Blood Double (God Wars #1)(47)
"Come on, this is the most beautiful woman you've ever seen. Admit it. Doesn't she deserve your help?" Shane wheedled.
"She deserves help," Kevis ran fingers through light-brown hair, his hazel eyes troubled, a frown marring his features. "I'll talk to Dad. Maybe we can get started on this soon. Have you contacted the Larentii to see if the scars can be removed?"
"I haven't gotten that far. I'll have Mom ask Pheligar if he can do it or if Lenigar or one of the others might be willing, as soon as she and Dad get back from assignment. This had to happen over several years, Kevis. I can't even begin to comprehend what she went through while somebody was carving this stuff into her skin," Franklin shook his head.
"Some of those cuts are deeper than that—I'm surprised she lived over it," Kevis muttered. "Dad is away, too, or I'd ask him to come now."
*
"Any new visions?" Ashe asked, holding back a sigh. Rabis sat on a bench outside his modest home, peeling potatoes for his evening meal of stew.
"No." Rabis didn't hold back his sigh. "I get brief, blurring images. As if things keep changing from one moment to the next."
"Is she still close, though?"
"Yes. All the indications are there. Have you ever told the others what she looks like—so they might help?"
"No. I'm almost afraid to tell them." Ashe rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably.
"Perhaps if you described her to them," Rabis' voice trailed off.
"Grandfather, I worry for her. Ever since you said she would be damaged and would mistrust another woman, I've worried. I've warned the others—the women—to stay away from the main house, too. Things are so unsettled, now, and everything is worse since I've detected evidence of a mind cloud."
"A mind cloud?" Rabis jerked his head up in alarm.
"Grandfather, you and the others inside my shield should be safe, but I can't guarantee that safety if you travel beyond the boundary of SouthStar."
"Something else to protect us from, besides aging?" Rabis lifted an eyebrow. "How long do you expect us to stay here, before boredom or something else comes to lure us away?"
"I don't know." Ashe raked fingers through slightly curly, light-brown hair. "I hope to keep all of you safe for as long as it takes. The Ir'Indicti is supposed to save the race, not allow it to die."
"But that requires remaining here forever, if the time isn't right. You say yourself that only someone with a great deal of power can place two different time periods on either side of a gate and hold it long enough for several to walk through. And you say that your love was standing there with the shining woman, and that she sent mindspeech to you. The half-Elemaiyan children are here already—they merely appeared one day, but your love hasn't come. That means that two separate times were joined together at once, and one of those times hasn't happened, yet."
"I know that, Grandfather. What if the mind cloud is attempting to eliminate that second timeline, so the ones who are here now will disappear into nothing? If that time and the one who manipulated it is destroyed, what will that mean for the rest of us? There will be dire consequence if they fail to accomplish the task within the designated time."
"Surely that can't be," Rabis mumbled, dropping his paring knife into a bowl filled with potatoes.
"I hope that's not the case, but there's nothing else I can do for now. With a possible mind cloud floating around, nobody is safe."
"Child, you are the Mighty Hand. Surely you should be able to do something about that." Rabis gave Ashe a worried glance before lifting his knife and turning his attention back to the potatoes.
"That's just it, Grandfather. What I detected, well, I couldn't find the source, and it was too elusive for me to attempt a cure."
"What about the other two? Might you come together and defeat it?"
"What if that's what it's waiting for? Hoping for? Maybe it was placed to lure us into the open, so we can be destroyed."
"What a frightening thought," Rabis muttered.
*
Breanne's Journal
I watched Trevor walk past, with one of his assistant deputies. I knew the deputy had only worked for Trevor three of Le-Ath Veronis' weeks, and had once been comesula. Now he was vampire, just as Trevor's other deputies were.
Did I want to call out to Trevor? Yes. I did. Instead, I pulled back into the shadows between two casinos. I was hunting Erithia Cordan and the obsessed man who'd trailed at her heels like a puppy when I'd seen them at Niff's.
A Council meeting had taken up most of my day, and after filching a bottle of blood substitute from the kitchen—I'd gotten quite adept at misting into the pantry, after all—I'd put off sleep in order to go sleuthing after a woman who held more than a few in her thrall.
My biggest problem, however, seemed to be that the specific obsession she'd placed couldn't be read in others, even employing the best of my curse to do it. I could read her, up to a point, anyway, and knew she'd placed the obsession, but couldn't read what the obsession was.
Obsession. That was the word I'd read when I'd seen her briefly, and she'd been planning to place more but I'd dropped my eyes before I could read the names of those she intended to obsess.