Craved: A Chosen Ones Novel

by Davenport, Nia

Oh, God. My body was starting to burn again.

  “Why in the fuck are you here?!” I whispered fiercely at him across the table because the only other option was yelling it.

  His eyes honed in on my mouth the minute it formed the work “fuck.” Something intense moved behind them. He leaned further over the back of the chair, putting his face mere inches from mine. “Say it again?”

  “Say what again?” I played stupid. It was a bad idea.

  “Fuck, Alex. Say Fuck again. You have no idea what it does to me when that word leaves your lips. The wicked images my imagination conjures up. Are you curious? Because if you are I can show you exactly how active of an imagination I have.”

  I clamped my mouth shut. Not trusting myself to speak following that little admission. Who knew what I would say? Probably something I would never be able to take back. Something like not as wicked as the ones mine conjures up. Or something like please show me and thank you in advance. Damn it. Maybe Whitney was right. I really, really, really needed to get laid. It’d been way too long and I was starting to trip out.

  When I finally trusted myself to speak without saying words that were completely off the table, I tried changing the subject again, steering us away from the word “fuck” and into safer waters.

  “Chase,” I spoke slow and precise like I was talking to someone dense. He didn’t answer my question the other times I’d asked, maybe the words would get through to him like this. “Why. Are. You. Here? Either there’s something important you came to tell me or you went through my roommate to track me down because you’ve turned into some kind of freaky stalker.”

  He looked at me offended. “I don’t stalk women. I don’t have to.”

  I rolled my eyes. Of course he didn’t. “Then there’s only option A left.”

  His eyes darted to the hostess stand.

  I felt a slight chill travel the length of my spine. I looked in the direction of his cold stare.

  A middle-age looking man had entered the restaurant with a pretty, human woman. He was surreal in his beauty which was perfection personified. He could have easily passed for a mortal man who’d been blessed with movie star good looks. There were no black wings trailing behind him and when he smiled, it was that of a human. No incisors lengthened or even played peek-a-boo with his gums. The only thing that gave him away were his eyes. They were a dark ebony ringed in silver.

  “Is that a Brethren?!”

  “Yes, it is.” Chase growled the words more than spoke them. “We should go. If we’ve spotted him, he has likely spotted us as well.”

  “Is that a quick question? He doesn’t have to be sporting black wings and deadly sharp fangs for me to tell. The silver around his pupils are enough.”

  Chase looked at me with a shocked expression. “You can see that?”

  “Yeah, why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because everybody else in this restaurant cannot. He is wearing a glamour that makes him appear completely human to everyone who looks upon him, including Neph-.” Chase immediately stopped talking and my hackles immediately rose.

  His words hinted that while I was a Nephilim he was not. I looked at him and his blue eyes sparkled like sapphires. They were an endless, cerulean blue and within them I observed a kaleidoscope effect. But that’s not all I saw and I wondered how I missed it before. Flecks of silver flickered around the blue. They were not there for long, but I saw them before they disappeared.

  And this, I thought when the rock dropped into the bottom of my stomach. This is why I knew better than to trust him. To let him get too close. At least it wasn’t the case this time of hindsight being 20/20. At least my lapse in judgement, my blind naivety, was brought to the light before something irreversible happened.

  My hand went to my waist and damnit, I didn’t have a weapon on me. I hadn’t expected to need one. I was going straight from my apartment, to dinner with Ben in his car, and back home. I eyed the steak knife and fork rolled up in a cloth napkin resting on the empty table next to us.

  I forced my body to relax. My heart beat a mile a minute and my hands threatened to start shaking with fury at being made a fool. Again. But I needed to stay calm. He hadn’t moved to hurt me yet. He wouldn’t do so in a crowded restaurant. It would draw too much attention. He had certainly come for me though. What else would explain him suddenly tracking me down after four, nearly five complete days with no contact?

  I forced myself to take my eyes off Chase and look at the Brethren in alarm. “We should leave.”

  He stood and held out his arm. “After you.”

  Shit. I really did not want him at my back, but I had no other choice if I didn’t want to let on that I knew he wasn’t what he pretended to be just yet. I began walking at a quicker pace than he would have expected me to. I used the distance between us to take advantage of my back being to him. I reached out directly in front of me and swiped the rolled up steak knife off the table. A nearly useless weapon was better than no weapon. It wouldn’t do him any real damage but it might buy me time to escape. I could embed it in his eye, or pierce a lung, or cut off his fucking balls. Either and all would hurt like a bitch and might make him pause for a split second. Sometimes a split second was all you had.

  “Alex, what’s wrong with you? Where are you going?” He called after me.

  I hadn’t waited on the elevator. I took the stairs two at a time and didn’t stop when I emerged onto the main street. I turned a sharp left onto one of the side streets. I expected it to be less busy but I didn’t expect it to be completely deserted. Shit. Again. I wasn’t yet ready for the confrontation that was about to happen. Oh well. If wants were dreams, wishes would fly.

  Leveraging the element of surprise, maybe the only advantage I had, I spun around and thrust the steak knife at his left eye. Some stupid part of me cringed at the damage I was about to inflict. I shook the feeling off. It will heal. Probably in seconds.

  His hand shot out and circled around my wrist, stopping it before the knife met its target. I swung at him with my free hand but he caught it too. He pushed my back and against the brick wall of a building. I tried to knee him in the groin, but he moved his body to the left and wedged it between my legs, forcing them a part more and rendering them useless. He used his entire body to pin me against the wall. There was nothing I could do to fight back. My body slumped in defeat but then a renewed sense of fight, of rage at being rendered so completely vulnerable so easily made it go taught again.

  “Alex! What the fuck?! Did you temporarily lose your mind?!” He was good. Really good. He actually sounded dumbstruck and concerned.

  “Fuck you,” I spat. “I didn’t lose my mind, but I’m no longer a fool either.” I raised my chin. Refusing to die like a coward. I would never beg for my life and there were no other lives to beg for this time either. “Hurry up and do it. Make it quick or slow. Torture me or not. I don’t give a shit.”

  He dropped my wrists like they’d scalded him and jerked away from me. His head snapped back as if he’d been slapped. I sprang off the wall and buried the knife in his chest, past his breastbone and into his heart.

  I should have run then. Sprinted around him and back onto the main street and kept running. But I didn’t. Because he hadn’t even tried to defend himself or deflect the blow. I wasn’t arrogant enough to think it was because I’d moved faster than he could react. I hadn’t. If that was the case, the knife would have found its mark in his left eye moments earlier.

  Chase stared down at the knife in shock as crimson bloomed across his chest. Then he dropped to his knees. He gripped the knife’s handle with both hands and pulled it out. The knife clattered to the pavement beside him and his shoulders sagged. He took in a deep, visibly painful breath then he hit the ground too.

  Again, I should have run. I should have stepped over him or around him and got the hell out of dodge. The stainless steel wouldn’t do any real damage. And yet, it clearly had. It should not have taken him down like it did. If by some small mir
acle I’d incapacitated him, it wouldn’t last for long. The wound would knit itself together and he’d be back on his feet. And yet it clearly, was not healing itself. I couldn’t run away. I couldn’t even walk away. My legs refused to obey the rational part of my brain’s command. Instead they listened to the irrational part. They moved closer to Chase’s body and bent down beside it. My hands hovered about the wound they’d created in his chest and my lips muttered the words to heal him. “Nunc ergo curate.”

  They didn’t work. He was not healing now. If he was human or a Nephilim, he should have been. If he was a daemon or a Brethren he should never have needed the words in the first place. What the fuck was going on? Nothing was behaving as it should have been, according to everything I’d come to know as fact. In desperation and panic and half thinking I was going out of my mind I did the only other thing I could think to do. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed 9-1-1.

  I paced back and forth across the floor of the hospital’s waiting area. If its floor had been covered with carpet instead of tile, I would have worried a hole in it by now. Chase had been in surgery for three hours and twenty two minutes. What could be taking that long? Was it a good thing or a bad thing? The better question was why the hell had he needed surgery in the first place?

  I wiped the steak knife clean of both of our prints before the paramedics arrived along with the police. I’d told them we’d been mugged by some assailant I was too shocked to give an accurate description of. I told them Chase had stepped in front of me to protect me and the guy had stabbed him with the knife. They found it odd that he’d used a steak knife instead of an actual knife, but all types of weirdos walked around Downtown Atlanta after dark. They wanted me to go down to the police station to give a formal statement before going to the hospital. I pulled rank on them using my family’s name and insisted that they take my statement at the hospital and that they make it quick. They apologetically obliged, made quick work of their business and left.

  “Miss Sinclair,” the surgeon who’d met the paramedics at the hospital’s emergency entrance and had wheeled Chase to the operating room addressed me as he removed his mask.

  I faced him straight on, trying to read his expression. His face gave nothing away.

  “Is he…okay?” I couldn’t ask the other thing.

  “It was touch and go, but he is stable now. We will have to keep him for observation for a few days and it will take a few weeks, maybe longer, for him to fully recuperate but he should be fine.”

  Relief flooded me along with something else I couldn’t quite name.

  “Is he awake?”

  “He is.”

  I had no right to ask what I did next but I did anyway. “Can I see him?”

  “Of course Ms. Sinclair. I will walk you back myself.”

  I cautiously approached Chase’s hospital bed. I didn’t know what to say or what to do or what he would say or do.

  His eyes flickered with the same emotion I’d last saw in them. Complete and utter shock.

  “You stabbed me. In the heart. With a steak knife.”

  “I did.” It was pointless to apologize for it.

  “Why?”

  “Because you were going to kill me?”

  “What? Why would I kill you?”

  I breathed out a frustrated breath. “You can drop the act. I know you’re not what you seem to be. I don’t know what you are but I know you’re not human.”

  Understanding dawned on his face.

  You shouldn’t have been able to tell. For all intents and purposes I am human.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He looked around the room and then past the partially opened door out into the hallway. “Not here.”

  He sat himself up and started disconnecting the various machines and tubes that were hooked up to him.

  “What are you doing? You can’t do that. You can’t go anywhere. You just got out of surgery!” I said bewildered.

  “I’ll be okay once I get back to my apartment. Will you go there with me? I promise not to hurt you and I promise to explain everything. I apologize for obviously scaring the shit out of you and making you stab me. I would never hurt you. Please, trust me on that at least?”

  I looked at him, nearly laughing at the madness of his plea and the irrationality it induced in me. Was he insane? Was I insane? If I’d trusted him not to hurt me, I wouldn’t have driven a steak knife into his heart. Then he wouldn’t have nearly died and we wouldn’t be talking to each other in a hospital room after a touch and go surgery that had had to be performed to save him. All of it sounded crazy. Completely illogical. The knife should have done little more damage than a flesh wound on a human would have done. I also should have never been able to pierce his heart with it. He should have, he damn well could have stopped me before I even nicked his chest. But he didn’t. I almost killed him; he didn’t injure me. Even when I attacked him the first time and moved to take out his eye, he didn’t retaliate. He only restrained me from harming him. When I’d told him to go ahead, get the business of killing me over with, the look that crossed his face was genuine confusion. And now that I thought about it, his eyes also held a hint of pain and maybe hurt. Maybe that part, remembering the pain and the possible hurt I’d seen is what made me come to the decision that I did. Or maybe it was the fact of thinking about how I’d driven a knife into his chest and recalling the blood staining his shirt and how he’d dropped to his knees in shock and then I hadn’t been able to reverse the damage. Either way, I nodded my head, silently communicating that I would, that I did trust him not to hurt me. I couldn’t say the words, but the sentiment was the same.

  “Are you sure you’re okay to leave?” A human wouldn’t have been but he wasn’t human. And yet, he’d bled like one and had had to have surgery like one.

  “Yeah. Like I said. I’ll be okay once I get to my apartment.”

  “What’s at your apartment?”

  He disconnected the last of the machines and stood. He walked over to me and held out his hand. “Not here.”

  I nodded again and put my hand in his. Given what had just happened the action was as wrong and as contradictory as the warmth that tingled in my palm and up my arm at the contact of my skin against his.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Revelations

  The staff on duty tried to stop Chase from leaving the hospital. When their efforts proved futile they had him sign papers that plainly stated he had not been discharged by a medical profession. He was discharging himself against the explicit advice of a doctor. He handed the papers back to the Charge Nurse and asked her for a pair of scrubs to leave in.

  I marveled at the fact that he had been able to walk out of there on two legs, stay upright for the car service I’d called, and then make it into his apartment. It must not have been as easy as he made it look because as soon as he reached the couch he collapsed onto it.

  “Are you alright?” I asked panicked.

  He’d gone a little pale and a slight sheen stood out along his brow line.

  “I’m good.” His chest heaved up and down heavily as he spoke. “In the bathroom inside the bedroom there is a vial of liquid underneath the counter. It’s clear and unmarked. Should be easy to spot. Can you grab it for me?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be right back.”

  I pushed the closed door leading into his bedroom open. Normally, entering a person’s bedroom was a deeply private act. They usually served as inner sanctums and going into them was like wading through their owner’s privacy. I didn’t feel like I was trespassing on anything personal when I walked into Chase’s bedroom. It was bare except for a plain-looking large bed with a black comforter that sat off to the right and a wooden dresser that sat on the wall opposite it. There were no personal knickknacks lying around, no pictures of family or himself or friends, or anything else that might provide an iota of insight about who he really was. The bathroom was just as bare. I looked in the cabinet under the sink and immediately saw the
vial. I swiped it up, wondering at the identity of the clear liquid contents it contained.

  I walked back into the living and handed the vial to Chase. “What’s in there?”

  He uncorked the small glass bottle and placed it to his lips. I expected him to drain it, but he only swallowed a small fraction of the liquid. A few seconds after he did so, his breathing became less heavy and his muscles relaxed. He re-corked the vial then held it out to me.

  “My archangelic creator says it is water from the River of Life that flows through Heaven. I don’t know for sure because I’ve never been to see for myself. Other than an Archangel in the flesh, it is the only thing capable of healing me or any of the other Chosen Ones when we have been mortally injured. I’ll be good as new in a couple of minutes.”

  I eyed the clear liquid that looked like water from the tap and nothing more. Still…I hastily sat it on the coffee table in front us. If it was what he said it was, it felt freaky to be holding it.

  “How is that possible? That I was able to injure you? The knife wasn’t silver. And what are you? You’re not human and you’re not a daemon and you’ve proven not to be a Brethren either? What else is there ? I didn’t think anything else existed except….” I nearly leapt from the couch until I remembered the fact that Archangels were banned from returning to Earth in corporeal form.

  “Remember the last time you were at my apartment and I asked if you wanted something to drink because you would need it after you heard what I was about to say? Well I am offering it again. Do you want a drink before I start talking?”

  Oh God. My head hurt and I wanted to rub my temples just guessing at what he would tell me. I had needed a drink or two then and I more than likely would now. I almost said yes. Then I remembered what transpired the last time I’d gotten drunk around him. I answered with a quick “No.” I hadn’t meant for it to sound as intense or as shaky as it did.

  “Okay, but it’s on the table if you change your mind. Here goes. I’m not entirely human; I technically am not a Nephilim though I am close enough to one that that is what we pretend to be; I’m not a daemon either, and you reasoned correctly when you stopped short of assuming that I’m an Archangel. Sort of. I am both more and less human than you are just as I am both more and less part Archangel than you are. I am the consequence of an Archangel’s essence being merged with the soul of a human child. It is what marks me and the others as Chosen Ones. It is also why I can pass for a Nephilim even though I am not truly one of you. You are part Archangel, part human as the product of a biological union between the two. I am what I am because an already made human soul was fused together with an Archangel’s essence. The result is that I have all of the abilities of an Archangel as well as all of the vulnerabilities of a human body. I am every bit as fast and as strong and as powerful as you would expect an Archangel to be, but I can be injured as easily as any human. Which is ironic because while you can heal humans, apparently Nephilim healing abilities do not work on me. I didn’t know that until you stabbed me by the way. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have let you.”