Zeph, having also grown too restive to sit still while she told the last bit, now perched on the edge of the settee. She described her frantic dive through the fold, which stripped her of her gríobhth form—the last thing she remembered—before it dumped her naked and near death to plummet through the night sky over Lake Sullivan.
“So,” Astar said, breaking the thoughtful silence that had fallen, fingers laced between his spread knees. “Let’s connect pieces of the puzzle. Was the intelligence you encountered at Gieneke from this world you visited?”
“‘Intelligence’ sounds so bland,” Jak complained. “Let’s give it a nickname. And I think we need a name for the place, like the Evil Realm.”
“We don’t know that it’s necessarily evil,” Lena countered, frowning at him. “That’s an unfair value judgment.”
“The alter-realm, then,” he suggested with a lift of his brows.
“Fine,” Astar said. “Was the Gieneke intelligence from the alter-realm?” Jak opened his mouth, and Astar pointed a quelling finger at him. “Don’t.”
Lena and Astar both looked at Stella. “How should I know if it was the same intelligence?” Stella asked. “Lena would know better than I would, as she had contact with it in both places.”
Lena shook her head. “I only assisted you at Gieneke. You’re the one who connected to the intelligence, who understood it well enough to take in its emotions and use them as a weapon against it. Can’t you see in my mind whether it was there in this alternate world or not?”
“I haven’t looked,” Stella replied, which was true. She’d been observing Lena’s mental and emotional wounds, not rummaging through her head for everything.
Lena heaved an impatient sigh. “Then look.”
“It’s not always that simple,” Stella cautioned.
Jak cocked his head, watching her thoughtfully.
“You looked in my head last night,” Rhy said, ceasing his pacing to stop by Lena’s chair, hand hovering as if he longed to touch her, before he shoved it in his pocket.
“You’re different,” Stella replied automatically. Aware that Astar was looking at her with considerable surprise, she added, “I looked in Rhy’s mind to determine how he knew Lena had gone to another world.”
Astar raised a brow. “What did you find?”
Lena regarded her with wariness, too, but also a considerable edge of morbid curiosity. Stella debated how much to tell them. Really, she should’ve planned this out, should’ve realized the question would come up.
“Just tell us,” Lena said, though her internal tumult didn’t match her outward calm. “We’re all in this together. I’d rather know, and for everyone to know.”
Stella sighed to herself. She disliked causing pain, for whatever reason—and it seemed she’d been doing a great deal of it lately. “Lena and Rhy have a connection. Perhaps formed when you were in love in your youth. It’s not something under your conscious control, but it is there.”
Rhy stood still, thoughts racing behind his blue eyes, a triumphant—and possessive—smile twitching his lips. Lena, also frozen in place, revealed nothing. Despair still clouded around her, but Stella couldn’t be sure if that was due to this information or a residual emotion from her traumatic experience.
“When you left our world, Lena,” Stella continued, as gently as she knew how, “it severed the connection between you and Rhy. He felt the break, like a wound.”
“Then it’s gone now,” Lena said with enough relief that Rhy frowned at her.
Stella shook her head regretfully. “It snapped back into place as soon as you reentered our world. I saw that in Rhy’s mind also.”
Lena took that in, then came to a decision. “Well, that’s neither here nor there and not relevant to solving the puzzle of the rifts, or to deciding our next steps.” She held out a hand again, looking like a queen in her high-backed chair, her hair a cloak of bronze around her. “Look in my mind. If what Zeph and I went through helps to solve this puzzle, then it will have been somewhat worth it.”
“Better than nothing,” Zeph agreed.
With no reason to refuse, Stella rose and went to Lena. She sat on the stuffed footstool Jak supplied with alacrity and a gallant bow. Bracing herself for the onslaught of Lena’s emotional din, she cleared her mind and reinforced her barriers to all else. Opening the door to another person’s mind was different every time, even with the same person. What she’d tried to explain to Jak the night before was true: for all of Rhy’s lack of discipline in other areas, he’d learned a great deal from his mother. He possessed a mental organization that allowed him to offer a clear pathway to what she sought, closing off the clutter and chaos of other parts of his mind.
Lena’s mind was easier to sort than many. She had her librarian mother’s clean catalogue of thoughts and memories, and her disciplined search for knowledge, her scientific approach to life, gave her an orderliness other people lacked. However, the strain of recent weeks had also left her mind like a library after a devastating flood. The mud of despair, rage, love, grief, and furious frustration coated everything, thoughts still floating unfocused in the debris.
Stella’s heart went out to her, and she did something she’d never tried before, channeling healing into the place, like a cleansing light. Not changing what was there, but lightening the load of it, making the mud less dense, sweeping it together so that Lena could begin dealing with it on her own. Behind a door, however, the looming wave of death remained.
She didn’t dare approach it.
Lena relaxed gradually, her mind sinking into sleep while Stella continued her housekeeping. When a hand touched her shoulder—Astar’s familiar, comforting essence in it—she gradually withdrew.
Then blinked at the bright midday light coming in the windows of the salon empty but for the three of them. She’d been in Lena’s mind for hours—and Lena herself slumbered peacefully.
“I wasn’t sure if I should interrupt or not,” Astar said, crouching beside her and searching her face.
Stella nodded, setting Lena’s hand gently in her lap, then standing to stretch her stiff body. “She was hurting, mentally and emotionally,” she explained.
“I figured as much,” Astar said, studying Lena’s sleeping face. “Should I send Rhy away again?”
“It wouldn’t do any good. I don’t think he could stay away. The next time something happened to her, he’d simply be drawn back again.”
Astar nodded thoughtfully, a new understanding in his eyes. “I hate to say I sympathize with the bloody idiot, but I do.”
Stella knew he did, and smiled at him, so truly happy for the love he’d found with Zeph. I refuse to be bitter or envious. “And it’s not only him that’s causing her distress. What happened to her has left her wounded on many levels.”
Astar searched her face. “Can you tell me?” he asked subvocally, using their longtime method of private communication. It did her heart good to feel that connection to him. She’d been so deliberately walling him out, to give him privacy with Zeph, that she hadn’t realized how much of him hadn’t been in her head.