Page 26

“So is Jacques playing dumb or has he really not figured it out yet?”

“You ever known Jacques to play those kinds of games? Man is oblivious.”

“Wow. You could drop a hint, do the best-friend wingman thing—pun intended.”

“Oh no, I don’t think either one of them would appreciate that. Trust me, it’s going to hit him over the head with the force of a boulder one day soon enough.”

“I’m going to make sure I’m stocked up on popcorn.”

—Conversation between Dahlia Dehlavi and Adam Garrett (circa September 2083)

Adam knew the answer he was going to get even before Sascha, Hanz, and Naia walked out of Jacques’s room after Hanz’s second attempt. Hanz was crying, his young face marked by exhaustion. Naia held his hand and murmured words of comfort, while Sascha had her arm around the male.

She shook her head gently at Adam, her cardinal eyes devoid of starlight.

Fuck!

The scream was internal, and echoed by the falcon who was his other half. But out loud he said, “Thank you for trying,” and—going on instinct—cradled the boy against his chest.

The E held on to him, apologizing.

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Adam reassured him, viscerally aware of the kid’s youth, his falcon spreading its wings over the boy. “You did all you could, and for that, you will always be a friend to WindHaven.”

After Sascha led Hanz out to the bedroom the clan had made up for him, Adam turned to Naia. She’d held it together till then, been strong for the boy, but now his dedicated, empathic healer, to whom the entire clan were pieces of her heart, collapsed into his arms.

Adam couldn’t cry, his tears locked deep within, but an hour later, after everyone else was lost to sleep and Kavi was in her office, he sat exhausted and restless beside Jacques’s bed and told his best friend off for being a fucking asshole and leaving them all when they needed him so much.

Even then, the tears wouldn’t come, his anger too huge a rock in his chest.

“You’re meant to be by my side for decades. Meant to be the hard head who knocks sense into me if I lose it. You’re not meant to fucking die, Jacques.”

Even with all hope gone, he didn’t want to take the final step.

But quite aside from his promise to Jacques, that was part of what being wing leader meant—he had to stand in front of all the hits, take the hardest blows.

As he wished he could’ve taken the blows that had smashed his best friend out of the sky.

“I reached out across the entire healer network again,” Naia had told him before she let sleep suck her under, her grief an open wound. “Just in case.”

“No results,” Adam guessed, because if anyone had come up with a solution, Naia wouldn’t be in this state.

“No.” She’d kept her head on his chest, his one of the few she could lean on in the clan—it wasn’t about love, but about people looking to her for their cue on how to react to the unfolding tragedy.

The minute Naia cracked, so would the rest of them.

Even Malia, so determinedly cheerful when she dropped off memory cubes for Jacques with his favorite music and her chatty updates on the clan, would crack with a finality that couldn’t be repaired.

“Sascha pulled every string she could for us to get Hanz,” he told Jacques now.

Thanks to your grandmother’s willingness to embrace change.

Words his best friend would’ve said if he could. He’d always been one of Aria’s biggest fans.

“I can see which way the wind is blowing, Adam,” his grandmother had said to him when he was yet the most junior of her wing-seconds. “We can’t fly alone anymore, relying on nothing but flight path agreements.”

A cupping of his face with her aged hands. “You’re going to take us into the future, my boy. And it’s time I talked to you about what that means.”

Adam had long known he’d lead WindHaven after his grandmother—it wasn’t about nepotism or getting elected.

Changeling clans didn’t work that way. It came down to an inner hum of power that spoke to every other member of the clan.

Adam’s had exploded to the surface that day in the courtroom when he’d almost managed to break the hold of two powerful adult wing-seconds.

It was that same part of him that allowed a teleport to the Canyon forty-five minutes after he’d returned to sit with Jacques.

Sascha, the right side of her face marked with the lines of her short rest, was the one who’d tracked him down to Jacques’s room to request he permit the teleporter and his passenger—another E.

“They’ll have to come in on the plateau,” Adam said, without explaining why. “The X is still up there for a visual reference.”

Adam led the couple into the infirmary less than three minutes later.

“I don’t know how Jaya managed to convince Abbot to teleport her,” she told Adam as the E in question attempted to reach Jacques, while an Arrow with blue eyes reminiscent of the sea watched over her. “She’s running on fumes, and he knows it.”

Jaya Storm’s exhaustion was clear in the droop of her shoulders and the heaviness in her face, but Adam also saw a look of determination that he recognized from his own healer.

“Nothing could’ve stopped her, and her mate knows it.

” That the two were mated was clear to his changeling senses.

“Better he comes with her so he can keep an eye on her.”

“She’s stubborn,” Sascha agreed. “She was the first E to realize that some of us are born with the ability to get through to people locked inside their minds—whether in comas, or due to accidents that take away their ability to communicate in any other fashion.”

Now, as Adam watched, Jaya swayed beside the bed. Her mate was with her in a heartbeat, grabbing hold of her. Jaya turned to Adam with eyes gone obsidian, no whites, no irises, and managed to gasp out, “I couldn’t reach him.”

Adam’s neck stiffened, his chest a giant bruise.

Abbot swung her into his arms at that instant, paused, then shot Adam a look that said he’d just tried to teleport out…

and failed. But he kept his silence as Adam led him quickly back outside, leaving Sascha to wait with Jacques.

The Arrow met his gaze out on the darkness of the plateau, his mate already unconscious, and said, “Empaths take a vow of confidentiality when it comes to any action related to a patient. As her escort, I’m bound by the same vow. ”

Adam appreciated the clear verbal assurance that neither of the pair would be sharing what they’d learned here this night. “Understood.”

“There’s no one else?” he asked Sascha after the couple had left and he’d returned to the infirmary.

Not a single star in Sascha’s eyes. “No, I’m so sorry, Adam.”

Adam knew they’d been lucky to get Hanz, much less Jaya.

He’d kept up with what was going on in the PsyNet, had even blood-bonded Psy children into the clan when it appeared their PsyNet was about to collapse with catastrophic effect.

Those children were now part of his heart, even though their pulses were distant and muffled because they’d never been fully integrated into the clan, their link to the PsyNet the far stronger bond.

“I was hoping for a miracle.” Naia’s statement was a husky murmur when he told her what had happened only a bare fifty minutes later, the night yet heavy around them. He’d known she wouldn’t sleep much, not just because she was a healer, but because this was Jacques.

“That faint line on the brain wave pattern.” She stroked her hand over Jacques’s tight curls, the shadows under her eyes a dark mauve. “I thought they’d find him in there, just lost.”

“Yeah.” It was all Adam could get out.

Naia, so gentle of heart but with a steel core when it came to the well-being of her clan, came to take his hand, her own warm and soft.

“He wouldn’t want this.” A crack in her voice even as she fought for Jacques’s right to leave them for skies eternal.

“But you’ll have to make the call.” Gentle voice, her other hand closing around his upper arm in silent comfort.

“His parents are in no state to decide.”

Jacques’s parents had been in flight in a distant part of the state when he was shot and had arrived home just in time to see him before Hanz went in to attempt contact.

His mother’s tears had been silent and constant; his father’s rage a thing Adam well understood.

His sister had arrived a couple of hours after them; younger than Jacques, still a student at a university on the other side of the country, she was barely holding it together.

Jacques was her big brother, the one who’d been known to fly all the way across the country just to visit with her over breakfast or lunch.

She’d spent an hour sobbing in Adam’s arms.

“I would never ask his family to make the decision. It’s a wing leader’s job.” Because they weren’t human, were changeling. “How long before we have no choice?”

“I can keep him alive on machines forever,” was Naia’s quiet response. “There remains that faint brain pattern…and we have the tech to keep his body going.”

“No.” If the mind and heart and soul that made Jacques a hard-assed protector, a loving son and brother, and a blood-loyal friend were gone, then Adam had to let his body go, too.

Jacques had spent more time in the air than any of them.

If some small part of him was alive in there, he’d hate to be tied to this bed.

“The clan needs to say good-bye, but he wouldn’t want to be seen like this.” Adam broke contact with Naia, squeezed his hands open and shut.

“We can say good-bye to his spirit,” Naia said, “without ever exposing his body.” A single tear rolled down her cheek, to be quickly followed by others.

“I’m going to miss you, my friend.” Leaning down, she pressed a kiss to his cheek.

“I wonder if you ever knew how much I adore you, you bad-tempered, beautiful man.”

Adam had known, had been waiting for Jacques to figure it out. Now time had run out for his best friend and for the woman who thought he hung the moon.

The last clan funeral had been Aria’s.

That good-bye had hurt, but it had been part of the natural way of things, Aria having lived a life long enough by her standards.

“Too long, Adam,” she’d said to him one night, as the two of them sat under the desert moon, their backs to the Canyon wall. “I’ve outlived a daughter, outlived the man that daughter loved, outlived the mate I loved with all my being.”

Then she’d turned to him, stroked her hand over his hair.

“But I also got to watch two strong and wild grandchildren, then great-grandchildren being born, got to hold each of them on the days of their births. And I got to bear a child, love her, and love the man who helped me make her. It’s been a good life in the grand scheme of things.”

A breath. “And I’ve upheld my vows as wing leader.

When I go, I will leave WindHaven in good hands.

I can hear the desert singing to me, Adam.

” She’d sighed. “My father’s father used to say that our clan lands were blessed with the quietest places, that we were renowned for it until many came here to bathe in the silence, but I’ve always heard the song. Now it calls me home.”

He’d wanted to ask her to stay a little longer, but the tiredness in her voice had been an ache. So he’d put his arm around his grandmother and for the first and only time in their relationship, he’d held her as if he was the wing leader, she the member of his clan who needed his strength.

And, swallowing back his tears at the thought of her presence missing from his life, he’d told her that if she wanted to fly, he’d hold her clan safe for her. “I promise, Shimásání.”

Two days later, Aria, beloved of her family and of her clan, ever to be remembered in their songs, had slipped away to fly wing tip to wing tip with Adam’s grandfather, their skies distant from this world.

Jacques’s death would be nothing akin to Aria’s. They’d mourned her, but they’d also been able to celebrate her. Those who’d known her as a youth—themselves graybeards—had told raucous tales of the young woman she’d been, and of her courtship of Adam’s far quieter and more submissive grandfather.

“She might as well have been a bear as far as he was concerned!” one old friend had said with a slap to his knee. “Poor man didn’t know whether to run or surrender.”

With Jacques, there would be no celebration, only pain and a horrible sense of unfairness. He was Adam’s age, their birthdays exactly three weeks apart, had been in the prime of his life.

Adam walked back to Jacques after Naia was called away to deal with a minor injury. His best friend lay motionless underneath the domed lid of the medical bed that was keeping his body alive, only his face exposed to the air.

And that face…

Adam’s gut twisted. No, this wasn’t Jacques, and Adam couldn’t put off the final call any longer. He’d give Jacques’s family time to say their farewells in the day to come, and then…then he’d let Jacques go.

That thought was heavy in his gut as he left the infirmary, and he was glad not to run into anyone else as he made his way to his office.

This far from dawn, the clan slept. Shutting the door to his office regardless, he picked up a pen he never used but couldn’t throw out, then pulled up the documents Jacques had left in the clan’s keeping in the event of his death.

He knew it was a way to delay the conversation he needed to have with Jacques’s mom and dad and sister, but on this day when he knew he’d lose his friend, he gave himself that grace. He had to come to terms with it first before he went to them, so he could be strong while they fell apart.

He pulled up the first document—a letter to him.

Well, shit, Adam, if you’re reading this, I’m fucking dead.

A laugh tore out of him even as his eyes burned.

Unable to bear it, he shut down the document and, thrusting the pen back down on his desk, strode out through the quiet hallways, to exit out into the canyon on the wings of a falcon.

He didn’t even know where he was flying to through the cool darkness until he swept over the inn and saw her vehicle parked in front of her room.