help himself; he struggled, and the brambles savaged his feathers.
Stop fighting! He’ll hear you!
Who is “he”?
The wind went silent.
Jay needed to be something sturdier.
He had to slow down. He had to be so patient. He had to wait and gather his shell.
The turtle fell through the brambles, tossed this way and that, but he hid inside his armor until he hit the ground beneath the lowest spines.
It was cold down here, making him even slower, but that was fine.
The turtle was cautious.
The turtle could wait.
He lumbered, seeking something different in the darkness … but found only deeper darkness, choking night … silence.…
CHAPTER 8
“JAY?”
He leaned toward the voice.
“Jay, wake up or I’m going to kill you.”
Jay followed the voice—which was as much magic as sound—back toward his brother. When he opened his eyes, he found Vireo looking pale and shaken, and Caryn flushed with relief.
“How long was I out?” he asked.
No one answered him. They probably assumed they didn’t need to. But he got nothing. He couldn’t hear a thing anyone wasn’t saying.
Unsettling.
They were both staring at him, waiting for him to say something.
He wasn’t with the shapeshifter anymore but in another SingleEarth medical room, where he had been given a bed of his own. He tried to push himself up, and realized that he was hurt.
“Be careful,” Caryn said. “I couldn’t heal it all. Your magic fought back when I tried.”
The clothes he had been wearing earlier were gone, replaced by light cloth pajama pants like those they gave out in hospitals. He didn’t have a shirt on, and there were bandages on his chest. And not just bandages but stitches, holding together wounds in the meat of his chest and shoulders.
He remembered the thorns cutting into him. Though the brambles themselves may have been an illusion or fantasy, they apparently represented a real, physical attack.
“What happened?” Vireo asked.
“I don’t know. How long was I unconscious?”
“A couple hours,” Vireo answered. “I called for Caryn’s help when I couldn’t reach you mentally and you started to bleed. It took us about an hour to get you stabilized. I take it you’re pretty mind-deaf right now?”
Jay nodded. He was too exhausted to hear anything specific in the noise around him, like listening for a whisper after spending hours in a noisy nightclub. Whatever he had touched minds with, it was far bigger than any shapeshifter.
“So …,” Vireo said. “I hate to ask while you’re still in your sickbed, but did you learn anything useful about our other patient?”
Jay paused to reflect on his experience.
“There is someone, a ‘he,’ that she is afraid of. I think her being unconscious may be a way of hiding from him. She has an elaborate trap in her mind set up to keep her hidden. I got caught in it when I tried to find her.”
“We should probably let Jay rest,” Caryn interjected. “Jay, do you need anything?”
He shook his head. He knew someone who might know more about their mysterious patient, but there was no point in explaining his intent to Caryn and Vireo. They would want him to be careful, by which they would mean, “Stay in bed and don’t go seeking flirtatious vampires.” Considering how many semi-legal and life-endangering escapades Caryn had engaged in, Jay resented her belief that he should be careful … but he knew better than to challenge her.
Thankfully, Vireo not only could shield himself against others’ thoughts in a way Jay had never been able to, he considered it polite to do so, so he didn’t hear anything inconvenient, and Jay didn’t get any comments from either of them on his decision to find Xeke again.
Jay didn’t have a choice. He had found the shapeshifter behind Xeke’s apartment. Xeke might know who she was.
Besides, it would be fun to see him again.
“I’m good.”
Vireo squeezed his shoulder on the way out. “I was worried about you,” he admitted.
Jay shrugged, not sure how to respond. “I’m okay,” he said.
“Yeah. But I’m the one who asked you to do it, and, well, just be careful with yourself.”
With that said, Vireo left quickly. For a man who had dedicated his life to meddling with others’ minds, Vireo wasn’t comfortable with his own emotional insides.
Once alone, Jay used the phone by his bed to call a SingleEarth secretary, who told him that they had no direct contact information for Xeke but suggested that he try the vampire’s club, a place in Boston called The Market.
Information offered two phone numbers matching that description. The first seemed