“What?” I growled.
“He knows about us. He knows . . .” She paused, her breath shivering. “Too much. One man was not meant to have such knowledge. He's not prepared for it.”
“Alexis, he has a woman. He took her tonight.”
“I cannot see her fate. She may yet live, but I don't know. I'm so sorry. I felt your distress. I've already called my brother. We'll be ready for you to pick us up in ten minutes.”
“But you just said you couldn't help us.”
“No. I said I couldn't get his location through my visions. But maybe we can pick something up through touch. We have other talents besides precognition, you know.” She stopped to curse. “Is this how everyone else lives? No insight at all? This is horrible!”
I chuckled, but it held little mirth. “Yeah, it is. I'll see you in ten.” I hung up.
“They're coming?” Kill asked.
“I'm going to get them,” I said. “It will be faster.”
Chapter Fourteen
I laruked to the room Alexis texted me a picture of. She was waiting for me just outside the room with her brother, her husband, and her son. Brendan kissed his wife goodbye, then Alexis bent to hug Jareth, who was walking now, and a perfect blend of his parents, with his father's blue eyes and his mother's black hair. He was going to be a heartbreaker someday. Right now, he was an adorable little boy in footed pajamas.
“Hey, Jareth,” I said as I crouched to talk to him. “I'm your Aunty Seren. Do you remember me?”
He nodded. “You're the fairy queen.”
I grinned. “I'm one of them, yes. Your mommy is gonna help me with something. Is that okay? I promise to look after her.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you.” I stood up and nodded at Brendan, who I had a strange past with.
He nodded back, no hard feelings there. Thank the Gods. He'd been a terror for a while there. But that was because I chose Tiernan over him. Now he had a beautiful wife and a son. That changes things.
The Trance Twins, as Killian called them, said goodbye to their family and then I laruked them to Sang-hee's garden. Once there, they did the same search Killian did, starting with the button he'd found.
“Huh,” Alex said as he passed the button to his sister.
“Huh?” Killian asked. “That's all you've got to say after peering into that psychopath's head. Did you not see what he did?”
“To the women?” Alex asked as his sister went into a trance. “Yes, I did. It was horrible.”
Killian gaped at Alex.
“Killian, I've been an extinguisher for most of my life. I'm trained to fight, and I'm good at it, but I'm mainly used for my psychic talents. And along with my sister, I'm the best.”
Alexis came out of her trance to say, “He's trying to tell you that we've seen a lot of terrible things. This man is evil, yes. But he doesn't shock me.”
“Holy fuck,” Killian muttered.
But my mind was turning back to the time when the Twins met Raza. They had read his mind without permission and seen his love for me there. At the time, I'd been with Tiernan and him alone. Raza's love for me was his secret, and Alexis nearly shared it with a roomful of extinguishers. And me. To punish her, Raza grabbed her wrist.
I don't know what he showed Alexis, but it was enough to send her into a screaming faint and because she'd been bonded to her brother back then, Alex had seen it too. And Raza wouldn't let go. He kept pushing his memories into themuntil Alex held a dagger to Raza's throat. Raza responded with a terrible threat that I still remember word for word: Draw one drop of my blood and your sister is dead. He had smiled as he said it.
So what stopped him? I did. From the moment we met, I've been the only one who could calm Raza. Even when he was lost to his dragon, in a rage that could have decimated entire cities, I was able to bring him back to himself. And I did it then. I made him let go. Not by force, but by a gentle touch on his hand and a whisper in his ear.
It's a strangely romantic memory. I have a lot of those featuring Raza. But looking back now, after seeing Alexis's non-reaction to a man Killian called monstrous, I was seeing that memory with new eyes. What the fuck had Raza shown them?
Not that I worried about my husband being a monster. Raza hadn't shown them things he had done but rather things that had been done to him. In his early years. Before he could fully defend himself. He never told me exactly what happened to him, but I knew he went through some terrible shit. Alexis even apologized to him after he let her go. She promised Raza that she'd keep his past a secret and then looked at me and said, “I don't know whether to feel jealousy or pity for you.”
