Chapter 8

Now, standing in Tampa, Florida, in the middle of the SearchLight compound, stuck in the bowels of the archives, she allowed rage to overtake her pain. If Jenny couldn’t explain, then or now, then Renée really had no recourse but to keep her heart away from her.

She collected the books she wanted, one of them a journal written by the son of a powerful undine. And wasn’t that screwy. Undines only reproduced once, and it was always a female. How the hell did that work?

As she dragged her feet back toward the computer station where she’d left Jenny, she remembered that all elementals, undines, salamanders, gnomes, and sylphs, were gender shifters. Even if they spent most of their lives as one gender, they could shift to the other. She wondered briefly, in an undine pairing, which one took on the male role for sex. Then she banished the thought. She was entering enemy territory again.