Roselle stared back at me, cool and collected. “We’re not friends, Ms Jules, no matter the relationship you may have had with my Walker. You and I have barely said a few sentences to each other, so please don’t imagine to know me.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, watching her face closely. “That was just polite conversation, but it’s good to know the real Roselle has a stick up her ass.” With that, I nodded once and moved around the haughty expression she gave me to peruse the different books at the end of the room. I had only seen a study like this in King Collins’s office. It was weird that he and the One may have something in common.
I found a small, ancient book on Shadows and very carefully pulled it out, delicately opening the creaking front cover, merely to shriek when the damn rickety thing flew into the air when the One’s voice spoke quietly behind me. Breath coming in gasps, I muttered, “Shit.”
I jerked around, my head back, following the soaring book.
But I banged smack into the One, my hands flying to his bare, flexing stomach.
A jolt of stars unlike I had experienced before crashed through my mind, a force I couldn’t pull away from. The tidal wave of power took me under, and the rip-tides twirled me in a rush of recollections incomprehensibly in fast-forward. The first memory was of me, sick and racing into the study to try to convince the Rulers not to make me attend dinner with the other spirits—where I met the Walker Leric. Every subsequent memory or thought, the real and the spelled, I’d had of him or any of the Walkers was crashing through my mind in a breakneck burst. The memories gushed all the way through to breakfast this morning and me arriving at the Temple. Then suddenly the power was gone.
I groaned with illness, my head still spinning, unable to keep my body from going utterly limp. I barely noticed when the One gripped me around the waist, keeping me from falling. His voice was gruff as he barked at someone, “Get back. I’ve got her.”
Feeling ten kinds of nausea from that fucking ride and unable to say a damn thing, I didn’t argue when he gently held me and sat my person on one of the conference room chairs. He placed the left side of my face on the cool marble before releasing me. I kept my eyes shut against the swirling, jumbled mess of vertigo.
But I could still hear their conversation as I inhaled shallow breaths.
“Well?” Roselle asked.
“Everything she told us is true,” the One spewed. I heard the definite menace in his tone that had been absent since I arrived here. “Every goddamn bit of it.” Something shattered in his wake, and he growled, “That mother-fucker is dead.”
“We’ll get him.” Roselle’s voice was instantly soothing, yet clipped and affirmative. “You know we will, so you might want to sit and calm yourself.”
“Christ, Roselle,” he muttered. “I don’t need to be coddled right now. I need a fucking knife in my hand and the bastard’s throat embedded on it.”
“How the hell did this happen?” Reese growled quietly, closer to me and pissed the hell off. “How did we have our essence stolen without any of us knowing?”
Roselle muttered, “We obviously slipped somewhere with distraction or drinking or sex or sleeping, who the fuck knows, but the point is, we became too lax and let a psychopath take a part of us to play with in his own demented time.”
I tried blinking my eyes open, listening to Reese and Roselle argue heatedly about becoming too sloppy in their vigilance. I stared at the bookshelf, blinking repeatedly until the freaking thing stopped spinning on me and the books remained upright. My stomach settled, and I placed my hands on the table, gently pushing myself to sit upright on the chair. The book I had started to look at was in front of me, along with a glass of water. I blinked until my gaze landed on the One’s profile. He stood staring out the dark windows, not participating in the discussion between his commanders.
A hundred foul names to call him rushed through my mind. I said not one.
I sipped from my glass, glaring…but a kernel of respect for the man flared to life.
Because he kind of reminded me of…myself.
His actions were what I would have done were the situation reversed. We were not about to just blindly trust what others said, knowing when to fight dirty, and doing it.
His eyes flicked in my direction, then back to where he stared unseeingly through the window. “Are you feeling better, Ms Jules?”
“Yes.” I took another small sip of my drink.
He made a simple statement on a small growl with no apology. “I like to be prepared.”
“Yes, so you’ve said.” I sat my glass down. “But should you ever do that again, when it’s not warranted, I will hurt you.”
Roselle paused in her speech, glancing at me. “You put your hands on him.”
I tapped my fingers on the table. “I did say warranted, in case you missed that part unless, as well as that stick up your ass, you’ve also got a hearing problem I need to know about?”