Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,37
other people, sensing shifts in feelings and internal orientations along a three-dimensional grid pattern, the highs and lows plotted along axes. Everyone had such a superstructure. Doggen, regular vampires, Shadows—even symphaths, although most of Xhex and Rehv’s kind could hide their structures from others of the subspecies. What was impossible—or should have been impossible—was for an individual to have two grids. In fact, Xhex had never seen such as thing…
Until she had met John Matthew, her hellren.
He had what was a bog-standard grid, just like everyone else, but there was something behind it, a shadow superstructure. It was like a mirror image of the primary grid, and the emotions were always plotted the same on both, the two working not in concert but identically.
To this night, Xhex had no idea what it meant.
At least not for sure.
She had her suspicions, however, ones that were too private and personal for her to share with anybody except John, but also ones that were too shattering for her to share with him. The truth was, she had started to wonder whether John was more connected with his father, Darius, than just on a sire/son basis. Except that was impossible, right? Reincarnation didn’t happen.
Really. It didn’t…
Yeah, except how else would anyone reconcile an identical copy of Trez’s dead shellan—who had a grid like that?
“I don’t want to hear it, okay.”
At the sound of the terse male voice, she didn’t bother shifting her eyes away from the female who was walking out of the club. “Where did you meet her?”
“I’m not talking about her.”
“She looks like Selena.”
“Really,” he groused. “I hadn’t noticed. And I am not—”
“I think she’s Selena.”
As he froze where he stood, she wanted to slap herself. The guy was broken by grief, and therefore primed to do things that were not in his best interest with a female who looked like that. In spite of the grid issue. Or maybe because of it.
Xhex shook her head. “I didn’t mean that—”
“What do you see?” he demanded. He took her arm in a hard grip. “Xhex, what do you know?”
The sense that they were being watched made her glance around—and yes, there it was. In the far corner of the club, a dense shadow that couldn’t be explained by any objects blocking any of the light. But it wasn’t the Omega. It was not evil. It wasn’t even a shadow.
It was an optical illusion thrown up so someone standing behind it was not seen.
And she had a feeling who it was.
And why they were here.
An abrupt sense of peacefulness came over her.
“What do you see?” Trez put her face in his. “Tell me.”
The way the male’s voice broke, the desperation in his face, the painful cast of his eyes, made Xhex abruptly hug him. How could she not? His suffering had been indescribable, but the end was in sight. She knew this without a doubt.
Holding him close, Xhex said in his ear, “It’s going to be okay.”
“What is?”
As she eased back from her old friend, from her dear friend, she reached up to his face. “All is as it should be.”
“What does that mean.”
Xhex stared up at the male. Putting her hand on his heart, she opened herself to fully read his grid. It was the kind of thing she hadn’t been able to do before now, and not because he locked her out. She loved him like a brother, and his loss was so painful that getting too close to his emotions, in the way of her kind, was agony.
Like putting her entire body on a red-hot grill—
Sucking a breath in through her teeth, Xhex trembled. His pain was a tidal wave that stung her very marrow, and she had to brace herself to absorb the enormity of it. But she owed him this.
Before she spoke, her eyes skipped to that corner of the club, to the shadow that was present, but couldn’t technically exist.
“Do you know what you feel in here?” she whispered as she rubbed over his heart.
“What?”
“In here.” She pressed in. “Here in your core.” When he started to shake his head, she talked over his questions, his desperation. “Listen to me. You can trust this. Do you understand what I am saying? You can trust what is in here.”
Trez swallowed hard. When his eyes went to the roof high above, she knew he wasn’t looking at anything. He was trying to keep tears from falling, here in this public place, with so many humans and staff around.