Kara sighed. She was still reeling from seeing Julian and didn’t have time to worry about Jaxon’s feelings. No matter what arguments he came up with, she knew one thing—if an angry black-wing came after them, she’d heal a hell of a lot faster than Abbey would. “We’ll talk. But right now, I need you to do this for me.”
He turned his head away and nodded. “Very well.”
“Now that that’s settled…” Aiden brushed past Jaxon and gathered Kara in his arms. Without another word, he dissolved, transporting Kara into the mind-numbing sludge.
And it hurt. The weight of the universe pressed in from all sides…bearing down on her soul. But somehow…it still felt like her guts were being sucked out through her pores.
A moment later, Aiden set Kara on her feet at the entrance of his large bedroom, but he kept an arm wrapped around her waist. She knew to stand still for a moment until the world stopped spinning and she didn’t feel like she was going to puke stardust. “Thanks for the ride.”
She didn’t understand how these warriors could seem so unaffected by something that made her feel as if she were being turned inside out, every single time. She missed visiting Julian’s grave, but she didn’t miss the travel.
“Lie down. I’ll fetch the healers,” Aiden told her, swiping his palms over his eyelids as if to clear the sleep from his eyes.
He showed her to an oversized bed with navy blue silk sheets, then walked quickly from the room. The comforter was pulled back and the bedding disheveled, as though he’d left in a hurry when he’d answered Kara’s call, but it was the middle of the day here on Mercury Island.
She glanced around. Vanilla candles burned low, mixing with the subtle scent of female blood. Clothes were strewn across the floor, and judging from the lace and pastel colors, not all of the clothes were his. His bedside table held vials of lotions and oils that Kara didn’t want to ponder too deeply.
She drew the covers over his bed and fell into the soft mattress. Sleeping for a week was sounding like a pretty good idea. Now that Julian wasn’t standing in front of her, she wondered if the whole thing had been a dream, or worse yet, if an Aniliáre really had been playing a trick on her.
But she wouldn’t believe that. What could anyone gain by posing as a violent, disoriented Julian? If they wanted to mess with Kara’s head and break her heart all over again, coming back as the loving, kind Julian was a better bet.
Aiden returned with two other men trailing behind him. Kara was ready for gnarled healers, wrinkled with age and ready with wisdom. She didn’t know if she would ever get used to the fact that Demiáre didn’t age like witches. The handsome men coming toward her might be twenty-nine—or twenty-nine hundred—for all Kara knew. She sat up and swung her feet over the side of the bed. So much for a nap.
“Kara, you may remember Rasi from your time here on the island.” Aiden gestured to a black-haired man with Asian features.
“Hi, Rasi.” She didn’t want to admit that she couldn’t keep all the men she’d met straight in her head. He might have been one of the men who’d helped to subdue Julian when he’d been in a mating rage.
Aiden gestured to a man with a long brown braid tied behind his back. The man wore brown leather pants and a flowing white shirt. “And this is Tyre. He’s recently come to live with us.”
Kara nodded. “Nice to meet you.”
“The pleasure is mine, my lady.” Tyre approached the bed and knelt before her. Rasi came to stand on Tyre’s other side.
Tyre picked up Kara’s hand and touched it to his forehead, and at the same time, pressed the fingertips of his other hand above her brows. She felt a strange sensation, like a cat’s paw batting the inside of her skull, and jerked away. “What are you doing?”
“I’m already finished. Rasi? Your turn.”
Tyre stepped back, and Rasi took his place. Kneeling beside Kara, he leaned into her and drew a long, slow breath. When he was finished, he stood.
“Well?” Aiden asked.
Rasi turned to the blond lord and replied, “She carries the scent of an Aniliáre, there’s no doubt about that. But I can’t place him.”
Aiden nodded. “And you, Tyre? What do you see?”
He looked at Kara when he spoke. “She remembers Lord Julian’s face. She’s telling the truth about that, and her memories don’t seem disturbed. Most likely a black-wing has taken his form.”
Kara shot to her feet. “These are your healers, Aiden? They seem more like your private investigators to me.”
Aiden placed his palms out. “I have to know what I’m dealing with, Kara. That’s the only way I can help you. You’ll learn soon enough that you can’t believe everything you see.”
“I know what I saw. It was Julian. He’s confused and alone, and…angry, maybe. But it was him.”
“Tell me what happened.”
She crossed her arms over her ribs, hugging herself tight. “I had a horrible night. I was in an accident and saw a couple of people…hurt.” That was all she could bring herself to say. “Tray walked me home, and we had a disagreement with Jaxon and Abbey.”
To call it a horrible night didn’t begin to describe it.
Aiden walked to her and placed his hand lightly on her shoulder, as if he didn’t really want to but thought it was the right thing to do under the circumstances. “I’m sorry, Kara. Please go on.” When she stiffened at his touch, he seemed to get the picture and folded his hands in front of him.
“I decided to take a walk. I walked down toward the bay and started feeling something strange in the air.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“No. And I don’t get that. If your warriors are that badly hurt and it happened around me, shouldn’t I have heard something?”
“The Aniliáre have powers you can’t begin to comprehend. If he didn’t want to be seen or heard, he could will a sphere around himself or whomever he chose. A black-wing can walk among the humans without ever being seen, or if he chooses to be seen, can change their memories with a glance. That’s what we are dealing with here.”
No flippin’ way.
Kara knew the Aniliáre were powerful, but she clearly hadn’t realized the full extent of it. “Okay.”
“Tell me what happened next.”
“Well, next I decided to hide in an alley.” Had she just said that out loud? Shit. “Not really hide, but get off the street. Then the next thing I knew, the warrior landed behind me, and when I turned, Julian was there. I tried to run, but I smacked into some kind of force field. He didn’t seem to recognize me.” She rubbed the dried blood from her upper lip.
Aiden swallowed, his expression grim. “And then he…forced himself upon you.”
“What? No! God, no. Julian wouldn’t do that.”
The men exchanged glances. “His scent is all over you, Kara,” Aiden said carefully.
“Yes, but it wasn’t like that. I was scared, but I’ve just—” she searched for the words and then met Aiden’s eyes, “—I’ve just missed him so much. I wanted to touch him again. I wanted to feel that he was real. I thought he might remember if I kissed him.”
“
You
kissed
him
?”
“Yeah.” Kara ran her thumbnail under the tips of her fingers. She hated the nervous tell, but Aiden was acting like she’d done something wrong.
“And then you came to your senses?”
“And then he dumped me on my ass.” If he hadn’t, there was no telling how far she might have taken it.
Aiden frowned. “Has Jaxon been taking care of you?”
“Jaxon? What does he have to do with this?”
“When a young female tells me she willingly pursued a man who de-winged her scouts and smacked her into a shield, I have to wonder if her mating needs are being met. It’s not safe for you to go without, Kara. It can cause unpredictability and unwise choices.”
Tyre snickered. “Of course, my lord, a properly sexed female isn’t much better. If I hadn’t healed, I’d have the scars to prove it.”
Aiden let out a deep breath and pinned Tyre with an irritated gaze before turning his attention back to Kara. She looked at the men, not liking that she knew exactly what Aiden was talking about. If she wasn’t getting better at keeping herself in check, she could imagine taking any one of them this very moment. Her cheeks warmed at the thought. “It wasn’t that I couldn’t control myself, it was
Julian
. He’s back. He regenerated!”
“It’s not possible, Kara.” Aiden closed his eyes as he ran a hand over his flaxen spikes. “I saw his body.”
She blinked in bewilderment and shook her head. “What? When?”
“After the last time you visited, when we told you that Julian’s energy had run dry, Gavin and I dug up the coffin. We had to see it with our own eyes to believe it. His body was nothing but a rotting corpse.”
Kara sucked in a breath. “No.”
His eyes looked truly hopeless. “He never came back.”
She sat heavily on the edge of the bed. “Something might be wrong with Julian, but it was him.” She knew her voice sounded desperate, as if she were trying to convince them the sky wasn’t blue, but she couldn’t imagine any other possibility than Julian coming to her tonight in the flesh. “It was him.”
Aiden fisted his hand on the end of the bed. “Do you know what you’re saying? You’re talking about a Shadow Rising. They don’t exist except in stories from the ancient scrolls. No one has ever witnessed one.”
Kara’s head perked up. “A Shadow Rising?”
Tyre folded his arms, looking more like a cocky lord than a man who scoured brains for a living. “The ancient scrolls speak of the Sons of the Sky clawing up from their graves with the powers of their fathers. But Lord Aiden is correct. In all the millennia that a Shadow Rising has been attempted, it has never once succeeded. It’s well known to be a fanciful tale.” He laughed. “The man who foretold it went to meet the Maker centuries ago. His silver wings are nothing but garden soil now.”
Kara’s nostrils flared, and it took all her strength not to bare her teeth at these men. “Fuck you all.” She swept past Aiden and his men and jogged down the hall.
“Kara!” Aiden called after her, but she didn’t stop.
A pained squeak escaped her lungs as she trotted past Julian’s bedroom and made her way down the stairs. She fled the house and ran through the grass as fast as her booted feet could carry her. The bright sun beat down on her head and made her eyes water. At home, the night was dark and bleak, with beloved warriors probably being bandaged and carried away at this very moment, but here, it was another perfect day. The tropical beauty clashed with the misery in her soul.
Her lungs burned with the effort as she scaled the side of a densely covered mountain. Through a break in the trees, she saw the glint of sunlight on silver and heard the whoosh of wings. “Leave me alone!” she called to the sky.
In the distance, she saw the tree. Tall and regal, it lorded over the clearing, fanning out over Julian’s final resting place. She forged ahead, not stopping until the headstone was before her. She dropped to her knees in the grass over Julian’s plot.
The grass?
“No,” she moaned, hearing the displacement of air behind her as her pursuers touched down.
The grass was more than a foot tall, and the soil clearly hadn’t been disturbed since Gavin and Aiden’s last excavation. There was no way anything had risen from the earth here.
She’d lost Julian in twelve inches of grass.
And if the man in the alley hadn’t been Julian, then she might have kissed the devil himself.
Chapter Five
She buried her head in her hands, pressing her fingertips tightly to her eyes. Her heart felt like it was being gouged from her chest with a wooden spoon.
“Kara?” Aiden said quietly.
Her hands fell limp to her sides. “No. Don’t talk. Take me home.”
“If an Aniliáre has taken an interest in you, this is the only safe place. You’ll stay with us.”
“Like hell I will. I’ll take my chances with the wards.”
“Half of the Aniliáre in the Shadowland could blow through those wards like hurricanes through a cardboard hut.”
She tore out a handful of grass by the roots and tossed it aside. “I don’t care.”
Aiden released an aggravated breath. “I need to talk to Gavin. Maybe he can make sense of this.”
Kara laughed. She was already emotionally down for the count, and the mention of Gavin was like another strong kick to the gut. Julian had ultimately given his life protecting Kara, but Gavin had walked away of his own free will when she’d needed him the most. She’d thought they were friends, perhaps future lovers, but now she never wanted to lay eyes on him again if she lived to be a thousand.
She rose and faced Aiden. “Leave Gavin out of this. Don’t spoil his vacation on my account.”
Aiden looked dangerous when he stepped closer to her. “This isn’t all about you, Kara. Men were hurt tonight. We’re a
clan
, and an attack on even one of our brothers is not acceptable. This black-wing has to be stopped, and to do that, we need you here. We can’t afford to risk more scouts to protect your solitary way of life.”
Oh, mother trucker.
He was right. Kara might not know all their names and faces, but those men had lost their wings while watching over her. Had she brought the black-wing down upon them somehow? Was living in the city as a mostly unprotected Demiáre female just inviting trouble?