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)
—From the section titled “Telepathy (Tp)” in Overview of Gradient Levels (24th edition) by Professor J. Paul Emory and K. V. Dutta, assigned textbook for PsyMed Foundation Courses 1 & 2
Adam landed about five hundred meters away from the chief’s home, near the clothing cache, got dressed at lightning speed, then ran the rest of the way…to emerge into a blaze of emergency lights. The ambulance he’d seen from the air stood in the drive, its back doors thrown wide open.
Though its lights continued to strobe, the siren was off.
A paramedic jumped out of the back—a former local who’d shifted to be closer to the main hospital. “Adam.” He jolted. “Shit, where’d you come from?”
Adam ignored the question. “What happened?”
“Massive heart attack,” the stocky Black man said as he headed back inside with a stretcher. “We just stabilized him for transport.”
No one stopped Adam when he followed the other man inside, and the chief’s wife sobbed in what looked like relief when she saw him. The usually perfectly dressed woman’s hair was a rain of silver-black around her, her face devoid of the red lipstick that was her trademark. “Adam, oh God, Adam,” she said from where she crouched bedside the chief.
“My Barry, he just fell.” She shifted from English to Diné Bizaad, the rhythms of her speech the same as his mother and grandmother’s, for the Diné, like all of the world’s peoples, ran the gamut from human to Psy to changeling.
Rafina Cross was human but had spent many a dinner up at the Canyon.
“You know how he is in the mornings, loves to get up with his cup of coffee when the world is quiet. Like your sister—he still uses that ‘early bird’ mug she gave him.” A trembling lower lip. “Remember how they both laughed when I told them they were taking greeting the sun and letting its spirit suffuse them too far?”
Having come down beside her, Adam cradled her suddenly fragile-seeming frame to his side. “How did he fall, Rafina?”
“We didn’t get in till one, but still he was up at four thirty. He usually wakes me at about five thirty with a cup of coffee and a kiss, and when I woke it was six already and he hadn’t been…I don’t know how long he was lying here!” Her sobs were heartbreaking, her hands fluttering into the air as the paramedics moved her husband onto the stretcher.
The older man was pale, his lips holding a bluish tinge and his sturdy body limp.
Adam had run into him right before he left for his “thirtieth honeymoon,” as he’d put it, and the seventy-five-year-old man had looked as fit as ever. Add in the fact that it had happened now…the pile of coincidences was getting far too big, but Adam didn’t know how anyone could incite a heart attack in a healthy man.
There was also the question of why anyone would want to attack the chief—if he’d known something about Jacques’s shooting, he’d have already called Adam…except it had been extremely early in the day when he went down, and the chief knew enough about changeling healing to know that Adam would’ve been assisting Naia for hours.
It was possible he’d waited to speak to Adam.
It was also possible this was just bad luck and bad timing. The chief had, after all, returned home only hours ago. The chances of him having discovered anything probative were close to nil.
Whatever the answer, Adam let it go for now and helped Rafina out to the ambulance, so she could ride to the nearest hospital—fifty high-speed minutes away—with her grievously ill husband. Naia often stepped in to assist with Raintree emergencies, but with her exhausted and the chief having suffered a major incident, that wasn’t an option.
Naia couldn’t reach humans with her healing abilities.
He wasn’t surprised to see a squad car parked on the road when he emerged from the house—whoever was on duty would’ve alerted the others as soon as they got word of the emergency request.
All three—Beaufort, Whitten, and Hendricks—were hovering near the ambulance but didn’t interfere or ask questions as the paramedics loaded the chief inside. Adam then all but lifted Rafina into the ambulance. “I’ll call Laurel,” he told her because he knew she’d start to worry about that as soon as she could think straight again. “Make sure she knows where you’ll both be.”
Laurel was the Crosses’ only daughter and lived about an hour out of Raintree—close to the hospital where her father was being taken. Married with two kids, she’d gone to school the same time as Saoirse, been friends with Adam’s sister. They still kept in touch in the distant way of old high school friends.
Rafina Cross squeezed his hand. “She’s pregnant.” A shaky tremor in her voice. “Tell her husband instead, then he can…”
“Got it. You just worry about the chief.” Stepping back, Adam shut the doors, then watched the ambulance move out of the drive and down the quiet suburban street. The siren didn’t streak into the air until about a minute later, when they would’ve turned onto a main thoroughfare and picked up speed.