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Then she dies as I have planned, and you will be left to wonder if you could have done the impossible.
And with that, he was gone, taking with him the uneasy sense of trouble. As the charm’s fierceness died to a more muted glow, I imagined Amaya sheathed, then knelt beside the woman.
Miss? Are you all right?
She didn’t respond to the soft question, so I lightly touched her shoulder. She jumped, then shimmied away from me, her brown eyes wide and staring.
It wasn’t so much the fear in her expression that surprised me, but rather the mark burned into her forehead. It was raw and weeping, as if it had only just been done. It was also K-shaped, with a tail that looped, reminding me oddly of a serpent. Two wounds marred her wrists, slicing up the center of her arms. While these were neither raw nor weeping, they’d split the skin open and looked painful. Two red marks also appeared to ring her calves, but from where I stood I couldn’t really see if they were open wounds or not.
Adeline had said you couldn’t be harmed on the astral plane, and yet this woman had been injured, and one of those wounds lay right where the stranger had been touching her. I doubted it was a coincidence.
Who are you? Her mind voice trembled with the fear so obvious in her pale features.
I’m a friend, I thought softly. There was a man attacking you—
Attacking? She frowned. What do you mean, “attacking”? We were having sex, for fuck’s sake!
Sex? On the astral field? How the hell was that even possible? That’s not what it looked like. Besides, you were screaming in fear.
She gathered the remnants of her clothing. Just because I don’t like it vanilla doesn’t mean it wasn’t sex.
I frowned. She was making all the right sounds, but there was something not quite right about her eyes—something beyond the fear. It was almost as if someone else was staring out of them.
I shivered. I need to know where you live, Miss—
Like I’m about to tell you that! And with that, she disappeared.
I swore softly, then closed my eyes and imagined myself back in my body. I whooshed back with surprising speed, my eyes springing open as I gasped in shock.
“Returning swiftly can be quite painful when one isn’t used to traveling on the astral plane,” Adeline commented. “Lie there and rest. I’ll bring you your tea.”
“No!” I jerked upright, and immediately regretted it as my stomach jumped into my throat. I swallowed bile, then added, “We don’t have time.”
Adeline stopped and frowned down at me. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I came across a woman being attacked by a man with no features.” I pushed to my knees, but the room spun around me, and it was all I could do not to fall back down. “He gave me twenty minutes to try to save her on this plane.”
“Meaning she wasn’t actually being attacked on the astral plane. What you saw was merely a reflection of what is happening here.”
“If that’s the case, he’s branding her with a hot iron and pulling her brains out.”
Adeline went pale. “Then you’re definitely dealing with a dark traveler.”
“Yes.” I pushed to my feet, then flung out an arm to steady myself, only to catch Azriel rather than the wall. The fingers that wrapped around mine were gentle steel, and heat leapt from his flesh, warming the chill from my body and lending me some much-needed strength.
“How are you going to find him if he has no features?” Adeline asked. “Did he give you any clue as to his identity? Did the woman?”
“No, so we’re going to have to do this the hard way.” I glanced at Azriel. “You need to take me to Stane’s. Now. Adeline, I’ll be back.”
Azriel stepped close and wrapped his arms around my waist. His scent—a scent that was both masculine and sharply electric—filled every breath as his power burned through me, sweeping us from flesh to energy in an instant. A second later we were on the gray fields, but these were very different from the ones I traveled. The fields I knew were little more than shadowed echoes of the real world, a place where things not sighted suddenly gained substance. But in Azriel’s arms, I saw the fields as a vast and beautiful place, filled with structures and life that were delicate and unworldly.
We re-formed outside of Stane’s electronics shop in Clifton Hill, which happened to be on the very same street that Nadler’s consortium had been attempting to purchase. In fact, only Stane’s building and one other—a bar—remained in private hands.
I’d known Stane a good part of my life, simply because he was Tao’s cousin. Tao, like Ilianna, was a childhood friend and current housemate, and he and Stane had come from the same brown werewolf pack. Their fathers were brothers—although Tao’s had died when he was young, and Tao himself hadn’t actually lived with the pack; he’d lived with his mother, who was human. Stane was a whiz at all things computer related, and he’d become a rather invaluable source of information and black market technology. If he couldn’t get me the information I needed in record time, no one could.
“You should have just zapped us inside.” I glanced at Azriel as I pushed open the somewhat ratty-looking door. A tiny bell rang cheerily above our heads. “It would have saved us a few seconds.”
“Stane does not react well to sudden appearances.” He shrugged.
