"Are you ready?" he asked, his gaze steady on mine.
I licked suddenly dry lips, and yet I didn’t know what it was I feared. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me because he still needed me to complete his mission.
"I would never hurt you, mission or not." He raised his hands, lightly cupping my cheeks. Electricity flared instantly, burning past my skin into my body, right down to my soul—until it felt like there were thousands of fireflies buzzing around inside me.
Then they exploded and, in the midst of the energy surge, the two separate entities that were our minds became one. In that state, what remained of the shifter’s memories and experiences were laid out before me like a picture book. The man who’d delivered the parcel was tall and powerfully built, but his face was blurry and he’d talked to the air. My father, undoubtedly, though the rat shifter had no sense of him. Then I felt the energy—an Aedh’s energy, the same sort of energy that had attacked me when the Raziq had held me captive—flowing through the shifter’s limbs, snatching away his memories, leaving huge swaths of nothingness rather than whatever conversation had followed the tall man’s arrival. I saw the tattoo on the stranger’s left shoulder as he departed—a dragon with two swords crossed across it. I saw a second tattoo—a ring of barbed wire—on his right shoulder.
Then, without warning, the contact deepened, flowing from an exchange of images to something both tempestuous and sensual—becoming a connection that went beyond mind, beyond body. It went beyond anything I’d ever felt before.
And it was a connection that was severed so abruptly I staggered backward, and would have fallen had not Azriel grabbed my arm.
I stared at him for several seconds, my breathing rapid and my heart feeling like it was about to explode out of my chest. His expression gave little away, but Valdis burned with orange fire, and it seemed to echo deep in the heart of his mismatched blue eyes.
"What the hell just happened?" I said, pulling away from his grip and taking a step back.
"Nothing," he said, voice clipped. "The connection simply became stronger than I’d intended."
"So you didn’t cause—" I paused. "—whatever the hell that was?"
"No."
"Then how did it happen? And what did happen?"
He shrugged and glanced down at the rat shifter—not letting me see his eyes, I thought. Then, as Valdis’s fire faded to blue, I realized he was simply getting himself under control. Which meant that whatever had happened had shaken him as badly as it had shaken me.
"We are Chi-linked. I did not expect it to affect the simple act of mind sharing, but it appears I was wrong."
"But that sensation was—" Erotic. A blush crept across my cheeks. Damn, I couldn’t admit that out loud. Not to a reaper. Not to him. So I simply added, "Unusual."