Authors: Virginia Kantra
“He probably has a warrant out for his arrest,” Gideon said.
“But he needs help,” Lara said.
“So we take him back to his ship.”
“It’s not his ship.” What had Justin said? Now that the boat was delivered, he was a free man.
His eyes had drifted shut again. His head bobbed on her shoulder. An unfamiliar tenderness wrung her heart. All that life, all that vitality, bleeding out of him . . .
“He’s alone,” she said. “Just like we were before we were found.”
“He’s not like us. You said so yourself.”
For all their training and power, the nephilim were still human, with human weaknesses. Human imperfections.
She licked dry lips. “What if I was wrong?”
Gideon spared a glance from the road, his straight brows twitching together. “Do you feel something?”
“No,” she admitted.
Her power had been exhausted by the skirmish with the demons. She had only a normal physical awareness of Justin’s presence.
Okay, not exactly normal. The whiff of demon still clung to them. Justin’s blood was on her hands. His warm, hard weight squashed her against the car door. But the powerful charge she’d experienced in the bar had faded to a faint static along her skin, as if she’d never been driven from her bed to seek him. As if . . .
Her breath caught. As if her compulsion was satisfied now that he was found. Now that he was with her. “Maybe we’re meant to bring him with us,” she said.
Gideon’s shoulders stiffened. “To Rockhaven.”
Recklessness seized her.
Why not?
“Yes.”
“We can’t bring an outsider into the community. He’s a threat.”
“Hardly a threat now,” she pointed out. “He can’t even hold his head up.”
* * *
Their voices rolled like a fretful tide, rushing, retreating, never still . Justin tried to focus on the words, but pain sank red talons into his skull , gripping his brain. Just a bump on the head. He’d survived worse. Floating in a cold green sea, limbs leaden, lost . . .
He shook his head to clear it.
Bad idea.
Agony seared his temples, speared his neck. His gorge rose as his stomach lurched in protest. He gritted his teeth, swallowing beer and bile, fighting not to vomit in the back of the moving car.
“Easy.”
Her
voice, clear and soothing, as she petted him.
Gratefully, he inhaled her scent, absorbed her touch, letting himself fall into the comfort of her body against his, sweaty, soft, female.
The white lane markers flashed and faded in the beam of their headlights.
Breathe
, he told himself.
In, out, in . . .
Jesus, he was dozing off. Or passing out. He clung to consciousness, fighting to snatch meaning from the conversation taking place over his head.
“Treat him at the infirmary,” Lara was saying.
“Assuming he survives the trip.” From the boyfriend.
Thanks, dipshit.
“Wow. I am so touched by your concern,” Lara said.
“You know what concerns me? Trying to explain to Axton what we’re doing with a dead body in the backseat.”
Justin felt Lara stiffen. “Would you rather explain why we left him behind to die?” she asked.
He wasn’t dying, he wanted to tell her. He was remarkably hard to kill.
“More lives than a fucking cat
,” the freighter captain had said when they pulled him from the sea.
But her fierce concern made him feel good. For the first time in years, a woman had his back.
Thankfully, he turned his face into her neck and slipped into the dark.
* * *
“Behind me,” he ordered, his mouth dry, his voice strained. “They attack from behind.”
The girl stumbled to obey, filling her hands with stones from the path. He admired her courage. But it was his duty to protect her. His responsibility.
He turned to face the wolf—
Not a wolf, not a wolf
, pounded his heart—blocking their way. It snarled, taunting. Testing.
Tightening his grip on his knife, he braced to take its charge.
It sprang. The world exploded in a blur of heat, claws, teeth, eyes. He staggered, thrusting, thrusting, felt the blade sink in and the sickening
thunk
of iron on bone.
Pain ripped his arm. His vision blurred.
A hoarse cry. His? Hers? A flash. The air stank of scorched meat and burning hair and blood.
He struggled to tug his knife free, fought to breathe. He couldn’t move. Buggering hell, he couldn’t move his arm.
He groaned.
“It’s all right,” she said.
He struggled to warn her, but his cry was an incoherent croak.
Demons.
“Ssh,” she soothed. Her hair fell thick and pale as straw around her quiet face. “It’s just a dream.”
Justin opened his eyes to find Lara bending over him.
Shock momentarily robbed him of speech. His head throbbed. His arm tingled with the pain of returning circulation.
He blinked at her, disoriented. “Not blond.”
Her lips curved. “Only in your dreams. Disappointed?”
“No.” He struggled to lift his arm, to touch the ends of her hair. “Pretty.”
“Thanks. How are you feeling?”
“No hospital,” he mumbled. Hospitals meant bureaucracy and forms and questions. The last thing he needed was Homeland Security inspecting his passport, demanding a copy of his birth certificate.
“Shh. We’re not going to the hospital. Try to get some rest, okay?”
He sighed and obeyed, weary and relieved.
Pretty
dark-haired Lara. Safe.
But a question niggled at the back of his brain and pursued him down into the dark.
Who was the woman in his dream?
The high beam of their headlights scraped the drive, throwing into sharp relief the marble eagles at the gate and the precepts of the Rule inscribed in stone:
scire, servare, obtemperare.
“To know, to save, to obey.”
Rockhaven school, announced a discreet sign to the left of the entrance. est. 1749.
Lara’s heartbeat quickened.
The tires whispered to a stop in a pool of floodlight within range of the cameras: one mounted on the gate, two artfully hidden in the landscaping. The governors didn’t let respect for tradition interfere with the need for security.
Lara rolled down her window, careful not to disturb Justin’s head on her lap.
A red light blinked. The mechanized iron gate swung silently open. Gideon drove through.
She let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding and settled back in her seat. Almost there. Almost home.
The first time she’d approached Rockhaven in the back of a car, she’d been a victim, a child, sick, sweaty, and scared half to death, with almost no memory of who she was or where she came from.
Her kind might live as humans, but they were not born as human infants. That status was reserved for the Most High.
Created as children of the air, the nephilim were sentenced to earth for overstepping the role dictated by Heaven. For intervening, always with the best of intentions, in human affairs. For violating humans’ free will . The most powerful in Heaven—with the most to lose, the most to forget—became the youngest on earth.
Lara was nine when she Fell .
She had always felt special—favored—because Simon Axton himself had found her. Not that she’d trusted him at the time, she recalled ruefully. Her short, brutal, bewildering experience on earth had taught her to be wary of strangers, particularly men.
But something in her had recognized and responded to the tall, terrifying headmaster. And she had fallen in love with the school at first sight. To her child’s eyes, the four-story fieldstone building, with its gabled roof and uncompromising lines, had the appearance of a fortress.
Rockhaven represented order. Permanence.
Safety.
The school became the only home she remembered.
The only family she knew.
Moonlight gleamed on the rows of dark windows. The sky overhead pulsed with stars. Cool night air flowed through the open window.
Lara inhaled in relief. Her responsibility was almost over. The consequences of her decision, good or bad, would be determined by the schoolmasters.
She smoothed the hair from Justin’s forehead, combing the matted strands with her fingers. His long body was crammed on the seat beside her, his neck and legs at awkward angles, one arm across his chest. Blood blackened the napkins stuck to his wound. She was afraid to disturb him, worried the bleeding would start again. Terrified that this time when she tried to rouse him, he wouldn’t regain consciousness.
Yellow light spilled from the west portico. Not everyone at the school was sleeping. Somebody was waiting up for them.
She clasped Justin’s unresponsive hand. All arriving nephilim were screened and welcomed by at least one of the governors. Often the rescued children needed medical attention. Most required a period of education and adjustment as they eased into their new bodies and community life.
She tightened her hold on Justin’s hand. His skin was warm. Feverish? He definitely needed a doctor. But he was not a child.
Lara swallowed against the constriction of her throat.
He wasn’t nephilim either.
She had overstepped—again—by bringing him here.
What would the consequences be this time?
* * *
Justin swayed as Lara and the Boyfriend supported him out of the car. Nothing wrong with his legs. It was his head that hurt. But the ground pitched under him like a ship’s deck in a squall. His stomach rolled like a rookie sailor’s. He needed to pee. Preferably without help.
Gritting his teeth, he dragged his feet up the shallow stone steps.
“One more,” Lara said. “You’re doing fine.”
He appreciated her concern. And the lie.
They maneuvered through a doorway with stained glass insets. He kept his head down, taking stock of his surroundings from beneath his lashes. Carved wood panel walls, old, dark, muted paintings, a curving staircase fit for a hotel. A chandelier, an explosion of light and color sparkling with crystals and candles, threw patterns on the hardwood floor.
The place didn’t look like a hospital, he noted with relief. But there was a vaguely institutional smell in the air, a patina of many bodies over time, a whiff of dust and floor polish.
“Where . . . are we?” he croaked.
“Home,” Lara said.
Justin tried to get his mush-for-brains to work. He had no home.
“The place where, when you have to go there,
they
have to take you in
,
”
Rick liked to say.
So, okay, this was Lara’s home. Would they take him in because she brought him here? Did he want them to?
He looked at the two people waiting under the light, a man and a woman, both tall and arrestingly beautiful, not old, not young. The woman’s skin was the color of coffee, the man’s face austere and pale. Something about the guy, his cool blue eyes or his chiseled profile or his stick-up-the-butt attitude, reminded Justin of . . . somebody.
“Who’s he?” His speech slurred like a drunk’s. “Your father?”
Lara sucked in her breath.
“Simon Axton.” The tall blond man introduced himself, offering a lean, well-manicured hand.
Or two.
Justin’s vision wavered. He was afraid if he let go of Lara, he’d fall.
He shifted his weight, stuck out his hand, gave them the name on his passport. “Justin Miller.”
Axton’s hand was cool like his eyes, his grip firm.
Nothing
to prove
, Justin thought. Until the man’s grip inexplicably tightened. His dark blond eyebrows rose. “What is this?” he asked Lara.
Justin’s head buzzed. As if his skull had been invaded by a rush of wind, a swarm of bees.
Lara cleared her throat. “He . . . I . . . This is the one I was sent to seek.”
Sent?
Justin pulled his hand free. He needed to sit down.
Axton glanced at the woman standing under the light of the chandelier. “Miriam?”
The handsome black woman came forward and took Justin’s arm. The Boyfriend had already moved away toward the long curving staircase. Distancing himself, Justin thought. Smart move. The ritzy entrance hall had all the tension of a bar before a fight broke out.
“Let me help you to a chair,” the woman said.
He leaned on her, grateful for the support. But he wasn’t about to leave Lara’s side. Not until he’d figured out what the hell was going on.
“What is he?” Axton asked.
Justin frowned in concentration. Or maybe he’d asked,
“How is he?”
The buzzing in his skull drowned out everything else.
The woman—Miriam—continued to hold his arm, like a doctor taking his pulse. Like a guard with a recalcitrant prisoner.
The pounding in his head intensified. His wound throbbed in time with his heart. He focused on Lara, warm and solid and real beside him, on her pink polished toes, on the clean, sweet scent of her hair. He breathed in, out, the rhythm of his breath like the sigh of the surf or the beat of the tide.
In
, filling his lungs, swirling in his head.
Out
.
The room stopped reeling.
A crease appeared between Miriam’s brows. “He is not of air.”
Heir of what?
he thought, confused.
“He needs our help,” Lara said.
Axton’s cool blue gaze rested on her without expression.
“His needs are not our concern.”
“I should examine him,” Miriam said.
What was she, a
doctor?
“He has something. An energy. I felt it.”
Amusement bubbled inside him. Some energy. He could barely stand.
Axton said something that sounded like “
she
,” and Miriam shrugged. “Perhaps,” she said.
“He’s a threat,” a different voice announced. “Let me get rid of him.”
Lara’s slim body tensed.
Trouble.
Justin raised his head, squinting into the shadows.
The speaker prowled from the foot of the stairs, wearing black and a sneer. Big hard dude, like those stone gods on Easter Island, large nose, strong chin, maybe six four, two hundred forty pounds, easy. Which meant he could kick Justin’s ass even before the bump on his head.
“Some welcoming committee you got here, honey,” he muttered.
Lara squeezed his hand. Reassurance? Or warning?
“Justin was hurt protecting me,” she said.
“A ruse,” Stone Face said. “To get you to trust him.”
Justin had heard enough. “Okay, I’m out of here.”
As soon as he found his balance. His strength. A cab.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lara said. “We’re hours from Norfolk.”
“You should have left him there,” Stone Face said.
“He needed a doctor.”
Axton arched dark blond eyebrows. “There are no emergency rooms in Virginia?”
“He didn’t want . . .” Lara’s voice shook slightly. “He was my responsibility. I had to make a decision—”
“When you go into the field, I expect you to be guided by your training and your partner. Not indulge in misplaced compassion.”
She winced.
Pain hammered Justin’s skull . “So dump me back where she found me, asshole, and we’ll call it even.”
“Please,” Lara said. To which one of them? “He wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. We were attacked.”
“You are trained in self-defense. Was it your preparation that was lacking? Or your skill?”
“There’s nothing wrong with their training,” Stone Face said.
“Gideon?” Axton’s gaze pinned the Boyfriend like a bug. “You were Guardian on this mission.”
The younger man flushed to the roots of his blond hair.
“We were outnumbered. There were four of them. Five.”
“Which?” asked Stone Face.
“So many?” Miriam said at the same time.
“Four and a lookout,” Lara said.
“Which compels me to inquire what you did to attract their attention,” Axton said.
The quick exchange made Justin dizzy. They’d been jumped in an alley. Had they been set up? Had he?
He was in over his head, the undercurrents in the room sucking his strength. He felt the walls closing in, the room whirling around him.
“Justin?” Lara’s voice, sharp and worried.
“Justin.”
I’m okay
, he wanted to tell her.
Except his brain was on fire and his mouth wouldn’t form the words.
His eyes rolled back in his head, and the floor tilted up to receive him.
* * *
Miriam Kioni stripped off her latex gloves and dropped them on the procedure tray. “He’ll have a scar, of course,” she said to Simon, standing with Lara at the side of Justin’s bed. Jude Zayin, the dark-browed master of the Guardians, watched silently from his post at the infirmary room door. “But the edges of the wound aligned nicely.”
The hot, bright medical lamp switched off.
In the sudden dimness, Lara blinked down at the shaved patch above Justin’s ear. Twenty-two stitches marched antlike across his scalp, disappearing into the gold stubble of his hair.
Something fluttered in her chest like wings. One of his eyes had swollen shut. His tanned skin had the waxy sheen of a melted candle. She curled her nails into her palms. “Should he still be unconscious?”
“It was easier to suture his wound while he was sleeping,” Miriam said with the calm authority of her hundred years.
The nephilim were not immortal. But the wisest and most powerful of them could enjoy the span of several human lifetimes. Miriam had been master of the Seekers and the school’s physician longer than Lara had been alive.
Lara would have to be an idiot to challenge her.
She moistened her lips. Apparently she was an idiot.
“But . . . His skull fracture . . .”
“A simple concussion,” Simon said.
Water hissed in the sink. “Probably not the first one either,” Miriam said.
Lara’s throat worked. “What are you talking about?”
“You can’t see it on the imaging equipment, but I found an old scar from a previous injury. Maybe he played football in high school.”
“Or got beaten up,” Zayin said.
Miriam scrubbed her hands at the sink. “Either way, it would make him more susceptible to another concussion.”
“But he’ll be all right?” Lara asked.
“The CAT scan didn’t reveal any internal bleeding or elevated pressure in the brain,” Miriam said. “He should be fine with a little rest.”
“He can rest someplace else,” Zayin said. “I don’t want him here.”
Miriam turned from the sink. “He needs at least forty-eight hours to recover.”
“I don’t give a damn what he needs,” Zayin growled. “He’s a risk.”
Lara gripped the metal guard rail on the side of Justin’s bed. “He’s a target.”
They all turned to look at her with varying degrees of surprise and impatience.
She swallowed hard and stood her ground, her heart beating like a rabbit’s. “The demons will know he helped me. Us,” she explained. “We can’t abandon him.”
“Maybe that’s what they’re counting on,” Zayin said.
Simon pursed his lips. “You think he’s one of them.”
“I know he’s not one of us,” Zayin said flatly. “I can’t read him. I don’t like it.”
“Miriam? You were in his head.”
“Only to control his pain and monitor autonomic function. I doubt I would have gotten that far if he weren’t unconscious already.” The doctor shrugged her slim shoulders. “An interesting case. His shields are very strong.”
“Yes. Interesting, as you say.” Simon’s perfect brow creased in thought. “Very well. He may stay as long as . . .required.”
Lara exhaled in relief. “
Thank
you.”
Zayin’s gaze met the headmaster’s, flat black colliding with blue. “As long as we take the necessary precautions.”
Simon inclined his head.
Justin’s hand, lean and brown, twitched against the white sheet. He stank of blood and Lidocaine and something else, a male, warm, animal scent, uniquely his. Lara had a sudden image of him standing golden, free, and fearless on the mast, and her heart squeezed in pity and regret.