“You do what you need to do to survive.” He wasn’t proud of it. When he jumped ship on the New Jersey docks, he’d been a kid, exact age unknown, without money, education, or prospects. For a couple of years, he’d done any work that was offered, legal or not. “Anyway, as long as the police aren’t searching for me, I’m good to go.”
“Not police. But there could be . . . people looking for you.”
He didn’t like that ominous little pause.
“Why?”
“Because of who you are.” She moistened her lips.
“What you are. What you did during that fight.”
Fuck. “Did I kill somebody?”
He couldn’t go to jail. Being locked up again would kill him.
She shook her head, her gaze dropping to her lap.
He got a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. “So, these guys who are after me . . . What do they want? Turf?
Revenge?”
“They believe you are one of us.”
“Why would they think that?”
“Because they felt your power. They will guess that I was searching for you.”
Searching for . . . Shit.
His head hurt. Her scent swam in his senses. He couldn’t think.
“You picked me up.”
She nodded.
“I thought you were slumming,” he said.
“I was Called to find you.”
“You left me.” He remembered that much. “For the ponytail.”
She winced. “I’m sorry. You were not what I expected.”
His mind scrambled back to their first meeting. “You knew I wasn’t some rich guy with a boat. I told you that up front.”
“It’s not that. I thought you would be like us. But you’re different.”
“Not . . . nephilim.”
“Not nephilim,” she agreed. She waited a beat and added,
“And not human.”
Not human?
Another flash of memory, voices talking over his head. “His toes are webbed.”
The room wobbled. He took a breath—soap and Lara—and held it until everything steadied inside. So his feet weren’t exactly like everybody else’s. Big fucking deal.
“Bullshit,” he said.
For seven years, he’d lived hand to mouth and moment to moment. He survived by not thinking any further than his next meal, his next job. We flow as the sea flows. The whisper surfaced from another life.
He wrenched his thoughts away. He didn’t dwell on the past. Or his dreams.
Or his damn feet.
“You have power,” Lara said. “Enough for Simon to consider you a threat.”
He shot her a look. “I wasn’t a threat until he locked me in his basement. Now I’m pissed off.”
“I’m sorry.” She frowned at her hands in her lap. Her towel had parted above her knee, along her thigh. Her cheeks flushed with earnestness. “You have to believe me.
I didn’t think . . . I thought they would help you. I wanted to help.”
He wanted to believe her. Her hand on his chest, her mouth on his mouth, her breath in his lungs . . .
“Prove it,” he said. “Help me now.”
Her fingers twisted together. “I can’t. I’ve been forbidden to see you. To speak with you. To have any contact with you at all.”
“What are they going to do, give you detention?”
“You don’t understand. I am sworn to obedience.”
She sounded like a cop. Or a nun.
“Shut up and do as you’re told?” he drawled.
Her eyes darkened. Something there, he thought. A shadow of hurt, a flicker of doubt. “Not always,” she said.
“Then come with me,” he said, surprising himself.
Until the words came out of his mouth, he had no idea he was going to say them. He wasn’t looking to get tangled up in a relationship. No ties, no strings. But there was something between them. A connection. He didn’t understand it, but there it was. He didn’t like the thought of leaving her here with psycho Axton and his hex-happy henchman.
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t leave Rockhaven.”
He should be relieved. He couldn’t rescue her if she didn’t want rescue. But . . . “They’re not keeping you here, are they? Against your will?”
She shook her head. “This is my home. I am bound here by the Rule.”
“Rules are made to be broken.”
“Not this Rule.” Her voice was earnest. “It’s our way of thinking. Our way of life. It’s what sets us apart from the rest of the world and binds us together as a community.
Without it, we cannot attain perfection.”
Some perfection. It sounded like a cult to him.
“You don’t belong here,” he said. “You’re not like the rest of them.”
“I am,” she insisted. “I’m with my own kind here. My family.”
He didn’t know enough about families to argue with her.
“All I need is a ride,” he said. “I’d call a cab, but I don’t know where the hell we are.”
Or where he was going. North, maybe.
“Pennsylvania. Bucks County,” she said.
He didn’t know Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from Bumfuck, USA, but he had a working sailor’s knowledge of the East Coast. “How far from the Port Authority? Newark,” he added when she just blinked those lovely eyes at him.
“I don’t . . . Two hours?”
“That’s good.” Damn good. “I can go anywhere in the world from there.”
North, he thought again. He was almost sure of it.
“You’ll be home before breakfast,” he said.
“Fine.” She stood.
He should have been happy with his victory. He was getting the hell out of here. He watched her cross to the dresser and open a drawer. Unease tickled his spine. “You can come back, right? They won’t kick you out for giving me a ride?”
“Oh, yes.” He tried not to be distracted by the tumble of her hair, the curve of her butt. “They’ll take me back.” Her tone was flat.
“But . . .”
She glanced at him over her shoulder. “There are always consequences for disobedience.”
“Right.” His mind weighed, calculated, decided. “Then you can’t come with me.”
“But you just said . . .” She turned, scowling, her clothes clutched to her chest. “You need me.”
“I should have said, you can’t come with me willingly. You can’t help me without getting into trouble.”
“So?”
He grinned, suddenly cheerful despite his splitting head. “So I’ll have to kidnap you.”
*
Lara’s breath huffed out. “Be serious.”
“I’m dead serious,” Justin said, and despite his smile, she almost believed him. “I don’t want to see you hurt. Tell Axton I forced you. He can’t blame you then.”
Memory uncoiled inside her, dark and insidious as smoke.
No, Simon would not blame her if she were forced.
She shuddered, her hands closing convulsively on her clothes. “What if he calls the police?”
“You really think your buddy Axton wants the cops on his turf?”
“Probably not,” she admitted. Rockhaven was its own community under the Rule, school and glassworks forming an isolated enclave in the rolling countryside. Simon would not seek help or accept interference from their neighbors.
“But if he thinks I’ve been abducted . . .”
“You’ll be home before he has time to file a report.”
“He’ll stil have questions.”
“So tell him the truth. I broke into your room. I had a knife.”
Justin’s lips curved upward, teasing, daring. “You couldn’t resist me.”
She stuck out her chin, uncomfortably aware of her nakedness under the towel. “I’m not a victim.”
She would not be a v
ictim ever again.
“You think you should struggle?” He cocked his head, as if considering. “Right now, you could probably take me.
But if you want it to look good, we could knock over the lamp or something. Rumple the sheets.”
She flushed. Her awareness of him lay on her like a second skin, twitching with his very pulse, his every breath.
She was exquisitely conscious of the effort it cost him simply to sit upright and smile. The echoes of his pain throbbed in her temples, the bite of the heth gnawed at her own throat. She could feel the sweat at the small of his back, the faint tremor in his legs of drugs or exhaustion. He must be half dead with pain and fatigue.
And yet he felt more alive to her than anyone she had ever known.
“We want them to think I was coerced,” she said coolly.
“Not seduced.”
“Too bad.” Another glint from those golden eyes. “I was prepared to be convincing.”
Her pulse fluttered. He was weakened and desperate.
How could he flirt with her now? “You convinced me to drive. That will have to be enough for you.”
For me.
He grinned, undiscouraged and approving. “That puts me in my place.”
It took all her will not to smile back.
“I have to get dressed,” she said and escaped into the tiny bathroom with her clothes.
He stood when she came out. He filled her room, as tall as Simon and leanly muscled. “Where’s your car?”
His size, his sudden shift, took her aback. “I don’t own a car. But I know the code to the garage.”
“Keys?”
“Hanging up inside.”
“Convenient.”
“It’s meant to be.”
There were no thieves among the nephilim. Their vehicles, gray sedans and blue school vans, were held in common.
He nodded once. “Ready, then?”
Be serious, she’d said. But this Justin, with his quick, hard questions and cool, hard eyes, filled her with doubt.
A chill chased up her arms. Simon had accused her of endangering the community, of lacking self-knowledge and obedience. What made her think she knew better than the headmaster? Than Zayin?
Justin watched her. Waiting. The black bead gleamed against the burned skin of his throat.
“I’m not sure I can even get you through the gates,” she blurted out.
His gaze remained steady on hers. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Her chest hollowed. She poised on the edge of a decision, about to jump.
When she Fell, the moment of choice had passed without effort or reflection. Her act of disobedience had been sheer reflex, a burst of compassion, an impulse born of love.
Why that child, unloved even by the mother who gave her birth? Why that moment, when the girl was almost free of her short, miserable existence? Of all the children Lara had watched and guided over the centuries, what made this one’s pain so intolerable, her life so precious?
Lara didn’t know.
The choice then—her immortality or the child’s soul—had been no choice at all. But by stopping the girl from taking her own life, Lara had doomed herself to Fall.
She was not that pure anymore. That fearless. She knew now that she could make mistakes. She had learned, in her soul and her fragile flesh, that she could hurt and be hurt.
She had paid for her disobedience by becoming human.
What would the price of disobedience be this time?
And what, she wondered, would it cost her to obey?
She looked at Justin, his lean, stubbled face, his long, amber eyes. The bandage on his head. The lines of pain around his mouth.
“You don’t belong here. You’re not like the rest of them. ”
She was. Oh, she was. Something other, something more than human. Or maybe something less.
Caged.
She had the right to embrace the security of her own bars. But she could not make that choice for him. There were worse sins than disobedience.
She took a breath. Released it slowly. “I’ll take you as far as Newark. There are things you need to know.” Even if telling him violated the precepts of safety and the rule of silence. “But you have to promise to listen.”
Clouds scudded across the pin-pricked sky.
The trees rippled and sighed. Lara gathered moonlight in her palms, bending the rising air around them, murmuring a quick glamour under her breath. Any student glancing out the dormitory windows would only see two shadows gliding over the lawn.
Beside her, Justin stalked as silent as the night, dimmed to black and silver by the uncertain light.
“Here,” she whispered.
The garage loomed out of the landscape, built two levels down into the side of a hill roofed with trees and sod. She tapped the door code into the keypad.
The double doors hummed. Light slanted across the drive.
“Kill the lights,” Justin snapped.
“They’re automatic.”
He grabbed her elbow. She felt the jolt of his touch before he dragged her under the opening door. Releasing her arm, he mashed his palm on the controls. The mechanism checked. Clunked. The doors lowered slowly.
Heart pounding, Lara scanned the pegboard hung with keys. A row of six blue school vans occupied the numbered spaces closest to the doors. The other cars—a fleet of gray Ford Taurus sedans—were parked in the row behind and on the lower level.
“Give me the keys to a van,” Justin said.
“What? No.” Didn’t he see the Rockhaven logo painted on the sides? “They’re too identifiable. We’ll take a Taurus.”
“You can drive whatever you want. But give me the keys.”
She was still reeling from the effects of his touch.
Automatically, she obeyed his tone of command.
He glanced from the numbered key in his hand to the row of painted parking spaces. “Thanks.”
She watched, mystified, as he climbed into the number three van. The engine roared to life. The van backed across the cement lane and stopped. Justin got out, slamming the driver’s side door, and stooped by the front tire. His arm jerked. She heard a pop, a hiss, before he straightened, still holding his dive knife.
“Get us a car,” he said.
Her brain sparked back to life. “What are you doing?”
He moved to the next tire. “Making sure nobody comes after us.”
Slash. Pop. Hiss.
She winced. “But—”
“Park by the doors. I need to block the other lane.”
She ran for a car at the end of a row, close to the ramp that led to the lower level. Through the windshield, she watched Justin make quick work of the remaining tires before raising the van’s hood. Metal banged metal.
Oh, skies.
Her mouth dried. Simon would be furious.
She rolled down her window. “You didn’t say anything about destroying school property.”
“You got a better idea?”
“No, but—”
He raised his head and looked at her, his face hard.
Determined. Dangerous. “If I block the exit with a couple of these vans, I won’t have to touch the other vehicles. Now move the car.”
She released the brake, feeling vaguely betrayed, as if she’d befriended a stray that turned into a tiger. She maneuvered her car into the narrow space by the garage doors. In her rearview mirror, she saw Justin help himself to another key from the pegboard.
He drove the second van into place behind her, across the lane. Slash, slash on the tires. Bang, bang under the hood.
She gritted her teeth.
The passenger door opened and he slid in beside her, hot and male and overwhelming. The heth gleamed in the hollow of his throat. “Let’s roll.”
Setting her jaw, she shifted gear.
*
Pain sank its talons into his skull. His eyeballs ached.
His throat throbbed.
Justin glanced at Lara’s rigid profile. She was pissed, but she hadn’t panicked on him. Or bailed.
The red haze over his vision faded. He was pushing her, he knew. Playing the connection that sparked between them.
Trusting her innate decency and compassion to overcome her loyalty to Axton.
She deserved better than that arrogant, ruthless prick and his stone-faced henchman.
Too bad he didn’t have anything better to offer.
Justin released his breath. At least they were free. He was free. For now.
The hot kernel of anger inside him eased.
She drove without headlights, knuckles white on the wheel, leaning forward to peer at the dark, winding road.
He could feel the moisture in the air, the rising wind of a gathering storm.
Something flickered through the trees. A fence. The black gleam of metal pickets following the dip of the ground, the curve of the road. Ahead of them, a small, square gatehouse rose out of the gloom.
Lara braked before they reached the metal barrier.
Justin tensed. “Guards?”
She shook her head, the shadows sliding over her face.
“Not at night. The exit gate is automatic.”
“Then why are we stopping?”
She turned to him, eyes wide in the dark. “Are you sure you want to go through with this? Once we’re outside the gates, I can’t guarantee your safety.”
She was worried about him, which was both convenient and oddly unsettling. Or maybe she was still fretting over Axton’s probable reaction to his escape. Not to mention eight slashed tires and two busted timing belts. “I like my chances out there better than in here.”
“You don’t even know where you’re going.”
The bead at his throat pulsed in time with his heart.
They’d been down this road before. “You’re wasting your breath.” And my time.
She blinked once. “Probably,” she agreed coolly.
What did that mean?
“Rockhaven is warded,” she continued. “The wards will not stop us. But Zayin’s binding might. Crossing the barrier will probably trigger the heth.”
Forgotten Sea Page 8