The Lawgivers: Gabriel (31 page)

Justice Mer-laine had planted a seed
that had jolted him to his core, though—the possibility that he had
planted a seed.

That hadn’t once crossed his mind until
the justice had pointed it out. He supposed it was because he
wasn’t accustomed to having to worry about that particular problem.
Everyone used birth control. Everyone that wasn’t human. The
natives had no birth control, however.

He didn’t know why the hell he hadn’t
thought about that while he was condemning them for breeding so
indiscriminately, but the fact remained that he should’ve known
that was the root of it. They had no way to prevent pregnancy
except abstinence, and who in the hell wanted to do without?
Particularly when one considered the misery of their
existence.

He supposed he’d also assumed—arrogance
again!—that they were too different for that to be an
issue.

He wasn’t as convinced it couldn’t
happen as he wanted to be anymore, not since Justice Mer-laine had
pointed out the possibility.

The mere thought of it was enough, for
a while, that abstinence wasn’t a problem for him. All he had to do
was think about it and his genitals shriveled. Nothing in his life
had terrified him as much—not even his first few
battles.

After a while, though, he’d realized it
wasn’t exactly fear that made him feel sick to his stomach when he
considered the possibility. It was his own childhood, the sense of
abandonment that had never left him, his anger that the man who’d
fathered him had never come to claim him even though he had to know
that his mother had died.

And it was the life that Lexa had had
and still faced.

And it was the fact that any child he
might have fathered on Lexa would face far worse than either of
them had.

That was what had finally driven him to
seek her out. He had to know that he hadn’t done anything that
unforgivably stupid! He had to know if he’d fucked up his life,
Lexa’s, and condemned a child to abject misery worse even than the
misery he’d known as a child.

And yet the moment he’d seen her all he
could think about was fucking her again!

Gods! He’d lost his mind!

* * * *

Lexa was too miserable to notice much
beyond her misery. She’d spent a near sleepless night after the
encounter at the stream—and many more after that while everything
replayed over and over in her mind endlessly. When she wasn’t
reliving the horrific revelations of her meeting with her sister,
she was going over and over the fight with Gabriel and in between
both she was turning everything she’d said and done over and over
in her mind trying to figure out how she could’ve done things
differently and what she should have done instead of what she had
done. The war going on inside her mind didn’t leave room for
anything else for days.

She didn’t even know how much time had
passed until she was shaken out of her self-absorption as she
headed back to the building site with yet another heavy basket
filled with damp clay and a man stepped out of the trees along the
path to block her. She jolted to halt, dropping the basket from
suddenly nerveless fingers. Before she could do more than leap back
and pivot on her heels to run, the man grabbed her. She managed to
clobber him with her fist before he could grab her
wrist.

“Lexa! It’s me, damn it!
Kyle!”

Lexa gaped at him, wondering who the
hell Kyle was, but it slowly penetrated her mind that he knew her
and when he did nothing but hold her to prevent her from fighting
him, she focused on his face. A choking sense of suffocation swept
over her as she took in the details of his face and realized he
looked like Sir—except far younger.

His face twisted into what was more of
a grimace than a smile. “Little snot.”

A somewhat hysterical bark of laughter
burst from her lips before she even knew she’d felt the urge. “I
never called you that!”

He chuckled. “Oh yes you did! Every
time I shit my pants, you called me a little snot.”

Lexa abruptly burst into tears. “I
never meant it!” she wailed. “I loved you more than
anything.”

She watched his Adam’s apple bob as he
swallowed and then he engulfed her in an embrace so tight she
thought he would squeeze the life out of her. “You left me,” he
muttered.

Lexa wailed harder. “I didn’t mean to!
I didn’t want to! Please, Kyley! Don’t believe that!”

His arms tightened even more before he
slowly eased his grip. “I know that now. I understand now. All I
could think at the time, though, was that you’d left
me.”

Lexa pulled away to search his face,
hoping against hope that he meant it. To her great relief, all she
saw in his expression was love. Sniffing, she smiled at him.
“You’ve gotten so big!” She released him long enough to tug at his
scraggly beard teasingly. “You’re turning into a long
beard.”

He looked offended briefly, but she saw
his eyes were gleaming with suppressed laughter. He’d always been a
happy, loving baby. It was of the things that had most endeared him
to her—his sunny disposition. “Hell no, I ain’t! All growed up,
though.”

“Grown,” Lexa corrected, smiling
faintly. “I don’t think mama would’ve approved of ‘ain’t’
either.

His eyes darkened. He released a heavy
sigh. Letting go of her, he stepped back. “I don’t remember
her.”

It made her hurt to think he didn’t.
Beyond the memories of her little sister and brothers, the only
comfort she’d had for years were her memories of their mother.
Thinking of Maura, unfortunately, not only dulled her pleasure but
produced the fear that she was going to lose Kyle just as she had
Maura—just as soon as he discovered what she’d done.

“I already know,” he said quietly.
“Maura told me.” He shook his head. “She’s too grief-stricken right
now to listen to reason, but I don’t let other people make my
decisions for me. I wanted to hear it from you.”

A mixture of gratitude and guilt and
anger flickered through Lexa. She wanted Kyle to believe she’d only
told Gabriel because she’d thought it would be for the best for
them. Partly it had been selfishness because she’d missed them so
much, but she truly had believed Gabriel when he’d told her the
udai would teach them how to make better lives for
themselves.

She was certain Gabriel had believed
everything he was telling her was the truth, too. She didn’t
believe he’d lied to her when he’d told her he would try to find
them for her or that he’d meant to harm them. There’d been no
reason to lie to her then, nothing to gain.

None of that made her feel less guilty
about it, though.

Kyle took her arm. “Come on. We’ll find
a place without the prying eyes and talk.”

Uneasiness slithered through Lexa for
the first time and she studied him doubtfully. He winced at the
look on her face. “Has it been that bad for you, Lexy? You don’t
even trust me anymore?”

Truthfully, she didn’t know who to
trust anymore. Her life had been safer and far less complicated
when she didn’t trust anyone at all.

She wanted to trust Kyle,
though—desperately—and she allowed him to lead her deeper into the
forest, wondering if he did mean to harm her.

She’d rather be dead, she thought
abruptly, than to live with the certain knowledge that no one at
all cared whether she lived or died, not even the people she
loved.

She thought she might get her wish when
he’d led her deeply into the woods and another man stepped out of
concealment. Recognition was far easier that time. He hadn’t
changed nearly as much as Kyle had—not physically anyway. She
glanced from her brother Kyle to Will questioningly. Kyle settled a
hand on her shoulder and squeezed it lightly—she thought to
reassure her—and then stepped away, leaving her to face a hard-eyed
stranger.

Will looked her up and down
assessingly. “I need to know if you’re the big sister I remember,
or someone I can’t trust. Are you with them? Or with
us?”

Lexa lifted her chin at the tone more
than the words, at the accusation in them and, quite suddenly,
everything was clear to her when it hadn’t been before. “You got
Maura’s man killed.”

His face darkened with anger, his lips
forming a thin, tight line. “No, you got him killed when you
betrayed us.”

Lexa felt her face blanch at the bald
accusation but anger revived her.

“She did what she had to to survive,
like we all do,” Kyle said angrily. “Isn’t that so, Lexy? Tell
him.”

She looked at Kyle mournfully,
realizing that they meant to force her to chose between them and
Gabriel, to betray them or him. She swallowed with an effort. “In
the beginning, yes.”

Kyle reddened, looked like he might
cry.

Will looked like he wanted to spit on
her. “That’s all I needed to know,” he said tightly.

Lexa’s heart jarred in her chest
painfully when it looked as if he meant to surge toward her.
Instead, he turned his back on her. “He’s a good man,” she said
shakily, unwilling to give up without a fight. She didn’t want to
have to choose between them! She loved them, too!

Will whipped his head around and sent
her a look of disgust. “He isn’t a man.”

“He is!” Lexa said angrily. “He’s
honorable and decent and … he’s been good to me, better than any
man ever was! They may be different from us in some ways, but
they’re still people.”

“Good!” Will spat with venom. “Should
make him easier than I thought to kill.”

Cold terror went through her at that.
“Will! You wouldn’t! Please tell me you wouldn’t do
that!”

“I will make you one promise, big
sister, and one only. I mean to kill as many of them as I can. I
mean to drive them off our world if I can. They don’t belong here.
This is our world! They call us savages and scavengers? What the
fuck are they but a bunch of vultures … picking over our corpses
and taking the best of what’s left for themselves?”

Lexa stared at him. “Why do you hate
them so much? They haven’t done us any harm! I don’t know what
happened any more than you do, but I know it happened a long time
before they came here. So we either did it to ourselves like Sir
said, or it was something that fell from the sky like the udai
think.”

“They could’ve stayed the hell out of
our business!” Will snarled.

Anger made Lexa incautious. “Left us to
our own business? You mean left us to the monsters that were
running things? It’s easy for you to say! You aren’t a woman! You
don’t know what it’s like to have no one to protect you, to have
any man that looks at you and decides he wants you beat you half to
death and take what he wants!”

Kyle looked like he wanted to throw up.
Will only glared at her. “Don’t I? Well what do you think those men
wanted with me and Kyle?”

Horror washed over her. It wasn’t as if
she hadn’t seen such things with her own eyes, but she’d
deliberately blocked that possibility where it concerned her sweet
little brothers. She mastered the urge to be violently ill. “The
lawgivers are trying to stop that! Someone had to!”

“We needed to!” Will said
furiously.

“But no one could or did!”

“I did,” Will growled. He moved toward
her, stopping only when he was towering over her. “And I
will.”

He’d as much as admitted that he was
the one who’d led the attack Gabriel had told her about. She knew
that was what he was saying. She didn’t doubt for a moment that he
was completely capable. He was nothing like the little brother
she’d known.

In a distant part of her mind, she was
proud of him, proud of his strength and his determination to stop
the strong from preying upon those weaker than them, but she
couldn’t agree with his hatred of the udai. She didn’t like them.
They were arrogant assholes, but they weren’t evil. Misguided,
maybe, but not willfully malicious. “They mean well,” she said a
little weakly. “I truly believe that.”

“Then you’re a damned fool, Lexa! The
only reason they brought us here was to make it easier to
exterminate us. That’s what the round up is all about—finding all
of us so they can make sure!”

Lexa blinked at him. “Why do you think
that? It doesn’t even make any sense, Will! If that was what they
wanted to do, they could’ve at any time! They don’t need to round
us up!”

Something flickered in his eyes.
Doubt?

“They couldn’t be sure they got all of
us any other way. I have … friends. I know what the plan
is.”

Lexa studied him, going over what he’d
said. “Udai? One of them told you this?”

His lips tightened. “Breathe a word
about any of this and sister or no sister ….” He left the threat
hanging between them.

Lexa gaped at him in disbelief and
dawning anger as he turned and strode away.

“You coming, Kyle?” he called back from
the shadows.

Kyle looked at her miserably. “Lexy
….”

“Kyle!”

Lexa flinched when Will bellowed again.
She swallowed with an effort. “You’d better go.”