Page 6 of The Brotherhood

“Me! What sort of power ye gettin’?” she accused, reminding him of her cute power hungers.

“I believe the human term is called joy.”

Another round of sudden silence. “I make ye so very happy?” she barely asked, her breaths shaking again.

“So very,” he swore, the hunger to kiss her growing with every breath.

“Ye growlin’ about it,” she whispered, her voice smiling. “I missed that bloody sound.”

“I am,” he said. “Did you know that you created that sound?”

She sucked in her breath. “What ye be meanin’?”

He smiled then slid his tongue over his lips. “Your voice has always been the driving force in my program. From the moment I laid eyes on you. From the moment you showed me… things.” And yet not all. He’d given her mercy but hadn’t forgotten their unfinished business.

“Na, na, na, na, mate! I ain’t bloody takin’ the blame for ye perviness, that’s all yous!”

He belted out a laugh. “Perviness. That’s called love in my language.”

She drew a huge, sharp breath. “Say it again!”

“What,” he grinned. “Perviness?”

“Say it! Ye know what I mean!”

His smile faded as he drew power and packed it into the words so she would know them as infinitely as he did. “I love you. My sweet human. My Rowan. My wife.”

His heart ached in his chest at her sniffled sobs. “Am I your everything?”

“You are,” he swore. “You’re my everything and my eternity.”

****

“We have a problem,” Handy said, hurrying into the medical room, flicking his gaze to the pod holding the Marsh King before locking onto Harlow and Quantum now both eyeing him. “The backlash is fucking up when Kaphas tries to bond with Celeste.”

“Define fucking up,” Harlow urged, his stern gaze moving between him and the screen.

“It’s hitting me and boomeranging back to her. She’s got bruises everywhere and signs of internal bleeding.”

“Is she healing?” Quantum asked, worried.

“For now, yes, until it decides to kill her. You need to get me out of his body.”

“Fuck me,” Harlow muttered, palms on the desk, shaking his head before looking at Quantum. “Why now? The separation between him and Kaphas has been stable, what’s changed?”

“You ripped the demons out of us, that’s what changed,” Handy said as he paced.

“Removing the demons could have shifted the balance between him and Kaphas,” Quantum theorized. “Makingtheir separation even sharper.” His brows furrowed. “If that extraction deepened the split, it might’ve redefined how the backlash power perceives you—pushing you from integrated to fully distinct.” He regarded Harlow. “We’ll need to get him into the Neuromancer and locate the split. We’ll map Handy’s portion, and extract the data to design his new body.”

****

Lyric blinked back tears as she searched her phone for Nidev’s original text. She was missing something. She had to be.

Finding it, she pulled out her small notebook, eyeing the crack in the stall door when the bathroom filled with laughter from several incoming students. She flipped to a clean page and glanced at her watch. She had fifteen minutes before he texted her the day’s assignment. She was on day five of them and failing royally. It was time to backtrack. She’d handwrite all the assignments he’d given her so far and figure out what she was missing.

Her breaths shuddered as she eyed the text on the screen and began scribbling.

Lyric,

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