Chapter 17
Issa opened her eyes, her mind swirling with images and thoughts and feelings. But at the center of all of it was a chill. She held up her hand and saw her white skin and blue veins. She could hardly feel her feet.
Almost instantly Eagle bent down, picked her up, swore at how cold she was to the touch, and whispered, “I don’t know what you keep doing to yourself, but, whatever it is, it seems to suck the warmth right out of your bones.”
Her teeth chattered. She agreed but couldn’t quite get the words out.
“Don’t talk,” he whispered. He carried her back into the bedroom and tucked her under the covers. “I’ll make you a hot cup of tea. Try to warm up.”
He raced into the kitchen, leaving her where she lay. The chattering of her teeth got worse. But she didn’t understand why she was so cold. She had just been sitting on the couch. He’d been the one outside, and she hadn’t even asked him if he had found anything. Vaguely she remembered the screams in her head.
“You killed someone,” she whispered. But he wasn’t close enough to hear.
Maybe she needed a hot bath. That might take the chill away from her soul. But she doubted it. Her mind was caught up in images from both her past and present. Stefan was there on the edges. He seemed to come from a more advanced belief system than she had.
It was hard to imagine what he was capable of. She couldn’t even remember how her relationship with Hadrid had developed. Or what she’d done to make it so close. She hadn’t been able to duplicate it in all the years since either. What she had with Roash was like water to rich cream. Hadrid had bonded to her in a way she’d never understood and hadn’t even tried to understand. She’d just accepted it.
She froze at that. Was that what Stefan meant? To not try so hard? Just to accept?
At the same time, memories of her mother in bed with another man while Issa stood guard all alone for her father and brothers consumed her. Had her mother loved Angus? Or had it been a way to get back at her husband? Or maybe it was a few warm moments in a cold lifetime. Either way, it added to Issa’s confused feelings. She’d had a civil relationship with her mother, but it certainly hadn’t been a loving relationship—at least not on her mother’s side. How sad was that? They could’ve been so much more. It was almost as if, every time her mother saw Issa, her mother was reminded of her own failures. She’d complained bitterly about the lack of time Issa spent with her, but, when Issa was with her mother, they hadn’t even spent it together. Like her mother had used guilt to keep Issa close just to keep punishing her.
For Issa, every time she saw her mother, she was reminded of everything she’d lost. And at the top of that list, right or wrong, was Hadrid.
*
Eagle made a cup of tea, carried it carefully into her room. He placed it on the night table. He could even hear her teeth chattering. He stood for a long moment and stared down at her. “Do you want a hot bath? Or do you want me to get in bed with you and hold you?”
She tried to answer, but nothing made it past the chattering.
He kicked off his shoes, walked around to the bed, crawled underneath the covers and wrapped her in his arms, pulling her tight against him. With his legs wrapped around hers fully, she was tucked into a fetal position, and he used his body heat to try to warm her. It amazed him to see just how cold she was—the chill seeping through her cheeks and neck.
“We’ll try this for a moment,” he murmured, letting his warm breath soak into her neck and face and icy cheeks. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll try a hot bath again.”
She nodded and took his hand to pull it more fully around her. The chill of her fingers made him wince. What had sent her into shock? Could it have been her trances? He didn’t know who to ask. He suspected Gray wouldn’t have a clue. Neither would Annie. He closed his eyes and relaxed, trying to will her body to absorb his own heat, mentally surrounding her with big thermal blankets, the two of them in a cocoon against the world.
“I’m so sorry you’ve had such a miserable time,” he whispered against her temple. “I’d have given anything for you not to have been through that.”
He could feel her shoulders shaking, and, with so much chattering, he knew she couldn’t talk.
“I can tell you that I tracked the blood back to the highway. I never saw a body. And I think whoever was hurt had a friend helping him.”
She jerked in surprise.
“I doubt my security system killed anyone,” he continued. “That doesn’t mean his cohort didn’t finish the job and bury him somewhere deep.”
He didn’t know if it was his body heat or his words, but she slowly stopped shaking.
Several minutes later, he said, “If you think you can sit up, let’s get some warm tea into you.”
With his help, she leaned against the headboard with the top blanket wrapped around her shoulders, the rest of the covers pulled up to her chest. Now out of the bed, he sat down on the opposite side and pulled the tea closer.
He took a sip and nodded. “It’s perfect. See if you can get a couple sips down.”
Her hands were still blue and, as long as he helped support the cup, it didn’t shake too badly when she grasped it. She took one sip, gave a small smile, and took another big one. As her body slowly eased from her frostbite stage into just plain cold, she said, “I have no idea what just happened. I’ll blame it on Stefan.”
“Stefan? Did he call?”
She snorted. “If that’s what you call it. I don’t know what kind of psychic he is. I swear to God, he filled the room with his conversation. Or maybe it just felt like that. He was talking inside my mind—or something like that.” She shook her head and leaned back, closing her eyes. “How is it possible he could do that?”
“This from the woman who can communicate with falcons.”
Her gaze flew open, and she studied Eagle for a long moment. “That’s normal. It’s natural for me. It’s all I’ve ever known.”
He gave her a lopsided smile. “Sweetie, that’s not normal for anyone else.”
She frowned and dropped her gaze to the cup in her hand. She gently swirled a finger around the rim of the cup. “It took me a long time to realize that. But for me …”
“And maybe for Stefan, whatever it is he does, is normal for him.”
“It was scary. Some of the stuff he had to say was even more so.” She tilted her head to the side and said, “He brought up all kinds of memories from when I was little. And something I had always assumed I had done, Stefan completely flipped around to make me see I was doing something completely different. Something much more fantastic and bizarre. And that’s why I don’t really think he can be right. I told him Hadrid was sending me those images.” She shook her head at the look on Eagle’s face. “I’m sorry. I’m not making much sense.”
“Explain,” he said.
“I’m not even sure I can.” She rubbed her temples. “I assumed I was always giving Hadrid suggestions about where to go. And he flew out and let me know if anything was wrong through images he sent me.”
Eagle settled in to listen. His mind was still figuring out how she could even do that much.
She continued. “And then, when things blew up, everybody, myself included—not that I had much time to know or understand what was going on—assumed I was to blame. That I had either been making up this connection the whole time, and Hadrid and I really had no abilities, or somehow he’d been either distracted or just really hadn’t seen the enemy when they arrived.”
“By rights, no one should blame either of you,” Eagle exclaimed.
“Sure, if you didn’t understand how many times we’d done the same thing over and over again with no problem. So everyone assumed we were the perfect guardians for their illegal activities.”
Eagle didn’t want to stop the flow of her words, but he had so many questions to ask. “So, after it all happened, there was no way to prove to anyone what you had actually been doing?”
She nodded. “But what Stefan suggested was that I wasn’t sending Hadrid out into any particular direction and wasn’t showing him where to go, but that I was actually connecting with him on some level. … That I was actually seeing the world below through him—seeing the world through his eyes.”
Eagle sat back. He forcibly closed his mouth to stop his jaw from hanging open. “It’s a fine distinction,” he said awkwardly.
“But one with a very definite twist and outcome.”
He tilted his head sideways and thought about that. “Of course, because, if you were somehow connecting with this falcon, seeing the world below through his eyes, you were the one making the decision as to whether your family was safe from danger.”
“Exactly. In which case I’m the one who failed them. I always figured I had failed them, but that it was a shared responsibility between Hadrid and me. But, according to Stefan, if I’m the one up there, seeing through his eyes, then I am entirely at fault, not Hadrid. And that makes me feel shitty because, in a way, I’d been blaming Hadrid.”
“And yet that night you didn’t see anything, so how could you be responsible? You did your job.” He took a deep breath. “That anyone could put a child in that position and then blame them when they failed, … it’s beyond belief.”
“I shouldn’t have failed.” She stared at him steadily, then shook her head. In a low voice she continued, “It was my fault. … I was distracted.”
“And it was okay to be distracted. You were six years old.” He knew they were coming to something crazy. “Distracted by what?”
She gave him a shuttered glance. “By my mother having sex with one of my father’s men.”
This time his jaw did drop. “Holy shit.”
She nodded. “You see? I wasn’t out there with Hadrid when I should have been. I was supposed to be looking out for the men below, but instead I was completely confused as to why my mother was in bed with someone other than my father.”
He let out a deep breath. “Well, that changes things entirely.”
“It does, and it doesn’t,” she said. “It’s still my fault. I still was negligent in my duties. And my family paid for it.”
He grasped her free hand and whispered, “I can say, without a doubt, sweetie, the only adult in this equation at fault is your mother. She was also posted as a lookout for the family. But because you and Hadrid were so good at it, she took the opportunity—probably every damn time—to have sex with this other man. When instead she should’ve been out there looking after you and her own husband and sons. But she left that on the shoulders of a six-year-old.” He shook his head. “This was not your fault.”
She burst into tears.
He quickly snatched her up, blankets and all, and pulled her onto his lap. There he cuddled her in his arms until she quieted. But, in his mind, all he could think of was how it was a damn good thing her mother was dead. Otherwise he’d be out there making her pay for what she’d done to her daughter.
Not to mention her husband and sons who had trusted her with their lives.
*
“Shit,” Stefan roared. He stared at the beautiful painting in front of him. The one now marred by a huge owl’s eye in the corner of the canvas. Always watching him, always glaring at him, waiting for him to do something.
“Dammit, Humbug, I told you that I’m feeding you and Roash as much energy as I can, along with Issa and Tabitha. We’re moving you slowly, mile by mile, under your own power—or rather our power,” he said in exasperation. “I don’t know how else to help you two or her. I don’t dare call the authorities. That’s for them to do.”
Of course the owl who was painted into his painting—an owl he didn’t remember painting—stared back at him silently. That gaze never shifted as Stefan moved around the room. But that eye didn’t belong in the painting. Stefan was working on something completely different. And every time he tried to complete one of his commissioned paintings, Humbug overtook Stefan’s consciousness toward the end of the process. Thus, when Stefan came back to reality, an owl was painted in the corner of the painting.
For three days Stefan had tried six different paintings, but, as he stepped back to look at the finished work, he found a damn snow owl painted into the corner. Not a whole owl but just a head, gazing unrelenting at him, as if crying out, Help me, help her, help us.
Stefan knew Roash was out there too. Figured he’d probably start painting falcons at this rate. But, so far, he’d been blessed to have only one bird show up on his canvases.
He’d never had something like this happen before. Sure, he painted subconsciously all the time. But this was a conscious painting, one he was doing for a client. He’d painted away, thinking he was doing fine, how he was on track, but then he’d realize he had white on his paintbrush. As soon as he saw that, he knew. He’d turn, and there would be the snow owl with golden eyes. How could this owl have such control—such a strong will—that he could show up in Stefan’s paintings like this?
He took another step back and shrugged. “At least I’m getting good at painting owls.”