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)
“No,” Adam interrupted. “I’ll do it.” Then, as Naia’s face trembled before she schooled it into professional calm, he gave a crisp, clear description of the man Sascha knew was his closest friend. “We don’t know about the internal semi-shift beyond what we can scan. His brain…that’s why you’re here, Hanz.”
Hanz’s throat moved as he swallowed. “Thank you. I’m sorry for causing you pain.”
Adam shook his head and touched Hanz on the shoulder, a changeling who understood when another being needed physical contact to feel safe. “It’s fine. You ask for whatever you need.”
“Sascha?” Hanz held out his hand.
Taking it, she said, “Ready?”
A nod, but inside her mind came a scared question. What if he’s trapped in there?
If he is and we can find him, that means he can come back once he heals, can finish the shift either way. She didn’t actually know that, and neither did any healers Naia had contacted, but it was their best hope. It would mean he’s just stuck, not gone.
Hanz’s eyes met hers, the sightless orbs swimming with distress and determination both. You’ll watch? I don’t want to make a mistake, make him worse.
You won’t. Jaya wouldn’t have sent you if she didn’t trust you could handle it. Sascha squeezed his hand before requesting a telepathic connection through his shields that would permit her to shadow him.
Hanz opened on his end at once, and she could immediately see everything he was doing as he did it. While she’d worked with Jaya on previous occasions, it was once again a revelation to see how their E abilities worked when compared to her own.
She saw Hanz take an initial broad emotional read of the room before he filtered out the “noise” and began to drill down through the layers of what appeared to his mind to be a heavy black blanket that stifled Jacques’s. It was obvious that he was being methodical in not skipping a single step as he built not a bridge but a tunnel.
I can get in, he said on a psychic exhale. It’s as if his natural shield suffered a quake. It’s here but in pieces with large gaps in between.
He was caught mid-shift, Sascha replied, perhaps right as the shield was resetting from one form to the next. Because when changelings shifted, they did so on every level.
Hanz didn’t reply, his attention on his work.
I’m trying to find him, the E said to Sascha. When people are lost in their minds, or when they’ve retreated to a protected bit of the brain, we have to drill. It sounds harsh, but it’s not, I promise.
I know. Jaya showed me once.
She’s so good at it, can do multiple tunnels at once, but I can only do one at a time.
Trust yourself, Hanz. Jaya does.
A long and deep breath before Hanz settled in, having already indicated he preferred to work standing up.
He went through three nutrient drinks and an equal number of hours of work before collapsing in the chair Adam had earlier dragged over for him—before the falcon wing leader had to leave to take a meeting that was urgent for the clan’s bottom line.
The heads of clans and packs didn’t have the luxury of giving in to their emotions, and their sentinels and seconds were cut from the same cloth. Sascha knew Jacques would’ve been the first person to remind Adam of his responsibilities had he shown any signs of forgetting. That was a sentinel’s—or second’s—job.
“I can’t find him,” Hanz said aloud to Sascha and Naia, his lower lip trembling and one of his hands clutching Sascha’s.
Naia, her face dark with grief, nonetheless put a reassuring hand on Hanz’s shoulder, while Sascha blanketed him in emotions warm and comforting.
Tears rolled down the young E’s face. “I want to try again,” he said through the roar of his own visceral emotions. “I don’t want to give up.”
Sascha’s heart was heavy, and though she agreed with Hanz that he should try again after a couple of hours of rest to rebuild his strength, she was conscious that success was unlikely. And much as she didn’t want to say that, she had to—Jacques’s clan deserved to have all available information.
“I saw every bit of what he did,” she told Adam and Naia after Hanz fell asleep. “He didn’t cut any corners, went over each area of Jacques’s mind multiple times.”
Face pinched, Naia folded her arms but let Adam haul her against him, his chin on her hair. “So he’s gone?”
“That’s the problem.” Sascha rubbed her hands down her own arms, her thin black sweater no proof against the cold inside her. “And it’s why Hanz wants to try again—there’s something there, but he couldn’t get to it, and he told me he’s never seen anything even similar.”
“That indistinct brain wave reading.” Naia’s head lifted, hope a soft melody in her tone.