But this didn’t look like a couple, or even three or four. It looked like she was having to sort through dozens, maybe hundreds of different scenes, which fit with my own experience. I didn’t know how many had been battering me there at the end, but it was a lot.

Especially for one freaking arrow!

I drank tea while we waited, even though it was going to make me have to take another bathroom break. I wanted breakfast, but it seemed rude to ask. The telepath was working her ass off; the least we could do was to wait patiently.

And we did, for what felt like forever. I had started to drift off, the comfy old chair cradling me, the fire warming me, the rain outside shush, shush, shushing me off to sleep…

When I felt a touch on my hand.

And when I looked up…

I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Four

I looked around, blinking and still half asleep, but not for long. I sat up abruptly and then paused, unsure of what I was seeing. Because this… didn’t look like an imprint.

The ones I’d encountered before were hazy and often distorted, with warped colors that kept trying to slide off the edges of things and sounds that echoed oddly. They had a dream-like quality, fuzzy and incomplete, and frequently came with an unpleasant echo of the imprinter’s shock and horror. Even under the best of circumstances, they were like a crappy, homemade video, where the cameraman couldn’t hold still and kept putting his finger in front of the lens.

But not now.

Not this.

“Where are we?” I asked the telepath, who seemed to expect my reaction.

“Take a moment,” she said, letting go of my hand. “Then we’ll talk.”

I took a moment.

We were sitting on a gray stone bench near a gray stone wall. The temperature was wintry, with a damp chill that shivered straight through to my bones, but the sun was shining and there was no snow. Early spring, I thought, somewhere north enough to tease warmer weather long before it delivered any.

In front of me was a flagstone expanse with a wooden lattice overhead striping it with shadow. The lattice was gray, too, being old and weather-worn, but was sturdy enough to support a flowering vine of some sort, which was startlingly vivid against the washed out, watercolor view behind it. I saw pale, almost white skies over winter-brown fields and what was probably the ocean in the distance. I couldn’t be sure, because the water and sky blended together on the horizon until they were indistinguishable, but seagulls whirled overhead and the air smelled of brine.