Psy & Changelings 02 - Visions of Heat

inside of her.
    “You didn’t have the skills.” Vaughn’s voice was so consciously gentle it hurt.
    “Didn’t I? Or maybe I didn’t want to see what the visions were trying to tell me, was too much of a coward.”
    “The guilt won’t ever go away,” he told her with changeling frankness, “but you can stop it from being so corrosive.”
    “How?”
    “By doing something that balances the scales, by saving someone else’s daughter or sister.” The sharp blade of knowledge cut every word.
    She looked up into his face, unsurprised to find his eyes gone utterly cat. “Will you tell me about her?” Already she knew this jaguar walked alone. But she wanted him to trust her this much at least.
    His hand stilled on her hair. “My sister starved to death because I was too young and weak to find enough food to keep her alive. And I miss her every day of my life.”
    Faith reached out in an effort to give comfort, the first time she’d done so. The hand she put on his thigh was tentative, but it held so much and, though he said nothing to acknowledge the act, he began to stroke her hair again.
    “What was her name?”
    “Skye.” His voice dropped until it was more growl than human. “Our parents abandoned us in predator territory with nothing but the clothes on our backs.”
    “But they were changelings.”
    “Being animal is no guarantee against evil.” Vaughn’s thigh turned rock-hard under her hand. “My parents weren’t evil, but they were caught up in it—I have to think that to keep myself sane.”
    She stayed silent, trying to give him what he’d given her.
    “My parents were very young and unmarried when they had me—most jaguars don’t follow human customs. Skye was born three years later. When she was two and a half, they joined a new church and got married. Soon afterward, they gave up their worldly possessions and we began living in a commune.” His voice was hard. “That wouldn’t have mattered if I hadn’t begun to notice the way some of the ‘elders’ looked at Skye. She was a baby and they wanted to put their hands on her.”
    Faith couldn’t imagine anything so horrendous. “You protected her.”
    “I got her killed.” Vaughn had lived with that knowledge for over two decades. “I was always with her—I refused to allow them near. I was labeled a problem child and my parents had to discipline me according to their new religion.” Hours of beatings, of isolation, of being told he was “full of sin.”
    It had terrified him that they’d get to Skye while he was locked up, but his parents must not have been completely lost because they’d always kept Skye close while he was being punished. “When it became clear that I wasn’t going to relent and that I’d taught the other kids to be wary of the elders, too, they began a campaign to get rid of us. They told our parents to prove their devotion to their new God by giving up the ‘fruits of sin,’ the children they’d borne out of wedlock.”
    “How could . . . ?” Faith shook her head in bewilderment and he realized how hard he’d clenched his hand in her hair.
    Softening his grip, he smoothed the silken mass. “It took a long time for my parents to buckle under.” But by the end of it, his mother hadn’t been able to look at him without seeing sin and his father had stopped hearing anything Skye had to say. “When they put us in the car and told us we weren’t coming back, we were so happy.” He could remember every glittering facet of the hope that had gripped his ten-year-old heart. Because despite everything, he’d still been a child.
    “Instead, they took us deep into the forest and left us there.” That was when they’d spouted the evil they’d been indoctrinated with. Skye had cried and tried to run after them, but they’d been full-grown jaguars and she’d been a baby. Following, Vaughn had waited until she was too exhausted to run anymore and then he’d found them a place to hide.
    “Oh, Vaughn.”
    “She died in my arms five days later.” His heart had broken so completely that day he hadn’t been sure it would ever recover. “I buried her in a cave.” Where it would never rain and she’d never be cold again. “Afterward, I decided to keep walking. I wanted to get to my parents so I could kill them.”
    “How did you get out?” Her voice was soft, passing no judgment on his need for retribution.
    “I didn’t. I collapsed two days later.” But even exhausted, broken, and