Total pages in book: 133
Estimated words: 125077 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 625(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125077 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 625(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Sure enough, Eddie was back with Trent and a wolfy Fen.
Fenrir sniffed the air, and a low growl started in the back of his throat.
“Where’s Gray?” Trent seemed to immediately know what had happened.
Luna stepped up to the massive wolf who should have terrified anyone in a room with him and put her small hands on either side of his face. “It’s okay, Fen. The bad man went back down, but he took your other dad.”
Fen’s head hung, and Evan moved in beside Luna, putting a hand on his head and stroking down his back.
Trent pulled me into his arms. “I’m sorry, baby. He’ll be back. I promise. He always comes back.”
I held on to him and hoped he was right.
Chapter Eleven
“How are you feeling?”
I took a deep breath and fought the urge to scream. I’d been asked this question five hundred times since I’d been released from the clinic the day before. I’d been told to rest for the night and while I would have ignored that advice, Trent was suddenly interested in following the nurse’s orders.
“I’m good, babe,” I managed to say between clenched teeth and what I was absolutely certain was a forced smile.
Because I was the one forcing it.
Trent sat next to me in bed, wearing not a stitch of clothing. He stretched that magnificent body and yawned. “I’m glad to hear it. Eddie’s been in the kitchen all morning.”
I still wasn’t entirely sure why I’d been forced to rest after my encounter with Liv. The vampire blood had done the trick and my wound had healed, but the nurse had mentioned my blood pressure was slightly high and then all the men had freaked out.
I’d had to send Evan to question several of the people I’d been scheduled to interview the night before because Trent had carried me down to our rooms and then watched over me like a damn hawk. “I didn’t need to take the night off.”
He leaned over and kiss my forehead. “Says the woman who slept for twelve hours.”
I frowned. “Seriously? I’ve been asleep for twelve hours? What time is it?”
He kissed his way down to my nose. “Nine. Ish. In the morning. We can sleep far longer. No one is really awake down here until after noon. The primals have only been asleep for a few hours.”
So I was going to throw my sleep schedule way off, but then it was crap anyway. Jet lag is a real thing, and when your jet lag comes from traveling through a time portal…well, it’s bad. Throw in early pregnancy symptoms and it wasn’t such a huge surprise that I’d slept.
Trent settled back down and cuddled me close. “Evan left notes from all of her interviews. I can’t thank you enough for trusting her. Evan needs some way to contribute. It’s been difficult to be the only girl. All of her role models were stories rather than people. I think watching you in action will be good for her.”
“Well, all she could do last night was watch me sleep. She’s going to think I’m a lazy Nex Apparatus.” I knew I should get up and start in on those notes, but the truth was it felt good to lay in his arms. I only wished Gray was with us. I was used to him being gone. He was often working, but this was different. Now I had to think about where he was. “How long do you think he’ll be gone?”
He was quiet for a moment, his hand stroking over my back. “Not long here. A long time for him. We could get lucky and have some crazy thing happen that he’s supposed to witness. His prophecy instincts can break Lucifer’s hold.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes Gray gets pulled to a place,” Trent explained. “The first time it happened was roughly five years after you disappeared. We had recently established Frelsi. The kids, Sasha, and I at this point were still out on the planes, but we came back to Earth from time to time to meet with our allies and check on Gray. We were there at the time, but Gray wasn’t in Frelsi and we didn’t expect him. I’m fairly certain he was on the Hell plane when it happened.”
“When what happened?”
“When a strange girl showed up outside the city,” Trent continued. “She shouldn’t have known where we were. No one should have. I can tell you her showing up the way she did caused many meetings. We were torn about what to do. We left her outside for days. The general consensus was that she was someone Myrddin had sent. And then suddenly Gray was beside me. He was in full-on prophet mode. I asked him why he was there and he told me he needed to witness something important.”
“Was it Shahidi?” Evan had told me about the young woman who held her grandfather’s soul. Shy came from a family of psychics. Myrddin had killed most of the well-known families with supernatural powers. Shy had been spared because she’d slept over at a friend’s house the night Myrddin had killed her whole family. But without her mother and grandmother to guide her, when she’d come into her powers she couldn’t handle them. At some point the queen’s father had been killed and his spirit had found Shy. She’d given him a space in her soul and he’d guided her and taught her how to navigate out of the mental health facility she’d been kept in and into the supernatural world that should have been hers. “She can talk to the dead, right? Gray was there to see Harry Wharton reunite with his grandchildren?”