Christine Feehan: Air Bound

Lissa placed the tea tray in the center of the low coffee table and poured each of them a cup. She handed one with milk to Airiana and settled in the chair across from her, leaving Blythe and Lexi to sit close.

“I don’t think I can explain adequately,” Airiana said and took a cautious sip of tea. She was beginning to shake and feared her tea would spill, but she didn’t want to put the cup down. It gave her something to do with her hands.

“All of us have a past,” Lissa said gently. “And all of us keep secrets. If yours is beginning to consume you, Airiana, then you need to tell us and let us help.”

Airiana had to put the teacup down. If she didn’t, she knew it would end up on her floor and she didn’t want that. In more ways than she wanted to admit, she was like her mother. She preferred neat and tidy and everything in its place.

“I think I’m losing my mind.” She blurted her fear out fast, wanting to get it over.

Lexi shook her head and Lissa frowned. Blythe leaned toward her, looking into her eyes and gently sweeping back the mane of wild hair Airiana hadn’t yet brushed into some semblance of order.

“Why do you think that, honey?” Blythe asked, all practical and interested like she managed to sound. Sane. She always sounded grounded and sane. That was the reason the rest of them always relied on her.

“My mind won’t stop seeing patterns everywhere. I can’t stop doing mathematical theories and I see them in my head. I was like this before when I was a child, but for a time it stopped and I thought I’d be all right. But it’s come back worse than ever. I’m devouring books. Textbooks. Anything I can get my hands on. I stay up all night on the Internet and read hundreds of articles,” Airiana confessed quickly, wringing her hands together, terrified that she was already so much worse than her mother had been. She ducked her head. “I even set up a small laboratory for myself.”

“Your mind was traumatized by finding your mother tortured in your own bedroom,” Blythe said softly. “You know you need to stay occupied . . .”

Airiana shook her head. “Not like this. This is different. This is . . . madness. I can’t make it stop. When I was young, I soaked up everything, absorbed knowledge, anything I could find or read. It was fun and exciting and I never considered the consequences of having a mind that couldn’t be satisfied. But my mother . . .”

“You aren’t your mother,” Lissa said firmly. “And you have all of us to help you through this. When you were young, did it help to keep learning?”

Airiana nodded slowly. “Yes. My mind would be quiet in the evenings, and on the weekends when I went home to see Mom, I didn’t have the chaos going on. The continual demand to keep working and learning abated a bit, although, when my mother wasn’t drinking, we discussed theories. She was wicked smart.”

“So there was balance,” Blythe said.

“Yes. I could talk to people who were as excited as I was about all the discoveries we were making. Before Mom drank, I could always share with her, but once she began, half the time it was just impossible. The breakthroughs in . . .” She trailed off, shaking her head, pressing her palm over her mouth, her large eyes growing enormous. “There are things I can’t talk about. For your safety as well as my own.”

Blythe nodded. “We understand. My cousin Sarah’s husband, Damon, works for the Defense Department. There’s never a discussion about his work.”

Airiana’s heart jerked hard. Blythe was far too shrewd not to know why Airiana’s mother had been tortured, not simply killed outright. In their group sessions, she had admitted to the others that she was responsible, but she had never said why. She’d never told them the kind of work she’d done back then.

She had explained that she lived in a dorm house that was really small apartments in a building the government provided for her and a few other remarkable students attending a special type of school. She couldn’t tell them the type of things they were all working on. She wanted them safe.

She hadn’t been able to keep her mother safe. Her mother, who resorted to drinking too much to still her brilliant mind and had talked to the wrong people—people who wanted her daughter’s work. Marina had taken money, or at least the frightening agents investigating her death had claimed she had. When she didn’t deliver the goods to the foreign agents, she had been tortured for the information and then killed. Airiana didn’t believe them.

Airiana had been whisked away, back to the school in protective custody. The story didn’t add up. Marina couldn’t possibly have known enough about Airiana’s work to sell it to a foreign government. In the beginning, she had chattered to her mother incessantly, but when her mother started drinking, she had stopped talking about her project so much. When she turned fourteen, she had taken an oath to keep her research secret, and she’d taken that very seriously. She had never so much as whispered about her work to her mother, even on Marina’s good days. Sadly, that had been the wedge that had slowly driven them apart.

Airiana nodded her head slowly to acknowledge Blythe’s revelation about Damon Wilder. The truth was, she had recognized Damon the moment she laid eyes on him when he’d first come to Sea Haven, only a couple of years earlier. She had studiously avoided close contact.

Damon had been aware of her, of course, but he hadn’t approached her, and she knew he wouldn’t. It had been years earlier that they’d met, and she’d been a child, but still, he couldn’t fail to recognize her. She had a very distinctive look. At the time, he’d come to brainstorm her project with her, but until he’d shown up in Sea Haven, she hadn’t seen him again.

“So what can I do to keep from going insane?” Airiana asked. She felt calmer now that she’d told them. She picked up her cup of tea, and this time her hands weren’t shaking nearly as much.

“You said you see patterns,” Lexi said. “What did you mean by that?”

“The day my mother died, I felt the wind on my face and I looked up at the clouds. I could see this amazing pattern forming, always moving, but immediately I knew something was very wrong. It was there, right in front of me. Who sees forecasts of danger or death in clouds?” Airiana pressed her fingers to her eyes. She had the beginnings of a wicked headache.

“You do, obviously,” Lissa said. “And why wouldn’t you? Why doesn’t that make sense to you? You said you felt the wind on your face just before you looked up. Airiana, everyone knows you’re an air element. You’re bound to air. Air is bound to you. Wouldn’t it try to warn you of danger? You communicate with air. Could it be that it communicates with you?”

“Well of course, Lissa, but not in patterns. I just know things when I’m outside, I feel things in the wind. But the patterns are different.”

“Warnings?” Lissa guessed. “Air warning you of danger, trying to tell you what is going to happen, or what has happened?”

Airiana frowned at her. “What are you saying?”

“I can read fire,” Lissa shrugged, looking a little embarrassed. “The way it moves speaks to me. I can tell if the flames are angry or joyous. I can manipulate fire. I just presumed you could do the same with air.”

Airiana shook her head.

“But you do,” Lexi leaned forward. “A hundred times a day. You blow out candles without being close to them. I’ve seen you lift your shoes and bring them over to you from across a room without even looking up. You manipulate air. You read air all the time. You know before anyone if a storm is approaching. You know if it’s going to rain. You always let me know days in advance what the weather will be like and I listen to you, not the weatherman. I plan my work around what you tell me. So if you’re communicating with air, how come it can’t communicate back?”