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Chapter 6
Sleep didn’t come immediately, and I drifted in a state of don’t-want-to-move. Thoughts tumbled sluggishly. What if the Rasha-Idris deal goes wrong, and Mzatal doesn’t send Idris? No. It can’t. She’ll come through. Bryce and Idris need a vehicle. Jill has an old car that she rarely uses. I’ll ask her if I can borrow it. Sheets and towels. They’ll need those. Clean ones. Bryce in the guestroom, and Idris in the basement. That’ll work. If Ryan comes home and wants the basement back, he can suck eggs.
What does that even mean? An image rose of Ryan tapping a hole in one end of an egg and slurping out the contents. That doesn’t seem all that dire.
It’s probably something filthy. Dirty eggs.
Chickens are messy.
And who put a stupid nightlight sigil on the ceiling?
A voice brushed me, like a whisper of breath on my cheek. Familiar and unwelcome. I twitched physically and mentally, awake enough to ward off the encroaching nightmare.
“Kara?” Again. Clearer. Seeking.
Heart pounding, I jerked fully awake and sat up. Rhyzkahl. That was Rhyzkahl’s voice. What the fuck?
I looked around me. My living room. My sofa. The afghan in a heap on the floor. Fuzzykins perched on the recliner. The song-rasp of crickets. The whirr of the air conditioner cycling on. Normal.
I was definitely awake. I’d experienced enough dream visits from the treacherous Rhyzkahl to know the difference. I drew the afghan up and hugged it to my chest. My pulse slowed as the familiarity of my home embraced me. Fuzzykins hissed, her eyes round and locked onto me. She flattened her ears, hissed again. Yep. Normal.
Or not.
A dim amber sigil glowed on the ceili
ng. Not my sigil. Not my ceiling. A mosaic dome with its apex and sigil just below my tongue-and-groove paneling. Transparent, like an overlay.
“Kara?” Thin. Weak. “Are you . . . here?” In front of me.
My gaze snapped down. Superimposed over my fireplace was a ghostly image of Rhyzkahl upon a bed, naked except for a twisted sheet draped over his hip.
“What’s going on?” I demanded, breathing shallowly. “What the fuck are you doing?” Panic clawed within my chest as I recoiled on all levels.
The vision faded to little more than a shadow. “I . . . am here.” Distant. Desperate. “Stay. Kara.”
Stay? I hadn’t moved. The shadow brightened and clarified into the vision of Rhyzkahl in his bed over the backdrop of my living room.
“You still have a fucking link to me?” My voice shook with anger and visceral terror. “You worthless son of a bitch.” I should have known he’d find a way. Had he made this link as part of the rakkuhr virus? I squeezed my eyes closed in an attempt to shake the connection. Though I no longer saw the physical aspects of the living room, potency strands and my protective wards shimmered in othersight as expected. Yet the vision of Rhyzkahl intensified—vibrant and textured and real.
My eyes flew open, and I sucked in a breath as my living room returned with only a ghost of Rhyzkahl. I’m seeing him with othersight? That was different. In other dream sendings, I’d been fully asleep while he manipulated my experience to feel like reality.
“Kara!” He lifted a shaking hand toward me.
Heart hammering, I closed my eyes again. Slipped out of othersight. My wards dimmed. Rhyzkahl solidified more. A reyza bellowed in the distance. The heady fragrance of flowers mingled with an acrid tang of sweat and pain.
The cushions of the sofa pressed against my back, yet at the same time I stood beneath a domed ceiling with Rhyzkahl before me. This is beyond weird. His usual dream projections were nothing like this.
Opening my eyes, I withdrew to the living room. Then twice more. With each shift, my control of how much I saw and felt increased.
Weird . . . and cool. Concentrating, I called forth Rhyzkahl’s shadowed chamber. Heavy drapes hung over the windows with only the faintest hint of daylight at the edges. The sigil in the ceiling cast a sluggish illumination onto the bed and little more.
I stood near the bed with my chin up and my gut churning. His silky white-blond hair had been cropped to finger length, and he currently had a serious case of bed head. The faas had probably cut it since several feet of hair would be a stone bitch to keep tidy on a bed-bound patient. His beautiful face was haggard and drawn, and he looked as if he’d lost a solid thirty pounds since the plantation battle.
Breathing unsteadily, he fought to sit upright but could only manage to prop on an elbow. “What is it . . . you want?” he croaked.
Delicious shock coursed through my veins. He wasn’t controlling this. His reactions were too natural—unmeasured and unscripted. I was in his dreamspace, not the other way around. And that meant that what I saw here was his reality—the weight loss, the cropped hair, the shadowed room.
This had the potential to be very interesting. I finished my perusal of the chamber before answering. “Want? From you?” I snorted and raked my gaze over him. “Seeing you like this is a damn good start.” My tormenter helpless and in pain. A decent and noble person would have at least a whisper of sympathy for Rhyzkahl. Not me. The asshole had willfully duped, used, and tortured me, had been party to submerging Szerain in his horrific imprisonment as Ryan, and had sponsored human trafficking. And that was only what I knew of.
