“Will I be able to see things through your eyes again?”
“I don’t know.” A butterfly touch caressed the side of his now healed eye. He felt the fire of her skin and loved it. “While I’ve heard of a few others doing so, I’ve never shared my blood with another. Well, I do share droplets to close the puncture wounds, as I told you, but because it isn’t ingested, the humans never link to me.”
So she’d given him what she’d never given another. His love for her grew, spread. “Who is Dmitri to you?” The guy had spoken as if he owned her, and that had burned Aden up inside.
Her gaze lowered to his chest, and her fingers soon followed, playing over him. “He is someone I despise very much. Someone I—” Her ears perked and she straightened. “Riley is here. His heart is racing.” Her brow furrowed, her head tilted and she frowned. “He needs us right away.”
Aden rose without hesitation and glanced down at himself. He was dressed in the clothes he’d worn all day, wrinkled and dirty from his work in the barn. “I need five minutes.”
“Very well. He says we will be gone all weekend and has even ensured no one will miss us,” Victoria said. “Pack a bag and I will take care of Dan and the boys. They’ll never know you left. I’ll meet you outside.” With that, she was off.
He showered quickly, dressed and packed a bag as she’d suggested, throwing in a pair of jeans, a few T-shirts, his toothbrush and toothpaste. Bad breath was not something he wanted to have while around Victoria. Already her senses were better than most.
As promised, she was waiting for him outside. Wet as his hair was, the cool night air gave him a chill and he had to wrap an arm around her to warm back up.
Riley and Mary Ann had a new, probably stolen sedan parked about a half mile from the ranch. Riley stood outside it, tugging a shirt over his head when they emerged from the shadows.
“Get in,” the shape-shifter said. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.” He slipped into the driver’s seat, and Mary Ann leaned into him, head remaining buried in a notebook.
Aden and Victoria claimed the back. Victoria rested her head against his shoulder. Not because she was sleepy—Aden hadn’t sensed fatigue in her and wasn’t sure she even needed rest—but simply to be near him. He was glad. A part of him feared he could lose her any moment, that someone—Dmitri perhaps—would rip her away from him and he’d never see her again. Did she fear the same thing?
“We won’t be parted,” he assured them both and she nodded.
We would never let that happen, Julian said.
Elijah sighed. As if we could stop it. From the very beginning, I warned you bad things would happen if you followed Mary Ann.
Yes, he had. Aden had run full speed ahead anyway, and he still couldn’t regret it.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“I’ll let Mary Ann tell you,” Riley said.
Mary Ann just mumbled something unintelligible under her breath and kept reading.
Aden let it drop, not wanting to interrupt whatever had the girl so entranced. He soon regretted the decision, though. A long while passed in silence, Mary Ann never looking up from that book, Riley concentrating on the road and Victoria lost in thought. Curiosity pounded him.
Aden closed his eyes. With as little rest as he’d gotten lately, his body constantly wired and ready to fight, a nap might do him good. In and out he breathed, forcing the tension to leave him with every exhalation.
After a while, he thought he heard Riley say softly, “You have to tell him, Vic.”
“I will,” Victoria replied just as softly, her words barely audible. “And don’t call me that.”
Tell him what? He waited for their conversation to continue, but it never did. “So what’s going on?” he asked, straightening. Victoria jumped, hand fluttering over her heart.
“Oh my God,” Mary Ann said, preventing the others from replying.
“What?” they all asked in unison.
Mary Ann turned and faced him, watery eyes rimmed with red. “You’re not going to believe this. Our mothers—wait.” She rubbed at her temples. “I think I need to start at the beginning. Otherwise, you’ll never believe me. First, our birth certificates came, and it turns out I have two moms. The one who died after giving birth to me and the one who raised me. Second…” She showed Aden the two birth certificates. His eyes widened as he noted their matching birthdays and the exact place of their birth.
“What does it mean?” he asked. “About you and me?”
Her gaze was solemn. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. All I know right now is that my mother, my real mother, could time travel like you until she got pregnant with me, and that she lived next door to yours. Look here.” She held up the certificates again and pointed to their addresses. “I missed it the first few glances because I was so hung up on our birth date and the hospital thing. Actually, I don’t think I would have realized it at all if not for my mother’s journal.
“In one passage, she talked about her neighbor Paula, who was pregnant, as well, only two weeks ahead of her. She talked about how she’d felt calmer when she was around Paula, after an initial creep-out—her words, not mine—so she talked my dad into giving up their apartment and renting the house next door to Paula. But the more advanced her and Paula’s pregnancies became, the more the creep-out feeling returned until they stopped hanging out. She said it became painful for her to be near the woman. Aden, your mother’s name is Paula. They were pregnant with us.”
What did it mean that their mothers had lived next to each other, felt drawn to each other? Enough to have their children on the same day? What did it mean that it had become painful for them to be around each other?
So your parents lived next to each other, and you were born on the same day, Elijah said, and in the same place. There was something in his tone, something both hard and soft that Aden couldn’t identify. Were they on the same wavelength? And you can now do what her mother used to do, what Mary Ann stopped her mother from doing. What she stops you from being able to do.
Maybe not. “What are you saying?” he demanded.
Everyone in the car eyed him strangely.
“Give me a minute,” he said. Their brows remained puckered, but they nodded. He closed his eyes, concentrating only on the people inside his head. “Elijah?”
Think about it, about the similarities.
Similarities. Aden’s mom had calmed Mary Ann’s mom. Mary Ann now stopped Aden. But the fact that Aden could do so, the fact that he possessed the same ability…Dear God.
Eve gasped. I’ve connected the dots. You can’t mean—
I do, Elijah replied flatly.
A tremor moved through Aden. The thought was surreal and wild. Could it be true, though?
“You’ve felt connected to her since the beginning, Eve,” he said.
Yes, I have, but that doesn’t mean what you’re thinking.
“What if I did indeed draw you into my head the day of my birth? We agree you’re human souls without bodies of your own. What if you’re actually ghosts? What if you died the day of my birth, in the hospital I was in? What if you, Eve, really are Mary Ann’s—
I can’t be her mother! I just can’t. I would remember my own child.
And there it was. Out in the open. Eve might very well be Mary Ann’s mother.
“Had you remained outside my body, yes, you might have. But you didn’t. You were sucked into me, or maybe even forced yourself into me for whatever reason, your memories washed. Probably because I was just an infant and my mind wasn’t capable of containing or processing four full lifetimes.”
No, she said on a trembling breath. No. There’s just no way.