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)
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.”