by Tes Hilaire
His father was already settled behind his desk when Logan reached the head council’s favored chamber. His father had a smattering of rooms throughout Haven and dozens of other little sanctuaries throughout the city that no one, save his son, knew about. Frankly Logan suspected he only knew because someone should be told about them just in case something happened to Calhoun Senior. The many relics housed in Haven were not the only ones entrusted to the Paladin to guard. There were at least two that his family personally guarded. Two that his father didn’t even trust to the brothers to defend.
Logan waited, arms folded behind his back. It was the only way he could fight the itching need to get out of Haven and back to Jessica. Frankly, he would have ignored the summons but he figured that unless his father had his say, he’d more than likely send one or more of his Paladin brothers after him, which, given Logan’s current mood wouldn’t be good for anyone.
It would be okay. Not many people had Bennett’s skills in tracking information, and the hospital was populated enough that it should be safe, especially if Jessica was surrounded by a bunch of men and women with badges and guns.
“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how disappointed I am in you,” his father said.
“And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that I think you’re overreacting and trying to control things that you are not meant to control.”
“Things have gotten completely out of hand. A null slipping in and then out of the halls of Haven. My son sleeping with some powerless girl. Paladin using their gifts against one another? The very foundation of our order is being threatened and you don’t see a problem?”
“That girl is my mate.”
“Have you performed the ceremony and bonded with her yet?”
Logan tensed, his jaw clenching. He hadn’t. And not because there hadn’t been opportunity. The first being during one of the many fabulously amazing moments during the night they’d spent together. Then he told himself that he hesitated because he wanted Jessica to understand who and what he was first, but he knew it was because there was a part of him that hoped by not doing so, he could somehow shield himself from the full effects of the mate bond. It stood to reason that if he didn’t perform the ceremony to open the pathway between them, then he could somehow make it through her eventual death. Not that he’d let her die anytime soon, but she would die. Eventually.
“Good, not bonded then,” his father said with some satisfaction.
Logan sighed. “Have you ever heard of a mate-bond, even if not formally acknowledged, disappearing?” That he asked with even a small measure of hope made him sick. But hell, he was scared. He honestly didn’t think he could take it if she died. And he would not become his father, turning his emotions off, his life obsession, his duties, and nothing more.
Nor would he become another Ganelon.
It was his father’s turn to sigh. “This is a mess.”
“What would you have me do, father? You know as well as I that I cannot deny the call of that bond, fully formed or not.”
“You could damn well try! Stop seeing her. Let her move on with her life.”
“You think I could do that?”
His father pounded his desk. “I will lock you up for her lifetime if I have to!” He took a deep breath, ran his hands through his hair, shaking his head as he regained his control. “You will someday take my place on the council. Your duty is to the task He placed upon us. It is to Him and your brothers. Not this human.”
Logan clenched his fists, knowing that to his father there was no other argument that mattered. “And her? What would you do with Jessica? She already knows what I am. I’ve already allowed the first link to form by becoming her lover.”
His father waved that off. “Matters not.”
“It doesn’t?” he asked, taken aback by the easy dismissal.
“I can block memories too.”
Logan shook his head. “You can’t block that sort of bond. She’ll always know she is missing something.”
“I would turn her into a vegetable before I allowed some mere human to hold the balance of my son’s sanity in her whimsical nature.”
Logan sucked in a breath. The way his father said it seemed so callous. When had his father become so heartless?
He stepped forward, his hand raised, finger pointed. “If you touch a single pathway within her mind, I’ll…”
“You’ll what?”
He curled his fingers back, dropping his hand back down to his side. “Trust me, father. You don’t want to know.”
And then he turned his back on his father and took himself from the room, because the truth was he didn’t like the answer any more than his father would.
He was already hanging by a thread. If his father did anything to Jessica, flesh and blood or not, Logan would treat him no differently than whoever stabbed her. And whoever that was would never touch a hair on her head again, because though they might not know it yet, they were already dead.
***
Jessica was a popular lady. Logan and his father weren’t the only visitors she had, though they were the ones who absorbed most of her thoughts and emotional agony. Not that her location was well known. The police were trying to keep her whereabouts hush, hush. At least until they had some leads on the attack. As if they’d ever get any. She figured tracking down a demon was not something they were equipped to do. Which is why, when Mike showed up somewhere in the stream of blue uniforms and well-wishers, she played the I-can’t-really-remember card.
Stupid. For her at least, though hopefully it would keep Mike safe from harm. She realized she was in deep shit. She also realized that the only one who could fix it was the man she should never see again.
No. She absolutely could not see Logan again. What they had was already too scary in intensity. And if there was even a chance that what Logan’s father had said was true? She shook her head. She would not risk Logan’s sanity and she certainly would not risk the loss of his soul.
Damn, why had this happened to them? Why pair her, a simple human with belief issues, with one of His warriors? To test her faith? To test Logan’s? It just didn’t make sense.
“What am I supposed to do? Follow my heart and risk his soul?”
No, Jessica. This is where you’re supposed to make the ultimate sacrifice and let him go.
She let her head flop against the stiff pillow. What a mess.
Someone knocked on the door. She looked over, half hoping, half dreading it would be Logan. It wasn’t. Though her feelings for the man in the doorway were similarly mixed. There’d been something weird about their last interaction. He took the dumping well but something after that—
“Hey, you in here talking to yourself?”
“Hey, Damon,” she said, struggling to sit up straighter in the bed. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Only good things, I hope.” He smiled, his black eyes twinkling mischievously.
“Right…” What had she been thinking about?
He stepped in, his gaze drawn to her bandaged right arm. He swallowed, the twinkle dimming, and she noticed that his coloring looked decidedly sick.
That’s right, he’d left her to go do something. Probably blamed himself. Which he shouldn’t. She still wasn’t sure what the purpose of the attack was, but she was sure of one thing: If Damon had been there, he would have been an annoyance, nothing more, and would likely be in the same position she was—if not dead.
“Hey, this isn’t your fault you know,” she told him.
“You’ll forgive me if I think it is.” He pulled a hand down over his face, then approached and took her hand. “Damn, Jessica. I wish I could make this up to you.”
She looked around the room, at the beeping machines, the sterile white curtain. God, she hated hospitals. At least, when she was the one i
n them. There was nothing to do but sit and wait and ponder your own faults and vulnerabilities. Not to mention the seriously fucked-up state of your life to have ended up there.
“Maybe you can,” she murmured.
“Excuse me?”
“I need you to help me with something,” she said, her voice low like a conspirator. “Something very important and very dangerous.”
He played along, leaning in closer. “Does it involve breaking the law?”
“Maybe.” She gnawed on her lip, looking by him to the open door. No one there. “Break me out of here. They said they’d release me in the morning but I can’t…I can’t…” she bit her lip, memories swamping her of another time. Another sterile concrete building. It was a morgue, but the vulnerability she felt had been the same. They’d told her she didn’t have to do it, the ID had already been made, but she’d needed the closure. Julia was her twin. Twins were supposed to sense when the other was in danger. Only Jessica hadn’t, not until the somber-faced officers had shown up at her door had she any inkling something was wrong. A day later, she still couldn’t believe Julia was dead. Wouldn’t she have felt it? Wouldn’t some great gaping hole be present in her chest? So she’d insisted. She’d walked behind the grim-faced officer into the cold, sterile morgue and waited while they set things up. It wasn’t until the white curtain opened that she finally felt it, that deep-seated agony that told her all she needed to know: She’d lost a part of herself.
And here she was, losing the rest.
Damon sighed. “Babe, I would if I could, but I’m not going to just kidnap you out of here.”
She shook her head. “You won’t have to. Just find some poor unsuspecting schmuck just off his residency that’s been stuck on back-to-back shifts and get him to let me out of here.”
He didn’t look happy, but he eventually nodded.
He was gone what seemed like hours but he did return, a young frazzled man in a white lab coat in his wake. She could have kissed Damon, but just the thought struck her as wrong.
Logan. She wanted him to be the one rescuing her. With her whole world turned upside down and the cold sterile walls of the hospital pressing in on her, she needed his steady presence. Only he needed her to walk away.
Damn him for being the one. Damn him for being who he was and making it impossible for them to be together. And damn Him for the reminder of what loving someone could be like and then taking it all away again.
Pulling herself from her misery, she waited patiently as the doctor did a cursory exam. She must have passed because he called in a nurse and asked her to prep the discharge forms. The nurse didn’t look thrilled but she nodded and went to get things moving.
It took too long, and Jessica both feared and wished for Logan to show up and stop her, but thirty minutes later Jessica was in a wheelchair sitting on the front curb as Damon brought his car around.
She waited until they were in the car and had pulled out of the lot before she spoke, her palms still sweaty from the jailbreak. She didn’t want to go home. Didn’t want to face the bloodstained floor. Didn’t want to face the stillness of the apartment where violence had found her and have to think about why and what she was going to do about it. But what else was there to do?
Maybe your job, Jessica?
That’s right. She’d never talked to the Sergeant. Never took that leave of absence, which meant she was still on the case.
“Can I borrow your phone?”
Damon searched her face, but pulled his phone from his pocket, his eyes locked back on the road as she typed in Grim’s number from memory. It rang. And rang. Eventually clicking over to voice mail. “Damn.”
“Not home?” he asked.
She shook her head, gnawing on her lip. The possibility that Grim was dead was very real, in which case it was all on her. If she’d stopped to call Mike before bolting out the door, then maybe they could have found him in time.
“What’s wrong, Jess?” Damon asked, his voice soft and soothing.
She stretched her neck side to side, the bones popping. “Grim’s not answering.”
“Grim?”
“My informant. He called, said someone was after him. I was headed out to meet him when I was attacked.”
Damon shook his head. “Jess, it’s been hours. You should’ve told Mike that so he could check it out.”
“I did tell Mike. He sent someone over to look and didn’t find anything.”
“Huh.” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “And now you can’t get ahold of him?”
She lifted his phone. “Voice mail. So either he’s not answering, can’t answer, or the battery is dead.”
He worked his jaw, his eyes on the light they were stuck at. “Where did you say he was?”
“Some warehouse on Manida Street.”
The light turned green and he started forward. “I can go check it out if you want. After I drop you off of course.”
“I’d appreciate it,” she told him, though even as she said it her gut twisted with unease. Was sending Damon really that smart? Despite her recent close encounter, he was even less equipped to deal with all this than she. At least she knew what she was facing. Unless…
She frowned as she looked out the window at the dark night, her thoughts turning to the body in the Dumpster. It was the night she’d met Logan, could the man’s death have been because of Logan and the creatures he fought and not because of her? It seemed too odd, too much of a coincidence. But hell, without Grim’s confirmation, she didn’t even know if their victim was the man she’d been supposed to meet. If Logan was there because of the whole angel warrior thing, then it stood to reason that the man was killed by one of the creatures Logan hunted. In which case it probably had nothing to do with her or her case. Just like the attack on her in the garage the next day was because she was a loose thread, not because of Tom’s car.
It made sense. It fit. Tom’s case and all this demon/vampire crap were two totally separate things. Therefore it would be okay for Damon to check things out. Still, if Mike’s officers hadn’t found anything, what made her think Damon would?
“Maybe I should come with you. Maybe the officers Mike sent didn’t find him because he didn’t want to be found by them.”
“So you think he’ll come out if you’re there?”
She twisted in her seat. The streetlights gave her enough light to get a decent look at him. Truth was he looked pretty crappy. His skin still had that glazed, sick look and his eyes were dull, as if he wasn’t fully there.
“You don’t look so good,” she said.
He quirked a brow, giving her the once over. “Are you pot or kettle?”
She laughed, but it came out sounding hollow and fake.
“Babe, I really think it’s best if I bring you home.”
She heaved out a breath that made her ribs ache. The reminder should have made her inclined to agree, but instead it drove the opposite point home: She didn’t want to go home. Not when it meant being alone. Not when she would have to eventually face Logan—and then find a way to break his heart so he’d go away. But she could find Grim and maybe, hopefully, she could find Rhodes’s real killer and clear Logan’s friend’s name.
“I need to find out what happened to Grim. I need to be sure he’s not still hiding in there waiting for me.”
He hesitated, but eventually nodded. “Okay. But I’m coming into the building with you.”
“Of course.” This was something else she could do for Logan. Maybe they couldn’t be together, but she could take greater care with her own life—which meant taking the help when offered.
Damon took the next cross street. A few more turns and they were on their way. Traffic was light, but Jessica couldn’t help squirming in the seat. Not only was she nervous, but the painkillers were wearing off and
her entire body ached.
Damon looked over at her, headlights flashing across his face, his hands tight around the wheel. “We’re almost there.”
She nodded, but the anxiety of not knowing what they’d find when they got there was gnawing at her nerves. It was only another five minutes before they reached their destination, but long enough for her to break out in a slick sweat that chilled quickly in the cool evening.
“Which building?” Damon asked. Jess scanned the street. Which building indeed. The entire area was one big warehouse after another.
“For him to get in and hide, it’s probably either abandoned or has really poor security.”
“I don’t think anything in this part of town has very good security. And a good number are abandoned.”
True. Which made her wonder just how vigorously the officers would have looked for Grim.
Damon coasted down the street. Jessica scanned the buildings for possibilities. Problem was they all seemed possible. What had made her think this was a good idea?
“Wait. What’s that?” Damon pulled to a stop, his arm outstretched as he pointed to one of the boarded-up warehouses. A board had fallen down and stood on its end, tipped toward a stack of barrels. One of the barrels was moved, shimmied around the board so only a glint of the dull metal flashed in the reflection of the Viper’s headlights.
“Want to check it out?” Damon asked.
The thought that this was all a waste of time crossed her mind but when she opened her mouth all that came out was an uneasy, “Sure.”
Jessica popped her door, her feet barely hit the pavement before Damon was there offering a hand.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.” He pointed his remote toward the car, a couple soft beeps, though they seemed loud in the still night.
She scanned the building. Any moment now Grim would pop his head out a window, relief flooding his gaze. Any moment and the barrel of an automatic would appear out that window, thug on the end, and mow them down.
“You have your gun, right? Mine’s probably in the evidence locker.”
“Right,” he replied solemnly.