I swam back to the surface with Thorin shaking my shoulders. “Solina, dammit. Don’t do this. Not again.”
“Chill out.” I pushed myself up to a sitting position as the room spun around me. “I’m okay.”
“See, we told you she’d be okay,” Hugh said. Thorin growled and lunged for him. Hugh jumped back, barely evading Thorin’s swipe.
“Stop it.” I waved at Thorin. “They warned me it might be a jolt.” Actually, they had said my mind might not handle it at all. They weren’t kidding.
He shot another black glare at the ravens. “It was too soon for you to do this.”
“I thought you were out checking crab pots,” I said.
“They were empty, so I came back.” He brushed a few stray hairs off my face and peered into my eyes. “I walked in to find you lying on the floor, still as a stone.”
“I found the connection.” I smiled, trying to reassure him. “It was a little bit overwhelming.”
His lips thinned. “You’re going to kill me slowly, aren’t you? You’re going to literally scare me to death, a little bit at a time.”
I reached up and patted his cheek. “Not on purpose.”
He pulled me in and squeezed me hard to his chest. “I thought I was a strong man, Sunshine. I never knew a little thing like you would be the death of me.”
I furrowed my brow and pushed at him until he let up. “I’m not so little when it comes down to it. Now, help me up, and let’s get this over with. I don’t like having the whole world in my head.”
He met my eyes with a solemn look. “Are you positive?”
“Absolutely.”
Thorin helped me settle in a chair and leaned on the armrest beside me. Hugh and Joe moved to the sofa and perched on the edge, a couple of nervous birds again.
“Okay. Let’s find that connection one more time,” Hugh said. “I’ve tried pulling back on my end, putting an insulator on our link. It will only slow the flow of information, not stop it, so you may have to slog through some stuff to reach the connection and cut it off.”
I nodded and took a deep breath. “Okay.”
I closed my eyes, prepared to go back inside myself, but Hugh stopped me. “Solina, wait.”
My eyes popped open. “What?”
“It won’t be easy. The things you’re getting right now are the most recent Thoughts and Memories. You might have to wade through some really bad stuff, if you know what I mean.”
Thorin put his hands to my shoulders and squeezed. “You sure you want to do this?”
Hugh scowled. “She has to, Boss Man. If she doesn’t do it now, it will only get worse. If she had crazy dreams before, she’s going to be completely out of her mind when the visions and nightmares stalk her in her sleep. It takes time to learn how to control it, and she could probably do it, but she’ll suffer for it. Better to get it over with all at once.”
“I’ll be all right.” I put steel in my voice. I looked up at Thorin with my best tough-girl face. No pity, I was telling him. No indulging my weaknesses. “I want to get this over with.”
He sucked in a breath, obviously working to control his protective instincts. He let the breath out with a whoosh and a deliberate blink. He nodded.
I closed my eyes, slowed my breathing, cleared my senses, and stepped deeper into my mind. Hugh was right. It was all there, swirling about me like an ocean of sounds and sights. The visions switched to rewind mode and showed me everything I had missed after exploding into a superstar. Maybe I could have skipped over it, but I wanted to see, wanted to know.
I should have realized I was pulling the pin on an emotional grenade.
I saw Thorin bringing me to his home, shifting with me from out of the darkness of a flooded cave...
Rewind.
Thorin leaving Grim with Baldur, but not before Grim drew Thorin into a feeble but brotherly embrace...
Rewind.
Thorin scooping up his brother from Val’s cave in the moments before I shattered into starlight. The wails of Val’s anguish reverberating against the cave’s walls. My voice rising up to join his...
I screamed and charged through the flood of Thoughts and Memories, a mad woman tearing through a twisted kingdom of pain and horror until I reached the source, the connection. It rose above a swirling landscape like a pillar. A thick, ropy cable extruding sticky webs wound around the strange, glowing shape. Although I would have sworn I’d never seen it before, the figure made me think of my fire, and I supposed that... thing was the source of all my otherworldly abilities: Sol’s eternal rune. In the past, I’d sensed it as a corporeal object hidden deep inside me, and now I had finally found it. I battered and tugged at the sticky strands, fighting a desperate attack until, finally, the ravens’ connection severed and fell away.
Hugin and Munin retreated from my mind, taking everything I never wanted to know or remember about the world with them. Relief flooded me, and I puddled into a boneless heap, but the release of my connection did not remove my anger, my guilt, or the devastation of my actions.
I returned to the present in a disconcerting blink. Thorin leaned in and put an arm around my shoulders. He murmured soothing things into my ear. My stomach tugged, twisted, and turned over. I shoved him away and ran for the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet in time to vomit, over and over, until my body shook, my stomach muscles ached, and a cold sweat soaked through my clothes. How many times can a person throw up in one day and survive?
I sank to the cold tile floor, stared up at the white ceiling, and waited for tears that never came. Instead, the familiar numbness returned. The more trauma I experienced, the more I realized I coped by turning everything off. It shut down the pain. It shut down everything.
Thorin eased into the bathroom and dropped down beside me. He tried gathering me up in his arms, but I pushed him away.
“Sunshine—”
“Go away.” I cut him off. Unable to face him, I turned my back.
He tried touching me again. Big mistake. My short recovery hadn’t allowed for the full recuperation of my fire, but I gave him every bit of the pittance I had managed to restore. It was enough. He cursed, pulled away, and retreated from the room.
