Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Soleil’s heart pounded, her head jerking toward the man her cat craved. He knelt on the other side of the street, his hand braced against the wall and his eyes obsidian.
No whites, no irises. Just black.
She’d seen Psy eyes do that during the worst day of her existence, the world filled with pain and death. But he wasn’t out of control, wasn’t violent. The impossibly, ridiculously perfect line of his jaw was set, his body rigid in a concentration so merciless it was a pulse in the air.
Her cat batted at it, delighted by him in a way far too familiar between strangers, but that wasn’t important at this moment. He had to be the reason these girls were alive. Of all the Psy in the street, he was the only one who was functional—and those black eyes told a story.
After doing a check on the girls to ensure that they’d sustained no physical injuries, she moved on to the next person, her mind and actions driven by years of practice and study. All the while, the scent of death lingered in her mouth, a whispering echo of terrified screams at the back of her brain.
So much blood.
There’d been so much blood then.
Her pack decimated by Psy driven mad by a psychic infection. The ones who hadn’t been intent on murder had clawed out their own eyes, smashed their own heads bloody against walls. And they’d been so quiet, some of them. Horrifically, shockingly quiet as they self-destructed in a fountain of violence.
Soleil had fought to help the ones who’d turned the violence inward, had literally tied one’s hands to a bicycle park station to stop her from the clawing. The woman had looked lost … then smashed her head into the footpath.
Soleil had heard her skull crack like an egg.
These Psy aren’t going mad, she reminded herself as she checked on a broken arm, they’re dying.
“You’ll be fine,” she told the man with the broken arm. “Just stay here until the ambulances—”
His skin turned to ice without warning, air escaping his throat in a last rattling gasp.
Cat hissing inside her, Soleil almost dropped his arm.
Almost.
She was sane enough, patched up inside enough, to lay it gently against his rapidly cooling body and think not like a woman broken by loss—but a healer. What had just taken place wasn’t normal, how quickly all evidence of life had been sucked out of him, how fast his face had lost color. Whatever was happening to the Psy was catastrophic.
Shoving aside images of the dead piled up on top of her, their bodies going from warm to cold and stiff and hard while she bled out below their weight, she moved on to the next injured individual. She had to run around a crashed vehicle to do so, steam hissing up from its crumpled hood. The driver was dead, his spine twisted into an unnatural shape.
But not far away sat a woman propped up against the pole of a streetlamp, her eyes a dazzling green. Those eyes were trained on Soleil’s dangerous stranger.
Blood coated one side of her face from where she must’ve fallen, but she didn’t react when Soleil knelt down with her borrowed first-aid kit. It held nowhere near the supplies in her own healing kit, a kit that had vanished from what had once been her aerie, but it was enough to patch people up, keep them breathing until the paramedics reached them.
“You have a severe gash on your cheek,” she told the woman with a confidence that first her parents, then Yariela had nurtured with a warmth that Soleil missed each and every day.
Rummaging in the kit, she picked up a small device. “I have a basic stitch-stapler that I’m going to use on you that should halt the bleeding. I’m sorry, I have no numbing gel.”
The woman continued to stare at the stranger. “I can feel him.” It came out a rasp. “Inside me. Holding me to life. He’s so beautiful. Cold crystal fire.”
Her words, her almost slavish focus should’ve raised every hair on Soleil’s body. Instead her cat licked its paw, annoyed at her patient because the stranger was Soleil’s. Regardless of her unhinged thoughts—her cat disagreed vehemently with that diagnosis—healing came first. So she used the woman’s preoccupation to start stapling up the cut.
It took until the third staple for the woman to jolt and wince. “It hurts.” Her eyes were suddenly wet, the dreaminess erased by pain.
“I know, but the cut is too deep to allow it to remain open.” What she hadn’t told the woman was that prior to the stapling, Soleil had been able to see inside her mouth—one entire side of her face had been flapping open.
Looked like the blonde had fallen on a sharp piece of metal protruding from the crashed car. It had nearly sliced off half her face. But the stitches would help minimize scarring, and there were cosmetic procedures for later on.