Hell, broth was barely a start, but if we could get it into him, at least that was something.
Unfortunately, he was so deeply asleep that nothing was rousing him. Not the smell of food, not a gentle shake, and not being picked up again and moved around till he was mostly sitting up in the bed.
“Maybe we should wait a bit, give him some time?” Paul asked. “If he’s this tired, maybe he needs that more than food.” He took a breath as though to add more, but then didn’t.
As pale and somber as everyone was, I didn’t want to consider what he might be thinking. I already knew, because we were probably all thinking it, even though I wished I weren’t.
That my father had survived this long only to fall into a coma and die of starvation now that he was free and safe.
“Should we contact...your mother?” Sexton asked, and I thought maybe it was the first time he’d referred to her as anything but “that vampire,” or some other near-pejorative, so that was interesting. Good, I thought. Maybe with my father alive, he’d be able to see how much they loved each other. I didn’t have a second’s doubt about that, because while my mother would never have said such a thing aloud, my father had been obvious in his?—
Wait.
I’dspokento my father. To a piece of my father that he’d left inside me when he’d left. The piece that had spent years training my own mental shields, and helped me protect myself the first time I’d been attacked.
“Flynn?” Davin asked, since apparently I was as transparent as glass. “What are you thinking?”
“He put a bit of his power in me, remember? The part that trained up my mental shields.” I glanced at Sexton, who cringed a bit, and then poor Paul, who looked lost, but Davin was nodding along, clearly following my train of thought.
“So you think maybe if you put it back, it’ll give him something to start with.”
“It makes sense, right? I just...am not sure exactly how to do that.” Turning back to Sexton, I held out my hands. “Is it just like...like you showed me with the book when we were looking for the power he’d left here on the island? I watched you do it, but I have no idea how it was done. Can you show me?”
From his position on the other side of the bed, Davin tensed, clearly ready for Sexton to pull some kind of weird heel-turn and take the opportunity to steal my energy. Maybe it was naive of me, but I didn’t have a single doubt left in my cousin. Not here, not now, not about this.
We hadn’t been when we’d met, but now? We were family.
Sexton took a deep breath and then frowned, putting his hand to his chest and looking confused. He shook it off after a second, muttering something about indigestion from having to eat so much, then reached for my hand.
He reached out to me mentally, and unlike the last time he’d done it, it wasn’t slimy or unwelcome. Maybe because I was expecting it this time, or maybe because his intentions were completely different.
It felt like a strange ghostly sort of embrace, as he used his own energy to show me how to isolate a piece of myself and put it into something else. And then, without a single suspicious move, he let go and retreated into himself, continuing to rub his chest.
When he was finished, he muttered something about going to get some more damned soup, and quickly left the room.
Davin watched him go, something between annoyance and confusion on his face, but I thought I might be starting to get the picture about what was going on with my cousin.
Instead of focusing on that, I turned to my father and followed the blueprint Sexton had given me. First, I searched myself for that tiny spark of my father, the one bit of me that still, even after all this time, wasn’t quite like the rest. When I located it, I pulled it to the front and moved my whole body forward, as though taking that piece of my energy into my hands and sliding it into my father’s chest.
Then, with some effort and just a twinge of pain, I cut it away from myself. For just a second, all I could feel was the loss of a part of myself. Of something that had been my protector for so long.
But then my father’s eyes snapped open. They were as blue as I remembered from our not-quite-meetings.
He sucked in a deep breath, and then his eyes scanned the room wildly, landing on Davin, the broth, Paul, and finally, me.Then he blinked, over and over, and a huge smile burst across his face like a spring rain in a cloudless sky.
“Flynn,” he said, his voice so like mine, as it had been in my visions of him, but now it also sounded as though he’d been eating sandpaper. “You’re...Flynn. Look at you. My god, I’ll bet you’re taller than me.”
“He is,” Davin agreed, and I supposed he would know, since he might be the only person alive who had carried both of us. Then Davin leaned forward, holding out the broth. “First you need to eat this. Then you probably need to get some more sleep, but for now, eat. As much as you can.”
Somehow, it didn’t surprise me that my father was no more inclined to overblown pride than I was, as he let Davin lift the mug to his mouth, and drank when offered. The sheer bliss on his face at what smelled to me like a plain ass cup of beef broth was sad.
He managed about half of it before holding up a hand and begging off. “I want more, but that’s...it’s a lot. Give me a few days to work up to it.”
When he sank back against the pillows, he looked exhausted already, but he was smiling. “I found you.” Then the smile disappeared and a look of near-panic replaced it. “They’re coming for you. I heard...He said to take you. You and your cousin. Something about the two of you being enough to complete the machine.”
That was so damn much information all at once. Me, Sexton, a machine, and what was more, the mere fact that he’d said “they.” There was more than one of “them.” The way he said “he,” it held weight. That “he” was someone in charge, someone my father was afraid of. And apparently “he” gave an order to take me and Sexton to the same prison my father had been held in.
To complete the machine.
