Page 65 of Heir

Closing my eyes—

“Don’t close your eyes!”

Jesus. Okay.

Opening my eyes, I focused on her face, contorting in pain. Meanwhile, inside my head, I was scooping up all this red, buzzing energy. It was like fog, but also flickering and pulsing lights. I gathered it in my arms, squeezing it into a small ball. But the ball grew with the more red energy I grabbed. Soon it was the size of a basketball and I held it in my hand.

“Good,” she said. “Now drop a shield around it. Like a dome. Trap it.”

This was all so weird. The fact that I could do all of this in my mind, just imagine it, but it was actually doing something to someone else, was surreal and not something I’m totally sure I believed. But it was happening, so I needed to just go with it. I set the pulsing, red energy, ball of anger on the ground in my mind, then conjured a shield. A transparent one. And dropped it over the ball, containing that rage. Trapping it so that it didn’t wreak havoc when I didn’t want it to.

I’d closed my eyes again at some point and blinked them open to find Raewyn sitting there on the coffee table, dabbing gently at her nose with a black handkerchief. “That wasn’t terrible for your first try.”

The front door opened and Gemma walked in, her gaze turning curious when she took in my bloody face, Raewyn, and the blood on her face. “Uh . . . hi.”

“What are you doing home early?” I asked, standing up and only a little wobbly. I approached her, unsure how to break the news about Aunt Delia.

“What are you talking about? It’s nine-thirty. My shift ended at nine.”

I glanced at the clock on the stove. “How long were we doing that thing on the couch?” I asked, turning to Maxar.

“Like eight hours,” he said.

My eyes nearly popped clean from my skull. That did not feel like eight hours. That felt more like twenty minutes, an hour tops.

“What is going on here?” Gemma asked.

“Raewyn is a demon, and she’s teaching me how to block demon mind control while also blocking my own anger so I don’t roast brains anymore.”

Gemma’s gaze flared. “Oh! Well, that’s great. I’ve had a bit of a headache all day and I wondered if it was because you tried to broil my gray matter yesterday.”

I pouted. “I’m sorry again.”

She shrugged. “It’s fine.”

Raewyn stood up from her spot on the coffee table. “I will be back tomorrow morning to work on this with you again.” She glanced at Gemma, sniffed the air and made a face of disgust, like she’d just smelled five-day-old fish that fell behind the radiator. Then she was gone.

“Well, she seems like someone I can’t wait to get to know better,” Gemma said sarcastically. She opened the freezer. “Hey, who ate my steak?”

Drak cleared his throat.

I closed the freezer and took Gemma’s hand. “We need to talk.”

Her hazel-green eyes went wide. “What’s wrong now?”

“Just . . . come with me, okay?” I laced our fingers together and took her out to the patio, closing the sliding glass door behind us, but not before shooting Drak a look that said, “Order dinner for Gemma, you steak-stealing dick.”

If he was any kind of Fated Mate, he’d know what that look meant and do the right thing.

“Okay, you’re freaking me out a little,” Gemma said as we took seats on the vinyl lounge chairs where we liked to read with our bikinis and sunhats on, with the tunes blasting. “What did you find out at Delia’s?”

I swallowed past my tight throat. My eyes stung and that rush of pure pain filled my chest again. “Um,” I started, my bottom lip wobbling. “We . . . went there, hoping to talk to her, and um . . .” I licked my lips.

Gemma’s gaze widened again. “And . . . what?”

I glanced down at my lap and reached for her hands lacing our fingers together. I gave her hands a gentle squeeze. She squeezed back to reassure me. Finally, I lifted my head again and breathed out slowly through thinly parted lips as a tear sprinted down my cheek. “She was um . . . she was dead. They …they killed her.”

Gemma gasped, released my hands and surged to her feet. “Who did?”

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