Page 98 of Centaur Bolt

“I do all the time.” Triss put an arm around her small shoulders and squeezed. “Your mom and I have no secrets.”

The boy smirked. “So I can tell her you brought us Nati squares for lunch?”

Triss grimaced. “Well, perhaps some secrets are best kept as such. You know how she feels about sweets.”

Tuli stared at me. “What are you?” she asked. “You don’t smell like a Dire.”

That was a relief. I think. Kiko let out the slightest choking noise but held her peace.

“She’s not a Dire, Tuli,” Triss corrected.

“And it isn’t polite to tell someone they smell,” Triss continued.

“I didn’t say she smelled. Only what shedidn’tsmelllike,” the young Centaurina clarified while frowning at her aunt.

“I’m a Jumper,” I said.

Trey tilted his head. “Do Jumpers have a smell?”

Triss rubbed a hand over her eyes. “Your mother will be waiting for you, so off you go. And do not mention the Nati squares, or I will not only never hear the end of it, but you won’t be getting any more of them.”

Trey assessed that statement and then grinned. “Okay.”

The twins scampered off, kicking playfully at each other. Triss turned to us. Her amber eyes shifted to me, and I hadn’t imagined the despair in them. “You were the one that helped Marcus the first time. And you were at the gate when we lost him…”

I swallowed. “Yes. That was me. I’m Riley.”

Kiko didn’t wait for an introduction. “I’m Kiko. This is Vali. Riley is a Jumper. She dreams of Marcus and thinks she might be able to rescue him.”

When I saw the spark in Triss’s eyes, I hurried to do damage control. “I don’t know if I can help him, not really.”

Kiko broke in with a long babble about psychic Jumpers and us needing a personal item of Marcus’s. Triss listened with growing hope on her attractive face. My stomach clenched.

When Kiko finally wound down, I added one important fact. “In my latest dream of Marcus, he told me that he had escaped. He and another are running from Isobel.”

Her eyes widened. “He isn’t still with that Sorceress?”

“Not if my dream was real,” I said. “But they need help getting away from her.” Was I wrong to give her such hope? Marcus being loose was infinitely preferable to captured. But what if I was wrong?

If it wasn’t a living dream, than everything I was about to do was totally nuts.

Her beautiful eyes assessed me, as though she understood what whizzed through my mind. And then, she said, “Come with me.”

We followed her to a sprawling house that looked to be made from adobe bricks. Its peachy tones gave it a beautiful organic look, something enhanced by the mature trees that it had been built through and around. In the center of the residence, a courtyard opened to the sky.

The garden within appeared a bit neglected.

Triss waved to it. “I’m afraid my plants are suffering. Marcus usually looks after them, and I just can’t do it without him.”

Marcus was a gardener? I bet he’d be able to tell a weed from a radish. I was here to get something that connected me to him, but we werein his home—and that meant that I’d be discovering things about him.

I’d much rather he was here to show me these things himself. My heart twisted.

“What kind of personal item are you looking for?” Triss asked.

I winced at the light shining in her eyes. “This is a really long shot, so I am not sure.”

“The one reference we found mentioned a Jumper using hairs and an amulet,” Vali stated. “So something that he wore frequently might work.”

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