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)
A small ax lay below her, its blade pointing up … and slick with fresh blood. It had been embedded in her back, he realized, just as wet fluid began to seep from her back and onto his arm.
I have a survivor! Blasting the telepathic message on a wide band as he tucked her body against his chest, he ran toward the small ambulance parked at the top of the site. It was there for the cleanup crew, the medics dispensing water and nutrients, as well as handling any minor injuries. Heavy bleeding from deep cut to the back! Multiple broken limbs, severe bruising, possible fractured facial bones!
The female paramedic had just snapped open the stretcher when Ivan reached her. Placing Lei on the white surface, he stepped back so the paramedic could press a scanner to her neck.
Flatline.
“I felt her pulse. And she’s bleeding.” Ivan didn’t imagine things—and he fucking wasn’t about to give up on Lei. “Check again!”
The paramedic obeyed, got another flatline.
It had to have been bare seconds since Lei’s last heartbeat. Falling back on the chilling precision of the pragmatic half of his brain, Ivan smashed into her mind using his telepathic energy. Psy couldn’t enter changeling minds—but they could smash them open. But a true hit tended to cause irreparable harm to the mind in question, which wasn’t his aim at all.
He would never hurt Lei.
He modulated the blow to be powerful but not deadly.
Powerful enough to shock and startle.
A faint gasp, her eyelids fluttering even as a strange clawing jolt burned through him—as if his telepathy had been reflected back—before Lei went still. But it was enough. The paramedic got to work, together with a colleague who’d just made it to them, events moving at rapid-fire speed.
“Wait!” Ivan yelled out after they’d loaded Lei into the ambulance and he saw there wasn’t enough space for him to join the paramedic in the back. “Her name is Lei! She’s a changeling!”
The driver nodded to acknowledge the words as he pulled his door shut. Then the vehicle was backing up to turn onto the road, its lights flashing.
“You have her ID?” his partner asked him, datapad in hand and chest heaving from his frantic run to reach Ivan. “I need to record it.”
Ivan stared after the retreating vehicle, Lei’s blood a metallic scent stuck to his gloved hands and jacket. “She’s not dead.”
“I’ll add her to the rolls of the survivors. Families are searching for their lost members.”
“No ID,” Ivan said, thinking of her cold, cold skin, so unlike the firelight of the woman who’d kissed him. “I know her.” Little pieces of her that he’d never forget. “First name: Lei. She’s changeling.”
“Ocelot?”
“I don’t know, but that’s the strongest possibility.” Inside his mind, a bruise throbbed. The clawing echo of the blow he’d struck, deep psychic grooves in his mind. That recoil hadn’t been normal. Had been psychic … but not quite.
“Ocelots will ID her if she’s one of them,” his partner stated, then—shoulders slumping—turned back to the field of the dead. “Finding her, it will help maintain morale … but there are so many more bodies to load.”
Ivan had been preparing to head to his vehicle, follow the ambulance—follow Lei—to the hospital, but he knew then that that wasn’t the choice Lei would want him to make. She’d helped an injured stranger for no reason except that it was the right thing to do. And the right thing to do at this moment was to give what respect he could to the dead, to make sure they didn’t spend another night out in the cold.
Lei was in good hands and, given the gravity of her wounds, would be taken directly into surgery. He’d go to her after he completed this dark task; he’d stay by her side so no one could hurt her while she was vulnerable and unconscious. He’d watch over her until she opened her eyes and told him to leave.
Because she would.
This massacre had taken place roughly two days ago, but Lei had chosen not to meet him an entire day earlier. She’d made her decision—and that decision was a future without Ivan Mercant.
Chapter 8
“Soleil Bijoux Garcia. Ah, Arturo, such a long name you’ve given your niñita!”
“That’s for later, when she’s all grown up. Right now, she’s my sweet Leilei; aren’t you, mi princesa? Papa loves you.”
—Conversation between Arturo Garcia and Yariela Castaneda (7 August 2056)
SOLEIL WAS ON the edge of a dark gray horizon, the light fading glimmer by final glimmer when it hit her. A demanding bolt of energy that jolted her entire body and turned the horizon to white fire.
A sharp gasp that almost hurt, cold air shards in lungs that had already been shutting down … and then her cat leaped. She didn’t know to where until she found herself with her claws hooked into a cool black space electric with silvery currents of energy that curved around her in a protective wall.