“What’s happening?” she asked again, almost a whisper this time.
“God. Emma, I’m so, so sorry.” Nathan rubbed his hand down his face. “I’ve spent the whole night planning what I wanted to say. Thinking of exactly what words to use and…. Fuck. Now I can’t remember any of it.”
She reached up to take hold of her locket. To feel the warm metal in her palm, letting it remind her of her mother—and Zach. Letting it anchor her as it had done when she was a child. “Nathan, I—”
“No.” He cut her off, rising from the stool and stepping toward her. “Not Nathan. Zach.” His voice dropped to a broken whisper. “You were right.”
Zach? Her Zach? This powerful man looming over her, looking like a broken angel, was Zach. The man she couldn’t stop thinking about, who drew her in like a magnet and pushed her away just as easily, was Zach.
For half a second, a rush of brilliant hope filled her. He’d found her, he’d come back to her, and he….
He’d lied to her. Manipulated her. Pretended he knew nothing about her or her father. He’d asked her invasive, judgmental questions that he already knew the answer to.
“I don’t understand.” The words ached as she forced them past the tension in her vocal cords. She lifted her hand from her locket to press against that sudden tightness in her throat, feeling herself swallow against her fingers.
The prickle behind her eye sharpened into a relentless stabbing, an ice pick of pain that hammered into her head, while the world blurred and distorted. She tried to step back but stumbled against something. The world tilted, pitching to the side, and sliding her away. She was going to fall, and she couldn’t even stop it because she could hardly see.
Almost in slow motion, Zach reached out to catch her. He wrapped his big hands around her arms and pulled her back to safety. She had a few seconds of sudden warmth and stillness. He was holding her and it felt utterly right. And then everything got a million times worse.
His hands were like brands forcing fire through her veins. Molten lava ran up to explode behind her eye. The flutter in her belly morphed into a heaving churn of acid as the world spun. The lights were too bright, reflecting in dazzling auras and diamond fractals off every surface. Every prism and beam of light was a laser of agony that stabbed into her brain.
Emma collapsed forward, retching, and Zach reacted instantly. He spun, lifting her in his arms and cradling her like a small child as she gasped for breath.
He carried her into the dim back office and settled her on her chair, murmuring, “Wait here.” Within a minute, he was back with a damp cloth and started gently wiping away the sweat that beaded over her forehead.
The seconds without his hands on her cooled some of the agony, but without the fire, all she felt was cold.
She wanted to push him away. Tell him to get out and never come back. But she couldn’t do it. She curled in on herself, trying to sink into the hard chair as tears pushed their way out from the corners of her eyes.
“God.” Zach looked at her for a long moment and then lifted her back into his arms. He spun and then slowly sank to the ground with his back against the side of her desk, still holding her cradled against his chest.
The worst of the shattering migraine passed as quickly as it started, the pain slipping away from behind her eye as the dark office slowly came back into focus. Zach stroked her hair gently as her shivers slowly eased, and her tears dried in streaks on her face.
“What just happened?” he asked quietly.
Emma closed her eyes, wishing she could let him hold her, wishing she could have this comfort, but knowing that she couldn’t. Then she did what she had to do. She pushed herself off his lap. Away from their strange truce. Away from his warmth and his concern and his lies.
She was too shattered to go far. She collapsed against the wall, drew her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them. “I think it was a vision.” She grunted bitterly. “Or rather, a vision failing.”
“You don’t have visions…?” He spoke the words slowly, as a question. As if he was testing them in his mind. Or perhaps as if it explained something important.
She shook her head and then winced as the movement sparked a flurry of exploding lights. “No.”
“Not ever?”
She stared at him. He didn’t deserve to know. And she couldn’t imagine why he wanted to. For the Council, maybe? For Gordon? Why couldn’t they just let her go?
Perhaps if they knew how badly she was broken, they would. Perhaps once Zach knew, he would leave her too, and then she would finally be free of it all. Free, and utterly, finally, alone.
“My Shadows didn’t come in like everyone else’s,” she admitted, her voice only slightly louder than a whisper. “You remember that I went to boarding school after my mother died?”
Zach nodded, his gaze locked on hers, and she continued. “Everyone waited. They thought I’d be like her, hoped maybe, that I would be their star. The most powerful Seer of my generation…. But nothing happened. I was almost seventeen by the time my Shadows arrived. My father would come once a year and that year he wanted to take some blood, some kind of medical test he was conducting—”
Zach dragged in a rough gasp, and she paused, but he didn’t say anything further.
After a moment, she continued. “I was—am—terrified of needles. Ever since I can remember. The needle in my skin triggered some kind of attack. Everything shone and moved. The pain was….” She swallowed. “Anyway, I thought I could see my mother. I hallucinated that she was coming to get me, that she was trying to tell me something. To warn me. But I couldn’t hear what she was saying.”
Emma’s voice wobbled but she took a breath and kept going. “When I woke up, I was in the clinic with the Healers. My Shadows had come in, but not like everyone hoped.”
