Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Justice-Psy Eleri Dias knows the end is near for her, her mind one step away from fatal psychic exposure. In the short time that remains, she is determined to atone for an act of omission that has haunted her for a long, cruel decade. But that decision not only means facing a powerful changeling wing leader, but also putting herself in the path of a serial killer.
Falcon wing leader Adam Garrett is fiercely protective of his family and his clan. After losing his parents as a teenager in a shocking act of malice, Adam has no forgiveness in him for the J-Psy who betrayed him, betrayed them, at the most painful moment of his life. But the evil that stalks his territory will allow him no respite, forcing him once more into contact with the J he has never been able to forget.
Everything that could've been between Eleri and Adam was lost years ago, a shimmering promise crushed. As they work to uncover a monster, the moment of reckoning looms ever closer. Soon, there may be no more time left for either atonement...or love
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Chapter 1
“Some of us didn’t make it, Sophie. We’ve accepted that. Our final goal is to create a better world for the next generation of the children we once were.”
“No, I won’t let you do this.”
“You have no choice—to be a good leader, you have to implement triage, focus your energy on the ones who are salvageable. Leave the rest of us to do what we do best. We’ve bathed in evil…there’s no washing that off, so we might as well use it to lure monstrous prey.”
—Heated discussion between Eleri Dias (J Corps) and Sophia Russo (director of the J Corps) (5 January 2084)
The road to Raintree, Arizona, was composed of sprawling desert and rippling walls of red-orange rock. Eleri was no geologist, had no idea whether the rock was shale or limestone or something else altogether. All she saw were natural formations that looked as if they’d been created by an expert sculptor, each ripple and gradation of color put delicately in place.
Where the rocks fell away, the desert glinted, the only signs of life in any direction scraggly bushes of a sandy green hue and the majestic forms of saguaro cactus plants, their arms akimbo at ninety-degree angles.
The sky was a searing blue, the landscape as arid and dry as Eleri’s heart and mind. It seemed fitting that it would all end here, in this place devoid of the lush greenery so prevalent in the place where she’d taken her first breath too many shadow memories ago.
LIAR!!
That echo was as vicious today as the day it had been born, his voice having haunted her through all the years in between. And the further she drove into Raintree, the higher the likelihood that she’d come face-to-face with him…with the one person to whom she could never atone. There was no way to bring back the dead, and he’d taken care of the justice at which she’d failed.
Eleri. That’s pretty. My name is Adam.
Her fingers flexed on the steering wheel, the wall of numbness in her mind a gift against the past. How much worse would it be if she could truly experience it, instead of looking at it from beyond a vast gulf of nothingness?
She hadn’t shared her latest PsyMed test results with Sophia. They would have distressed her, and she was already in a physically vulnerable state, her pregnancy now at seven and a half months.
Poor Sophie.
Trying so hard to save all of them when that was an impossibility. And a terrible irony, because it had been Sophia’s refusal to give up on her fellow Js that had led to her forcible elevation to Director of the J Corps.
Sophia was Ruling Coalition member Nikita Duncan’s senior aide, and had no time to head a group of damaged telepaths who had once been overseen by the J Corps Management Board. But when the Ruling Coalition wiped out that board—after Sophia brought its mismanagement of the Corps to the Coalition’s attention—and asked all working Js in the world to get together to nominate their new leadership, they’d come back with a single name: Sophia “Sophie” Russo.
They’d dropped the mess of the J Corps into Sophia’s lap and trusted her to build a better long-term structure for them. She could’ve said no, but of course she hadn’t. Because Sophie wanted not just life for all of them, but a life filled with joy and hope.
“Sophia’s as tough as fucking nails, except when it comes to Js.”
It was Bram who’d said that in the conversation group of four he’d set up almost eighteen years ago: the Quatro Cartel. Bram’s little joke because the biggest case in the news at the time—when the four of them had been between nine and ten—had involved a ruthless drug cartel that liked to remove organs from people who owed them money, for no reason except that it was horrific torture.
“Perhaps we should follow that cartel’s example, Bram,” Saffron had said two months ago in her whisper of a voice, her throat still healing from her altercation with a murderer on a rampage. “Remove organs one by one, make our targets suffer.”
No one had told her that would take her into sociopath territory. Fact was, none of them had the patience for such games of torture, especially not Saffron, with her violent rages and extreme temper. Regardless, they agreed with her in principle—after what they’d seen in the minds they’d wandered, Eleri and the rest of the cartel of four had no doubts about evil and what it deserved.
Quatro had begun as a secret because they’d been children at a strict boarding school who’d wanted a private way to talk. It was Yúzé who’d taken Bram’s initial idea and used his tech skills to move the chat into a secure online room—Eleri didn’t understand how he’d done it, but then tech had always been Yúzé’s specialty. As a J, he’d been pulled near exclusively into cases that involved high-tech elements of murder.