“Of course,” he agreed smoothly. “Unless we do battle and then, of course, I’m in charge.”
She looked up, straightening with both hands on her hips and a defiant glare. “Why’s that? Because a set of balls somehow imbues you with superior skills?”
“No,” he said patiently enough, but she could see the anger tensing his shoulders. Those beautiful broad shoulders, smooth golden skin, thick muscles . . .
Damn it, Casey! Stop that! She forced herself to maintain eye contact, refusing to look away. She was stronger than that.
“If we go into a fight, you’ll listen to me because I’ve won more battles than you’ve read about in all of your studies combined. Because I’ve faced my enemies close enough to see the terror in their eyes when my sword took their lives.”
In three long strides, he was right in front of her, forcing her to meet his gaze. And he was more than angry, she saw. He was furious.
“Because I’m the best chance you have of getting out of this alive, and I want you alive, Cassandra.”
She stared up at him, breathing hard, her heart pounding in her chest. He was a formidable sight when he was angry. Even knowing he’d never hurt her, she could easily understand the terror his enemies must have felt, confronting the cold determination in his dark eyes.
“You’re right,” she said finally. “I don’t have a lot of experience fighting, and sure as hell not killing. But I’m not someone who needs protecting, either. You saw me the other night. If it comes down to it, I’ll fight and I’ll win.”
He opened his mouth to protest, but she stopped him.
“Having said that,” she continued. “I’ll admit that when the shit hits the fan, you’re probably better at thinking on your feet than I am.”
He scowled at her. “You people have the strangest way of saying things. Lucky for you I’m brilliant as well as handsome. And you’re correct. When things get shitty, I’ll be the last one standing.”
Cassandra choked on a laugh, not sure if he’d meant to amuse her or not. His quick grin told her it was intentional, but he was as accomplished at covering up his true feelings as she was.
“Are we good?” she asked.
“Oh, Cassandra darling, we’re so far above good that we’re walking on clouds.”
And with that pronouncement, he strolled over to the closet, dropped both towels to the floor, and stood there, naked, staring at his wardrobe long enough that she knew he was only doing it to tease her. He didn’t have that many fucking clothes to choose from! He finally yanked his jeans from the shelf and she nearly choked on her tongue when he bent over to pull them on. Bastard.
She turned away, determined to get back in control, forcing her thoughts to where they were going and what needed to be done.
“So we’re going back to that house?” he asked, his voice muffled by the T-shirt he was pulling over his head, his jeans still unzipped and clinging loosely to his narrow hips.
She dropped the file she was holding, raising one hand to her forehead in a frustrated gesture. “I’m sure they’ve cleared out by now, but there might be something I can use.” She let out a long breath, blowing aside a few pieces of hair that had escaped the loose braid which was the best she could manage with her injured arm. “After that, we’re moving to a safe house nearby. I can control security better there, both physical and Internet. Plus it’s a four-bedroom house, so there’ll be more room.”
He was suddenly there, his heat surrounding her, making her think of . . . things. He put a finger under her chin, forcing her to look up at him. “We don’t need room, do we, Cassandra?”
A blush heated her cheeks when she answered him. “It has a pool. And a hot tub. You’ll like it.”
“Excellent.” He met her gaze, holding it intentionally as he adjusted himself and zipped up his pants.
She rolled her eyes. He was such a guy. Nice to know the species hadn’t changed much in thousands of years. “We’ll need to stop at the store,” she said, turning back to her packing. “We’ll get food. And anything else you need.”
“Shopping?” he asked enthusiastically. “Great! I’ll make a list.”
Cassandra hated shopping. Just her luck she’d get the one ancient warrior god who liked it.
“NO, YOU CAN NOT drive,” she insisted an hour later as they loaded up the back of her Yukon. “I told you”—a hundred times—“that you need a license. But more to the point, you don’t know how to do it.”
“So teach me. I’m a fast learner.”
“Not now, okay?” she said in frustration, struggling to shove her heavy duffel into the cargo compartment. “I know you’re a god and all that, but in this universe, you’re just another ridiculously handsome man who knows how to shoot a gun. And that won’t help when you’re taking your test, okay?”
“So you think I’m handsome.” He lifted the duffel with irritating ease, sliding it into the space where she normally stowed it.
Naturally, he’d seize on that. It was true, but he hardly needed her to tell him. Especially not after she’d spent most of the night and a good part of the morning worshipping his body.
“And my knowledge of weapons is not limited to guns, obviously. The sword goes without saying, and knives are as natural to me as breathing. But battle-axes were always my personal favorite. I was never fond of the flail, though. All that flailing around.”
Casey sighed while he chuckled at his own joke, lame as it was. Hell, most people probably didn’t even know what a flail was anymore—basically a spiked ball on a chain used during ye olde Medieval times. They were depicted in movies occasionally, but usually far larger than they’d ever been in real life. She could understand why Damian hadn’t liked it. As brutal a weapon as it had been, it was probably too lightweight for him to use effectively. The battle-axe, on the other hand . . . yeah, she could picture that quite easily. And a nice picture it was, too.
“Down!”
She reacted instantly to Damian’s shouted warning, dropping to the ground and rolling into the cover of a nearby vehicle, pulling her weapon and scanning the parking lot all at once. Thank God she’d paid attention to the instinct that had her wearing the Glock on her belt this morning. Her brain belatedly identified the sound of a weapon firing, even as she catalogued the information. Two shots, long-distance rifle. She scanned the parking lot and spotted Damian on the ground a few feet away, facing her, crouched between two trucks. She raised a hand to indicate she was all right. More than a little relief showed in his dark eyes, before he nodded to say he was also okay.
Casey smiled tightly, then quietly said, “rifle,” figuring he’d understand. He was already familiar with modern weapons, though he’d only used a relative few. He proved this again when he nodded his agreement and pointed at an office building across the parking lot. If the shot had come from there, the shooter had to be using a rifle.
She didn’t question Damian’s judgment regarding the sniper’s site, just scooted up and maneuvered over to look. Pain shot through her wounded arm, a reminder that she’d already been shot once this week, which was more than enough. She peered around the back end of the sedan she’d been hiding behind. The office building was maybe eight stories high, with row after row of tinted windows reflecting the morning sunlight.
It was modern enough that she doubted those windows opened. Most of the newer buildings were climate-controlled, and builders didn’t want any stray currents of air drifting in to mess up the thermostat. That meant the shooter had either been on the roof, or had broken out a window, but she wasn’t sure it made a difference. What mattered at this point was whether their assailant had accepted his failure and made an escape, or if he was sitting up there somewhere waiting for them to stick their heads out.
With nothing else to do—since she wasn’t going to offer herself as a test targe
t—she searched the blank windows and finally found one on the seventh floor that was suspiciously dark compared to all of the others, which were still reflecting the sun with a blinding glare. She saw movement in the dark hole and dragged her backpack over from where it was still sitting on the ground. Rummaging around inside, she pulled out a pair of powerful binoculars and scanned the building. It took her a minute to locate the broken window through the binocular’s lenses, but she studied it until her eyes watered and she was satisfied there was no longer anyone there.
“He’s gone,” she told Damian, not bothering to speak quietly. He didn’t take her word for it, but held out a hand in a silent request for the binoculars. Or maybe it was a demand, but Casey was giving him the benefit of the doubt and calling it a request. She shrugged and tossed them over. It was no skin off her nose if he wanted to double-check. Double-checking kept people alive sometimes.
“You’re right,” Damian said and straightened out of hiding, going directly to the RV which was parked next to her Yukon. He reached out and rubbed his fingers over two entry holes. “You’re right about this, too,” he continued, shoving his fingers in deeply enough to extract first one slug and then another. “Rifle, .300 caliber rounds.”
“How the hell do you know that?” she demanded, taking one of the slugs from him. It was definitely a .300 Winchester mag round, but. . . . “I mean, I get that you know weapons, but ammunition? They didn’t have guns back in your day, and we haven’t had time to get to a range yet. So where’d you come up with this knowledge?”
“The Internet. I’ve been studying. If I’m to live my life in this reality, I need to have information regarding warfare in this time.”
“When did you do all of this?”
He shrugged. “When you were gone the first day, and that night, when I couldn’t sleep. Over the last few centuries, I’ve spent too many nights silent and alone. Now that I have a choice, I feel as if I’m wasting my time sleeping, when I could be doing.” He flashed her a quick grin. “When I’m not doing you, that is.”
“Nice,” she said, flipping him off. “Which one of us do you think they were trying to kill?”
“I’m an unknown in this world, while you managed to locate and steal a precious artifact from them. You represent the greater threat.”
“But I’ve never had anyone come after me like this. I mean, sure, I’ve been in a few firefights, like what happened the other night. But I’ve never had anyone try to kill me after the fact. Especially since they got the damn thing back. Why come after me now?”
“You fear they have plans to use the Talisman, and so are still pursuing the device. Perhaps they fear your pursuit will disrupt whatever those plans are.”
“They don’t need to kill me for that. They could simply secure the artifact somewhere I can’t get to it. Take it out of the country, maybe overseas. Besides, it’s not like I have a reputation or anything. I’m not exactly Lara Croft.”
He considered her words for a moment, then said, “I don’t know who that is. But there are many ways you could destroy their schemes without ever recovering the Talisman itself.”
Casey didn’t waste time trying to bring him up to date on popular culture. Especially since she was convinced it wasn’t her they’d been after in the first place. It didn’t take a forensic genius to look at those bullet holes and know the sniper had been gunning for Damian. He was several inches taller than she was, and he’d been walking on the side the shooter had seemed to be aiming at. It was sheer luck that the guy wasn’t a better marksman, but it made more sense to think he’d missed by a few inches, rather than a few feet.
“Here’s an idea . . . maybe they were after you,” she said, meeting his obsidian gaze. “Tell me something. Would Nick benefit somehow from getting all of you guys back? I mean, apart from the obvious, the bonds of friendship and so on. But is there more? Do the four of you constitute a power matrix of some kind?”
Damian’s usually expressive face shut down at her question, his mouth tightening into a narrow line as if to keep any stray words from escaping. “That’s a question of magic. You should ask Nico about it,” he said finally and then turned back to study the bullet holes in the unlucky RV.
So that’s the way it was, she thought to herself. She’d ask Nick all right, but only for the details, because Damian’s reaction had already told her she was right. She knew it was possible. She’d read about such things, but never encountered one. Nick might have used his magic to create a matrix, an amplifier of sorts that would make him infinitely stronger. And if he was already strong to begin with? Well, shit.
The downside was that, just as it enhanced his power, it was also bound into the four warriors. And when Sotiris had ripped them away. . . . Was that the real reason Nick had been hiding who he was for all these years? She couldn’t blame him for lying about it. It must feel as if pieces of his soul had been ripped away. Not to mention, the shocking loss of power for a man accustomed to being a virtual god.
“We must return to Nicodemus,” Damian said suddenly. “When Sotiris discovers his sniper has failed, he may target Nico instead.”
Casey frowned. “I don’t think so. He could have gone after Nick any time in the last two decades, when he first started working with the FBI to recover stuff like the Talisman. Why change that strategy now?”
“For the same reason he came after you today. Because one of you has the potential to disrupt his plans. When are we meeting Nico?”
“I’m not sure. He’s probably still in Kansas.”
“Cassandra,” Damian said, giving her an almost pitying look. “He’s here already. Though perhaps he hasn’t called you yet,” he added.
“How do you know that?” she demanded, frustrated beyond tolerance at being caught in a lie.
He grinned. “I didn’t until you just told me. We should go to him now. He’ll need our help.”
She stared at him, furious with him for tricking her, furious with herself for falling for it. “Later,” she conceded grudgingly. “Besides, Nick has plenty of protections in place; he doesn’t need our help. We can brief him tonight, after we get to the safe house. Our best bet is to focus on the Talisman. It’s at the center of all of this.”
She could see Damian’s jaw working as he fought the urge to argue with her. There was no argument he could make that would change her mind, but she could understand his desire to see Nick sooner, rather than later. After all, it had been centuries, and their parting hadn’t exactly been planned.
Still, the next few hours would be a lot more pleasant if she wasn’t dragging a sulking Damian along behind her. She stepped closer and put a hand on his arm. “The best way to protect him, to protect ourselves, is to find out who’s behind the attack.”
He nodded stiffly. “The decision is yours.”
It was probably the best she was going to get, so she simply squeezed his arm and moved on. “All right. First order of business is to find out as much as we can about the shooter.”
“How? He’s long gone.”
“Yes, but nothing happens in a vacuum anymore. Especially not in the age of terrorism in which we live. Our shooter had to get in and out of that building, and there’s bound to be security. I’m betting they have cameras on every door, every elevator. Maybe even the parking lot.”
“And they’ll share that with you?”
Okay, the way he’d said that was almost insulting. She bared her teeth at him in what passed for a smile. “Watch and learn, big guy. Come on. There’s no point in standing around here with targets on our backs. And we definitely don’t want to be here when the guy who owns this RV discovers the bullet holes in his vehicle.”
DAMIAN FROWNED in confusion when Cassandra drove them not to the shooter’s building, and not even to the safe house she’d spoken of, but to a modest inn called a motel. It was in reasona
bly good repair, albeit painted a garish turquoise with pink trim. But that aside, he didn’t understand her purpose in coming here.
“What are we doing?” he asked, when she parked in front of the glass-fronted motel office.
“You’ll see.”
And that was all she said, which was infuriating as hell. He understood the need for a chain of command. He’d even gone along with her decision to wait until later before briefing Nico. It was true what she said about his brother being able to protect himself, but Damian’s purpose in life had been to watch Nico’s back, and in his heart, he knew there was no more important task. But then, there were things he hadn’t confided to her about himself and Nico. He liked Cassandra and admired her courage, but some things were not his to share. Or, not only his.
“I’m going to get a room,” she said brusquely, and was out of the vehicle and heading for the office almost before she’d said the last word.
Damian sighed deeply. He could have gone to the office with her. He probably would have, if she’d given him time. But he doubted there was any danger, and Cassandra was more than capable of taking care of herself. Of course, there was her shoulder to consider. She wasn’t exactly at full strength. Cursing under his breath, he shoved open the door and went after her, covering the short distance in a few quick strides. She glanced back in surprise when he walked into the office, but then smiled. A genuine smile this time, rather than the grimace of earlier.
“Hey, babe,” she said casually, as if they were a couple on holiday.
Feeling reckless, Damian concealed a smile of his own and slipped up behind her, circling her slender waist with one arm and fitting his body against hers. “They got a room?” he asked, taking on the vernacular of some of the characters he’d watched on TV while waiting for her.
The Stone Warriors: Damian Page 13