Page 32

Eleri, I should be arriving in approximately three hours.

—Message from Bram Priest to Eleri Dias (now)

The healer, who Adam introduced as Naia, continued to appear worried, but she didn’t stop Eleri from entering the patient room, her eyes dark and huge. Hopeful despite herself, Eleri thought, clinging to this last shred of a chance.

I am so sorry.

She didn’t know what she’d been expecting when she walked inside, but it wasn’t the twisted half-falcon, half-human body that lay beneath the curving plas of the high-spec monitoring bed that wouldn’t have been out of place in an intensive-care unit.

He was covered by a sheet below it, but the amputations and malformations were obvious, his face bearing stark evidence of a shift gone catastrophically wrong.

Not halting in her path to the bed because the wall of numbness inside her buried her initial violent shock, she went to stand beside it. “Could you give me an update on his status?” she asked Naia, who’d gone to the foot of the bed. “Especially as it pertains to his brain.”

Adam stood in silence beside her as the healer read off the latest numbers from the screen at the end of the bed.

The sum total of it all was that Jacques was reading as close to brain-dead as possible except for that one strange pattern that no one could explain.

It could, Eleri realized, simply be an error caused by the incomplete shift, his brain readings so askew the computronic system couldn’t make sense of them.

Adam and Naia no doubt understood that, too. But they had to be sure they weren’t killing their friend and clanmate when they shut down the machines. They had to know beyond any doubt that the neural reading wasn’t because Jacques was trapped inside, with no way out.

Eleri wanted to give them an answer. “I’m ready.”

Naia took a deep breath. “I’m lowering the protective plas.”

The clear barrier slipped back into the sides of the bed, leaving Jacques accessible for tactile contact.

Eleri stripped off her gloves, but Adam gripped her forearm when she would’ve put her hand on the part of Jacques’s hand that bore human skin.

Sensing her eyes going pure black on a surge that was her reaction to Adam’s proximity, she said, “I won’t harm him.” She glanced past Naia. “Where is Sascha Duncan? She can mak—”

“Are you sure this is safe for you?” Adam interrupted her to demand, and his response spoke to that tiny fragment of her that could feel yearning.

“Yes, I’m sure.” She wondered what it would be like to touch him as he’d touched Naia, attempt to offer comfort in the physical changeling way. She could never do that, but she could try with her words. “I’m sorry.”

A cardinal-eyed woman dressed in black sweatpants and a black T-shirt, her hair in a loose braid that had begun to unravel and the honey brown of her skin dull with tiredness, perhaps sorrow, rushed into the room. “Naia,” Sascha Duncan said. “I got your message. What’s happened?”

Even as Naia explained, Adam’s fingers tightened on Eleri’s forearm, as if to pull her away.

“Let me.” A quiet request to allow her to attempt this absolution even if it was destined to fail.

He would hate her even more after it was done, but at least he would be at peace with making the call to let Jacques go.

She could take that with her to the end.

One good thing she’d done for the boy who’d smiled at her.

His jaw worked before he released her.

“Don’t shadow me,” she said to Sascha, the E who had started an unstoppable avalanche of change.

“Even if I can effectively lower my shields, which is doubtful given the progression of my Sensitivity”—her brain fighting desperately to protect her—“I can’t protect you from the memories inside me.

” They floated everywhere now, ugly splinters of evil.

“I can monitor Jacques instead,” Sascha said, but when Eleri went to touch Jacques’s partially twisted and taloned hand, the empath frowned. “Maybe try another area. Not one where the two sides of his nature are entwined. It might make a difference.”

Eleri saw no reason not to follow her advice. “If it’s permitted, I’ll use the side of his neck. It’s visible and appears to have remained fully human.” A glance at Naia.

“No falcon structures beneath,” Naia confirmed.

“Do it,” Adam said, closing his own hand over Jacques’s mangled one for a second. “We’re coming for you, Jacques. Fly toward us.”

Eleri waited until he’d released his friend’s hand before placing her fingertips against Jacques’s skin. It was warm, his body alive, his pulse slow and steady. But inside him was…silence.

Not the kind in which she’d been raised, but the kind that was a void.

No wind, no sound, no motion. A quiet so pristine that it was a glass pond deeper than the one she’d experienced with an elderly human once—the woman had been a monk who’d practiced meditation for five decades, and who’d held out her hand in an invitation to touch when a young Eleri looked at her with curiosity.

“I have no shield, child,” she’d said after Eleri gasped at the peace of her mind, “because I need no shield. I am one with time and the universe.”

Jacques was no monk who lived in a forest. Yet this pristine silence…it was too profound, too oddly thick . “Is he like you?” she asked Adam. “Wild energy under the skin? Or is he a calmer personality?”

Adam snorted. “Jacques is about as wild as they come.”

Naia’s smile was bittersweet. “It’s why he and Adam are so close. They’re as wild as each other.”

“Did he meditate?”

Naia broke into shocked laughter. “Jacques? I’d like to see anyone get him to do that.” Her tone was rich with affection. “No, he’s not the meditating kind.”

Eleri walked into the thick silence again; into the void that wasn’t empty, wasn’t dead, but wasn’t quite alive, either.

A paradox.

Was her Psy brain unable to sense him because he was in limbo?

Breaking contact with the injured falcon, she reached her other hand instinctively toward Adam, and for a second, her heart just stopped.

A primal warmth against her, a sense of a huge and wild creature enclosing her in its massive wings.

Protecting, not assaulting.

She could have stood there all day, all night, all year, to the last drops of her existence, but this wasn’t about her. Keeping hold of Adam with one hand, she reinitiated contact with Jacques with her other, acting on the same instincts that made her such a ruthless hunter.

The pond rippled.

The wild creature that was Adam went motionless.

A shout so distant it was a dull echo through stone, music as heard through her reconditioned brain.

She gripped Adam’s hand harder while pressing her palm against Jacques’s neck.

The shout was louder…though “loud” was a misnomer, because it remained quieter than the brush of a butterfly’s wing. But against her nonexistent psychic skin, it was very much an active sound . She was suddenly aware of Adam’s urgent voice, wanted to tell him to be quiet so she could focus.

The ripples spread.

She attempted to use the faint motion to shove her psychic hand through the glassy surface.

She pierced it…but only the merest inch. And what she touched on the other side, it felt wrong, off. The semi-shift had affected Jacques’s brain, neither part of him strong enough to be sentient in any true form.

A hard pull from Adam, his hand gripping the one she had on Jacques and physically hauling it off the other man’s skin. “You’re bleeding.” It was a snarl as he released one hand to grab tissues held out by Sascha while Naia ran to grab a scanner.

He pressed the wad to her nose. “You told me this wasn’t dangerous.” An accusation.

“He’s in there,” she managed to get out, then took over holding the tissues. “I don’t know why I’m bleeding.” She turned to let Naia scan her. “I was just listening really hard.”

Adam’s jaw was a granite line, his hand still tight on hers—and his eyes pure falcon. “ Eleri. ”

“I’m sure,” she said, hearing the question in the crack in his voice. “But I don’t know how to get him out. He’s in two pieces and neither piece is…complete enough to take action.”

“ Fuck ,” Adam said at the same time that Naia’s expression dropped.

But the healer said, “No damage beyond a few burst blood vessels,” to Eleri before swallowing hard. “Nothing you did had any effect?”

Eleri went to reply, sucked in a breath.

The spreading ripples. Invisible droplets falling onto the pristine surface.

“Wait, wait.” She pulled away her hand with force, forfeiting the precious contact with Adam. “Don’t touch me until I say so.”

She put her hand back on Jacques. Nothing. Silence. Glass. “Now.”

Adam’s fingers sliding through hers.

The pond rippled, that faint shout spearing through.

“It’s you,” she whispered. “He’s reacting to you.” And though she wanted this to be her gift to Adam, she knew she wasn’t the expert in guiding lost minds to the surface, far less a mind cracked in two.

She looked at Sascha. “Try your empathy again, but this time while in contact with Adam. I’ll retain the contact, too.”

Giving an immediate nod, Sascha held out a hand across Jacques’s body, and Adam took it. Then the empath placed her fingers against Jacques’s neck on the opposite side from Eleri. Her intake of breath was audible…right before those eyes of darkest obsidian filled with multihued light.

Eleri had heard that empathic eyes could do that, but she’d never thought to see it in person.

“Come on, Jacques.” Adam’s rough voice, his big body all but vibrating as it pushed half against Eleri…until she felt held against his wide chest.

Sascha broke contact with Jacques. “I can sense him, but he didn’t react to any stimuli.” She looked at Eleri, who’d also lifted her hand from Jacques’s neck. “What did you feel?”

“A reaction every time Adam was in contact with me, a distant shout.”

Sascha frowned. “Can we try again? Perhaps he’s just tired after the first attempts.”

Nodding, Eleri touched Jacques as Sascha did the same. And heard his shout; if anything, it seemed stronger, more resonant. “I hear him,” she said to Sascha.

“I can’t. But…you’re not reading him with your high-level psychic senses. You’re using the most instinctual part of you, a part that’s never supposed to be revealed or used because it’s too close to your vulnerable psychic core.”

What a strange irony, that the thing that was killing her might save a life.

“What do I do?” she asked the empath. “I don’t know how to pull him out.”

Adam made a rough sound in his throat next to her. “You’re bleeding again.”

“Don’t stop me,” she ordered before he could pull her away. “It’s like a thread that gets stronger the longer we maintain contact.”

“Which will be useless if you collapse.” Adam hauled her away. “Sit fucking down.”

The next thing she knew, she had a chair behind her and was crumpling into it, her vision blurred. “Oh.” She was bleeding badly enough from the eyes that it had impacted her vision. “I don’t feel anything,” she protested. “No pain.”

“Be quiet,” Adam snapped, while dabbing at the corners of her eyes with unexpected gentleness. “You don’t just bleed out of your fucking eyes because everything is all right.”

Naia ran the scanner over her again, deep grooves around either side of her mouth. “I’m seeing too many broken or damaged blood vessels for my liking, but no neural damage.”

“There isn’t any,” Eleri said, and, when no one would listen to her, grabbed Adam’s wrist, the bone and muscle of him her anchor. “ Please. He’s trapped. I need to pull him out. I can’t leave him in there.”