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)
Reaching out a finger, she dipped it mischievously in the lake, the motion reminiscent of a small cat playing with a bowl of water.
“Why did you do that?” he asked as their reflections rippled.
A shrug. “For fun,” she said with a laugh. “Want to go swimming?”
“It’s cold,” he said. “You shouldn’t get cold right now.” She needed to conserve her energy.
Her smile faded, and she went down into a seated position with her feet in the water of the lake. “I’m hurt.”
Echoing her, he dipped his own feet in the water. He could’ve sworn he’d been wearing boots just before, but his feet were now bare, his jeans rolled up. “No, it’s just exhaustion. A little rest and fuel and you’ll recover.”
Head lowered, she leaned her body against his. “Inside,” she whispered. “I’m hurt inside. I can feel it.” She spread her hand over her heart. “They’re all gone.”
He understood loss, understood loneliness, and so he did the one thing he did with no one, not even Grandmother. He put his arm around her, holding her to his side, this fragile creature of starlight.
“I tried to save them.” Her voice trembled, wet and broken. “I tried so hard.”
“I know.” That was why she’d been lying under all those bodies, with an ax in her back. “No one could’ve asked more of you.”
Her shoulders jerking under his arm, her tears sparkles in the air. He didn’t know how to deal with tears, but he knew what it was to lose the very foundation of your world, to become a planet with no sun, a place of ice and frost.
Shifting, he slid one arm under her legs while keeping his other around her back, and scooped her up into his lap. “You’re not alone,” he told her. “I’m here.”
No answer, but she stayed against him, stars dazzling his vision.
Pressing her hand over his heart after her tears faded into a silence heavy with pain, she said, “Why is your heartbeat so strange?”
He looked down, saw the glow of arteries and veins shining through his T-shirt. They pulsed a vivid orange with an edge of scarlet. “That’s the color of Jax when it’s heated up. Some people like to drink it.”
“Jax?”
“A drug.” So strange, that it would be in his heart. No medic had ever warned him of deposits in that region of his body. “It opens the mind, intensifies the world, offers false freedom.”
Sitting up without warning, her spine rigid, she took his face in her hands. “Don’t put poison inside you.” An order, the stars in her eyes shifting to a primal tawny gold. “Promise me.”
“I’ve never taken Jax of my own free will,” he told her, because this was a dream and he didn’t have to fear that the truth would make her see him as defective. “My mother used it while I was in the womb—and she gave it to me when I was a child.”
A haze of red in her gaze now, flames of anger licking at the gold and husky brown. “It harmed you?”
“My brain pathways are abnormal.” There was no way to dress that up when the configuration of his brain was so bizarre that the neuro specialists his grandmother had hired didn’t know what to make of it.
What was known was that of those adult Psy confirmed to have been exposed to Jax in utero, ninety-six percent experienced episodes of “serious mental instability” in their late twenties to midthirties. Ivan sat right in the center of that zone. “I thought I had it under control, thought my brain had figured its way around the toxic deposits. I was wrong.”
She ran her fingers through his hair, and he thought she must be leaving behind a trail of starlight. “You’re so afraid.”
“Fear is useless. I’m pragmatic.” He knew what awaited and he’d prepared for it, planned for it. But … he hadn’t prepared for her, had never foreseen how desperately he’d want to fight the fate his mother had chosen for him.
“You’re so sure the worst will happen.”
“Ninety-six percent,” he said, not quite ready to tell her that it was already happening; his short clock was now in its final countdown. “The remaining four percent had significant other abnormalities. I might have fooled myself for a time, but the fact is that no one escapes Jax when it’s present during cell development and growth.”
Hands fisting in his hair, she scowled. “I’m not done with this conversation, but I have to go.” She looked over her shoulder, as if being tugged by unseen hands.
Desperation was a howl inside his skull. “Will you remember me when you wake?” he asked her. “Will you remember us?” As they’d been in the forest in Texas, a fragile bubble of happiness.
“I don’t know. I’m so splintered inside I can barely see my way out.” Starlight fingers brushing his cheek … and then she was gone, the stars falling until he held an overflowing handful that flickered and began to die, one by one.