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)
A cardinal-eyed woman dressed in black sweatpants and a black T-shirt, her hair in a loose braid that had begun to unravel and the honey brown of her skin dull with tiredness, perhaps sorrow, rushed into the room. “Naia,” Sascha Duncan said. “I got your message. What’s happened?”
Even as Naia explained, Adam’s fingers tightened on Eleri’s forearm, as if to pull her away.
“Let me.” A quiet request to allow her to attempt this absolution even if it was destined to fail. He would hate her even more after it was done, but at least he would be at peace with making the call to let Jacques go. She could take that with her to the end. One good thing she’d done for the boy who’d smiled at her.
His jaw worked before he released her.
“Don’t shadow me,” she said to Sascha, the E who had started an unstoppable avalanche of change. “Even if I can effectively lower my shields, which is doubtful given the progression of my Sensitivity”—her brain fighting desperately to protect her—“I can’t protect you from the memories inside me.” They floated everywhere now, ugly splinters of evil.
“I can monitor Jacques instead,” Sascha said, but when Eleri went to touch Jacques’s partially twisted and taloned hand, the empath frowned. “Maybe try another area. Not one where the two sides of his nature are entwined. It might make a difference.”
Eleri saw no reason not to follow her advice. “If it’s permitted, I’ll use the side of his neck. It’s visible and appears to have remained fully human.” A glance at Naia.
“No falcon structures beneath,” Naia confirmed.
“Do it,” Adam said, closing his own hand over Jacques’s mangled one for a second. “We’re coming for you, Jacques. Fly toward us.”
Eleri waited until he’d released his friend’s hand before placing her fingertips against Jacques’s skin. It was warm, his body alive, his pulse slow and steady. But inside him was…silence.
Not the kind in which she’d been raised, but the kind that was a void. No wind, no sound, no motion. A quiet so pristine that it was a glass pond deeper than the one she’d experienced with an elderly human once—the woman had been a monk who’d practiced meditation for five decades, and who’d held out her hand in an invitation to touch when a young Eleri looked at her with curiosity.
“I have no shield, child,” she’d said after Eleri gasped at the peace of her mind, “because I need no shield. I am one with time and the universe.”
Jacques was no monk who lived in a forest. Yet this pristine silence…it was too profound, too oddly thick. “Is he like you?” she asked Adam. “Wild energy under the skin? Or is he a calmer personality?”
Adam snorted. “Jacques is about as wild as they come.”
Naia’s smile was bittersweet. “It’s why he and Adam are so close. They’re as wild as each other.”
“Did he meditate?”
Naia broke into shocked laughter. “Jacques? I’d like to see anyone get him to do that.” Her tone was rich with affection. “No, he’s not the meditating kind.”
Eleri walked into the thick silence again; into the void that wasn’t empty, wasn’t dead, but wasn’t quite alive, either.
A paradox.
Was her Psy brain unable to sense him because he was in limbo?
Breaking contact with the injured falcon, she reached her other hand instinctively toward Adam, and for a second, her heart just stopped.
A primal warmth against her, a sense of a huge and wild creature enclosing her in its massive wings.
Protecting, not assaulting.
She could have stood there all day, all night, all year, to the last drops of her existence, but this wasn’t about her. Keeping hold of Adam with one hand, she reinitiated contact with Jacques with her other, acting on the same instincts that made her such a ruthless hunter.
The pond rippled.
The wild creature that was Adam went motionless.
A shout so distant it was a dull echo through stone, music as heard through her reconditioned brain.
She gripped Adam’s hand harder while pressing her palm against Jacques’s neck.
The shout was louder…though “loud” was a misnomer, because it remained quieter than the brush of a butterfly’s wing. But against her nonexistent psychic skin, it was very much an active sound. She was suddenly aware of Adam’s urgent voice, wanted to tell him to be quiet so she could focus.
The ripples spread.
She attempted to use the faint motion to shove her psychic hand through the glassy surface.
She pierced it…but only the merest inch. And what she touched on the other side, it felt wrong, off. The semi-shift had affected Jacques’s brain, neither part of him strong enough to be sentient in any true form.
A hard pull from Adam, his hand gripping the one she had on Jacques and physically hauling it off the other man’s skin. “You’re bleeding.” It was a snarl as he released one hand to grab tissues held out by Sascha while Naia ran to grab a scanner.