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)
Ena sighed internally. “I, too, am pleased to meet you, Soleil,” she said to the healer whom Ivan had mated.
You do realize, she telepathed her grandson, she and Arwen will become firm friends and hound us all to take better care of ourselves?
A quiet joy in Ivan’s eyes, a subtle gentling of the soul that she hoped would bring him the peace she’d never been able to foster in him.
“You’re a healer?” she said to Soleil, to confirm her guess.
Soleil’s laughter was sunshine, wrapping around Ena the same way Arwen wrapped her up in his arms from behind when he thought he could get away with it. Her empath grandson had altered Ena, altered all of them, and she had the thought that Soleil would do the same. Healers had a way of loving until it became a fact of life, a simple acceptance that settled on the skin and the soul.
“Is it that obvious?” Soleil said with a look up at Ivan that held the same primal possessiveness Ena had seen when Valentin looked at Silver.
Healer she might be, but she was also a predatory changeling with her mate.
When she turned back to Ena, her eyes were no longer human. “Ivan is beyond lucky to have you in his life, Grandmother. Thank you for loving him as a boy so he had the heart to love me as a man.”
Only a healer would say such a thing to Ena Mercant, a ruthless matriarch whose Silence was meant to be flawless. Truly. How did her grandchildren keep doing this to her?
“Come,” she said, “let us walk and get to know one another.”
Ivan stayed quiet as the two of them spoke, and the more Ena learned of Soleil, the more she began to realize that this woman had a spine of steel. Of course she did; no weak-willed creature would’ve broken through Ivan’s refusal to admit that he was worth more than a life in the shadows.
And it was those shadows about which Ivan told her when they began to talk of his ability. He’d already mentioned to her that his shields were fragmenting, but she hadn’t realized the situation was this bad. “Excuse me?” she said, her tone frigid, when he told her his plans for the psychic cage.
“Don’t worry, Grandmother,” Soleil muttered, her arms folded and feline eyes narrowed. “I already told him that’s not an option.”
If Ena had not already approved of Soleil, she’d have passed the mark at that instant. The thin woman across from her was not playing when it came to Ivan’s safety. “Show me the shields,” Ena said.
They spent the next twenty minutes going over every technical detail. The problem was that Ivan appeared to have thought of all possible options, tested them, and confirmed that they wouldn’t work.
Ena’s heart thudded in her mouth, her mind filled with the memory of his small and cold hand in hers as she walked him out of the sterile room where he’d been taken after his mother’s death. That too-quiet, damaged boy had become a man of courage and loyalty who’d found happiness at long last.
Ena refused to let him down now.
But even Ena Mercant, she realized in the darkest part of night, many hours after she’d left Ivan and Soleil in the forest, couldn’t magic an answer where none existed. No one in the world had a brain like Ivan’s, and the problem wasn’t in the structure of his shields or their complexity. It was in the fact that his ability was morphing at a rate far beyond the capacity of any shield to contain.
It was as if the power he’d named the spider had been designed to penetrate shields—Ivan’s and everyone else’s. But such a neural design made no sense in the Psy world. It might have if Ivan could control it from his end, the power a dark one but a power nonetheless. But Ivan had never been able to control it … so when it broke free, it would enmesh him as much as any one of his targets.
The sea crashed below her home, smashing at the rocks, while Ena ran headlong into the realization that this time, she might not be able to solve the problem, might not be able to save a member of her family.
Chapter 47
There’s a minute possibility that the DNA trace is failing because the DNA involved is classified. I would put the chances of this at under 0.1%—because we’d be talking about such highly classified DNA files that it’s getting into the Council superstructure.
Those individuals keep a steely grip on their familial connections. No one vanishes unless the family wants them to vanish—and in those cases, the vanishing is final. I’m not giving up, but even we don’t have the connections to get to a small number of those classified files, so let us hope that 0.1% chance is so unlikely as to be negligible.