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)
Because Ivan wasn’t done with life. Not yet. Not while he was still himself enough to watch over Soleil, ensure that her new pack would treat her well, and that she’d live a life of happiness.
A small cat prowled inside him, swiping at him with an annoyed paw for what he’d done, the mess he’d gotten himself into. Mad, he had to be going mad to believe that their wild bond had followed him here, but he carried that annoyed cat with him as he walked in this psychic space unlike any he’d ever explored.
It was nothing akin to the PsyNet, with minds neatly grouped or laid out in various patterns, each with a small section of the Net to themselves. Here the minds sat jumbled up against each other, or hung twisted in streams of violent psychic energy that crackled with random bolts of lightning.
Driven by instinct, he’d avoided the bolts but now deliberately took a glancing hit—he needed the data. It felt like being sucked into a cyclonic vortex that didn’t know whether it was twisting clockwise or anti-clockwise, creating brutal opposing forces that threatened to rip him apart.
Shaking it off with effort, he looked once again at all the minds being buffeted, felt a cold chill run through his veins. If the lightning continued … People were going to start dying. Soon. Those bolts held far too much unrestrained power, enough to crash and crush.
This explained the comas, the catatonia, the mental chaos.
He was no expert in psychic mechanics, but it was obvious that there were no safe zones. The power was too erratic. The only way for those caught in this zone to protect themselves would be to hunker down behind shields so heavy they could no longer interact in the physical world—but those would only last so long, and anyone not in on the plan for separation would’ve been taken by surprise, with no time to realize what was happening before they were hit by a bolt.
These people were in a critical countdown.
A tug on the part of him that held all those silver threads.
It led to a mind under considerable pressure from the bolts. He recognized that mind, though that should’ve been impossible. It was of a person he’d thrown onto the island, away from the abyss. In the same way he recognized this mind, he knew that it was on the brink of total catastrophic failure, far too weak to survive much more.
The cat nudged at him, told him to remember.
The memory came in a rush: Of the healer with big brown eyes who owned Ivan, and an alpha changeling with claw marks on one side of his face. A primal bond sealed in blood. A bond that would permit a transfer of power.
Ivan was no alpha. He was a monster, a spider that sucked others dry. He could kill this person if he opened up that part of his mind, the very part that had shoved a tendril outside a once-solid cage and formed the link between them. Yet if he didn’t, they’d die regardless.
Thoughts grim, he consciously opened the door of the psychic prison for the first time in nearly two decades, releasing the spider but using all his adult knowledge in an attempt to reverse the polarity—his aim to pulse energy from himself down that silvery thread. Giving rather than devouring.
The mind flared with light, became stronger.
It had worked.
Shocked, he stood there for a second, staring. Why had he never considered this before? It was a good skill. He received his answer a heartbeat later. Because now that the spider was free, it was bunching in readiness to shoot out more lines of its web, hook in others, begin to feed.
Ivan slammed it back into its prison, feeling the pushback as it fought him. He’d have to be extremely careful with any future assists, act at rapid speed. To allow the spider to linger was to expose everyone in the vicinity to the mutation in him that just wanted to feed and feed and feed.
As if his mother’s craving for the crystalline petals had burned itself into the cells of her son, creating a monstrous creature that was never satisfied, no matter how much power it had at its disposal. He’d always seen his mutated ability as a spider because of the web, the connections, but it could as well be termed a locust.
One that fed and fed, leaving nothing but a lifeless desert in its wake.
Moving on, searching for others to whom he was connected and could help, he saw that some minds in the ChaosNet were different. They glowed not with the dull starlight of the minds under assault, but with a dazzling kaleidoscopic energy that reminded him of the crystalline flowers … and they absorbed the lightning strikes rather than being damaged by them.