The oldest two were males, one dark blond, the other with hair the color of rich chocolate. Both had human eyes. The fair-haired male looked to be around forty, but the other was nearer Sascha's age. Then there was a teenage girl with deep red hair and the eyes of a cardinal Psy. She sat protectively next to a young boy who had the same hair and the same eyes. Last, a girl of about ten sat between the two older males. She had strawberry blonde hair and the feel of a powerful Psy. Her eyes were a pale green.
"How?" How had they survived being cut off from the Net? How had they survived at all?
"We're not cold-blooded murderers, Sascha." Hawke's voice was ice. "Not like the Psy." He sat down and Sascha let Lucas nudge her into a seat, too.
The teenager's head shot up and Sascha swore she felt a spike of temper. "You're making generalizations again. That's the same as saying all wolves are vicious."
Instead of getting angry, Hawke seemed to relax a fraction. "Sascha Duncan, meet Sienna Lauren. Next to her is her brother, Toby." He gestured to the two older males.
The blond one stood, his bearing as erect as a soldier's. "I'm Walker Lauren. Sienna and Toby are the children of my deceased sister. This is my daughter, Marlee." He nodded to the girl who sat beside him. A small hand slipped into his and his fingers curled around it.
"I'm Judd Lauren," the dark-haired man said after Walker sat down. "Walker's brother."
"I don't understand." Sascha could barely think through the riot of questions in her mind. "You're listed as dead on the Net." And the NetMind did not make mistakes.
"As far as the Net is concerned, we are," Walker answered.
In spite of the way he'd accepted Marlee's touch, she could feel nothing from him. Nothing. The same with Judd Lauren. The youngest two, Marlee and Toby, were definitely giving off emotion but Sienna was harder to read. "Are you all E-Psy?"
Sienna shook her head. "What's an E-Psy?"
Walker threw her a sharp look. "Sienna."
The teenager sat back, her mouth shut. Sascha knew that the two males had to be worried that Sascha would betray them, linked as she was to the Net.
"Why did you come into SnowDancer territory? You had to know it was courting death."
Walker and Judd glanced at each other and when Walker spoke, she knew he spoke for all of them. "We defected."
Her shock had her reaching for Lucas's hand, clasping it tight as it sat on the table. "What?"
"The entire family was slated for rehabilitation after our sister committed suicide." Walker's calm tone gave away nothing but Sascha could feel pain and anguish coming off Marlee and Toby.
Instinctively, she did what she could to soothe them. Sienna's eyes widened. "What are you doing, Sascha?"
Walker and Judd froze, looking at Sascha as one would eye a poisonous snake. Judd turned to Hawke. "You promised us she was safe." The words were razor sharp.
"She is." The pale eyes of a wolf met Sascha's. "Tell them what you were doing, sweetheart."
Lucas bristled. "Watch it, wolf."
Hawke's smile was slow and very satisfied. Next to him, Sienna sat up absolutely straight in her chair, looking from the two alphas back to Sascha.
"I'm sorry," Sascha apologized, ignoring the byplay between the males. "My control over my powers is still a little erratic. I'm an E-Psy, an empath."
Walker leaned forward. "There's no such thing as an E designation."
"There used to be before Silence," she told him. "E-Psy are healers of the mind. We're supposed to help people who are drowning under the weight of emotion, but I guess our existence was a roadblock to the implementation of the Protocol." So they'd been quietly destroyed. Despite everything she knew about her race, that admission of ultimate betrayal felt like a knife cut to the soul.
"I think we need to talk," Walker said.
"Yes." She felt Lucas's beast awaken, his possessive instincts disliking the idea of her alone with the other male. "I think we all need to talk more."
Walker took the hint. "Of course."
She thought back to what they'd been speaking about. "Why was the whole family sentenced to the Center?" She looked at the innocent faces of the children and wondered what kind of a cruel mind could deprive them of their personalities before they'd even had a chance to develop. She wasn't naive enough to think that the Lauren children had been the first to be so condemned, but nothing she'd seen thus far had prepared her for this new horror.
"My mother took her life in a most unusual fashion for a Psy - a cardinal Psy," Sienna said, ignoring Walker's look. "She stripped herself naked and teleported off Golden Gate Bridge, screaming that she was finally free."
Chapter 23
Sascha looked into the young cardinal's eyes and wanted to tell her to let the anger and pain out. Damming it up behind a wall of silence would only equal a slow death. She'd learned that the hard way.
"We'd also had several... incidents in the past. The Council decided they needed to 'purge' our family tree of undesirable traits." Judd's eyes went to Marlee. "Non-biological members of the family were given the choice to renounce any relationship or undergo rehabilitation."
Sascha read between the lines and what she heard was so heartbreaking she couldn't speak. Marlee's biological mother had forsaken her child, handed her over for torture. The staggering nature of the betrayal was something no one with a human or changeling heart would ever understand. And Sascha's heart was no longer Psy, if it had ever been.
"How can you be alive?" Lucas raised her hand to his lips for a gentle kiss. She knew it wasn't a territorial marking - it was simply a changeling gesture of affection for a mate, something he hadn't even thought about. But all the Psy in the room noticed. And wondered. "According to Sascha, once you're cut off from the Net, you lose the feedback needed to function."
"That's what we thought," Walker began. "When we decided to defect, we came to the SnowDancers because of their reputation with the Psy. They're thought of as brutal animals who kill without conscience. However, we'd researched them during the time the Council allowed us to wrap up our affairs. We knew they wouldn't destroy Toby and Marlee on sight."
Sascha frowned. "I don't think the little ones need to be here for this." Their fear was very real and very scary.
"That's what I told them," Hawke said, a tic at the corner of his mouth. "We don't talk about this kind of stuff in front of pups."
"You expect us to leave them to your tender care?" Judd asked.
"Sienna, take the kids and go," Hawke ordered.
Surprising Sascha, the clearly headstrong teenager stood and took Toby's hand. "Marlee, come here."
The girl looked to her father. Finally, Walker nodded. Marlee almost ran to Sienna's other side and slipped her hand into the redhead's free one. The young ones had obviously become used to touch in the months they'd been here and, Sascha guessed, the older Psy were trying to learn to accept those touches for the children's sake. No normal Psy would've ever allowed care for another to influence them, but the Laurens were hardly normal.
"I'm doing this for Toby and Marlee, not you." The defiant words were directed at Hawke.
The alpha gave her a mock-salute. "Heaven forbid you do anything because I asked you to."
"I deserve to know what's going on." Sienna looked at her uncles. "I'm not a child."
"Stay in contact." Walker's tone revealed nothing of what he thought of Sienna's going over to the "dark side" and obeying Hawke's command.
No one spoke until the door had closed behind Sienna and the kids. Then they talked of death.
"So you expected to die," Sascha said.
"Of course." Walker nodded. "But we wanted to give Toby and Marlee a chance. They're young enough to learn to live a new way, their minds still plastic. We hoped that they might survive the necessary cutoff from the Net, somehow be able to find new pathways in their brain. It wasn't much of a chance but it was more than they'd have had otherwise."
"Sienna?"
"She was sixteen at the time." Walker's eyes were so coldly clinical that it startled Sascha to realize they were the same pale green as Marlee's. "We worked on the assumption that the wolves would see her as a threat and eliminate her."
"Yet you brought her in?" Lucas's voice was a whip. "You took a juvenile into almost certain death?"
If Sascha didn't know better, she'd have thought that Judd's jaw set in anger. "We had no choice," the younger male said. "Sienna would rather have died than be rehabilitated. If we hadn't taken her, she would've followed us on her own."
Sascha stroked Lucas with the secret part of her mind, which she was finally learning to understand. "They're right," she said. "Rehabilitation is worse than death, worse than anything you can imagine."
Lucas allowed her to soothe him, allowed her to surround him in affection. "Why didn't you kill them?" he asked Hawke.
"We're not idiots - it was obvious they'd come expecting death-by-changeling." His hand was a fist on the table.
"We captured them with the intention of collecting a ransom."
"Then we told him it was the Council that would pay the ransom and why," Judd said. "It left him in a bad position. He couldn't have five Net-linked Psy in his territory and since he has a conscience, he couldn't simply execute us or hand us over to be rehabilitated. He told us to cut the link."
"We'd always known that any of us who survived the SnowDancers would have to do that in any case to ensure our safety," Walker added. "Once the Council figured out we'd escaped, they would've used the Net link to exterminate us. No one defects from the Psy."
