Transcendent by Lesley Livingston Read Free Book Online Page B

spear against a wall and reached up to lift the winged helmet off her head. Then she stripped off her armored gloves and, not knowing what else to do, held out her hand, knuckles forward, as if she was approaching a strange dog tied up outside a coffee shop.
    Maddox managed to crack a half smile as Fennrys tilted his wolf’s head at her, and she felt a bit ridiculous. In the deep depths of his gaze, she could see that Fennrys did, too. Knowing him as well as she did, and seeing his all-too-human expression radiating from the eyes of an animal, was almost comical. It would have been—if she could get beyond thetragedy of the moment when she realized what she’d just done. Fenn whined at her and lifted one huge front paw in her direction.
    Mason felt a shaky sob bubble up in her chest, and she sank to her knees and threw her arms around his neck, burying her face in the fur of his ruff. She felt Maddox loosen the chain around the wolf’s neck and she reached over to pull the thing off of him, tossing it to the floor and hugging Fennrys, trying to soothe the panting, terrified animal he’d suddenly become.
    Behind her, she heard Rafe quietly tell his pack to back off.
    She sensed Maddox standing and moving cautiously away from Fenn, and she stayed as still as she could, wrapped in her armor, Fennrys wrapped in her arms, and willed them all to leave the two of them alone. When finally she could sense that the curtained alcove was empty, she loosened her grip on the thick gold fur, and did her best to help the Fennrys Wolf come back home.
    Back to himself . . . and back to her.

VII
    W hen Mason Starling was a child, she’d died.
    The experience had left her with a few . . . issues. Catastrophic claustrophobia, for one. Several years of therapy had done little before she’d packed it in and decided that she would cope in her own way, without hypnosis or drugs or those interminable couch sessions where one kindly old gent—very old school—had told Mason that, whenever she felt the walls closing in, all she had to do was shut her eyes and, in her mind, go to her “Safe Harbor.” She’d thought, at the time, it was the most idiotic thing anyone had ever said to her.
    My Safe Harbor . . .
    She wondered if Fenn had a Safe Harbor—if such a thing was even remotely possible for someone like him—but she decided to try and find out. Of course, she didn’t have any pharmaceuticals or any idea how to hypnotize him, and she was pretty sure he wouldn’t go lie down on one of the Weather Room’s white leather couches.
    But she had his medallion. She had magick.
    Mason retrieved the spear and, now that she and Fenn were alone, willed it and herself back into “civvies.” She sheathed the spear-turned-sword and, reaching into the pocket of her jeans, pulled out Fennrys’s Janus medallion. She unraveled the braided leather cord and stretched it out as long as it would go, so that she could tie it around the thick yellow ruff of fur that circled Fennrys’s wolf neck. Then she shoved aside any trace of her roiling, raging, recently manifested Valkyrie in order to concentrate on what Fennrys had told her about the magick.
    Make it happen in your mind .
    Find your Safe Harbor, Fenn , she urged silently, pushing her will into the medallion. “Find it,” she whispered, even as she tried to find her own. Find your Safe Harbor . . .
    The sudden lack of rain sounds was the first thing Mason noticed.
    And the faint smell of dust.
    Old wood . . . and metal . . . the distant sound of traffic and a feeling of space, even though she sensed she was indoors. She opened her eyes and felt everything just . . . fall away. Her mouth stretched wide in a smile of pure joy and she turned in a slow circle, the flirty skirt she wore whispering around her thighs as she moved and the heels of her shoes tapping lightly on the bare concrete