"Yeah, well, maybe this guy falls into the 'almost.' He's different - he was able to trap you into the visions."
"Perhaps," she agreed. "But that doesn't change anything."
He didn't reply, the jaguar very much apparent in his eyes.
So she spoke to the animal. "You once asked me about guilt. I said I didn't feel any. That was a lie." She forced herself to break another wall of Silence - to do and feel was easy compared to putting those things in words. "The guilt walks beside me from morning till night, from instant to instant. I'm an F-Psy, but I couldn't save my own sister's life. That makes me a failure."
"You had no way of knowing what it was you were seeing," he grit out.
"Logic doesn't work here, Vaughn! You know that more than anyone." She pushed him, asked him to remember the guilt he felt for Skye's death though he'd been a child himself.
He curved his hand around her neck. "There will come a time when I won't bend, won't be reasonable, won't act human."
She'd realized that in the first few seconds after meeting him. "But that particular point hasn't been reached."
"I want you with me at all times. The second anything goes wrong, you get out. I don't care if you have to turn his brains to jelly. Get out."
"I have no intention of permitting him close enough to hurt me. I'll be a shadow and then I'll be gone."
The cat clawed at the walls of Vaughn's mind as they worked out the details with the others. "There's something else," he said, after they'd agreed on a simple plan.
"The Council." Sascha leaned forward. "They have to know she's defected by now. They'll come after her with every weapon they have. As an F-Psy, she knows far too much."
The animal in Vaughn wanted to eliminate the threat and take care of them once and for all - Psy with crushed skulls couldn't harm his mate - but the man knew it wasn't so simple. Currently the Council had six heads, but it was a multi-limbed monster. Taking out one head would cause two or three more to sprout in its place. The only way it could ever be totally destroyed was for it to be torn out by its very roots. And the only people who could invoke a change that deep were the Psy themselves.
Faith rested her body against his side. "There may be something that will stay their hand."
The beast calmed at the gentle heat of her. "You have an idea?"
"Less an idea than a knowing." Her voice was suddenly heavy with grief. "It's always bothered me why Marine was murdered. He has this sick excitement leading up to the kill he's planning to make tomorrow, but there was nothing like that with Marine. He didn't stalk her. The buildup was in how clearly I saw the end result - loss of breath eventually metamorphosing into total suffocation."
Her strength impressed him to animal pride. Shifting his hold, he leaned against the railing and pulled her into the cradle formed by his spread legs. She came without complaint, putting her own hands over the ones he'd draped around her hips.
"Could she have been a chance kill, taken because the opportunity was there?" Judd Lauren's voice made the jaguar want to snarl - the cat didn't understand the fine distinction between enemy and uncertain ally.
"No, there was no sense of him being rushed or unprepared."
Vaughn hated to hear the pain in her voice, but knew time alone would heal those wounds. Though they'd never disappear, they'd turn into scars and that was okay, because those scars made them stronger.
Sascha tapped her foot. "What did your sister do?"
"She was a cardinal telepath. A communications specialist for the PsyClan."
"While I was in the Net, I heard rumors that your PsyClan did a considerable amount of sub-rosa work for the Council."
Faith's fingernails dug into his skin. "And if she was 'pathing for them, then she knew everything that was being sent and received, knew every secret, every detail of every plan."
"A liability if she decided not to play the game." After all, Marine NightStar had been his mate's sister and Faith was too intelligent, too independent, too human, to have ever made a good Council cipher.
Faith suddenly gave a violent shake of her head. "This isn't getting us anywhere. A knowing doesn't usually give me details - we'll have to wait and see if we can scan the killer's mind. Even if the Council comes after me, it won't be before we incapacitate him."
Clay crossed his arms across his chest. "How do you know?"
"I know.'' Her voice was haunted and very, very certain. "We have that much time. The answer will come to us tomorrow."
"And if it doesn't?" Sascha asked quietly.
"Then at least Marine will have been avenged." The bone-deep fury in her found an echo in the heart of the jaguar. "I want him to pay for what he did."