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)
“I know you.” A feline rumble, her claws slicing out to lie against his skin. “Oh, I should’ve listened to my cat!” Dawning realization, the fleeting emergence of the vibrant colors of her. “Stars in the darkness. Silver threads in my mind. It’s you.”
The bruise inside his brain that had never quite healed pulsed anew, but it didn’t hurt. It … ached. For her. He wanted to believe she’d remembered everything, and that she’d always meant to come back to him, but she wouldn’t be looking at him with such innocence if she knew all of him.
It was better this way, he reminded himself. Far better.
Things had changed for the worse since the kiss that had forever altered him. He was no longer the man who’d dared dream those dreams. No, he was now a monster barely leashed, his time as the Ivan his family knew—and the Ivan that Lei had once known—in a sharp countdown to the end.
But he saw no harm in telling Lei one thing. It might lead her to trust him. Then he could help her, look after her. Because it turned out that not even the monstrous spider inside him could bear to see her suffering.
“I found you in the snow,” he said, his voice rough.
What he didn’t say was that he’d then lost her. But she was alive, and that was what mattered. She breathed, she existed. And she’d just smiled at him as if he was the most wonderful thing she’d ever seen.
It was a beautiful lie, formed on the foundation of memories lost, bloodstains forgotten, but Ivan wasn’t about to reject it. Not when he had so little time left as Ivan, as the man Lei had met in a forest well over a thousand miles from this street. Where she was concerned, he’d take the scraps, hold them as close as a miser with his coins.
“Does your leg cause you pain?” he asked. “It was badly shattered.”
“In the cold.” Claws brushing against his skin, her breath soft as she leaned toward him … before she jerked back with a scowl. “Who are you?” A demand.
“Ivan.” A man with a nightmare in his head and one who’d just realized he’d permit her to claw him, permit her to mark him.
As she’d already marked him that cold day among the dead, the bruise not a bruise at all, but the swiping marks of a cat’s claws. “What’s your name?” he asked, because to call her Lei without introduction would give away far too much.
“Tell me what happened that day,” she said instead of answering, slicing back her claws but continuing to stare at him with eyes that were hauntingly beautiful. “I need to know.”
Undone by the stark request, the ground shaky under him, he told her all of it. From the moment he’d found her, to the moment he’d “crashed” her mind with his own, jolting her to life.
“My cat knows you,” she said. “As if you’re inside me.” Another scowl, her hand going up to her temple before dropping back down. “Did you leave something inside me?”
“Psy can’t influence a changeling in such a way—and if I left something, I would’ve been able to track it, find you.” Instead of being haunted by dreams of an ocelot prowling through his world.
Narrowed eyes. “Something happened that day.”
“Yes.” Impossible to ignore that when it was taking all his will not to touch her. “But I can’t tell you what—though I do think you have it the other way around.”
Taking a box of energy bars offered by a shopkeeper who was handing them out to all the rescuers, she opened it and put several bars in his lap. And he thought of their starlit picnic and the food she’d made him try, a moment he’d gone over so many times that the memory was frozen in a glass bauble in his mind.
“Other way around?” she muttered when he didn’t continue. “What are you talking about?”
“I think you left something in me.” A thing of fur and teeth that had haunted him each day since.
Chapter 14
Incidents of Scarab Syndrome continue to rise in the general population.
—Address by Dr. Maia Ndiaye, PsyMed SF Echo, to virtual assembly of medical professionals from the Pacific Islands’ United Medical Corps
The Consortium can’t function as a cohesive unit without solid leadership. Where is the Architect who sold us this bill of goods?
—Priority question from a member of the Consortium (unanswered)
THE ARCHITECT WHO had become Queen of the Scarabs was pleased. “You have done well,” she told those of her children whom she had selected for this task.
They didn’t respond, couldn’t respond, their minds too busy undertaking the work she’d assigned them. She had her own task, too, the most critical one of them all. Settling back in her office chair on the physical plane, she unleashed the full power of her mind on the psychic one.