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)
Jacques’s smile faded. “That was ten years ago. She still like that?”
“No.” Adam couldn’t get over the sheer flatness of her emotional response, the complete lack of personality. It was a stark contrast to the girl whose pupils had gone huge with shock at a connection that had hit them both without warning…and yet she’d stayed, offered him a bandage…and looked back to meet his gaze when she was called over by her superior.
What had happened to Eleri Dias in the years in between?
Jacques blew out a breath. “So, why’s she here?”
When Adam told him, Jacques frowned. “Her theory makes sense, but we only have her word for it. You going to touch base with your Enforcement friends to verify?”
“Yeah. I’m not about to take her allegations on trust.” Once, she could’ve told him the sky was green and the earth blue, and he’d no doubt have followed along like an infatuated puppy. Adam didn’t know how to put limits on his love—he was all in with his family, his friends, his clan.
But Eleri had put paid to that possibility between them with a single act of complicit silence.
“Let’s debrief after I get back.” Lifting his arms, Jacques stripped off his T-shirt to reveal a chiseled chest brushed with curled dark hair. Over his shoulder draped part of a tattoo that Adam knew covered the left half of his back.
He’d been there when Jacques designed that tat—and when the final DNA-encoded ink was needled into his cells. Adam was no scientist, didn’t know how the ink held through the shift, but that it did was unquestioned.
He knew not just because of Jacques, but because of the tattoo he carried on his own left front pectoral, a memory of grief etched in flesh that had, over time, become a reminder of love.
Two falcons side by side, their wings forever stretched in flight.
Adam would never forgive his parents’ murder, but he was no longer blinded by it until that was all he remembered of them.
Or he hadn’t been.
Until her.
“Seriously?” Adam managed to keep his voice light even as his spine threatened to lock, his talons to release. “I do not want to see your pasty butt.”
“My butt is a delicious chocolate brown, per any number of admiring lady friends, thank you very much.”
As they laughed together with the ease of old friends who’d shifted together many a time, Jacques stripped to the skin and threw his clothes over a nearby rock before shifting into his falcon form.
Like Adam, he was a peregrine, but his feathers tended toward a more intense gray coloration with less of a blue undertone. As for the tattoo, it didn’t vanish but was scattered across one wing in a spray of black that gave him a distinct appearance. Ink wasn’t always that visible in both forms, but Jacques had a lot of it; the one that had caught Adam’s eye today was far from his only one.
After fussing with and settling his wings a couple of times—a pure Jacques trait—WindHaven’s second-in-command dropped off the edge of the plateau, his wings opening out in a smooth glide, a falcon at home in the skies.
Adam watched his best friend soar across Raintree.
Shaking off his own need to fly, to just get this energy out, he grabbed the other man’s clothes and dropped them in one of the closed bins they had out here for that purpose. The bins were sunk into the earth, with only the lids visible. Once he’d placed the clothes inside, he entered Jacques’s name on the digital label so his friend could find his clothes on his return.
No one stopped him on his way back from the plateau, and he deliberately avoided venturing into the section on the right that held a cluster of residences up against the cliff edge.
Today wasn’t a day to stop by for a chat with clanmates.
Instead, he entered the internal part of the Canyon, then made his way to his office, where he input the comm code that would connect him to a human friend in Enforcement. The investigative service had a bad rap because it had been controlled and manipulated by Psy for a long time—not just politically, but through interference with the minds of the humans who made up a large percentage of Enforcement ranks. Unlike changelings, humans had no natural protective shield.
That didn’t mean there weren’t good people in there, people who wanted justice and worked toward it. Adam’s contact had survived unmolested because he’d made certain he didn’t get promoted beyond the first rank of detective.
As a result, he was often the “junior” on important cases, even though his experience meant he knew far more than his supervising officers. Since he also didn’t care for credit, his senior officers let him do pretty much what he wanted as long as he got the work done.