Esperance: (New Adult Paranormal Romance) (Heart Lines Series Book 3)

by Heather Hildenbrand

  At Indra’s, my attempt to use magic on him had startled him out of unconsciousness. I’d felt a push-back from him—almost literally—as he’d forced my awareness out of reach.

  I’d given up every time he’d protested. But I’d never actually failed. In fact, I distinctly remembered Indra herself warning me off continuing. I’d let it go at her insistence. Not because of my own failure.

  “I’m going to try it,” I said suddenly, blinking my way out of those memories and back to the present. To Mason. Who needed me and, unlike Alex, wasn’t presently putting up a fight against the prospect of receiving my help.

  I shot Koby another look, sobering at the thought of what might happen if I actually succeeded. “Will you stay close?” I asked quietly. “If I do this, I… it’s going to be rough, I think,” I said quietly.

  Kobo reached for my hand again and squeezed it. “I’ll do everything I can to lessen the burden for you.”

  My eyes went wide. “No, I didn’t mean for you to—Koby, I can’t ask you to do that,” I said, finally understanding what he meant to do.

  “This is why I’ve come here, Sam. To share this for you. To minimize your pain as you heal.”

  Koby’s eyes fastened on mine in open sincerity. I was humbled. A lump rose in my throat and I smiled, blinking at him through blurred eyes.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He gave me a final squeeze and then let go, steeping back and giving me space to get settled first. I stood beside Mason and once again, took his hand in mine. His skin was warm to the touch and soft against mine. I watched his face for some sign of recognition or movement, but there was nothing. The heart monitor continued to beep a steady rhythm.

  Rather than annoying, it was comforting. It would be the first sign that I’d either failed or succeeded. And I’d already hurt Mason more than once. I desperately wanted to make this right.

  Closing my eyes, I called the surge of magic up inside me, letting it course through my veins. I felt every inch of me come alive like a string of rope lights being flicked on one section at a time. My chest warmed first, and then one by one, my limbs: arms, legs, face, and fingertips—all of it heat and light and swirling shades of white against my closed lids.

  The longer I let it flow, the more aware I became of the other energies inside the room. Koby to my left, his aural field white and yellow. A combination that felt like pure love and loyalty. And finally Mason. Muted. Sleeping.

  I steadied my own energy, careful to keep it hovering just at the edges of my own hands, and went to work.

  Mason’s breathing remained steady, as did the heart monitor. I worked slowly, picking my way through the colors that Mirabelle and Kiwi had told me to look for in his aura. The problem area, as Koby had called it.

  I followed the colors through deep layers and couldn’t help but notice how hard they were to peel back. Like layers of sticky tape. I wondered if his coma had something to do with it. I pressed on, sifting as I went, through low tones of green with darker, sticky tendrils that ran like spider webs through his entire body.

  The dark lines I’d seen before, I realized.

  They were magic. The darkest kind of magic. This is what the infection was.

  I followed the lines to their source and found Mason’s chest completely tangled by a messy wad of the black tendrils.

  Something dark and disgusting seemed to shove at me—it had a rhythm that was all its own but not unlike Mason’s actual heartbeat. And it definitely didn’t want me poking around.

  I let my own magic surge to the surface and used it like a protective armor. Then I dug in.

  The lines were stretchy but unyielding as I tried prying them away with my mind. I knew there was something there, something I needed to see just underneath the tangle of blackness. I kept going, inch by mental inch untangling the giant ball corroding Mason’s core.

  When I finally saw it—a faint pulsing that lay at the very bottom of the tangles, it took me a moment to understand what it was I saw.

  I felt my breath catch and then a roaring in my ears took over and I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was breathing anymore. This is what I’d suspected, but I’d never dreamed I could actually see it. Even if the “seeing” was symbolic. I was seeing with my mind. Or, if the burning light inside me was any indication, with my heart.

  My heart was seeing Mason’s heart.

  No, not his human heart. His vibrational energy point. Oh God, I sounded like Mirabelle. I made a mental note to tell her that subconsciously I had learned everything she’d tried to teach me at Oracle.

  Then, I looked more closely at the energy inside Mason. And I knew. I was seeing Mason’s soul. And it was currently being strangled.

  Fear clawed toward me and I fumbled, almost losing my entire connection. I had no idea if the fear was my own—that I’d hurt Mason in my attempt to help him—or if it sprung form the dark cords that were currently holding Mason’s wolf soul hostage.

  Working against it, in spite of it, with it clawing up at me, was the hardest work I’d ever done.

  My energy screamed. The Knowing went crazy, plunging straight into the chaos that had wrapped itself around Mason and tearing at the cords frantically. A warrior force that was absolutely not my own making.

  Hina.

  The wolves. The wolves.

  My palms itched and sweated and ached with the effort of holding my own magic inside me while letting it take over just enough to understand what it wanted me to do next.

  I listened.

  Just like with RJ, I let it lead.

  Closer and closer, I leaned in toward the dark tendrils, picking them apart like a knotted shoelace. For every tangle I loosened, three more seemed to appear in its place.

  My energy waned and resurged more than once until finally, the last of the knots was loosened and my chest heaved a final time as if releasing the last of the oxygen inside me. When my entire body felt like an empty cavity, desperate for air, I inhaled.

  It was the longest, deepest, heaviest breath I had ever taken or imagined. The Knowing urged me on. Hina. Her voice like a flashlight in the dark.

  A full moon. Pulling me closer and closer. Inhale, it said.

  And I did. To the sound of a thousand whispering voices thrumming over the beat of a tribal drum and the images of vibrant swirls of colors. Auras or souls—I didn’t know. And I didn’t care. I was only here for this. To take it in. To heal.

  The wolves. The wolves.

  Inhale.

  Finally, when I was full of … whatever this was, the voice went silent, the colors vanished, and it all just stopped.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Alex

  My veins sang with the efforts of the poison. Above me, birds called and flitted from branch to branch in the sun-speckled canopy. Their chipper songs grated on my nerves almost as much as my own failure did. I’d gone from dying in love—well… possibly love. Definitely passion. To living in a vacuum. No feelings. No emotions. Nothing. The longer it went on, the more I felt like a fucking robot. And the more I wanted my life back. Even if living that life meant another brush with death.

  I’d already thought it over.

  Well, I’d weighed the pros and cons over a bottle of whiskey last night from the rocking chair on the porch. With RJ gone, the house had been too empty to sit in. And the rocking chair felt like a memory; every time I sat there I could see RJ sitting beside me, toasting me with his full-toothed smile the night he found out I was dying. It was the best memory I had of that house. And some nights it felt like the only thing keeping me sane in all this, knowing I’d once been capable of a friendship. Well, the closest to friendship I’d ever come, anyway.

  And then there was Sam.

  The moment her face entered my mind, I remembered why I’d come out here and my resolve hardened all over again. I had to get me back—and then maybe, someday, I could get her back too. It was a long shot and I knew going forward the way things were now was a dead end. But la
st night, as I stared into the near-empty bottle in my hand, I’d had an idea: what if I could go back?

  Re-set things.

  Maybe not the clock but the circumstances.

  I’d had plenty of chances to fuck things up when I’d first come to town, and while I knew I hadn’t exactly gotten it right, it hadn’t gone completely to shit until the moment I’d chosen Indra instead of Sam to heal me.

  That was a moment I deeply regretted. Maybe more than any other moment in my life. Looking back, I could see the hurt and betrayal in Sam’s eyes as she’d agreed to it. She’d done that for me. And what had I ever done for her? Not a damned thing.

  The poison worked its way farther into my body and I imagined it seeping from my blood stream into my organs. I lay there and waited for it to begin burning like I remembered. Back when I walked around in pain and smiled through it because I’d had Sam. Her smile. Her sarcasm. And her trust.

  If I wanted any of that again, this was my only hope.

  But it was taking its sweet time. So far, I felt heavy and achy but not hot. Where was the internal fire that had lit my veins every day for months?

  “Poison isn’t the answer.”

  I looked up sharply from where I lay on my back in the leaves, not even bothering to react at the sight of Breck bending over me. His stubbled face was the last thing I wanted to see right now.

  Not because I was worried he was going to hurt me. I hadn’t violated his rules so screw him. Besides, self-preservation had gone out the window along with my ability to give a fuck about whatever had led him to follow me all the way to the Obupa.

  “Fuck off,” I said, blinking hard as my vision began to swim and dizziness sent me spinning where I lay.

  Maybe the poison was finally working.

  A sick sort of hope rose inside me. Who hoped for a fatal illness to take hold? How had I fallen so damned far? And without a single fucking emotion to blame it on.

  “This is depressing, dude,” Breck said, his blue eyes blurring into tiny little pools where I began imagining gold fish swimming and swirling in their liquid depths.

  Behind his nearly-shaved blond head, the branches and their leaves bled into incongruous shapes and abstract blobs. “Bite me,” I said but out loud it sounded slurred and weak.

  The poison was definitely working.

  I relaxed into it, perfectly content to let it have me.

  “Did Sushna give you this shit?” Breck asked.

  I perked up a bit at the name of the old woman. But still, I only laid there as he snatched the tiny bottle out of my limp hand and held it up to his nose. He sniffed at it once, twice and then a third time, frowning as he let it drop. I tried to answer him to tell him yes, Sushna had in fact supplied me with the concoction she promised would behave exactly like werewolf venom, although she’d tried talking me out of taking it before I’d left.

  It hadn’t worked but there was a hilarious sort of irony that the queen of dark magic herself had advised me against actually taking the black market shit I’d come for.

  Breck’s face appeared over mine again. I tried blinking to sharpen the image but it didn’t help. His cheeks seemed to drip right off his face as he talked. “Alex, man, listen. I despise your ass right now for what you did to my sister. But I don’t want you to die. Unless of course you go near her and I have to kill you. But out here, in the woods, all alone like this,” he said, straightening and looking around at the serene forest surrounding us. “It’s sad. You’re not Romeo. And she’s not Juliet.”

  At his words, I felt a stirring of temper. Mostly because he was wrong and the deep-seated asshole in me needed to tell him so. I tried pushing up on my hands but my elbows didn’t lock properly and I fell back onto my side. In the end, I chose talking instead of moving.

  “Don’t… want to… die,” I managed.

  Breck knelt beside me, waving the empty vial in front of me, the contents of which I’d chugged twenty minutes ago. “Then why are you drinking poison and trying to off yourself in the national forest on the first nice day we’ve had all month?”

  I gave him my best irritated glare but my face felt drunk and one eye ended up closing entirely. “Venom,” I said, my top lip folding over the bottom one in an exaggerated “m” sound.

  Damn. This shit was way more potent than last time. Maybe I should have done this closer to home. Or gone organic and let one of those monsters just bite my ass.

  Breck stared down at me a moment and then finally shook his head, muttering to himself as he dropped the vial to the ground. He got up and shuffled a few steps away and I relaxed, again content to stare blankly at the birds flitting through the treetops overhead.

  There was heavy rustling as Breck searched through some bag or another. I ignored him and just floated, my eyelids getting heavier as the rest of my limbs slowly stopped responding to my brain. Even though this particular symptom wasn’t in line with the venom, I decided I was fine with that.

  In the past couple of weeks, I’d been on the move constantly. Running this place or that. Kidnapping and delivering werewolves to Indra. Drinking or running or breaking things in my spare time—anything to expel the wild rage that built inside me if ignored too long.

  And Sam.

  I hadn’t slept in five days.

  Every time I closed my eyes, she was there. Hell, sometimes she was even there when I opened them. Or at least the idea of her face was there. It was practically all I saw. I had no idea if Indra was fucking with me or if it was my own subconscious revolting against the dark magic now living inside me. But I was done.

  Done being a puppet.

  I needed a re-set. A way to wipe the slate clean and start over. And so, exhausting any other options—since there really weren’t any to begin with—I’d come to the Obupa. Again. And I’d struck a bargain.

  Sushna was only too eager to do business with me.

  In exchange for a future favor, I’d come away with enough venom—or some sort of liquid that mimicked venom according to Sushna—to send me straight to death’s doorstep. And this time, when Sam asked to heal me, I was going to let her.

  That was my plan. Only—

  The venom felt less and less like venom. And more and more like… something else. Sort of like the Belladonna I’d ingested last year. Only, it was actually getting to me this time.

  Where was the burning that had lit my veins before? The fiery cord of pain that started in my extremities and traveled to my chest? The exhaustion? The muscle weakness?

  I did feel tired. But this was different.

  Because I also felt like throwing up and screaming and I couldn’t feel my tongue. When I smacked it against the back of my teeth, I realized it had grown too big for my mouth and now lolled against my lips. I tried returning it to my mouth and my lungs tightened. It took me a second longer than it should have to realize I couldn’t breathe that way. My lips parted in a delayed reflex and I sucked in air. My tongue fell out of my mouth again. The sound of my own wheezing was the last piece of proof: this shit was not what I’d asked for.

  Sushna had screwed me.

  I was dying.

  For real.

  I tried getting up but my hands and feet wouldn’t comply. My skin and bones felt like jelly. My chest tightened with the effort, and my wheezing became louder. I caught sight of Breck returning to my side as I fell back against the ground. He loomed over me, his expression still one of annoyance but now his mouth was set in a determined expression. He knelt beside me and shoved my shirt up, exposing my chest. I didn’t bother trying to push him away. Hell, I couldn’t even object.

  His mouth hardened into a thin line as he worked at something in his hands. I struggled to open my eyes wide enough to see what he held up to my skin but everything around me looked as if it were melting—an oil painting with a bucket of water poured over it.

  I groaned but it sounded hollow and far away over the rushing in my ears. Indra was going to be pissed when she found out her golden boy ha
d offed himself. Sam would be…

  I couldn’t even imagine. Sad? Heartbroken? Or would she be relieved to have the burden that was Alex Channing off her shoulders? I didn’t know, but the pain that accompanied that thought gave me a flash of hope. Maybe the poison was driving out the magic after all.

  Maybe I could feel again.

  Breck’s hand on my chest startled me. I craned my neck and looked up in time to see his eyed widen and his jaw harden in a determination that sent a shudder through me. He rose up over me, raising his fist high overhead. In it, I caught sight of something silver and sharp glinting in the sunlight before he brought it down in a sure arc, plunging a long needle into my skin.

  I cried out and jerked, my body almost lifting off the ground in the sudden sharp pain piercing through layers of skin, nerves, muscle, and possibly bone. Breck didn’t let up. He pressed the plunger on the syringe and emptied the contents of whatever it was into me.

  I howled, the sound ripping form my throat both eerie and raw. My tongue slid back into my mouth, the swollen mass almost suffocating me.

  My mouth opened again and I gagged.

  Breck pulled the needle free and dropped the syringe, grabbing my shirt with both fists and hauling me up so we were eye to eye. His chest heaved with heavy breaths and his expression was expectant—and more than a little uncertain. Like he was waiting to see.

  “Well?” he demanded, shaking me like a fucking ragdoll as he spoke. “Did it work?”

  I blinked furiously, trying to understand what the hell he was talking about. Slowly, the shape of his head became the shape of his head. I licked my lips and found my tongue to be a little closer to its original shape. My hand reached for his and closed around his wrist. Not with any real pressure but enough.

  A small success. I’d fucking take it.

  “Did what work?” I demanded, my voice only slightly wobbly and a lot hoarse. But the words were more enunciated and I knew that meant I was going to be okay.