He chuckled, giving me one last squeeze before he let me go.
I took a quick shower, throwing on jeans and a soft cotton shirt before joining the others. I was sitting on the edge of the sofa lacing up my boots when the vision came again, so my landing was softer, but the shock of it hit just as hard. “Brianna,” Emily called, but I didn’t see her face. I saw the dark-haired man, GQ, a pair of hands pressed against his bare chest as he screamed out in pain. It was only a blip, a brief flash of image, and I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Or why.
“What is it?” Emily said, and I opened my eyes to see her face, the one person who could save us.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “But we’re running out of time.”
We were sitting on the couch, Logan perched on a chair beside us, when Aern came in. He didn’t look happy, and Logan met him at the desk across from us to go over the Council’s new Intel.
“He’s got thirty more men posted here,” Aern explained, pointing at the documents now spread over the desk. “And Kara’s team reported a group of uniformed men here.”
“Uniformed?” Logan asked.
Aern nodded. “This isn’t like him. And he’s gathering too many men to be predictable.”
“What are these?” Logan said as he pointed to another section of pages.
“Fires.” Aern flipped through a stack of photos, laid out three or four. “Explosions here and here, straight fire there.”
Fire. Aern and Emily, and fire. There was another push. I pulled my hand free of my sister’s, wiped the palm on my jeans. “This isn’t working. I need to try something else.” I returned my hand to hers as she listened, waiting for instruction. “When you connected with Aern, how did it feel to set the bond, what did you do to start it into place?”
“I told you, I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t do anything. It just felt right; it felt like we were linked. Secure.”
“She said it was like lacing up sneakers,” Aern called over his shoulder. Emily narrowed her eyes at his back and he turned, winked at her.
“How did you know it was the bond?” I asked.
She stared at me. “Because of the prophecy.”
“You expected it,” I said. “Do you think you could do it again, if I told you it would work?”
“We’re already connected, Bri.”
I shook my head. “Not Aern, try it with Logan.”
The men stopped talking to look at us, the two of them and Emily frozen at my words. “I don’t think …” Emily started after a heavy silence.
“There,” I said. “That tug right there, when you get protective of Aern.” A flash of indignation crossed her features and I felt it again. “Yes. There.”
Without taking my eyes from her, I said, “Logan, that thing we’ve been working on, try it on Aern.”
Emily’s eyes flicked from me to the men, back. There was nothing we’d been working on, and I didn’t know if Logan could guess my intention, but he moved. And it was enough to make Emily believe.
It shifted again, the tiniest impression in her bonds. “There. I think I’ve got it.” I glanced at Logan, smiled.
Emily leaned forward to whisper, “That was mean,” and I laughed.
“Hush,” I said. “I need to concentrate.” I closed my eyes, feeling along the threads that had wavered, and then followed them, examining their connections and comparing them to my own. It didn’t make any sense, didn’t explain why Emily’s powers had only worked on the bond with Aern, why mine could already free the powers to heal for the others, the ability to shield on Wesley. “Wait,” I said. “Wait, wait, wait.”
I opened my eyes, staring at the lines crossing my wrists, wounds overlapping the tattoos. And I had it. The connections I needed weren’t threads, they were a network, a spider web of contacts that had been disrupted, the way they’d been disrupted in the others. Bound and severed. Disconnected.
“They did this to us,” I whispered.
“Who?” Emily asked.
“The shadows. Our kind.”
She gaped at me, unwilling to understand. “What are you talking about?”
“This isn’t natural, there’s something, some reason we were stopped … separated from our powers.”
She glanced at the men, both of us knowing they were different. The letter hadn’t fully explained, but the Seven Lines’ power had been taken long ago, stolen from their ancestors thousands of years back. Ours, ours had been robbed from us. And no one would have the power to do that except a shadow. One of our kind.
Emily stared at me, gaze beseeching, begging for it not to have been our own mother.
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter now. Morgan, that’s what matters now. We can do this, Emily. We have the key.”
Chapter Nineteen
Time
All this time, the whole of my life, I’d thought the Seven Lines were the powerful ones. I could see the future, bits and flashes of warning, but they held the power. Emily was the chosen, I the prophet. And we would save them.