Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
It had been a thing of sunshine and joy.
Not a horror of scarlet blood and a man made helpless to save his mate.
Giving up on the push-ups when they did nothing to halt his thoughts of her, he sat back on the carpet he’d installed himself despite the ribbing from his clanmates about getting soft. Hah! Hadn’t the big, furry mudaks all been jealous afterward and sidled up to him one after the other asking about where to get the same plush carpet?
“Why are you haunting me?” he demanded of the girl become woman he’d never met, never seen. He was starting to wonder if she was someone his great-grandfather had known. Déwei Nguyen had been a powerful F-Psy, the real deal. Yakov and Pavel, in contrast, had only inherited a drop of his talent. With them, it was more a sense of intense intuition, rather than a manageable ability.
To Yakov, it felt like an itch under the skin when he knew he had to do something. He’d learned young not to fight the drive, because it never led him astray. That whisper of foresight had saved his and his twin’s skin many a time—whether by warning them that their parents were approaching and they’d better hide all evidence of their illicit activities, or by making them halt in their tracks right before they walked onto a cliff destabilized by a storm.
But Pavel didn’t dream about a woman with haunted eyes. Not like Yakov.
“That’s because I like boys,” Pavel had joked as an older teen, then waggled dark eyebrows identical to Yakov’s; his eyes were a distinctive aqua green behind his spectacles, Pavel’s vision the only physical difference between the two of them. “Maybe your future mate is Psy and is seducing you with telepathy.”
Back then, with the Psy keeping a firm distance from changelings as well as humans, the idea had made Yakov roll his eyes. “It’s probably just some kind of weird psychic memory inherited from Denu.” The word he and Pavel used to refer to their great-grandfather didn’t officially come from any of the languages spoken inside their family unit.
Not Pavel and Yakov’s native Russian. Not their great-grandfather’s first languages of Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese that their beloved babushka Quyen had taught them pieces of, not the English spoken by their wickedly funny babushka Graciele, nor the Portuguese spoken by their paternal grandfather, Wacian.
According to their mother, as toddlers, they’d heard family members talking about their great-grandfather and tried to replicate his name, but in their baby mouths, Déwei Nguyen had come out sounding like “denu” and that was that. Their grandmother Quyen, one of Déwei’s two children with his bear mate, had refused to allow anyone to correct them, and so he was forever Denu to Yakov and Pavel.
The two of them had been born after their denu passed, but their grandmother had told them stories about him that made him come alive. “He was so handsome and he had such a laugh, boys,” their babushka would say. “His eyes would crinkle up at the corners, and it would just spill out of him.” Her own lips curving, her eyes awash with happy memories.
Later, when they were older, she’d told them the other side of her father’s life. “He was a man of heart and honor, my papa, but he had such sorrow inside him.” Déwei, she’d told them, had already been mated when the Psy race embraced Silence, his home the StoneWater den.
“He never once considered leaving my mama—he adored her to his dying breath.” A smile potent with memory. “But he did miss his own parents and siblings terribly. I was born after the Psy embraced Silence, so I never met them. As an adult, I asked him about them, and he said they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to maintain an emotional distance if they continued to stay in touch.”
She’d shown them a picture of her parents in the twilight of their life, Déwei Nguyen’s hair a shock of silky white and his face creased with laugh lines as he stood with his arm around his laughing mate, her hair a tumble of silver that yet retained a hint of the vivid red from images of her youth.
“You two love as fiercely as he did.” Their grandmother’s eyes had shone wet, her throat moving as she swallowed. “Always hold on tight to you and yours—and don’t allow politics to come in between. That’s what my papa taught me. Love is a far greater gift.”
“I could use your help today, Denu,” Yakov said now. “Who is she? A girl you had a crush on as a youth? Good thing your Mimi never knew.” According to their grandmother, that had been his affectionate pet name for his mate, Marian Marchenko.
“Hot-tempered, my mama was,” Babulya Quyen had said with a laugh when they’d asked about their great-grandmother. “She apparently chased him down with a skillet once during their courtship, after she mistakenly thought he was making eyes at another bear. Shows you my father’s charm that he not only got her to put down that skillet—but convinced her to make him pancakes on it!”