Falling Light (A Game of Shadows Novel) by Thea Harrison

thought back.
    Michael tore off the rest of his bandages, tossed them on the floor of his old car, shrugged on his shirt and grabbed the bags of food. He gestured to her. She ran to collect the pillow and blanket and her purse from the Ford before clambering into the Jeep’s passenger seat.
    He dug into his weapons bag and pulled out the nine-millimeter, which he set in the driver’s door pocket. When they had both snapped on their seat belts he turned the SUV around and inched past the Ford toward the main road.
    Then she remembered. She had to will it to start. She flung out her hands and commanded, “Stop!”
    Michael slammed on the brakes. He scanned the surrounding scene. “What?”
    She waved her hands at him in triumph. “I did it!”
    He looked at her from under lowered brows. “Try doing it silently next time.”
    It was a look of such ordinary exasperation she grinned. “I will,” she told him. “Come on, lighten up. I just remembered how to do something else. This is a good thing.”
    A corner of his well-made mouth lifted. Really, he was sexier than any man had a right to be.
    “Yes,” he said, as he accelerated the Jeep again. “This is a very good thing.”

Chapter Six

    AFTER ASTRA LEFT the dream with Mary, she cast her awareness through her house, checking on her uninvited guests.
    Jerry lay in the bed of one of her guest rooms. He had been a big, strong man in his youth. Astra remembered his childhood well. Now his body looked shrunken under the covers, and his copper skin had an unhealthy pallor. His grandson Jamie had pulled his long, dark gray hair out of the ponytail, and it rippled over the pillow. She sighed. Jerry was a good man. It was hard to watch him die.
    Jamie had dragged a chair in from the living room. He sat in it, slumped sideways in a dejected heap, resting his head on the crook of one arm on the bed beside Jerry’s right hand. Like his grandfather, he wore his hair long and pulled back in a ponytail. Leather and silver bracelets adorned his lean wrists.
    He was a good-looking boy, Astra thought, as she studied him. He was tall and rangy, around twenty-two or twenty-three. His body had yet to finish filling out the promise of power in those wide shoulders. His hair gleamed black like a raven’s wing, and he had his grandfather’s strong, proud features, only Jamie’s were molded with more sensuality, with large, dark eyes and full, sensual lips.
    There was a third person in the room, a ghost of a tall man.
    He was a faint shimmer in the quiet bedroom, a strong, steady presence. Jerry wasn’t awake, and apparently Jamie didn’t have the capacity to see or sense him, because the boy never reacted when the ghost laid a hand on Jamie’s shoulder.
    Astra, however, could see the ghost very well. He had short black hair, distinguished aquiline features and the same copper skin as his father and nephew.
    Nicholas Crow had indeed come, and just as she had expected, he had gone straight to his father’s sickbed.
    She couldn’t do anything for any of them. She had no platitudes to speak. Nicholas was already dead. Jerry was going to die. And she didn’t have a clue what she was going to do about Jamie.
    Thanks to Jerry, now Jamie knew where she lived. And soon Jerry would no longer be around to teach the boy. Left alone, Jamie would mature without either Nicholas or his grandfather’s discipline or steadying influence.
    In Astra’s mind, that turned him into a loose cannon. She might very well end up having to kill the boy just to ensure his silence, and wouldn’t that be a pretty turn of events. Then the deaths of all three males in the Crow family could be laid at her feet.
    She turned away and put the sadness in that room out of her mind. She had work to do, and being maudlin wasn’t going to get any of it done.
    As she regained energy, she worked while her old body rested.
    She sent out psychic calls and waited for responses. When they came, she issued orders. Her