Ready, she walked out into the living room and took her usual position in the chair. Monitoring would've begun the second she entered the living area, but now they'd be sitting up in expectation of a session. Instead, she threw up the strongest blocks she could imagine - she couldn't stop the visions, but she could occasionally contain them for a time - and started reading a book.

By the time she finished it two hours later, she knew they had to be getting impatient. She never used the chair for such mundane things. Then she picked up another book. Ten minutes later, her comm console chimed an incoming call. Using the remote, she flicked on the screen facing the chair.

"Father."

The title was nothing more than a convenient way to refer to him. Anthony Kyriakus was a stranger to her except as the governing force of the PsyClan, no matter that it was half his blood that ran in her veins. "Faith, Medical has informed me of erratic behavior on your part."

Here it came, she thought, the request for a complete mental and physical workup. "Father, would you consider it a breach of your rights as a free citizen to be monitored on the PsyNet?" An ultimately logical question. "Or am I allowed to shadow you wherever you go?"

Anthony's brown eyes remained cool on-screen. "It was for your own protection."

"You didn't answer my question." She picked up her book again. "As it appears I cannot inform myself in private, I thought I should do it in public." The most subtle of threats.

"You've never shown any desire for complete isolation."

Isolation, not privacy. It was becoming crystal clear how they'd been herding her along a certain path her entire life. But he was right - she couldn't show such a drastic change without some explanation. A flicker of memory from the Net gave her inspiration and if it came from the same part of her that showed her the visions, she chose to ignore that. "Perhaps an adult cardinal, one of the rare F designation, might possibly be interested in other opportunities... but those opportunities are highly unlikely to be offered to someone with a babysitter."

Understanding filtered so quickly into Anthony's face that she was certain he'd already been thinking along those lines. "It's a dangerous game. Only the strong survive."

"Which is why I can't appear weak."

"Have you heard anything concrete?"

"I'll tell you when it's time." A blatant untruth because the time would never come, no matter what Anthony believed. The Council was hardly going to consider a cloistered foreseer as a possible member. But as far as reasons for privacy went, it was close to perfect.

Something brutal and ugly shoved at the walls she'd set up against the visions and she knew she had to get out of here before it erupted and exposed her. Because the business visions were never this powerful, this aggressive. Putting down the book, she swung her legs over the side of the chair. "My answer, Father?"

"Privacy is a citizen's right." He nodded. "But should you need assistance, contact me."

"Of course." She switched off the screen without further good-byes - they were redundant in her situation, something she'd figured out as a child. But at least now she'd be left alone on the Net, a huge step forward. No one could suspect her of anything at this stage - even the information she'd found out about Sascha had come from public bulletin boards. However, her next searches weren't going to be so innocent.

Another push on her mind. She strolled out of the room and forced herself to get water and several nutrition bars from the cooler. The second her hand closed around a bar, Vaughn's mocking smile appeared in the screen of her mind. She could imagine what he'd say to her choice of food and, though it was a dangerous game, she indulged herself and focused on him all the way to her bedroom. Once inside, she put down the food and closed the door.

The next push almost drove her off her feet. She swayed, but remained upright - if she fell, the sensors outside the door might pick it up. Breathing carefully, she somehow got to the bed before collapsing. Sweat dampened her hands and temples - a physiological reaction to unknown stress factors.

Fear.

She was Psy. She should feel no fear. But neither should she be seeing what she was now being forced into seeing. Then the darkness breached the flimsy walls of her defenses and hooked its claws into her mind. Her back arched, her hands clenched, her teeth snapped shut with crushing force, and she was no longer aware of anything but the vision.

Chapter 9

It was as if the darkness knew when she was alone and at her most helpless. Like some vicious beast waiting in the shadows for its prey to drop its guard, it crept in through the vision channels and seized control of her senses. And then it - he - forced her to watch what would come to pass if he wasn't stopped.

Blood, so much blood on his hands, in his hair, on his skin. The pale fragility of his hand was almost invisible under the rich, dark coating - wait. He was older than this, decades more experienced than the slender boy drenched in blood. But it was the same darkness, the same evil. She understood what she was seeing, though this had rarely ever happened to her.

An unexpected expression of the ability of foresight was backsight, the ability to see the past. F-Psy who primarily saw the past were very, very rare. Faith could think of none in the last fifty years. When they did appear, they tended to head into Enforcement. But most active F-Psy usually had one or two flashes of backsight during the year. In her case, she'd always caught innocuous images connected with the future she was trying to glimpse.

Never had she been so covered in blood that she was sticky with it, the iron-rich metallic scent drawn in with every breath. Her eyelashes were crusted with the dried fluid and the blood under her fingernails was so dark it was almost black. The imprint of her footsteps had started to set as the blood on the floor congealed. The knife she'd used was in one hand. When she raised it, the light from a torch glinted, off it.

A torch?

Turning, she found herself surrounded by a dozen black-suited men. The vision flash-fractured and the next time she opened her eyes, she was in the confines of a white-on-white room. Bloodlust roared in her veins and she realized she was older, years older. And hungry. So hungry. For human prey.

Another violent jerk along the timeline. She was with the dark-suited men once again. They set her free at the start of a maze and she started hunting. The fear she sensed in her prey drew her like a drug. She ran on strong feet, knowing they'd have chosen a suitable sacrifice. They always did.

Her hand clenched on the knife. She spied the vulnerable nape of the girl who'd stumbled onto the hard ground. A smile cracked the anticipation on her face. This would be so much fun.

No!

Faith ripped herself from the vision so violently that she fell to the floor. Curling up into a fetal position, she tried to stifle her whimpers, tried to wipe the taint of blood from her brain. For those long moments she'd become the killer, become the very evil that had taken her sister's life. That was what had brought her back to herself - the knowledge that if she let it continue, she might just feel her own hands slide around her sister's throat.

The bedside comm console chimed. They'd heard her fall of course. The outside sensors were very sensitive and she'd made a great deal of noise. Forcing herself to get up, she answered without visual. "I tripped on something."

"Are you injured?"

"No. I'm fine. Please don't disturb me till morning." She cut off the communication with that bare statement, aware her vocal mask was about to crack. Her voice wanted to tremble, wanted to cry.

Step two in the inevitable road to F-Psy insanity.

She had to get out of this claustrophobic compound. But she couldn't leave. Not now. Everybody was too aware of her wakefulness - they might even try to contact her again despite her orders. The urge to flee was so strong, it felt as if her skin had been drawn taut over flesh on the verge of explosion.

She couldn't satisfy the urge, couldn't run free, couldn't walk out to safety and toward the night-glow eyes of a predator so lethal that she shouldn't have thought of him in the same breath as the word safety. He was out of her reach anyway - she was a prisoner in this place everyone called her home. Would it one day become her tomb?

Shivering at the morbid thought, she crawled back into bed and lay there, staring up at the ceiling, memories of blood and horror her only companions. And though she refused to admit she felt anything, loneliness had a claw grip around her heart.

It hurt.

Faith woke the second someone whispered a breath against her neck. Her heart kicked into high gear. She knew that masculine scent, but its presence here was impossible. Thinking it an illusion of her stressed mind, she opened her eyes and found herself looking into the face of a human jaguar. He was lying alongside her, head propped up one hand.

"What are you doing in my bed?" she asked, too surprised to suppress the question.

"I just wanted to know if I could do it." He'd left his hair undone and it flowed over his shoulders in an amber-gold wave that shone, though the only light came from a small night-lamp.

That tiny lamp usually helped her delineate the line between waking and dreaming, but right now she wasn't certain where she stood. Raising a hand, she touched his hair. Warm strands slid through her fingers. The unexpected shock of sensation had her snatching back her hand. "You're real."

The smallest curving of his lips. "Are you sure?" He brushed a kiss over her mouth.

It was the most fleeting of touches but she felt burned. "You're definitely real." An accusation.

He chuckled, completely unrepentant.

"Don't make any loud sounds," she cautioned. "This room and my bathroom are private but everything else is monitored. Did you - ?"

"They don't know I'm here." He looked up at the roof, at the skylight no one should've been able to open. "Psy don't monitor danger from above."

She couldn't figure out how he'd done it, but that didn't surprise her - he was a cat, after all. "Did Sascha send you?"