“David,” Kay asked softly, “what made you come out here with Zach? You must have already been almost here when Elizabeth was taken.”
“I had a nightmare,” he replied in a low voice as he quietly folded his hands around the mug in front of him.
“You dreamed about Elizabeth?” she repeated. Seers had visions all the time, but other Shadow Weavers tended to only get strong, meaningful feelings about people they cared about a great deal. And even those were vague and often entirely unhelpful.
He didn’t answer, just stared back at her in grim silence. And she knew that she was right.
“God.” The words slipped out of her mouth. “You’re the man she loved. The one who left.”
ChapterThirty
Ethan felt Kay’s sorrow,her grief and fear and anger, humming through her body and filtering through her Shadows where they linked with his.
He didn’t know David, but he knew how much Kay respected him—hadrespected him—and it was clear that he felt the same way about her. But the history between David and Elizabeth was still reverberating around the room as if a grenade had exploded in a pond.
Ethan leaned his cheek on Kay’s hair. What must that have been like? To walk away and only return years later to find the woman you loved was married to someone else, the mother to another man’s child, and to know that you were the one who had left, who had pushed her away.
It was so close to what he had almost done to Kay that it filled him with horror. With a deep need to wrap himself around her and hold her close against him. Thank God she’d forgiven him.
The silence stretched until finally Zach put down his mug and looked at them all seriously. “Okay. Well. That explains a lot. But we don’t have time for it now. We need to discuss a plan and decide what to do about James.”
Ethan grunted his agreement. James was the one who had led the attacks. Who had hurt Kay and kidnapped Elizabeth. Never, as long as he lived, would he forget that black ball of Shadow exploding into Kay. They needed to find James and stop him.
But Kay shook her head. “Something isn’t right. This isn’t James—he’s behaving like someone else. He even sounds like someone else.” She met each of their eyes as she paused, seeming to gather her thoughts. “He sounds like Gordon.”
Her face was pale, but her words were firm. “I spent hours wondering how I could have missed this part of him for all these years. I doubted myself, but now, listening to him on the phone, I realized that it wasn’t there to see. Not until now.”
Zach gave her a sad smile. “I was his friend too, Kay, not just you. But people change.” He glanced at David. “They leave, they fail, they make mistakes.”
“Yes,” David agreed, although which part he was agreeing with wasn’t entirely clear.
Bryn nodded. “He was always very caring of you, Kay, and you too, Zach.”
“So why is he doing this now?” she demanded. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Kay scraped her hand down her face tiredly. “I know he’s done terrible things, but he keeps saying he’s trying to help. He told me several times that this was his sacrifice, his way of keeping me safe.”
“No.” Zach frowned. “He was busy setting me up to take the blame. That’s hardly keeping his friends safe.”
Kay winced, but she didn’t back down. “He said he only did that because he thought we’d stay together—he wasn’t trying to set you up, he was trying to get us away from the bus stop.”
“And you believed him?” Ethan asked, knowing his voice was oozing skepticism. Kay was so deeply loyal to the people she claimed, and James had been her friend for years.
She sat up straight, her eyes widening as if she’d suddenly thought of something. “Every single time he’s spoken to me, he’s said the same words. That it’s going to be okay. That we’re well. That we’re doing the right thing…. Doesn’t that seem strange to you? Like he’s under some kind of hypnosis, maybe.”
Ethan nodded slowly. Almost wishing he didn’t have to agree. “Yes, he said it when we were in his flat, and again now on the phone.”
“Gordon and I have never seen eye to eye,” David admitted. “It was a surprise to me when James applied to join the Circle under my leadership, given how poor my relationship with his uncle is. But it was immediately obvious how close he was to you, Kay and Zach. Gordon has certainly manipulated him somehow. And then… well, blood Shadows.”
“What does that mean?” Ethan asked. “You say, ‘blood Shadows’ as if it’s the answer.”
Bryn glanced at David before answering for him. “There are lots of reasons why blood Shadows are forbidden. Not only because of the inherent evil in using Shadows to control others, or the fact that they’re formed from blood, but also because using that kind of Shadow is harmful.”
His gaze was stark as he met their eyes. “Blood Shadows cause a backlash. The person working with the blood is always, always affected. They lose part of their humanity to the corruption in the Shadow. I think that James used so much recently that it’s started to take over, and that’s why you’ve suddenly seen such a big change in him.”
“That’s what caused those cysts in James’s Shadow?” Ethan asked.
“Yes, I think so,” Bryn agreed. “It’s how the ancient texts describe a person consumed by the blood Shadow they’re working with.”
