Page 38 of Fuse

Making me nearly dread the moment he exposes his full gaze again.

But never solidifying the purpose of my prairie porch more.

Past the whipping mane of his hair, even across the fifty feet still separating us, his grief pierces my heart like flying glass. I gasp from the impact right before a similar sound erupts from Trixie. I automatically reach for her, as much to rein her as comfort her. She longs to go to him. I get the maternal instinct and even understand it because of my own aching protectiveness for him—but there’s a deeper instinct ordering me to stand back. A dictate twined with the spiritual strands of my bond to him. That intangible energy that blares a signal in my head as loud as it is clear.

“He needs space.”

“Space?” she snaps at me. “Are you looking at him?”

I nod sorrowfully—as I comprehend exactly why he’s returned three hours after Sawyer and Angie. Grasping why the two of them held back on telling me everything that happened on the rooftop with Kane. If they had, I’d be heading into the third hour of my own agony instead of throwing sandbags on my shock to keep the flood from swallowing me whole.

“Yes,” I tell Trixie. “I’m looking.” And I’m seeing.

“But—”

I’m not the one who yanks her back this time. Quickly, I follow the hand that’s encased her elbow, up a lean-muscled arm to Chase’s determined face. “I’m hurting for him too, Mom. But we need to trust Emma.” He dips his head toward me with the weight of respect. “She has the full window to Reece now.”

No sooner has he said that then the chopper lifts up and away, leaving Reece standing in the field by himself. At once, he reels back by a few steps. He lifts his hands higher but then spins around as if needing to run from them—and does. As he breaks into a full sprint, his aching bellow shudders the air and echoes through the entire canyon. As energy explodes off his fingers, he disappears into the hills that are washed into the mix of late afternoon gold and early evening black. They welcome him with restless winds that crackle from the force of his speed.

He moves so fast, Trixie and Chase hardly realize the deafening whomp is Reece and not the departing helicopter.

“R-Reece?” Trixie stammers. “Reece? What on earth?”

She rushes forward, bending the tall grass back the other way, easily able to escape Chase, who’s slowed by his own version of incredulity as he joins her in eyeballing the new dust cloud that billows close to the hills in the distance. A cloud that’s laced by lightning in all-too-familiar shades of blue.

Trixie’s gaze bulges. “Oh, dear heavens. What should we…shouldn’t we…”

I wrap one of her hands with both of mine. As obvious as the action seems, I do it with torn feelings. I’ll never be a mother in the biological sense, but it doesn’t take emotional rocket science to relate to why Trixie’s close to a basket case after everything that’s happened in the last twelve hours. In the last twelve months. She’s had to accept that one of her children was permanently mutated by mad scientists before another died in battle against those same psychopaths—all because of her husband of nearly thirty-five years. It hasn’t felt right to ask if Lawson’s death worsened or bettered her ordeal, but the way she’s immersed herself in caring for Reece, Chase, Joany, and me, constantly flying between New York and here to do so, has struck us all as a viable therapy regime. Since we’re all so grateful she hasn’t chosen alcohol, sex, or boy toys as her therapy of choice, the four of us have formed a tacit agreement not to challenge her decisions.

Which makes me feel like a sizable shit right now.

Still, I state with quiet firmness, “He knows you’re here for him.” I include Chase in my regard too. “That everyone is. But he can’t deal with bad days by just coming home and grabbing a hot shower and a cold beer.”

Chase moans softly. “Which sounds like a damn good plan.”

“Which you need to go do.” I clarify it as encouragement and not commandment, with a tight but sincere smile. “Please.” My addendum isn’t so tactful, because my senses start to crackle again. Yanked from their moorings by Reece’s furious, flaring beacon again. He’s alone and adrift, grieving and angry—and right now, all that matters is just getting to him. “I’m…I’m sure he just needs to clear the mental cache and cookies,” I add, squeezing Trixie’s hand once more. I look down at our twined fingers, noting that Reece definitely got his long fingers from his maternal side.

“And she’s his tech support.” Chase is equally resolute about his message, calmly extricating his mother’s hand from mine, seeming to sense my compulsion about hurrying to his brother’s side. “So let her go and be that, Mom. Come on. I’m sure Joany’s rustling something up for dinner.”

For a second, Trixie still vacillates as if deciding between one muddy slope and another, her face crunched with conflict. “Tell him I’ll make chocolate chip cookies for dessert,” she finally urges to me. “His favorite. With the walnuts.”

The breath she hitches between the sentences sends a little hook into my heart. All too clearly, I can imagine Reece as a boy, running into a huge kitchen in which Trixie is pulling out a tray filled with those cookies. That kitchen is inside a place called Richards Hall, where the woman probably had a staff numbering in double digits who could’ve baked those cookies—but she knew that the most valuable ingredient in fresh-baked cookies was, and always will be, a mother’s love. It’s a perfect reminder that no matter what state I’m about to find Reece in, he’s a man beneath it all. The man I love, part of a family I’m growing to adore just as equally.

“Of course I’ll tell him.” It comes from the center of my soul, which flares again from the inescapable call of its mate. Reece’s need is so intense, I have to fight the rage at my human limitations as I run-walk across the distance to him. Already knowing, despite no other guidance system but the ache in my chest, that I’m going the right way.

The pain worsens, meaning I’m either about to have heart failure or I’m closing in on him. I don’t dismiss the possibility of the former, since the journey into the depths of the canyon covers some seriously rocky terrain. But just when I’m getting ready to curse the unsteady ground, the prickly coastal shrubs, and the strengthening nighttime gusts, I let out a cry of gratitude.

And then awe.

And then alarm.

Gratitude because that wind now carries brilliant blue sparks, as if a cosmic torch welder is doing repair work just around the corner.

Awe because all those lights look dipped in a puddle of blue magma. I’ve never seen the blue so rich and vibrant and concentrated before.

And alarm—because I realize that where there’s magma, there has to be a volcano.

A volcano with a god in its core.