Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Allhan rubbed his face and tried to recalibrate what they were talking about. So much death to choose from, wasn’t there.
“I would have shown you anything you wanted to see.” Vishous took a draw on his hand-rolled. “But context is critical. I’d rather have been there with you as you read everything.”
Doc Jane nodded. “And we’re just bringing this up because we’re worried about you. Not because you did anything wrong.”
As they both seemed to want him to say something, he forced his head to nod. Then tacked on, “Th-thank you.”
What else could he say? He was crushed by the parallel realities they were all living in, to the point where he had to rub the center of his chest, the ache there so acute, he couldn’t draw in a breath. He even glanced down to check that he didn’t have a black dagger sticking out of his sternum.
Not yet, he thought. That was coming later.
“Do you want to talk about what you read in the incident reports?” Doc Jane prompted.
Allhan took in a deep breath. And then the words came out in a torrent, the pressure created by so many things he couldn’t talk about transferring to what he could.
And he didn’t stutter.
“I just never had any idea about what it really is like for you.” He looked back and forth between them. “Both of you. What your nights are like, what the days must feel like. What has to haunt you. That alley and passageway by Bathe are permanently in my head. It’s as if they’ve changed something physical inside me. And when I was reading the reports, I was able to understand what I couldn’t before. I can see things now. In a way I couldn’t have otherwise.”
The stillness that came over the pair of them was remarkable, and Allhan realized that they were both always in movement. Even if they were sitting down, their minds were so powerful, so engaged with what they did for the Brotherhood, for the species, that there was a perpetual distraction, always simmering below their surface.
“I don’t want anybody to go through what I did with those males,” Allhan continued. “But I wish other people could understand, as I do now, how it is to be you. Out in the field, facing the enemy, getting hurt, seeing what happens out there. And then in the clinic, treating the aftermath.”
His body started pacing, not because he told it to, but because the emotion swelling in him was too much to contain. Putting his hands on his head, he pushed into his skull, some part of him feeling like an explosion was imminent.
“People need to know what you do. How much—” His voice cracked. “How much they owe you. And the Brotherhood.”
Tears tangled in his lashes, and he slashed them away. “I just hadn’t thought about it. Until now. I didn’t know.”
All at once, he stopped. He was getting too close to the edge of no return if he kept talking, and as he felt both of them staring at him in shock, he had a thought that he wasn’t going to be able to bear seeing hatred and anger contort those familiar faces.
Slowly lowering his eyes, he spoke to the carpeting under his feet. “Smart people can be stupid. They can be so stupid. I am so stupid—”
“No, you’re not.”
He wasn’t sure which one of them said it. But all of a sudden, he sensed them around him. Vishous on his right, Jane on the left.
They were talking to him, their words once again overlaying until the syllables became like music, the individual components nothing to be teased apart, the totality something that both eased him and increased his torment.
In the same way a piano chord could both touch the heart and warn the soul in a straddling of sharps and flats.
Their expressions, of caring, of concern… of love… gutted him.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he whispered. “But I am very certain… that you both have been better to me than I deserve.”
As Vishous muttered curses, the lies that had been constructed and that supported Allhan’s stupid, fumbling attempts to mastermind all that he had were an ugly contamination in his mind, choking out everything good that he could have felt at a moment like this.
“I’m so sorry,” he choked out as Doc Jane wrapped him in a hug. “I don’t know why you’re doing… any of this.”
Clearing his throat, Vishous broke off and went over to stab his hand-rolled out in the ashtray he’d put on the coffee table. Then he straightened and pulled up his leathers like he was trying to find some self-control.
“I’ve wondered the same thing, Al.” As his mate gasped, Vishous shrugged and turned around. “It’s the truth. You and I decided never to have young, but here we are. With a son.”