Page 24 of The Firebrand
The witch threw locked arms around Braelyn, pressing lips to her ear. “He is a special male. Be gentle with his heart. It’s big and mushy. But when he growls, bite him.”
Rein’s eyes narrowed, piercing both women. “Since I have no choice, I’ll take the female with me. Call if there’s news.”
Braelyn flung goodbyes over her shoulder as Rein dragged her along, two steps to his one.
Good thing I have on running shoes.
ChapterSix
Indigofiddled with her clunky boots, tugging up her thick socks while she waited for the door to close behind Rein and Braelyn. Her gaze flipped to Alarik as he opened his desk drawer to extract a green telephone. His hotline to the Alliance’s board of directors. Cells didn’t work for realm-to-realm calls since the Whorl messed with the signals. Sat phones were iffy. Her nephew, in a rare talkative moment, blabbed that D-chips worked just fine.
“Who ya calling, bro-bro?”
Finger up, he gave her the wait-a-minute signal.
Irritating.
As she eavesdropped on his end of the conversation, she plopped her boots onto the empty chair, the untied laces trailing to the side.
“We have a problem. Braelyn James is on Scath. She ran across my son, Rein, when he was Earthside, but he could not wipe her memory. His solution was to bring her here.”
Alarik tapped a pen on the desktop while he listened.
“She is safe. Unhurt. My son asked me to test her blood. I did.”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“What will I find?”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“Hmm.” Alarik stiffened. “Rein suggested a spell to scrub her memory. Dangerous business. You must deal with this.”
After a long pause, Alarik hung up the phone.
Indigo stared at her brother, who returned to straightening his desk. “Trouble in paradise?”
“Perhaps.”
“I saw her.” Indigo blew on her nails while eyeing Alarik through the veil of her lashes. He quirked a brow.
She was not clairvoyant. As Rein said, no mage possessed that power. Indigo’s talent, though, was special. Only she, among all Aeternals, read the River Am.
The beautiful but deadly river was linked to her soul. From its different shores—grassy banks, rocky cliffs, heavily treed slopes, pebbled edges, sandy beaches—wherever she plopped her ass, it spoke to her.
The Yore Stream was a narrow waterway, a multitude of rivulets, tributaries flowing into bogs of mist and shadows. Its events were stable, set in time, accurate records of what had been. Some history drew a smile to her lips; some brought tears streaming down her cheeks. Children had been born; grandparents had died. Crops had flourished. Drought had shriveled cornfields. Demons had fallen victim to a Firebrand’s sword. Evil had slain innocence. Jeweled crowns had sat on the heads of incubus kings and succubus queens. Mates had made love to their females under winking skies. Yesterday could not be changed. It was complete. For good. Or for bad.
If she squared her shoulders, pointed her gaze forward, she stared at the Current Floodplain. It was a wide, slow mixture of water fed by the untold forks above it. Here, events of the present unfolded before drifting into the past. Despite its turbulent making, this part of the river was also unchangeable, immutable.
What drove her whack-a-doodle, made her a Rorschach test flunky? Upstream. The countless eddies. Whirlpools gyrated in wild arcs, in downward circles. In these spinning vortices of the Chance Rapids, she glimpsed thousands of futures. After she sifted through the swirling froth, the murky undercurrents, the roiling, turbid possibilities, she warned Alarik as well as other officials of potential danger. But the undertaking was literally mind-blowing because only a single possible future churned into the present.
That one. No. That one. Maybe that one.
In one of these innumerable maelstroms, she had seen Braelyn.
Alarik was alert, no more fascination with boring studies, columns of numbers, or data reports from spellcasters on his payroll. “You saw the human female? Explain.”
Indigo held up a finger.
