Read Online The Drafter by Kim Harrison - Free Book Online

one gave us a second look. You timed me decrypting the floor’s main door. I was three seconds slow.”
    But two minutes better than my best time , she thought at the memory of burning circuits. Her closed eyes twitched, and Jack’s words made her blood hum as the night became real.
    â€œYou sat, admiring the view as I worked,” he said, and she breathed easy, remembering the deep purples and shining golds of lights between the street and night sky, her confidence that they’d be back at their hotel by sunrise eating breakfast on their balcony and Jack complaining that she was poisoning him with health food.
    â€œYou pointed out the planes stacked for landing,” he said, and she drowsed, recalling her good mood. “You sampled the chocolate, everything going well. Then you heard the elevator, and you were feeling daring, so you left me.”
    I left him . His worry twined about hers, magnifying it. An anchor had to be within a drafter’s reach to recognize a jump, and drafting out of his sight might have left Jack unable to bring back her memory at all. It must have been worth the risk , she thought, her grip tightening on the button, the holes sharp on her skin.
    â€œIt was the security guard,” Jack said, his touch returning to her jawline to work the new frown from her brow. Memories were coming back stronger now. She could feel Jack with her, their mental connection tightening until his emotion in her mind was as real and recognizable ashers. There’d been lights on the ceiling, doors opening that should have remained shut, a dangerous, aware lifter instead of a cream-puff guard.
    Jack’s fingers fell away as their connection solidified and her closed eyes began to dart in earnest. Together they saw the man she had killed. She recognized his expression, gave Jack the knowledge that the guard had smelled like whiskey and sweat when they had collided. Jack felt her confidence when the guard opened the door, felt her pain when his fist found her eye. Peri’s heart pounded as she recalled the taste of her blood when he shot her, the smell of gunpowder, the shock of adrenaline. She was falling away from a man with gray hair. . . .
    And then Jack wrapped his mind around the blood, the pain, the scent of gunpowder, and the image of a confident man in a suit—fragmenting them. Peri’s breath came easier as the broken weave vanished, replaced by the memory of fear and the sudden give as her knife scraped on the guard’s ribs and found his lungs.
    The memories came in no order, with no reason to them, a mixing of the first timeline and the second as Jack, deep into her psyche, burned the first one away—long before the chaos of two realities could linger and drive her insane. Peri’s darting eyes slowed in the first hint of release, and at his urging, they ran through the night again, both of them looking in the shadow places of her mind for remnants of the original timeline that could trigger a mental crash.
    Peri tensed when they found it, feeling Jack’s grip on her mind tightening. There’d been someone else—a man in a suit. Remembered panic pooled from her to Jack, and she gasped when Jack followed her fear deep into her mind and plucked from it the memory of a man eating a chocolate, reinforcing that she’d eaten a chocolate as she sat in a chair.
    But she knew they hadn’t been alone, and an oily voice crying Bravo! echoed against the black edges of burned memory. Jack blotted it away, soothing her.
    Her hand throbbed as she recalled pinning a man to a chair, the disdain in his eyes, her fear at his confidence.
    In her mind, Jack folded the edges of the first-weave memory in on itself, erasing it. It wasn’t there. It hadn’t really happened.
    And then it was gone.
    She was left with the memory of Jack standing before the wave screen, cursing the files’ lack of organization, his face lit and pale in the glow. It