Page 27

A breath

Fingers that do not touch

An uncrossable divide

Some stories…

…are unfinished

—“Story Fragment” by Adina Mercant, poet (b. 1832, d. 1901)

Adam landed at the clothing cache nearest the inn.

It took him only a minute to pull on a pair of jeans and a black tee.

Then he was jogging barefoot through the trees with the familiarity of a man who’d been a boy on this same soil, knew it inside out.

The darkness embraced him in a way that brought comfort, muffling the anguish to come on the dawn.

When he emerged behind the inn, it was to see Eleri’s lights on at an hour when the rest of the world slept.

I don’t sleep much.

She opened the door before he could knock once again, and the fact that she was wearing her suit pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, her hair sleeked back into a neat bun, told him she either hadn’t gone to bed at all—or had woken after a couple of hours and decided to ready herself for the day.

“What’s happened?” Her eyes searched him with a quickness he could almost read as concern. “Jacques?”

She went as if to pull him inside, only to hesitate right before her bare fingers made contact with his arm. The air hung, the moment frozen.

Dropping her hand, she stepped back. “Come inside.”

He entered.

He could lie, tell himself he didn’t know why he’d come to her, but he knew. He’d always known.

Striding in, he pushed the door shut behind him with extreme care only because otherwise he would’ve slammed it and woken the other guest—who Mi-ja had put three rooms over, if the guest’s shiny sedan was parked in the correct spot.

“Did you feel anything ?” he found himself asking this woman who’d haunted him for ten years. Only it wasn’t an ask, rather a demand stripped of all niceties. “That first time. In the—”

“—hallway,” she completed, her eyes locked to his in the hushed silence of a world swathed in darkness. “You were leaning up against a wall away from the rest of your clan, your tie askew and your knuckles raw.”

“I’d just punched one of the courthouse’s stone columns.” His throat was lined with grit, his words serrated. “And I haven’t worn a tie since that day.” He’d done it to honor his parents, and to ensure their party would be taken seriously in the courtroom—he’d still believed in justice then.

“I didn’t know who you were,” Eleri said, her own voice different in a way he couldn’t quite pinpoint—it wasn’t that she was suddenly awash in emotion.

She was just…less flat by a fraction. “But I could tell you were changeling, so I thought you must have some connection to the case, because as far as I knew, it was the only changeling-related case on the docket that day.”

“You offered me a bandage.” He’d been struck dumb by the sight of her as she turned the corner, a slim young woman in a crisp black pantsuit paired with a white shirt buttoned up to the neck, her hair in a neat braid.

“You stared at me for a long time before you said for me to stay, that it would ‘heal up real quick. Changeling skin is tough.’?”

His heart punched against his rib cage at her exact recitation of his long-ago words. “I heard Js have eidetic memories.”

“Only for the memories we read. Our own…we lose them over time, so much flotsam in the sea of other people’s echoes.”

“But you remember that day, that moment.”

“That day defined my existence,” she said, her voice quiet now, and still with no depth, as if he spoke to a shadow. “In more ways than one.”

He went to grasp her upper arms, shake her, but halted. “What happens if I touch you?” He expected her to say he had no right to touch her. Or if not that, to tell him that he’d kill her by overloading her.

He would believe her, would have to believe her. Because the idea of actually doing her harm? Fuck, no.

But Eleri said, “I don’t know. Changelings have natural shields. Sophie’s husband has a natural shield.”

Adam frowned. “I met a J with dark hair, purplish blue eyes once. Her name was Sophia.” It had been in a home that sat partially on DarkRiver lands, partially on SnowDancer.

The woman he’d met had been a visitor whose stay had overlapped his by only a few minutes; she’d been leaving the home of DarkRiver sentinel Mercy, who was mated to a SnowDancer lieutenant.

A number of packmates from both packs had been floating around at the time, the couple having hosted a casual afternoon gathering of friends. DarkRiver and SnowDancer’s alliance had gone far beyond agreements and territorial lines to a thing of blood in the children Mercy and her mate had created.

Triplets who were cherished by both packs.

Winged clans tended not to bond that way to other clans for the simple reason that their ways were not those of the predatory changelings who claimed the ground, but seeing how the wolves laughed with the leopards while ribbing them mercilessly—and vice versa—had made Adam consider if winged clans could learn from their example.

After all, a falcon was as deadly a predator as a wolf.

That day, as Mercy walked her guest out, she’d stopped by Adam. “Adam, this is Sophia.”

“Hi, Sophia.” Having spotted the black gloves on Mercy’s guest’s hands, Adam hadn’t offered her a handshake—he hadn’t known what the gloves meant at the time, but it didn’t take a genius to work out that it was a subtle message not to touch.

“Adam’s a falcon,” Mercy had told Sophia with a grin. “I know it’s driving you crazy.”

Sophia’s eyes had crinkled at the corners. “It was. You…feel different,” she’d said to Adam. “The way you walk, your presence, it’s hard to put my finger on it. I apologize if I was being unintentionally nosy.”

Adam had waved off the apology, smiled. “We play the same game with Psy—telepath, telekinetic, something else? It’s as hard to tell for us as it is for you to figure out our animals.”

“Sophia’s a former J,” Mercy had shared even as she leaned down to scoop up a baby who was doing a race-crawl toward a large platter of chips on a low table.

“Nope, nope, nope,” she’d said to the baby in a voice both firm and full of love.

“You do not want to pull those down on your head. No, not even if you’re adorable. ”

Laughing, the baby had smacked her with a wet kiss before said baby was stolen away by a passing young packmate who threw the delighted child over his muscular shoulder as he headed outside.

“These days,” Mercy had said without missing a beat, “Sophia keeps Nikita Duncan in line.” While Adam was still digesting the latter, Mercy had pointed out the window at a lean, dark-haired male.

“That’s her husband, Max, out by the car with Clay.

Next time, you’ll have to coordinate your visits so I can do a proper introduction. ”

“Max,” Adam said on the heels of the memory. “Her husband’s name was Max.”

Eleri nodded. “Yes, that’s Sophie.” She didn’t break eye contact. “Max is human, but he has a natural shield.”

“I saw them touch.” It had been after Sophia walked over to join Max. “She looked happy, not under stress.”

Locking his gaze to Eleri’s in a silent question, he telegraphed his intention to touch her by raising his hand. When she didn’t move, he very, very lightly placed his hand against her clothed upper arm. She didn’t react. So he exerted more pressure.

A reaction now, a motionlessness. But—“There’s no overload.” She was the one to raise her bare hand, reach for him.

He flinched.

She halted.

“It could kill you if you’re wrong,” he ground out, because no matter what he’d said to her that first day, no matter his anger and raw sense of betrayal, Adam would never, ever hurt her .

“Fleeting contact when I’m prepared won’t cause harm.” She moved her fingers slowly toward his bare forearm.

A butterfly brush of his rigid skin.

An exhale. “Nothing.” She tried again, this time holding the contact for a second. “Nothing but you.” A whisper. “I sense a turbulent wildness on the edge of my perception, an awareness of a great winged creature…but there’s no pain, no sense of overload. I don’t feel your memories.”

It hit him then. “How long since you’ve touched another person?”

She still had her fingers on his forearm, was staring at the connection, didn’t seem to hear him.

“Eleri.” He shook her a little, just a little, with that one hand he had on her upper arm.

“I found Reagan,” she whispered, her hand dropping away. “I held his body as he died. He mistimed it, was still alive in the physical sense. I was able to hold him so he didn’t die alone. Maybe he knew.”

Another wave of rage, primal with the falcon’s fury. His hands tightened on her biceps and only then did he realize he was gripping her with both hands now. “I can’t hear that name. Don’t say it around me.”

The falcon clawed at him, wanting out, wanting to strike at a foe long dead. “The only reason that fucker didn’t die at my hands is because it would’ve brought the Council’s attention to the clan.” He’d still have gone after him if his grandmother hadn’t managed to calm him down.

“Our vengeance will be against the one who took their lives,” she’d said, her face grim. “The one who helped in the injustice is our unknowing ally—he set the murderer free for us to find.”

He’d held on to that logic because it had been the only thing keeping him sane.

Eleri’s eyes were black now, but they were nothing like Sascha’s. The empath’s darkness had held grief, the black soft with shadows. Eleri’s were an endless nothingness. “He was my mentor; more than that, he was the only paternal figure of any kind I ever had.”

Adam wanted to thrust her away from him, but he couldn’t. That was the problem. “I hate you ,” he said, and it was a harsh, grating whisper that hid a heart torn and bleeding. “For showing me what could’ve been only to tear it away so viciously.”

He squeezed her biceps, his talons curling around her but not cutting through. Never cutting through. “Did you know?” She wasn’t changeling, their ways not hers.

“I thought you were the most beautiful being I had seen in all my life,” she said in that flat tone that held none of the wonder in her words. “I didn’t know someone that beautiful could exist.”

Her fingers rising, brushing his jaw. “I felt a compulsion to go to you, to give you something, anything. But you wouldn’t even take a bandage from me.

” She pressed her hand over his heart. “I felt another, even deeper compulsion to take your hand and just run, hide both of us. I didn’t even know you and I wanted desperately to keep you . I thought I was going mad.”

Her words scraped away the scars to reveal the throbbing wound she’d inflicted on his heart that day. “You did give me something,” he found himself saying.

“No. I’d remember. I remember everything about that interaction.”

So did he. Down to the way her lashes had come down over her eyes, and how her pulse had jumped in her throat. “When the bailiff called your name, and you walked away to head to the courtroom, you dropped a pen.”

He’d caught it before it hit the floor, which attracted her attention, and put it in his pocket. A symbol of good luck, he’d thought then, because surely the fact that he’d met her on this benighted day meant everything. Maybe even that his parents were there, giving him one final gift.

He’d met his mate at only eighteen.

He’d heard of such sudden meetings but mostly in entertainment shows.

All the mated couples he knew had grown toward each other over time until the mating bond kicked in.

Or like his grandparents; they’d been part of the same clan or friendly groups of clans, their paths crisscrossing since childhood.

Mating at first sight was a romantic myth, he’d thought when making fun of Saoirse’s romance novels like the arrogant kid brother he’d been. Then it had hit him like a roundhouse punch, both sides of his nature in perfect harmony.

There she is. My mate. Mine.

Later, after the horror of that courtroom, he’d laughed at himself through a haze of angry tears.

And he’d seen the same pen he’d so carefully tucked away as a scalpel thrust into his heart.

“I kept it all this time as a reminder to never seek you out, that whatever might’ve been between us died that day. ”

He was still holding her, their bodies too close, their breaths intermingling as she tipped her head back to meet his gaze.

“I’m sorry. I know there’s no forgiveness, and it’s selfish of me even to speak the words, but I can no more stop them than I could stop myself from talking to you that day. I’m sorry, Adam.”

A shine on the right side of her face, a single tear rolling down her cheek.

He took one hand off her, caught the tear with his fingertip, his heart thudding to a different beat now. “You’re crying.” A part of him that would never forget her, even as it couldn’t forgive her, wanted to hope.

She looked at the teardrop balanced on his fingertip as if she was looking at something unrelated to herself. “You reach a part of me beyond the numbness. So deep that even I can’t feel it. All I see is a wall of gray.”

She touched her finger to the teardrop, took the finger to her mouth as if to taste her own pain.

He gripped her jaw. “I can’t forgive you.” The betrayal was too huge, the anguish too enormous. “I needed you to choose me that day! I needed you to fight for us!” That it had been an irrational expectation didn’t matter, not between them. Not when it was her.

“I know.” Her hand on his heart again, and he had the sense she was listening to his heartbeat. “There can never be anything that will balance those scales.”

He wanted to shake her all over again. “How can you be like this?” he asked in a snarl before finally releasing her and striding away, the falcon inside him beating its wings.

“Js feel too much,” she said. “That’s why the Council kept reconditioning us. Reconditioning me. Making me perfect over and over again, until there’s not much of my original personality left…and nothing but a gray wall in its place.”

It wasn’t, he realized, an excuse. She’d never once tried to obfuscate things from him since the moment they met again.

The true horror of what she was saying seeped into him drop by cold drop.