Finally, she speaks, her voice low and almost robotic. “I don’t want to fight. Help get her back. Do what you need to fix her. She’s your primary, and she’s your world. Everything else is unimportant.”
Defeat flickers in the air for a moment before it disappears. The bleeding stopped when he arrived. I can’t taste anything to verify, but it feels like surrender. I don’t know what is going on with her, but I’m afraid that something terrible has happened.
Maybe it’s even my fault.
My heart hurts for a moment, until I remember Taurus is right. I’m lying here broken and decimated. My spouse chose this time to profess his love to my mate. That is the crux of our problem. All the doubt and fear creep back in, taking over in a way that makes it hard to focus on what they are all doing.
Why would hedothat? Didn’t he realize how callous it sounded? Did he not think about how much it would hurt me to find out if I heard him? Doesn’t he care about my feelings? Isn’t that what got us here?
“I will need both of you to do this,” my primary says, his voice firm.
“We can help you do this, and the rest can go from there,” Deli replies, her tone flat. “I don’t know how much help I can be—given my state—but I will try.”
I feel a few tears dropping on my arm, and I know Rafe’s crying again.
“We don’t want you to go—either of you. We love you both,” Taurus says.
My primary has switched to being gentle with them instead of yelling or threatening. The only reason he would do that is that his wife must look ready to keel over and run for the hills or both. He’s not so kind to people who have taken part in causing me pain, even if it’s unintentional.
I know he loves me, but contrary to what he told her, she is his entire world and the stars above. I don’t even know if I could compete, and I have no problem with that. But something about her is bothering him, and he’s curbing his rage to keep it from manifesting.
“Okay.” She still sounds distant, and since I can’t see or feel her, there’s a lot she’s holding back in that one paltry word. She hasn’t even responded to his declaration. Hell, she’s barely responding to anything besides that bottle of scotch.
“This will be tricky. You need to build a shield of your own but leave a small conduit that reaches out, so it refills her shields. The chain has to be visible so I see it and feel it, but strong enough to protect yourself from getting fried. The line will let me siphon energy over to her. I only need enough to help shore her shields up, not drain you. Can you do that?”
“Yeah, I’m sure we’ve got that covered,” his wife says, her voice full of sarcasm.
Does she have experience in building emotional shields that I don’t know about? She could. Deli seems to have an endless array of talents she doesn’t mention until she needs them. She never makes a big deal of being a proficient gymnast or a magick user or one hell of a singer once we know. It’s almost like she masters things because she’s bored and then moves on to the next thing.
I don’t know what comes next: ballerina, equestrian, sushi chef, linguist, candlemaker. It could be anything.
Maybe their pain hides behind a shield, though. More than once, I’ve caught whiffs of damage from one or both. It’s never for long, and it always disappears as quickly as it came. She may hoard it all to keep it from touching us.
That’s a discussion for another day, I think.
“She’s right. We can,” Rafe whispers.
Again, there’s no rise from my primary on the bitter response from his wife. Normally, he’d snap back, so something strange is going on. They need to hurry the hell up and let me see why she’s behaving so out of character.
“Right then, this will feel weird. You may be used to building shields, but I doubt you’ve tried draining them, so bear with me. If you two build yours and let me know when you have a line formed for me to grab onto, that would help.”
Everything goes quiet, so I know they’re focusing on the task. The long hair holds me against his chest. I hope the cat remembers to wall off her powers after the light show at the beach. Her strength—even depleted—is something I don’t plan on messing with.
I’m uncertain ifsheknows what she can do.
“Okay, I see the stoat’s line now. It isn’t half bad,” Taurus muses. “Looking for yours, wife.”
I don’t know why it surprises him that someone whose primary is a priestess and who has an Empath for a wife, has at least a little clue about shields and all things mystical.
A delicate sniff from the other side of the room announces that Deli is ready, and I hear the smile in his voice when he finds her line. “It’s sparkly blue even when you’re feeling run through, my love. I shouldn’t be surprised, should I?”
“You should not,” she replies. “Shields draw energy from those who build them. If you want them to hold up, they need to reflect both what they are blocking and what they are protecting.”
Taurus wanders around inside me, tinkering with the source of my empathy. He siphons off their contributions, and I think about what she said.
She knows more than a thing or two about walls and shields and emotions. I don’t think she’s an empath, but I think she’s developed the skill to help her deal with the powers insideher. At the beach, she talked about nature: feeling and hearing everything around her. Being connected to the natural world must require a lot of boundaries to keep from going crazy with all the noise. Add to that magick and a cantankerous kitty, and you have enough things battling for control of you to be a crown in medieval Europe.
Deli learned to control it all by doing what she told me—cutting off the lines or controlling the flow. That’s interesting.
