Blue Violet (4 page)

“I can’t be
sure, but I’m guessing that Adelaide has the ability to see relationships
between people, and that’s what those sort of shimmering strands of light
were.” Opening her eyes, Ellie tried to gauge her brother’s reaction. “What do
you think?”

Griffin
wandered to the couch as he mentally walked through what she’d just shown him. 
While he’d been able to watch everything Ellie thought, it was a little like a
game of telephone. He’d seen it all through Ellie’s eyes, through her emotions
and her filters.

“That was
quite a shock you gave Adelaide,” he started.

Ellie blinked.
“Wait…
you
felt it?” she squeaked.

“It surprised
me too,” Griffin admitted, allowing himself a small grin at his sister’s
obvious astonishment. “One minute I’m driving through the mountains on my way
here, the next… Ouch!  I didn’t know what it was until you showed me just now.”

Ellie frowned
and joined him on the couch. “You’ve never felt things through our link before.
If the shock was that powerful, Adelaide surely would’ve noticed.”

“I don’t think
she did.”

Ellie took a
deep breath of relief.

“You’d be the
best judge as to Adelaide’s abilities and what those strands of light mean,”
Griffin continued.

“I didn’t
touch her long enough to determine much,” Ellie muttered.

Seeing ideas
starting to form in Ellie’s eyes, Griffin said, “I think you should wait a
while before you try to figure that out.”

Ellie wrinkled
her nose. “Fine,” she grumbled.

Griffin paused
for a second. “They don’t know about me yet, right?”

Ellie shook
her head.

“Okay.”
Griffin fell silent.

Ellie didn’t
push him; she just felt grateful that he seemed to want to help. They were at
their best when they acted as a team, and she needed him now.

After a couple
of minutes, he said, “Let me think about this for a while. We can talk again in
the morning.”

With a nod of
agreement, Ellie hopped up and headed upstairs to work on her homework and do
some more thinking herself. Ellie hadn’t shown Griffin what had happened to her
when she’d first seen Alex. It was too new. Too unclear to her how she felt and
what it meant.

…but she knew
she definitely felt
something
... and she felt both terrified and oddly
eager to find out what.

Alex tried his
best to keep his mind off the girl he’d met today.
Ellie…cute name…what was
that short for?
He remembered as she’d walk away in the parking lot, he’d
felt like he’d just been punched in the gut. That sensation had lingered,
bothering him for the rest of the afternoon. He was
not interested
in
high school girls. Not even when he
was
in high school. But when he’d
looked up and his gaze had connected with hers, he’d felt a connection. A
strong one.

Alex rolled
his shoulders and forced the girl from his mind. He’d come home for a specific
reason. And it wasn’t to crush on one of his younger sisters’ friends, no
matter how adorable she was.

After Ellie
had walked away, he’d ushered his siblings over to their car. “Did I hear
something about a study session? You might need to cancel that, Delia. This
week at least.”

“I figured
there was a reason you’re here,” Adelaide replied.

“Yeah, what’s
up, Alex? You’re supposed to be off at college,” Nate added.

“Your mom
called. She’s having one of her
feelings
again.” Alex locked his eyes on
Adelaide.

All three frowned
at this news. Lila and Adelaide’s mother, Lucy, had the ability to sense
others’ emotions and intentions. Sometimes this translated to an intuition of
something coming. She could feel if it was negative or positive. And almost
always it related to her family in some way. Lucy herself didn’t claim this as
part of her powers. She thought of it more as
mother’s
or
women’s
intuition.
Either way, they’d all learned to take her premonitions
seriously.

“Did she say
what the feeling was?” Lila asked. She tossed her backpack in the trunk of
Nate’s car.

“No, she just
asked me to come home. And when I got there, she sent me here to make sure you
three came straight back after school.”

“Well, let’s
go find out what this is about,” Nate said, and they all loaded up in their
cars.

Adelaide and
Lila beat him back to the house. As he walked in the door, he heard Adelaide on
the phone.

“I’m sorry we
have to flake on you, Ellie,” she was saying. “But with Alex home from college,
we’ll be doing family stuff most of the week...”

Alex tamped
down on his unusual curiosity about the girl he’d met today and went into the living
room where the others were gathered. He greeted everyone he hadn’t seen yet
with warm hugs.

“What’d you
tell her?” Nate asked, as Adelaide sat beside him on the floor and took his
hand.

“That with
Alex home, we decided to have some family time,” she replied with a shrug.

Nate nodded.
“Not bad. About as truthful as you could be.”

“Mmm…yeah.”
she agreed. “You know I don’t like lying.” She paused for a moment, her
expression thoughtful. “Besides, I have get the impression that she sees a lot
more than she lets on.”

“Who are you
talking about?” Lucy walked into the room, followed by Hugh. They headed
straight to Alex to give him warm hugs.

“Oh, this girl
Adelaide met at school,” Lila answered. “New girl. Her name is Ellie, and today
was her first day. Lila walked right up to her in the lunch room.”

Lucy raised
her eyebrows as she took a seat on the couch. “You don’t think she suspects
anything?” she asked with a concerned frown.

“How could
she?  She’s only known us one day,” Nate said.

Lucy’s frown didn’t
let up.

“Do you think
your feeling has something to do with this girl?” Hugh asked quietly. He rested
one hand on his wife’s leg in an attempt to soothe her.

“I don’t
know…” Lucy glanced around the room at the faces she loved so much. “It’s
different this time. Almost like I’m getting two separate signals.”

“Are they
centered on a specific person?” Hugh prodded.

“No, I…” Lucy
shook her head, visibly frustrated. “Part is good.” She looked up at Alex.
“Like what I picked up on just before we found you. And that part seems to be
very strong. But even stronger is this sense of
dread
. Something bad is
coming. I feel like we’re all in danger. That’s why I asked you to come home,
Alex. I think we need to protect ourselves, and the best way I can think of to
do that is by being together.”

The room fell
silent.

“Do you think
you should meet Ellie right away?” Alex asked his adoptive mother. He shifted
to prop his ankle on his knee.

Lucy shook her
head. “No. I think if she was like us, it would’ve been pretty obvious to you
guys. Or she might have said something. There’re not many of us around. I think
she’d be too surprised to find three together— let alone
nine
—not to
say anything.” She turned to her daughter. “Delia? Did you see anything?”

Adelaide
shrugged. “I saw some relationships between her and a few of us, but nothing
I’m worried about.” She didn’t like to share what she saw about developing or
future relationships. She tended to get a little apprehensive that she would
influence the people involved and affect what could have been.

The others all
nodded. Alex quietly blew out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and
squashed that small kernel of hope that had irrationally popped up. He thought,
Dang. If she had powers then maybe…
But Lucy was right. If she
was
of their kind, she’d have come forward.

Hugh leaned
forward, absently tapping his glass. “I think our only option at this point is
to stick together and keep our eyes open. Alex, we’ll need you to stay home for
a while.”
            Alex nodded his agreement and saw Ramsey do the same across the
room. In truth, he often felt a little homesick while he was away at college.
He’d become used to having a family around him, despite the years he’d spent
alone. After his grandfather had passed away in 1917, leaving Alex without any
remaining living relatives, he’d wandered for years. So now secretly, he was
pleased with this chance to be home.

Alex and the
rest of the family failed to see the large, oddly colored golden falcon perched
high in the trees just outside the house.

Ellie took a
break from her homework and went downstairs, only to find the house empty.
Griffin had apparently gone out. She’d been so distracted with thoughts of Alex
Jenner, a Vyusher could have walked directly in front of her, in full wolf
form, and she wouldn’t have noticed.

Huh. Now
that I think about it, Griffin’s tapping into my morphing ability. That’s a
little strange,
she thought. Ellie was a metamorph, with the ability to
shift into specific animal forms. One being a falcon, inherited from her
father. Griffin hated to fly, but the only one of her morphs he’d been able to
master was her strongest form—the falcon.

He must be
out doing some scouting of the area,
Ellie decided, not bothering to tap
into his mind reading ability to find out what was going on. He’d come home
eventually and probably tell her about it. She went to make some homemade hot
chocolate to pass the time while she waited. She didn’t know if Griffin would
be home any time soon, but decided to make enough for him, too. She was just
mixing in the milk when the phone rang.

“Hello?” She
picked it up without bothering to check the ID. Very few people had the number.

“Hi, Ellie,
it’s Adelaide.”

“Oh, hi!”
Ellie grimaced.
I wonder what this is about.

“I’m so sorry
to do this, but we need to cancel our study session this week,” Adelaide said,
her voice ripe with contrition.

Ellie frowned.
“Oh! Why?” She was proud of how she pulled off the right mix of surprise and
casual interest despite her thumping heart.

“With Alex
home from college, we’ll be doing family stuff most of the week…sorry we have
to flake.”

“Oh, no prob.
We’ll do it some other time.” Ellie hoped the relief she felt wasn’t obvious as
she spoke.

“Thanks,
Ellie!  Gotta go.”

“Okay, bye!” Ellie
put the phone back on the receiver.

Phew!
There’s one complication avoided… at least for now.

She fleetingly
wondered why Alex had suddenly come home, but assumed nothing serious had
motivated the decision. He’d looked perfectly relaxed at the school that
afternoon. Ellie’s mind drifted to that moment. The first moment she’d seen
him… and then when their gazes had locked. She’d never experienced anything
like it.

I wonder if
he’d felt anything too, or if I just looked like any other high school girl to
him?
Other than her eyes, she knew she really wasn’t a stand-out beauty.
Alex, on the other hand, was gorgeous. Dark, brooding, yummy. Why would someone
like him be remotely interested in someone like her?

Ellie gave
herself a mental shake.
Not gonna happen, Ellie
...
Let it go
. 
With that, she deliberately put all thoughts of Alex from her mind and finished
making her hot chocolate. She then settled down on the couch in the living room
to work on her math homework. She’d finished several problems when she heard
Griffin making his way into the house.

“Hey, Griff,”
she called.

She didn’t
look up when he walked into the room, until she realized that he stood directly
in front of her, patiently waiting for her attention. Slowly, she raised her
head and then her eyebrows.

“Do you want
something?”

“I just spent
the last few hours listening to the Jenners… You were right about Adelaide’s
ability,” Griffin said. He leaned against a chair crossing one ankle over the
other.

Ellie bit her
lip. “She thought about today?”

“Yeah. She
sees relationships between people. She saw strong relationships between herself
and you, as well as between Alex and you. But she didn’t think about the
specifics. They did seem to be positive relationships in her mind, though.”

“That’s a
relief.” Ellie smiled, and then gave her brother a very direct look. “Why did
you listen in on the entire family tonight?”

“Because when
I felt that shock earlier today, I also managed to hear a little of Adelaide’s
thoughts when you touched her. And what I heard made me think that she was
beginning to wonder about you.” He dropped into the chair he was leaning
against and propped his feet up on the coffee table, looking deceptively
relaxed.

“Oh.” Ellie
cringed.

“Exactly.” He
gave her that utterly
Griffin
look that she hated…a look that stated
quite clearly
here you go again, Ellie
.

“…So I figured
a little reconnaissance wouldn’t hurt.”

Ellie waited a
second for him to continue. “And...?” she prompted when he remained silent.

“Well, the
mother’s name is Lucy. She and her husband Hugh are
te’sorthene
”

Ellie’s eyes
lit up at this bit of information. Her mind reeling. Ellie remembered her
mother telling her about
te’sorthene
as a child. The word literally
meant a friend bonded by heart or sprit. But the Svatura used the term to refer
to what equated to soul mates. Rare, because of how few Svatura existed, but
more common in their large clan due to sheer numbers.
Te’sorthene
was
supposed to be a pre-destined bond between two people that was elemental,
almost physical. Most of the mated couples in their tribe were
te’sorthene
.