“What’s wrong with her?”
Dad and Jenna’s frightened expressions registered, but I was too busy trying to ride the wave of pain swamping my senses to reassure them.
Connor grabbed my shoulders, lowering me until I was lying on the bench.
The pain receded a tiny bit, still there but not as overwhelming.
From a distance, I could hear Dad’s raised voice and Jenna trying to calm Linda down.
A voice boomed in my mind.Childe.
As quickly as it had come, the pain vanished. It became nothing more than a hazy memory as my mind tried to convince itself that someone wasn’t just digging their fingers into a place where they didn’t belong.
What the fuck was that?
As if the situation wasn’t embarrassing enough, liquid started to drip out of my nose and onto my upper lip as I forced myself up to sitting.
Blood. That’s just great.
“Oh my God, Aileen.” Jenna grabbed napkins from the dispenser. Two thirds of them ripped. That didn’t stop her. She yanked one after another out until she had a large pile she could then shove in my direction. “You have a nose bleed.”
I took the napkins and pressed them against my nose, wishing I was alone with Connor so I could ask him what the hell was going on.
“You okay?” Connor asked.
“Let me get back to you on that.”
I wasn’t sure what I was feeling right now. Angry, certainly. A little scared. Maybe a lot scared. And about every emotion in between.
A person’s mind was supposed to be sacrosanct. Mine wasn’t. And that was terrifying.
Connor’s focus turned inward, his expression remote.
I didn’t take his withdrawal personally. This wasn’t good. Someone with power of this nature could have turned my mind into Swiss cheese. Worse—I had no idea how to keep the invasion from happening again.
Seeing the concern on my family’s faces, I lowered the wad of now bloody napkins to give them a reassuring smile. “Sorry about this.”
Jenna’s tiny flinch made me cover my lips with the napkins again. Maybe smiling wasn’t such a good idea after all.
My dad’s face expression looked like it had been chiseled out of granite.
Linda was the only one to show appreciation, mouthing a silent, “Cool.”
Way to go, self. Stellar job appearing normal and well adjusted.
“You don’t have to apologize.” My dad nudged Jenna’s shoulder, nodding for her to scoot out of the booth. “But I think it’s best if we take you to a hospital to get checked out.”
Linda, sensing her time was limited, shoveled several bites of pancake into her mouth as she shuffled sideways. Reaching the end of the table, she hovered over her food for those last few bites.
“That’s not necessary, Dad,” I protested.
A visit to the hospital was the last thing I needed. I wasn’t sure how much human technology could glean from our blood, but I didn’t want to chance it. Even with Thomas’s people seeded within the phlebotomy labs, there was no reason to be reckless.
There weren’t a lot of universal rules in the spook world, but not giving humans evidence of our existence was a big one.
Besides, Dad and Jenna would probably find it suspicious when the doctors had never heard of what I had.
I needed an excuse. A good one. Preferably one my family could accept.
