The Lawgivers: Gabriel (17 page)

She didn’t understand him at all, but
she thought she needed to pound it into her head that he was as
contemptuous of her as he was all the other humans. He tolerated
her presence only because he was doing his job. He didn’t want her
as his woman. He didn’t even think of her as woman. He despised
humans—and that included her.

Unfortunately, it was really hard to
focus on building up a wall of defense, on convincing herself that
she despised him when she’d spent so many days fantasizing about
the man … because she’d already more than half convinced herself
that he was interested in her as a woman. That attempt at
self-defense was made more difficult by the images that kept
flickering through her mind and refused to be banished, images of
how he’d looked with the moonlight glistening on his damp skin.
Because every time those pictures rose in her mind’s eye, she felt
the same breathless excitement/fear she’d felt then, when she’d
struggled to get up the nerve to touch him, as if she was standing
on the edge of a cliff and felt some unseen force pushing her to
take the leap.

She couldn’t leave it alone no matter
how many times she brought her thoughts to a halt and redirected
them. She kept worrying it over like an aching tooth. He was like
the dancing light of a campfire, fascinating, mesmerizing, tempting
her to try to get closer and closer even though she knew she was
going to get burned if she got too close.

It dawned on her after a while, when
she’d exhausted herself going back and forth with ‘I hate him, I
hate him not’ what the other thing was that made her keep going
over and over the memory of the attack.

There hadn’t been anything but
moonlight to illuminate the scene, but she had good night vision
and she finally realized when she allowed her mind to focus on the
attack itself that she’d seen the cat that had attacked Gabriel
better than she’d thought she had at first. Well enough that the
‘something’ strange about it finally hit her.

The cat was sleek and strong and well
fed.

Most of the animals she saw looked like
the people she encountered—skinny and underfed. Like it was for
her, survival was a constant battle. There never seemed to be
enough food and there was always so much work that needed to be
done to get it that there was no filling out the bones.

So where had the cat come from that it
looked so well fed?

Emerging from her focus on her thoughts
after a while, Lexa scanned the terrain around her. Was it pure
imagination, she wondered, or was there a lot more green than she
was used to seeing? Less bare, scarred dirt?

Pausing after a few minutes, she moved
away from the group and crouched down to examine a patch of green.
It wasn’t moss as she’d thought, which was most of what she
generally saw that was green. Instead of the ‘furry’ mat, this was
tiny, thin blades. Frowning in confusion, she glanced around from
her lower vantage point and saw that even what at first appeared to
be bare patches of dirt had tiny green sprigs.

They weren’t all the same. There were
different shades of green and some of the blades weren’t long and
thin but more rounded and shorter.

Different plants, but all young and
just sprouting from the soil.

It reminded her of Sir’s fields—except
he never managed to get so much to sprout and his was confined to
narrow rows.

A shadow fell over her and she looked
up to discover that Gabriel had come to stand over her.

Irritation flickered through her—and
discomfort.

Ignoring her frown, he crouched beside
her. “The new seedlings are sprouting,” he said with
satisfaction.

“These were planted?” Lexa asked in
surprise, immediately forgetting her discomfort and anger that he
seemed to watch her so closely.

Gah-re-al sent her a look of surprise.
“You’re familiar with planting?”

It was actually insulting, Lexa thought
with fresh anger, that he thought she didn’t know anything at all!
“Sir planted things,” she said stiffly. She decided not to
elaborate. He hadn’t had nearly this kind of success and she wanted
to put Gabriel in his place, not reinforce his conviction that
humans couldn’t do anything. “So your people planted this?” she
asked when he looked like he might pursue that line of
questioning.

Something flickered in his eyes. “They
spread the seeds. They’ve been genetically altered to adapt to the
conditions. This world has had a drastic climate change since those
plants grew here naturally.” He lifted his head, surveying the
terrain. “From what we can determine.”

Lexa wasn’t certain she understood much
of what he was talking about, but it triggered a memory from her
childhood. “Sir said it was different after the bomb.”

He sent her a sharp glance.
“Bomb?”

Lexa shrugged. “They didn’t know what
it was. Nobody saw it, nobody that lived anyway, that I’ve ever
heard. Sir said his parents thought they had dropped the bomb,
though.”

“They who?”

She shrugged again. “Just they. His
parents never told him who ‘they’ were. They weren’t even sure that
was what happened, but there was fire and then the sky was full of
clouds and the sun could barely shine through at all and that’s
when everything began to die and there only seemed to be one
season—winter.”

“Assuming it actually was his parents
and not his grandparents … two generations … more or less,” he said
speculatively, then added with conviction, “It wasn’t a
bomb.”

Lexa frowned. “How do you
know?”

“Any bomb capable of so much
destruction would leave enough radiation to make this a completely
dead world. Nothing would grow for hundreds or thousands of years …
if ever again. There are areas with elevated radiation but nothing
significant enough to make the bomb theory work.” He looked down at
her, studying her speculatively. “Your father’s parents told him
about it?”

Lexa wasn’t sure she liked his
interest. The questions made her uneasy, mostly because she could
see it wasn’t idle curiosity. “Yes.”

“So he was born after?”

She was sure of that point. She shook
her head. “He talked about ‘after’, but he remembered ‘before’. I
was born ‘after’.”

“How old …? Do you know how old he
was?”

Lexa stared at him blankly, trying to
figure out what he was talking about.

“How many years since Sir’s birth when
it happened? How many since his birth would Sir be now?”

“Birthdays?” Lexa asked when the
mention of his birth triggered a memory.

Gah-re-al struggled for a moment to
come up with the reference and finally recalled that it was their
word for each anniversary after their birth—at least the builders
had. So maybe that was why Lexa seemed different than the others?
Maybe her father had been descended from the builders just as the
man she called Sir seemed to have been? “Yes.”

“He had ten birthdays before. He used
to talk about the birthdays. He said they were pretty and they
tasted wonderful. They put candles on them and set them on
fire.”

Gabriel stared at her blankly, confused
when he’d thought moments before that he knew what she was talking
about, but although he knew that the old ones had celebrated births
and anniversaries of them, nothing she’d said seemed to coincide
with anything he’d learned. She seemed to be talking about a thing
rather than an event.

After a few moments, he realized it was
a dead end anyway. She didn’t seem to understand the correlation
between birth anniversaries and age. He might as well take a wild
guess himself.

Not that he supposed it mattered a
great deal. He’d been told to get as much information as he could
so that the khabler, the archeologists, could crosscheck it against
the data they were collecting and the theories they’d come up with,
but wild speculation was as useless as their theories.

“Is your father—Sir—still
alive?”

Lexa felt a jolt go through her at the
question. Partly that was because it triggered a flood of memories
she’d tried very hard to block from her mind. Mostly, though, it
was because it struck her abruptly that there was more than idle
curiosity behind the questions. He was looking for information and
she was suddenly uneasy about his motives.

Not that there was anything he could do
to Sir—she was certain he was dead. And for all she knew the man
who’d fathered her was, but the fact that he’d asked seemed to
indicate that he—meaning the angel-demons—was looking for others
and she wasn’t about to help them, not when, regardless of what
she’d been told, she had no certainty of why they wanted to track
all of her people down. Finally, she merely shrugged.

“You don’t know? Or you don’t want to
say?” He hooked a finger beneath her chin and forced her to meet
his gaze when she didn’t answer. She struggled to assume the blank
mask she always wore when any show of emotion was liable to set
Ralph’s temper off.

Not that looking perfectly blank ever
really made him happy.

It didn’t satisfy Gabriel either. After
a moment, he released her, rose to his full height and strode
away.

She watched him, feeling the brand of
his touch fade slowly away. Lifting a hand, she rubbed the spot,
wondering why it almost felt like a burn, why she could still feel
the ghost of his touch. His hand hadn’t felt overly warm and he
hadn’t held her hard enough to bruise.

It was strange that so slight a touch
could make her feel so very peculiar.

Chapter Ten

Gah-re-al had moved beyond much in the
way of reasoning ability where it concerned Lexa—or more
specifically his balls. It was one thing to abstain when there was
no choice because there was no woman available. He was actually
able to put sex out of his mind for periods of time and focus
completely on whatever task was at hand. It wasn’t a great deal
harder to manage his libido when the only females within range
didn’t appeal to him or were downright revolting.

He’d never been a great hand at
ignoring the demands of his body when there was a woman damned
close that did appeal to him, however, and he’d given up on trying
to convince himself that Lexa didn’t.

Because his mind and his dick were in
complete disagreement over that issue.

He spent part of his time trying to
think of some way to get her alone—away from the prying eyes of the
villagers—part of the time berating himself for not seizing the
opportunity to fuck her brains out when he’d had the chance, and
the rest of the time trying to figure out some way to put some
distance between her and himself before he did or said something
truly stupid.

Contrarily, when he finally emerged
from his preoccupation sufficiently to notice his surroundings and
realized that they were within a few days of the rendezvous he was
far more dismayed than relieved. Happily, it occurred to him
shortly behind that realization that his proximity to the
rendezvous point meant that he was close enough to Maya for a quick
visit to assuage his physical distress—if he could come up with a
reasonable (in the eyes of his superiors) excuse to abandon his
charges to take care of it.

A growing sense of desperation
eventually provided the solution.

They were dangerously low on supplies.
Of course, they had been since the onset of their journey. The
resources of the village hadn’t been abundant enough to provide
what they’d needed for such a grueling trek. If not for the fact
that the villagers were accustomed to starvation rations he doubted
they would’ve gotten as far as they had before they ran completely
out of food.

If hunting the newly introduced
wildlife hadn’t been forbidden they could have done far better in
rationing the supplies they’d brought.

They needed rations to supplement the
little that was left or the villagers were going to be too weak to
make the rest of the trip.

And high command’s refusal to provide
medical attention for Lexa when he’d felt it was warranted was a
perfect excuse to go in person to requisition supplies.

He was still uneasy about leaving Lexa.
She’d been attacked when he’d left her with the villagers before.
But he managed to convince himself that he wouldn’t be gone long
enough for them to grow brazen enough for another attack even if he
hadn’t managed to convince them that the penalty for assault was
steeper than they’d want to pay.

When he’d settled them to make camp,
therefore, he left, heading directly to headquarters to report. He
wasn’t surprised that it took longer than he’d hoped it would to
make his report and request the supplies, but he was irritated …
and anxious about getting back.

Indecision wasn’t something he was
accustomed to, but his uneasiness about leaving Lexa with the
villagers had seriously impaired his sense of time. Did he dare
take more time for a visit with Maya? He decided he could afford
it. He thought he’d reached the point where he couldn’t afford not
to.

Maya had a visitor. He didn’t know why
he hadn’t considered the possibility—unless it was due to the fog
swirling in what was left of his brain once he’d allowed the fever
to take full possession—but he hadn’t. He didn’t in fact tumble to
it for many moments. He met Maya at her door with a searing kiss
and an all over greeting with his hands to prepare her for what he
was about to bestow upon her—weeks of frustration and a buildup of
semen that was liable to put her in orbit.