She pressed closer, her eyes remaining shut.

"Faith." He made his voice a command edged with the roughness of a growl. It wasn't difficult. This aroused, he had trouble controlling the beast. It was something Faith was going to have to learn to deal with, but not today. Today was about keeping her safe. "Open your eyes."

She shook her head, but her hands slipped down from around his neck to curl into fists against his chest.

A slow smile spread over his lips. "I'm not naked." Taking one feminine fist, he pressed it against his jean-covered thigh, then had to bite back a very sexual demand when the fingers of that hand spread and sent sensation straight to his groin.

"Are you real?"

It was a question that made it brutally clear how deep she'd retreated into her mind before he'd pulled her out. Leaning forward, he nipped at the skin of her neck. She jerked and opened her eyes at last.

Silver lightning sparked in their night-sky depths, vivid and wild.

Chapter 11

"What?" she asked, when he continued to stare.

"I can see lightning."

"How - ?" She shook her head but didn't shift off his lap, and that told him everything he needed to know. "Thank you."

"You're welcome."

She gave him a wary look. "Why are you being so agreeable?"

Because the cat found it amusing to tease her. "I'm always agreeable."

The wariness turned into full-blown disbelief. "You're playing cat games with me."

Surprised by her quick understanding, he shrugged. "I am a cat."

"You're right." Then she did something that stunned the hell out of him. Drawing up her body, she took a deep breath and brushed the most fleeting of kisses over his lips. "Thank you. I wouldn't have made it out on my own."

Raw anger wiped out the playfulness. "What the hell were you doing going alone into that kind of a vision in the first place?"

"You know I can't control them."

Pressing her closer with hands that threatened to go clawed, he stared straight into those lightning-storm eyes. "Then learn."

Faith blinked, not sure how to handle Vaughn in his current mood. But everything she'd learned about predators, about him, told her not to betray her lack of assurance. "I can hardly learn to control something without rules," she pointed out, "and there are none for the F-Psy, none that ensure the visions will only ever come when I want them to come. Yes, I can usually set them off with certain markers, but I can't hold them back for long periods of time."

"Who says?"

"My trainers, the PsyClan, the Council..." Understanding dawned. "Why wouldn't they teach me to block the visions if there were a way?"

"What would that control mean for the PsyClan?"

"It would contribute to a considerable rise in income," she said. "I could produce on command - there'd be no chance of my having a vision during sleep or in any other situation where my recall could be compromised, as sometimes happens now. So their not teaching me control, if they know how to accomplish it, makes no sense."

"Faith, why do you live in this house surrounded by sensors?"

She didn't want to answer and the impulse was so against any kind of rational behavior that she knew she couldn't give in to it. "Sometimes the visions are hard on my body and mind. I need to be monitored in case I need assistance."

"And if you could control the visions, then you could contain them until you reached a safe location. There would be no need for you to be caged up here."

Faith slowly drew her hands away from his body. "You want me to say they don't teach me control because this way I'm dependent on them, my ability at their beck and call. I have no choice but to forecast."

"What I want is for you to use that sensible Psy brain of yours - if they can train your visions to be lucrative and business focused, don't you think they could train you to decide whether or not you wanted to give in to a vision at any particular moment?"

For a member of a race notorious for acting first and thinking later, he made far too much sense. "Be that as it may," she said, instead of confronting his irrefutable logic, "I can't control them now and I absolutely cannot control the dark visions. Neither can I risk betraying the degradation of my conditioning by asking for further training."

"You're a cardinal." Vaughn tipped up her chin until she could no longer avoid meeting that wild gold gaze. "You don't need anyone to hold your hand."

"But I do need someone to hold back the darkness." There was no way she could become proficient enough at control, if control was even possible, soon enough to fight its growing power. "I can't break its grip when it hooks into me."

"Maybe because you've locked away what you need to fight it."

She pushed off his chest and slid down to kneel beside him. "Emotion."

He stretched out onto his back, acting as if this were his territory. She'd read about the way predatory male changelings liked to claim territory, be it land or sexual mates. Flames raced through her, a memory of the earlier lightning storm.

"Fire to fight fire, Red."

The echo of her thoughts might've startled her if she hadn't been concentrating on keeping her eyes from moving over the body lying so carelessly on her bed. Big and dangerous, there was at the same time something ultimately strokable about Vaughn.

"I can't." She shook her head to dispel the strange compulsion. "You don't understand the extent of the madness that infected the F-Psy before the implementation of the Silence Protocol." She'd seen the records, records no one could've doctored. "My own family records show generation upon generation of mad ones."

"How many in a generation?"

She triggered the memory files in her mind. "At least one."

"How many F-Psy in each generation?"

"The NightStar PsyClan has always produced an unusually high number of the F designation. Each generation has had at least one, but sometimes two, F cardinals and around ten lower-Gradient foreseers."

"One in eleven or twelve sounds like pretty good odds compared to what you're facing now."

Certain madness in twenty or thirty years if she was lucky, sentenced to spend the next five or six decades locked in the hell of her fragmented mind. "But the ones who went mad before - they were young. What if I'm the flawed one in this generation? If I break Silence, I'll fall."

"And if you don't break it, you'll spend your life in a cage."

"It's so easy for you to say." She shook her head. "You grew up on the outside, feeling and experiencing everything. You can't begin to imagine what you're asking me to consider."

A big hand flattened on her back, bare inches from the curve of her bottom. "Look at me, Faith."

She turned her body until her toes almost brushed his jeans at the thigh, her eyes on his face. He was nothing tame and she was drawn to that. But she was different. "All my life that I remember, I've lived in this compound. Even the freedom of the PsyNet was almost closed to me by some very delicate conditioning." Conditioning she'd broken on her own, she realized with a warm glow she couldn't fully explain. "I'm changing that. I'm going out into the Net and seeing the information it has to offer."

"None of that involves leaving your safe little cocoon."

It was the blunt response of a man whose animal side clearly saw no reason for lies.

"You think that makes me a coward, that I should go out there and experience the world. What you don't understand is that the world might kill me."

"Then tell me."

She'd known there would be no easy acceptance from this jaguar stretched out on her bed, all gleaming skin and amber-gold hair. "One thing no one can fake is the reaction of my designation when surrounded by a large number of unshielded individuals. All species have a natural shield, though the changeling shield is far tougher, but the upper layer of the mind, the public self, is almost universally unshielded."

"Mine?" His jaw tightened.

She shook her head. "You're fully blocked. That happens with some individuals - an extension of the natural shield. However, in your case I'm guessing Sascha had something to do with it." He didn't answer and she felt some unknown thing inside her shrivel. "Not worthy of your trust, right?"

His fingers pressed lightly on her spine. "Trust is earned."

"I trust you."

"Do you? Or have you been forced into that position?"

There was no answer she could give him, because she didn't know. Moving, she felt his fingers fall off her back, but now her toes were nudging his jean-covered thighs. "The public mind," she began, turning to what was familiar as a means of grounding herself, "throws out a constant bombardment of thought and feeling. All Psy are trained to shield against those random pieces of data, to the extent that most no longer even notice the background chatter. But it's been well documented that F-Psy, no matter how strong their shields, are affected by those thoughts."

"Affected how?" His hand slipped under the thin material of her top to lie against her lower spine.

She felt her stomach twist itself into a tight knot. "You must stop touching me."

"Why?"

"It's too much." Especially on top of the betrayals he was asking her to attribute to her own people, her own family. "Please, Vaughn."

She looked so fragile sitting there, all night-sky eyes and creamy skin. With any other woman, he'd have tugged her down and held her tight. Doing that with Faith, however, might cause her to panic, and right now he didn't want to make her vulnerable in any sense - the darkness could be waiting for a break in her defenses. But neither could he let her run. "Each time I do what you want, I'm helping your PsyClan and the Council imprison you."