Page 205 of Hunters and Prey

Giving me another sideways look, his sculpted lips firm, the male seer added,

“I would very much like to know what created these marks.”

Luric, an East Indian-looking seer with a sprinkling of gray at the temples of his wavy dark hair, and striking purple eyes that somehow matched his features perfectly, had already bandaged up my foot.

He’d started there, he explained, because the cut was deeper, and it was still bleeding.

With that done, maybe he’d felt like he had more time to question me, and to examine the strange mark on my arm.

“My head hurts, too,” I informed him.

Luric looked up from the bite, those purple eyes sharp.

“Where?” he said.

I touched the back of my head, wincing at the lump there.

He stepped around behind me, and began feeling over the back of my head.

I winced and gritted my teeth as he did.

Black hung back, leaning against a counter by the wall, letting the tech work, but from the look on his face, he hated this. He hated just standing there, not knowing anything. More than hating the process of my exam, or even how useless I was at explaining anything about what happened to me, he hated how helpless he felt.

I blew warmth at him, trying to calm him down.

His eyes met mine.

I didn’t see much relaxation of tension there.

I was sitting on an exam table in the company’s research suite on the sixty-second floor, just below the lobby. The labs had been eating up more space on that floor lately, according to Black, and they were already asking for more room. The research wing of the house was one of the reasons Black was considering kicking out more tenants on the lower floors.

He wanted to move the labs to a floor of their own.

I suspected he wanted to do the same with his new seer infiltration unit.

Since I’d gotten in here, they’d scraped my skin for soil samples, taken samples of my hair, photographed all of my injuries… the new ones, at least… taken blood and saliva samples, and even had me breathe into a machine to check the air in my lungs when they heard me coughing.

I hadn’t really realized how filthy I was until I watched them go over me with a fine-toothed comb.

Now, as Luric probed the lump on the back of my head, I could practically feel the seer tech frowning. I could also feel him using his sight––both kinds, that is––to examine the injury, along with his fingers.

“You got hit back here,” he said, after a pause. “Hard. The area is swollen.”

Glancing at Black over my shoulder, he added,

“This is even more recent than the bite. I would guess this just happened, from the rate of swelling. As in, right before you came back. If you are right about losing consciousness and acute stress or trauma-triggers being participating factors in these ‘jumps,’ it might be the cause of your return. Either way, you show all of the signs of both fleeing through a jungle-like environment, and having been in a fight. Your bruised knuckles…”

He pointed to my hands.

“…The bite on your arm. The bruise patterns on the rest of your body. The blunt force trauma to the back of your head…”

I nodded, but didn’t answer.

There wasn’t a lot I could say.

I didn’t remember a damned thing.

I remembered watching Kung Fu movies with Angel.

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