by Anne Hope
With a conceding nod, Jace hastened out of the armory, for once eager to do as he was told.
Chapter Forty-Five
Marcus’s instincts led them deep into the mountains, where rugged beauty mingled with unforgiving terrain, making it more and more difficult to penetrate into the woods. Clusters of evergreens flanked rocky paths carpeted by thick tangles of undergrowth.
After the armory, Regan had teleported them to the garage. There, they’d climbed into a Land Rover, coaxed the motor to life, and peeled out of the Watchers’ complex. They’d driven for nearly an hour, until the road had dwindled down to a strip of dirt, then disappeared altogether, at which point they’d been forced to continue on foot.
“I think we’re getting closer,” Regan said as she carved her way through a snare of branches. “I feel Ben’s energy guiding me, which is totally nuts because I’m not a tracker.”
Marcus plowed forward, kicking his booted foot free of the relentless underbrush. “It’s not nuts at all. Remember how Jace was able to track Lia? He managed to break through both Cal’s and Athanatos’s shields. A Hybrid is naturally attracted to his or her old soul. Once the connection is forged, it’s pretty hard to break. Unless something happens to compromise it.” Like a firstborn ingesting the damn thing.
Dusk had come and gone. As the night deepened so did the shadows, casting a tenebrous veil over the land that perfectly matched Marcus’s bleak mood. There wasn’t much on earth he feared, save for going rogue. The idea of losing control had always been a black seed dwelling within him. Now it had sprouted roots.
“That’s not going to happen,” Regan insisted. “We won’t let it.”
Her optimism should’ve been a comfort. Instead, it served to exacerbate his fears, maybe because he was terrified of failing her again. He’d watched her die twice—once at the Rivershore Hospital and then again in his dream. The only thing worse than seeing death claim her would be to see the humanity leave her eyes. The most beautiful thing about Regan had always been the depth of her compassion. To see her lose that now…
“I know that look.” Her voice snapped him out of his morbid thoughts. “You’re doing the Marcus thing again.”
His mouth couldn’t help but twitch at the corners. “And what, I’m afraid to ask, is the Marcus thing?”
“You get real quiet and moody, start thinking the world’s about to end. I’m guessing it’s ’cause you’ve been around Cal too long.”
“I’m not a fan of blind optimism.” Something rustled up ahead, probably a deer. From one of the distant treetops, an owl hooted.
“Neither am I. Though a little positive thinking couldn’t hurt.”
He angled a questioning glance her way. “Fine, I’ll bite. How do you see this situation turning out? Go ahead. Give me your positive slant on things.”
She ran her fingers through her waterfall of hair, pushing the red strands off her face. “We’ll track Ben, and hopefully he’ll lead us straight to Kyros. When we take the bastard out, Cal will realize that Ben isn’t a threat and back off. Easy as pie.”
She made it sound so simple.
As much as Marcus hated to be the voice of opposition, he felt a little perspective was sorely needed. “Assuming we can get past Kyros’s army, which by the way is armed with angel’s blood, and cut down a firstborn whose been evading us for hundreds of years and who is now being protected by the angel of fate. Not only that, but we have to accomplish all this before the links to our lost souls are severed and we go rogue.”
Regan released an exasperated sigh. “You’re a real killjoy, you know that?”
“Just stating the facts.”
She ducked and squeezed through a canopy of redwoods behind him. “Well, if I thought the way you do, I’d always be brooding, too.” She caught up to him and grabbed him by the arm, looking up at him expectantly. “You never told me how you figured it out. What tipped you off that Ben is the carrier of our souls?”
He stood still for a second, hesitated. “Remember the dream I had after—” We made love. The words hovered on the tip of his tongue, but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to voice them. Now that they were back in the real world, the concept of love seemed no more tangible than the dream he spoke of. “I told Adrian about it, and he had a theory. He said the only way a Hybrid can dream is if he finds his old soul. Seeing as Ben’s was the only soul around, it didn’t take a genius to connect the dots.”
She let go of his arm, and they resumed their trek through the woods. “So are you ever gonna tell me what the dream was about?” He opened his mouth to protest, but she silenced him with a quelling look. “And don’t give me some bogus excuse like you did last night. I saw the expression on your face, Marcus. Whatever you saw freaked you out real bad.”
The last thing he wanted was to relive the nightmare, but she had a right to hear about it, especially since he now knew what he’d seen had been an actual memory. “I was at the back of a crowd, pushing my way through. I wasn’t sure why I was so desperate to get to the front. I just had a feeling that it was a matter of life and death.” For a moment the trees parted, and a slash of moonlight cut a wedge in their path. “I got there just in time to see a woman hanged.” He met her honeyed gaze, felt an echo of the agony he’d experienced in the dream. “That woman was you.”
Silence thickened between them, as deep as the night. “It was only a dream,” she whispered. “You’d just finished bringing me back to life. Your subconscious was probably in overdrive.”
“You don’t understand. The place where the dream was set, I’ve been there before. That’s where I first turned—in Boston back in 1742.”
Surprise slackened her mouth. “Are you saying you think the dream was actually a memory?”
“I don’t think. I know. Back at the complex, when I was out cold, I remembered. Remembered everything that happened before I turned.” His gaze briefly latched on to her face. “We were married. Neither of us knew I was a Hybrid, or what a Hybrid was, for that matter. All we knew was that I was born with a gift. I could find anyone. I also had the nasty habit of bringing out the worst in people.” Emotion softened his voice. “Except you.”
He squeezed through a bristly clasp of Douglas firs, inhaling a lungful of air that smelled of moist earth, peppered with a hint of pine and mulch. “We lived in seclusion, far removed from everyone. Until a Rogue decided to pay our town a visit and started snatching kids. I had no choice. I had to get involved. So I tracked the children and brought them back home. At first I got a hero’s welcome. Then the town turned on me. I was arrested for kidnapping and sentenced to death.”
Sadness tugged at her lush mouth. “That’s how you died.”
“No. You decided to save me by confessing to a crime you didn’t commit. I tried to return the favor, but I got there too late.” A thick lump of bile rose to block his windpipe. “I stood in the rain and watched you die, all because you couldn’t leave well enough alone, even then.”
She bit her lower lip, shrugged uncomfortably. “Sounds like something I would do, but you’re forgetting one small detail. I was only born about sixty years ago. I didn’t exist back in 1742.”
“You didn’t, but your soul did. Souls are constantly being reborn. It’s not much of a stretch to assume that yours once lived in my wife, just as it now lives in Ben.”
“I guess so.” She didn’t look entirely convinced. Still, something hot and gripping flickered in her gaze. “So you actually married me, huh?”
He averted his eyes. He had to. “Yeah, and look what good it did you.”
“If what you’re telling me is true, I was responsible for my own actions. Sounds like I was desperate to save you. I obviously didn’t know you were immortal.” Regan grew unnaturally silent. When she finally spoke, her voice was thin and feather soft. “You never did tell me how you turned.”
He remembered the brutal rage that had seized him after his wife died, the hunger for violence that had overtaken him,
how he’d whipped out the dagger he’d wrestled from the prison guard before escaping from the jailhouse that morning. “I started one hell of a fight. I was determined to slice open everyone who conspired to take you from me. Unfortunately, someone ran me through before I could finish the job. They tried to burn my body along with yours.”
Pain ripped through him at the memory of the flames feasting on her flesh. “But I came back.” A cloud slid across the moon, and the night grew blacker than sin. As black as the evil that had once lurked within him. “I rose from the ashes and killed them all.”
Lillith crept along the dense forested trail, where moss blanketed the ground and the smell of vegetation was thick enough to clog one’s throat. Tall trees intertwined their branches to block out the moon, but Lillith could see clearly in the dark. She advanced in brisk, sure-footed steps, her fingers clutching the gold, ruby-hilted dagger she’d stolen from the Seraphim Council before returning to earth.
Unlike Cal, Lillith felt no qualms about terminating the boy. She’d murdered children before, mainly infants and toddlers, hundreds of them. She’d had no choice. She’d needed to feed her babies, and they’d hungered for souls.
Her children were all dead now, some killed in the Great Flood, others in the New World. But her lineage persisted. She’d recently learned that her daughter’s offspring, Kyros and Kora, still lived, and Lillith had every intention of keeping it that way. The life of one small human boy was a small price to pay to protect what was hers.
She nearly missed the cave, the entrance concealed beneath its heavy cloak of mold and foliage. This was it—the place she sought. Until now, the child had been cloaked, virtually invisible to her. But suddenly she found herself able to track him, which confirmed what she’d already feared. The end was near. Micah wouldn’t have uncloaked the boy otherwise.
Pleased that her extrasensory abilities hadn’t been compromised like Cal’s when her wings were stripped from her, she entered the cave. Shadowy arms faithfully rose to embrace her, filling her with feral pleasure.
It will be over soon.
A soft glowing light flickered in the deepest part of the cavern, where the blackness should’ve been absolute. It drew her forward, emboldened her, even as lingering traces of Micah’s energy tainted the air and threatened to stifle her next breath.
A few sharp turns led her to the end of the cave, and the source of the light revealed itself. A vaporous fire danced in a hidden niche, smoldering without the benefit of wood. Blue flames held back the darkness, making no sound as they swayed and pulsed. As much as they mimicked fire, these flames did not actually burn. In fact, they were as cold as ice to the touch.
Angel fire.
Several feet from the blaze, shaking like an injured bird, crouched the boy.
He was alone, but the area had been sealed to prevent him from escaping. Only another angel had the power to tear down the barrier around him. With a concentrated thought, Lillith dismantled Micah’s seal and approached the child. He looked up at her, his face streaked with tears, his eyes two deep pools of tempered hope.
“Are you here to free me?” he asked between hiccupping sobs.
Lillith’s fingers tightened around the dagger she concealed behind her back. She gave the boy a buttery smile. “You could say that.”
Chapter Forty-Six
After Marcus’s startling revelation, Regan lapsed into deep thought, struggling to absorb what she’d learned. Could everything Marcus had told her be true? Had they been together in a past life, husband and wife, no less? Had she died in a misguided attempt to protect him? As much as she tried to convince herself that it was all a product of his imagination, a vivid delusion arising from his injuries, something primitive within her rejected the notion.
On a subconscious level, she accepted the story as truth, the same way she’d accepted the fact that they were soul mates. Some things were embedded in the very fabric of a person’s composition. Like her love for Marcus. A love that apparently transcended not only time, but death itself.
“How did you know who they were? The people who killed me?” When Marcus died, all of his memories should have abandoned him along with his soul.
“I didn’t. Not consciously. When I first turned, I was driven by instinct alone. I didn’t realize there was order to my madness.”
“Why do you remember our past life together and I don’t?”
He walked ahead of her, his heavy boots hammering the ground, his muscular arms chopping away at the branches, clearing the way for her. “I’m not sure. Maybe because your soul was born—potentially more than once—between that incarnation and your current one. Every time a soul is reborn, it’s cleansed of its memories. Otherwise, everyone would remember their past lives.” Marcus stopped abruptly, and Regan slammed into his broad back.
“What’s wrong?”
He shook his head. “Something’s happened. I can’t feel him anymore.”
“Ben?” Regan dug deep within herself, searched for the pulsing ribbon of energy that tethered her to Ben, found nothing but emptiness. The connection had evaporated in the space of a heartbeat. “Neither do I.”
Marcus scanned the area, his expression sharp and focused, as though he, too, was searching for the thread of energy he’d lost. He expelled a mouthful of air, his shoulders sagging wearily. He still hadn’t recovered fully from his scuffle with Thomas, and his face was as pale as the moon’s.
She placed a comforting hand on his arm. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. But I’ll be much better once I get a lock on Ben’s signature again.” He fell on his haunches, touched the ground in silent meditation, then shook his head in defeat. “Something’s running interference. Another energy.”
The wind caressed them with clammy fingers, growing stronger by the minute, threatening to morph into a gale. “How do we override it?”
“A physical object would help.” His stormy features matched the sudden shift in the weather. “Unfortunately, everything I had of Ben’s was thrown out with my clothes.”
“Not everything.” She dug into her pocket and pulled out the toy figure she’d retrieved before Elliot had come and taken Marcus’s ruined clothing away. “Will this do?”
Marcus stood and turned toward her. The smile that lit his face swept through her like a heat wave. He palmed her cheeks, then trapped her mouth in a fierce kiss. “Have I ever told you how amazing you are?”
“Once or twice in the last three decades or so. Most of the time you’re busy accusing me of rash behavior and recklessness.”
He kissed her again. This time the kiss was slower, warm and languid, like melting chocolate. She could’ve stood here forever, surrounded by gnarled trees and wicked tangles of grass, kissing Marcus beneath an ever-thickening cover of clouds. But time didn’t allow it.
Marcus pulled away first, taking the toy from her and rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger. Regan watched him, afraid to hope.
“I feel something, a low pulse of energy. The signal is weak, but it’s telling me to keep moving east.” The wind gusted, howling like a wounded animal.
Ignoring the approaching storm, Regan resumed her hike through the woods. “Then we’ll keep moving east.”
“They’re moving east.” Jace led the Watchers down a rugged trail as the wind picked up speed. It seemed with each step they took, the valley grew deeper, the untamed forest wilder. The ground beneath their feet was rocky, overrun with roots and weeds, which only served to slow them down.
“Are you sure?” Cal walked a few paces behind Jace, dressed in his black battle gear, a broadsword hanging at his side. “There is no room for error. Time is of the essence.”
Frustration nipped at Jace’s patience. “I’m sure.”
Lia squeezed through a vicious knot of trees, caught up to them. “He’s right. I feel them, too.”
The forest hissed as the rest of the Watchers, eight in all, carved a rough path through the woods.
“What is it?” Cal squatted beside him to study the ground.
Jace indicated the faint indentation in the soil. It was hidden beneath twigs and a smattering of pebbles, but he made out the distinct outline of a man’s boot.
“You think it belongs to Marcus?” Lia asked, inspecting the footprint over their shoulders.
“Who else would be out here in the middle of no man’s land?” He stood and resumed his trek through the forest, more determined than ever to get to Marcus and Regan before they found trouble, which he knew they would. Regan and Marcus attracted danger the way a flame attracts moths.
Beyond the mountains, storm clouds gathered, just a shade lighter than the midnight sky. The darkness grew flat, impenetrable, with hardly any moonlight to slice through the gloom. Somewhere in the quickly receding distance, lightning cracked the smooth black lid of night, moments before thunder boomed.
“The storm is almost upon us.” Cal stared up at the heavens, looking like he had a serious bone to pick with his old buddies, the angels. “We need to hurry.”
Energy rippled through the ozone-scented atmosphere, making Jace’s skin prickle and the scar on his wrist hum. He ran his thumb over it, his eyes seeking out Lia’s. The blue intensity of her gaze told him she felt it, too.
Jace didn’t understand his strange connection to Marcus and Regan, how it had come to be. At first, he’d thought it had something to do with Regan being his mother, but now he wasn’t so sure. His theory would’ve made sense if he and Regan were the only ones implicated, but Lia and Marcus were part of this as well. It was something more, something bigger. He’d bet his immortal ass on it.
A burst of light zigzagged through the sky again, and Lia shivered beside him. She wrapped her arms protectively around her middle.
Jace gripped her by the elbow as thunder crescendoed through the valley. “What’s the matter?”