Each showed a glow painful enough to cause flickering afterimages on the retinas. No way to tell who was inside the light.
“I’ll allow it to leak that you and Illium were testing a power transfer like Lijuan can do with her troops.” Dmitri’s tone was clear, his features grim. “I’ll also let it drop that it went wrong and Illium lost the power in an uncontrolled surge that caused the rain and lightning. No one’s going to forget the sheer fury of the incident—failed experiment or not, you’re clearly no easy target.” A short pause before his lips curved in a grim smile. “The belief that you’ve been running dangerous experiments with him will also answer the lingering questions about his earlier fall.”
“Do it.” Raphael had appreciated Dmitri’s tactical mind many times over the centuries, but never more than today. “No one wants to accept that an angel barely over five hundred years old could ascend. All we have to do is provide an alternative explanation.”
Elena picked up one of the photographs after Dmitri left. “Raphael, is it my imagination or are you stronger?”
Of course, his consort would feel the change. They were too intimately entwined for it to be otherwise. “What I drew from Illium didn’t leach off. It’s become woven into my body, an auxiliary generator of a kind.”
Dropping the photograph, Elena faced him, her boots touching his. “If Caliane’s power transfer theory is right, then Illium became more temporarily because you need more power than you can generate on your own.” She spread one hand protectively over his heart, brushing the thumb of her other over his right temple, over the Legion mark. “Something bad is coming. Worse than before.”
Enclosing her in his wings and his arms, Raphael didn’t say anything. They both knew she was right.
Eleven archangels.
A dangerous near ascension that could’ve annihilated an entire city.
Two Ancients walking the earth.
An archangel who could give a twisted form of life.
The Cascade was gathering momentum.
Beijing was already gone. New York and Elijah’s territory had barely survived. No one could predict how much of the world would be left standing when the Cascade ended.
“Together, hbeebti.”
“Always, Archangel.”
Turn the page for an excerpt from
Slave to Sensation
the first book in Nalini Singh’s bestselling Psy-Changeling series.
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Sascha Duncan couldn’t read a single line of the report flickering across the screen of her handheld organizer. A haze of fear clouded her vision, insulating her from the cold efficiency of her mother’s office. Even the sound of Nikita wrapping up a call barely penetrated her numbed mind.
She was terrified.
This morning, she’d woken to find herself curled up in bed, whimpering. Normal Psy did not whimper, did not show any emotion, did not feel. But Sascha had known since childhood that she wasn’t normal. She’d successfully hidden her flaw for twenty-six years but now things were going wrong. Very, very wrong.
Her mind was deteriorating at such an accelerating rate that she’d begun experiencing physical side effects—muscle spasms, tremors, an abnormal heart rhythm, and those ragged tears after dreams she never recalled. It would soon become impossible to conceal her fractured psyche. The result of exposure would be incarceration at the Center. Of course no one called it a prison. Termed a “rehabilitation facility,” it provided a brutally efficient way for the Psy to cull the weak from the herd.
After they were through with her, if she was lucky she’d end up a drooling mess with no mind to speak of. If she wasn’t so fortunate, she’d retain enough of her thinking processes to become a drone in the vast business networks of the Psy, a robot with just enough neurons functioning to file the mail or sweep the floors.
The feel of her hand tightening on the organizer jolted her back to reality. If there was one place she couldn’t break down, it was here, sitting across from her mother. Nikita Duncan might be her blood but she was also a member of the Psy Council. Sascha wasn’t sure that if it came down to it, Nikita wouldn’t sacrifice her daughter to keep her place on the most powerful body in the world.
With grim determination, she began to reinforce the psychic shields that protected the secret corridors of her mind. It was the one thing she excelled at and by the time her mother finished her call, Sascha exhibited as much emotion as a sculpture carved from arctic ice.
“We have a meeting with Lucas Hunter in ten minutes. Are you ready?” Nikita’s almond-shaped eyes held nothing but cool interest.
“Of course, Mother.” She forced herself to meet that direct gaze without flinching, trying not to wonder if her own was as unrevealing. It helped that, unlike Nikita, she had the night-sky eyes of a cardinal Psy—an endless field of black scattered with pinpricks of cold white fire.
“Hunter is an alpha changeling so don’t underestimate him. He thinks like a Psy.” Nikita turned to bring up her computer screen, a flat panel that slid up and out from the surface of her desk.
Sascha called up the relevant data on her organizer. The miniature computer held all the notes she could possibly need for the meeting and was compact enough to slip into her pocket. If Lucas Hunter stuck true to type, he’d turn up with paper hard copies of everything.
According to her information, Hunter had become the only ruling alpha in the DarkRiver leopard pack at twenty-three years of age. In the ten years since, DarkRiver had consolidated its hold over San Francisco and surrounding regions to the extent that they were now the dominant predators in the area. Outside changelings who wanted to work, live, or play in DarkRiver territory had to receive their permission. If they didn’t, changeling territorial law went into force and the outcome was savage.
What had made Sascha’s eyes open wide in her first reading of this material was that DarkRiver had negotiated a mutual nonaggression pact with the SnowDancers, the wolf pack that controlled the rest of California. Since the SnowDancers were known to be vicious and unforgiving to anyone who dared rise to power in their territory, it made her wonder at DarkRiver’s civilized image. No one survived the wolves by playing nice.
A soft chime sounded.
“Shall we go, Mother?” Nothing about Nikita’s relationship to Sascha was, or had ever been, maternal, but protocol stated she was to be addressed by her family designation.
Nikita nodded and stood to her full height, a graceful five eight. Dressed in a black pantsuit teamed with a white shirt, she looked every inch the successful woman she was, her hair cut to just below her ears in a blunt style that suited her. She was beautiful. And she was lethal.