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)
And she thought: He loves them even if he won’t acknowledge it. It made her happy, that he’d had love in his life, whether overt or covert. Love was love and it altered the pathways of the mind and the heart, taught a person that life wasn’t only pain. Even his mother, she thought, had loved him in her own broken way.
As if he’d heard her thoughts, he said, “It wasn’t only darkness with my mother. One of my earliest memories is of the two of us sneaking into a playground after nightfall, both of us giggling as we crawled under the chain link. She must’ve been taking Jax for her Silence to be so bad, but she wasn’t showing any external effects at that time.
“That night, she pushed me on the swing and we spun together on a merry-go-round. Later, she spotted me while I climbed from one side of the jungle gym to the other. And afterward, I remember that she had food, that we sat at a picnic table and ate and drank and I went to sleep in a warm bed.”
Soleil’s heart ached for that young woman and her son. “Do you know how she fell into Jax?”
“It was hard to get any real information out of her, and I was so young. I don’t even remember if she ever told me any other last name but Mercant—the only clue I have is a ring she said was a reminder of where she came from, but even Grandmother wasn’t able to trace it to a family in the Net.
“It doesn’t have a real emblem on it, just a kind of a swaying line that doesn’t match up with anything in the Net’s archives. I looked, too, once I was older. My mother wore it always, so I’m certain she didn’t lie about its origins, but I also think she took it for exactly that reason—because it couldn’t be traced back.”
“You don’t wear it?”
“I keep it with me, but it’s—” When he hesitated, as if searching for the right words, she said, “I get it. It’s complicated.” The ring was a symbol of pain as much as it was a piece of memory.
Ivan let her weave her fingers through his hair, let her nuzzle at him.
It was several minutes later that he said, “I remember her saying once that she was born into a family of vipers. Jax was an escape to her. She saw it as rebellion. I saw it as giving up.” No anger in his tone, nothing but old memories.
He traced her facial scar with one gentle finger, the same way she might trace one of his tattoos. Because it was part of the story of her life. “What was it like,” he asked, “having a human mother and a changeling father?”
“My normal,” she whispered. “I used to pounce on her in my ocelot form and she’d squeak, then rub my belly and kiss my face and tell me I was the cutest little kitten ever.” The memory hurt but it was beautiful, too.
“Sometimes, she’d catch me when I was being a really naughty cub and tickle my stomach until I couldn’t stop laughing—I liked the tickling, because she never did it when I wasn’t in the mood and because she’d always be laughing, too, both of us in hysterics when my father found us.
“I can still remember him standing there, looking down at the two of us and shaking his head.” Those had been the best days, days saturated in a kind of forever sunshine in her memories.
“My father sometimes slept in ocelot form, other times in human. I could find either when I woke early and went to jump on them to wake them up.” She smiled at the memory of her mischievous childhood antics. “One thing I remember is that they were always touching when I found them asleep, her hand fisted on his fur or his arms wrapped around her.”
She told him of their road trips and she told him of their final ride together. The car skidding off the road, killing her father on impact, leaving her mother badly injured and bleeding while the pungent smell of fuel filled the air and the storm winds howled outside.
How her mother had told her to get out in case of an explosion, and how she’d tried to help her mother only to feel the loving quicksilver and shining talent of Hinemoa Bijoux’s life slip away. How a passing motorist had found her sitting mute and bloodied and rain-drenched beside the car a long time later.
Ivan stroked her back and held her and she could bear to speak the words.
Another question, another answer. Another glimpse into one another.
So many things she and Ivan talked about as they lay together, DarkRiver and Mercant, Psy and changeling, Lei and her Ivan, and the whole world was perfect for a single fragment of time.