Visions of Heat

produced their first successful subjects. The test graduates were only teenagers and the conditioning was prone to failure, but they were enough to change things. Mercury stopped being referred to as a cult by the majority and started being spoken of as a think tank.

It took one hundred years for them to morph into a group of visionaries, the saviors of the Psy. 'The first pro-Silence Council was dominated by acolytes of Mercury. Two were graduates of their beta version of the Protocol.'

'Sascha?'

Startled out of her painful thoughts on the high cost of such absolute Silence, she turned. Faith's hand was outstretched, a touch halted midthought. 'You have to be more careful,' she said gently. She had no desire to reinforce the straitjacket of Silence, but so long as the other cardinal was in the Net, she had to be hyperaware.

Faith's hand curled into a fist and she tucked it under her thigh. 'I'm changing, Sascha. I want to fight it, but the change is happening on a level I can't seem to stop. And I'm not sure that's a good thing.'

'Why?'

'I'm an F-Psy, valued and protected among our race. Out here, I'd be nothing.'

'That's not true.' Sascha attempted to use her empathic gifts to soothe the bruised pain inside of Faith, pain she could feel like a rock on her heart. 'If you can learn to utilize and manage your gifts in a different way, you'll be as valued here. Imagine, you could warn of disasters and violence. You could save so many lives.'

Faith looked away. She didn't want to see the other side of the ledger, didn't want to consider the deaths on the conscience of every foreseer who'd chosen an easier path. Like her. 'Do you have any idea why my normal shields might be failing? These protections are specifically designed to guard F-Psy during visions, but they can't protect me against the darkness. They can't keep me safe.'

Only Vaughn could do that, and she wondered why he bothered. If the foreseers hadn't withdrawn into Silence, perhaps his sister, too, would have lived.

CHAPTER 14

'What do you feel during these visions?' Sascha asked, not forcing her to face the issue as Vaughn would've done. 'There's no one here but us.'

'And a cat with very good hearing.' Faith couldn't see him, but she knew he was out there pacing, protecting.

'Actually two,' Sascha corrected. 'A result of Lucas being overprotective is my guess, though I wouldn't put it past the sentinels to do it on their own.' Her laugh was both amused and exasperated.

'Two?' She could bear Vaughn hearing her confession, because no matter what she'd said in the car, she trusted him. But another cat?

'Don't worry. Vaughn would never allow him within hearing range.'

Something in the other woman's tone made Faith go still. 'What?'

Sascha smiled. 'Nothing. So, what do you feel?'

'Rage, pain, malice, fury, bloodlust.' She couldn't bring herself to list the sick pleasure felt by the sadistic sexuality of that raping mind. Because during the visions, she was him and the pleasure was her own.

It made her want to vomit, to tear out her own mind. No wonder F-Psy had chosen the coward's way out and surrendered to the clean commerce of Silence.

'The worst possible way to snap out of the Protocol.' The renegade cardinal's face softened. 'I think emotions are the key to why your shields are failing. Psy in the past would probably have fought fire with fire, shoving up blocks powered by the depth of their horror at the acts.'

Faith was startled by the echo of Vaughn's earlier comments. 'Go on.'

'It's speculation on my part, but I know my shields cracked because I was crushing emotion when emotion was my strength.'

Faith didn't ask more about Sascha's abilities. Faith was linked to the Net. The PsyClan did monitor her. On top of that, the Council was now paying her an unusual amount of attention. 'But my ability isn't based on emotion.'

'I think you're wrong. If emotion wasn't at the heart of foresight, F-Psy would never have seen the things they once did, never have seen murder and disaster. They saw those things because they were people who cared about others, who were driven to try to stop the evil.'

Faith couldn't begin to imagine the strength it must've taken to be a foreseer in the time before Silence, to see death and pain in an endless sequence of what could be. 'You're saying it's possible that Silence left the section of my mind that has the capacity to see darkness, the emotional center, unprotected. To even accept the existence of such a center would go against the conditioning. Following that logic, I can't shield that which doesn't exist.' Leaving her totally exposed to the malicious power of a killer in need of an audience.

'Exactly.' Sascha's eyes flashed bright and Faith almost imagined she saw colors. Impossible. 'I think that's why Vaughn can pull you out—his touch awakens that buried center.'

Faith's stomach clenched at the mention of the cat who'd somehow become integral to her life. 'Even if you're right and I find that area of my brain and reinitiate the protections, it won't stop the visions, just make them easier to escape, correct?'

'Faith.' Sascha sighed. 'If you continue to try to block your gift as it's been blocked for twenty-four years, you'll destroy yourself from the inside out.'

And go insane, Faith finished silently, hands clenching into rigid balls under her thighs. 'If I accept these visions, it'll be the same as accepting emotion and I won't be able to hide that for long. I'm too closely watched. The end result will be the same—incarceration in a mental health facility.' Another trap with no way out.

'You always have choices. The question is, are you willing to see them?'

Or are you a coward hiding behind the convenient shield of Silence?

Words Sascha would never say, but Vaughn would in a heartbeat. He wasn't gentle like the cardinal beside her. He was a predator and he went for the throat. And she watched the forest for him until he appeared for her in a flash of gold and black—a jaguar circling her, protecting her, perhaps caging her. She should try to run, try to escape, but of course, there was nowhere to go.

Not when the real threat was inside her own mind.

Vaughn did another sweep of his range and confirmed that the second sentinel in the area, Dorian, was keeping to the outer boundary. Only Vaughn was allowed so close to Faith. Even having Dorian in the same wide range made him want to react with brutal violence. The jaguar suddenly understood the extreme possessiveness that gripped DarkRiver males during the mating dance, understood why some of them turned close to feral.

Because the same violent fury was riding him now.

He roared and everything in the forest went silent. Brooding but ever watchful, he began to once again consider how to seduce the object of his hunger. He wasn't a fool. He knew sex would amp up the electricity between them, not turn it down. But if he didn't have her soon, he might gnaw off a paw.

The cat was frustrated with the man. Take her, it said; pleasure will crush her fear. The man wanted to agree. It would be so easy. Except that it would be a lie. No one raised as Faith had been, in the privacy-less box she called a home, would so quickly be able to adapt to the ferocity of his needs. And a Psy? Impossible.

Sex might actually send her into the very seizures she'd been conditioned to expect.

But she felt him on the psychic level, an intimacy he'd never expected. That she could pick up only his most erotic thoughts delighted him. It gave him the best of both worlds—his privacy and the ability to seduce her without subjecting her to touch, which might send her over the edge.

Sensual hunger beating in every surge of blood, he began to think of Faith and all the ways in which he wanted to take her. The jaguar, being a jaguar, wanted to enter her from behind. A view nothing could match, the