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“I figured. Where did all of that come from? The head…exploding thing? One of your mother’s enchantress powers?”

He paused. “More or less. More accurately I suppose it was my version of it. I was very upset. I had recently taken all the power The Grove had gained from your blood into me to weaken it and keep it from expanding. It was an . . . intense colligation of things with results I’m not sure I could repeat if I tried. I still have a lot to learn.”

“I see.”

“In my mother’s journals she wrote that many generations ago the Druid Circle decided that our line was cursed. The wolf’s eye is too strong combined with beast-call. An individual with that much power can’t be controlled. The Arch himself went to seize the head of our house for execution but ended up marrying her instead and making her Arch in his place soon after.”

“That tracks,” I said wryly.

“I thought that would amuse you. And it was an enlightening story. I can see why she kept the nature of our other powers so secretive, even from me, though it will be hard to do the same with Conan.”

“Telepathy, huh?”

We were quiet for a time. He had moved closer to me on the bed and held my hand like it might break. “How long was I out this time?” I asked him.

“It’s been just over a week since you were last conscious. Sloan told me I only missed you by two minutes.”

I squeezed his hand comfortingly. “I’ll try not to stay away so long anymore. I think it’s just my mind’s way of trying to heal from the ordeal.”

“When my parents died, they died together. I don’t know the details, no one alive does. All that was found of them were their heads mounted on spikes side by side at the gates of the enemy’s keep. But I always wondered if they really died together or if one was taken from this life and the other followed willingly. If they let themselves be killed to stay together.

“That’s how I felt when you were taken, when I felt some of what was happening to you, when I thought I might be too late—”

He had to pause for a moment to collect himself.

“And then I saw you like that, so close to death, and I knew. A true tie of fate is a noose, and I felt it tighten as you became more mortal at their hands. If they’d taken you from this realm I would have followed you into the next one.” He was weeping quietly.

“Don’t say that. What about Conan?”

“Someday he would have understood, as I have come to. He’ll find his mate, and they will be the other half of his soul and he will understand that this life isn’t worth living without them.”

“Well, we’ll both just have to stay alive then, won’t we?” I said emotionally just before the darkness pulled me under again.

When something truly horrific happens to us it is more than the memory of pain that remains at first. It is anguish. It is the feeling of it all over again with just a thought, triggered easily by just the wrong word or memory. It was the sad reality of reaching for a smile and finding it forced, of reliving it all again with one short blink. I’d born many unpleasant things in my long life, and so I knew that this sort of thing would fade for me with time, but that made it no easier to bear in the real raw reality of the now.

I tried to hide it, tried my hardest, in fact, because the fact was I was mortified that spending a few days with my body inside out may have broken my spirit.

I was healing, though, slowly as it was, and I took heart in that. I was awake more and more, even started receiving visitors, though Dom limited it to short visits, one at a time.

It was never more apparent than when Christian came to see me that I just wasn’t myself. His unfailing good nature, his endless sense of humor, made my fragile state impossible to ignore, at least on the inside.

“I guess you haven’t heard, being unconscious and all,” Christian told me, his voice pitched low like someone was listening in and he didn’t want to be heard. “Dom went on an unholy rampage against the English slayers. No, scratch that, it was more like a holy war.”

I was a bit surprised to hear it named like that, an all-out war, though I shouldn’t have been. The way Dom had found me, I might have been more surprised if he hadn’t gone to war over it.

It was during these visits with Christian that I remembered bits about myself. Like, oh yeah, I used to be funny. Humor was a thing I used to enjoy.

And so I would throw out a few obligatory insults, jokes, and get the reaction that made me feel better, because if I could fake it, then it was still in there somewhere, that old me, and I’d find her again, eventually.

Caleb was, ironically, easier to take. I didn’t have to pretend things were normal in front of his dead, judgement-free eyes. Being friends with a cold-blooded alien had its perks.

Sven was somber, and it seemed to pain him a bit to even be in my vicinity. He squirmed in the chair beside my bed, could hardly look at me.

Being a telepath could be brutal, I was sure.

“Don’t let Conan near you until you’re better, okay? Just trust me on this.”

I had already figured as much, so I just nodded.