Fatal Sight (Harbingers Of Death Book 2) by LeAnn Mason (book club reads .TXT) 📕

in any one place long enough to make connections. Your attachments are a liability.

Dad had added that lesson after Mom went. And now, Jessica was gone. Lesson confirmed. Looked like my inclination to run had been the right one. My time here was over. I could nearly feel the ice once again encrust my heart, ensuring the organ was impenetrable to the fallacy of affection.

“Got it. Yep. No problem. I’ll be out of your way tomorrow morning, if I’m allowed one night to pack and rest up. And then you guys can work on healing and moving on... And…”

My brain couldn’t keep up with my babble. I gave up on finishing the inane well-wishes I didn’t actually feel to push my way blindly out the door. The need to be far away from the Egyptian god of death fueled my retreat.

“Aria,” Seke called plaintively after me. “Please, understand this is for the best. For all of us.” Shadows pulled and swirled around him as if of their own accord, as if he did it absently, reflexively. It was a defense mechanism I’d witnessed once before — when I’d kicked him in his ancient Egyptian jewels.

Not like I could hurt him now, though I kind of wish I would. He’d hurt me.

Running upstairs toward my bedroom — no, not my bedroom anymore — I nearly crashed into Cole and his girls making their way down.

“Watch it, cupcake,” Cole snapped, pulling Ember out of my way before I barreled over her.

The rejection I’d felt was swiftly turning to anger. “Don’t worry, dog,” I snarled as I kept going. “I won’t get in your way ever again.” I lifted my middle finger in a goodbye salute to the HDPU.

6

If I’d thought it would be easy living without the HDPU, I was sorely mistaken.

And I mean sorely. Every fucking muscle in my fucking body burns like hellfire.

I’d trained my whole life and been through some rigorous pounding with Cole and Raven as my opponents, but nothing prepared me for harbinger boot camp.

Okay, they didn’t call it that. The recruiters called it ‘testing.’ The training facility was intended to challenge new recruits and explore their full range of abilities and potential. Something about isolating their strong suits and predicting their best fit in the HD network.

“Screaming” wasn’t really one of their normal tests, so I was put through a gamut of other horrors that pushed my body and mind to the limits. It was like the Olympics — if I was a one-woman team. I sampled all of the sports and games I could think of and then some. Within the span of a week, I’d run, swam, biked, climbed, tried skiing, and even ziplined. Not to mention the brutal obstacle courses that called for Parkour.

The knowledge tests were my least favorite. My homeschooling wasn’t the most robust, though I was pretty sure I aced the mythology portions.

My favorite activity was sparring. No one cared what style of fighting I used here — it was about assessing what I could do, not critiquing my style — and I was all kinds of dirty. I hadn’t made enemies per se with my knee-to-the-groin specialty, but no one went out of their way to chat with me.

I didn’t mind.

Even here, I was an anomaly. The only banshee. I got strange looks and wide berths. No one was there long enough to make friends anyway. There were only about eight other recruits on the same cycle as me with others coming and going. And they were almost all about ten years younger than me. It was pretty much as alienating as my first days in the clink. Joining the Harbingers of Death hadn’t been the most revitalizing decision for my social life. Not that said social life had been banging prior to my supernatural onboarding. But it hadn’t done it any favors.

Most mornings, I woke up asking myself why I stayed. Each time I pulled on my assigned uniform — only slightly comfier than the prison garb — before starting the day and every time I peeled the heavy, sweat-laden fabric from my body before bed, I stared at the tattoo glistening like a mirage on my pale-ass skin. The same color as my hair, those slashed lines niggled at me. The only way to find out more about the druids and find out if they could fix the fucking bind on my powers was to stick it out in the supe community. For now. I wouldn’t find answers, let alone a druid out in the human world. And to be honest, I didn’t really have anywhere else to go.

I didn’t even know where we were since they’d pulled a Cole so I couldn’t reveal the location of the camp to anyone. I’d gotten into the sleek car when it pulled up outside the bunker and, within seconds, had been robbed of my sight. The drive took hours, much of which I ended up sleeping through — thankfully. Peopling would have been much too hard at that point.

Leaving the HDPU had been… hard, to say the least. There was a bright side to all of the working out at the testing facility — no time or energy to wallow in self-pity or what-ifs.

Between all of the exhausting tests where I was observed, poked, prodded, pricked, and monitored by grunting, monosyllabic drill-sergeant types, there were only about seven hours of downtime in each twenty-four-hour period. Those precious hours were split between mess hall meals of bland, high-protein food, showers that were shorter than the ones I’d enjoyed in prison, and tossing and turning on thin cots only to wake up with a stiff neck, aching muscles, and heavy eyes.

Super fun.

In fact, it reminded me of prison in a lot of ways.

While the games and tests were harrowing, I wasn’t really bad at any of them. I guessed I could attribute that fact to the aforementioned training my parents and Seke had forced on me, though