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The Psy race considers humankind prey, our minds theirs to violate at will. Humans will never achieve our true potential as long as we have to conceal our light in order to escape drawing Psy attention.

Shoving aside the echoes of a past that had destroyed the boy he’d been, Adam considered her words. “You think he builds the shelters ahead of time, then goes trawling for victims.”

Eleri turned those beautiful mutable eyes on him. “Yes, so they have to be in places he can reach on a regular basis—like after work. Sixty minutes in a high-speed vehicle to the furthest shelter, ninety if in a lower-spec car, three-hour maximum round-trip total.

“Add in a couple of hours of construction on the shelter and—if he finishes work at five or six—he’d still be in bed by eleven, midnight at the latest. I also don’t think the abductions were opportunistic; he’s just taken care to make them appear that way—I believe he goes out of his home range on purpose, to stop anyone tracing him back to Raintree. ”

Adam agreed with her thought process, while being aware that he was only getting one side of the story. “What would your colleagues say if I asked them?”

“That he must prefabricate the shelters so he can put them up within an hour, and that he’s as opportunistic in the captivity sites as he is in his abductions. Several members believe he might even keep the victims in his truck or other similar vehicle.”

Adam held that gaze, his falcon in his eyes—both parts of him trying to see through to the truth of her. “And yet you think you’re right. Why?”

“Instinct,” was the toneless response. “The same thing that means I can track serial killers across the PsyNet by their psychic signatures.”

A disbelieving lift of his eyebrow, his gaze not human in any fashion as he watched her. Adam Garrett was a raptor designed to rend his prey to pieces, and he remained, Eleri thought, a breath away from doing the same to her.

“If you can track murderers on your Net, why all this?” He waved at her car, the evidence she carried.

“First, I need to pick up the scent. The PsyNet is a vast place.” What Eleri didn’t say was that for a J like her, a Sensitive on the verge of Exposure, the PsyNet was also a place she tried to avoid as much as possible.

Its psychic fabric teemed with millions upon millions of memories that had slipped free of people’s shields and now floated around in disembodied pieces.

Those fragments didn’t affect undamaged Js, but Eleri could no longer claim that status; she risked the memories burrowing their way into her and setting up home atop the vicious memories of far sicker strangers.

“Funny,” Bram had said the last time the four of them had gotten together, “you’d think we’d want those random memories to settle in, dampen the ones from our work.”

Only, of course, it didn’t work that way. The fragments had razored edges that drew psychic blood, and when one embedded itself, it stirred older, darker memories to the surface, like a stone thrown into a still pond.

So no, memory shards weren’t a good thing.

The only time Eleri stepped foot in the psychic network anymore was when she was sure enough of the identity of a killer that she could stalk him on the psychic level.

She’d led Enforcement to three so far by that method, and for two others…

well, some people didn’t need any kind of a second chance to do what they’d done, and Js were experts at stealth assassinations.

Her mind opened the box of her own memories, time scrolling backward.

“Are you shocked I executed Prisoner 45TN?” Reagan, sitting across from her two years after the court case that had ripped the veil from her eyes.

He’d had a faded smile on his face that night. “It’s a madness in Js,” he’d told her. “It’s why the wardens and guards are meant to watch us closely when we’re in jails or other places with such prisoners. Something breaks in us and we no longer have control when it comes to ending deviant minds.”

Eleri had known her mentor too well by then to fall for that. “You were in control. You chose it.”

“Yes. Because 45TN’s crimes involved children. That’s the one thing I’m incapable of forgiving even to the extent of permitting the justice system to deal with them.”

Eleri had adopted the same line in the sand…and added a number more. And she’d bettered her mentor by becoming expert at inducing death in a way that left no trace of any external involvement.

She had every intention of using those skills on the Sandman. “I’m certain he’s here,” she said when Adam Garrett didn’t respond. “All I need is the time to track him down. After that, you’re free to do with me what you will.”

The falcon who had once looked at her out of a smiling young man’s face today stared at her with the grim visage of a wing leader.

His talons weren’t out as they’d been in that courtroom, but she knew this man was far more dangerous than the boy she’d first met…

the one who’d made her wonder for a blip in time whether her destiny wasn’t set in stone after all.

“Go,” he said at last. “Start your search. I’ll find you after I’ve checked on your information.”

Eleri nodded.

But he said, “Wait,” when she would’ve got in the car. “What are the chances he’ll strike in Raintree?”

“Low. If he does, he risks compromising his bolt-hole.” She hesitated, then shared the rest. “Unless he suffers a catastrophic psychic break, which he shows no signs of doing, I don’t think I’ll find him because he makes a mistake here—I’ll find him because he made mistakes at the other sites that give me clues as to who he is.

I just don’t know what those mistakes are yet. ”

···

Jacques snarled when Adam told his best friend and most senior wing-second about the visitor in town.

“She the liar?” he asked, because Jacques and Adam had been friends since the day they met, and now that Adam’s grandmother was gone, Jacques was the only person in the world who knew this story. Or at least most of it.

Adam had never actually told Aria—but she’d been his wing leader as well as his grandmother.

She’d known the instant she’d looked at his face in the hallway outside the courtroom.

“Ah, Bear,” she’d murmured when she caught his gaze on the J-Psy trainee who had, at that point, been standing with her senior outside the courtroom.

“What trouble are you getting into now?”

Despite the lightness of the question, her tone had been uneasy…concerned. Because Aria had already understood what it had taken Eleri’s betrayal for Adam to comprehend: Psy could not be trusted.

Not even Psy who made their changeling hearts sing.

“She was the junior on the case,” Adam said to Jacques today, because what she’d done was bad enough; there was no point in blaming her for something she hadn’t done. “Around the same age as us.”

Jacques’s brown eyes didn’t soften, the mahogany of his skin stretched taut over thick muscle. “We knew right and wrong at that age.”

“Yes, we did.” Adam was fully aware that his anger at Eleri was irrational—because he’d always been more angry at her than at the now-dead senior J who’d made the actual scan and done the witness broadcast.

He’d expected her to be better. And she’d let him down at a point in his life when he’d been the most wounded, the most vulnerable. The same Eleri who’d offered to tend his cuts with a sweet and unexpected empathy had thrust a stiletto straight into his stupidly soft and unshielded heart.

That she was Psy and could never truly grasp the injury she’d inflicted? Neither man nor falcon cared. Because he’d seen how she’d looked at him the day they’d met, witnessed the glimmer of realization in the hazel that altered color as quickly as Eleri altered loyalties.

Some part of her had known .

“You want me to run her out of town?” Jacques walked with him to the edge of the Canyon plateau, the hot desert winds making their wings stir against the inside of their skin as their falcons readied themselves for flight.

“Fuck you,” Adam said without altering his tone. “I can run anyone I want out of town.”

A wicked grin that came out rarely among strangers but was deeply familiar to Jacques’s friends. “I dunno, man. You’ve always been weird about her.”

The other man ran his hand over the dark hair he kept cut close to his skull, the edges shaved with the same precision he showed in his work for the clan. “You raged about her after you got home, and it was only later that I realized she hadn’t been the actual J on the case.”

Adam shrugged and gave his best friend a partial answer, not able to share the rest even with him. “Maybe it was because she was close to our age. Not as cold or as hard as the older Js—I expected better from her. Expected her to care.”

Jacques’s smile faded. “That was ten years ago. She still like that?”

“No.” Adam couldn’t get over the sheer flatness of her emotional response, the complete lack of personality.

It was a stark contrast to the girl whose pupils had gone huge with shock at a connection that had hit them both without warning…

and yet she’d stayed, offered him a bandage…

and looked back to meet his gaze when she was called over by her superior.

What had happened to Eleri Dias in the years in between?

Jacques blew out a breath. “So, why’s she here?”

When Adam told him, Jacques frowned. “Her theory makes sense, but we only have her word for it. You going to touch base with your Enforcement friends to verify?”

“Yeah. I’m not about to take her allegations on trust.” Once, she could’ve told him the sky was green and the earth blue, and he’d no doubt have followed along like an infatuated puppy. Adam didn’t know how to put limits on his love—he was all in with his family, his friends, his clan.

But Eleri had put paid to that possibility between them with a single act of complicit silence.