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)
Sascha nodded, but, much as she wanted to nurture that hope, said, “Hanz said it’s so faint an impression that he doesn’t believe even Jaya would be able to reach it—if it can be reached. It doesn’t feel…whole.”
Adam pinned her with a raptor’s angry gaze, but she knew the anger had nothing to do with her. “And you? You’re more experienced. What do you think?”
“This isn’t my field, but I agree with him that it’s too faint. As for the wholeness, I have far more experience with changeling minds on the emotional level, and Jacques’s doesn’t feel right.” She pressed a fist to her heart, as if that would stop the pain. “Not wild enough. Not human enough, either.”
“Stuck,” Adam said, his tone curt.
“Stuck,” she agreed, giving shape to the horrific nightmare that was Jacques’s reality. She could only hope that he felt none of it. Because if he was in there and conscious on any level…
Her gut twisted.
Chapter 16
“So is Jacques playing dumb or has he really not figured it out yet?”
“You ever known Jacques to play those kinds of games? Man is oblivious.”
“Wow. You could drop a hint, do the best-friend wingman thing—pun intended.”
“Oh no, I don’t think either one of them would appreciate that. Trust me, it’s going to hit him over the head with the force of a boulder one day soon enough.”
“I’m going to make sure I’m stocked up on popcorn.”
—Conversation between Dahlia Dehlavi and Adam Garrett (circa September 2083)
Adam knew the answer he was going to get even before Sascha, Hanz, and Naia walked out of Jacques’s room after Hanz’s second attempt. Hanz was crying, his young face marked by exhaustion. Naia held his hand and murmured words of comfort, while Sascha had her arm around the male.
She shook her head gently at Adam, her cardinal eyes devoid of starlight.
Fuck!
The scream was internal, and echoed by the falcon who was his other half. But out loud he said, “Thank you for trying,” and—going on instinct—cradled the boy against his chest.
The E held on to him, apologizing.
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Adam reassured him, viscerally aware of the kid’s youth, his falcon spreading its wings over the boy. “You did all you could, and for that, you will always be a friend to WindHaven.”
After Sascha led Hanz out to the bedroom the clan had made up for him, Adam turned to Naia. She’d held it together till then, been strong for the boy, but now his dedicated, empathic healer, to whom the entire clan were pieces of her heart, collapsed into his arms.
Adam couldn’t cry, his tears locked deep within, but an hour later, after everyone else was lost to sleep and Kavi was in her office, he sat exhausted and restless beside Jacques’s bed and told his best friend off for being a fucking asshole and leaving them all when they needed him so much.
Even then, the tears wouldn’t come, his anger too huge a rock in his chest.
“You’re meant to be by my side for decades. Meant to be the hard head who knocks sense into me if I lose it. You’re not meant to fucking die, Jacques.”
Even with all hope gone, he didn’t want to take the final step. But quite aside from his promise to Jacques, that was part of what being wing leader meant—he had to stand in front of all the hits, take the hardest blows. As he wished he could’ve taken the blows that had smashed his best friend out of the sky.
“I reached out across the entire healer network again,” Naia had told him before she let sleep suck her under, her grief an open wound. “Just in case.”
“No results,” Adam guessed, because if anyone had come up with a solution, Naia wouldn’t be in this state.
“No.” She’d kept her head on his chest, his one of the few she could lean on in the clan—it wasn’t about love, but about people looking to her for their cue on how to react to the unfolding tragedy.
The minute Naia cracked, so would the rest of them.
Even Malia, so determinedly cheerful when she dropped off memory cubes for Jacques with his favorite music and her chatty updates on the clan, would crack with a finality that couldn’t be repaired.
“Sascha pulled every string she could for us to get Hanz,” he told Jacques now.
Thanks to your grandmother’s willingness to embrace change.
Words his best friend would’ve said if he could. He’d always been one of Aria’s biggest fans.
“I can see which way the wind is blowing, Adam,” his grandmother had said to him when he was yet the most junior of her wing-seconds. “We can’t fly alone anymore, relying on nothing but flight path agreements.”
A cupping of his face with her aged hands. “You’re going to take us into the future, my boy. And it’s time I talked to you about what that means.”