Chapter 15
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C yan opened her eyes, staring around cautiously.
Everything hurt as if she’d run a marathon and had collapsed to some concrete pavement afterward.
She glanced around and saw Steele still out on the ground beside her.
A second glance around confirmed they were in the woods, and it was getting darker by the minute.
She had no idea how long they had been unconscious, but they needed to get back to safety and fast.
Again, she saw no sign of the attacker. She had caught just a faint breath of his energy but not enough to sense where he was right now, and that concerned her too. Because if somebody had the ability to knock them both out like that, no way in hell she would let them get anywhere near Terk.
And, of course, she’d been off-center ever since she had first found Steele in these woods.
Off-center, out of sync, and not quite fully back after sending so much of her own healing energy through him.
Energy that had then opened pathways she hadn’t expected, exposing her to his thought processes and to his history.
She didn’t want that. She could barely control her own emotions, and now his had been shared with her too.
No wonder she’d been bitchy most of the time.
She had no way to block out everything coming from him, and she’d been trying hard to keep some semblance of control, even as she realized he had no idea she could access his life in ways she wished she couldn’t.
It’s not as if she’d done it on purpose.
It was just a side effect of her energy work as she had tried to keep him alive.
Yet this two-way stuff had never happened before. Not like this.
She could only think it was because they’d linked years ago at that accident scene to help those poor people.
Their energy, reconnecting now, was already familiar with each other.
Almost instantly his memories of that same accident filled her mind.
His emotions, the pain, the grief, the empathy for the victims and yet the respect, the caring about her energy and her own psyche in those hours of shared chaos.
But now, here she was, in another strange scenario, getting even stranger after she had sent healing energy into him after that first attack.
She had been flooded with his thoughts and emotions even then.
Yet she had to ignore them, had to keep sending her healing energy into him, as his energy poured out of his feet.
Shaking her head, she wondered what would happen this time, when she healed him a second round.
She had to send more of her healing energy to him. She could easily take the blame for this one herself. But that first healing session? She’d been off track, trying to keep him from understanding what she had seen, assuming he wouldn’t be happy that she had seen it.
The rest of his history?… Good Lord. She’d thought her own was bad, but his was just plain dark. A sad darkness at that. If she dwelled on that, it would break her, and she couldn’t afford that right now.
She glanced around. Seeing nothing, she crouched at Steele’s side and whispered, “Hey, wake up. I need you awake.” She heard her own sense of sadness in her tone. She hadn’t expected that. Not after all this time. Yet here he was. And she was just a stranger to him.
He groaned ever-so-slightly.
“Yeah, we were attacked again.”
He opened his eyes and stared at her, and then an awareness entered his gaze and ripped through him, and he lurched up in a panic.
She held him back. “Save it, tiger. He’s gone, or at least I can’t see him anywhere.
He didn’t kill us, and, given how that went down, he probably could have.
As much as I know you want to go after him, you’ve taken another blow to the head.
I don’t see that this one is draining you quite like the other one did, but you still need some recuperation time. ”