“Physical danger isn’t the only kind,” Jay pointed out.
“Right. But, see, this holiday is my mother’s big effort to show her support before the wedding. If we don’t go, we might as well write off my whole family, and I’m not willing to do that as long as they’re halfway trying. I already told my mom flat out that if anyone gets nasty with Caryn, we’re leaving.”
Jay knew he was a little late to take on the role of big brother. Time to change the subject.
“So, how is the patient?” he asked.
Jeremy’s frustration with his parents blended seamlessly with his frustration with this patient. “Physically, we can’t find anything wrong with her. Even magically, Caryn says she is stable now. I was about to hit the library, to see if I can identify her breed or where she might have come from. Want to help?”
“No, thanks,” Jay said automatically. He could read just fine, but given a choice, he preferred not to. Books were just words to him, flat and static and frustratingly slow to reveal themselves.
“Okay. I’ll let you know if I learn anything,” Jeremy said. “Mer—um, have a good day.”
“Thanks. Merry Christmas,” Jay answered, since Jeremy apparently celebrated that holiday. Most of Jay’s kind didn’t, though some had picked up some neo-pagan leanings and had started claiming holidays celebrated by human witches in the last few decades.
Once Jeremy had left, taking his anxiety and wedding obsessions with him, it was easier for Jay to focus on the other mind in the room. If the problem wasn’t medical or magical, then it was probably psychological. That meant Jay was better equipped to deal with it than the doctors. It was silly that they hadn’t asked him yet.
Skin-to-skin contact made mental contact stronger. Jay reached out to take her hand.
Yes, the shapeshifter slept, but not in any normal or healthy way. In sleep, people’s minds still worked. Even when they didn’t dream—even if they were medically brain-dead—they let off sparks from unformed thoughts and neurological impulses. A telepath might hear nothing unless the person were dreaming, but Jay could pick up on the basic static that was life.
This woman’s mind was as silent as a corpse’s. Either there was absolutely nothing happening in her mind, in which case her body systems should have stopped, or else something very powerful was keeping Jay out.
Normally, he would have taken that as a challenge to which he must rise, but this time he hesitated. Back in the woods, this had gone badly, and he couldn’t help but remember the presence that had stalked him in his dreams. Did he want to seek this woman’s mind?
CHAPTER 7
“JAY, QUIT IT.”
The sharp words came from a familiar voice and mind just as Jay had steeled himself to reach for the shapeshifter’s hidden psyche.
He drew back carefully from the shapeshifter before standing with a long stretch of his spine and saying, “Hi, Vir. What are you doing here?”
Vireo didn’t bother to answer the question, or to continue addressing Jay in any way. SingleEarth had called him to check on their patient, since he was a practiced mental healer. He didn’t bother to say anything out loud, because he knew that as soon as Jay asked the question, the answers came to mind. Speaking was a waste of time.
After all, they were brothers.
“Careful,” Jay said. “There was another power in her when I first found her. I’m not sure if it was hers, or someone else’s, but it threw me out. Hard.”
Jay spoke out loud because Vireo, despite having worked most of his life to focus his empathic abilities, wasn’t always great at picking up all the details.
Vireo nodded and said, “Thanks,” though he had already focused his attention on his patient and was just waiting for Jay to go away and stop being a distraction.
As Jay turned to leave, he heard Vireo’s mental suggestion: You might want to change your clothes, too.
Oh, right. He was still wearing wrinkled, water-stained tuxedo pants and a dress shirt that had seen better days, and he had never bothered to put his shoes back on after his interrupted nap.
Jay kept a cache of clothes in his car for whenever he ended up somewhere unexpected—which was most of the time. Unless he was hunting, Jay tried not to plan anything more complicated than naps and breakfast, which meant he didn’t maintain an apartment. Even his car was registered in his father’s name. He was willing to rise to the occasion when he needed to do his job, but he refused to join the stable grind of so-called respectable life.
While he was retrieving his duffel bag from his car, he noticed his dead cell phone on the passenger seat. He brought it with him back to his room and plugged it in before he changed.
Once he was comfortable in jeans and a T-shirt under a heavy sweatshirt he wasn’t entirely sure was his, he turned on his phone and dialed into his voice mail.
The first two messages were from Nikolas.
“Marguerite told me she saw you at Kendra’s but that she lost track of you. I wanted to make sure you made it home all right.”
The second message still sounded calm, but the words suggested otherwise. “Jay, I know you well enough to guess that you are likely to forget about your phone, but do me a favor and confirm you’re alive before I need to tell your cousin that you went missing from an event I invited you to.”
The third message was from Sarah herself. “Hi, Jay. This is Sarah. Nikolas just told me you showed up at Kendra’s bash and apparently left with someone called … Xeke? Nikolas assures me this Xeke is as trustworthy as a vamp can be, but you know I want to hear your voice. Call me.”
Sarah had been a Vida witch, which meant she was a vampire hunter born and bred. Jay had never caught the whole story of how she had become a vampire, but it was obvious that her change hadn’t eliminated her natural distrust of most other vampires.
Jay called and left a message with a bloodbond, who informed him that it was just past noon and that Sarah—like any vampire changed barely two months before—was asleep.
Tag, Sarah. You’re it.
With that responsibility attended to, the mystery of the woods needled him like a porcupine quill. His failure to remember where he had found the shapeshifter wasn’t just a matter of his being absentminded. It suggested magic, which would best be investigated by a witch.
Of course, Jay was a witch, but for this he needed someone with a specific skill set.
As Jay crept back into the patient’s room, wishing he didn’t need to ask for his brother’s help, Vireo swore. His attempts weren’t working. Her mind was just too far away, or maybe too well shielded.
Aware that Vireo had a temper, Jay approached with some caution before saying, “Are you sure I can’t help?”
Vireo wanted to say no. He was sure his brother could reach the woman, but Jay had no training as a mental healer. It was kind of like sending a random person with a bullhorn to keep someone from jumping off a roof. Sure, they would be loud enough, but they were just as likely to push the person off the roof as counsel them to safety.
“Can you just tell me if she’s in there at all?” Vireo asked.
“She’s in there, somewhere,” Jay answered. “There’s just something very, very wrong with her.” Realizing that he could approach his problem as an offer to help instead of a request for help, he said, “I think it might be related to the woods where I found her. They were strange, too. But I can’t remember where they were, or where I was, or how I got back here.”
Vireo wasn’t so deaf that he didn’t pick up that when Jay said I can’t remember, he meant a vast-enough failure to indicate a problem.
“Come here,” Vireo said. “Sit in front of me.”
Jay sat cross-legged in front of his brother, who mirrored his position and then reached out to touch fingertips to Jay’s third eye, the spot between the brows where mystics said there was a power center. Jay had never been big on that philosophy; he didn’t bother with power points and—
He yelped as Vireo shocked him with a spik
e of power, a teasing chastisement in reaction to Jay’s thoughts. Vireo liked power centers, philosophy, and mojo.
“How did you get to the woods?” Vireo asked.
Jay wasn’t being asked to respond out loud. He thought about the party, and the conversation with Xeke. He felt Vireo try to squash a critical thought about his hunter brother offering his throat to a vamp, probably out of an impulse toward professional courtesy.
Jay recalled waking up at Xeke’s and walking into the woods from there.
Why did you go into the woods?
Something called me.
Vireo poked around at that memory a little longer, drawing out anything Jay could remember about the trees and the snowdrifts and even the angle of the moon, before asking how he got to Haven #2.
Jay remembered the car. Putting the shapeshifter in. Wrapping her in the blanket. Wondering what time it was. Leaving the parking lot. Driving down a little road … and being at SingleEarth.
No matter how much pressure Vireo applied, there simply wasn’t anything between the dark, winding road and SingleEarth Haven #2.
“Whatever muddled your mind did a fine job of it,” Vireo said as he withdrew from Jay’s thoughts. And the last thing you need is for your brain to get more scrambled. He asked, “Are you willing to try to reach her again?”
He was still skeptical of letting Jay involve himself with this patient, but anything that had tossed Jay out of the shapeshifter’s mind the first time would be far too powerful for Vireo to fight his way past.
“I can try,” Jay answered. He was a hunter. He frequently risked his neck, when it was called for.
Jay sat beside the sable-skinned shapeshifter and reached toward her.
Empathy was different from telepathy in one simple way: direction.
Telepaths heard thoughts that others projected. Weak telepaths could only hear the thoughts that someone else had the power to focus and put out into the ether. With proper training, many witches and some shapeshifters were able to develop basic telepathy.
Powerful telepathy, the ability to read and speak to others’ minds, was rare among mortals but common among vampires. Mortal blood gave vampires a solid form, but otherwise they—like the elementals who gave them their power—were nothing but raw force given sentience. They were creatures of thought, and so they were masters of that realm.
Because it was conscious, telepathy could be blocked through mental effort. Many individuals learned how to guard against it. Empathy was completely different.
Every creature in the world was somewhat empathic. Emotion and instincts were constantly projected in each creature’s aura. Individuals who could shield their minds from the most powerful telepaths in the world tended to be naked in front of Jay.
Figuratively speaking.
He hadn’t ever had to fight to get into someone’s mind, the way he fought now. It was like the strands kept slipping away from him, hiding.
Where are you? he wondered, dropping his own mental walls in the hope that he could slip into her mind like a drop of water into a pool.
By the time Vireo yelped “Jay!” he was gone, absorbed into a deep, dark forest that received him like a hostile stranger.
Is this a dream? he wondered. The power to walk through others’ dreams was incredibly rare, and beyond even Jay’s abilities. If this isn’t a dream, what is it?
The woods were so dark, he was only vaguely aware of tree trunks around him, the black night pressing in … and something prowling. He couldn’t reach out to the beast mentally because he was already inside someone’s mind, and there wasn’t a separate mind in here to reach for.
When he tried to walk on the forest floor, brambles ripped at his legs.
If this was like a dreamscape, he might be able to control it. Could he go up?
Jay let himself be a bird.
When he did this in the real, waking world, the experience was only mental. He formed a connection to the animal and studied its thought patterns until he could slip into them at will. In this world … he spread white and blue wings and aimed for the tops of the trees.
Something yanked at him, knocking him back down, until his feathers tangled in the brambles. Thorns like daggers pinned him in place, a warning not to move.
The wind whispered to him as he struggled:
Stay still. Stay silent. Stay still. Stay silent. Do not be.
Not be.
Nobody.
Be nobody. Quiet. Silent. Still.
He couldn’t help himself; he struggled, and the brambles savaged his feathers.
Stop fighting! He’ll hear you!
Who is “he”?
The wind went silent.
Jay needed to be something sturdier.
He had to slow down. He had to be so patient. He had to wait and gather his shell.
The turtle fell through the brambles, tossed this way and that, but he hid inside his armor until he hit the ground beneath the lowest spines.
It was cold down here, making him even slower, but that was fine.
The turtle was cautious.
The turtle could wait.
He lumbered, seeking something different in the darkness … but found only deeper darkness, choking night … silence.…
CHAPTER 8
“JAY?”
He leaned toward the voice.
“Jay, wake up or I’m going to kill you.”
Jay followed the voice—which was as much magic as sound—back toward his brother. When he opened his eyes, he found Vireo looking pale and shaken, and Caryn flushed with relief.
“How long was I out?” he asked.
No one answered him. They probably assumed they didn’t need to. But he got nothing. He couldn’t hear a thing anyone wasn’t saying.
Unsettling.
They were both staring at him, waiting for him to say something.
He wasn’t with the shapeshifter anymore but in another SingleEarth medical room, where he had been given a bed of his own. He tried to push himself up, and realized that he was hurt.
“Be careful,” Caryn said. “I couldn’t heal it all. Your magic fought back when I tried.”
The clothes he had been wearing earlier were gone, replaced by light cloth pajama pants like those they gave out in hospitals. He didn’t have a shirt on, and there were bandages on his chest. And not just bandages but stitches, holding together wounds in the meat of his chest and shoulders.
He remembered the thorns cutting into him. Though the brambles themselves may have been an illusion or fantasy, they apparently represented a real, physical attack.
“What happened?” Vireo asked.
“I don’t know. How long was I unconscious?”
“A couple hours,” Vireo answered. “I called for Caryn’s help when I couldn’t reach you mentally and you started to bleed. It took us about an hour to get you stabilized. I take it you’re pretty mind-deaf right now?”
Jay nodded. He was too exhausted to hear anything specific in the noise around him, like listening for a whisper after spending hours in a noisy nightclub. Whatever he had touched minds with, it was far bigger than any shapeshifter.
“So …,” Vireo said. “I hate to ask while you’re still in your sickbed, but did you learn anything useful about our other patient?”
Jay paused to reflect on his experience.
“There is someone, a ‘he,’ that she is afraid of. I think her being unconscious may be a way of hiding from him. She has an elaborate trap in her mind set up to keep her hidden. I got caught in it when I tried to find her.”
“We should probably let Jay rest,” Caryn interjected. “Jay, do you need anything?”
He shook his head. He knew someone who might know more about their mysterious patient, but there was no point in explaining his intent to Caryn and Vireo. They would want him to be careful, by which they would mean, “Stay in bed and don’t go seeking flirtatious vampires.” Considering how many semi-legal and life-endangering escapades Caryn had enga
ged in, Jay resented her belief that he should be careful … but he knew better than to challenge her.
Thankfully, Vireo not only could shield himself against others’ thoughts in a way Jay had never been able to, he considered it polite to do so, so he didn’t hear anything inconvenient, and Jay didn’t get any comments from either of them on his decision to find Xeke again.
Jay didn’t have a choice. He had found the shapeshifter behind Xeke’s apartment. Xeke might know who she was.
Besides, it would be fun to see him again.
“I’m good.”
Vireo squeezed his shoulder on the way out. “I was worried about you,” he admitted.
Jay shrugged, not sure how to respond. “I’m okay,” he said.
“Yeah. But I’m the one who asked you to do it, and, well, just be careful with yourself.”
With that said, Vireo left quickly. For a man who had dedicated his life to meddling with others’ minds, Vireo wasn’t comfortable with his own emotional insides.
Once alone, Jay used the phone by his bed to call a SingleEarth secretary, who told him that they had no direct contact information for Xeke but suggested that he try the vampire’s club, a place in Boston called The Market.
Information offered two phone numbers matching that description. The first seemed to belong to a clothing store. The other was the club’s answering service, which informed Jay that the phones were not manned in the mornings and that he could either leave a message or call back after six.
A few words into telling whoever heard it to ask Xeke to call him, it occurred to him that the message he had been about to leave wasn’t going to work.
Hello, this is Jay Marinitch. Xeke and I met last night at a party.
Given the way Xeke liked to flirt, that probably applied to a lot of people. The club wasn’t likely to give out Xeke’s number to every person who called, or to even bother to pass on a message. Jay tried to think quickly. What would actually seem important enough to get them to bother Xeke with it?
Promises to Keep Page 5
