Page 178 of Seer Prophet

“Don’t sweat it,” I told her. “Just tell me what you want from me. Like you said, we don’t have a lot of time.”

I felt her fighting with my words, maybe even with my light, off in some place where I couldn’t see it. Eventually, she only nodded.

I could feel she hadn’t given up exactly.

But maybe she’d given up for now.

“That is more complicated,” she said. “And it is not so much that we want something from you. It is more that we would like to offer you our help, now that we can.”

She paused, as if waiting for me to respond.

When I didn’t, she went on. She kept her voice low, only speaking loud enough to be heard over the wind blowing sand down the beach, rippling her long, dark hair.

“You probably don’t know this about me,” she said. “But I am a prescient, Alyson. A true one.”

I looked up.

I should have known that, but she managed to surprise me anyway. I knew she was Elaerian. The fact that she was on the Displacement List and Uye wasn’t, made me think my biological father probablywasn’tElaerian––which meant he was Sark. That, or he was the last remaining name, one of the two that had been blacked-out on the Elaerian list.

For some reason, I knew he wasn’t.

I didn’t ask her if she was telekinetic, but I found myself doubting she was.

I couldn’t have said why, exactly, but something about her light made me think it didn’t have that component, any more than Feigran’s did, the only other true prescient I’d ever met.

Kali wasn’t an infiltrator.

Now that I stood close to her, I knew that for sure.

Her light felt entirely absent of that warrior stamp I’d grown accustomed to, given that most of the seers I knew had it––even, increasingly, my adopted brother, Jon, especially since he and Wreg bonded for real.

Something about remembering Jon, while looking at this woman, made me frown again.

Why was I letting this confuse me?

I knew who my family was.

Trying to apply that same sentiment to the male seer, Uye, who’d looked at me with such love in his eyes, was harder. Maybe it was just easier to push away someone who looked so much like me. Someone who seemed to feel free to touch Revik right in front of me, even though it obviously bothered her mate.

“Allie.” She caught hold of my arm. She held it even after I stiffened, although I had to fight not to jerk it from her fingers. “Alyson.” Her voice blurred. Her eyes filled with tears. “I love you more than my life. I know it may not seem it, but everything we have done, everything,all of it… it has all been for you, my dearest, dearest child.”

But I knew that quote.

I’d heard it come from my husband’s lips.

I knew who taught it to him.

Wiping my face angrily with a hand, I stepped away from her.

Reluctantly, she released me.

“What do you want from me?” I asked again.

She inhaled a breath, as if to compose herself. After looking at me for another moment, she sighed. The sound got carried from both of us by wind.

I felt grief leave her light, but from further away now.

“Alyson,” she said. “I didn’t only leave the Displacement Lists there for you. I wrote them. Or, I should say… I transcribed them. About a hundred years ago, they came to me non-stop. For months. It was agony. I wrote them down, everything. I made only two copies.”

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