The rain had already begun to fall before they’d gathered enough to keep even a small fire going throughout the night, only a few drops here and there, but big, fat cold drops that encouraged her to move faster without any prompting. Dropping her last load next to Gabriel, who was busy building a fire, with a sense of relief, she headed to the very back corner of the building and sat down with her back wedged in the V the back and side wall created. She was damp and shivering. The wind came with the rain and howled around the building like banshees, blasting chilling gusts into their sanctuary that whipped the flames of the fire as it caught and nearly put it out.
Gabriel looked around when he finally had the fire going satisfactorily. He spied her almost immediately even though Lexa knew she had to be almost completely cloaked in shadows. “You aren’t going to get warm back there,” he said coolly.
“I’m fine,” Lexa responded, struggling to keep her teeth from clacking together.
He studied her for a long moment and finally got up.
Her heart skipped several beats, but he headed toward the front of the building rather than in her direction, standing just beyond the curtain of water that had replaced the spattering drops that had chased her inside. Relieved, Lexa studied him for a while and finally transferred her attention to the rain.
It was unnerving to see so much water falling from the sky. It was even more unnerving that the rain was accompanied by almost blinding, flashing light and great explosions of sound that, at times, made vibrations travel through the seemingly solid rock beneath and behind her. She’d never seen the like of it—nothing so powerful and frightening, at any rate.
It rained in the desert occasionally. Quite often only enough rain fell to dampen the ground, though, and her clothes, making her thoroughly miserable since she rarely found much in the way of shelter in time to avoid getting drenched. She’d even seen the flashes of light and heard the booming that seemed to accompany it several times, but usually far into the distance. The only time she’d seen anything even close to the storm crashing around them now was when she’d been a small child and she’d had her mother to cuddle her and protect her then.
Of course her mother had been nearly as frightened by the storm as she was, but it had still been comforting to be sheltered in the warmth of her mother’s embrace, curled in a tight ball next to her younger sister and brothers.
She wondered if her little sister was still alive or if she’d died long ago—either in childbirth or at the hands of the man Ralph had traded her off to.
She wondered if there was any chance at all that her little brothers were still alive. Ralph had suggested he’d killed them, but now she wondered if that was what he’d really meant when he’d said he’d disposed of them or if he’d only said that to torment her.
She hadn’t allowed herself to think about them. Every time the memories tried to surface, she beat them down and forced them to the back of her mind again because allowing herself to think about them only made her cry. And that was not only a useless waste of energy, it was dangerous to allow herself to be distracted.
Abruptly, though, the things Gabriel had said seemed to assemble themselves into a much larger picture than she’d seen before.
The angel-demons—the udai as he called them—were gathering her people together to teach them the things they’d lost. If that truly was the case, then they would bring her little sister and brothers to the same place, wouldn’t they?
Assuming they were still alive.
A feeling she was almost totally unfamiliar with filled her, a sort of airy lightness that made her chest feel tight. It wasn’t the painful sadness she was used to. It was a tentative sort of happiness that made her feel like she had a smile trapped inside. It was like the feeling she got when she’d been without food and water for a long time and thought she’d spied a place where she might get them.
Hopefulness.
Those thoughts drew her from her internal focus to Gabriel. She saw that he’d found containers among the trash and had lined them up along the bottom of the window to catch the water falling out of the sky.
She’d tried that. She never caught much. The water always seemed to miss the cans and fall around them, but with so many she thought he might catch enough for a few days.
Not that that mattered to him, she supposed. He could fly. If he found himself without water, he could soar right up into the sky and fly around until he spotted a waterhole below him. Or he could fly back to the village of his people and get water.
She hadn’t considered that before, she realized. No wonder his people always looked like they had plenty! They must be able to find everything they needed so much easier because they could go up into the sky and see for long distances.
Not that that was easy. It looked effortless when she was on the ground looking up, but she knew from the times he’d taken her with him that it was hard work even though he seemed able to soar with the air beneath his wings a lot.
She saw when Gabriel reached the fire again that he was wet from the rain that had blown in. He crouched before the fire and lifted his wings, shaking them. Water drops flew in every direction. The fire leapt upward, sending sparks out in a shower and then settled again. He fed more of the pieces of dried plants to the fire and straightened, heading directly toward her.
Lexa’s discomfort, forgotten as she gathered the makings of a camp and her mind wandered to her family, reared its head again as he settled beside her.
Drawing his legs up, he settled his forearms on his knees. “About what I said earlier ….”
Lexa cringed inwardly. He’d told her before that he couldn’t take her as his woman. She’d forgotten that because he’d made her feel so wonderful.
Or maybe she hadn’t forgotten? Maybe she’d just done as she so often did with unpleasant things. Maybe she’d just pushed it to the back of her mind where it couldn’t hurt her? “I misunderstood, that’s all,” she said hurriedly.
He frowned, studying his hands. She had the feeling that he wanted to leave it at that. She certainly did. He grimaced. “Not entirely.” He shook his head.
Lexa felt her heart jerk almost painfully in her chest, but she was afraid to guess what he’d meant.
“In other circumstances …,” he began again and then paused once more as if searching for words.
She didn’t think he needed to explain it. As soon as he said that she realized that he was saying it wasn’t possible even if he wanted to and that was enough. She didn’t even know why it was that she’d leapt to such a stupid conclusion when he’d already said he didn’t want her as his woman.
Because she had wanted it, she realized. Somehow, she’d thought, hoped, that he’d been so pleased with the experience that he’d changed his mind.
How stupid was that?
“But it is what it is,” she agreed, hoping he’d just drop the subject, then added, partly from curiosity and partly to divert him from saying more, “Why did you bring me here?”
Gah-re-al flicked a look at her and frowned at his hands, feeling an uncomfortable sensation twist his belly. It only took a moment to identify it.
Guilt. He’d brought her to convince her to tell him about the other villages she’d found to make it easier for him to find them and it suddenly felt like a betrayal. He hadn’t thought of it, before, as using her. He’d told himself that it was for the best for her people and he truly thought it was, and it still felt like duplicity and he felt treacherous for having worked to gain her trust for his own ends.
Lexa hesitated, but as soon as she’d thought of her family and the possibility that they might still be alive, she’d made her decision. She could just hope that the angel—the udai, she corrected herself—found them or she could lead Gabriel to where she’d last seen them. “I could … show you where there are others, more villages …,” she began hesitantly.
The sense of guilt vanished abruptly and a sense of fierce satisfaction took its place. Gah-re-al had wanted to ge
t his hands on Ralph since she’d told him what the bastard had done. He tensed and looked at her more fully then, lifting his dark brows questioningly.
Lexa sucked her lower lip. “If I tell you, would you …?” She paused again, wondering if it was a mistake to tell him anything at all. She didn’t really know him. He seemed to be willing to help, but she knew from experience that that might not be true. People often pretended to be one way when they were entirely different. “My little sister and brothers might still be alive,” she continued after a little soul searching. “I think Ralph might have lied and they might be in his village. Will you try to find them?”
The anger that tightened his face wasn’t feigned. “You can count on that,” he said tightly.
* * * *
Gah-re-al was far from immune to the hopefulness in Lexa’s voice when she’d spoken of her siblings. It produced an odd sort of sinking feeling in his gut, but the prospect of getting his hands on Ralph so far eclipsed that sour note with a sense of triumph that it even smothered the guilt that had preceded it. Ralph had earned the death penalty many times over, he thought with a mixture of rage, disgust, and savage satisfaction.
He was going to enjoy that one.
It was a disturbing thought.
He followed orders and his orders were to exterminate the most violent offenders, with a special emphasis on the repeat offenders—like the men he’d dispatched in the latest village he’d discovered. He didn’t derive any satisfaction from carrying out his orders beyond the knowledge that they would never again commit the atrocities they’d been executed for—and the satisfaction of still being among the living afterward.
He didn’t merely want to execute Ralph for his crimes as quickly and cleanly as possible, however. He wanted the bastard to live long enough to suffer and regret every time he’d beaten and raped Lexa.
That was the part that was disturbing. The law was clear that infractions were punishable by confinement or execution if the crime warranted it—not torture.
He wrestled with his conscience for a while and finally put it aside with the reflection that he couldn’t anticipate what would happen when and if he managed to get hold of the self-proclaimed king, Ralph. He might be forced to beat the bastard down to capture him.
After a while his complaining stomach distracted him and he dug rations out of his pack, offering Lexa one of the meals. He had to show her how to use the chemical heating method and open it for her. She looked torn between amazement and uneasiness. Amusement flickered through him. “It’s safe to eat.”
She still looked a little doubtful, but she carefully tried a small bite and then beamed at him. “It tastes …. It’s wonderful! What is it?”
“You wouldn’t know if I told you,” he responded with a chuckle.
She considered that and then discarded the question and focused on eating.
They had to share his nitin. She studied it over when he handed it to her. “This is a strange thing. It feels like plasty but it looks like can.”
“We haven’t found the materials this was made of here on your world.”
She took a few sips of the water it held and carefully handed it back to him. “What was it like on the world you came from?”
He frowned. He didn’t particularly like remembering. “Colder,” he said shortly.
“All the time?” she asked in surprise.
“Yes. In the spring and summer and fall it was cold and in the winter it was bitter cold. It was further from its star—its sun—than your world is.”
Lexa frowned. “Sooo … you didn’t play outside when you were a child?”
It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her he didn’t want to talk about it at all, but he didn’t like the way she had of withdrawing when he was brusque with her. Instead, he shrugged. He doubted that the ‘play’ he took part in in anyway resembled what she was talking about. It hadn’t even been the sort of thing children outside the orphan facility did. “War games. Exercise. Team sports.”
Lexa smiled at him even though she had no idea what any of those games might be like. “When I was really little and wasn’t very good at many chores, before my mother died, it was my job to take care of my little sister and brothers so that mother and Sir could work and we played games. Our favorite was hide and go seek.” She thought about it. “Well, they were younger than me and they didn’t really understand it that well, but it was still fun. I would cover my eyes and count and they would find a place to hide. It never took me very long to find them because they always hid in the same places,” she ended, chuckling at the memory.
“That was somewhat like one of the war games we played,” Gah-re-al said, surprised. “They would divide us up and we were enemies and we had to hunt our enemies and kill them.”
Lexa gaped at him in horror. “Kill them?”
He chuckled at the look on her face. “Play kill.”
“Oh,” Lexa responded, still dismayed. “Was it … fun?”
“Yes. I guess. When I found and killed the most I got to go inside and get warm. I usually managed to find and kill the most once I found out I’d be excused to go inside,” he added with amusement.
Lexa mulled that over a while. “What happened to the ones that you play killed?”
He shrugged and then grinned. “They had to stay outside and practice more.”
It didn’t sound to her like he’d had very much fun growing up. Of course, she didn’t really understand the ‘exercise’ and the ‘team sports’, but it seemed to her that he was saying the war games were the most fun and that didn’t sound like fun to her at all.
When she’d finished her food, Gabriel took the container from her, flattened it so that it looked like paper and shoved it back in his pack with his empty container. “We reuse these,” he said at her questioning look. “To waste is to want.”
It seemed a curious thing to say—almost accusing—but she was sleepy. She didn’t ask him what he meant. She curled up tightly and wrapped her thin blanket around her shoulders. With a full stomach and the heat from the fire she was more comfortable than she’d been since she could remember.
She was drowsing, drifting lazily toward sleep, when Gabriel gathered her close against his body. Pleasure wafted through her along with the thought that he must mean to couple with her, but she fell into the abyss of sleep still waiting.
* * * *
Gah-re-al’s mind leapt from the mostly unselfish impulse to share his body heat with Lexa since she was shivering to the completely selfish impulse to initiate sex almost the instant he felt her snuggle against his length and relax.
He dismissed the thought immediately. He was already feeling the effects of the long flight to reach the city and not just weary but sore. Beyond that, he’d screwed up and given her the impression that their liaison was more than it was—or could be. Sex at this point was a very bad idea even if she was agreeable.
And he doubted that she would be. Very likely she was as tired and sore as he was from the trip. She hadn’t seemed angry but his experience with women had taught him that they had a way of pretending they weren’t until one broached the ‘touchy’ subject in any way. Then they transformed from meek and cuddly to wildcat in the blink of an eye.
He wasn’t in the mood to deal with that.
Of course, she’d said she wouldn’t mind fucking again, he recalled.
He’d been trying to forget the uncomfortable incident but once that thought occurred to him, he struggled to recreate the discussion, trying to recall whether that statement was made before or after he’d screwed up. He was fairly certain that it was before and possibly what had led him to utter the remark that she’d misunderstood, which probably meant that she’d rescinded the offer, he decided with some disappointment.
She hadn’t said so, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t changed her mind.
He dismissed the urge and focused on relaxing but just about the time he felt himself drifting toward sleep, Lexa shifted restlessly agai
nst him and woke his dicks up. That circumstance redirected his mind to fucking again except that time he was groggy enough it seemed like a good idea.
It did flicker through his mind that she might not be agreeable to the idea, but he couldn’t remember why she might not and decided it was worth a try. If she pushed him away or clobbered him, that was a no. If she didn’t do either, he reasoned, she was either in the mood or too far gone to fight back.
* * * *
It was the languid heat of passion that dragged Lexa up from the depths of sleep. She resisted briefly, trying to hug the threads of sleep tightly enough to submerge herself in nothingness again. Even as she struggled back toward the depths, however, her mind sent out feelers to determine the source of the burgeoning pleasure/discomfort.
The Lawgivers: Gabriel Page 19