Liminal - Excerpt Only

Liminal - Excerpt Only (Chapter Four)

But rather than reducing him to a gibbering mess, he raked his hands through his shaggy hair. And when he linked his hands and arched them over his head to stretch his back, and his t-shirt rode up to reveal tanned and toned abs, I had to lock my jaw so I didn't make even more of an idiot of myself. I mean, sleep-talking? About the guy who's in a prime position to overhear you? Sheesh. Über-embarrassing. I didn't know him very well but I couldn't imagine him letting me forget that one in a hurry.

"You aren't normal, luv," he said. " You will never be normal. You're a lim. Get over it. Quit shagging 'round and deal with it."

"Excuse me?" This unexpected "deal with it" bluntness was shocking as a face-full of cold water.

He yawned. "I'm knackered. Gonna go catch some Zs. You should get some rest, too. You can either share my bed, or make yourself comfy in one of the other bedrooms. Your choice. But in the interests of full disclosure, I'm a snuggler. Consider yourself officially warned."

My jaw sagged. "W-what?"

All remnants of teasing drained away with his sigh. "Get some rest, Wren. I'll answer all your questions when my head doesn't feel like it's gonna topple off my neck. I'm so dangerously low on energy I'm barely functional. When you unsynched back there you knocked me 'round pretty bloody bad."

I battled to escape the embrace of the too-squishy couch cushions. "You can't seriously think I'm hanging here 'til you feel up to answering my questions?"

"Yeah. I seriously can. Because you seriously are." A pause, while he gave me the fish-eye. "Seriously."

He had my tone and cadence so dead on that I flushed. I'm not usually a potty-mouth—it's so not worth it when Mom has such a thing about swearing—but this situation needed a response that a guy like Kade would understand. "No effing way I'm staying here. You got that?"

"Yeah," he said. "I got that. But here's the thing, luv. I didn't realize how bad you were until I synched with you. You havea month, tops. And like it or not, I'm all you've got."

"What do you mean, 'a month'?"

His killer-blue eyes turned hard and cold and unforgiving as the sea in winter. "Migraines. Muscle spasms. Bone-deep aches. Nausea. Any of this sounding familiar, Wren?"

"Uh—"

"Shut up and listen."

"Don't forget the nightmares that seem so real you wake up shaking and scared as hell," I blurted.

"You're not the only one who has nightmares," he said.

"Not like these."

"That's what you think." Uttered so softly I almost missed it. "Those are symptoms," he continued.

"You think? Tell me something I don't know." Considering I wanted to wipe the floor with his know-it-all attitude, I figured I handled that pretty well.

"What about hardly bothering to eat because nothing tastes any good anymore? Hearing buzzing or roaring sounds?"

"I haven't gone completely off food. Sure, there's more and more stuff I can't stand, but—"

"Soon you won't want to eat at all. You'll have to force nourishment down your throat. And it's only going to get worse."

 I decided it was in my best interests to shut up and let him talk. You know, so I didn't end up anorexic or anything. I gave him a "get on with it, already" wave of my hand.

"Liminals are humans with the ability to vibrate at a different frequency—outside the range that normal human senses can perceive." He threw me a "you got that?" kind of look complete with peaked eyebrows and just the tiniest smirk. It was that look you frequently see on the faces of people who believe they're way smarter than everyone else—like they think no one could possibly understand what they've said and they just know they're gonna have to dumb it down.