Shifting Fate (17 page)

He smiled.

I dropped my face back to his chest,
smoothing a hand over my hair and straightening the hem of my
shirt. He pulled a hand free to rub my back. “Stop. I like you all
mussed up.” I scrunched my nose at him and he added, “It’s
adorable, really.”

“
Too far,” I told him. “I
might have believed you otherwise.”

He rolled to his side so he could face me. “I
told you I’d never lie.”

I bit down a smile. “You did.”

“
And you,” he said, “why
don’t you tell me what you did to me?” At my confused expression,
he clarified, “I don’t have a scratch on me, Brianna. I feel great,
after just a few hours of sleep.”

“
Oh,” I answered sheepishly.
“I know you said to save my strength, but I had to, Logan. I only
did what I’ve done for the others, just enough to help you heal. To
keep you safe.”

“
This isn’t like the
others,” he reasoned. His free hand came up to tug the collar of
his shirt lower. “I had fifteen stitches across my chest yesterday.
There isn’t a mark left.”

“
You said you weren’t hurt,”
I hissed.

“
I believe I said I was
‘fine’.” He stared at me. “You’re avoiding the issue. I’m healing
as fast as Aern.”

“
That has nothing to do with
me,” I said. “All I do is repair the connection, you, each of you,
are using it under your own power. If you heal as fast as Aern,
that’s because of your own strength, because of the blood of your
line. It works just like the sway.”

He was silent for a long moment, his eyes
tracing the lines of my face, and I said, “But you don’t use your
sway, do you?”

His fingers trailed over my back, his words
unapologetic. “There’s no need to.”

I watched his face, ready to say more, but
before I could there was a light click outside the bedroom door as
someone walked into the sitting room. “Brianna?”

“
Just a minute,” I called to
Emily. “I’ll be right there.”

I crawled over Logan and he caught my hand,
sitting up to face me where I stood by the bed. “More questions?” I
asked.

“
Just one,” he
whispered.

I bit my lip, trying not to grin. “What?”

His eyes fell to my mouth,
then rose slowly to meet mine. “In our vision,”
our
vision, the one where we’d kissed,
“what else do I do to you?”

I blushed, cheeks heating at his words, his
slow grin, and he pulled me to him, kissing me soft, slow, and
deliberate.

When he drew back, I brought my lips to his
ear. “It’s all a surprise from here.” His hands tightened on my
waist and I added, “Now get out before my sister thinks there’s
something going on in here.”

He chuckled, giving me one last squeeze
before he let me go.

I took a quick shower, throwing on jeans and
a soft cotton shirt before joining the others. I was sitting on the
edge of the sofa lacing up my boots when the vision came again, so
my landing was softer, but the shock of it hit just as hard.
“Brianna,” Emily called, but I didn’t see her face. I saw the
dark-haired man, GQ, a pair of hands pressed against his bare chest
as he screamed out in pain. It was only a blip, a brief flash of
image, and I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Or why.

“
What is it?” Emily said,
and I opened my eyes to see her face, the one person who could save
us.

“
I don’t know,” I whispered.
“But we’re running out of time.”

We were sitting on the couch, Logan perched
on a chair beside us, when Aern came in. He didn’t look happy, and
Logan met him at the desk across from us to go over the Council’s
new Intel.

“
He’s got thirty more men
posted here,” Aern explained, pointing at the documents now spread
over the desk. “And Kara’s team reported a group of uniformed men
here.”

“
Uniformed?” Logan
asked.

Aern nodded. “This isn’t like him. And he’s
gathering too many men to be predictable.”

“
What are these?” Logan said
as he pointed to another section of pages.

“
Fires.” Aern flipped
through a stack of photos, laid out three or four. “Explosions here
and here, straight fire there.”

Fire. Aern and Emily, and
fire
. There was another push. I pulled my
hand free of my sister’s, wiped the palm on my jeans. “This isn’t
working. I need to try something else.” I returned my hand to hers
as she listened, waiting for instruction. “When you connected with
Aern, how did it feel to set the bond, what did you do to start it
into place?”

“
I told you, I don’t know,”
she said. “I didn’t
do
anything. It just felt right; it felt like we were linked.
Secure.”

“
She said it was like lacing
up sneakers,” Aern called over his shoulder. Emily narrowed her
eyes at his back and he turned, winked at her.

“
How did you know it was the
bond?” I asked.

She stared at me. “Because of the
prophecy.”

“
You expected it,” I said.
“Do you think you could do it again, if I told you it would
work?”

“
We’re already connected,
Bri.”

I shook my head. “Not Aern, try it with
Logan.”

The men stopped talking to look at us, the
two of them and Emily frozen at my words. “I don’t think …” Emily
started after a heavy silence.

“
There,” I said. “That tug
right there, when you get protective of Aern.” A flash of
indignation crossed her features and I felt it again. “Yes.
There.”

Without taking my eyes from her, I said,
“Logan, that thing we’ve been working on, try it on Aern.”

Emily’s eyes flicked from me to the men,
back. There was nothing we’d been working on, and I didn’t know if
Logan could guess my intention, but he moved. And it was enough to
make Emily believe.

It shifted again, the tiniest impression in
her bonds. “There. I think I’ve got it.” I glanced at Logan,
smiled.

Emily leaned forward to whisper, “That was
mean,” and I laughed.

“
Hush,” I said. “I need to
concentrate.” I closed my eyes, feeling along the threads that had
wavered, and then followed them, examining their connections and
comparing them to my own. It didn’t make any sense, didn’t explain
why Emily’s powers had only worked on the bond with Aern, why mine
could already free the powers to heal for the others, the ability
to shield on Wesley. “Wait,” I said. “Wait, wait, wait.”

I opened my eyes, staring at the lines
crossing my wrists, wounds overlapping the tattoos. And I had it.
The connections I needed weren’t threads, they were a network, a
spider web of contacts that had been disrupted, the way they’d been
disrupted in the others. Bound and severed. Disconnected.

“
They did this to us,” I
whispered.

“
Who?” Emily
asked.

“
The shadows.
Our kind
.”

She gaped at me, unwilling to understand.
“What are you talking about?”

“
This isn’t natural, there’s
something, some reason we were stopped … separated from our
powers.”

She glanced at the men, both
of us knowing they were different. The letter hadn’t fully
explained, but the Seven Lines’ power had been taken long ago,
stolen from their ancestors thousands of years back. Ours, ours had
been robbed from
us
. And no one would have the power to do that except a shadow.
One of our kind.

Emily stared at me, gaze beseeching, begging
for it not to have been our own mother.

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter now.
Morgan, that’s what matters now. We can do this, Emily. We have the
key.”

Chapter Nineteen

Time

All this time, the whole of
my life, I’d thought the Seven Lines were the powerful ones. I
could see the future, bits and flashes of warning, but
they
held the power. Emily
was the chosen, I the prophet. And we would save them.

Things were just not turning out that way at
all.

It was time. Now that I knew how to repair
the connections in Emily, the moment she was strong enough, we’d
have to go after Morgan. Every minute we waited was one more chance
for him to use that power, one more life he could destroy. It was
the risk that the rest of them would find out the truth, that the
Seven Lines would lose the anonymity that kept things from getting
out of control.

I mended another link, joined another
disconnected fiber, and Emily said, “So, when you’re done, then I
have to figure out how to use it.”

Behind closed eyes, I answered, “It won’t be
as hard as you think. Once it’s there, you’ll know, it will be a
part of you.”

“
And I’ll just break
someone’s sway, and then we’ll go find a human to test it out
on.”

I shook my head, focusing hard on the
smallest of the threads, the tiny fibers that coupled with her
bond. “I don’t think that’s the best idea. We should probably keep
this experiment in a controlled environment.”

“
So, you’re thinking order a
pizza, snatch up the delivery guy?”

I opened my eyes to look at her, face pinched
and knee hopping with the rhythmic bounce of her foot. “I don’t
know, Em. We’ll figure it out.” I wasn’t sure if she felt the
urgency, felt it the way I felt it, or if it was just the idea of
waiting when it was so close. I drew back, searching inside my own
threads, suddenly convinced I’d been wrong about the bond with
Aern. If its purpose was to protect him, then it didn’t make sense
that I’d seen the fire in my visions. But I hesitated, because
Emily had been gone in those visions, cut down before the flames
tore through the city.

“
Bri,” Emily asked, “are you
okay?”

I shook my head absently. “Yeah, I just ... I
think I need a break.”

Aern checked his watch. “We’ve got a meeting
at eleven, some of the Division men.” He glanced at Emily, back at
me. “If you feel up to it.”

I nodded, mentally binding one more piece in
place before the process, the throbbing in my head, became too
much.

Aern gathered the documents, sliding them
into one neat folder before crossing to Emily and me. He put a hand
on my shoulder. “I’ll have Ava send up some food. If there’s
anything else you need …”

“
Thanks, and I’ll be fine.”
The three of them tried to hide their concern, but I could feel it,
suffocating. “Really,” I said. “Go do your thing.”

The corner of Aern’s mouth turned up, and he
gave my shoulder a pat before he and Emily left the room. Logan
moved to sit beside me, drawing me against him for the twenty
minutes or so I had for a nap. When I woke, there were sandwiches
and tea waiting on a small white platter that sat on the end table,
and my head was resting in his lap.

“
You’ve got about five
minutes,” he said when he saw me squinting one eye open to check. I
squeezed it back shut, not quite recovered but not wanting to miss
the meeting if there was a chance it would spark a
vision.

Logan ran a finger across my temple. “How’s
your head?”

“
Better,” I promised. I
wondered about Emily, if I’d made enough connections for her to
feel the change. “Five minutes?”

“
They’ll wait on
you.”

“
It’s all right. I can do
it.” I sat up, pulling my hair into a low ponytail, and reached for
a section of the quartered sandwich. “Logan,” I vowed, “if this all
works out, I’m going to lock myself in a room for a three day
sleep-cation.”

He smiled, stretched a leg over the carpet.
“I’m right there with you.”

The others had already assembled in one of
the conference rooms, a dozen or so Division soldiers including
Kara, Seth, and Eric. They stood randomly scattered about the room,
talking, but when Logan and I entered, they began making their way
to the leather chairs that circled the dark glass table.

Wesley surprised me by the door, his familiar
face somehow changed, older in the few weeks I’d not seen him. I
drew in a breath before greeting him.

“
Brianna,” he replied
warmly. His voice was more confident than I remembered, stronger
despite the thin white scars that ran the length of his
neck.

I resisted the urge to reach out to him in
front of our audience, to run a finger over what was left of the
damage. “Wesley,” I whispered. “Are you okay?”

He shrugged it off, his smile more of an
assurance than any words could be, and I realized that he was here,
at a meeting of Division and Council soldiers. My gaze flicked to
Aern, scanned the room again, but I couldn’t determine exactly
which team he was on, where he fit in. “Where’s Brendan?” I
whispered.

Wesley’s chin tilted down, the boy I’d known
suddenly returning, and said, “He … well, he’s not really feeling
up to this yet.”

I stared into Wesley’s eyes, knowing the
answer went deeper, his hesitation implying much more. I was struck
with an image, something not quite a vision, not quite right.
Brendan, head down as he sat at his desk, a desk at the Westlake
house, waving off a fretful Ellin as she tried to offer him a cup
of hot tea. His face was scarred, but not like Wesley’s. This was
worse, much worse, as the skin that covered one side of his face
and most of his ear was raw, even with the healing. I placed a hand
absently over my cheek, as if feeling the damage, and Wesley
nodded.