Read Asunder (Incarnate) for Free Online

just—I want a weapon, Sam. You gave me a knife when I told you someone followed me home one night. A knife won’t work against Janan. We only know one thing that affects him, and this is it. I want to understand how. I want to discover if maybe there’s another way I can protect myself.”I wanted to feel safe, but that would never happen in Heart, and I wouldn’t ask Sam to spend this lifetime in a dusty cabin just for me.
    “Let’s go through the rest of Menehem’s research,” Sam said. “I’m sure he recorded videos and every possible variation in his results. Will that help?”
    “It’s a start.”

4
WATCHERS
    SAM WAS ALREADY sleeping on the sofa when the noise came, a soft shriek of wind that sent splinters of fear through my chest. I scrambled for the window.
    Dusk had fallen, and the view from the window nearest my bed revealed only twin mountains against starlight, and lots of trees in between. Brittle leaves rushed in the wind, and I relaxed. Real wind. Real wind in a strange place. I didn’t know the sounds of this building like I knew those of Purple Rose Cottage. I wasn’t familiar with the particular way wind cut across the iron corner in the northeast, or which trees groaned. I didn’t know their voices.
    The sound remained, but the branches, half-dressed with autumn, became motionless.
    A square of light fell from my window onto the grass when Sam clicked on the nearest lamp. “What is it?” He stopped at the foot of the bed, yawning.
    “They’re watching.” I grabbed my flashlight from the nightstand, gave the tube a few sharp twists, and shone the light toward the woods.
    Shadows skittered away, yelping and whining, but they didn’t come closer. When I pulled the beam toward the lab again, the shadows relaxed and resumed their places at the tree line.
    “Watching?” Sam touched my shoulder and peered out from behind me. “How many are there?”
    “A lot.” I closed the window and pulled the shade. We were probably safe inside the iron building. Probably. “Do you think any of these are the same sylph that attacked me on my birthday?”
    “I don’t know.” Sam clicked off the light. “If they are, why behave differently now?”
    Mysteries and more mysteries.
    The sylph didn’t leave that night, or the next, or the next. They never moved closer, never threatened or attacked, but they were always there. Watching.
    Over the next few weeks, I learned why it had taken Menehem eighteen years to re-create and perfect the results of the first Templedark.
    The process of creating and dispersing the poison was a complicated one. Sam and I watched video after video of Menehem explaining different theories and tests to the camera. The hundreds of combinations ran together until one finally gave the response Menehem had been looking for.
    Sam and I sat curled on the sofa together, his arm around my shoulders. I had a notebook balanced on my knees so I could write down stray thoughts. The screen, which Menehem had hidden in a wall, showed a summer day with my father bustling about the yard with cans of aerosol poison, which he’d created using a machine in the back of the lab.
    “Aerosol,” he explained to the camera for the hundredth time, “has proven to be the most effective delivery system. It allows the hormones to be both solid and suspended midair. For sylph, both corporeal and incorporeal, almost a paradox themselves, fighting them with a substance that behaves the same way seems the most logical.
    “The problem has been finding just the right amount of each hormone and timing the exposure, but I believe that I’ve finally found a combination that will work. I started with…”
    He droned on for a while, repeating many of the same things he’d said before. Then he ambled toward a large speaker by the building and flipped a switch. Music crackled and settled, and a haunting piano sonata flowed across the small field and toward the nearby creek. Music streamed toward the