Spider-Touched (18 page)

Rebekka stifled the noise quickly by pressing the toddler’s face to her neck, and he quieted as though recognizing and responding to the threat of danger. But it was too late. The sound of his cries had already carried, alerting the guardsmen to their presence.

“Go!” she told Levi, turning her back so he couldn’t make another attempt to take Eston from her.

She heard the soft slide of a blade leaving its sheath. Terror for Levi coiled and knotted in her stomach; fear that he’d go after Gulzar melded to what she held for herself. If she was taken and questioned—

Rebekka blocked it from her mind and began running. Levi was smart. The desire for revenge wouldn’t overcome his survival instinct. He would kill the guardsmen and Gulzar if he had a chance, but primarily he would try to lead them away from the route she would take.

A shout went up behind her. A gun fired.

It was followed by more shots and the squeal of tires. But rather than coming toward her, the silver car headed in the direction of the Mission and the Barrens.

Rebekka’s breath labored and her chest burned from running even a short distance with Eston. Some of the fishermen looked up as she hurried past them, their eyes and postures telling her to keep going, they would offer no aid.

She stumbled and nearly fell, the jerky movements making Eston cry again. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw the jeep that had been trailing the bus. “Hush, please hush,” she pleaded, crouching in the nearest shadow, rocking, trying to muffle his sobs.

The jeep sped by, its engine noise masking the sound of Eston crying. For a split second Rebekka thought all of the men had gone after Levi. But then a bullet ricocheted off the ground near her and a male voice shouted, “Stay where you are.”

Jurgen
.

Rebekka froze—but only for an instant. Being taken alive was worse than dying.

She scrambled toward the corner of a burned-out building.

Brick chipped as a bullet struck. Fragments hit her face, making it sting and bleed. She bolted, desperately looking for someplace to hide with each step. The prospect of being flushed out into the open like game and easily picked off with a rifle made her bite her tongue to keep from whimpering.

The rubble and debris along the waterfront became too difficult to maneuver around with Eston in her arms. She turned, and within a block the street loomed ahead, an asphalt-coated killing ground.

A sob caught in her throat at the thought of crossing it. But the thought of being raped by the guardsmen or sold to be raped by criminals running the maze kept her moving.

She should have let Levi take Eston. Abandoning him near the Mission was no crueler fate than what might happen to him with her.

Rebekka paused next to the burned husk of a military tank that had been used hundreds of years before her birth to reclaim the city from anarchy. She strained to hear something beyond Eston’s whimpers and the sounds of her own harsh breathing, something that would tell her it was safe to emerge from hiding. She found no reassurance.

Every second she delayed added to her peril. And yet she had to steel herself to edge forward and peek around the black and rusted metal of the tank.

Hope rose in her when she saw no guardsmen. Up ahead there was a curve in the road. In her mind’s eye she pictured what lay beyond it, the true beginnings of Oakland. There were shops there, places it wouldn’t be easy for a guardsman to take a woman and child away without witnesses.

She doubted the guardsmen hunting with Gulzar wanted what they were doing known. Not all those in authority were corrupt—Rebekka knew that, though only dire circumstances like the one she was in would make her risk her life on it.

“Just a little bit farther,” she whispered, more for her benefit than Eston’s.

She rubbed her cheek against the soft down of his hair as she gathered her courage to leave the shelter of the tank. Another peek and she ran, angling for the corner and the promise of safety it represented.

She’d almost reached it when the jeep came into view, racing from the direction she’d come from and carrying two guardsmen, Jurgen and the one she didn’t know.

Jurgen stood, taking aim with his rifle, and she pushed herself harder, drawing on the last of her strength to get around the corner. Her terror spiked when she saw a car approaching.

Before she could reach an opening between houses and dart through it, the black sedan cut her off. The man she’d noticed as the bus passed the library emerged and opened the back door, forcing her into the car. He followed her, slamming the door shut behind him.

It happened so quickly she had no chance to offer any resistance. And then he was urging her to stay quiet, and the instinct for self-preservation made Rebekka comply as the jeep carrying the guardsmen stopped next to the sedan.

A partition shielded the backseat from the front but didn’t filter out sound. Boots crunched as one of the guardsmen got out and approached. An electric window in front slid down. The man driving, a chauffeur or bodyguard maybe, said, “Are you chasing a woman carrying a child?”

Rebekka closed her eyes, willing Eston to remain silent. She fought to slow her breathing and could barely hear over the thundering race of her heart.

“You saw them?” Jurgen asked, wariness in his voice, or suspicion.

“Nearly hit them,” the driver said. “If I’d been going any faster I wouldn’t have been able to swerve out of the way in time.”

Jurgen didn’t say anything immediately. Rebekka could almost sense him struggling for a legitimate reason to search the car. Finally he said, “Which way did she go?”

“I don’t know. By the time I looked again, she was gone. What’d she do? From what I saw, I wouldn’t have thought she was someone the guard would be interested in.”

“She’s wanted for questioning. Her companion just killed a guardsman without any provocation.”

Fear for Levi flashed through Rebekka, overwhelming the fury she felt at Jurgen’s claim the attack hadn’t been provoked. She silently urged the driver to ask if the killer was alive and in custody. But Jurgen stepped away from the sedan, and the sound of his heavy footsteps marked his return to the jeep.

The window in the front seat hummed as it closed, the sedan already in motion. It wheeled around to head in the direction of the city, and the pressure in Rebekka’s chest eased though the worry for Levi remained.

She turned toward the man who’d probably saved her life. But before she could speak, Eston chortled and opened his arms, leaning away from her in order to go to the stranger.

“Mas,” he said. “Mas.”

Rebekka reacted without thinking. Her hand snaked over to the door handle but just as quickly the stranger grabbed her arm. “You’ll hurt yourself,” he said, ordering the driver to secure the car.

Locks snicked into place. The man released her and Rebekka pulled away, pressing her back to the door. “What do you want?”

“The prisoner you and your friend freed when you ambushed the trapper’s truck.”

A small shock of amazement went through Rebekka, that Araña had managed what seemed impossible. But on its heels came fear as Eston wriggled and struggled to get to the man who was no stranger to him—the man who must have escaped into the woods before Levi could stop him.

“I don’t know where the prisoner is,” Rebekka said, reluctantly giving up her hold on the toddler rather than continuing to restrain him. “Who are you?”

Her rescuer grunted as Eston clambered onto him, but his hands were gentle as he repositioned the child.

“Who are you?” she repeated.

Indecision played over his face. It lasted only a split second before he shook it off. “Tomás Iberá.”

Her heart stuttered, the blood it pumped turning to ice.
Iberá
. She recognized the name.

His family was old, one of those who’d “founded” Oakland—reclaiming it from the chaos of lawlessness after The Last War and the subsequent emergence of the supernaturals. Enzo Iberá was a general in the guard and said to be one of those in contention for taking it over after its last leader was killed by werewolves and feral dogs in the red zone.

Tomás tapped on the partition separating front seat from backseat. “Home,” he said to the driver.

Rebekka forced thoughts through a mind nearly frozen by fear. She tried to make sense of what Tomás had said—and hadn’t said.

His only interest seemed to be the prisoner. And yet he hadn’t turned her over to the guardsmen—though perhaps the reason for that was simple. He might not have recognized them as men who did business with the maze.

She wracked her brain for what she knew of the Iberás, and came up blank. If those in his family frequented the red zone, they didn’t visit the shapeshifter brothels.

“What’s so important about the convict?” Rebekka asked.

Tomás turned toward the front without answering, leaving her imagination to run riot with images of what would happen when they reached their destination.

Ten

ARAÑA’S silence bothered Tir. Not just the physical silence that had settled around her before they left the Were’s forest lair, but her emotional silence.

A wall stood between them, blocking her feelings from him. Its presence created a void, a hollow spot that had him reaching up to rub his chest. They’d passed through the red zone to the area set aside for the human gifted without speaking a word.

Tir’s lip curled in disdain at the word.
Gifted
. He’d met his share of them over the centuries and found them capable of cruelty beyond measure. Humans were never meant to posses such talent. They were dust, the walking dead, frail and unworthy. They were
less
than the most simple of beasts. They were—

He turned, aware she’d stopped walking. His cock hardened as his eyes traveled over her crouched form and he remembered the feel of her above him, the heated clamp of her channel and the silky texture of her skin.

She was nothing to him beyond useful help, he told himself. But the lie showed itself in the clenching of his jaw, in the flash of anger and need that had him wanting to return to her side and end the silence created by his threat.

His eyes hesitated on the hand bearing the brand, noting the fingerless glove she must have found among the weeds. Realization slid into him like a knife.

He looked around, studied the area and found dark stains on the ground. This was where her family had been killed. This was the place where guardsmen had thought to rape her.

Tir closed his eyes and reached for her mentally, only to be met by a wall of rigid control. She was stronger than most humans, though it had been centuries since he last cared enough about what one of them felt to do anything but try to block them out.

He pushed harder and could almost taste the tears held back, contained in a bottomless well of sorrow. For the first time in what he remembered of his life, he wondered if he had family that grieved when he disappeared. He wondered if he had ever loved another deeply enough that their passing from his life tore a rent in his soul.

He prodded at his lost memory, but there was no echo of pain, no resonance of sorrow. Nothing rose from the darkness.

Tir touched the sigil-inscribed collar, silently reminding himself the
only
thing that mattered was gaining the information that would allow him to translate the tattoos on his arms and achieve his freedom. She was a dangerous distraction, one he couldn’t afford.

He watched as she stood and moved away from him, obviously searching for something. She found it moments later, and before she slipped it into her pocket, he saw it was a wallet.

“We’ve got money for food and lodging now,” she said, her subdued voice coming to him on a breeze, along with the scent of her sadness.

Tir steeled himself to wait until she returned to his side. His hands balled into fists in an effort to keep from reaching for her.

He succeeded at the first, but not the second. Her dark pain-shadowed eyes had him cupping her face and trying to smooth the bruised look away with the pads of his thumbs.

Tir leaned in and covered her lips with his, found an unexpected gentleness in himself. She resisted his offer of comfort at first. But with the tender probing of his tongue in a request for admission, he broke through the barrier she’d erected.

Araña softened, opened for him. He tasted her sorrow as well as her strength.

Her hands went to his chest, her palms pressing to his nipples, sending jagged bolts of pleasure to his cock. Lust coiled in his belly as he found the contrast of bare flesh and gloved leather wickedly erotic.

Tir moaned, deepening the kiss. His hands left her face to pull her more tightly against him.

He felt her grief retreat, driven away by the hard press of his body to hers. Desire rose in its place, fanning the flames of his own and making him want to press her to the ground and take her until nothing remained for her but pleasure.

He plundered her mouth until she clung to him. Only then did he lift his lips from hers.

“We need to go to the occult shop,” she said.

Tir could feel her desire to escape more than just this place where her family was killed. His arms tightened involuntarily. Denial flared. She wouldn’t be free of him until he allowed it.