It was quiet until Clay spoke up. “Fuck, it’s like they know our Soul Weaver is hampered or something. How would they know to send someone now?”
Baer cleared his throat. “Maybe they don’t, and this was the plan all along. We’re going to have to be careful about who we let in from here on out.”
Grey’s anger and frustration swelled like a wave in his chest. It was all he could do to hold it back and not scream.
“It’s a good thing that guy was such a horrible shot,” Wiley said. “But I have to feel sorry for him. When he came out of whatever it was possessing him, he seemed so bewildered. He had no idea why he was even here. Now he’s going to jail for something that’s not even his fault.”
Someone touched his arm and he turned toward them, noting Lucien’s cologne. “Sorry I slammed you so hard onto the floor. Was instinct.”
“To protect the blind guy?” Grey knew irritation laced his voice, but he couldn’t help it.
“Yeah, Grey, to protect my friend from the man with a gun. What else was I going to do?”
“Get down yourself?”
He chuckled. “I did. Squished you right into the floor.”
His humor did nothing to appease Grey’s wrath. It was too powerful, filling his body as if his very blood thrummed with it. He turned to storm out, but his shins hit the coffee table. Cursing, he ignored the pain and moved around the table to where he knew the back door was. Nobody said a word as he left, and not even their thoughts could get through the fury pounding in his head.
He stalked into his apartment, shaking with rage, and stood in the middle of the living room. His breaths came hard and fast. He closed his hands into fists, then opened them and swiped everything off the coffee table. Something shattered. Caught in the grip of anger, he turned and knocked a lamp off the small table near the television, relishing the sound of it breaking.
Before he knew it, he’d turned the entire room upside down. With the floor littered with debris, every step was a challenge and he growled as he tripped and went to his knees. Something sharp cut right through his jeans and sliced into his flesh. He’d broken something else and didn’t even know what.
He didn’t fucking care.
Getting to his feet, he limped into the bathroom and peeled off his jeans, wincing when something caught. He pulled a piece of what felt like glass out and sat on the toilet lid to hold a wad of toilet paper to his knee. He’d let his temper get the best of him, but it still beat in his heart and he didn’t know how to make it stop.
He’d never felt so helpless in his entire life, and he didn’t know how he was going to get used to his new reality. He’d always been self-sufficient, always taken care of himself. Even as a child at home he’d kept to himself—his parents had never been particularly demonstrative. They’d each been caught up in their careers, and he’d always felt like an afterthought to them.
So, he’d done his own thing. Studied on his own and later, he’d set out and left them behind. He’d forged a career doing what he loved the most and had been successful in it. In fact, he’d been successful in nearly everything he’d done.
This new reality needed to be faced like another challenge. Tearing up his place had solved nothing. Now he just had an obstacle course of a mess on his hands.
But he wasn’t going to do anything about it that night. Instead, he fumbled for the first aid kit and put a Band-Aid on his wound. He felt around, examining his work, and sighed. The bandage wasn’t big enough to cover the cut. Whatever. A little blood on his sheets wouldn’t hurt anything.
When Grey crawled into his bed, the anger had eased somewhat, giving way to even blacker thoughts. Would he be any help to the rest of the Weavers? The fuller the circle became, the more powerful they grew, but what the hell good was he when he couldn’t even recognize an enthralled man?
Yeah, he was spending a lot of time feeling sorry for himself, but he was also supposed to play a part in this battle. He was an integral part of the Circle.
Just what the hell was he supposed to do?
Chapter 6
Grey was tired of the dark.
It was almost ironic. After so many years of locking himself away in dimly lit rooms to type piles and piles of words into one computer after another, he found himself longing to see the sun. To watch the glittering, sparkling light dance and peek between the leaves as they fluttered in the breeze. He wanted to sit on the patio and watch the light bounce off the pool water and gild Ruby’s dark coat as she lay stretched out in the grass.
Instead, he sat at the small kitchen table in his apartment with his head in his hands, and his world was only dark.
He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there. He didn’t sleep much, and what he’d gotten was broken. Throughout the night and early morning, he reached for his phone again and again, demanding it tell him the time.
10:59 p.m.
12:27 a.m.
4:02 a.m.
6:35 a.m.
Much to Dane’s chagrin, he refused to come down to the main house for breakfast. Coffee and company were not going to help his mood. He hadn’t even let Dane into the apartment. Just met him at the door. It was better if Dane didn’t see the mess he’d made last night. It all still needed to be cleaned up, but he couldn’t muster the energy. Not yet.
But he needed to. The last check of the time had been 8:46 a.m. Cort would be arriving for another of their sessions. Some small part of him wished for time to finally speed up so that Cort would be there. So the man with the teasing remarks and easy laugh could help him make sense of all the anger, pain, and frustration in his chest. He wanted to feel Cort’s strong hand squeezing his shoulder and promising that he’d get through this, because for some completely illogical reason, he believed Cort.
The rest of him knew none of it was true. Cort wasn’t going to make this better. He didn’t have an answer. Grey was still desperately clinging to the hope that he was going to get his eyesight back, but there was zero proof that such a hope was even true. The spell they’d tried had done nothing. He was almost completely cut off from his powers. As a Weaver, he was useless.
What scared him the most was the possibility of his powers not returning, keeping the Circle from defeating the pestilents. He didn’t know how they would close the rift the pestilents were using to steal the Earth’s energy, but the aunts had been clear that it would take all of them. As long as Grey lived, just holding the powers of the Soul Weaver captive, they’d never defeat the pestilents.
Grey might have been prone to some dark thoughts from time to time, but he’d never once seriously considered ending his life.
Sitting alone in the darkness, the thoughts of his brothers’ muffled whispers, he couldn’t avoid the thought that maybe it would have been better if he’d died in the last battle. It would suck to wait thirty years for the arrival of the next Soul Weaver, but at least the clock would have already started for that person.
Footsteps echoed up the stairs and Grey jerked upright, straining to hear them. He knew that cadence even if it was a bit lighter than it had been that first day of sessions. His heartbeat skipped and sped up despite his internal argument that there was no reason for it to increase.
Three sharp knocks. “Hey, Grey!” Cort called through the door, using the same light and easy tone he always used. The same happy tone he was coming to expect from the man.