwanted external input by the time her parents took her out into the wider world.
"It's also possible your brain works differently than a fully Psy brain and you were born with the shield."
"Yes, that's very possible." Kaia certainly couldn't remember ever being overwhelmed by psychic noise.
"If true, that gives you a psychic advantage."
He shifted his head slightly.
Heart swelling with an emotion she shouldn't be feeling for this man whose time was running out--except that it was far too late to step back--she restarted her petting of his hair.
"Have you ever used your telepathy to communicate?"
"I have a few clanmates with telepathic abilities." Nowhere near as strong as hers but enough to hold a conversation. "We mostly treat it as a game, to be honest. Like a parlor trick."
And at last, he broke out of the shadows with a laugh. "Only you would treat telepathy as a parlor trick."
"I have gills if I want them and I can swim in the black." She tugged playfully on his hair again. "What's telepathy next to that? I can open my mouth or change my expression and communicate as effectively."
Bowen looked over his shoulder at her, his smile a thing of beauty. She wanted to tumble him to the grass and kiss him and hold him and try to soothe the pain of the boy he'd once been. Because it existed still inside this powerful man. But he wasn't done with his questions.
Shifting position to lean against her legs so she had better access to his hair, he said, "Your clan knew about the Psy need for biofeedback long before Sascha Duncan defected into DarkRiver. Did you tell the cats?"
"We weren't allies then." She ran her fingers down to his neck, began to give him a gentle massage. "By the time we heard about the defection, the leopards had already figured out what they needed to do."
He dropped his head a little forward. Kaia massaged out the stiffness, giving him a soft end to a hard night. It had nearly destroyed him to tell her what he had--but he'd done it because he'd caused her pain and that wasn't acceptable to him. Even if it meant tearing open his greatest hurt.
She leaned down and kissed the skin of his nape.
A shiver ran through him.
Getting up onto his knees, he turned and braced his hands on either side of her on the bench. It was instinct to bend and press her mouth to his. He let her lead the kiss . . . until he wrapped his arms tight around her and pulled her right off the bench.
Landing on his back on the grass with an audible "oof," Kaia sprawled on top of him, he laughed and that laugh fell into the kiss. When she said, "Hex," in a worried voice, he shook his head. "He's a few feet to our right. We didn't crush him."
The sudden spike of worry flatlining, she returned to a kiss that was molten wetness and a dark demand. Bo gripped the back of her head with one hand, while his other arm was a steel band around her waist, but Kaia felt no fear, nothing but a sense of rightness that was liquid fire in her veins.
Breathless, needy, she demanded as much in turn. He gave without hesitation.
His body was big and warm and his heart pounded so powerful a beat that her blood thundered in time with it. "Bo."
Tightening his hold, he flicked his tongue at her own, teasing her with soft licks and sucks; it spoke to the other part of her nature as deeply as it did to the human side.
Kaia was seduced by playful and roughly real as she'd never be by smooth charm or practiced seduction.
A little nip of her lower lip that made her toes curl, then a groan that tore out of him as he kissed her deeper and deeper. Until she didn't want to break it even though she needed air, her lungs aching.
When he pulled up her dress to stroke one hand over her thighs, she moaned and said, "Hurry," driven by a
visceral hunger to erase the darkness of what had come before with passion and sweetness and touch.
Bowen moved his hands to the sides of her panties and began to tug down the flimsy scrap of lace. The erotic brush of lace against flesh, the rough warmth of his hands, the way he kept becoming distracted by the damp heat between her legs . . . Kaia would go mad before he was done.
Scrambling back, she took care of the task herself, then got to work on his belt. He rose up on his elbows and watched her, the glittering heat of his eyes accompanied by a slight smile that made her crave another kiss. But she needed this most primal sense of connection with him even more. Belt undone, she flipped open the button on his jeans and pulled down his zipper, careful over the hard ridge of his body.
It didn't take her long to free him into her hands--to the hiss of his breath. She straddled him, her dress covering them both. "If we get caught," she whispered as she sank down into him, her nails digging into his chest through his shirt, "just pretend I'm sitting on you."
He laughed and it came out a groan. "You can sit on me anytime you like, Siren." He sounded like himself again, no fractures in his psyche from that long-ago attack, but Kaia knew that was an impossibility. The fractures might one day heal totally, but the scars would remain. She wondered if he'd ever spoken about the horrific attack to anyone--she'd ask him another time. They'd had enough darkness today, enough pain.
Today, she'd love him with her body and show him once again that there was more to this world than a fight for survival.
Flowing over him, she kissed him slow and deep as she rocked her body on his. He put his hands on her hips to help her maintain the rhythm and so she wouldn't have to do all the work. Kaia smiled against his mouth. "You're a keeper, Bowen Knight," she whispered. It was so quiet that she didn't know if he'd heard.
His fingers clenched on her hips, his body beginning to stiffen. She increased her pace, ready to watch him go over, but her lover was a master at strategy. He put his hands on her breasts and squeezed her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers, jolting her beyond the edge in the instant before he fell.
Chapter 44
Mama and Papa won't wake up.
--Kaia Luna (7) to Geraldine Rhys
KAIA LAY ON top of Bowen, their clothing set to rights but their hearts pumping and their breaths short. He had one arm around her back, the other folded under his head, a big warm male pillow with more than one hard edge.
Unbuttoning his shirt to expose the warmth of his skin, she spread her hand on him with a sigh. He didn't have any chest hair, though the last time they'd been in bed she'd discovered a trail lower down on his abdomen. As he'd discovered so many exquisitely sensitive places on her own body.
"Someone's coming," he murmured.
Kaia had already heard the low-voiced conversation of a couple on a walk, been lazily ignoring it. "They won't see us if we stay quiet and motionless." It helped that she'd chosen a bench in a pool of liquid night created by the dimmed lighting as Ryujin settled into sleep.
Station dwellers all worked different shifts, but they tried not to lose complete touch with the surface world. It made meetings and research cooperation difficult if the Ryujin scientists were on a divergent sleep cycle. As a result, the entire station went "dark" for about four hours a night.
She continued to pet Bo as they lay there. He didn't stop her exploration, not even when she traced the scars above his heart, where the surgeons had gone in. She'd seen the bullet scar on his back, too. The impact site had, ironically, suffered almost no damage; it was inside him that the designed-to-fragment bullet had devastated.
Those, however, were far from the only scars on his body. "What's this from?" She rubbed a faint ridge on his lower abdomen as Hex came over to curl up in the warm spot between Bowen's shoulder and neck.
"Security op when I was young. Stealing back data a Psy business had stolen from a human one. I didn't dodge a knife-wielding ninja fast enough."
Kaia laughed softly. "A knife-wielding ninja?"
"Fine, you've tortured the truth out of me," he grumbled. "An explosive detonated early, blew a piece of shrapnel into my gut--looks and sounds bad but it didn't perforate any internal organs, just my pride." Despite his scowling words, his eyes were closed and he lay boneless against the grass, akin to one of the changelings who liked being stroked. A cat, maybe. Or perhaps a wolf. Maybe even a creature like Kaia. Or maybe he was simply being human.
Kaia had known a great many humans as a child, her mother and father defiant adventurers who wanted to save the world. So foolish, so wonderfully hopeful. So deeply betrayed by the very people they'd fought to help. "If only my parents could've known I'd one day exchange skin privileges with a human under the moonlight."
Bowen ran his fingers through his hair. "Would you be struck from the family tree?"
Kaia smiled. "No. My parents were rebels--they didn't believe in BlackSea's isolationist policies. They'd be happy I no longer see humans as a monolithic group. My mama and papa taught me to judge each individual person on their own actions." But the child she'd been, scared and angry and grieving, had forgotten that lesson.
"Why were you so angry toward humanity?" Bowen asked softly. "It had to do with more than Hugo's dossier, didn't it?"
No smile on her face or in her heart now. "My parents fell ill from a virus running red-hot through a human township." Her mother had been working in the township's run-down clinic to stem the tide of illness, while her father had driven emergency supplies in and out--Kaia herself had been enrolled in the local school, but her father would pick her up after school and she'd ride with him.
"Why blame humanity for a virus?"
"I didn't blame them for the virus. I blamed them for not giving my parents the medicines they needed." Even so young, Kaia--the child of a doctor--had known Elenise and Iosef shouldn't be dumped in the corridor without even the most rudimentary line of fluids going into their bodies.
Bowen crushed her closer to the hard heat of him. "Corruption?"
"Certain people pulled strings to get their families seen to first, even though they weren't critical like Mama and Papa--and even though my parents had done more to help than any of them." Her face went all hot as it had done when she'd been a small girl afraid and suddenly without the voices of the two people who were her world. "They left my parents on stretchers in the corridor, on dirty sheets."
Scalding wet burned the backs of her eyes. "I ran back to our small home to get them blankets, but someone had broken in, taken everything."
"Ah, baby." Bowen's free hand coming around to cup the back of her head, his mouth pressing a kiss to her hair. "How old were you?"
"Seven." Scared and alone in a distant land. "We didn't have a built-in comm and the thieves took the organizers. My mother should've had a phone in her pocket, but it was gone by the time I found them on the stretchers--after my father didn't come to pick me up from school." She'd run over to the clinic with a friend who lived close to it, figuring he'd been held up and she'd sit in her mother's office.
"I want to kill the bastards who did that to you." Bowen's muscles rock hard under her, around her.
"I finally found a nurse who'd worked with my mother and she snuck me into the supervisor's room so I could use the clinic's single comm to call my aunt." Her parents had made sure she memorized a list of emergency call codes. "BlackSea airlifted my parents to one of our own clinics, but even with how fast the clan responded, it was too late. If they'd had the medicines in time . . ."
Kaia had sat and watched their chests rise and fall because of the machines and she'd willed them to wake up even knowing it was far too late. "I began to hate humans the day my mother and father stopped breathing."
"I'm sorry, Siren. I can't blame you for it." His exhale was rough, his hold warm and strong. "I ran on hate against the Psy for a long time."
That he understood and didn't judge her for her pain-fueled anger, it meant everything. "What changed?"
"A little Psy girl in the street who rushed to pull a kitten to safety when it would've tumbled into a canal, Ashaya working so hard to build a shield for humans, empaths helping to heal broken human minds, the old Psy woman at the grocery store who carefully adds up her purchases before going to pay . . ."
Another kiss pressed to her hair. "The adult me knows not all Psy are powerful or wealthy or ruthless. I see them struggling to survive same as humans and changelings. But even then, I can't forget what the Psy as a group have done to humanity over the centuries."
Kaia petted his chest. "It's hard, isn't it?" To forget. To forgive.
"You're stronger than me, Kaia. Thank you for not kicking this human to the curb."
She smiled, and it was shaky. "Some things are inevitable."
Even when they were the worst possible choice for a woman.
Kaia was a cook in an undersea station for a reason. It was safe. People didn't get shot going about their business. And because strangers couldn't easily come or go, the station wasn't exposed to potentially devastating diseases. As she'd learned as a child, while changelings were tough, they weren't immune to deadly pathogens. Should there be an outbreak on land or even in the floating city above, the station could be sealed; at least some of her friends and family would survive.
She wouldn't, once again, lose everyone she most loved in a single horrific event.
Bowen Knight wasn't safe, would never be safe. The woman who called him her own would have to accept that each and every day of her life. Kaia's scarred heart didn't have that capacity--it was as well that was a road she wouldn't be asked to travel . . . because Bowen would leave her one way or another.
To the surface, she thought fiercely, she'd lose him to the surface and to the land that was a nightmare she could never again face. Her world was the deep and the ocean close to Ryujin, and, very rarely, Bebe's isolated little island with its five palm trees and two fruit trees amid rocks and sand.
Kaia hadn't walked on inhabited land since she was seven years old.
Chapter 45
We're heading to Ryujin. Apply for leave.
--Edison Kahananui to his brothers Armand, Teizo, Tevesi, and Taji