Lightning In My Wake (The Lightning Series) (15 page)

I hefted out a heavy breath—laden with self-depreciating emotions.
Being his mate wasn’t as easy as it seemed. I was a selfish person—always had been. I was a willful, spoiled child and had come to realize I was even more of a rude, willful, spoiled woman. I was so self- involved, my own reflection was checking herself out. I flashed for my own satisfaction and monetary gain when I could be helping people. I treated my entire life like one big vacation.

But for Theo I would give it all away.

I could become what he needed.

I would carve out my own heart and offer it to him if it would help him.

The time to grow up and leave the spoiled child behind had come and gone.

“I can do that.”

She laughed, “I know you can. I watched your love this morning. Take care of him.”

Pema sighed and shrugged. I took it our little chat was finished. There was so much more I needed to know, but I had a feeling she’d given me all she wanted me to have.

“Hey, how can you travel with someone else without losing them?”

She shrugged, got up from her perch and wiped off her backside. “Don’t let go.”

“So all the others, who travelled with those they loved?”

She wrapped her arm around my shoulder like we were old friends, “I can’t answer for them. All I can say is that not letting go works.”

“What about the weight?”

“That’s all up here,” she tapped lightly on my temple. “Mind over matter.”

Pema broke free of our hold as we reached the temple. She explained on the long walk back that she chose to come there as a teen. The monks don’t know what she is, but they’ve seen her flash and she laughed in telling me that she has heard the word lightning used frequently in describing her.

They don’t ask for information and she offers none.
They make her live in the other cabin because she’s a girl and in her own words, super-hot.

There are
so many more things I want to ask her. Why did she choose Tibet? Why did they let her stay? Why doesn’t her family hide together?

Chapter Fifteen

Theo

When the Synod summons a Lucent, the Lucent shall answer the call in haste.

I wasn’t one of these people that could read or study while listening to music. I needed complete quiet without interruptions.

Collin hadn’t gotten the memo and neither had the voice—now two voices in my head.

It took Collin a
full thirty minutes to open the books. He sat and stared at them for a half an hours. I understood his reverence, I did. But that Pema girl had given us a deadline. These books weren’t going to be around forever like his books were. There weren’t digital copies of them everywhere at our disposal.

He got up as the sun set and lit an oil lamp I hadn’t even noticed in the corner.

The second voice was spoken in Portuguese, which I found strange. And not the contemporary Portuguese either. This was old school. The same phrase was spoken over and over in perfect form, not a hint of a lilted accent or Americanized fashion.

It was akin to having noise cancelling ear buds plugged in.
All I could hear were their voices.

Cosmically or heavenly, those same voices rose and fell with the climaxes and valleys in the texts before me. It was like they were speaking through it to me, or to me about them. I didn’t know which.

But mostly, I couldn’t get them to stop.

A hand touched mine and like water through a syphon, the voices were sucked away.

Colby.

To regain my
senses, I tore my gaze from the page and up to her face. Her glassy blues bore down into me. Colby’s eyes had always been otherworldly to me. Mostly they were blue, but like her wake they lightened and darkened according to her mood. There was a storm brewing in them now.

“Theo, where were you?”
Concern laced her tone.

I shook my head from the residual echoes of the voices, “I’m here.”

“No, you weren’t. You were somewhere else. Collin was yelling your name when I came in. Did something happen?”

Shifting to see Collin, I saw he was distressed.
He was stroking his beard, consoling himself. I must’ve been far gone.

“No, nothing happened. I just need to read more.”

She nodded and let go, but as soon as she did, the voices returned. My hand jerked out and grabbed her wrist. They quieted again, as if she were their master.

“Tell me,” Colby demanded.

“There are voices. They’ve spoken to me only twice. But when I read these books, they are relentless. You made them stop.”

“What do they say,” she broke down and kneeled in front of me, fisting the edge of my shirt.

“They say ‘Help us’, ‘Ajudar-nos-á’”

“Help them what?”

“I don’t know. Sit with me while I read. We don’t have much time.”

She pulled up a chair, never letting go of my hand and I read faster th
an I’ve ever read. Colby filtered through pictures, taking notes as she did. The three of us studied until we could hardly see the letters anymore.

“You must retire. There are still two more days.” Pema had entered the cabin again.

Colby squeezed my hand once and then let go, looking for any sign that it had distressed me.

“I’m good,” I assured her.

Collin stayed to speak to Pema while Colby and I went outside. My legs would barely move and my neck ached from being huddled over the texts.

“Hold my hands,” she requested,
and the glow of something mischievous beamed in her eyes. “Don’t use your powers.”

“What?”

And before I knew it, we were in the bathroom of the house in Tibet—in the bathtub.

“I did it!” She yelled and flailed her arms.

“How?”

“Pema told me to not let go. Just don’t let go. How stupid is that? All this time, I’ve been too scared.
So everyone else must’ve let go. We could’ve flashed together as kids.” Frustration took hold of me and I took hold of her.

“Everything works out like it
should. We can flash together now. As long as you don’t let go of me again, everything will be fine.” Unlike the times before, she willingly relented to my touch. Her arms wrapped around my neck and her face went where it should, to that nook between my neck and my shoulder—as I thought it had been made just for her.

Just when I was getting comfortable, she broke free. “I can go get Collin!”

“Okay, but I don’t share bathtubs with dudes.”

```

That night was spent debriefing
each other of what we had seen, which was no more than patches of a quilt that didn’t fit together, and just left more holes.

“
What did Pema tell you,” I asked Colby.

She looked down and straightened an already perfectly placed piece of her dress—which me
ant she was about to lie to me. Somehow my female still thought she could lie to me and get away with it.

Wrong.

“She just warned me about some things.”

“What things,” Collin interjected.

“Things I should be aware of as—you know.” Starting with her neck, Colby’s blush invaded her skin until the tips of her ears glowed red and even her lips flushed.

“Spit it out,” Collin rose in posture, challenging her
as a joke. Colby and Collin had become rivaling siblings sometime in the past day.

“Hey! Lay off Sasquatch!”

Collin reared back, feigning offense. He pinged his gaze between the two of us and then blurted out, “What’s a sasquatch?”

The glint in Colby’s eyes told me she wasn’t letting this issue go so easily but neither was Collin. It also told me that Colby had found a way out of her wriggling jam. She’d found a way out of explaining to us what she and Pema had discussed.

Poor Collin.

“It’s a big hairy, Viking ape,” she spewed at him in jest.

Collin pointed at her, “There are no legends of Viking apes.”

“
Oh yeah? I’m looking at one.”

I could’ve stopped it at any time, but it was kinda fun to watch. Plus, Collin couldn’t ogle her if she was gutting him.

“I am not descended from Viking people, and for that matter, I am not descended from apes either. How dare you!”

Collin’s poker face was infallible. I couldn’t discern whether or not he was truly offended or just playing along.

“I was just calling you a name based on your looks, you oaf.”

“Well, if we are making assumptions based on appearance alone then you are a…” We waited for a few second
s while he formulated a name for Colby. I had the feeling Collin had never playfully or seriously insulted someone in his life. “A wiry, boney little imp who has no manners.”

That one shut us all up.

That was a little more truth than joke.

I supposed I should
’ve come to Colby’s rescue, but I was in the middle of witnessing something I’d never seen. Colby Evans was speechless. Any residual blush had floated away with her loss of words. I should’ve called Ari. Even though I despised her, we could’ve shared a laugh over this scenario.

She opened her mouth twice to take her revenge and then closed it, stood up and with slumped s
houlders forged to the bedroom—which was unheard of. Colby didn’t back down form a battle, especially one of wit and sarcasm.

“I apologize, Theodore. I thought it was all in play.
” Collin said to me, though his gaze was still on the hallway.

“It’s fine. I don’t know what’s gotten into her.”

~~~

Collin and I sat for a while, discussing the day’s ev
ents. I’d finally gotten comfortable when the lightest of footsteps pranced down the hallway. A bag was thrown into my lap.

“Resin,” she whisper yelled and snapped her fingers, getting us to pay attention.
Collin jolted to action, grabbing his bag and scouting outside from the windows.

“Can you take Collin,” I asked Colby. I hadn’t really gotten a chance to
investigate the hows and whys of Colby’s newfound bring a buddy program. I wished I had.

“Yes, but first I need something. Go ahead and go somewhere, anywhere and I will catch up.”
I caught her wrist, “I’m not leaving you.”

“Two seconds, Theo. I’m grabbing one thing and then I’m gone. I swear it. If I’m not with you in ten minutes, come after me.”

I was screaming then, “They could have you in ten minutes.”

“I wouldn’t let them. I will flash before getting caught.”

“Ten minutes, Evans.”

She grabbed me by
the collar and jerked me toward her for a small but powerful kiss. “I swear.”

Giving up on the feeling in my gut, I flashed to Brussels. I looked at my watch, she had seven minutes and forty seven seconds. I ducked into the nearest hotel and made reservations for two rooms.

Five minutes and three seconds.

I was gonna kill her if she got
herself killed or caught. Forget the Eidolon business. Forget the voices and the effing books and everything that came with it.

I might be able to travel the planet in a flash—but Colby Evans was my whole world.

I’d just gotten her back—there was no way I would lose her now.

Desperate in only a few minutes, I called her phone. Nothing. I called Collin’s phone. Nothing. Seven minutes had gone by and I was about to explode. I could feel her presence still in Tibet.
And if I concentrated hard enough, I could track her motions. She was running, not from something, but toward something—Pema’s cabin.

“Sir!”

Yelling tore me from her. The girl behind the desk was shoving printed papers at me and waving a pen. She didn’t realize that Colby was not here yet and the only real reason I was still here, not insane and with a purpose for the first time in my life was because of Colby. Didn’t she realize as she’s making me remember my own name and forcing me to sign some bullshit form that my girl could be captured?

Then I felt it
, the shift of her presence. I could feel her entire path this time. It was as if my chest was a map, somewhere in my soul was the planes of the Earth and she was moving along them with ease like a figuring along a board game. The feeling seized momentarily and my heart along with it, thinking something had happened. As quickly as it fled, it returned, close. She was close, within five hundred or so feet of me.

Signing the stupid piece of paper, I finally relaxed. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end as they entered the lobby.
A simple nod of the head toward the elevator and we were shuffling in single file, wordlessly. We were on the seventh floor and on every floor we stopped to take in more people. Every person in that hotel was conspiring against my getting information from Colby and Collin. I’d been shuffled into the corner and I held Colby flush against me. It was the slowest elevator in the history of mankind.