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“The person establishing the link has to break it. At least, that’s the way it’s usually done.”
“Oh, God, I just remembered. He saw us. When I voyeured, you know, us, in the turret room, he saw us.”
At that Antony drew his hand into a fist. He muttered a string of obscenities, which seemed quite appropriate. “You think he saw the whole damn thing?” He was shouting now.
Parisa thought it through. “Wait. Maybe not. When I first opened the window, the pain began and I pushed it away. Mentally. I remember thinking that I so didn’t want to have pain right then, so I gave it a hard push and then I felt nothing. I felt like I normally did.”
He met her gaze and nodded. “You may have pushed him out. Jesus, what power.”
She leaned into him and bumped her forehead against his shoulder. “Oh, God, I hope so. I think so.” She bumped her head a few more times, which seemed kind of silly but it comforted her. “You know, if my life gets any weirder, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
He slipped his arm around her and pulled her up next to him, holding her close. “Get some rest. Later maybe we can experiment. But if this is true, then it would explain why we had a greeting party in Toulouse.”
She rolled into him and snuggled close. She slung a leg over his legs and an arm over his stomach.
“How did you figure out it was Greaves?”
“I dreamed of peaches rolling around in my head, crashing into one another. Then I remembered that Greaves was sometimes called the little peach. On some level, I must have known, but it was only through my dream that the knowledge was able to break through to my conscious mind.”
“Wow,” he muttered.
“Yeah.”
She wasn’t sleepy. Not even a little. Her mind worked over the dream, over Greaves’s mind-link. Because she couldn’t sleep and because she was nestled against Antony, she opened her voyeur’s window. Instead of focusing on Fiona this time, however, she chose a more innocuous object: the White Tank Mountains just beyond the villa. She panned her window back and forth. She wanted to see if and when the pain would come.
After a few more seconds, there it was, a flash of pain, but smaller this time, thank you God.
She shifted her attention to the pain, but it retreated. She relaxed and watched the pain until it faded to nothing. She remained very still within her own mind. She needed to understand, she wanted to understand, exactly what was going on.
She took slow, even breaths and waited. She panned to the north side of the villa property, in the direction of Antony’s olive grove. She began moving the window through the grove as though searching, but the whole time she kept her attention focused on the point where the pain had receded.
She moved to one end of the grove and back. She crossed a dirt lane and moved into the vineyard.
She waited.
After what felt like five minutes, she felt a twinge within her mind—then a distinct absence, much like what she’d felt when she’d pushed Greaves out of her mind in the turret room.
So she was right. Greaves was there. She also thought it was very telling that the level of pain the mind-link usually induced had diminished. If all her suppositions were correct, no doubt Greaves was working his end of the equation as well.
She repeated the process two more times. Each time, the experience was the same.
So it was all true. Greaves had formed a link with her. She knew that telepathic links could be forged between powerful ascenders—Endelle had one with Thorne, her second-in-command. When she needed him, all she had to do was think about him and send a command. He could respond mind-to-mind.
This was similar. But was it telepathic, or was it related strictly to her voyeur’s window?
Only one way to find out. She closed her eyes and, without opening her window, focused all her mental attention on Greaves. Are you there, Commander? she sent.
She waited.
Nothing returned to her. Nothing. Not a flash of pain, not even a twinge.
She made the attempt several times.
Nothing.
If all her musings were correct, then Greaves had apparently formed a link with her voyeurism but not with her telepathy.
A flush started at her forehead and climbed down her face, her neck, her chest, and over her arms. She felt hot and cold at the same time. Her palms were clammy.
Antony’s breathing was now deep and even. The warrior needed a nap.
Slowly, she pulled away from him. She slid off the bed and padded her way to the bathroom. The toilet had its own little room. She grabbed a towel, went inside, and closed the door. She was completely naked so she wrapped the oversized black bath towel around her body and sat down on the lid.
She leaned over and, with her elbows on her thighs, she put her head in her hands. Sweat now dripped down her neck and from beneath her br**sts.
She couldn’t breathe very well so she worked at that for a long time until she knew she wouldn’t hyperventilate. She wasn’t sure exactly what was wrong with her but of all the things she had experienced in the past three-plus months, the thought that Greaves had a link to her made her nauseous. She felt controlled and put in yet another box. She hated these boxes. She hated that she was living in Antony’s villa again, with another dome of mist over the property, she hated that she’d spent the last few months in Rith’s residence living like some kind of mystical bird that had to be coddled and caged, and she really hated that anyone had access to her mind like this.
But what distressed her most of all was that she was sharing Antony’s bed as though they’d been lovers for years. Where was her choice in any of this? She hadn’t exactly chosen Antony. He’d simply shown up in her voyeur’s window about the same time she’d mounted her wings for the first time.
Her previous life, the one she’d lived as a librarian on Mortal Earth, had been a life of her choosing. No one had forced it on her. No one had come along insisting that she shelve books to assist the war effort. No, she’d become a librarian by choice.
Now she was locked into some kind of übersexual relationship with Antony and as pleasurable as it was, what was it really? Well, if she’d understood everything that had been going on since she’d first been brought to the villa, her entire relationship with Antony was because of the breh-hedden, something she didn’t understand, but which had also locked her down and helped force her into this box.
Right now, she felt no different, well maybe a little different, than when she’d lived in Rith’s house in Burma, like a jewel that was owned by someone else and needed constant guarding and polishing and tending.
