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)
But then the yearning twisted, turned, and became a stabbing that threatened to disable her, and that she couldn’t allow, not on this one day when she had made a promise to Adam.
Who turned right then to look at her. “You still okay to attempt to read Jacques?”
She gave a short nod.
But the beautiful woman with black hair and creamy skin hesitated. “I know a little about the gloves,” she said to Eleri. “Information is being shared post-Silence among M-Psy, healers, doctors. Since we might come up against gloved Psy who need help.”
“Eleri told me she could handle it since Jacques is in a coma.” Adam’s fingers gripping Eleri’s jaw, the contact already so familiar that the yearning threatened to overwhelm her with thoughts of a future where such touch was commonplace. “You lie?”
“No,” Eleri said even as the healer told Adam to break contact in a sharp tone, her body moving as if she’d force the break. As if she had the right to do so.
Changeling hierarchy, Eleri thought, was far more complex than she’d realized.
“It’s all right,” Eleri said to her. “Changelings have natural shields.”
The healer halted, looked between the two of them with a frown.
“To my knowledge,” Eleri said to Adam, “the risk is exactly as I told you. The only thing I didn’t articulate is that I don’t believe he’s in there any longer.” She softened her voice as much as she could and knew it wasn’t enough. “The Es are the specialists. If they couldn’t find him…”
Adam didn’t release her and she didn’t pull away. “I know it’s worse than a long shot.”
It was as if he, too, was attempting to live a lifetime in a moment. The yearning inside her grew so intense that it was a visceral physical pain. “I should do it now,” she said, because this was all she had left to give her beautiful boy. “While your clan house is quiet.”
“The Canyon,” Adam said roughly, the heat of his body a caress against the coldness of her. “We call the entirety of our home the Canyon.”
“The Canyon.” She hugged the knowledge close as Adam released her at last.
It was time for her to break his heart one more time.
Chapter 20
Eleri, I should be arriving in approximately three hours.
—Message from Bram Priest to Eleri Dias (now)
The healer, who Adam introduced as Naia, continued to appear worried, but she didn’t stop Eleri from entering the patient room, her eyes dark and huge. Hopeful despite herself, Eleri thought, clinging to this last shred of a chance.
I am so sorry.
She didn’t know what she’d been expecting when she walked inside, but it wasn’t the twisted half-falcon, half-human body that lay beneath the curving plas of the high-spec monitoring bed that wouldn’t have been out of place in an intensive-care unit. He was covered by a sheet below it, but the amputations and malformations were obvious, his face bearing stark evidence of a shift gone catastrophically wrong.
Not halting in her path to the bed because the wall of numbness inside her buried her initial violent shock, she went to stand beside it. “Could you give me an update on his status?” she asked Naia, who’d gone to the foot of the bed. “Especially as it pertains to his brain.”
Adam stood in silence beside her as the healer read off the latest numbers from the screen at the end of the bed. The sum total of it all was that Jacques was reading as close to brain-dead as possible except for that one strange pattern that no one could explain. It could, Eleri realized, simply be an error caused by the incomplete shift, his brain readings so askew the computronic system couldn’t make sense of them.
Adam and Naia no doubt understood that, too. But they had to be sure they weren’t killing their friend and clanmate when they shut down the machines. They had to know beyond any doubt that the neural reading wasn’t because Jacques was trapped inside, with no way out.
Eleri wanted to give them an answer. “I’m ready.”
Naia took a deep breath. “I’m lowering the protective plas.”
The clear barrier slipped back into the sides of the bed, leaving Jacques accessible for tactile contact.
Eleri stripped off her gloves, but Adam gripped her forearm when she would’ve put her hand on the part of Jacques’s hand that bore human skin.
Sensing her eyes going pure black on a surge that was her reaction to Adam’s proximity, she said, “I won’t harm him.” She glanced past Naia. “Where is Sascha Duncan? She can mak—”
“Are you sure this is safe for you?” Adam interrupted her to demand, and his response spoke to that tiny fragment of her that could feel yearning.
“Yes, I’m sure.” She wondered what it would be like to touch him as he’d touched Naia, attempt to offer comfort in the physical changeling way. She could never do that, but she could try with her words. “I’m sorry.”