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)
And this time, none of the Psy, that old and weak race, could see her.
Chapter 15
Psy, human, changeling, all three races spend their lives searching for and highlighting differences, when the truth is that we are far more alike than we are not.
—Excerpt from “Reflections on Identity” by Keelie Schaeffer, PhD, Anthropology and Psychology Quarterly (March 2074)
“WE ALL KNOW healers have an ability analogous to a psychic one.”
Soleil stared at him, at this beautiful stranger who’d allowed her to touch him in a way that was far too intimate between people who’d only met once before—while one of them had been unconscious. Contrary to what her cat might believe, that didn’t count as a relationship.
Nose in the air, her cat twitched its tail.
“It’s Psy that play with minds,” she said, and made herself look away from the striking blue of his gaze. “Don’t try anything.”
“If I could have, I’d have found you,” he said again. “I looked for you, but you’d been transferred with no forwarding record. And you weren’t listed as a SkyElm ocelot. Were you visiting family there?”
The strange joy of finding out why he felt so familiar shattered as things spiked and twisted inside Soleil. She couldn’t answer, her cat, too, going mute within. This was a pain for which neither part of her had any words. It was one thing to know you were unwanted by your pack, another to be so viciously rejected.
Her alpha had disavowed her while she was helpless and broken.
A stir next to her that was electricity in the air. “You need to eat.”
Soleil’s fingers clenched on the cool red of the energy bar she hadn’t opened, her eyes on the vista in front of her. Defeat was a hammer coming down on her shoulders. There was no way she could sneak out of this street, far less sneak up on Lucas Hunter.
Paramedics swarmed the area, as did civilians … and many, many members of DarkRiver.
“Oh, Leilei,” Farah murmured from beside her. “You know you were never going to spill his blood. You heal. You don’t murder.”
It was my duty as the sole survivor, she wanted to say, wanted to argue. There’s no one else left to take vengeance, get answers. But she stayed silent—talking to invisible people was something she usually saved for the third date.
Farah laughed—because that was just her kind of humor.
Stifling a strangled laugh-cry, Soleil swallowed the anguish tearing her apart and forced herself to rip open the wrapper of the energy bar. Forced herself not to think about her best friend’s enormous laugh, or of how she’d never again look out from her aerie to see Farah, small and smart and fast, running over to share a piece of wicked gossip.
“Staring at it won’t get energy into your body,” Ivan said.
Soleil’s shoulders stiffened. “Neither will stuffing it someplace small and sunless in yours, but I’d sure feel good after.”
Ivan turned to look at her, his gaze unblinking.
Her cat, meanwhile, was cackling. The human side of Soleil was by turns astonished and aghast. She did not go around saying that kind of thing—though she had always had a quick-fire temper when someone pushed her buttons. But … that temper had gone into deep freeze the day her world fell.
Except, it appeared, for this stranger who’d saved her life.
She probably should have apologized. In no mood to do so, though she knew he’d said nothing that deserved such a scathing response, she took a giant bite of the energy bar, chewed.
Ivan returned to his own bar, his focus on getting it down methodical. She tried not to watch him out of the corner of her eye, but it was impossible. She was aware of his every slight move—from the way his eyes tracked their environment, to the way the strong muscles of his throat moved as he swallowed.
Flickers of stars in her mind, streamers of silver that made her cat pounce.
Whatever he’d done that day on the field, it had linked them in some way. He was difficult to read, but instinct—and common sense—told her he hadn’t done it on purpose. What reason would a powerful Psy have to attach himself to a broken changeling?
No matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t find a rational answer to that question.
And she realized she was staring at him again, as if he was her personal North Star. His cheekbones were knife blades against the cool white of his skin, his cheeks hollow. His eyes glittered. It would take more than a few nutrient bars to make up for the steep physical price he’d paid to do whatever it was that he’d done.
“How did you keep so many people alive?” she asked.
“Grabbed and threw them back into a stable part of the PsyNet, away from the part that was collapsing under us.”