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Today, I watched Adam go hug Saoirse because she was sad over a fight with her friend. He gave her his favorite cookie and just stayed tucked against her until she started to feel better.

He’s so like Cormac. Or as you called him when I first brought him home—my wild Irish boy. Huge hearts both of them, no boundaries in how they love.

Naia worked on Jacques through the afternoon and deep into the night, but while she managed to stabilize his body, it left Jacques hooked up to multiple machines.

“I’ve got faint signs of brain activity,” she said when Adam forced her to stop, her exhaustion so great that to allow her to go on would have been a dereliction of his duty as wing leader.

“I can’t see it.” Adam had enough familiarity with the machines to be able to read them on a basic level, and right now, the brain scan was a deadly blank.

“Here.” Naia zoomed in to the most rudimentary of the graphical readings, and yes, there they were—tiny spikes and blips.

Adam’s gut had been a knot since the instant they’d found Jacques; now it twisted with harsh physical pain. He didn’t say anything to Naia, however. It was obvious that she needed this minuscule bit of hope…even if he knew it wasn’t anything on which she could base that hope.

That reading? It could be nothing but the final agonal pulses of a dying brain.

Adam had no idea what being trapped mid-shift while badly wounded did to a brain, but he knew it couldn’t be good. Adam couldn’t even feel Jacques through the blood bond any longer, though the bond hadn’t completely severed.

The awareness had begun to fade seconds after he landed beside Jacques, as if his best friend had started to let go once under his wing leader’s watch—only Jacques wasn’t the kind to let go. He was a stubborn fucker. So it hadn’t been a choice. If Jacques could’ve hung on, he would have.

Adam said none of that to Naia, didn’t even allow a hint of his fear to seep through as he nudged her to the small room in the infirmary that she’d set up with a bed. There was no point in fighting to take her to her actual suite—Naia wouldn’t go, not with Jacques in such a critical state.

“Kavi is here to watch over him,” he reminded her when she hesitated on the way out of the patient room. “Amir is going to keep her company—remember, he also has paramedic training, so he can help her if she needs it.”

Naia didn’t move.

“We both need to sleep,” he added, then threw in a dose of guilt to force her hand. “I can’t rest until you do.”

That did it. He made sure she didn’t stop again, not even to give her nurse further instructions.

Not only was Kavita Roshan highly experienced—she’d been Naia’s right hand for years—she was currently in the second year of a study plan that meant she had begun to take over a number of the more routine procedures from Naia.

Kavi helped Adam by slipping out of sight when she saw them emerge from Jacques’s room, while Amir stayed in sight. “Kavi and I will make sure he’s never alone,” the wing commander promised. “Sleep so you can help him when you wake.”

Bleary-eyed, her body trembling, Naia just nodded and was soon lying in the bed. She was asleep by the time Adam covered her with a blanket, but deep lines marked her forehead, her hands were clenched tight under her head, and the normally rich cream hue of her skin held a grayish pallor.

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, he stroked her hair and leaned down to press a kiss to her cheek.

“Rest. Your clan watches over Jacques. We need you whole and healthy.” He kept up the gentle strokes, using skin privileges to reach the most primal core of her, the part that was of the falcon within and that accepted its wing leader’s word as law.

Natural falcons didn’t act the same way, were often solitary flyers, but changelings weren’t the same as their wild brethren. As with feline changelings, their human halves changed the equation, made them crave community.

Healers were the most community-minded of them all, the softest, and apt to wear themselves down to the bone to care for their clanmates. That was why wing leaders were so hyper-protective of their healers—Adam included. As far as he was concerned, Naia had no self-protective instincts at all.

Amir was waiting outside when Adam left Naia—after she finally fell into a sleep deep enough to be restful.

“Kavi is with Jacques,” his brother-in-law said.

“No other patients in the infirmary right now, so he has our full attention. If Kavi has to deal with anything, I’ll step in.

We won’t leave him alone.” An attempt at a smile.

“He might wake up out of plain irritation—you know how he scowls when we drag him to social events.”

Neither one of them laughed, the idea of Jacques’s scowl being missing from future parties one neither of them could face. “Wake me if anything happens.”

A quick nod. “But you have to rest—you can’t be so worn-out that you crash if Naia needs to draw more energy from you.”

Adam nodded; Amir was right. The energy transfer would suffer a catastrophic glitch if Adam’s body just couldn’t take it anymore. It was what his grandmother had feared most as she began to age—and why she’d urged Adam to take on the mantle long before her death.

He’d refused that, because no one wanted Aria as anything but the leader of WindHaven, but he had agreed that Naia—already WindHaven’s healer at the time—would monitor her blood bond with Aria to ensure no possibility of a delay in an emergency.

“That’s our deal, kiddo.” His grandmother’s thin but strong fingers against his jaw. “If the bond begins to flicker, you step into position as wing leader.”

Truth was that Aria should’ve still been alive. Yes, she’d given birth to Adam’s mother at forty-five, but she’d still only been a hundred at her death. Most changelings of her generation were healthy and strong for another two, even three decades.

“Losing her daughter and the son-in-law she adored wounded her to the core,” his mother’s best friend, Jenesse, had said to Adam after the clan scattered Aria’s ashes to the winds.

“Her heart was broken, as was your grandfather’s.

They kept going because she knew her duty as wing leader—and he would never abandon her to that duty alone. ”

Adam’s grandfather, Luis, had been a man as patient and calm as Aria was a storm force.

He’d loved her with a quiet devotion to his last breath—and he’d stood by her through all the seasons of life, as he’d stood by Adam and Saoirse…

until his heart just couldn’t take it anymore.

He’d gone to sleep one day and never woken.

“But duty alone wouldn’t have kept either Aria or Luis here so many years,” Jenesse had added.

“That was you and Saoirse and those babies of Saoirse’s.

I think if Luis hadn’t passed away, Aria would have fought on, but losing him?

It was too much, Adam. Even for that powerful, generous heart that sheltered WindHaven for so very long. ”

Adam had known that, his bond with his grandmother one that wouldn’t permit her to go without giving him warning, but hearing Jenesse speak the words had fractured his heart all the same.

The night after his grandmother’s funeral, Jacques had sat with Adam for hours on a remote plateau while the stars glittered above. As those stars faded into the coming dawn, he’d clapped Adam on the shoulder, and said, “For life, Adam. The two of us. To the end.”

The memory of Jacques’s deep voice meshed with that of his mother.

Just wait until you have a fledgling. I’ll be sitting right there with a glass of wine watching you lose your mind as your baby bird flies the nest.

Adam had lost too many people. He couldn’t bear to lose his best friend, too.

···

Eleri couldn’t sleep.

Her sleepless nights had begun to increase over the past weeks, though she wasn’t as bad as Bram and could still snatch a couple of hours here and there without medicinal assistance.

Today, she got up, showered, and dressed, though it was only four in the morning. No point in pretending she might fall back asleep—she wouldn’t, not given the message that had been waiting for her when she returned from the site of the falcon shooting.

Eleri, you received another letter from the Sandman. Sent to the task force HQ as usual. We’re processing it now, but I’m attaching a scan for you. —Tim

Senior detective Tim Xiao had worked with her many times over the years, their relationship built on mutual respect, but she knew that even he thought she was going off the rails with her obsession with Raintree.

He’d said so to her face.

It had, she knew, been an attempt to help. Tim didn’t want her to tank her career. But Tim, for all his experience, was human and had no comprehension of what happened to Js, why they tended to “retire” so early and vanish off the face of the planet.

Eleri didn’t intend to educate him.

He was a good cop, would’ve been a good friend to her if she’d had the capacity for friendship any longer. There was no point in bringing him into her hell—better he think she’d just “lost the plot,” as he’d put it, than that he realize this was the last throw of the dice for her.

Eleri had no need to protect a future career.

Once dressed, she made herself a glass of nutrients because her personal comm device had a flashing alarm that told her she’d missed two doses. It tasted like nothing, and she had no reaction to that, either.

At times, a distant part of her brain tried to scream, to tell her that she should be angry about her utter lack of response to the world. But that part was so deeply muffled by the wall of numbness induced by multiple reconditionings that she was barely even aware of it.

“I envy you sometimes,” Saffron had said once. “That you’ve disassociated to that degree. The rage that burns in me…I’ll go insane before I ever hit Exposure.”