13 – Winding Up

Eyes squeezed shut, Leilani used every bit of strength she had to grab at the dragen and put his foreleg in her mouth. Blood, thick and metallic, flowed over her tongue. She thought she should hate it, but she didn’t care one way or the other. It wasn’t pleasing, it wasn’t repulsive. It was blood, and it could help her. She swallowed it down as quickly as she could. Please work, please work.

Nothing happened. Her mouth went numb, her tongue, too, but that was it. Then her throat was numb. She couldn’t feel anything except a need to gasp for breath and try to move in the bed. Was she drooling, was she choking on the blood?

Energy surged through her, as her body felt good, filled with natural human energy and the call to move for the first time in too long. But inside her head-oh!

Leilani sat straight up in bed, her ears humming so she couldn’t hear what was going on around her. Hands on her. There were hands on her shoulders and she hated them. The humming in her ears built and crescendoed as something forced its way into her mind. Pressure built inside her head, pressure and humming, humming and pressure, and then, pop!

The metaphorical clock in Leilani’s mind, the one she imagined she imagined, it became real, silver pouring from it, blinding her instantly, permanently. The silver light pulled her internal gaze, directing it to the clock, and it was all she could see that was not a poisonous silver.

The clock was bright. It was beautiful, actually. The hands were at 12:00. Both the little hand and the big hand pointing straight up. It called to her, sang to her, enticed her, and promised her that travel would be so very easy from now on and she would never have to pay for it with anything.

Because she’d already lost her sight.

Leilani gasped and blinked, tearing her eyes open, wanting to see, needing to see…

She saw nothing but strange silver light that obscured everything. She was completely blind.

She pushed her way out of the bed. People tried to contain her. She froze, but only for a minute. She couldn’t afford to freeze again. She would never be tied down again.

“Look at her eyes,” said a man’s voice she didn’t recognize.

“Oh, Leilani, oh no,” a woman said. Eventine.

Leilani could think the word Eventine, but inside her head, she couldn’t understand it. All that mattered was the light, the silver light. She closed her eyes tight and focused on the silver light. On the clock in her mind. A hand landed on her elbow. She shrieked and the hands spun madly, stopping when she cut off her own voice.

The little hand was straight up, and the big hand had stopped at a tic mark just a sliver to the right of straight up. 12:01. There was no longer carpet under her feet, but now blankets. She had been moved, and she was now standing on the bed.

“Where did she go?” one of the males in the room cried. “She can’t just freaking disappear!”

Could he really not see her? She backed up, almost tripping over the pillows on the bed, but catching herself and slamming into the back wall. The big hand on the clock in her mind jogged once and landed back on straight up.

“Oh shit,” a strange male voice said, sounding awed. “There she is.”

Someone touched her hand, tried to pull her down from the bed. Someone else did, too, on the other side. Leilani pushed at the hands that were touching her, rejecting the noise and the confusion. Her circumstances seemed unimportant and far away, and even her lack of sight seemed inconsequential. She had a mission. No, not a mission. She had a purpose.

Change something. Something big. What was bigger than making it all have never happened in the first place?

Fixing everything. Could she do it? Did she dare try to go back in time and make it so none of it had ever happened? IS that what the catamount had said to do? Is that what she was supposed to do with this clock? With the power it promised?

She could warn the shiften, keep talking until one of them understood, and then she could step through the time hole she created and destroy this world. She put her hands to her head, the rules of time travel someone had once explained to her spinning through her head like scrolls of wet paper.

Time spurs were dangerous.

Time spurs weaken the thread of time.

Only two types of time travel.

Time travel comes at a price.

Leilani squeezed her hands against her temples and tried to get herself under control.

She’d done it before.

She had done it before, and suddenly it seemed good and smart that she do it again. Which would mean this was her last trip through time, because once she fixed this, the females would not die, which would mean there would be no need for one true mates, and she would never exist. Something about paradoxes and impossibilities played through her mind in a male’s voice. Graeme’s voice. He’d said those words to her in another time, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t playing by the rules anymore. So if that’s what it took to fix this, she was ready to do it, ready to never have been born.

On one level in Leilani’s humming mind, never having been born seemed like a good thing, but on another level of consciousness, a deep level she rarely acknowledged, she knew she would be cutting herself out of the life of someone she desperately wanted to get to know.

Her mate.

Jaggar.