The Lawgivers: Gabriel (11 page)

Not that he blamed them. They’d
traveled a very long way to claim it just to turn around and go
back!

“Oh I’m delighted that you finally
gained the trust of one of them and gathered some useful
information.” She chuckled. “And not particularly surprised one of
the little savage females has attached herself to you. You’re a
very attractive man, Gah-re-al. It just surprises me that you
allowed it considering your views on the savages.” She paused,
clearly trying to decide whether to pursue the topic or not. “It’s
… a little odd that you keep referring to the primitive by name.
You aren’t growing attached? Thinking of her as a pet? Because
that’s never a good idea with these creatures, let me tell you.
They are wild. And like any wild thing, they can be
dangerous.”

Gah-re-al felt his face heat with a
mixture of anger and discomfort. “I don’t need you to tell me how
dangerous they can be,” he said tightly. “It’s my job to put down
the most savage of the lot in order to give the gentler ones a
chance. And it’s no easy task, regardless of the superior weapons
we have. They attack in packs and from every direction at once and
quite often without any warning.”

She rose abruptly and rushed to him,
slipping her arms around his waist and settling her cheek on his
shoulder. “I know! I’m sorry. I worry about you every time you go
out. I worry that I won’t see you again.” She leaned away to look
at him earnestly. “Were you injured putting the savages
down?”

Gah-re-al peeled her loose and stepped
away. She looked hurt and that made him more uncomfortable. “I
stink,” he said by way of apology. “I know I should’ve cleaned up
before I came, but I have to return as quickly as I can. I left
them camped in the open and they’re defenseless.”

Maya studied him, her expression still
a careful mask of concern although anger flickered in her eyes.
“You’re worried about them? Or her?”

Discomfort wafted through Gah-re-al
again as the questions sank home. He hadn’t examined his
anxiousness to get back to the group he’d left on the plain. They
were his responsibility and he took his responsibilities
seriously—whatever Maya thought about his views on the primitives.
It struck him as soon as she asked, though, that most of his focus,
most of the anxiety churning in his gut, was about Lexa.

He shook his head. “As long as you’ve
been an advocate of the ‘save the humans’ drive, I’d think you’d be
glad to think I was coming around to your views. Not that I am.
They’re a dangerous species and either too wild, now, to ‘patch
them up’ with a little instruction and expect them to behave like
the civilized beings your people think they were or they never were
civilized and the only thing you can hope to do is to train them to
perform—give them a veneer that’ll disappear the moment you turn
your back. It’s simply a matter of my responsibilities and I’ve
always taken those seriously. If I didn’t know better, I’d think
you were jealous.”

He’d meant it as a joke, but he was
unnerved by the look Maya gave him. “Oh I know better than to get
attached to you,” she said with slightly forced humor. “You’ve made
it clear you aren’t in the market for a mate to settle
with.”

The comment annoyed him. “I’m a
Lawgiver, Maya. As you pointed out yourself, there are no
guarantees any time I go out that I’ll be coming back. There’s more
danger out there than the primitives themselves. I’ve been seeing
more and more signs of predators … the four-legged kind,” he added
dryly, “which is one of the reasons I don’t like leaving the humans
for very long, the other being I don’t want to have to round them
up again. They aren’t exactly thrilled with the prospect of being
your little social experiment.”

Maya looked horrified. “Oh gods! You
haven’t been attacked by one of the beasts we
re-introduced?”

“I haven’t had a nasty encounter … yet,
but then I’m strong and well armed. The natives aren’t either of
those things … which is one very good reason that I need to get
back to the group under my care as quickly as possible. I only came
to gather supplies to get them here and took the time to stop by to
give you a report.”

Actually, he mentally amended wryly,
he’d hoped for a little recreation—trail dirt and grime or not—to
rid himself of the growing temptation to try to seduce Lexa—the
idea that had been sewn the day Lexa pointed out that his actions
made the others believe she was his woman. Not that he’d
consciously acknowledged that before Maya had rubbed his face in
it! He’d thought it was a simple matter of having done without a
female too long. He was still more inclined to think so than the
alternative. Lexa was merely attractive enough to him to remind him
that he hadn’t been with a woman in far too long and he’d thought
it might be a good thing to work it out of his system before his
baser urges overruled good sense.

Maya had never seemed particularly put
off by a little dirt, he thought wryly. In fact, she seemed to find
a little exciting—as long as he didn’t actually stink. She’d said
she liked the smell of a hardworking man. Privately, he’d thought
it was part of the attraction of the savages for her—she just had a
taste for low company. If she hadn’t, he didn’t think she would’ve
given him the time of day. He’d been a soldier before he’d become a
Lawgiver and she was far above him in social rank. Women of her
class generally didn’t associate with men of his—which was the
reason he’d thought it safe enough to take her as a
lover.

He wasn’t particularly pleased to
discover that she seemed to have expected some sort of commitment
from him.

Then again, maybe she hadn’t expected
or wanted it? Maybe she was just peeved that he hadn’t tried?
Somehow he couldn’t see her actually settling for a man like him
when she could do far better for herself.

Maya pursed her lips. “I’m sorry,
Gah-re-al, truly. But you know we have to carefully balance the
ecosystem.”

“Yeah, well I don’t especially care to
be a meal just to balance things out,” he said sardonically, “and I
don’t think the humans would be too keen on it either.” He shook
his head in disgust, mostly because the ‘reunion’ hadn’t gone as
he’d expected it would. “I have to go.”

She sent him a coy smile. “You didn’t
want to get in a little fucking before you leave again?”

Considering that was what he’d stopped
at her habitat for, he wasn’t particularly happy to discover that
he’d lost interest and wasn’t the least bit tempted to take her up
on the offer. Then again, the main reason he’d been attracted to
Maya was because she was a ‘lady’ and as desirable for being his
social superior as she was unattainable. Her penchant for being
crude and ‘earthy’ in the bedroom didn’t particularly thrill him
since it demolished the illusion that he was making love with a
high society woman. He could have that with any whore he cared to
pay. “Too late, now,” he responded, grinning at her to soften the
rejection. “I’ll take you up on the offer when I get the primitives
settled in the new location.”

“Maybe I won’t offer,” she said
coolly.

He shrugged indifferently. “We’ll talk
when I get back.”

* * * *

Lexa’s belly tightened as she watched
Gabriel lift his wings and race toward the edge of the plateau. Her
mind didn’t leap instantly toward the rocky drop of twenty feet or
so, however. She was too caught by the beauty and fluidity of his
motions, the bunching and flexing of hard muscle in his legs and
arms, the expansion of a chest that had already seemed amazingly
broad … too awed and unnerved by the seeming enormity of his size
with his wings stretched wide.

Logically, she knew he was no bigger
than before—which was impressive enough in itself when he stood
almost a full head taller than any of the human men. The illusion
of him having somehow grown substantially larger was hard to shake,
though.

She was so caught up by her fascination
that it wasn’t until he leapt from the edge that she fully
assimilated his intent. Her belly went weightless as he soared over
the edge and then began to slowly climb with the powerful beat of
his wings. She found herself holding her breath as he seemed to
hover for a moment, as if a war raged between the embrace of the
world and the air beneath his wings, feeling a sense of wonder as
he began to climb instead of dropping as any human
would.

She watched until he’d climbed so high
into the sky she might never have known he was an angel-demon if
she hadn’t seen him take flight. If she’d merely caught sight of
him from a distance, she would’ve thought he was one of the great
birds she’d seen soaring high above her.

But then, maybe those huge birds she’d
seen from time to time had never been birds as she’d
thought?

A strange sort of emptiness began to
take hold of her as he diminished from her sight, became no more
than a dark spec against the back drop of blue sky and clouds and
then disappeared completely.

What must it be like to do that, she
wondered? Not terrifying, certainly, as it would’ve been to her.
Was it … exciting? Or was it something he was so used to that it
was little different to him than walking was to her?

She decided the latter speculation was
probably closest to the truth.

Why that should bother her, she didn’t
know.

Except it brought home the vast chasm
between them, she realized.

Somehow, even while she was thinking
about how different he was from all the men she’d known before,
she’d still, in the back of her mind, been thinking of him as if he
were a man. And he wasn’t, for all that he looked like one in
almost every way. He was a different sort of being. He wasn’t human
and he wasn’t a man.

And he was contemptuous of the beings
he protected.

He hadn’t protected her because he was
interested in having her as his woman but because, for some reason
she didn’t completely understand, his people had sent him to do
it—to make judgments on them and punish them. He’d been punishing
the man for doing something his people considered against their
laws, not protecting her.

She’d known that. Why had she allowed
herself to imagine that it was because he wanted her?

That thought brought the heated color
of discomfort to her face, bringing her out of her internal
wanderings and making her acutely aware of her
surroundings.

The villagers had settled as
comfortably as they could manage on the rocky plateau where Gabriel
had left them. Most of them looked to be dozing in the brutal
mid-afternoon heat. A few had wandered back to the small pool of
water to drink, which Lexa supposed was the reason Gabriel had made
them climb the plateau since they hadn’t been near a water hole in
two days.

For once, she didn’t feel as if
everyone was staring at her and it occurred to her to wonder just
how long she’d allowed her mind to wander. How long had Gabriel
been gone?

More importantly, how long would he be
gone?

She supposed he’d marched the villagers
far enough he thought it unlikely they would even attempt to escape
or he wouldn’t have left them at all. He hadn’t let them out of his
sight since they’d left the village—until now.

Lifting her head, she scanned the sky
as far as she could in every direction to make certain he hadn’t
circled around as he had the day he’d herded them out of the
village. When she saw no sign of him, she got up and headed toward
the pool in a leisurely way. She’d already filled her bottles and
drank all she could hold. Gabriel had made the men wait and sent
the women and children to drink first, but she didn’t think anybody
that noticed her getting up would think anything about her heading
toward the pool. A few seemed to stir and glance at her but then
dismiss her, bearing up her conclusion.

She squatted by the pool for a few
minutes when she reached it and scooped up water in her hands to
drink. After lingering a few minutes more and surreptitiously
scanning the people on the plateau that she could see, she
straightened again and looked around. Satisfied that no one seemed
interested in what she was doing, she headed off toward a jumble of
boulders and scraggly plants near the trail they’d followed when
they’d climbed the plateau, hoping if anyone noticed they’d think
she was only interested in finding a little privacy to empty her
bladder.

Her pulse was racing as she rose and
headed toward the boulders, conflicting urges making it difficult
to maintain the appearance of nonchalance as she struggled to
calculate how long Gabriel had actually been gone and realized that
an appreciable length of time had lapsed since he’d left. Trying to
convince herself that she couldn’t possibly have been so sunk in
her thoughts that as much time had passed as it seemed, she
wrestled with the wisdom of even attempting flight. If he’d been
gone as long as it seemed now, it also seemed logical to assume
he’d be returning any time and that made attempting escape a very
bad idea.

On the other hand, it occurred to her
that Gabriel’s actions hadn’t just set her on the path of
speculation about being his woman. It had made the villagers think
she was.

No doubt they were amused that he’d
shunned her afterwards, because he hadn’t been near her since,
making it painfully obvious that he had no interest in her after
all.