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)
Cold in Adam’s veins as he remembered how Eleri had spoken about Exposure. She’d danced around the road she’d choose to take if she was on the verge of losing herself, but he wasn’t an idiot—he’d seen the answer in the dull sorrow in her eyes, in her refusal to discuss their future.
If I’m that badly messed up, you make sure I get to fly.
Jacques’s words, but that had been Eleri’s wish, too. She hadn’t wanted to live if she had to do it as a woman lost in screaming madness. “Can you tell before she wakes?” he forced himself to ask the doctor.
But she shook her head. “No.” A pause. “Working with Js…it requires compassion of a kind that a percentage of my colleagues might find against medical ethics. I don’t. If a J has made their wishes clear, then my team will execute that request in a way that ensures a painless peace.”
Anguish rocked him, but he wasn’t going to let Eleri down—not in joy…and not in the terrible darkness. “I know who to ask.” Bram would categorically know Eleri’s wishes on this point as no doubt Eleri knew those of the man who was her brother chosen. “Until we know, fight for her.”
When the doctor moved to the back of the plane to consult with a colleague who was monitoring Eleri’s neural readings, he leaned close to Eleri’s ear. “You did it, wild bird. We’ve got Hendricks.” The killer had run his car off the road and got himself stuck in the desert in his attempt to drive out of a dust storm. “No one will even find his bones by the time we get through with him.”
They had, however, given Detective Beaufort and Eleri’s task force colleagues the identity of the man known as the Sandman. “We told them it was his scent in the bunker, that he must’ve escaped into the desert. Beaufort has to know we have the fucker, but he’s not going to spill.”
And the task force could verify Hendricks’s identity as the Sandman via the DNA in the little prison cell he’d created to feed his warped needs. “Your people are ripping apart his house right now,” he told Eleri. “From the message I got before we took off, there’s not going to be a problem with evidence to confirm his guilt.”
Hendricks himself wasn’t talking, was barely conscious. He’d made the bad mistake of attempting to take Dahlia on first with a gun and then a knife. She, a changeling who could read the desert storm—and who was forewarned—had easily avoided the attempted strikes, then come down on top of him. Needless to say, she’d shredded his back to ribbons, then broken his arm the same way he’d broken Malia’s.
“The pathetic piece of shit tried to goad me to slit his throat with my talon.” A snort from his wing-second. “As if I’d make it that easy for him. He’ll be here when you get back.”
Recalling everything Eleri had told him of the Sandman murders, Adam had said, “Keep the human population of the Canyon away from him, and check his genealogy. Eleri said all the victims showed signs of a telepathic assault. Whatever Hendricks is, he’s not fully human.”
Now, while his clan made sure a vicious murderer would never again claim a victim, Adam held Eleri’s hand, skin to skin, blood to blood, in a silent reminder that he was here, that she was part of something bigger now…that she was his mate and he’d waited for her for a lifetime.
Oh, I’m so sorry. I should’ve been looking up instead of at my organizer.
…you’ve cut your knuckles. Let me get a bandage from the first aid—
No, stay, it will heal up real quick.
“Stay,” he whispered as his heart threatened to break. “Please, Eleri, just stay.”
• • •
“Prep for landing,” came the pilot’s instruction after too long.
“Stabilize her.” Dr. Czajka indicated for Adam to hold on tight to the board on which the medics had strapped Eleri down. “We want as little movement to her brain as possible.”
The doctor and two other medics took hold of other parts of the board, all four of them bracing themselves to take any impact. But the pilot managed to land with a skill that was a falcon gliding to home ground.
“I don’t know much about changeling bonds,” Czajka said to him as she ran down the hospital hallway beside the hover-propelled gurney a minute later. “But if you believe physical contact will help with her medical status, then scrub up and join us in the operating theatre.”
Then she was gone, taking Eleri with her.
Adam turned to the nurse who’d been on the flight. “Show me how to scrub up.”
It took far too long, even with the facility’s high-tech sanitizer, but he was finally ready. He walked in to find Eleri in surgery, Dr. Czajka about to use a fine drill to make a hole in her skull. “Easiest, fastest way to relieve pressure on the brain,” the surgeon said.