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 fresh blood that was dripping and falling to decay on the earth? That, Dahlia could track.
As she flew, he ran back inside the station. “Phone.”
When Beaufort threw over his own, already unlocked, Adam called Bram. “Is Eleri still in the Net?”
“Yes. What—”
“Abduction.” His eye caught on a glint below the desk.
Grabbing a disposable glove out of a box on the wall, he used it to crouch down and pick up Eleri’s device. “Do you know how to get into her phone?”
“No. J devices are heavily secured—iris print, live voice code, all of it. No way to get into it even by the manufacturer.”
Fuck. “Watch for her on the Net, contact me if anything changes.”
“Adam, I’ve got it,” Beaufort said at the same time that Adam hung up. “Outside camera feed.”
Vaulting over the desk to the screen on the other man’s desk, Adam watched as a black van he recognized as belonging to the local bakery stopped by the station’s back door and a black-clad figure in a grotesque horror mask got out. The person went into the station, dragged a limp Eleri out, and bundled her into the van before driving off.
All in under a minute.
“Not one of the Thompsons,” the detective said. “Definitely male.” He was already programming an alert on the vehicle.
Falcons on the ground would hear it, too, signal wing mates to new data via screens mounted on their ground vehicles. This wasn’t WindHaven’s first search; they’d long ago learned to coordinate from ground to sky and back.
“You talk to the Thompsons,” he said to the detective, aware that the elderly couple—both women—probably hadn’t even noticed the van was missing. “I’m going up.” The recording showed that Eleri was taken only eleven minutes ago.
Adam and his clan would find her and Malia both.
As it was, he saw Dahlia dive down in the distance as he took off. Arrowing toward her, Adam a far faster flyer than his gyrfalcon clanmate, he dived at the same spot thick with trees—to find her standing beside the open sliding door of the van.
She shook her head, her hair a tumbling darkness to her waist but for that streak of white. “Gone, but she bled in here.”
The abductor had driven Eleri out of the central area and out of sight of any security cameras before moving her into his own vehicle and taking off. “Can you track on?”
Leaning close to the carpet, Dahlia took a long breath. “Fresh. Not coagulated.” She shifted and was in the air a heartbeat later, Adam at her wing as they chased the scent of violence.
WindHaven didn’t advertise Dahlia’s ability, not even when they used that ability to help find the lost. No one outside the clan knew she could track over literal miles with the merest hint of a scent.
And today, she had a blood trail Adam’s mate had left for them.
The murderer’s first mistake had been to take one of their fledglings, his second to go after Adam’s mate.
He wouldn’t get the chance to make a third mistake.
Chapter 34
Js with weak shields are at catastrophic risk of a memory seizure, where the memories of another overwrite all of their own. There is no remedy for this because no J has ever survived a total overwrite.
—J Corps Medical Handbook (updated 2083)
Eleri was inside a nightmare, her world shattered pieces of color painful and jagged. Everything hurt, but she couldn’t pinpoint any of the pain. It was everywhere and nowhere.
Nausea churned in her gut.
Twisting instinctively to the side, she pressed her hands to a floor coated in straw and dust and retched. Nothing came out, her body refusing to release its pain. And all the while, the insanity inside her head wouldn’t stop—erratic flashes of memory, a throat being slit, a falcon in flight, a glass shattering.
It cut her.
Except it couldn’t. It was inside her head.
Then the falcon’s talons clamped on her arm. She shoved it aside, but her fingers were weak, and oddly, the talons didn’t feel like talons at all. They felt like fingers even though her…Her eyes jittered, snagged. She wasn’t wearing her gloves. Why wasn’t she wearing her gloves?
Because this was a nightmare.
And that hand that wasn’t a talon had taken hers and soon she’d be awash in another person’s memories and nightmares. She braced herself as much as she could, even as her mind spun and spun and spun.
The hand was solid. The mind was solid. Nothing to see.
Relief kicked her in the gut. Whoever this person was, they had an impenetrable shield. She tried to look at them, take them in, but her brain was so scrambled that her visual cortex couldn’t process the information.
Her hand clenched on the straw on the hard floor.
Lifting it up, she stared and tried to see. She couldn’t, but some small part of her brain wondered why she’d imagined straw. She’d never been in a farm-like environment in her life, and that was what her brain associated with straw. Yet the tactile sensations she was experiencing told her that she was holding straw.