Mine to Possess

“Not at first. I had no way to track you after you got out of juvie.” She kicked at the grass. “Then one day, a few weeks ago, I thought I saw you. Drove me crazy-I thought I was hallucinating, making up fantasies of what you would’ve looked like as an adult.”

He didn’t respond, despite the near-echo of his earlier thoughts.

She blew out a breath. “I swear-” The abrasive sound of teeth grinding against each other. “I went back to where I thought I’d seen you, realized it was the DarkRiver business HQ, and looked them up on the Internet. I still wasn’t sure-there was no photo and you changed your last name to Bennett.”

It had been a way to drop off the face of the world, to lose any simmering media attention. But over the years, it had become his name. “We’ll talk about you tracking me later,” he said, cold fire burning a hole in his gut. “First, tell me why you need my help.”

“If you’re trying to scare me, it’s working. That doesn’t mean I’m going to cut and run.”

In that bravado-filled challenge, he caught another fleeting glimpse of the girl she’d been. The day they had met, she’d sat there beside him, wide-eyed and terrified to her tiny toes, but stubborn enough not to leave till the paramedics came. “Why not?” he said, shifting his anger into sarcasm. “You’re real good at it.”

She raised her face to the canopy and took a deep breath, as if trying to hold on to her temper. He wondered if she’d succeed. His Tally had always been very quiet…except with him. He alone had known that she was neither shy nor particularly calm. The girl had a temper like a stick of dynamite. Quick to heat, quick to blow over.

“Kids are disappearing, not only here but across the country,” she now said, her anger red-hot, but no longer directed at him. “At first, they were labeled runaways, but I knew some of them. They weren’t that kind.” Her shoulders drew up. “Now I have proof I was right, and I wish every night that I didn’t.” Her voice broke.

“Talk to me.” He didn’t like seeing her in pain, never had, probably never would. This familiar stranger, this woman who saw him as a monster, was his one fucking fatal weakness and didn’t that just suck?

“They found Mickey’s body two weeks ago.” A tear streaked down her cheek. She dashed it away with a furious swipe. “He was eleven years old, bright, so bright, could remember everything he’d ever read.”

“Like you.”

“Yeah. Except instead of being abandoned as a baby, he had the bad luck to live with a mother who always chose abusive men.” She gave him a smile but it was nothing happy. “He was mine, Clay. I promised him safety and in return, he went to school every day.” Tremors shook her frame, whitened her knuckles. “Someone beat him to death. Everything was broken. The bastards pulverized his face-like they were wiping him out!”

Anger shot through his bloodstream. He thought of the children in the pack, of what he’d do to anyone who dared harm them. “One of his mother’s men?”

“I might have thought so, but Mickey was at a camp out of state when they took him. And it’s not only him we lost.” A breath that sounded as if her throat was lined with broken glass. “They found two more bodies this week. At least one more kid remains missing.”

The leopard half of his soul-angry, hurt, and still in shock at her return-wanted to go to her. To hold her. Tactile contact, affection as a method of healing, was the way of changelings, something he’d been taught after being pulled into DarkRiver. But Talin was scared of him. She had told him that to his face, and the sharp knife of it was still buried in his heart. The man wasn’t sure he wanted to chance another rejection. Keeping the animal’s instincts in check, he finally stepped out of the shadows. “Do you want to be held, Talin?”

Her damp eyes widened at the blunt question, then she nodded in a little jerking motion. Something in him quieted, waiting. “Then come here.”

A pause during which the entire forest seemed to freeze, the night creatures aware of the leopard’s tense watchfulness.

“Oh, God, Clay.” Suddenly her arms were wrapped around his back, her cheek pressed against the white cotton of his T-shirt.

Hardly daring to breathe, he closed his own arms around her feminine warmth, blindingly aware of every inch of her pressed into him, every spot of wetness soaking through his T-shirt.

She was so small, so damn soft, her humanity apparent in the delicacy of her skin, the lightness of her bones. The Psy might be fragile in comparison to changelings, but they had powers of the mind to compensate. Humans had the same fragility but none of the psychic abilities. A wave of protectiveness washed over him.

“Shh, Tally.” He used the nickname because, at this moment, he knew her. She had always had a heart too big for her body, a heart that felt such pain for others while ignoring its own. “I’ll find your lost one.”

She shook her head against him. “It’s too late. Three bodies already. Jonquil is probably dead, too.”

“Then I’ll find who did this to them and stop him.”