Page 15

Damon

“W hat. Happened.” It took all of my control not to roar the question. I was holding on by the skin of my teeth.

The Lemera stood next to me, the two of us staring at Kit and Frankie where they sat on a couple of large, flat rocks the ocean had beaten smooth.

“The boy has gained some ability to walk the dream paths,” the Lemera said. She waved a hand. “They are a way to commune within the world—sometimes with ourselves, often with each other. I have been teaching the ways to Kitasa but she is still new to this…aspect of her magic. I’ve worked to train him as well but this…level of intricacy, I did not expect.” She blew out a breath and it was laden with frustration and guilt. “He must be learning, subconsciously, because of the souls Madae has taken in. Madae—Arsay, if that is who she truly is. Perhaps there is some aspect of dream or soul magic on his father’s side that made this ability more inherent to him. Maybe it is solely because of what he has absorbed from Arsay. Regardless, he learned enough control and wisdom that he was able to forge a solid connection—one that led him to Kit, or Kit to him. They connected on the dream paths.”

The revenant looked at me, her eyes that milky, dead stare. Fury and fear lurked in their depths.

“I felt Kitasa calling me. I do not know what transpired but she and the boy were in trouble. I went to them. They’d…wounded her somehow.”

“Wounded?” I asked. “Wounded who? Fanis? Arsay? Whoever the fuck she is?”

“Yes.” The Lemera’s face twisted in a grimace, a macabre sight that would have been unsettling if I hadn’t been scared to death for Kit—and Doyle. “You need to understand—the dream paths don’t take place in a physical sense. Our…essences connect. Our souls. We can talk and if we reach out to touch, there’s the impression that we are doing so, but our body remains in the physical world, exactly where it was when we closed our eyes to sleep. But both Doyle and Kitasa had called weapons. Doyle had an axe. Kitasa called a sword.” Her brow furrowed and she shook her head. “It was not her mother’s sword. It was…old and made with a dark, angry magic.”

Old, dark…

“She has a sword that’s called Death. She brought it with her.”

“A named blade.” The Lemera’s dead gaze focused on me. “Did she name it?”

“I doubt it. She doesn’t name her weapons. I think this one…named itself.” It also freaked the hell out of my people. I hadn’t seen it personally—she always kept it covered if she wasn’t using it. A couple of my best had been on hand when she transferred it to the Lair. Neither had liked the way its power tasted or smelled. “I know that she’s got a habit of either finding unusual weapons or them finding her.”

“That is in our blood.” She made a vague gesture with her hand. “The weapon may prove useful, especially since it somehow proved to hurt Arsay even within a dream. They attacked the crone when she went after the boy. That attack left Arsay…somehow lesser .”

“If Arsay was the one hurt, why does Kit have amnesia?” I demanded.

“Amnesia…is this the word for lost memories?”

“Yes.”

“She is still learning how to walk dream paths. I can only teach her so fast. It is not a simple power,” the Lemera said. Her voice was flat, her stare direct. “You can’t just sever the connection—I believe she was connected to Doyle. She reached out to me but her cry was…muted. If it had been her dream, I would have sensed her sooner. My connection to the boy is not as strong. When he disappeared, she was cut adrift, her soul with no body.”

“She’s right there !” I pointed at her. “That’s her. Her soul. Her body.”

The specter closed her eyes. “You do not understand. Let me try again…” Her brow crumpled and then she canted her head to the side. “I’ve seen young children running with stringed toys. The toys fly up into the sky and the child keeps it tethered by holding onto the string.”

“You mean a kite?”

“A kite,” she murmured with a nod. “Yes, a kite. Think of the sleeping aneira and the dream paths as a child with a kite. The child is the sleeper. The kite is the aneira on the dream path. Doyle pulled Kitasa into his own dream, so it’s like there were two kites on one string. Then he abruptly disappears—he must have been awakened. But Kitasa was in that dream because he pulled her there. Her string was cut. She was left to drift about, flailing in the wind until she started to crash.”

A sick feeling settled in my gut.

“What happens if she crashes?”

“If you crash in the dream path, if your link to the anchor is severed, you can die or go mad,” the Lemera said bluntly. “I felt the link break. I caught her and held her. But she was…adrift long enough that some of her…sense of self must have been affected.”

“It’s not her sense of self ,” I snapped. “It’s her memories. It’s her .”

The Lemera studied me. “And do you think your sense of self, your identity isn’t built on just that? Memory, the events of your life and all those around you, what you experience and go through, that’s what makes you, cat.”

The cool response made me feel like a dumbass and I was already floundering. The urge to bare my teeth and lash out almost overwhelmed me. I battled it down—fighting her wouldn’t help Kit.

Kit was what mattered.

Kit and Doyle.

“Is this permanent?”

The Lemera shook her head. “I cannot answer that. Through the bond we share, I was able to push some memories through to her, but I haven’t walked all of them—I cannot share all of them. And the few I’ve shared may not be enough to bring her back.”

A sharp, sudden gasp had us both going quiet.

Frankie laid two fingers on Kit’s temples on either side of her head.

I stiffened but the Lemera took my arm, her grip icy and jarring. “She’s not going to hurt her.”

“You two were ready to kill each other a few hours ago,” I reminded her. And I couldn’t forget what Frankie was .

“I’m already dead,” the specter said pointedly. “And I was only responding to her attacks. I did not even attempt to harm her. I have few lines when it comes to protecting Kitasa, cat. She is in no danger from that one.”

Inside, my cat rumbled an agreement.

Annoyed, and surprised, I rocked back on my heels and focused on the two females.

Kit was tense and uneasy, but she wasn’t scared. As I watched, she shifted around and withdrew her hands from her lap, her right one moving to rest on the surface of the stone next to her.

She flexed it.

The familiar movement had me narrowing my eyes.

“Can she hear her weapons?” I asked the Lemera.

“I…” the Lemera sounded puzzled. “I do not know.”

The urge to claw at something until it bled built inside. But what the fuck was I going to attack? It wasn’t Kit’s fault. As much as I distrusted Frankie, she wasn’t to blame. And while I might not mind picking a fight with either her or the Lemera, if either of them could help Kit—or help protect her from Fanis—Arsay, then I wouldn’t risk the chance of interfering with that.

Fuck !

The impotent rage built and surged and I spun around, seeking an outlet.

“Alpha.”

Frankie’s voice, cool and level, came like a slap out of the dark and I turned to see both her and Kit on their feet, facing me.

Frankie lifted a dark brow. “She has questions for you. I’ve done what I can, but…injuries like this take time. We can’t force it.”

Kit’s eyes were huge. For the life of me, I couldn’t read them.

I was used to being able to read her, either through those pretty, forest-green eyes or how she held herself, even her scent.

But it was like facing a stranger.

Her scent hadn’t changed—soft and clean, something hinting of vanilla and apples even under the light layer of sweat, but nothing else was right.

She sat too still, eyes on my face and in utter silence as she studied me.

Finally, she said, “You came to my office with a picture of a boy.”

Hope flickered to life inside. “You remember that?”

Earlier, she’d said she didn’t remember anything , not even her name or how old she was, where she’d come from or where she lived. She knew basic facts of life, knowledge we all pick up, but nothing personal…and nothing about us, or Doyle or even where we were.

“No,” she said, dashing my hopes. “She…” She turned her head, but frowned as she searched the beach and found only Frankie. “Where did the other one go? The one who looks like me?”

“Lemera,” I said in a rough voice. “You call her Lemeraties sometimes. She’s…around.” How the fuck did I explain that phantom to Kit? I didn’t even understand her. “What about her?”

“She was…I dreamed about her, I guess,” Kit said in a blunt voice. Her gaze came back to mine and finally, I saw something. Confusion, anger, frustration. “She was in my head. Or in my memories. I don’t know. But I was…maybe I was dying. She… Lemeraties wouldn’t let me go—wouldn’t let me fade. She showed me something—a memory. You were in it. You came to my office with a picture of a boy. Who’s the boy?”

“Doyle.” My heart ripped open inside and black, bitter blood spilled out. “That was years ago, Kit, when we first met. Doyle was my ward—he’s practically my son and he went missing. He’s also…” I stopped.

She narrowed her eyes and leaned forward when I stayed quiet. “He’s what ?”

Dragging in air, I looked away. “He’s your cousin. We didn’t know that until later.”

A disbelieving laugh escaped her and I shot her a look.

“You hired me to find some kid—and it turns out I’m related to him? How did that happen? And where are we now ? Are we still looking for him?”

“Not still . Again .”

She drew back, her hands moving from her lap to the flat surface of the rock beneath her. “Again…” Exploding off the rock, she paced to the waterline and then came back to stand next to me. “What do you mean again? Did you hire me to find him? Or did I ask you for help?”

“No.” Rising, I reached out a hand to her, waiting to see what she’d do.

She looked at me skeptically, the distrust on her face as bad as it had been the first few days. It cut so deep, I was surprised I wasn’t bleeding.

But slowly, she offered me a hand—her right.

“Your left one,” I said gruffly.

She frowned, but did so, hesitating. Slowly, she reached out to trace her fingers over the marks on the inside of her wrist. Bite marks. The only light came from the fire but it was enough to allow both of us to see. Our night vision was acute, mine even more so, but Kit’s was excellent. As long as there was some ambient light, we could see. She must have noticed the scars on her wrist.

“These are from you,” she said, her right hand falling away as she proffered her left.

“Yeah.” Carefully, I gripped her wrist in my right hand and traced the pads of my fingers over the scars. “We both annoyed the shit out of each other the first few days. But even when you were annoying, I couldn’t help but fall for you. You were mouthy and determined…even when you had every right to tell me to fuck off, you still kept trying. Saving Doyle was your priority. I’ve never seen anybody care so much about somebody they’d never met.”

Her heart had accelerated and her breathing sped up.

Slowly, I lifted my eyes to hers.

The tension snapped to a sharp edge and she twisted out of my grip.

“You bite me to show your thanks?”

The caustic acid in her voice lightened something inside me. That was her. That was my Kit. Maybe she didn’t remember who she was—but that was her . She was still in there.

“No, kitten,” I told her, the cat rising to the surface and pushing at me. “I bit you after an evil piece of shit tried to pull some mind-mojo on you—a vampire. He’d tricked you into thinking he was doing it so you two would have a bond and he could help you if you needed him. But then he tried to use that bond to harm you because you were getting too close to figuring out something he didn’t want people knowing. Only a couple of ways to break that bond—you could disappear, and you didn’t want to run. Or you could replace that bond with another one.”

Kit narrowed her eyes.

I didn’t look away.

“So instead of being bonded to a vampire , you made me bond to you ?”

“Baby girl…” I’d never felt less like smiling, but I managed. “I didn’t make you do anything. You asked. And I was more than happy to oblige, especially since I’d been going crazy over you almost from day one. If it helps, I still had claw marks on my back and shoulders from the previous night.”

Blood stained her cheeks and she shoved her wrist behind her back.

“So, we’re…together,” she said haltingly.

“Yes.”

“Since you bit me? For…years?”

My gut twisted. “Not the entire time.” I can’t tell her about the mountains … fuck me. Seeing the questions forming in her eyes, I shook my head. “You don’t want to ask about that part right now, kitten. Don’t ask, because I’m not telling you.”

She wanted to push. I could see it.

But to my surprise, she jerked her head in a nod and turned. Striding away from me, she said, “I’m tired. I need some sleep.”