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)
He knew it was a way to delay the conversation he needed to have with Jacques’s mom and dad and sister, but on this day when he knew he’d lose his friend, he gave himself that grace. He had to come to terms with it first before he went to them, so he could be strong while they fell apart.
He pulled up the first document—a letter to him.
Well, shit, Adam, if you’re reading this, I’m fucking dead.
A laugh tore out of him even as his eyes burned.
Unable to bear it, he shut down the document and, thrusting the pen back down on his desk, strode out through the quiet hallways, to exit out into the canyon on the wings of a falcon. He didn’t even know where he was flying to through the cool darkness until he swept over the inn and saw her vehicle parked in front of her room.
Chapter 17
A breath
Fingers that do not touch
An uncrossable divide
Some stories…
…are unfinished
—“Story Fragment” by Adina Mercant, poet (b. 1832, d. 1901)
Adam landed at the clothing cache nearest the inn.
It took him only a minute to pull on a pair of jeans and a black tee. Then he was jogging barefoot through the trees with the familiarity of a man who’d been a boy on this same soil, knew it inside out. The darkness embraced him in a way that brought comfort, muffling the anguish to come on the dawn.
When he emerged behind the inn, it was to see Eleri’s lights on at an hour when the rest of the world slept.
I don’t sleep much.
She opened the door before he could knock once again, and the fact that she was wearing her suit pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, her hair sleeked back into a neat bun, told him she either hadn’t gone to bed at all—or had woken after a couple of hours and decided to ready herself for the day.
“What’s happened?” Her eyes searched him with a quickness he could almost read as concern. “Jacques?”
She went as if to pull him inside, only to hesitate right before her bare fingers made contact with his arm. The air hung, the moment frozen.
Dropping her hand, she stepped back. “Come inside.”
He entered.
He could lie, tell himself he didn’t know why he’d come to her, but he knew. He’d always known.
Striding in, he pushed the door shut behind him with extreme care only because otherwise he would’ve slammed it and woken the other guest—who Mi-ja had put three rooms over, if the guest’s shiny sedan was parked in the correct spot.
“Did you feel anything?” he found himself asking this woman who’d haunted him for ten years. Only it wasn’t an ask, rather a demand stripped of all niceties. “That first time. In the—”
“—hallway,” she completed, her eyes locked to his in the hushed silence of a world swathed in darkness. “You were leaning up against a wall away from the rest of your clan, your tie askew and your knuckles raw.”
“I’d just punched one of the courthouse’s stone columns.” His throat was lined with grit, his words serrated. “And I haven’t worn a tie since that day.” He’d done it to honor his parents, and to ensure their party would be taken seriously in the courtroom—he’d still believed in justice then.
“I didn’t know who you were,” Eleri said, her own voice different in a way he couldn’t quite pinpoint—it wasn’t that she was suddenly awash in emotion. She was just…less flat by a fraction. “But I could tell you were changeling, so I thought you must have some connection to the case, because as far as I knew, it was the only changeling-related case on the docket that day.”
“You offered me a bandage.” He’d been struck dumb by the sight of her as she turned the corner, a slim young woman in a crisp black pantsuit paired with a white shirt buttoned up to the neck, her hair in a neat braid.
“You stared at me for a long time before you said for me to stay, that it would ‘heal up real quick. Changeling skin is tough.’ ”
His heart punched against his rib cage at her exact recitation of his long-ago words. “I heard Js have eidetic memories.”
“Only for the memories we read. Our own…we lose them over time, so much flotsam in the sea of other people’s echoes.”
“But you remember that day, that moment.”
“That day defined my existence,” she said, her voice quiet now, and still with no depth, as if he spoke to a shadow. “In more ways than one.”
He went to grasp her upper arms, shake her, but halted. “What happens if I touch you?” He expected her to say he had no right to touch her. Or if not that, to tell him that he’d kill her by overloading her.