Page 54

Well, I’m resisting the urge to tear off his head and feed his balls to the wild vultures for the time being.

—Reply from Dahlia Dehlavi to Adam Garrett (today)

Sophia Russo—alerted by Bram—had a PsyMed air-evac team waiting for them by the time they got Eleri to the nearest major hospital—it happened to be the same place Chief Cross had been taken after his heart attack.

Naia had done all she could, but Eleri was in bad shape.

“She needs specialized care,” Sophia had said over a comm call, the fine tracery of scars on her face melding with skin gone too pale.

“With the drugs and possible unshielded contact with a psychopathic mind, she suffered a catastrophic overload that most likely led to a seizure. The risk is nowhere near past—this could still turn fatal for her.”

Adam hadn’t argued; Naia had been clear that she couldn’t reach Eleri, not even through the blood bond Adam had forced into being. If Eleri didn’t want it, she’d have to wake the hell up and tell him. She could reject it, reject him , rejoin the PsyNet. He didn’t care. As long as she was alive.

“I’m going with her. She’s one of mine now,” he’d said, not about to tell this near-stranger that Eleri was his mate, that she’d always been his, would always be his even if she walked away.

Because he’d fight for her every second of every day.

As for WindHaven, Dahlia, Pascal, and Maraea would handle clan security—and the arrangements for the man who was now an involuntary guest of the clan—while Adam was gone.

Malia was safe with Saoirse and Amir, with Kavita having already set her arm. Naia would also double-check on his niece as soon as she landed at the Canyon.

Adam had also made it a point to talk to his niece over the phone and was proud of her stalwart heart.

He’d make sure her emotional bruises had the care they needed, but for today, she wouldn’t miss him—per Amir, all Malia wanted to do was snuggle on the sofa with her family and watch reruns of her favorite comm shows.

“Our girl is almost asleep already,” Amir had shared, his relief intermingled with a taut anger. “Adrenaline crash mixed with the aftereffects of the drug the bastard gave her. Kavi says it should be out of her system in the next couple of hours.”

Edward, the nurse who’d joined Naia in the underground bunker, had found the pressure injector the killer had used on Malia and Eleri, and the empty drug ampule inside had proved to be nothing that would cause Malia long-term harm; changelings used a smaller dose of the same drug as an over-the-counter pain reliever.

The same drug, in such a concentrated dose, was poison to Eleri’s Psy mind.

He held her hand throughout the evac flight, while the medical team tried to stabilize her in ways Naia simply couldn’t. “How bad is it?” he asked the short and trim fortysomething medic with a cap of dark-blond curls who appeared to be the lead.

Her name was embroidered above the pocket of her dark green scrubs: Agata Czajka .

“Bad,” was the clipped response.

Czajka checked a handheld device as the heavily stabilized air-evac jet-chopper took them out toward the nearest hospital with the right facilities—thirty minutes by air.

“Js of Eleri’s generation,” she said as she worked, “were reconditioned by having a thin layer of their personality scraped off. Eleri is listed as having undergone the procedure eight times.”

Recalling the brutality of what had been done to Eleri made his falcon’s talons push at his fingertips, his voice dropping. “You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m a neurosurgeon, not one of those Council butchers they called reconditioning techs,” Dr. Czajka said in the same clipped tone. “I was brought onboard by Sophia Russo to lead a team whose goal it is to try to fix the neural damage across the senior cabal of the Corps.”

Though her expression didn’t alter, she was gentle as she used a swab to clear a patch of blood from under Eleri’s eye. “The task is complex and difficult even with Js who were only reconditioned once. Add severe drug toxicity to that…the fact she’s alive is what the other races term a miracle.”

“Eleri doesn’t give up.”

“No, clearly not,” the doctor said. “I didn’t even realize that they continued to recondition after the fifth pass—that’s considered a hard line in Psy neuro-medicine.” The clipped tone was a razor blade by now. “Eleri’s sense of self would have been hanging on by a thread.”

Dr. Czajka glanced at him, her eyes a hard blue.

“I’m seeing evidence of a memory seizure—if she wakes up, you have to prepare yourself to meet an Eleri whose memories have been overwritten or corrupted.

It usually causes the impacted Js to turn either violent and aggressive, act for short periods like the person whose memories they now carry, or to become catatonic. ”

Cold in Adam’s veins as he remembered how Eleri had spoken about Exposure. She’d danced around the road she’d choose to take if she was on the verge of losing herself, but he wasn’t an idiot—he’d seen the answer in the dull sorrow in her eyes, in her refusal to discuss their future.

If I’m that badly messed up, you make sure I get to fly.

Jacques’s words, but that had been Eleri’s wish, too. She hadn’t wanted to live if she had to do it as a woman lost in screaming madness. “Can you tell before she wakes?” he forced himself to ask the doctor.

But she shook her head. “No.” A pause. “Working with Js…it requires compassion of a kind that a percentage of my colleagues might find against medical ethics. I don’t. If a J has made their wishes clear, then my team will execute that request in a way that ensures a painless peace.”

Anguish rocked him, but he wasn’t going to let Eleri down—not in joy…and not in the terrible darkness. “I know who to ask.” Bram would categorically know Eleri’s wishes on this point as no doubt Eleri knew those of the man who was her brother chosen. “Until we know, fight for her.”

When the doctor moved to the back of the plane to consult with a colleague who was monitoring Eleri’s neural readings, he leaned close to Eleri’s ear.

“You did it, wild bird. We’ve got Hendricks.

” The killer had run his car off the road and got himself stuck in the desert in his attempt to drive out of a dust storm.

“No one will even find his bones by the time we get through with him.”

They had, however, given Detective Beaufort and Eleri’s task force colleagues the identity of the man known as the Sandman. “We told them it was his scent in the bunker, that he must’ve escaped into the desert. Beaufort has to know we have the fucker, but he’s not going to spill.”

And the task force could verify Hendricks’s identity as the Sandman via the DNA in the little prison cell he’d created to feed his warped needs.

“Your people are ripping apart his house right now,” he told Eleri.

“From the message I got before we took off, there’s not going to be a problem with evidence to confirm his guilt. ”

Hendricks himself wasn’t talking, was barely conscious.

He’d made the bad mistake of attempting to take Dahlia on first with a gun and then a knife.

She, a changeling who could read the desert storm—and who was forewarned—had easily avoided the attempted strikes, then come down on top of him.

Needless to say, she’d shredded his back to ribbons, then broken his arm the same way he’d broken Malia’s.

“The pathetic piece of shit tried to goad me to slit his throat with my talon.” A snort from his wing-second. “As if I’d make it that easy for him. He’ll be here when you get back.”

Recalling everything Eleri had told him of the Sandman murders, Adam had said, “Keep the human population of the Canyon away from him, and check his genealogy. Eleri said all the victims showed signs of a telepathic assault. Whatever Hendricks is, he’s not fully human.”

Now, while his clan made sure a vicious murderer would never again claim a victim, Adam held Eleri’s hand, skin to skin, blood to blood, in a silent reminder that he was here, that she was part of something bigger now…that she was his mate and he’d waited for her for a lifetime.

Oh, I’m so sorry. I should’ve been looking up instead of at my organizer.

… you’ve cut your knuckles. Let me get a bandage from the first aid—

No, stay, it will heal up real quick.

“Stay,” he whispered as his heart threatened to break. “Please, Eleri, just stay.”

···

“Prep for landing,” came the pilot’s instruction after too long.

“Stabilize her.” Dr. Czajka indicated for Adam to hold on tight to the board on which the medics had strapped Eleri down. “We want as little movement to her brain as possible.”

The doctor and two other medics took hold of other parts of the board, all four of them bracing themselves to take any impact. But the pilot managed to land with a skill that was a falcon gliding to home ground.

“I don’t know much about changeling bonds,” Czajka said to him as she ran down the hospital hallway beside the hover-propelled gurney a minute later. “But if you believe physical contact will help with her medical status, then scrub up and join us in the operating theatre.”

Then she was gone, taking Eleri with her.

Adam turned to the nurse who’d been on the flight. “Show me how to scrub up.”

It took far too long, even with the facility’s high-tech sanitizer, but he was finally ready. He walked in to find Eleri in surgery, Dr. Czajka about to use a fine drill to make a hole in her skull. “Easiest, fastest way to relieve pressure on the brain,” the surgeon said.

Adam realized Czajka was buying them time to think about what else they could do.

He took Eleri’s bare hand in his, her flesh too cold, her bones so fragile.