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“If you never saw him, how do you know it was a man?”
“Because girls don’t like the dark and all the spiders down here, do they?”
No, they didn’t, I thought with a shiver. Luckily, Valdis’s light wasn’t revealing any eight-legged critters in the immediate vicinity.
“Let me try,” Azriel said, then touched his free hand to the shifter’s forehead.
The shifter stilled instantly, and his face went slack. Azriel closed his eyes, and, for several minutes there was little noise other than the sound of both my breathing and the shifter’s.
Then Azriel opened his eyes again. “He does not lie. However, he does not tell the truth, either.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, Hieu has tampered with this man’s memories.”
No surprise there, I guess. Not when he didn’t want to be found. “That still leaves the problem of how the book actually got here. I mean, my father no longer has a flesh form, and though this doesn’t stop him from manhandling me, the fact remains that you can’t carry anything in Aedh form unless it’s in contact with your skin before you change shape.”
Azriel nodded. His fingers were still resting against the rat shifter’s forehead, keeping him still, keeping him compliant.
“Hieu did not entirely erase the event from his mind. There are remnants.” He hesitated. “I can show them to you,
if you like, but it will mean I need to go into your thoughts.”
“You do that anyway.”
“That is surface sifting. This would be deeper.”
I studied him for a moment, wondering at the wariness I saw in him. “Is it dangerous?”
“For you? No. But you are not happy with my frequent incursions as it is, and this might just strengthen the link that already exists.”
Well, wasn’t that just great! But it wasn’t like I had another choice, not if I wanted answers.
“You always have another choice,” he said softly.
I snorted. “You’re in my head one way or another, so let’s just get on with it.”
His gaze lingered on mine for a moment, then he nodded and tapped the rat shifter’s head twice. The rat shifter dropped to the ground and didn’t move. But he was breathing, so he wasn’t dead.
“Handy trick,” I muttered, crossing my arms in an effort to chase away the chill beginning to invade my bones. “Why didn’t you do that with the half-shifter in the locker room? Why use the ropes?”
“Because Razan are harder to render unconscious by this means. The rope achieved the same result, but with less effort.”
Azriel stepped over the shifter and stopped in front of me. The heat of him washed over my skin, filled with the vague scents of musk and man. When he’d first appeared in my life, he’d smelled of nothing. Holding flesh was obviously changing him in more ways than what he was saying.
“Are you ready?” he asked, his gaze steady on mine.
I licked suddenly dry lips, and yet I didn’t know what it was I feared. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me because he still needed me to complete his mission.
“I would never hurt you, mission or not.” He raised his hands, lightly cupping my cheeks. Electricity flared instantly, burning past my skin into my body, right down to my soul—until it felt like there were thousands of fireflies buzzing around inside me.
Then they exploded and, in the midst of the energy surge, the two separate entities that were our minds became one. In that state, what remained of the shifter’s memories and experiences were laid out before me like a picture book. The man who’d delivered the parcel was tall and powerfully built, but his face was blurry and he’d talked to the air. My father, undoubtedly, though the rat shifter had no sense of him. Then I felt the energy—an Aedh’s energy, the same sort of energy that had attacked me when the Raziq had held me captive—flowing through the shifter’s limbs, snatching away his memories, leaving huge swaths of nothingness rather than whatever conversation had followed the tall man’s arrival. I saw the tattoo on the stranger’s left shoulder as he departed—a dragon with two swords crossed across it. I saw a second tattoo—a ring of barbed wire—on his right shoulder.
Then, without warning, the contact deepened, flowing from an exchange of images to something both tempestuous and sensual—becoming a connection that went beyond mind, beyond body. It went beyond anything I’d ever felt before.
And it was a connection that was severed so abruptly I staggered backward, and would have fallen had not Azriel grabbed my arm.
I stared at him for several seconds, my breathing rapid and my heart feeling like it was about to explode out of my chest. His expression gave little away, but Valdis burned with orange fire, and it seemed to echo deep in the heart of his mismatched blue eyes.
