his punches was because he understood the way wolf society worked. Being beaten in a fight was bad, but not as bad as being beaten without putting up a solid resistance.
Tai's feelings made no difference to Judd. He had no intention of assimilating into the changeling world. But his niece and nephew, Marlee and Toby, also had to survive in the network of underground tunnels that was the SnowDancer den, and his enemies might become theirs. So he hadn't humiliated the boy by ending the fight before it began.
"Is he going to be alright?" Brenna asked, when Tai moaned a second time.
"Give him a minute or two."
Glancing back at him, she sucked in a breath. "You're bleeding!"
He stepped away before she could touch his shredded forearms. "It's nothing serious." And it wasn't. As a child he had been subjected to the most excruciating pain and then been taught to block it. A good Psy felt nothing. A good Arrow felt even less.
It made it so much easier to kill people.
"Tai went clawed." Brenna's face was furious as she glared down at the male slumped against the wall. "Wait till Hawke hears - "
"He won't hear. Because you won't tell him." Judd didn't need protecting. If Hawke had known what Judd truly was, what he had done, what he had become, the SnowDancer alpha would have taken him out at their first meeting. "Explain your comment about Sascha."
Brenna scowled but didn't press him about the scratches on his arm. "No more healing sessions. I'm done."
He knew how badly she'd been brutalized. "You have to continue."
"No." A short, sharp, and very final word. "I don't want anyone in my head again. Ever. Sascha can't get in anyway."
"That makes no sense." Sascha had the rare gift of being able to speak as easily to changeling minds as to Psy. "You don't have the capacity to block her."
"I do now - something's changed."
Tai coughed to full wakefulness and they both turned to watch him as he used the wall to drag himself upright. Blinking several times after getting vertical, he lifted a hand to his cheek. "Christ, my face feels like a truck ran into it."
Brenna's eyes narrowed. "What the hell did you think you were doing?"
"I - "
"Save it. Why did you come after Judd?"
"Brenna, this is none of your concern." Judd could feel blood drying on his skin, the cells already clotting. "Tai and I have come to an understanding." He looked the other male in the eye.
Tai's jaw set, but he nodded. "We're square."
And their relative status in the pack's hierarchy had been clarified beyond any shadow of a doubt - if Judd's rank hadn't already been higher, he'd now be dominant to the wolf.
Shoving a hand through his hair, Tai turned to Brenna. "Can I talk to you about - "
"No." She cut him off with a wave of her hand. "I don't want to go with you to your college dance. You're too young and too idiotic."
Tai swallowed. "How did you know what I was going to say?"
"Maybe I'm Psy." A dark answer. "That's the rumor going around, isn't it?"
Streaks of red appeared on Tai's cheekbones. "I told them they were talking shit."
This was the first that Judd had heard of the clearly malicious attempt to cause Brenna emotional pain and it was the last thing he would have predicted. The wolves might make vicious enemies, but they were also fiercely protective of their own and had closed ranks around Brenna as soon as she'd been rescued.
He looked at Tai. "I think you should go."
The young wolf didn't argue, sliding past them as quickly as his legs would carry him.
"Do you know what makes it worse?" Brenna's question shifted his attention from the boy's retreating footsteps.
"What?"
"It's true." She turned the full power of that shattered blue-brown gaze on him. "I'm different. I see things with these damn eyes he gave me. Terrible things."
"They're simply echoes of what happened to you." A powerful sociopath had ripped open her mind, raped her on the most intimate of levels. That the experience had left her with psychic scars was unsurprising.
"That's what Sascha said. But the deaths I see - "
A scream ripped the moment into two.
They were both running before it ended. A hundred feet down a second tunnel, they were joined by Indigo and a couple of others. As they turned a corner, Andrew came tearing around it and clamped his hand on Brenna's upper arm, jerking his sister to a