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We failed to enter WindHaven’s home base. We don’t know why, but we tried multiple times. There is something very strange about that canyon.

“Anger,” Eleri said into the quiet heavy with all the words she could never speak. “It’s an emotion with which I had more than a passing acquaintance in my younger years.” She could still remember the fury that had unfurled in her after her first major memory reads and recalls.

“No amount of scrubbing could remove the filth that clung to me after I walked through the minds of people who are warped in ways most of the world will never understand.” She’d stood in the shower attempting to get clean until her skin was raw and thick with welts.

“I couldn’t sleep with the rage inside me.

I paced all night, ended up so wired that my mind buzzed with a thousand angry bees. ”

Adam shot her a glance before returning his eyes to the dark road into the Canyon. “It led to your first reconditioning?” His entire frame was a lesson in anger silent and deadly.

“No, it led to my first execution,” she said, and was aware of his head jerking toward her before he looked back to the road. “It’s an unspoken rule in the system that Js are never to be left alone with certain types of criminals. We…break. No amount of reconditioning can fix that tendency.”

She spoke on because this time in the dark might be all they’d ever have and she wanted him to remember her…because he might.

Reagan was gone.

Saffron, Yúzé, and Bram would follow her into the abyss all too soon.

Her family of record had long erased her from their minds.

Adam Garrett was the only one who might one day want to remember her…and she wanted him to know her. Not who she’d been in that long-ago hallway, but who she’d become over the years in between. Even if what she was about to say might repulse him.

“During my time, we had to undergo mandatory and intensive counseling sessions with specialist M-Psy—it was an attempt to program us not to kill.” The M-Psy hadn’t been empaths, of course, and thus had stood no chance against the steel-trap minds of Js who had long ago learned to pretend to be Silent when theirs was a designation that could never be perfect under the protocol.

“We might even have been the only designation under Silence to receive counseling as part of our training. To their credit, the Ms linked to the J Corps did their best. They were as traumatized as their Js in the end—losing client after client to suicide turns out to have a catastrophic effect on all the healing fields.” M-Psy linked to Js had higher rates of suicide and madness than any other.

“The Council kept trying nonetheless because Js were important to their hold on power. They were willing to sacrifice a few Ms in the pursuit of that power.” It wasn’t, after all, one of the rare designations.

“If you’re talking about the kind of criminals I think you are,” Adam said, his voice no longer wholly human, “then I won’t be crying any tears over their executions.”

“It’s considered vigilante justice.” Eleri didn’t disagree with that take; she also didn’t believe all vigilante justice was bad. “I got very good at releasing my anger by entering certain minds and turning them off.” There was no other way to explain the mechanism of what she did.

“Others cause the targets to mutilate themselves, or to suffer nightmares, but I like to go into their minds without warning—so the targets know they’re not in control mere seconds before they collapse of ‘natural causes.’?”

Eleri had never questioned her actions. She’d walked in those minds, knew exactly the horrors they’d committed. “The problem with my anger was that it kept growing. Until there were three deaths in my vicinity within the space of three days.

“Multiple senior Js pulled me aside and warned me I was at risk of total rehabilitation unless I reined it in—the authorities turned a blind eye to this ‘minor problem’ with active Js, but they had their limits.”

She could still remember Reagan telling her that if she got herself rehabilitated, she’d leave the world with one less very effective soldier against evil.

“Our version of final justice is a temporary release,” he’d pointed out.

“You have more than a decade of active service left in you—so many more monsters yet to stop—but you won’t get the chance if you don’t get a grip. ”

He’d been wrong about how many years she had left, but right otherwise.

“I didn’t want to rein it in,” Eleri said.

“I was a being of rage by then. But Reagan had saved me in so many ways—first by telling me never to let my ability to bend memories come to the attention of the authorities, and second, by covering up some of my executions by calling in favors he’d collected over a lifetime. He asked me to make it out.”

Eleri’s spine felt as stiff as a rod of steel.

“To do that, I had to put my rage in a place where I could control it.” It had caused her physical pain at the start, this version of Silence she’d chosen for herself.

“I might not have managed to hold on to it, but two months after I began to try, Reagan chose death…and it was the last promise he asked of me.”

The forces inside Adam churned in a turbulent storm.

To him, Reagan had made a choice that turned him into a villain.

But to Eleri, the same villain had been a hero.

A hero who had probably saved her life. As for what she’d done, who better to play judge, jury, and executioner than the woman who had walked in the minds of her targets?

The changeling in him found nothing wrong with justified kills.

But part of the storm was his need for her to feel . “So that’s it?” he said. “Your anger is just gone?”

“No.” Nothing in her tone. “It lives far below the surface of my conscious mind—like a great beast beneath a frozen ocean, a shadow lurking. I’d be at high risk of a catastrophic loss of control if it ever broke through.”

Adam wasn’t done with this, but it would have to wait—he’d almost arrived at the entrance to the underground garage inside the Canyon. The entrance sat a small distance below the plateau, ensuring late-night comings and goings wouldn’t disturb those who lived up top.

It was then that he realized how much he wanted to tell Eleri about his people, how much he wanted to have every conversation under the sun with her. It wasn’t love; it was the primal pull of the mating bond—meant to be born of love or to turn into love.

The latter pathway didn’t exist for them.

We become a living and wide-open psychic nerve. We prefer to exit the world prior to that…

His inner fury darkened, grew ever more animalistic, until Adam wondered who he’d be by the time this was all over.

The SUV’s headlights flashed against the subtle road marker designed for falcon eyes. “We’re here.”

“That looks like a solid wall of stone.”

“It’s meant to.” A quick turn and he was driving into the garage, which was lit up only the softest amount—enough for safety and visibility to their clan, but not enough to permit any light to leak out to outside watchers or those who might think to invade their inner core under the shadow of darkness.

Of course, any such invaders would be at a serious disadvantage, since WindHaven always had patrols in the air above the heart of their home—the place where their young could always feel safe.

The memories of the Territorial Wars had never left his people, for while they’d survived as a clan, they’d been devastated in the aftermath.

No one, the survivors had vowed together, would take any of them unawares again. That wary distrust included the Psy who had made him a promise that he believed, but whom he couldn’t trust. And though his heart twisted on that acceptance, he didn’t fight it.

A wing leader’s loyalty was first to his people.

“Aren’t you worried I’ll take telepathic images of your clan’s home location for a teleport lock?” Eleri asked, as if reading his mind.

He could’ve told her that something in the composition of the Canyon disrupted teleport locks.

His clan had discovered that accidentally during the Territorial Wars of the eighteenth century.

One of the clans they’d been battling had included a family of teleporters—and they’d been using that advantage to the nth degree.

Except they couldn’t get into the Canyon, no matter how many different image locks they managed to acquire.

It was a decade postwar, after the two clans were united by a mating, that their once-enemy had shared that strange fact.

Adam, conscious that information from the past could become distorted over time, had asked Judd Lauren from the SnowDancer wolves to test the Canyon’s impermeability to teleporters.

“Never felt anything like it,” the intrigued teleporter had said afterward, staring up at the Canyon from Raintree. “The best way I can describe it is mineral static. Like the stone somehow catches psychic energy and twists it. You ever had it tested?”

“Far as our scientists can tell, it’s the same as any other rock around here. Our geologists and others continue to do research on it. My sister’s even gotten in on the act, and she’s an aeronautical engineer.”

“Well, hit me up if you need another test,” Judd had said. “This stuff could be the best anti-Tk material ever known. Take a whole massive threat out of the equation. Lot of people—Psy included—would pay money for that.” A frown. “I wonder if Kaleb or Vasic could ’port through it.”

While Adam knew Judd trusted both men, they were effective strangers to WindHaven, so that question would remain unanswered for the time being. Judd wouldn’t unilaterally mention it to them, either, the trust between SnowDancer and WindHaven as strong as the rocks that made up the Canyon.

But Adam didn’t tell Eleri that.