"Fences. Hidden cameras. Live guards. Motion sensors."
Sascha's eyebrows rose. "Of course. It must be one of the F-Psy."
"Foresight?" It helped to have a Psy in the pack. Before Sascha, they'd been close to blind about the intricacies of the Psy world. "I thought they were extremely rare. Wouldn't the Council want them locked up tight somewhere closer to where they could keep an eye on them?"
She shook her head. "I've heard it said that the most powerful of them need space even from other Psy. So though you saw live guards, it's likely no one actually lives in the home except for the F-Psy herself. I don't know that much more about them - foreseers are close to a subrace within the Psy and they belong to PsyClans, which represent them in public. Meeting one face-to-face is almost unheard of. Rumor has it that some of them never leave their homes. Ever."
Vaughn understood the need for aloneness, but there was a pathology to what Sascha was describing. "Are they prisoners?"
"No, I don't think so. They're too important to be made unhappy," she said, then seemed to catch herself. "You know what I mean - Psy don't feel happiness or unhappiness, but if the F designation decided to cease forecasting, the economic consequences would devastate the Psy.
"So no, I don't think they're prisoners, just that they prefer to live in a shell where they don't have to face the dark side of light." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Maybe if they stepped out occasionally, they'd remember the world they'd forsaken and wake up to the reality of their gift."
He watched her and knew she was remembering the vicious torture her mate had undergone as a child and his resulting vengeance - vengeance that had cemented the bond between Vaughn and Lucas. Perhaps if the F-Psy hadn't retreated into Silence, if they hadn't stopped forecasting disaster and murder, Lucas might've been spared that horror.
And perhaps Vaughn could've grown up jaguar, instead of being abandoned to the most savage kind of death by his own parents. Perhaps.
Manual strangulation.
Faith stared at the ceiling of her darkened bedroom, the two words slamming around and around her skull in an unstoppable loop. It was tempting to call the whole thing a coincidence and shove it to the back of her mind. Part of her wanted to do precisely that. It would be so much easier, so much more bearable. But it would be a lie.
Marine was dead.
And Faith had foreseen her murder.
If only she'd known how to interpret the visions, her younger sister might still be alive. If only. She'd been taught since childhood that it did no good to cry over the past, that it did no good to cry at all, and so now she didn't cry. She didn't even think she needed to, but deep inside herself, a caged and almost irretrievably broken part of her screamed in torment.
Faith was deaf to those agonized screams from her disintegrating psyche. All she knew was that she couldn't turn back from this. This wasn't some misjudged market trend, but the matter of a life. She couldn't choose to look away .. . not when she continued to feel the weight of the darkness pressing against her eyelids, violent and ugly.
The killer wasn't finished.
A discreet chime split the heavy silence. Glad that the bedroom hookup was vocal, not visual, she answered without turning on the lights. "Yes?"
"We've received no readings since yesterday." It was Xi Yun himself.
"I'm tired." And she hadn't wanted to sit in that red chair and possibly give away the tumult in her mind. "I need to catch up on my sleep as you suggested."
"Understood."
"I won't be back online for a few days."
"How many?" The question was supposed to be a precaution against her kind's tendency to forget, but Faith had begun to resent the intrusion of late, begun to see it as yet one more way to chain her, to ensure her talents were never out of reach.
"Three days." It was the longest they'd allow her, the longest they'd "trust" her capacity to care for herself. She'd often thought it was as well that NightStar and the Council were wary of damaging her abilities. Otherwise, they'd probably shove aside her PsyNet shields and monitor her on the most intensely private level - through mind control. All for her own good, of course.
She shivered and told herself it was because the room temperature