by I. T. Lucas
“Got it.”
62
Wonder
Wonder’s chest hurt something awful. It felt as if she’d gotten stabbed in the heart.
Wait a minute, she had.
Should she check?
She tried to move, but something, or rather someone was holding her tight. It was okay, though, Wonder didn’t need to open her eyes to know it was Anandur. She recognized his scent.
“Are you awake?”
“Where are we?” she murmured.
“In a car on the way to the airport.”
She would’ve liked to sit up, but it hurt too much to move. It even hurt to talk. But she could listen. “Tell me what happened.”
“You Tasered my brother, and he nailed you with a knife. Lucky for him, you’re an immortal.” He patted her back gently. “He’s okay. Say hi, Brundar.”
“I’m glad you’re an immortal,” Anandur’s brother said from the front of the car. “I reacted on impulse and threw the knife before I knew it was you.”
She needed to set the record straight even if it hurt like hell to talk. “I only saw your boots, and when the light reflected from your blade, I aimed and fired. I didn’t know it was you either.”
“Killer reflexes,” Brundar said. “Are you sure you don’t want to join the Guardian force?”
Anandur patted her back again. “Don’t answer him. I know it hurts to talk when your heart is mending itself. Anyway, Grud escaped.”
Wonder shifted in his arms so she could look at him. “How?”
“Very cleverly. He pried open the sewage grate, then somehow managed to remove one of the bars and used it to loosen the concrete blocks in the wall behind the cages. Apparently, he worked on it every time you took me out of the cage. He didn’t trust me enough to do it while I was there. Smart son of a bitch, pardon my French. But that one is really vile, and now he is on the loose. Not for long, though. We have a force of Guardians looking for him.”
Wonder had thought they’d been conversing in English this whole time, not French. Anandur was confusing her.
“What about Shaveh and Mordan?” Wonder whispered in an attempt to minimize the pain.
“They’re coming with us.”
Had Anandur said something about an airport? “Where are we going?”
“Not far. Only to Los Angeles.”
“I can’t. I need to go to work.” Wonder tried to sit up, but Anandur only tightened his hold on her.
“No, you don’t. With Grud on the loose, it’s not safe for you to go back to work or to the shelter. Until he’s caught, you’ll stay under our protection. Naturally, I hope you’ll stay for good, but it’s your decision. No one is forcing you to join us.”
“But…”
He put a finger to her lips to shush her. “Before you start arguing again, let me tell you something. That Doomer wasn’t shy about expressing his intentions toward you. If not for the cages keeping me from tearing out his throat, he would’ve been dead already.”
Given the vehemence in Anandur‘s voice, she could only imagine what Grud had been planning for her. In fact, she didn’t need Anandur to spell it out for her because she’d seen the glimpses of hatred and lust in Grud’s eyes but had chosen to ignore it.
He had the right to hate her. She would’ve been naive to think that feeding him and keeping him as clean as she could, would diminish his hatred of her.
As much as she didn’t like the idea of running like a coward, it was the prudent thing to do. She might have been able to take on Grud one on one, but there was the possibility that he would return with reinforcements. Besides, she only had a Taser gun that was good for one shot. He would probably be back with a real gun.
But what if Anandur and his people wouldn’t let her go? What if they were planning something?
Once she was in their midst, escaping would be difficult.
Not that there was anything she could do about it. Already, she was surrounded by them, and she was still recuperating from a major injury. Running off was not an option. They would catch her.
Besides, it felt so good to be held that she didn’t want it to end. Wonder couldn’t remember ever being held. She needed that contact, she craved it, and it wasn’t even about sexual attraction, although there was that too.
Who knew, maybe all that Anandur had told her was true and she would stay, not because she had no choice but because she wanted to.
63
Anandur
By the time they arrived at the airport, Wonder had fallen asleep again. It was good for her, therapeutic.
Brundar opened the back passenger door and peered inside. “Do you need help getting her out?”
“No, I’m good. I’ll manage.”
As if he was going to let anyone else carry her. She would be frightened if she opened her eyes and saw a stranger’s face inches away from hers. Fates only knew what the woman would do.
She might decide to head-butt the poor schmuck. For all her protests to the contrary, Wonder had excellent fighting instincts. The girl was born to be a Guardian.
Sliding carefully sideways, Anandur pulled out one leg, turned a little and got the other out. With both feet planted on the asphalt, he pushed up and away from the car.
Success.
Wonder continued sleeping peacefully in his arms. Thankfully, it was a small private airport with not many humans milling around. With him walking barefoot and Wonder’s T-shirt torn and covered in blood, they made one hell of a spectacle.
“Which plane did you get?” he asked Brundar.
“We used every flying machine we had. The two planes and three helicopters.”
“Are you coming back with us?”
“Yes. Onegus can handle the Doomers without me. I want to get back to Calypso.” He rubbed his chest. “I didn’t expect the separation to be that difficult.”
“Who is Calypso?” Wonder asked with her eyes still closed.
“Calypso, or Callie as everyone other than my brother calls her, is Brundar’s better half. Were you pretending to sleep all of this time?”
She opened one eye. “Define all of this time.”
Brundar chuckled. “You have your hands full, brother, literally.”
“Fine by me. Couldn’t have asked for a better charge.”
“What’s a charge?” Wonder asked. “Do you need to pay someone?”
Anandur chuckled. “I see that you are feeling better. I’ll explain everything and answer your twenty questions once we are on the plane.”
“Again with the twenty questions,” she murmured. “What if I have more?”
Climbing the stairs up to the clan’s private jet, Anandur tucked Wonder closer against his chest and then turned sideways to enter. She was a tall woman, and he didn’t want to accidentally bang her legs.
Once inside, he sat with her in his arms.
“You should put Wonder in her own seat.” Brundar entered behind them and took one of the seats across from them. “She needs to buckle up.”
Anandur didn’t want to let go.
“I’m better now.” Wonder rubbed a hand over her chest. “It doesn't hurt as much anymore.”
Reluctantly, Anandur lifted her and put her down in the seat next to him.
She looked around. “Wow, I’ve never been on a plane before. I thought they were bigger.”
“It’s a private jet.” Anandur pressed on the side panel, and a table slid out. There was a mini fridge under it, and he opened it, hoping someone had remembered to restock it. “Snake Venom, I’d be damned. Remind me to kiss whoever put it in there.”
He reached inside again, pulled out a can of ginger ale for Wonder, and popped the lid. “Here you go, sweetheart. I heard it's good for someone who’s healing from an injury.” Anandur cast his brother a baleful look.
Brundar crossed his arms over his chest and shrugged. The bastard. He wouldn’t have been so calm if someone had turned Callie into a practice target.
Lifting the bottle to
his mouth, Anandur took a long gulp, and then another. “Fates, I needed that. I also need a hot shower, a change of clothes, and several steaks with a mountain of mash potatoes on the side.”
“Sounds good to me,” Wonder said. “Where are you taking me?”
Anandur and Brundar exchanged quick glances.
“Go ahead, tell her,” Brundar said. “If she kept her own existence so well hidden not even Magnus and I suspected anything, she can keep our existence secret as well.”
“Keep or village?” Anandur asked.
“Keep first, and from there to the village. Kian’s instructions.”
“Got it.”
Sipping on her ginger ale, Wonder looked at Brundar and then at Anandur. “Who is Kian?”
Okay, that was question number what? One hundred and ten? It was time he started giving her some answers.
“Kian is the leader of the clan’s American arm. His sister Sari heads the one in Scotland, and their mother heads a small sanctuary in Alaska that is hidden under a dome of ice.”
Wonder frowned. “That seems extreme. Why hide under a dome of ice? And how is it even possible?”
Brundar was watching her with a stoic expression that only Anandur could decipher as amused. Well, by now Callie knew her mate well enough to decipher the slight variations as well.
“If you were the last goddess on earth, you would be cautious too.”
That shut Wonder up. For about two seconds of wide-eyed staring at his face.
“Did you say a goddess?”
“Sounds unbelievable, I know. She is the Clan Mother. Everyone in the clan aside from a few newcomers are her descendants.”
“No, to me it sounds very believable.” Wonder put the empty can of ginger ale on the table and lifted her hands in the air, then winced and clutched at her chest. “I thought I dreamt it.”
“Did you dream about a goddess?” Brundar asked.
“Not one particular goddess. I just knew that there were three kinds of people, namely immortals, gods, and humans. I didn’t know how I knew that, but it was like knowing that the earth orbits the sun and that the moon orbits the earth. It was a fact. But it seemed like no one ever heard of real living breathing gods or immortals. They were supposedly myths.”
That was odd. If Wonder were a randomly activated Dormant like Eva, she would’ve assumed, just as Eva had, that she was a freak of nature or the product of some secret experiment. She wouldn’t have dreamt about a world in which gods, immortals and humans coexisted. Except, it was possible that she had seen a movie or read a book that had influenced her subconscious, producing dreams of gods and goddesses.
“I knew I wasn’t a myth,” she continued. “Although at some point I started to doubt my immortality and thought I just had an abnormally fast rate of healing. That was until I encountered the first Doomer and discovered that there were more immortals out there. But the Doomers didn’t know anything about gods either. They also thought they were a myth.”
“They were lying,” Brundar said.
Anandur scratched his beard. “Not necessarily. I talked a lot with Dalhu and he said the soldiers are not told much. All they know is that a clan of immortals exist who compete with them for the control of humanity. They don’t want them to know the clan has a goddess while their supreme leader is only the immortal son of a god. Dalhu knew because he was smart and wasn’t happy with the simplistic version he’d been fed.”
“What about Robert?”
“Robert is more of a ‘follow the commands and don’t ask too many questions’ kind of guy. He didn’t know much until Carol told him.”
Wonder lifted her hand to get their attention. “So let me get it straight. You guys are related to a real, living, breathing goddess?”
“Yes.”
“And you know where she lives?”
“More or less. It’s a secret not even her children are privy to. She and her people come and go using machine-piloted planes.” He didn’t want to get into a long explanation about the Odus. Wonder was having a hard enough time wrapping her head around all the new information coming her way.
“Is there any way I could meet her?”
Anandur shook his head. “It’s up to her. The goddess does as she pleases. She might get curious about you and want to see you, but only if you become part of the clan.”
Wonder narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re not just saying that to make me want to stay?”
He scratched his beard again and smiled. “Maybe?”
The end… for now.
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Annani’s Story
Goddess’s Choice
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2: Dark Stranger Revealed
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