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Ezra argued with himself a million times before he finally aimed his thoughts toward Brooke and politely knocked to get her attention. Just a little ping.

Ezra, her voice came in his head.Is everything okay?

I don’t know, Miss Brooke. I don’t want you to think I’m trying to keep something from you, but I’m not certain it’s something I should bring to you.

Why don’t you tell me what it is, Ezra dear?

Her mental voice sounded almost grandmotherly today, and that didn’t fit with the child he saw even a little bit, but he’d been around vampires enough to know he shouldn’t focus on it.

The first time Genie was in my room, in the infirmary, I felt like shesawme. Not the sick man in the bed, not the cat who is ascendent over the man even when I’m in human form, not the slave who’s recently been sold to a child vampire — but me. There was a connection from the very beginning. Elijah didn’t meet her until after she’d saved his life, and he’s assuming the connection he feels to her is from that, but I’m not so certain.

In my long life, I’ve run across people who were close in a previous life, and they were able to…she hesitated a few seconds.They were able to pick up on connections from those earlier lives with little effort.

Do you think that’s what this is?

I do not know, but thank you for bringing this to my attention. I need all the clues if I am to help solve this puzzle. Are you happy or upset with this bond you’ve found yourself part of?

He hadn’t thought of it in those terms. It hadn’t occurred to him to consider how it affected him, only how he might help figure out how to assist Genie.

I don’t know. Slaves learn not to be happy or sad, and I know I’m supposed to begin thinking in those terms as I gain freedoms, but I haven’t really. Not yet.

If you were to lose the connection, would you be disappointed?

I’m sorry, Brooke. It feels as if I should have an answer for you, but I don’t. I think I might be a little disappointed, but there might also be some relief. I don’t understand what it means, so I don’t know how to feel about it. Will I be safer with it, or without it? I do not know, my Master.

I believe you will be safe either way.

That’s nice to hear. Thank you for that.

You are welcome. I feel quite good about the fact you contacted me to share information.

Ezra focused back on the conversation at the table, and Dev was still explaining chakras to Genie. She was a nurse who understood how the systems of the body worked, and she didn’t want to add this ‘energy system’ to what she knew about the body already, but she was having to admit something was messing with her that didn’t seem to be physical.

Still, she was arguing and not truly taking it in.

“There’s a human in the flock I met yesterday,” Ezra began, but realized he couldn’t explain it to Genie or the experience he had in mind wouldn’t work. “Hang on, I’ll telepath Brooke what I think we need.”

Ezra looked down at his plate and politely knocked to get Brooke’s attention again, and she agreed with his idea — though it took nearly ten minutes for her to get the human down to them.

Dev blindfolded Genie before the young woman arrived, and they put the human on a kitchen chair in the middle of the room, draped a white sheet over her and the chair so she looked a bit like a Halloween ghost, and then walked Genie behind her before taking off the blindfold.

“Feel the energy all around her,” Ezra told Genie. “Don’t touch the sheet. Focus on about two or three inches away. You’llbe feeling her aura. Sensing it. Tell us when something doesn’t feel right. Do her entire body. We’ll make a note of the places you say don’t feel quite right.”

The woman raced in a roller derby league and she had bruises all over, but she’d also spilled boiling water on her arm and part of her hand a few days before. Brooke has a young-ish Lugat vampire who’d fed his blood to the flock member to help heal her, but his blood doesn’t pack the same punch as theold ones, so while she was better and not in danger from infection, her aura was still going to scream of a problem in a bunch of places.

Brooke had telepathically told him Genie couldn’t know about what Lugat blood did to heal people. It was detrimental for people who worked in the health field to know about it, because there were Concilio rules against using Lugat blood willy-nilly to create ‘miraculous’ healings. People had to already know about the supernatural, in most cases long before they were hurt, before they qualified to receive it.

He’d never heard the term ‘willy-nilly’ before, but he immediately understood it when Brooke used it. He had the idea that speaking telepathically helped with vocabulary words he was unfamiliar with, but there was too much going on to think about it too much.

Genie noted seven places the young woman’s aura didn’t feel the same, and noted it was ‘really hot and vibrated weird’ over her hand and forearm, where Ezra had seen the burn.

Dev draped a piece of a paper napkin over every spot Genie noted, and when she’d gone over the woman’s entire aura and then Dev slowly pulled the sheet away to look at each spot individually, there were bruises and/or abrasions at every place except the human’s knee, and it turned out she was nursing a knee injury that didn’t show.

Dev had pulled the sheet down until just before her hand on her thigh would show, and then they’d started at the woman’s feet and moved up.

When they finally pulled the sheet away to see the healing burn, Genie started asking questions about antibiotics and mentioning silver treatments, and the woman told her, “Brooke warned me you’re a nurse and would want to know all of that, but she told me to tell you I’ve been seen by a doctor and it’s all taken care of. That isn’t your job here. She just wanted me to let you feel my aura. Since that’s done, I need to get back to my homework. I have a huge exam coming up in statistics that just might fry my brain for good this time.”

She stood and left the room, and Dev walked Genie and the chair back to the breakfast table, where she grabbed another biscuit, opened it, and slathered grape jelly on the two halves.