MEETING OF MINDS: By Lori Titus
Wednesday, July 27th, 2011“What’s your name again?” Marradith asked.
She felt rude asking the question, but she couldn’t hear the man speaking to her over the roar of the jet’s engine. Daria had left on an earlier flight than expected, due to pressing business in Los Angeles. Marradith would fly to California with this man, and they’d never met before. They were outside the hangar on a private airfield, a few miles away from the White Sands Compound.
The man was at least six inches taller than her. He bent so he could get closer to her ear, and brushed her hair off her shoulder in doing so.
“David,” he said. “David Brennan.”
Since she’d become a Sojourner, Marradith indulged in a little mind game of trying to figure out exactly what a person was when she met them. She could tell Wolves without even seeing them–she felt a heat rush through her spine. Fiona told her once that there was a physiological reason for this. The rush of blood came when exposed to Others who had the gene that made them Wolf.
Marradith had gotten better about sensing vampires, though sometimes she still couldn’t distinguish them right away. Her own Mother was half vampire, so the blood was fairly diluted. Vampires weren’t like those in movies–pale, odd, dead looking. But she was learning how to define their difference. It was more in how they moved than how they looked. There was a temperance to their movement, an attempt to conceal their natural speed and strength.
Shifters were tricky. They lacked any kind of physical smell, but that was easily masked by perfume or scented soap. Or the fact that most of them didn’t let you get close enough for you to notice.
This man was different. She frowned behind her sunglasses. Tilting her chin, she stared at him.
“I seem to have passed your Mother’s stringent approval process,” he said. “I have identification if you need it.”
“Sure,” she said, and took the documents from him, matching the picture ID to his face. “If you’ve met my Mother you’ll know what her greatest peeve is.”
He smiled. “Being called Lenora.”
“Give the man a prize,” Marradith said.
He laughed. “It’s nice to meet you.”
It wasn’t until then that she read his ID that she realized how young he was. He was only seventeen. He had light brown hair that slanted sideways over his left brow. He was white, and she guessed that he was either a transplanted Southerner or Midwesterner. There was no accent in his speech, but Sojourners were trained to lose their dialect. It was easier for them to blend in that way. She noted the pale brown freckles across the bridge of his nose and his cheeks.
His eyes were hazel, and he smiled at her approvingly.
“That really was a good guess. I’m from Nebraska but my Dad was from down south, and I spent a lot of summers there. I have been a lot of places now. We should have a lot of things to discuss.”
“You read me?” Marradith said.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that, but it may take a while for me to get used to you,” he said. “I read people all the time, and sometimes it’s unintentional. You’ll have to excuse me, but I have never met another Lamia that wasn‘t one of my family.”
“So sometimes it is unintentional?” Marradith said with a raised eyebrow.
David blushed. “Well this time it was.”
“How many of us are there?” Marradith asked.
David shrugged. “There’s really no telling. Most of us live as humans. And there are a few within The Circle,” he said grimly. “Though they tend to have a brief shelf life within that group.”
“All Lamia can read each other?”
He shrugged. “Not necessarily. Telepathy is my thing, just as electrical impulses are yours. Though I don’t doubt that you could read me easily if you wanted to.”
Marradith looked away from him. She’d read Justin’s mind before, and the magic that Fiona taught her often required a form of mind reading between the two of them. But she still thought of telepathy as a very intimate thing; not something that she wanted to share with a person she didn’t know.
“Danny’s going to be meeting us?” Marradith asked.
“Yes. In fact, he should be with your Uncle Jake already. I spoke to him this morning.”
“You know Danny?”
“Yes. I was with him and your Mom while you were on the run.”
Marradith wasn’t sure if she was imagining it, but she thought he was insulted by the last question.
“Just asking,” she said.
He smiled then. “ Come on, let’s go.”
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©2011 Lori Titus
The Marradith Ryder Series will expand into two novellas this year: The Moon Goddess and Marradith, Darkly, . For more information, see the author’s website at http://loribeth215.wordpress.com/ . Until then, you can find her latest release, Hailey’s Shadow, here: http://tinyurl.com/3z9zlhf
