Page 105 of Storm Echo

No more extraneous energy left. Heart or lungs? Partial shutdown of both, so that enough remained for oxygen to get to her brain. If her brain was starved of oxygen, it would cause catastrophic damage.

“Just ten more seconds, sir! They’re coming!”

Her heart stopped, her lungs following.

Her brain began final shutdown procedures.

Chapter 51

Mercy, you’re the closest.Go.

—Lucas to Mercy

SHE WAS MADE of stars again, his Lei. His mate. And she stood in the center of his web, this web that had collected so many minds. He didn’t want her to see him, the bloated spider at the core, but she took his hand, and she led him to the very nucleus of the nightmare.

“Look, Ivan,” she said, and pointed.

He didn’t want to see, didn’t want to look. But she leaned up to press her lips to his cheek and whispered, “Please, for me.”

There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her. So he looked.

No spider hunched below, but the space wasn’t empty. At the center of the network was … “It’s a heart.” A huge silver heart that burned with flame-kissed silver fire and pumped in time with Ivan’s heartbeat.

He opened his eyes to find Soleil’s open, too, her cat looking at him through irises tawny gold and wild. Content in a way he’d never before been, he just looked back at her, the two of them face-to-face on their bed.

The security specialist part of his brain activated. “How are we in bed? We were outside.”

Even as Soleil’s gaze flared, he twisted to get out of bed … and groaned, his entire body feeling as if he’d been stomped on by a horse. An angry one. That was when he remembered all the nutrients he’d taken to artificially boost his psychic strength.

He should feel worse. It was a miracle he was awake and functional.

No, not a miracle, he realized looking back at Soleil. He wasn’t in worse shape because his mate had taken some of the backlash. She sat up slowly, sleep lines on one cheek and a wince in her expression. “Ouch,” she said, “everything aches. And I need to go be unladylike rightnow.”

She was in the sanitary facility part of the aerie before his brain computed what she’d meant. That alerted him to the realization he, too, needed to use those facilities. But it took him so long to get his creaky body upright that Soleil was out by then. Deciding that if they were under threat, those threats would’ve had plenty of time to stroll in while he was moving about as fast as a hundred-year-old tortoise, he went in to do what needed to be done.

Afterward, he washed his hands, then threw cold water on his face. He was moving a little better and feeling more awake by the time he wiped off the wet and walked back out. Soleil was standing in front of the mirror that hung on one wall of their bedroom, fixing her hair with slow hands. As he watched her, he did a telepathic scan.

That he hadn’t done that straight off the bat told him exactly how bad a hit the two of them had taken. The first mind he touched was changeling and opaque to him … except he identified it at once as belonging to Lucas Hunter. Because Soleil knew her alpha, the knowledge shared with him through their bond.

The next mind was Psy and “felt” like Arwen’s, but it wasn’t Arwen. After that, he found Grandmother, the resonance of her permanently embedded in his brain. That mind was followed by … Arwen’s. Yes, that was definitely his cousin. And neither his cousin nor his grand mother was far away. In point of fact, he thought they were right below the aerie.

InsideDarkRiver territory.

That was when he hit a mind so opaque that he could have no hope of guessing its identity—so he simply walked outside and looked over the verandah railing. “Lei,” he murmured, knowing her sharp hearing would pick it up, “Kaleb Krychek is down there with Lucas, a woman I recognize as Lucas’s mate, Sascha Duncan, my grandmother, and Arwen. I think that’s everyone.”

Soft footsteps before she peered over the railing, too. “Guess what?” she said. “I looked at my phone. It’s tomorrow. I mean, it’s tomorrow from when we collapsed.”

Ivan double-checked her statement against the PsyNet. “We’ve been out for thirty-two hours.”

They stared at one another before Soleil yawned. “No wonder I’m starving.” Reaching into a pocket as she leaned against him, she pulled out an energy bar. “Here, I grabbed a few of these from the kitchen.”

One arm hooked loosely around her waist, he all but inhaled one, then another as she finished one and said, “I scented Lucas, Mercy, and Tammy in the aerie, as well as two unknowns. At least one didn’t smell of leopard but had a scent you and your grandmother both carry. I’m guessing maybe your cousin?”

Ivan nodded. “I can’t see Grandmother climbing up here.”

“I wouldn’t count on that, vida mía.” A kiss to his cheek, the way she had of just touching him in affection already something he craved. “Your abuela is a force where the people she loves are concerned.”

Ivan couldn’t argue with that. “Shall we go down?”

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