Darkness Bound (15 page)

“You’re
evil
,” he protested, crushing her body to his once more.

“But you love me,” she whispered, and kissed him.

They stood there entwined for a long, breathless moment until a politely cleared throat dragged them abruptly back to reality.

“Your Highnesses.” Viscount Weymouth bowed low from the waist. He straightened and beamed at Jenna and Leander, who broke apart but stood with their arms around each other’s waists.

“Weymouth.” Leander cocked his head, narrowing his eyes. “You’re looking rather pleased with yourself this morning.”

A faint blush rose in the viscount’s cheeks. He glanced at his valet, standing stoically beside him, staring at nothing. “Just . . .
er . . . just anxious to begin our journey, My Lord,” he stammered, walking stiffly into the opulence of the East Library. Prisms of fractured, golden sunlight reflecting from the crystal chandelier hanging from the gilded ceiling above glinted off his spectacles, and shone from the dome of his balding head. He paused beside the marble fireplace, staring pensively down into the dark hearth for a moment. Then he turned and said briskly, “Is everything in order?”

Leander slanted his wife a look. She blinked up at him, smiling coyly again, and he clenched his jaw, shaking his head. He exhaled hard, raked a hand through his hair, then gave her a gentle kiss on the temple.

He murmured into her ear, “Our discussion isn’t over yet.” To the viscount, he said, “Yes. We’re ready. Aren’t we, darling?”

“Ready as we’ll ever be.” She sent the viscount a long, searching look, under which he squirmed.

The blush in his cheeks deepened, turning them ruddy. “And how are you feeling this morning, Your Highness?” he asked, a little too brightly. “Any sign of the Sight returning?”

Jenna and Leander shared a knowing glance.

They hadn’t told anyone her Sight had returned once the children had been born because there was a traitor to be found . . . and nothing brought out the circling wolves like a whiff of weakness. It would be so much more convenient if the mind reading would return—she’d simply line everyone up and shake their hands, and it would be done—but at least they knew where Caesar was hiding. It would have to be enough for now.

“No, not yet.” Jenna sighed, pretending dismay and doing her best to look crestfallen. “All the other Gifts are intact, but the Sight . . . we’re still hoping, of course.”

“Of course!” the viscount enthused, rising up on his toes as if he were going to hop. He lowered himself immediately and nervously cleared his throat. “Er . . . well, then, if there’s not anything else, I’ll wait outside. My family is already gathered in the motor court, along with the rest of the Assembly.”

Jenna’s stomach squeezed to a knot. Once they left, Sommerley would be a ghost town. No one knew if they’d ever be able to return. For a woman who as a child had never lived in any one place longer than a few months, Sommerley had become more than a home. It had become a sanctuary.

Her arm tightened around her husband’s waist.
Home is with him. Home is wherever he and the girls are. Nothing else matters.

“Thank you, Edward,” said Leander. “We’ll be down in a moment.”

The viscount and his valet bowed their goodbyes and left, and Jenna and Leander stood looking in silence around the grand, glittering room.

Leander turned to her. “It’s twelve hundred miles from here to Morocco—”

“Thirteen hundred sixty-eight,” Jenna correctly softly. “I know, love.”

He stared at her a beat.

“I looked it up.”

His eyes bored into her. “How long have you been planning this?”

She stroked his cheek with her fingertips. “I’m going to be fine, Leander. I promise I won’t take any unnecessary risks. Caesar won’t even know I’m there . . . you know I can do this.”

As he stared down at her, a muscle in his jaw flexed, over and over.

“If I leave soon, I can be there before sunset. A bit of recon, then I’ll head toward Brazil.”

He shook his head. “You’ll be flying over open water on the way back. What is it? Two, three thousand miles from Morocco to Manaus?”

“Four thousand two hundred fifty.” Jenna pressed her fingers against that angry muscle in his jaw, willing it to calm.

Leander cupped her face in his hands. “This is insanity! You’ll be totally exposed! Over that distance, you’ll have to fly without stopping, for . . . how long? Days, likely! There’re airplanes, there’s radar . . . you don’t think someone will notice a huge white dragon flying over the Atlantic Ocean?”

“I can be Vapor,” she said gently. “I can be a bird—”

“What if you tire? What about food, water? What if, God forbid, you get injured? Jenna,
think
!”

She removed his hands from her face, and stepped back, out of his reach. She watched his face, his desperate, begging eyes, and steeled herself against them.

“I’m doing this, Leander. You know how much I love you, but I’m not asking your permission. This tribe is my responsibility, our survival is my responsibility, and I’m not just going to sit by helplessly while Caesar tears us apart and makes the world hate us. I’m going to spy on him and his little pack of rats, and find out what their plan is, so we can formulate a plan of our own. I’m sorry you don’t approve, but I’m doing it. This isn’t a negotiation.”

His eyes flashed. “And what about the girls? They’re still breast-feeding—”

“Grayson Sutherland’s wife is still breast-feeding, too.”

Grayson was an Assembly member, one of the few families left at Sommerley who’d be making the trip with them to Manaus. His wife had conveniently given birth the month prior, and had agreed to care for Honor and Hope in Jenna’s absence.

Leander’s face hardened. “A wet nurse. I see you’ve thought of everything.”

“I have. And everything will be fine, you’ll see. Please, just trust me.”

They stared at one another while the long-case clock chimed the hour. When the doleful tolls faded into silence, Jenna asked quietly, “Did you think I’d just stand by and let him walk all over us? Did you think when my Gifts returned I wouldn’t retaliate?”

Leander blinked. His lips parted. Dread leached the color from his face. “You can’t kill him, Jenna. He can’t be killed, you know that. Don’t even try; you’ll only end up getting hurt. Or worse!”

“Everything that can be made can be unmade. We just don’t know how Caesar can be unmade yet, but he can. He might be immortal, but he isn’t invincible. Even Superman has his Kryptonite—”

“Superman is a comic book character! Caesar is real!”

“He’s got a weakness, Leander. I know it. And I’m going to find out what it is.”

In a hoarse, disbelieving voice, he asked, “Even if it kills you?”

Yes.

The word was unspoken, but Leander saw it in her eyes. In the way her chin lifted, the way her back straightened, the way her gaze, always so soft when she looked at him, turned steely.

Yes, she would die for them. For her beloved, beautiful husband and her two new babies and this clan of magical, mystical beings who’d accepted her as their own, even though she was only half their world. Only half their Blood.

“It’s my responsibility. More than anyone, you understand responsibility. If the roles were reversed, you’d be doing the exact same thing.”

He closed his eyes. Jenna knew he knew she spoke the truth, and she also knew he hated to admit it.

“If anything happens to you, it will end me. You do realize that, don’t you?” he whispered. He opened his eyes, and they blazed. “I won’t go on without you. I can’t.”

She stepped into the circle of his outstretched arms and rested her cheek against his chest. He buried his face in her hair and they clung to each other, hearts pounding, the dark, uncertain future rushing toward them at the speed of a runaway train.

Jenna gently kissed her love on the cheek. “You’ll never be without me. Even when I’m far away, my heart is always with you. My heart will always only be with you.”

Then, without waiting for a response, without giving him the opportunity to try to argue her out of what she needed to do, she Shifted to Vapor.

It rose to a burning bright peak within her, effortless as breathing, smooth as silk. From one heartbeat to the next her body transformed from cumbersome flesh and blood and bone to cool, lovely mist, weightless and wonderful. As it always did when she left her physical self behind, a song of joy pierced straight through her, thrilling and impossibly sweet.

Goodbye, my love. Wish me luck; I’m going to need it.

As she surged in a glittering gray plume toward the window that stood ajar at the end of the room, Leander was left holding up her empty dress in the stillness and splendor of the East Library, watching her go with haunted, anguished eyes.

Like an arrow sure of its mark, the half-Blood Queen of the
Ikati
shot out into the morning sky.

“Before we do this, Red,” Hawk said, his voice low and serious, his face a mask of stone, “there are three things you need to remember if you’re going to get back to New York in one piece.”

That sounded ominous enough to Jack, but his manner made her even more anxious. She’d never seen him this . . . wired.

After her emotional admission a day and a half ago, before she’d gone to bathe in the pool beneath the waterfall, they’d settled again into silence. He’d politely requested that she let him stand nearby—back turned—to make sure nothing snuck up on her during her swim, and he’d kept his word. Crouched on an outcropping of rock just above the warm, clear waters, he’d never once looked her way . . . and she’d checked repeatedly.

But his gaze had never strayed from some fixed point in the distance, far overhead.

Following her blurted admission about her brother, she found both Hawk’s request to stand guard and his respect for her privacy deeply touching.

Even after more than thirty-six hours, she was still raw and bleeding in places inside of her that had been scabbed over for years. He must have sensed it, because he allowed her to retreat into the snug, safe corner of her mind she’d created long ago to cope when things went sideways. He only spoke to her in gentle tones to warn her of some obstacle in their path as they walked, or instruct her on the finer points of forest living, like how to use a handful of foaming berries and a macerated twig to brush her teeth, or how to funnel rainwater from the curved leaves of trees when she was thirsty. Last night, when she’d awoken screaming from another nightmare, he’d only squeezed her into the hard warmth of his chest until she stopped trembling, then released her and stared silently out into the vast emerald darkness, never speaking a word at all.

Now, after a week of sailing the ocean and trudging through wilderness and forging a kind of bizarre, backward alliance based on blurted honesties, silences that should have been uncomfortable but were companionable instead, and the knowledge they’d already forced one another to re-examine some of their sacrosanct beliefs, they stood together in the soft sapphire aftermath of twilight, looking down into the wide, misted bowl of an emerald valley wherein Hawk said his colony lay.

“What are the three things?” Jack’s voice was as low and solemn as his.

He was examining the landscape below the hill they were about to descend with eyes so focused and predatory she thought briefly his nickname was exactly apropos. A raptor’s gaze held just that kind of piercing, hungry keenness.

“First and most important, the Alpha is always right. No matter what, no questions asked.”

“The Alpha,” she repeated, unsure. “How will I know which one is the Alpha?”

His lips quirked. “Trust me, you’ll know.”

Adrenaline threaded along her nerve endings like a barbed, creeping vine, lifting all the tiny hairs on the back of her neck. “Second?”

“Second, you’re only here to observe. Opinions won’t be welcome, and you might find yourself missing your tongue if you say the wrong thing. Females don’t have quite the . . .” He searched for a word, then tried a different tack. “Let’s just say the feminist movement hasn’t reached the rainforest.” His eyes, electric green even in darkness, met hers. “Yet.”

“Got it. You’re all a bunch of tongue-chopping Archie Bunkers.”

His smile soured. “Not all, no. But enough for it turn deadly if, for instance, Gloria Steinem showed up and started burning bras.”

Deadly
? Her mouth went dry. “Duly noted. Mum’s the word. And third?”

The smile vanished. When he again spoke, her heart began to flutter like a hummingbird’s at the ominous tone in which they were spoken.

“Don’t go anywhere without me. Especially at night.”

They stared at each other. Off on the distant horizon, a full moon crested a range of rolling black hills and spread her pallid glow over the treetops.

“Tell me they’re not going to hurt me,” she said, carefully watching his face. “Tell me I’m going to get out of this alive.”

He turned to her and looked down on her from his full, imposing height, his manner as intense as the look in his eyes. “No one is going to hurt you,” he insisted with vehemence. “Anyone who’s stupid enough to even
look
at you the wrong way will have to deal with me.”

That protectiveness again. That freely offered—and undeserved—shielding from harm.

Why would he defend her against his own kind, after what she’d written, after how she’d argued for war against them, after all she’d done? He’d said he was responsible for her safety . . . but was there more to it than that?

Do I want there to be?

After a moment of fraught indecision in which she debated the merits of opening this particular can of worms, Jack said, “I thought you thought I was a bigot.”

He answered softly, “I thought you thought I was a lying, scheming, underhanded son of a dung beetle.”

The air all around them breathed with the lush music of the rainforest. Frogs croaked. Insects whirred. Mammals chirped or called or howled. Everything smelled of nighttime and wildness, and the space between them was palpably alive. Jack felt on the verge of something vast and bottomless, a weightless, sightless sensation of falling or flying blindfolded, of jumping into impenetrable blackness and having it swallow her whole.

Why do you make me feel like this?

Why is it when I look into your eyes I feel . . . free?

“I
do
think you’re a lying, scheming, underhanded son of a dung beetle,” Jack agreed, letting him see the truth of it in her unguarded gaze. “I hate that you tricked me. I hate that you used me.” She hesitated, then went on, smaller; emotion constricting her voice. “I hate that I liked it so much.”

He said her name, his eyes as soft as his voice.

“I hate that I could have looked back on that night with only good memories—
amazing
memories—and now I can only look back and see one more betrayal.”

She’d wounded him. She saw it in the way he stiffened, in the way his glittering eyes reflected back sorrow and shame. For a moment she was brilliantly, blindingly
glad
she’d hurt him. For a moment it was enough that she wasn’t the only one in pain.

But then he whispered with searing, startling remorse, “I didn’t know you, Jacqueline. I didn’t know
you
. If I had, I never would’ve agreed to it. I never would’ve hurt you. I thought you were something else, some
one
else, this heartless woman who felt nothing, who only wanted to spread hatred and fear. But you’re not. You’re . . . unexpected. You’re . . .”

He hesitated, but seemed unable to continue, or unsure of what to say.

His gaze dropped to her lips.

Everything honed to a crystalline clarity. His eyes, his face, the space between them, crackling hot. A frenzy of emotion whipped her heartbeat into a thundering gallop, and it became hard to breathe.

A sinister rustling in the underbrush ripped her attention away from him to the dark forest.

Hawk whirled around. He shoved Jack behind him with one hand. From his throat he issued a low, preternatural hiss.

It was answered by more hissing from the darkness.

Jack froze in horror as she peeked around Hawk’s shoulder and saw, slinking forward in a solid line from the depths of the jungle, ten monstrously huge black panthers. Their long tails waved in sinuous harmony, their eyes shone with predatory malice, their muzzles full of sharp fangs were bared.

They moved clear of the underbrush, slowly spread apart, and sank into coiled, silent crouches.

Poised to pounce.