“Out!” Roane roared this time.
I slammed back into reality and felt Roane’s body on top of mine. I heard his ferocity. He was tense and hard like a rock, but his attention was focused on her.
My palm itched. I looked at it, detached from myself, and saw it jerk. It was like it knew I watched it, like it had something it wanted to do. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but I knew something was going to happen. It closed on itself and I felt a searing heat flare through my body. My hand trembled, but it remained fisted and then the heat surged through my body again and soared to my hand. The heat burst out of my body and shot through the air. It aimed perfectly.
Wren saw it coming. The heat slammed against her chest and she crashed backwards through the doors. She was there. She was gone.
“Where did you send her?” Roane scrambled off the bed and looked through the opened doors.
“I wanted her gone.” We still hadn’t heard her fall.
“Gregory!”
“She’s okay. She landed in the lilies.” Gregory’s voice echoed through the house.
Roane swung his impenetrable eyes my way from the doorway. “Wren hates lilies. Did you know that?”
My eyes went wide as I realized that when I’d been inside of her, I’d done a quick scan. It was like I was some ultra-charged empath now and I was the internet inside of humans, well, vampires. I shrugged. “Lucky guess. She didn?
?t look like the flower type.”
Roane studied me intently. The silence stretched out. One second. Five seconds. Thirty—a minute—five minutes. Ten minutes. That’s how long we stared at each other. Ten freaking minutes. Then, “You don’t even need a shield anymore.”
“That’s all? I heat-rayed your girlfriend out of this house. All you say is that I don’t need a shield anymore?”
Roane didn’t change expressions. “You’re changing, Davy. You know that you’re changing and you know what you’re changing into.
Talia needed a shield and you don’t. It’s… remarkable.”
I didn’t like that name. In fact, I loathed that name. “Who is Talia?”
“She was the Immortal before you.”
“I know that look,” Roane announced a few hours later as he strode back into the room and closed the doors behind him. I knew he’d left to deal with Wren, but I didn’t care to ask what had happened. She was gone. I was glad and then I thought better of it when I watched him close those doors. It might’ve been his slow movements or how he paused before he pulled those two doors shut, but the entire movement was ominous.
I sat up slowly and swallowed tightly. My hands fisted into the satin sheets, but it was all I could do. I was afraid to move. I was afraid to breathe. I was even afraid to think. He looked long and hard as if to see inside of me. He might’ve been. He knew more about me than I did.
“What look?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear his answer.
Roane gestured with a nod. “You don’t want to be here. Are you thinking of your little human boy? Are you hoping that he’ll take you away from here? You want to forget everything that’s happened this last week?”
He had no idea… how right he was. “Just because you can read other people’s thoughts doesn’t mean that you can read mine.”
“I can’t anymore, but I could before. Now there’s no way to get into that head. She wasn’t like that.”
‘She.’ Something about that word did not sit well with me. I didn’t want him to know, though, so my voice didn’t tremble when I asked, “She? Talia?”
Roane did his thing again. He measured me up and down for thirty seconds. “Yes. She was a good person.”
“She wasn’t really a person, was she?”
“You’re right. She wasn’t really a person.”
“Even though that’s what the lore says about Immortals. That they’re human, but they have immortality.”
“They?”
“I’m the last in a long line, right? Wren said that I’m not going to make the week before I’m on that rooftop.”