Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
When she re-formed, she was at the base of Deer Mountain, on the main trail. The fact that she didn’t bother to hide herself behind a big tree, but instead popped out of thin air right in front of anybody who’d been around? Not good. And as she got to hiking, she told herself the protocol slipup had been intentional because the temperature was north of a meat locker, and who the hell would be out here? But that was bullshit. She hadn’t even thought about some human who might be hardcore-ing for their wilderness YouTube channel seeing her poof! into existence—and recording the damn thing.
It was the one rule that the vampire species and the Lessening Society agreed on.
No human involvement, unless it couldn’t be avoided. And then if it couldn’t be avoided, you needed to clean that crap up.
Xhex glanced around.
Then again, considering everything else she was fucking up lately, this was a minor infraction. Besides, no one was actually out here.
Nobody human, that was.
As a shiver went through her, she crossed her arms over her chest, her leather jacket creaking from the cold. Without her usual holsters on, there was too much room inside her coat, the sartorial equivalent of clipping your nails, she supposed.
“I’ve got a journey, huh,” she muttered as she scanned the trees that crowded up to the cleared trail. “So here I am. I’m starting. I’m walking.”
With visions of Dustin Hoffman in a white suit pounding on a taxicab hood, she trudged onward, ascending at first gradually and then with greater angle. She remembered the first time she had done this—and John Matthew had been forced to reveal himself.
There was no one with her tonight.
And unfortunately that continued to prove true. No matter how far she went, or how intently she searched the pines, the old woman with the strange aura failed to show up.
It seemed ironic that she was trying to seek out that which she had totally denied back in the spring. Then again, life had a sick sense of humor, and people who were at rock bottom didn’t have the luxury of getting fussy with their opinion of reality.
You have a disease of the soul. If you do not cure it now, it will destroy you.
Between one blink and the next, she saw eyes staring up out of a bandana, eyes that she had taken without any conscious knowledge of having done so. Then she pictured that body on the slab at the morgue.
The energy is trapped just beneath your flesh. Unless it is released, once and for all, you will never be at peace.
“But how?” she said to the pine trees. “How do I release it? Ah, come on… throw me a fucking bone.”
You must, child. Or you will die by inches… and take all you love down with you. To stay where you are is a death sentence.
“What am I doing? Please… tell me.”
There was no reply, and goddamn but she wished she hadn’t wasted her time arguing with the entity. Instead of getting answers, she’d only wanted to fight with everything she hadn’t wanted to accept.
Now, when she needed guidance most, all she had were her own useless thoughts, scrambled and tormented.
And her own useless company.
Or so it appeared.
* * *
As Xhex marched up the trail like she was heading to her own execution, Blade tracked his sister through the pines, making sure that he stayed downwind and behind her. He was also careful to monitor her vicinity. That male of hers, John Matthew, was bonded, and he had big friends, so there was a chance that there were members of the Black Dagger Brotherhood nearby.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t handle them. He had too much on his mind to be bothered—and the fact that Xhex had shown up tonight, while he was already wrestling with so much, was just fabulous.
Exactly what he needed.
Her mood seemed no less sore than his own, however. Walking up the main trail, she stopped regularly, but not because she was taxed physically. She was in prime condition, a true specimen of a female, capable of feats of strength and cunning that made her just as deadly as any male.
No, she halted from time to time because she was searching for something, and he wondered what would bring her here with such dark expectation.
Then again, her grid was in shambles. The collapse that had been threatened had in fact occurred, the three-dimensional structure of her emotions and her consciousness utterly disbanded. Something had happened since he had seen her last—and so recently, too.
You are better at caring for others than you wish to acknowledge.
Shut up, he thought back at the voice of that “old woman.”
Memories of the entity, or whatever it was, had dogged him since the moment the thing had supposedly departed. To the point where he felt hounded. Pursued. Even though there was never aught in his wake. Indeed, he had left the confines of the cave shelter after darkness had arrived to try to find some peace—and his sister’s path up the mountain had intersected his winding way down. As if things had been planned.