Ashaya looked up at him. "Dor - "

"She's dead. A Psy team will be sent out to investigate within the hour." Sascha had taught him that - death alone was an acceptable excuse for leaving the PsyNet. All Psy who dropped from the Net without explanation were searched for, a search that didn't stop until a body was found, or death confirmed. "It might be sooner if she got out a telepathic mayday. You can't be here when they arrive."

Ashaya didn't release the girl's hand. "What about you?"

He met her eyes. "I won't leave her alone in the dark."

"A silly emotional choice," Ashaya said, but her voice shook. "One I find myself wishing I had the freedom to make."

He shook his head, his leopard clawing at him in angry panic. "Go, Shaya. I keyed the car to you and the route's preprogrammed. Set it to automatic and get the hell out."

She withdrew her hand slowly from around the girl's. "This was a frenzied attack. She was cut so badly that she can't have come far."

"Go!"

His snapped command made her give a stiff nod and run back to the car. A minute later, she drove past him as he carried the girl off the road and through the stand of manicured trees that lined the road. The line of greenery acted as a fence for the complex of homes behind it. Small, contained buildings no predator would live in, but that suited the Psy. It was obvious the girl had come from the nearest house.

The door stood open and even from the bottom of the drive-way, he could see the bloody handprint on the door. It was stretched, as if she'd slipped. More blood lay drying on the steps leading down from the entrance hallway, on the white cobblestones of the drive, on the ground inches from his feet.

Carefully skirting the last of her lifeblood, he carried the girl's body back up to what had once been her safe haven. Like the site of Kylie's murder. The scent of an abattoir hit him as he neared. There was a sick miasma to the smell that he knew he'd never be able to explain to anyone who didn't possess the same acute sense of smell. Something had gone terribly, violently wrong in that small white house.

Then he was on the doorstep and what he saw made him wish, for one selfish instant, that he'd driven by a minute earlier, that he'd missed seeing the carnage. Now these images were imprinted on his retinas, to be filed away beside the ones that tormented him night after night. Holding the girl tighter, he stepped inside the house.

A single delicate hand was all that showed of what had to be another female body in the room to the left. He glanced inside, saw that she couldn't have been more than thirteen. She'd been stabbed only once but the weapon had hit her heart. The acetic furniture preferred by the Psy lay overturned, as if she'd made a desperate bid to escape. She hadn't even reached the doorway.

Not moving from his position in the center of the hallway, he looked to the right. Another room. Another body. This one was a male. Slender, perhaps in his early twenties. He'd fought hard - his hands were bloody and broken as they lay upturned on the pale carpet, his chest a veritable mass of stab wounds. The room paid silent testament to his struggle to survive, the hard-wearing plastic of the chairs cracked and splashed with the rust red of drying blood.

He looked down at the carpet. Following the trail of lost life, he found himself in what had to be the bedroom area. In the first room, he discovered a lone middle-aged male. The man lay on his back, dead from what appeared to be a self-inflicted stab wound to the heart. One of his hands was still wrapped around the blade. There was no peace in his face, none of that icy Psy calm either. No, this man looked tormented. As if he'd seen a glimpse of hell itself.

A flicker of movement behind him. Dorian turned slowly.

The Psy who'd teleported in was dressed in the head-to-toe black of elite Psy guards. His uniform bore the now familiar image of two golden snakes twined in combat - Ming's emblem.

Their eyes met. Cool Psy gray. Bright changeling blue.

Dorian recognized him in a single instant. Ming's emblem but Anthony's man. Zie Zen's pickup.

The Tk-Psy's attention went to the girl's body. "You need to leave." He raised his arms.

Dorian held her tighter. "What will you do to her?"

"Erase her," was the pitiless answer. "Erase all of them."

Dorian's jaw set. "No. Give me her name."

The Psy male held his gaze for almost a minute, then blinked very deliberately. A thin piece of plaspaper appeared in his hand. "Her birth ID."

"Aren't you afraid I'll talk about this and blow your cover?"

"No. In an hour, this place will be clean, so clean that not even changeling noses will be able to sniff out the blood." As if to prove that, he looked at the carpet and Dorian saw the blood drops literally detach from the fibers and rise to hover an inch above.

Dorian's leopard growled low in his throat. "Where's your team?"

"They're coming by car." The man raised his arms again. "You need to give her to me and disappear. I can't hide your presence if you're still here when the cleanup crew arrives."

"Why do this if you don't believe in your Council?"

"Every freedom has a price." His eyes shifted from gray to crawling black. Dorian saw more and more blood begin to rise out of the carpet and off the walls. "You need to leave. The PsyNet isn't ready to know this yet. But it will be one day."

Dorian walked across the now clean stretch of carpet and faced the Psy, the girl's body between them. "My memories will be your proof?" A Justice Psy could pick out those memories if he cooperated, and broadcast them to the court. "What about yours?"

The Psy took the murdered girl with the same care that Dorian handed her over. "I'm tired." A calm statement. "I can't continue to erase lives as if they were nothing more than marks on a page. I'll make a mistake. Then I'll die."

Dorian's ears picked up the sounds of steps on the cobblestones. "You don't have the right to be tired." He took the girl's birth ID, which was hovering in the air between them. "When you can write her name on a memorial, when you can honor her blood, then you'll have earned the right." He didn't give the Psy man a chance to answer, turning to make his way out the back door as the other members of the cleanup team came in through the front. As he moved, he could feel a screen of blood rising behind him.

Another image to add to the gallery of nightmare.

Chapter 28

Obsession comes easily to Dorian. It worries me. If he walks back into the abyss, if he chooses the darkness, I'm not sure we'll be able to pull him out.

-  E-mail from Sascha Duncan to Tamsyn Ryder

Ashaya had disobeyed Dorian's direct order. She knew she was taking what could amount to a stupid risk, but had found that it wasn't in her to leave him behind. She'd driven a mile down the road, raised every one of her shields to conceal her presence in case of telepathic scans, and pulled off into the shade of a large tree. The vehicle remained visible from the road but there was nothing she could do about that.

She'd wait another fifteen minutes, she rationalized. If he wasn't back by then -

The driver's-side door wrenched upward.

"Slide into the passenger seat." Dorian's tone was clipped, his clothing streaked with blood.

She moved swiftly and they were on their way seconds later. "What did you find?"

"An entire family, dead. Murder-suicide."

She swallowed. "Someone breached Silence," she guessed, "and didn't come out sane on the other side. There were vague rumors that that was happening - "

"I told you to get the hell out of here." Dorian turned in to a side road with a jarring movement. "What the fuck did you think you were doing?"

She'd been fooled into dropping her guard by his apparent calm. Her head jerked up. "I thought you might need hel - "

"I'm a sentinel," he interrupted, his tone cutting. "That means I can take care of myself. Contrary to what you think, I'm not a cripple."

"I never - "

"Yeah, you never thought," he said and it felt as if he'd scraped a razor blade over her skin, his rage was so sharp. "Did you even consider how it would've hit Keenan if you'd been captured or killed?"

Guilt grew a taut knot inside of her. "No."

"Christ."

She felt her desperate grip on her emotions begin to unravel. She tried to rewind the unraveled thread. Failed. Her hands curled. "Don't make judgments about my feelings toward my son." Keenan was her weakness. They both knew that.

"What feelings?"

It was a direct hit, but she stood firm. She knew she was right - and she wasn't going to let him intimidate her into silence. "I was concerned for you. Your emotional reaction to the girl was so strong, I thought you might not make it out before the Psy team arrived." All his rage, his need for vengeance, it had been in that final chrome-blue glance.

Dorian shot her a furious look. "You're so brainwashed you can't even accept your own emotions and you're judging mine? That's fucking rich." He shook his head, the blond silk of his hair shifting with ease.

She wanted to do violence. "Next time," she said, gritting her teeth, "I'll leave you to your self-destructive urges. It would make my life considerably simpler."

Dorian was still fuming more than an hour later. He'd showered at Tammy's and changed into the spare clothes he always kept there. With Tammy being their healer, they often came to her bleeding or worse. Now he stood with his body braced against the frame of the back door, staring out at Ashaya and Keenan as they sat politely across from each other at the picnic table in the yard.

"You want to talk about it?" A warm female voice.

He glanced at Tamsyn. "No. I told Sascha the same thing before she left."

She wrapped an arm around his waist, leaning against him until he put an arm over her shoulders. "Always were stubborn." A smile. "Sascha figured we'd tag-team you. She was round one. I'm the closer."