Everything Melissa's mind picked up; the tastes of old women's minds as they bargained for the best prices, the children running in the streets against their mothers' calls, the troublemakers hiding in the shadows of alleys; all this was clouded by the adrenalin running through her body.
"Are you sure this one is it?" Jonathan asked, looking over in reluctant exasperation. Since Rex hadn't given Dess any information, Melissa and Jonathan had had to drive all over Texas looking for the right orphanage. Finally they stopped in this small, run down city.
"Yes." Her voice shook. "I can taste him."
Her door clicked open and she climbed out into the street, looking across at the small, high building. She felt Jonathan come to stand next to her after a few moments.
It happened very quickly; Melissa, in great anticipation, jumped forward to cross the street and see her Rex, finally after all the time they'd been apart, after everything that had happened.
She heard Jonathan call her name behind her, and didn't have time to stop before his hand shot out and grabbed her bare upper arm, stopping her just before a car zoomed by.
The sudden burst of thought and emotion from his mind was unexpected, and so, unguarded. There was none of the carefulness or control that Melissa had used when she used to touch Rex freely. First she felt his burst of energy as he saw her run out in front of the car, his automatic response to grab her, and then the pain that came as a result of it. More slowly, she felt the permanent emotions that he felt more often than the fleeting, temporary ones; him missing his father, his old life, and devastation over Jessica's condition.
She pulled away as his bitterness added to her own, and realized how much worse Jonathan probably felt than she did, due to the current state of her own mind..
She looked back at him for a moment, and then, without a word, ran across the street and into the gray building.