Rising Darkness (Game of Shadows #1)(39)

He had prepared his entire life for this very encounter with Mary, and still the reality of coming face-to-face with her blew through all of his expectations. He had never quite found his equilibrium after her scream in the psychic realm, and internally he was still reeling.

He had to get grounded and centered again, to reconnect with his sense of purpose. He knew how to do that when he was alone, but he didn’t know how to do it in her presence.

When he had opened the door to her Toyota and looked upon her unconscious face for the first time, he felt as if he had been dealt a body blow.

She was young, possibly as much as ten years younger than he, and she had fine-boned features and a honey-toned skin color that had turned pallid. Her face was lopsided with a swollen bruise that had begun to turn a dark purple. Her tawny hair was kinked with curls that were confined in a braid. She was dressed in nondescript, comfortable clothing.

Her looks didn’t matter in the slightest. He knew she could have been old or young, or of any nationality, and before he had laid eyes on her, he would have said that he’d had no expectation or desire for her to be anything but what she was.

But this . . .

She was beautiful.

He spiraled down into a place of astonished enchantment and did nothing to try to stop it. Instead he embraced his fall.

He gently laid the tips of his fingers on her cheek, and the impact of that first touch sent him to his knees. She was warm, living and embodied, and it was such a goddamned miracle, his eyes flooded with moisture.

He, who had experienced relatively few emotions in this life, was overcome with a feeling so powerful, it shook his body to the marrow. Blinking hard to clear his eyesight, he traced her soft, lush lips. The delicate warm brush of her breath on his hand thrilled him utterly.

She was revolutionary, transformative. He had not known beauty before he looked at her. He had not known desire, until he touched her face.

Connecting with her hemorrhaging energy shocked him back to the present, along with the realization of the real extremity of her situation. Then every emotion that had exploded into life inside of him seemed to redouble in reaction: rage and fear, hope and determination, and a wicked hate for the one who had damaged her.

He fought to keep his expression and manner neutral, to hide what went on inside of him and to give her as much room as he could to deal with her own reactions. The last thing he wanted to do was to escalate her before they were able to get help from Astra, and precipitate a crisis that neither one of them would be able to handle on their own.

But he had not counted on how hard that would be, when the reality of his own reaction to her was so volcanic, it eroded his own reasoning and his control.

And as it turned out, there was nothing he could do to stop her anyway.

When Mary cried out and doubled over, Michael checked traffic, yanked the car onto the shoulder and slammed on the brakes.

Cars shot past, headlights blazing like comets. He turned to his passenger. Although the car was filled with night shadows, he could see quite clearly with his psychic senses. Mary’s spirit wound was bleeding bright, feverish gouts of energy.

He tried to shift her. She was rigid, clamped in a fetal position. He twisted in his seat, got a firmer hold and hauled her toward him. Her skin felt burning hot and dry. Her spirit wound was affecting her physical body. He wondered how high her temperature had spiked. If it went too high for too long it would kill her.

Stopping for any length of time on the side of a major highway was all but suicidal. He gave up on trying to conduct any risk assessment and instead focused on the problem at hand. Slipping one hand under Mary’s chin, he tried to turn her face up. She was locked in place, the tendons in her neck standing out against his palm. He didn’t want to force her head around in case he hurt her.

Awkward in the cramped space, he wrapped his arms around her. He put one hand to her forehead and pushed his other hand under her arm, laying it against her sternum. Then he rested his cheek against the delicate protrusion of bone at the nape of her neck, closed his eyes and sent his awareness into her mind.

The psychic landscape was the land of spirit, which lay interlocked with the physical world. The interior of the mind was quite a different matter. It was a small, private realm comprised of perception, memory, thought, emotion, dream images and imagination. After pushing into her mind, Michael paused to let her adjust to his intrusion while he attempted to get oriented.

Tattered scraps of images drifted around him. He kept from focusing on any one image and allowed them to continue drifting, as he spent precious time forcing himself to settle into the calm, aware state of utter mindfulness. He could not help her if he was in a panic.

When he was centered and still, he extended his senses throughout her mind.

Turbulent emotion buffeted him. Trauma, shock, horror, fear. Incredulity. The sour taste of guilt.

Why guilt?

The question almost snared him, but at the last moment he let it go and let it wash through him. These were her surface emotions, connected to recent experiences and relatively shallow. He could not sense her active, aware presence in any of them.

He reached deeper and sank into an agony so raw and acidic it burned. He had to force himself not to recoil but to push further until he could sense her presence.

“Mary,” he said to her. MARY.

He found her presence. An image slammed into him. This time he was unable to let it wash past. Since this was the image he had been searching for, the image that held her awareness, he embraced it and entered a scene.