To my surprise, Carrick holds his hand out to me. While I would implicitly trust Titus not to let me fall, part of me wonders if Carrick would toss me over.
And yet… I find my arm lifting, and I place my hand in his. When his warm fingers curl over mine, a sensation of comfort, safety, and security overwhelms me, which actually makes me want to pull away from him. But I don’t and I find the strength to take a half step forward, eyes still pinned on the horizon.
“You got it,” Titus encourages softly.
Another half step and my pelvis bumps against the wall.
“Deep breaths,” Carrick growls—his form of encouragement—and it’s only at this point that I realize I’m panting. “Slow in. Slow out.”
I do as he says, closing my eyes and taking a handful of deep breaths and letting them blow out slowly through my mouth.
When it feels like my pulse is under control, I open my eyes and stare at the horizon again.
“For now, don’t worry about looking at the people below,” Carrick says in a low voice. “Just see if you can feel any vibes.”
Nodding in understanding, I do as he asks. I open my senses, lower my defenses, and invite feeling into my body. I’ve been practicing a lot, and it’s getting easier and easier with every successive attempt.
Immediately, I get competing feelings—dark and light pulses shooting at me. I can’t tell if it’s one Dark Fae and one Light, or a handful of each. It’s hard to sort out, which is exactly what I tell Carrick and Titus.
“Can you try to separate them?” Carrick asks.
I scrunch up my face, an effort in supreme concentration. First, I try to filter out the light buzzing, but it seems to be coming from all around me. Yet, up here on this roof with only Carrick and Titus, I know that’s not possible.
Shaking my head, I apologize. “I can’t. It’s too muddled.”
“Line of sight must be needed for you to hone in,” Titus suggests. “Which means you’re going to have to look over the edge.”
My pulse starts to race again and to my complete shock, it’s as if Carrick senses it because his thumb begins to graze along my wrist. It’s stunning enough I forget about being scared and twist to look at him.
As always, his expression is wholly inscrutable, but there is a keenness in his eyes that could possibly be interpreted as confidence in me.
Taking strength from Titus’ grip on my arm, and Carrick’s thumb trying to ease the pulse in my wrist, I suck in a breath and lean forward, letting the brick wall support my legs. My stomach twists, topples, and churns as I gaze down and across the street to the park. I don’t have it in me to look straight down at the road below us.
I open myself again—an odd phenomenon that means nothing more than I don’t keep walls up to keep things out. I still feel both the light fizzy feeling and the dark vibe as I let my eyes roam around the people down below.
Suddenly, the dark vibe becomes stronger as my gaze passes across two men sitting on a park bench—fairly youngish looking by their clothes. However, I can’t see the details of their faces from this far away.
“Right there… I can pinpoint a dark vibe coming from those two guys right there,” I say with a nod toward the park. With neither hand able to point, I clarify, “On the bench, beside the double trash cans about twenty feet from the street corner.”
“Can you tell if the vibe is coming from them in general or individually?” Carrick asks.
I’m surprised at how I can instantly focus and tell that, individually, they both have a dark vibe. “Individually… they’re each dark. One is deeper than the other—or maybe more experienced is the description I’m looking for. More sophisticated, maybe.”
“Fascinating,” Titus murmurs.
“Can you see if they’re fae or daemon?” Carrick asks.
“I’m not sure,” I reply with a shake, but I narrow my eyes and squint as hard as I can. From this distance, I can see under their veil, the human faces becoming transparent, but I can’t see fine details. But I can tell one thing for sure. “I can’t see an aura.”
“Fae,” Carrick says, saying something we all know. “And two of them together. That’s a rarity.”
“I wish we had a way to definitively test if the vibe Finley feels matches the type of fae,” Titus remarks.
Carrick nods gravely. “Without knowing more about them—their intentions and actions—we can’t positively know. But I think they correlate.”
Titus and Carrick keep talking about the two fae on the park bench, and I continue to squint, trying so hard to see their visages that my head actually starts hurting.
So much so that Titus and Carrick’s voices start to fade. Suddenly, I can hear two men talking just as clearly as if they were standing on either side of me.