“I did not have to delve to find them!” Dante growled. “They were open.”
“My thoughts were only open because you were not here and because I had only just emerged from stasis and had not had time to gather myself! The overlords wakened me. The humans were in the map room,” Galen said flatly. “They have found Alexander’s library.”
Dante felt a sense of cold fear wash over him. He’d removed Claire from danger, he thought, and taken her to her sister … so that her sister could sign a death warrant for both?
“Exactly.” Galen thought it over and shrugged. “Actually, they told me to take Claire. They did not say anything about the other.”
“You were ordered to seize her?” Dante demanded sharply.
Galen wrestled with his conscience. “I seized her. I was ordered to destroy her. I am not in the habit of following their orders blindly, however, and the fact that they singled her out when the room was filled with so many humans made me immediately suspect that their motives had nothing to do with protecting the knowledge.”
Fury and fear in equal measure flooded Dante. “I will not allow that,” he responded, pealing Claire lose and carefully setting her behind him.
“It is not me you need concern yourself over …,” Galen began.
“I am not concerned. I will kill you,” Dante said through clenched teeth.
Galen narrowed his eyes. “You might waste your time trying … or you could take the woman to a place where she will be safe. If you care for her, I would think that would be the highest priority.”
Dante felt like throttling the bastard. As if his determination to protect Claire from him was pure ego!
Galen made a sound of disgust. “She has scrambled your brains! You are looking for trouble you do not need and you are far too touchy! I was ordered to destroy her! They will expect me to report! Beam me to the surface and then take her and go!”
* * * *
Claire glanced from one angel to the other and back again, trying to figure out what they were arguing about.
She sure hoped it didn’t have anything to do with the fact that she’d been dusting Galen’s penis off when he’d woken.
She had a bad feeling it might, though.
Not that it was any of Dante’s damned business anyway! He might think he owned her because he’d so manfully and skillfully seduced her, but he didn’t! It wasn’t that she was pissed off with him for doing it—even though she mostly hadn’t said no because he hadn’t given her the chance to say no. But it didn’t follow that she considered he owned her because she’d had a really good time!
It didn’t mean that he owned her just because she thought she wouldn’t be totally against having sex with him again.
Because this was definitely one of those situations where there was never going to be any kind of real relationship.
With Nick she’d been doubtful simply because he’d seemed such a lady’s man. Dante, not being human or of Earth, was so far out of her league he might as well have been a heavenly creature!
And wasn’t it just par for the course that she’d met two absolutely gorgeous men, both of whom thrilled her as no one else ever had, and it wasn’t likely that she was going to have an actual relationship with either one of them?
That wouldn’t have mattered except they’d made her yearn for a relationship when she hadn’t particularly cared, before, whether she had one or not. She’d been perfectly content with the life she’d had before either of them had come into it, in a fair way to being completely convinced that the pursuit of her career would ensure a life of contentment.
She supposed, now, that that was because of the relationships she’d previously experienced.
She’d had several, fairly typical, crushes during her tweens and early teens. She hadn’t met anyone of any serious interest to her, though, until high school. Thankfully, that relationship had tanked before she’d gotten in too deep, because they hadn’t been dating more than a few months before she discovered he was cheating, lining up his next girlfriend before he dumped her.
The only gratifying part of that relationship was dumping him before he could dump her because bestowing her virginity on him had been seriously disappointing. And by dumping him first, she had the satisfaction of knowing she’d inconvenienced him if she hadn’t managed to inflict any other wounds.
Her college sweetheart had been only marginally better in some ways but at least David had been a good guy. They’d dated throughout most of their stint at college and parted as friends when they graduated and left, neither of them heartbroken because neither of them had been ‘in love’.
So it wasn’t that she’d had particularly bad experiences that she hadn’t been especially interested in marriage or at least a long term, serious relationship and the possibility of children. It was simply that she hadn’t met any man she didn’t think she could live without, no man who tempted her to throw away what she had—comfort, financial stability, and order—for ‘greener’ pastures.
Until she’d met Nick—and then Dante—both of whom were wildly exciting enough both in bed and outside it to tempt any red-blooded woman, she was sure, to do something totally stupid and gamble her contentment on the possibility of having far more.
The problem was—aside from the small matter that neither of them had actually asked her to merge with them—that as exciting as they both were to her, she couldn’t envision a future with either one.
Dante for very obvious reasons!
And Nick for … well for equally obvious reasons even though he wasn’t alien like Dante.
“Wait here,” Dante said, abruptly breaking in to Claire’s thoughts and making it fairly obvious that whatever the two angel-beings been arguing about didn’t involve her.
She gaped at his back as he and the other angel headed toward the door. “What?”
He not only didn’t respond, he didn’t even acknowledge that she’d spoken. Both angels strode from the room without a backward glance.
“Hey! Wait! What’s going on?” Claire demanded as the door opened and they stepped through it. It closed again before she’d even gotten the question out. She hesitated a moment and then followed.
Unfortunately, the door didn’t open automatically for her as it had for the two angels. She stopped.
“Open! Door open!” When the voice command didn’t work either, she began running her hands along both sides of the door panel in search of a manual release. Having checked the entire thing and still found no way to open the door, she pounded on the panel with one fist. “Open, damn it! Dante! You bastard! Unlock this door!”
Furious when she discovered nothing she could do would budge the door, she pounded on it a couple more times and then hurried to the viewing ports to look out. What she saw then so completely stunned her that she forgot her anger.
The earthquake and the tsunami that followed not only hadn’t destroyed the site, it had dragged much of the loose soil back into the sea when it had receded, revealing the remnants of a huge city.
As she stared, a beam spotlighted an area below and then the angel from the temple appeared. The people below noticed—immediately. After simply staring for a handful of seconds, they began grabbing up anything they could find and throwing it at him. He stared back at them, his hands on his hips, and finally simply took flight and left them.
Dante appeared behind her. Her first notion that he was there was when she felt him at her back. “I must take you ….”
She whirled on him angrily. “You bastard! You did that! Don’t you even bother trying to deny it!”
“I did not.”
“I don’t believe you! No way am I going to believe it was these ‘overlords’ you told me about! I haven’t seen them. Not once! But you always manage to be at every disaster!”
“I was not here. I only just arrived. Galen was here—in the library with you. I notice you have not accused him.”
“That other angel? You’re saying he did this?”
Claire blinked at him, trying to wrap her mind around what he seemed to be accusing her of. “You’re saying …. Exactly what are you saying?”
He frowned. “He was naked. The images in his mind were … sexual. I am saying that mayhap you have not accused him because you took him as a lover?”
Claire felt her jaw drop to half mast. “Well, that’s a nasty accusation! My god! He just came out of stasis! You think I was down there humping him while he was as stiff as stone? I thought he was a statue!”
Dante glared at her for a long moment and finally shook his head. “We cannot stay here. There is danger. I must take you to a place where you will be safe.”
He didn’t wait for her to agree. He took her by one arm and led her to the egg-chair while he told her he was taking her somewhere safe without explaining why she needed to go anywhere.
“You think there will be another earthquake?” she asked doubtfully when he’d shoved her into the thing and secured her safety harness.
He looked surprised but then shook his head. “There are always aftershocks,” he said pointedly and then strode to the control console.
“But … What about Maddie? What about my sister? What about the other people down there?”
Dante settled in the chair beside hers. “This will be rough. It is always choppy when we dive beneath the sea.”
Claire actually felt the dive. Since she’d previously not felt any sensation of movement at all in the ship, that circumstance was enough to frighten her to silence. A shiver skated through her when the interior dimmed dramatically and she saw water lapping at the portals and then the interior lights came on in response.
That didn’t especially comfort her.
She tried to convince herself that the ship was functioning just as it ought and she had nothing to worry about, but she couldn’t dismiss that sensation of plummeting toward the sea just before she’d seen the waves lapping at the portals.
The water world outside grew darker and darker. She kept expecting exterior lights to come on to illuminate the area around the ship, but they never did.
“I think the exterior lights must be out,” she finally commented a little uneasily.
Dante looked vaguely amused when he glanced at her. “The computer does not need lights to navigate.”
“Smartass!” Claire muttered, but the comment did make her feel a little less threatened, made her feel better—until she began to hear noises from outside the hull. “What’s that?”
“The ship is docking,” Dante responded, throwing off his safety harness and getting up.
Claire fought to free herself, mostly because she’d panicked the minute he started removing his harness, instantly certain that her worst fears had been realized. By the time what he’d said sank in she was already free. She tried to save face by pretending she hadn’t been scared shitless, but she was still shaky when Dante ushered her from the control room and she had the uncomfortable feeling he could tell.
They emerged from the ship into what looked mostly like a submarine—except for the size of it—or an underwater tank. The lights flickered on as they exited—and kept on flickering. The sound of dripping water prevailed and the air was thick with the combined scents of the sea and the mold/mildew of a dank basement. “What is this place?”
Her voice echoed hollowly, like she’d spoken into a tin can, and she shivered.
“One of the fortresses of the angels,” Dante responded in a clipped voice, taking her arm and ushering her from the tube-like room where the ship sat, through a door easily large enough to have accommodated the entire ship, and then across the wide expanse of what appeared to be a vast hanger that could’ve held a dozen ships, at a minimum, just like the one Dante had docked.
Eventually, they reached a second set of doors.
What lay beyond was a pleasant surprise after the dungeon-like atmosphere of the hanger. It was still rather austere and stuffy, as if it had been abandoned for many years, but the walls, floor and ceilings looked a little less institutional. There was something cushiony beneath the feet that absorbed the sound of their footsteps and prevented the eerie echo effect of the outer chamber—possibly carpet of some kind, although it didn’t actually look like carpet. The walls were painted a warm white and the ceiling a bright white that lightened the area without being the blinding, antiseptic white that seemed typical of institutions.
“You live here?” Claire said a little doubtfully as they marched along a very long corridor.
Dante seemed to hesitate. “Long ago.”
Claire frowned. It seemed to her that he’d suggested before that a lot of time had passed since he’d arrived on Earth, but he didn’t seem old to her at all. Was his race … immortal? Or almost so?
It didn’t seem all that farfetched given the advances in aging research that had been going on. Scientists seemed to think they were on the verge of being able to extend human lives a hundred years—maybe indefinitely.
He brought her eventually to what appeared to be an apartment. “This is my quarters. Hopefully you will be reasonably comfortable here until … until we can find a solution to the problem.”
Claire had been looking the area over with interest until that comment. “What problem?”
Dante stared at her a moment and then approached her, catching her upper arms in a firm grip. “The gods, Claire. They want you dead. Weren’t you listening? You’re in danger.”
Claire gaped at him, her mind racing with so many thoughts she could barely grasp any of them. “That’s what that was about? The earthquake? Is that what you’re saying?”
His jaw tightened. “I don’t know.”
Claire blinked at him. “Well if you don’t know, what the hell are you talking about? Why did you bring me here? What were you thinking?”
He scanned her face. “I was thinking that I have lost everything that I ever held dear to me and that I could not bear to lose you, as well. I was not thinking beyond that or beyond the need to buy time to find a solution.”
That statement threw Claire so completely into chaos that she could only gape at him with her jaw at half mast, trying to come to terms with how she felt about what he’d just said.
Terrified if what he’d said about the gods was true—because if they wanted her dead she was pretty sure she was totally fucked.
Dante released his grip on her arms and cupped her face, tilting it so that she was forced to look at him. “I told you I would never allow harm to come to you. I won’t. Trust me. I will protect you, Claire.”
She didn’t have a lot of options, did she? It wasn’t as if she had men beating down the door to rescue her. It occurred to her, though, that she only had Dante’s word for it that she was in any danger at all.
Chapter Ten
Dante released her as if scalded. Anger flooded him, but even he knew it was pain based and had very little to do with a sense of insult that she’d questioned his integrity. “You think that I have … manufactured a threat? To what purpose?”
Claire felt her own fear based anger rise another notch. “You were reading my mind? God! I have no privacy at all around you!”
“It is the mating bond!” Dante ground out. “When I am holding you, I cannot tell whether you are speaking or thinking!”
“Mate …? What? Because we had sex … like once?” Claire exclaimed with a mixture of disbelief and anger. “Oh that is a lame excuse! And you’re a total dick to try to use that to try to manipulate me!”
Dante glared at her, speechless with anger for several moments, and finally stalked out, deciding it would be best to cool down before he tried again to explain himself.
He had known that she did not trust him and worse that she had no reason to trust and every reason to distrust.
It was still hard to swallow that bitter pill.
And there had been many in
his life that he had had to swallow, he thought bitterly.
Not for the first time, he wondered if all of it harked back to his own humanity. Would he feel none of the things he felt if he did not have human blood coursing through his veins? Or would he feel it all, but not so intensely that it had slipped his control once, long ago, and destroyed his life?
The pure bloods certainly seemed to think that all of his faults lay in the fact that his mother had been human. If not for that, he would be able to control his tendency toward violence. He would be less emotional, or at least less at the mercy of his emotions, more inclined toward calm reflection and logical resolution of life’s problems.
Mostly what it had boiled down to, however, was that he was considered ‘less’ because he was a half-breed. He had been provoked and denied far more often because he was looked down upon. His entire life had been more of a struggle because of his breeding. He had been warrior class because he was half-breed, had no alternative to violence as a way of life and that one thing had certainly done nothing to teach him the error of using violence to resolve issues.
His mate had taken another because he was a half-breed.
And he had become one of the fallen as a consequence.
Because he had not accepted a second when his mate had expressed a desire to form a triad—and had also refused to simply remove himself altogether from the mating and find another. He had forced a fight upon the male he saw as his rival—the pure blood—and Juna had died trying to prevent him from killing her lover.
He thought that had been the bitterest pill of all—that she had forfeited her life to save Raphael’s.
And if it was not punishment enough to lose his woman forever, he had been convicted of violence that had resulted in a death and become one of the fallen, exiled from his home world forever—to live among the species who were just as he was, prone to outbursts of violence at any time they were angered, inclined, always, to blame others for their failings, for their own mistakes.
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