Then they’d kissed and she’d had another shock. Affection had whispered between them. Not passion, not hunger, not desire. Her mind was having trouble with the thought that Lucas’s kiss hadn’t caused Rina to burst into sexual flame.

A knock on the door startled her into a soundless gasp. “Yes?”

Tamsyn’s smile appeared in the doorway. “I brought you a cup of hot chocolate. If you need anything else, let me know.” She put the mug down on a bedside table. “I’ll leave you in peace.”

“Tamsyn?”

“Yes?” She paused with her hand on the doorknob.

“Can you explain something to me?” Sascha couldn’t ask Lucas. It would betray too much she wasn’t ready to face. However, Tamysn had said she was a healer. Maybe that meant what was said between them would remain in confidence.

“The kiss?” Tamsyn raised a brow.

Sascha thought she hid her surprise well. “Yes.”

“It’s like when he kissed me the first time we met. He’s alpha and each time he touches us, he reinforces the bonds of Pack. With the women, he’s generally more affectionate.” She rolled her eyes. “They’re chauvinistic pigs but we love them. Anyway, as I was saying, that kiss wasn’t sexual in any way. It was about… togetherness.”

“What about with the men?” Sascha asked, the seeds of understanding blooming in her mind.

“They go for night runs, fight each other to test their skills, and occasionally get together to play poker or watch a game. It works.” She gave a mystified shrug.

“So a kiss is nothing special to Lucas?” Her idiocy where this one male was concerned kept surprising her into hurt. He’d said it was an experiment. Perhaps he’d wanted to know what it was like to kiss a “hunk of concrete.”

Tamsyn cocked her head to the side and gave Sascha a probing look. “Inside the pack, it’s special because it tells us he cares for us, that he’ll die for us.”

Sascha nodded, feeling worse and worse.

“But outside the pack? The only women I’ve known Lucas to kiss outside the pack are the ones he wants in his bed.” The door shut behind the grinning healer.

Sascha’s cheeks flamed. Lucas wanted her in his bed. In spite of her vows to not let him reach her, she was aroused to fever pitch. Concentration went out the window. Dreams intertwined with reality and she remembered his kiss in the forest as she remembered his far more intimate kiss in her dreams.

It was the prosaic sound of an engine getting closer that brought back the world and reminded her what she was meant to be doing. Taking a deep breath, she sat down cross-legged on the floor and started to recite a mental exercise so demanding, it succeeded in driving everything else from her mind. Ready, she took the first step out into the Net.

The world opened.

In front of her was an endless starry sky. Each star was a mind, some strong, some weak. Her star was at the center of this universe because she was the entry point. The PsyNet was spread across the world but if she wanted find a particular mind, all she had to do was think of it and it would appear in her field of vision, something like a link on the human-changeling Internet. However, similarly to a link, she had to have a starting point-knowledge of what the mind felt like, looked like.

There was her mother’s blazing star-a cool, pure brilliance. Over there were some of the Psy who worked in the Duncan empire. But she didn’t want to speak to anyone today. What she was interested in were the dark spaces between minds, the spaces where information floated, controlled into order by the NetMind.

She allowed her consciousness to flow out, letting data filter through her as if she were doing nothing more than catching up on the news. The NetMind brushed past her and kept going, not alive, not dead, but sentient in a way the world had never known. Still young, it was the librarian of this vast archive.

It would’ve been easy to become sidetracked by the endless streams of data, but despite her free-floating appearance, she was being very choosy, her senses tuned to a fine point. This was about murder… and the greatest lie that had ever been perpetuated by a race upon its own kind.

Lucas returned a few minutes after five to find Sascha and Tamsyn standing in the yard.

“The juveniles?” the healer asked the second he got within earshot.

Sascha looked up, face drawn. “Are they all right?”

“They were already on their way back by the time I tracked down their whereabouts.”

“They heard?” Tamsyn’s relief was obvious.

Lucas saw Sascha frown as she realized that something was going on beneath the surface. It had been inevitable. She was too smart to miss much. “They were stopped by a SnowDancer patrol and told to haul ass back home.”

“Were your packmates injured?”

He shook his head. “They treated the kids as if they were wolf pups.” That was very unusual. When they’d first decided on a truce, Hawke had put out the word that the leopards were allies, but letting them pass without trouble and doing what the soldiers had done was something entirely different. Lucas had been alpha too long not to understand the implied message, but it was an offer he couldn’t accept without considerable thought. “They’ll be home by nightfall.”

Tammy smiled. “I’ll leave you two to catch up.”

He waited for Sascha to ask what was going on but she shook her head. “Don’t trust me.” She rubbed at her eyes. “My mind is vulnerable as long as I’m uplinked to the Net.”

He had far more faith in her skills than she had in herself, he thought. “What did you find?” They’d discuss her connection to the PsyNet another time.

“Nothing.” Fatigue dulled her tone.

He moved close enough to caress her cheek with his knuckles. “It exhausted you.”

She didn’t pull away and when his hand dropped from her face to entangle with one of her hands, she curled her fingers around his. He had to stifle the panther’s satisfied growl.

“There was nothing useful in the public files.”

“But?” He could read the confusion, the bewilderment in her face. Whatever she’d learned had shaken her enough that she was no longer able to maintain her usual mask.

Ebony-dark eyes looked up at him before glancing away. “I felt the shadows of violence,” she whispered. “Like someone had left behind a mental print in certain places.”

“Could you use it to track them?”

“No.” She shook her head. “The print is faint. Most Psy wouldn’t even be able to detect it.”

But she had, he thought, because she felt. Instead of making her confront something he was convinced of but she was clearly hiding from, he used his free hand to tuck an errant strand of hair behind her ear. “So the info’s been buried deep?”

She nodded. “I’m going to try a few other things tonight.”

He smelled fear in the air. “Will it be dangerous?”

“I’m a cardinal Psy.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s all I have to give you.” She pulled her hand from his.

Some time later, Lucas sat in the huge kitchen of their largest safe house, talking to Tamsyn and two of the most dangerous males in his pack. Dorian had fought his inexplicable handicap by skilling himself in human martial arts to such an extent that he could take down a fully grown leopard with his bare hands. Nate was perhaps even more lethal-he had cubs to protect. “How many here?” Lucas asked.

“Fourteen maternal females, twenty cubs, eight juveniles, and six other soldiers aside from you three,” Tamsyn said from the counter, where she was organizing medical supplies.

He turned to Dorian. “Is everyone accounted for?”

“Yes. Over half the children are already on their way to safe harbor.”

“Let’s start moving the remaining cubs and the vulnerable females tomorrow morning.” The soldier females like Rina would remain behind. Many of them were far more deadly than the beta males. “Continue sprinkling the elders in among the evacuees.” Their old ones would ensure DarkRiver’s traditions were passed down no matter what.