Rage and Ruin by Jennifer L. Armentrout Page 0,152

but the moment one of us got the other on the mat, we ended up staying there, kissing, touching, until Peanut drifted into the room and then back out, screaming something about his eyes.

When we’d started patrolling, I’d wondered if it would be weird to hold his hand as we walked. I hadn’t quite worked up the nerve to do that.

But we hadn’t spent the whole day training or making out. We’d planned for the Harbinger. I had come to accept that Zayne had been right all those days ago, when he’d said we wouldn’t find the Harbinger until he wanted to be found. Once he came around again, we needed to get him to talk, because if we took him out, we wouldn’t know what was going on with Bael and the senator and those spirits trapped in the school. And if the Harbinger had been the one to set those wards, he could possibly be the only one able to break them. So, we needed to make ourselves available.

We needed to be alert.

And we needed to be patient.

The latter was not a part of my skill set.

Under Zayne’s watchful eyes, I was treating the narrow ledge of the building as if it were a balance beam. I thought that perhaps he had about four separate heart attacks each time I misstepped.

“Do you really need to do that?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“The correct answer would be no.”

Grinning, I pivoted like a ballerina, eliciting a harsh curse from Zayne. “It’s practice. That’s what I’m doing.”

“Practice for what? Earning a new world record for how many times you can make my heart stop?”

“Besides that, it helps me work on my balance when I can’t see.”

“And that can’t be done when you’re not several hundred feet in the air?”

“Nope. Because I can’t mess up when I’m up here. Down there, nothing bad would happen if I fell.”

“That would be the point,” he replied dryly.

“Don’t be such a worrywart. I know exactly how wide this is. Nine inches.” I carefully made my way back to him and stopped a couple feet away. I looked down, unable to see the width of the ledge or the shape of my boots. “The ledge is like my field of vision. Well, except the edges here are straight and not like a wonky circle where things are sometimes clear and sometimes blurry. Everything else is...” I lifted my arms. “Shadows. It’s weird, because sometimes it’s not even black. It’s like gray. I don’t know. That might be the cataracts.”

“Do you think it’s possible to get them removed?”

“My eyes?”

“The cataracts.” He sighed.

I grinned again. “The last doctor I saw said they were actually protecting my retinas in a way, and until they’re causing a real problem, they wanted to hold off on talking about surgery. There are a lot more risks involved with operating on people who have RP, and more possible side effects.”

“I hate to think what might classify as a real problem.”

I snorted, thinking that while I’d adapted the best I could to the restricted vision, the cataracts often annoyed the Hell out of me. “If they cause a lot of pain or fully obstruct my central vision, I guess.”

“But you said your eyes hurt before.”

“Yeah, but it’s manageable. More of an achy feeling and that probably has nothing to do with the cataracts. I mean, not directly. I do think I need to have my eyes checked, though.” Tipping my head back, I looked up at the sky. It took me a moment to see the distant, faint glow of one star and then another. “I had edemas once before. They could come back.”

“Macular edemas? The swelling behind the retinas?” he asked, surprising me once more with his own independent research. “That could be what’s causing your eyes to ache. We need to make an appointment. Call Thierry and see if the doctor they took you to could hook you up with someone closer, like the Wilmer Eye Institute over in Baltimore. They’re a part of Johns Hopkins.”

He really had done his research.

“We’ll just have to be careful,” he continued. “As long as there’s no genetic testing—”

“They’ll have no idea I’m not completely human.” I lowered my arms, inching closer to Zayne. “Though, can you imagine if they did test? The look on the geneticists’ faces when they got an eyeful of my DNA?”

He laughed. “They’d probably think you’re an alien.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in aliens.”

“I never said that. I just said it wasn’t likely those