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)
Despite his focus on his destination, however, he never lost sight of his surroundings—he’d been a scout for the clan in his younger years, had excellent peripheral senses and reflexes—so he saw the shiny car parked on the side of the road a bare five-minute drive from the hidden vehicle. Spotted, too, the person next to it.
That person lifted their arm in a wave, and Jacques dipped his wing in reply. When the individual waved him urgently closer, he went lower. He had no reason not to…and no reason to expect that the next thing the person raised would be a weapon. He was fast, he was trained, and he was strong. He managed to turn enough that the first shot from the laser weapon barely singed his wing.
But he was also a creature of the air who’d been lured too close to the ground. The second shot pierced his torso while he was still climbing—even as he released a warning cry to his clan. Agony exploded through his body, but some part of him was thinking through the pain, and that part attempted to shift.
He’d break a few bones if he fell from this height, but he wouldn’t die—and the thin blade of laser weaponry would injure far less integral organs in his human body than in his falcon self.
The third bolt of icy fire caught him mid-shift.
He fell hard enough to send a storm of dust into the air, felt his heart stutter…and heard the cries of falcons responding from a distance.
The car on the road started up.
The coward who’d shot him, the imposter in the skin of one trusted, was running away. Too late. Jacques had seen them.
Jacques would…
The thought slipped out of his grasp even as he attempted to hold on to it, the taste of wet iron filling his mouth.
The last thing he saw was red spreading on the ground in front of him.
Chapter 9
The perpetrator is careful not to leave any traces, on the victims or otherwise. DNA, prints, other physical evidence findings have all so far been negative. The only lead we have is the method of murder: it requires telepathic ability.
—Sandman Task Force briefing (2 October 2083)
Adam’s entire body jolted, his blood bond with Jacques shrieking with the kind of pain that could only mean a mortal wound.
“Jacques!” He was running almost before he’d processed the primal surge, was still in stride as he cleared the lip of the exit into the Canyon, and shifted while in his clothes. They disintegrated away, so much fine dust under the force of the act that turned a changeling into their other self.
Clanmates who’d been near him when he sensed Jacques fall flew out behind him.
His falcon called out, got no reply from his best friend—but caught the faint ripple of panicked cries across the skies. His clanmates stayed silent so those distant cries could be heard. And those falcons, the ones closer to Jacques, were relaying back that this was the worst of the worst.
Jacques, big and moody and loyal to the bone, was down.
Adam knew he didn’t have to worry about contacting Naia—he’d felt WindHaven’s healer take to the air right after him, and one of her team would already be racing down the Canyon road in a vehicle fully equipped to function as an ambulance.
Naia would’ve grabbed a locator beacon from the plateau after she shifted; it’d allow the person on the ground to track her location even if they lost sight of her or of Adam. He didn’t wait for her—his blood bond with Jacques might mean Adam could hold him to the world long enough for Naia to help him.
His wings ached with the speed of his flight, but he still caught a glimpse of a lone figure in black looking up at him from the parking lot of the only diner in Raintree, her hand held up to shade her eyes as she watched him and others streak across the sky.
Then he’d left her and the town behind, was out in the desert.
The blood bond wasn’t a perfect homing beacon, couldn’t lead him directly to injured clanmates, but it could give him a direction—and in this case, that was all he needed. Because others, who’d been closer when Jacques went down had heard his cry for help, found him; two of the clan circled above the location, giving Adam aerial notice that he’d arrived at the right place.
A third stood guard beside Jacques’s mangled body.
Adam landed hard in his falcon form before shifting into his human one, while the clanmate who’d stood sentinel lifted off to help guard the area. Old memories threatened to crowd his mind, a cold wind. He hadn’t witnessed his parents’ murder, but he’d seen the pictures taken by the cops after breaking into his grandmother’s files, and those images had haunted him every time he closed his eyes for years.