by Adrian, Lara
Eyes she was certain would’ve haunted her forever if she wasn’t staring into them right now.
She inhaled a stunned breath. “It’s him.”
At her almost soundless murmur, Tamisia glanced over. “Him, who?”
“Him,” she whispered, backing away from the group and tugging Sia with her. “The Breed warrior in the forest wasteland.”
“You mean, the one you dreamt about?”
Phaedra nodded, swallowing in disbelief. “I thought he was just part of the nightmare. I thought he was killed with the others in the dream, but Sia, it’s him. He’s real.”
Faith, how could it be possible that he was standing in front of her now? How was any of this possible?
“You.”
All the fine hairs at the back of Phaedra’s neck rose at the guttural scrape of his voice. When she looked his way, she drew in a sharp breath at the fury she saw in his narrowed eyes. The lavender burned away in an instant, changing to a fiery amber that seared her from across the room.
All the hard angles and shadowed hollows of his face sharpened as he glowered at her. Behind the harsh line of his sneer, the points of his fangs erupted to fill his mouth.
He let out a dark, animal roar and surged forward, knocking Tegan out of the way as he charged for Phaedra. As he lunged, she leaped back, raising her hands in reflex. But she didn’t need to summon her light to protect herself.
Snarling and gnashing his teeth, Micah was stopped only inches from her, halted by no less than three large Breed males and one former Atlantean soldier.
Even in his weakened state, it took all four of them to hold him back as he fumed and fought to get at her, his molten eyes trained on Phaedra in murderous rage.
“You,” he seethed. “You were there.”
Heart slamming against her rib cage, she shook her head. “No. That’s impossible. It . . . you . . . none of this can be real.”
“I saw you.” The accusation boiled through his teeth and fangs as he bucked against the hands that restrained him from killing her where she stood. “I saw your glowing hands right before the explosion lit up the sky.”
Tegan’s green gaze sliced her way. “What’s he talking about?”
“It . . . it was a dream.” Phaedra shook her head again, feeling the weight of every pair of eyes locked on her now. “About a week ago, I had an awful nightmare—”
“She was there,” Micah snarled, fire filling his irises. “The night my team was incinerated. I saw her. I spoke to her. Fucking Atlanteans. I should’ve taken you out when I had the chance.”
He made another grab for her, practically dragging the other males with him. The burst of energy cost him, though.
His breath rolled heavily through his parted lips, sweat beading on his face and powerful chest. His chin sagged, all of his powerful muscles trembling with strain. One of his knees started to give out, but several pairs of arms kept him upright.
When Micah’s body slumped into semiconsciousness, Tegan cursed. “Let’s get him back down to the infirmary and get him fed while he can still drink on his own.”
Lazaro Archer nodded. “I’ll have a blood Host brought in at once.”
“As for you,” Tegan said, swiveling at hard look at Phaedra, “it sounds like you have some explaining to do.”
“It was only a dream.” She inclined her head. “I promise you, I have nothing to hide.”
“You’d better hope not.”
“She’s telling the truth,” Sia said, stepping forward with all the authority of her former status as an Atlantean council elder. “I was with Phaedra when she woke from her dream. I’ve never seen my friend so upset or distressed. In fact, she still hasn’t fully recovered. That’s why she’s going away to the colony to rest for a little while.”
“Not anymore, she’s not.” Tegan’s clipped reply was an unmistakable command. With his arms under Micah to help keep the big warrior on his feet, he sent a glower at Phaedra. “You don’t leave this property unless and until I say so.”
CHAPTER 5
Micah took one last, long pull from the blood Host’s wrist before sweeping his tongue over the punctures to close and heal the human’s skin.
Shuddering as the thin red cells coursed down his throat, he sagged back onto his infirmary bed and waited for the blood to start doing its work on his depleted body. His father and Lazaro Archer had caught him up to speed on how Tegan had found him in a nomad’s tent on the Kazakhstan wilderness after nights of searching, and the coma that had slowed his metabolism just enough for him to cling to life until Lazaro had arranged for his medevac to Rome.
His outburst in the mansion’s foyer a short while ago had cost him precious strength, but already the blood he’d taken from his Host was knitting him back together.
He could have drunk more. Christ, he needed the nourishment and then some. But if he’d been allowed to take his fill right now, he might’ve drained the pleasant, yet forgettable, woman Lazaro had brought in from the city to feed him.
Eyes closed, he listened over the drum of his strengthening heart and bloodstream as the human accepted her payment, then slipped back into her coat and was escorted out of the room. Her footsteps faded up the corridor outside, accompanied by the heavier tread of the warrior who’d been tasked with returning her to the city.
“You scared the poor female half to death.”
Micah lifted his eyelids and slid his gaze toward his father, who stood frowning at him beside the narrow cot. Groaning, he let out a slow breath, still waiting for his body to fully recalibrate. “I was as gentle with her wrist as I could manage.”
Tegan shook his head. “Not the blood Host. Phaedra.”
“The Atlantean?” Micah scoffed, recalling her startlement in the foyer. Unfortunately, he also recalled how soft and feminine she looked in her simple summer dress and delicate flats. “She ought to be scared. She’s got to answer for the blood of five good men on her hands.”
“We don’t know that yet.”
“Like hell we don’t. She was there that night. It’s not like I’d forget that face.” Fuck, not even if he wanted to. Even before he saw her today, those wide, long-lashed golden eyes had been branded into his memory for good.
Not even the coma that had claimed him for the past week had been dark enough or deep enough to erase the vision of her delicate oval face, thick waves of glorious chestnut-brown hair, and ethereal, almost regal, beauty.
Sure, she was pretty, but that only made her more dangerous.
He pushed himself up to a sitting position, letting out a low curse as every cell and fiber in his body complained in protest. “I’m telling you, I saw her. I was close enough to touch her.”
“I know what you said, son. And she says she wasn’t there.”
“Not physically, anyway,” added Lazaro Archer.
The leader of the Rome command center and Tegan had waited alone with Micah as he fed. The pair of Order elders were still grim-faced and sober, but neither one seemed to share his mistrust of the female. Were the two seasoned warriors actually going to give the immortal’s denial the benefit of the doubt?
Micah scowled. “I don’t care if she was there in the flesh or projecting herself into those woods using some kind of Atlantean magic. She was the only one there besides me and my team in the instant before the whole damn sky lit up. That demands an explanation. Hell, it demands a full interrogation.”
“Agreed,” his father acknowledged gravely. “Now that you’re back among the living, there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. Maybe we should start with the reason you and your team went AWOL after the mission in Budapest?”
Micah felt his jaw tense, a tendon jerking in his cheek. He glanced away from the shrewd, gem-green hold of his father’s stare.
“That’s what it was, am I right? Not missing in action, as we’d all been left to assume. You were absent without leave.” When Micah glanced up, Tegan blew out a harsh breath. “Christ. It’s true. Wher
e did you go? What happened out there that night?”
“I fucked up.”
As far as explanations went, it wasn’t much, but it summed up the situation succinctly enough. Still, he knew he owed his father—and the Order—more than that.
Exhaling, he recounted his team’s last movements. “We were on a covert assignment. For several weeks, we’d been surveilling the head of an emerging terror group that was stirring up trouble in the region. Real asshole. Seemed to get off on spilling as much innocent blood as he could.”
“Igor Nagy.” His father made the name sound like a curse. With good reason. It was rare that members of the Breed bothered with mass violence on their human neighbors, but every once in a while a sadistic piece of shit like Nagy decided to throw a grenade into the tentative, all too fragile, peace between man and Breed.
Under normal circumstances, it would be up to the Joint Urban Security Taskforce Initiative Squads to round up Nagy and his followers, but the wheels of JUSTIS moved too slowly for the Order’s liking, and Nagy was proving to be more than a nuisance. Elusive, surprisingly well-funded, and apparently insatiable in his need for violence, the bastard had to go.
“He’d been next to impossible to track down, but our intel placed his hideout somewhere in the Siberian interior. We got the bastard, along with about a dozen of his soldiers.”
“We’re aware of the black ops mission to eliminate Nagy, and your team’s success,” Tegan said. “That’s why you were chosen to lead the operation.”
The flat statement of fact might have passed as praise from anyone else. Maybe it was. Either way, it should have felt welcome, coming from a warrior of his father’s renown. Instead, it only made Micah’s guilt weigh even heavier on his conscience. The men he’d served with, fought beside as brothers, deserved all the praise. Not him.
Not after he’d led some of the Order’s finest warriors straight to their deaths in the middle of a godforsaken stretch of wasteland.
And for what?
A sense of déjà vu. A curious and compelling vision he’d been unable to shake or explain. Not to his team, and sure as hell not to his scowling father or the equally disapproving chief of the Rome command center.
“What I want to know is what happened after you and your men cleared that bunker,” his father pressed. “Why didn’t your unit report back to base per your orders from Commander Reichen?”
Micah cleared his throat. “Because I issued different orders to my men . . . sir.”
The admission of insubordination was met with silence from the Order elders. They exchanged a grave look before Tegan’s eyes cut back to him. “I hope you’ve got a damn good reason. Especially when you’re the only one left standing. Barely, at that.”
He had never lied to his parents, not once.
He’d never lied to the Order’s leadership, either. As much as he might want to deny the stupid mistake that cost so heavily, he wasn’t about to offer anything other than the truth now. If it meant the end of his time as a warrior, so be it. God knew, he deserved that and more.
“I don’t have a good reason for taking my team deeper into the interior that night. All I had was . . . a sense that I had to go in. I felt as if . . . as if something was pulling me forward, deeper into the taiga. The farther we went, the more barren the terrain became. The foliage disappeared. The trees were black, the ground like loose rubble under our boots.”
“The Deadlands,” his father confirmed, his voice low. “That might explain why your communication links abruptly went silent. About ten years ago, some kind of incident decimated a large swath of land in that region.”
“Hundreds of thousands of acres,” Lazaro interjected. “As I recall, there was a lot of finger-pointing, but no one has ever accepted responsibility or offered a full explanation for what happened. All we know for certain is that someone either fumbled or deliberately deployed a massive chemical weapon in the region.”
“Possibly,” Tegan said, his expression skeptical. He swung that dubious look back to his son. “What happened when you reached the Deadlands?”
“I led the team deeper into the black trees. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew something waited for me. Then, I saw the white doe.”
He stopped there, trying to decide how best to explain the most insane part of the story. Not that he should worry about that. The two commanders were already looking at him as if he’d lost his mind.
Tegan shook his head. “What white doe?”
“The one I’d been dreaming about for more than a week. Every time I slept, the same thing happened. The doe appeared and led me into a barren stretch of woods. It always ran ahead, just long enough for me to reach it, as if it wanted me to follow.”
A dark look stormed in his father’s eyes. “Are you telling me this dream is the reason you ignored mission procedure and a direct order from your commander to go trekking off on your own?”
Fuck. Although he spoke evenly, the incredulity and anger in that restrained tone were obvious. Micah understood it, but he was also fully cognizant of the fact that the two of them were cut from the same cloth. If the situation had been reversed and Tegan had felt the same inexplicable impulse to see what lurked in that forest wasteland, he wouldn’t have waited around for anyone’s blessing or permission, either.
Not that it excused Micah’s actions. Especially when those actions had come at such a steep cost to his friends and comrades.
“This time, the doe wasn’t a dream. It was real. And it wasn’t alone. That Atlantean female upstairs in the mansion was in the charred forest along with it. She ran as soon as she saw me. At first, I was concerned about her being in that place alone. But once I caught up to her and saw her palms glowing with Atlantean fire . . . by then, it was too late. The forest erupted. The light was searing. I heard my teammates scream in agony in the distance behind me as the sky lit up with the heat of a hundred suns. Then everything went black.”
His father said nothing, staring at him in a silence that seemed to roil with unspoken reactions. Shock. Confusion. Perhaps even a small measure of relief that his only son had been spared.
Disappointment in him as a fellow warrior, no doubt.
Micah had made a point all his life to excel in whatever he undertook. He didn’t make mistakes. He was never ruled by impulse or emotion, even to the point of machine-like coldness, according to the reputation he’d deservedly earned.
His instincts as a warrior had been flawless—until now.
“My God,” Lazaro murmured in the quiet that hung in the room now. “What you’re describing is nothing short of hell.”
Micah couldn’t deny that. Yet what he’d endured paled next to the fate of his team.
“I came to sometime later. My skin was blistered, peeling away in sheets with every movement. My throat felt scorched with fire. I could barely see through my burned eyes. All I knew was I needed to find my men,” he said, pushing on with the rest of his report. “I dragged myself back to where they’d been before the blast, but I didn’t see them anywhere. There was only ash and debris under me. It took a minute for the truth to settle in. My unit was gone. Somehow, I’d survived the worst of it, but what was left of my five teammates was scattered over the forest floor beneath me.”
His father’s measured silence didn’t break as he listened. His stern face remained unreadable, utterly still except for the tendon that had begun to pulse along his jaw. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded wooden. “Do you have any idea how lucky you were?”
That toneless question held more emotion than the formidable warrior would ever express in words. Micah knew that. His father was Gen One, among the first generation of the Breed. Hardly the touchy-feely type, even if he wasn’t centuries old and a full half blood-drinking, savage otherworlder.
Micah’s mother was the only one Tegan permitted past his walls. There had been a time when Micah was a boy that he’d known some of that unguarded caring, too, but tho
se years were long gone. The door seemed closed to him completely the day he’d announced his intention to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a warrior.
“I don’t know why I didn’t die along with my team,” he replied, shaking his head at the idea.
Why he’d been spared made no sense to him. Not only because he hadn’t deserved to live when he’d been the one who led his men into that hellish attack, but because the intensity of the blast had been strong enough to incinerate five strong Breed males standing only a few hundred yards away from him.
Yet he’d survived.
He needed to know why.
And now that he was feeling his body coming back online thanks to the blood he’d consumed, he wasn’t about to lie around in an infirmary for another minute. He needed to use every ounce of life in him to avenge his team and destroy whatever—or whoever—was responsible for the attack.
Pivoting on the mattress, he swung his bare feet to the cold tile floor. He stood up, prepared to take the first step toward the open door of the room.
“Where do you think you’re going, son?”
“Back upstairs to get some answers out of the Atlantean woman.”
His father gave a tight shake of his head. “I’ll handle that. We’re not finished here yet.”
“As for Phaedra,” Lazaro interjected, “I can personally vouch for her character. She’s been a member of this community for decades and she’s a close friend of Tamisia’s.”
Micah grunted. “There’s another Atlantean female with blood on her hands.”
“Sia’s paid for her mistakes,” Tegan said. “Since her exile from the colony several months ago, she’s proven herself an ally of the Order time and again.”
“Phaedra’s never given any reason to doubt her,” Lazaro added. “For her to have anything to do with the destruction you witnessed with your team, she’d have to be some kind of monster. For crissake, she runs a women’s shelter out of her home in the city. Phaedra’s a good, kind-hearted woman.”