Mine to Possess

“There’s only one other left. Open the screen.”

Jon clenched his head in his hands as the wall behind the chair suddenly silvered from opaque to clear. There was a little girl on the other side. She was sitting hunched into the far corner, her knees drawn up to her chest. Her eyes met his. Big, brown, filled with excruciating fear and—at seeing him—a desperate flash of hope.

“If you don’t cooperate, we’ll use her,” Lizard told him.

Jon decided he’d have to kill the bastard before he escaped. “Why do you think I care?”

“You’re human.”

And Jon knew that this time, there would be screaming.

CHAPTER 29

Teijan was waiting for Clay above ground, looking sleek and well-groomed, a small man with a solid aura of power. “Hello, Clay.”

“Teijan.” He could still taste Talin on his lips, tart and familiar. It calmed his possessive instincts, but didn’t make him any less pissed with her for refusing to get medical attention until they found the boy. “Wanted to ask— you know anything about a man being jumped around here last night?”

“The cop?” A spark of pure surprise lit Teijan’s inky black eyes. “A group of my people took exception to the event.” His mouth firmed into an unforgiving line. “Most of them know about bullies. They scared off the perpetrators, called the paramedics.”

“Anyone see anything?” He knew the Rats would’ve disappeared Down Below before Enforcement arrived, wary of a law that often treated them like trash. Yet they had saved a cop’s life, with no hope of gain for themselves. He’d make sure Max knew that.

“No.” He spread out his hands. “It was dark and they are human, with human eyes. Suyi did mention the thugs looked like hired muscle.”

Clay had expected as much. If it was a Psy behind the kidnappings, he or she wasn’t anyone with access to the kind of power the Council wielded—otherwise Max would’ve been dead by now, his brains turned to jelly. But the fact that this was happening in Nikita Duncan’s city, without her apparent involvement—Nikita didn’t need to hire ineffectual human thugs—made him wonder exactly how bad things had gotten in the PsyNet. “So,” he looked to Teijan, “why the call?”

“The boy,” Teijan said, “one of the children is adamant she saw him disappear off the street.”

His leopard sat up in interest. “She saw him get snatched?”

“No, she saw him disappear.” Teijan made a flicking notion with his fine-boned hand. “Poof. Like magic. Her words.”

Everything in Clay stilled. It didn’t make sense—if the kidnapper was a teleportation—capable telekinetic, he or she would have had no need to hire humans to do the dirty work. Tk-Psy that strong could crush a human body with little effort.

“We didn’t believe her at first.” Teijan frowned. “But then I realized why the picture of the boy disturbs me and mine so much.”

“Why?”

“He’s not human. He’s not changeling. He’s not Psy. He’s more other than anyone I’ve ever before met.”

Talin could barely grasp the enormity of what she was reading. Dev might not have told her the truth, but he’d given her what she needed to find that truth herself.

She was standing there stunned when the door opened and Clay walked in. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said, tugging him to the table.

“Try me.” The edge in his tone scraped over her spine like a fine nail.

She glanced up, belatedly noticing the furious expression on his face. It was obvious it wasn’t directed at her. “What’s the matter?”

“You first.” His hand closed around her ponytail and he stroked the length through his fist. Then he did it again, top to bottom.

To her surprise, she could feel him relaxing. And that relaxed her. Skin privileges, she thought with an inward smile. “Alright. Here, look.” Bending over the table, very aware of him playing with her hair, she showed him the crucial pages.

“Family trees,” he murmured. “Detailed.”

She nodded. Her hair slipped out of his grasp but a second later, she felt a tug as he recaptured it. The caress was strangely soothing. “Looks like Shine went way beyond the most recent generations.”

Clay was caught by the fierce light in Talin’s eyes. Her intelligence blazed hot and damned sexy. “For all of them?”

“Yes.” She grinned. “It’s as if they were tracing the families, not the individual children.”

“Shine doesn’t take on whole families.”

“I’m not so sure. Look.” She tapped a particular record. “One kid in this three-sibling family has Shine support, but all three are being monitored. The only reason the other two were left alone is because they have other scholarships.”

“That can’t be the case with all of them.”

“No. But if you look carefully at the charts, you’ll see that a lot of the unfunded or untraced ones are actually stepsiblings. They’re following bloodlines.”

Clay stopped sliding Talin’s hair through his fist, though he kept the smooth, silky stuff in his grip. “That explains a lot.”

Lines formed on her forehead. “Why do I get the feeling you already know what I’m leading up to?”

He tugged at her hair, tipping up her head. Then he kissed her. A short, fleeting brush of lips on lips that tantalized the cat, teased and tempted in a way that would eventually become dangerous. But not yet. He still had enough control to pull back. “I have suspicions, no proof.”

Her eyes were catlike in their smugness. “Look at the heads of the family trees.”

He finally released her hair so he could spread out the charts. “I’m not seeing anything obvious.”

“That’s because it’s not.” She picked up one particular sheet. “This is Jon’s record. I was staring at it this morning when it struck me that I’d heard—read—the name Duchslaya Yurev before. He’s at the top of this tree. I did a search.” She pointed to the computer built into the side of the desk. “Yurev was one of his generation’s greatest minds. He’s half the reason we know as much as we do about genetics.”

“Kid’s full name is Jonquil Alexi Duchslaya,” Clay said, looking at the chart. “Okay, it’s an ancestral name. Not unusual.”

“No, but guess what.” She traced a line on the chart. “Jonquil is Yurev’s only remaining direct descendant.”

Excitement gripped his gut. “Was Yurev human?”

“No.” Her next words were a whisper. “He was a cardinal telepath.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah.”

For a minute, they just stared at each other. “What about the other names?”

Her face fell. “Nothing. It’s like they’ve been erased from the system—I only realized about Yurev because he was mentioned in an out-of-print textbook I read when I was fifteen. I was bored and it was the last physical book in the library I hadn’t read.”

“Geek.”

She stuck out her tongue at him. “I guess Yurev was too famous to wipe out completely—though you know, he’s not in any of the electronic textbooks, hasn’t been for over half a century. Even the Internet databases have very little on him. If he was that hard to trace, I have no clue how Shine did the others.”

“Maybe,” he murmured, “they had a head start, a list to a certain point.”

“Hold on.” Tally liberated a small notebook from the confusion of paper on the table. “See on the family trees,