Paladin (Graven Gods Book 1)

by Angela Knight

  I stared at her through my tears. “Why did you leave me?” It was a cry of betrayal, aimed as much at my mother as at her. “I needed you!”

  Her vivid blue eyes narrowed as her ears flicked back a fraction -- an expression, I knew, of puzzlement. “Darling, I didn’t leave you. I was here the whole time. Don’t you remember?”

  “But you stopped talking to me! I needed you, and you abandoned me! You pretended to be a cat!”

  She sat back on her haunches in my lap. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I am a cat.”

  I glared at her, even though she wasn’t really the one I was angry at. “No, you’re not a cat -- you’re a goddess. Who just happens to inhabit the body of a cat.”

  But even if I said the words, some part of me rebelled. This was impossible. This was the twenty-first century, the time of science, not superstition. And if there was a God, his name was God, or Jesus, or Allah or Shiva.

  Yet I also knew better. The world was full of gods, or at least beings millennia of humans had created by believing with such intensity they’d conjured them from the raw material of the universe: magic. The elemental force science had yet to discover.

  The conflict between what I knew and what I knew made my skull ache.

  Calliope tilted her furry head as she studied me. Then she sighed and jumped on the desk, where she sat, coiling her tail around her haunches. I recognized the pose she always adopted when she was trying to decide what to say. “I couldn’t have talked to you if I wanted to -- and the Elder Gods know I did. It wasn’t easy to watch you struggle to adjust.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because you couldn’t listen. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. The spell wouldn’t let you believe me. You’d have thought you were insane. If you’d gone to the wrong person about it, you might’ve ended up in a rubber room somewhere. I’d never have seen you again.”

  “My mother did this to me, didn’t she?” I surged to my feet, unable to sit still any longer in my anger, confusion and pain.

  “Yes,” the cat admitted reluctantly. “It was Paladin’s spell, but she cast it.”

  “Why?” I demanded again, and began to pace, unable to sit still in my anxious confusion. “Why did she make me forget everything -- forget her, Daddy -- even Richard, for God sake! I loved them! They were my family. I had a right to remember them.”

  “Because you were too young,” Paladin said. He’d simply appeared beside the desk as if he’d beamed in like Captain Kirk.

  I jumped, staring at him wildly. From the corner of one eye, I saw Calliope crouch, startled, her tail lashing, unable to see what I was staring at. Paladin stood with his brawny arms crossed, looking as solid as any flesh and blood man. Not at all like a figment of my imagination.

  “You’re real,” I said stupidly.

  “That depends on your definition of real.” He smiled slightly, a crooked quirk of his mouth.

  And he looked exactly the way I’d always imagined. A head taller than me, powerfully muscled in black jeans and a black T-shirt that stretched over broad shoulders. Black hair a little too long, arctic wolf eyes, thick dark brows. Broad cheekbones and a sensual mouth. Richard Paladin.

  Except there was no Richard Paladin. Never had been. That much had been imagination. Paladin, god of justice, shared my body as he had my mother’s before me, and my grandfather’s before that, and my great grandfather’s before that, on and on back through my family line.

  No matter how solid he appeared, he wasn’t really there. He was making me see him, hear him, as if he existed beyond my skull. Another trick, just as when he’d pretended to be my imaginary friend, a character in my books, the voice of my subconscious.

  Lies. It had always been lies. “You son of a bitch.”

  Temper heated Paladin’s arctic eyes with a hot electric snap and a trace of godly arrogance. “I know you’re angry, but that’s not the way you talk to me.”

  I tensed, my hands balling into fists. “After what you’ve done, you don’t get to tell me how to talk to you.”

  “Summer…” Calliope began, her tone warning.

  “Calliope, please leave us alone,” he said, without looking away from me.

  Evidently he must have sent the command to her somehow, because she answered. “Paladin, I don’t think that’s a good idea. She…”

  “We need to have this out.” He sounded so calm I wanted to pick up my laptop and heave it at his head.

  Grumbling under her breath, Calliope leaped off the desk and stalked out. The door slammed behind her lashing tail without anyone touching it. I wasn’t sure if she’d done it or if Paladin had. My money was on the cat.

  What I didn’t understand was why my mother had wiped herself out of my mind, along with everyone else I loved.

  “You were too young for her to do anything else,” Paladin told me, his gaze blue and intense.

  “Yeah, well, apparently I was old enough to be alone,” I snarled.

  “You were also old enough to be destroyed. At twelve, your talent and your brain were still developing, just as your body was still growing. You didn’t have the physical ability to use your amplified power as an Avatar, any more than you had the physical strength to defend yourself against Valak’s men. Now you’re an adult, and you are strong enough.”

  “You could have defended me!” I whirled and started stalking back and forth across the room. “You’re a god, aren’t you? Whatever power I’ve got, you’ve got far more.”

  “But your brain wasn’t developed enough to channel the full force of my magic.” His tone sounded so patient I wanted to smack him. “If I’d tried, I would’ve overloaded you like a lightning bolt frying a phone line.”

  “So why not just block the magic? Why block all my memories?”

  “What could we have left you? Everything in your early childhood revolved around magic. Your parents were the avatars of gods, your nanny was a talking cat, and you spent all your time learning to use magic. There was no way to let you remember your life without letting you remember magic. And if you tried to use any of those spells…”

  I paused to glare up into his eyes, trying to ignore the way his mouth had tasted in my dreams. “I have never been stupid, Paladin, even at the age of twelve. I wouldn’t have used my magic knowing how dangerous it was.”

  “You’d been using minor spells since you were two. It had become unconscious habit.” He folded his arms, impressive biceps rolling. “If you’d used it in any way -- even by accident -- it would have sent up a flare to any magical predator all the way to Graven. I couldn’t have defended you without frying you.”

  I wanted his lush mouth, but I was damned if I’d give in. “I could have handled it. I had the training.”

  His eyes narrowed as he stared down into my face. “Do you remember the moment when your mother sent me into you? How it felt when all of my memories and my mind crushed down on your consciousness?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “I don’t think you do.” His beautiful eyes narrowed. “Maybe you need a reminder.”

  The memory fell on me in a thundering rush. Paladin stormed into me through my mother’s burning fingers. Sledgehammer blows of images, ancient power, and remorseless will such as I had never sensed from him before or since.

  That’s the real Paladin, I realized dimly through the roaring chaos. He’d hidden himself from me every bit as much as the cat had.

  The memory ended the instant before it would have driven me to my knees.

  “I didn’t give you amnesia for the hell of it.” Paladin stepped closer, the better to loom. “Your developing consciousness could not have survived otherwise. You didn’t have a solid enough identity. It takes years for the human brain to develop to that point.”

  “So?” I challenged stubbornly. “I know you can control your power. You’ve been doing it for thousands of years.”

  “My control wasn’t accessible until your brain was able to provide the circuitry to use it. Without the spel
l’s containment, I’d have destroyed you.” Pain shot through me like a lightning strike -- Paladin’s anguish at an old, old memory.

  I stared at him, frowning, as I realized this was about more than just me. Something still haunted him. The death of someone he’d loved. “Paladin, who did you destroy?”

  “A boy.” He sighed, and I saw that long-ago child -- slim and dark-haired, with big gray eyes shining with mischievous intelligence. “His name was Cein. An enemy of mine killed my host -- his father -- and I was forced to move into him. He was only ten, and he went mad. He died a year later of multiple strokes, despite everything I did to save him. The very act of trying to heal his brain destroyed it.”

  I could feel his grief for Cein, still vivid after all this time. I wondered how many centuries had gone by…

  “A thousand years.” He remembered the boy’s face, thin, delicate, with clever eyes the same vivid blue as Paladin’s. “Cein was so promising, so bright, with such talent. He was the product of generations of work. After he died, I had to move my consciousness into a gemstone until I could find someone else with enough talent to become my avatar.” A muscle rolled in his jaw. “I regretted the loss of Cein far more than the years I was trapped. I spent my imprisonment designing a spell to ensure no other host of mine suffered as he had.”

  “Okay, I see what you mean, but I’m twenty-five. Why didn’t you break the spell when I turned twenty-one?”

  “You might have been an adult legally, but the human brain isn’t fully developed until the age of twenty-five. I accelerated your maturation as much as I could, building the neural circuitry to develop your magical talent, but it took time.”

  “Which still doesn’t explain why you pretended to be my imaginary friend all those years.”

  Paladin brushed his knuckles over my cheekbones and down the line of my jaw. His fingers felt deliciously warm and just a trifle rough. “I was trying to make sure that when I was able to reveal myself, you’d accept me, trust me. So you wouldn’t see me as some kind of alien invader.”

  I had to admit he had a point. “I guess if you’d just appeared in my head, I’d have fought like a rabid weasel.”

  Paladin smiled, but I felt his sadness. “I owed it to your mother to be careful with you. Protecting you was all I could do for her.” I could feel his bitter regret and guilt. He’d failed to save Dad, Mom, and Richard. Ulf had survived only because of my mother. I was the last one of the family left, and he was determined that I wasn’t going to suffer the way the others had.

  A new thought struck me. “The… fantasies I had. Were those mine, or yours?”

  Heat stirred in his eyes. “They were ours.” He grimaced in uncomfortable memory, and the need faded. “Though not at first. You started fantasizing about me when you were… too young. I ignored it.”

  “Yeah.” My cheeks burned. I’d been fourteen, in fact. For years, idle fantasies had been all I’d had of him.

  I’d just graduated college when those chaste daydreams finally changed. It was like going from grainy black and white to full color 3-D, complete with all the smells and tastes of passion.

  “I remember,” I said softly. “I was twenty-one and I’d just broken up with Ronnie Gordon.”

  “That boy was never good enough for you,” Paladin said roughly. “And he was a lousy lover.”

  Paladin, on the other hand, was very, very good. The fantasies he’d created for me opened up a whole world of passion and erotic pleasure, teaching me far more about my body and making love than Ronnie ever had.

  Up to and including my deeply buried kinky streak, which he’d exploited ruthlessly for our mutual pleasure. An uncomfortable thought occurred to me. “Did you have the same kind of… relationship with Mom?”

  I felt just how appalled he was at that thought. “Elder gods, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you don’t do that with hosts. Anyway, she was in love with your father.” He shrugged. “I was simply her god -- a combination power source and inheritance she had to pass on to the next generation.”

  I stared at him. Whatever I felt for him -- and at the moment I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was outraged betrayal or delight at discovering that he was real -- there’d been nothing that sanitized about it. “So are you saying…”

  He didn’t look away. “I’ve never felt this way about one of my hosts before. Never.”

  “Never?” My brows twitched. “In…”

  “… More than four thousand years inhabiting various avatars, male and female. I have never felt this way for any of them.”

  His blue gaze burned into mine, and I found I had no choice but to believe him. He’d shared their minds, felt their desire for those they’d been mated with, but he’d never really shared the emotion. Not the way he’d felt it with me.

  “Why?” It was a cry from my heart. “What made me different?” And can I trust you not to change your mind and abandon me like everyone else? But I couldn’t bring myself to say that out loud.

  I should have known he’d hear my doubts as clearly as if I’d shouted them. “I’ve been part of you in a way I’ve never been with any of the others. I had to spend far more time nurturing you, helping you grow into your potential, listening to your fears and dreams. I watched you become the woman you are, Summer.” He smiled slightly. “How could I not love you, you with your fierce intelligence, your charming whimsy, your lonely passion? You could never be part of the blurring multitude.”

  I opened my mouth, only to realize I didn’t know what to say. I closed it again.

  He smiled slightly. Those blue, blue eyes met mine with a stare so intense, it seemed to stab to my soul. “It didn’t just go one way, either. Your image of Richard Paladin shaped me, too. Your belief in me, in my humanity, made me want to be that man, even though I’d never really been human. I lost that aloof, godly attitude I’d used to keep from being hurt when my hosts died. I couldn’t be aloof with you, Summer. Eventually I didn’t even try.”

  “You never seemed all that aloof with Mom.” She, on the other hand, could be ruthless as hell. I remembered that moment when she’d picked me up and thrown me away.

  Right out the window.

  Paladin winced. “She did not throw you away, Summer. The way we were cornered, she was convinced she had to buy us time to escape.”

  “I’m surprised you let her talk you into it.”

  “There was too great a chance she was right. If Valak had gotten his hands on you, you’d have ended up worse than dead.” The look in his eyes turned distant. “And Barbara…” Paladin absently conjured a glowing outline of Mom’s face, delicate and achingly beautiful. “After your father and Richard died, she was never the same.”

  I stared at the image, remembering how the mother I’d worshipped had become a bitter ghost. Pale and thin, hollow black eyes burning with a cold craving for revenge. “Valak must have known Mom would keep coming.”

  Paladin nodded shortly. “Barbara St. Clare would never have given up until she avenged her dead, no matter how long it took. So he came after us with every weapon and warrior he could get his hands on. One was even the avatar of a death goddess. We were desperately outnumbered before we even knew they were there.” The image of my mother vanished in a wisp of smoke and sparkle. “If we’d tried to fight, we would all have ended up dead. There were just too many powerful bastards among them.”

  “Yet Mom killed Valak anyway.” I felt grimly proud of her for that.

  “Or at least the body he occupied at the time.” His gaze turned brooding. “Maybe I should have stayed with her. If I’d sent you out with Calliope…”

  I couldn’t let him carry that particular guilt. “Cal’s good, but she doesn’t have opposable thumbs. That’s a serious drawback in combat. Besides there were three guys waiting for us outside that attic window.”

  I had a flashing memory of Paladin’s hand-to-hand battle with them -- the way he’d surprised them with skills no twelve-year-old sh
ould have had, Demi or not. “Maybe Calliope and I could have fought our way through them, but if we’d failed…”

  “Yes.” He rested his chin on top of my head. For a moment I just stood there, enjoying the warm shelter of his body. “I hate to say this, but I don’t think I could have saved Barbara, no matter what I’d done. Your mother was dead long before Valak killed her. Those last two years were like sharing a body with a zombie. Even if I’d slain Valak for her, it wouldn’t have given her back the half of her soul she lost when Graham and Richard died.”

  “But what about me?” I stepped back and looked up at him, giving voice to the bewildered pain I’d never had the chance to grow beyond. “I needed her, too. I needed her more. Why hadn’t she loved me enough to live for me?”

  Paladin shook his head, the memory of pain and defeat visible in his vivid eyes. “She was crippled to the soul, Summer -- as wounded as if Valak had sliced off both her legs. As much as she loved you, avenging her dead had become her obsession. She ate only if I forced her to, and rarely slept if I didn’t knock her out cold. I tried to remind her that she still had you, that you still needed her. But every night she curled up in bed beside the hollow where her dead husband used to sleep. And it slowly ate her alive.”

  I shuddered, finding it all too easy to imagine what that must have been like. I felt the same bloody craving for revenge. Valak didn’t deserve to walk this world when he’d wiped my family off the face of it.

  “Summer, you’re not alone.” Paladin stroked the line of my cheek, ran a fingertip over my lower lip. “I love you. I’m here for you, and I always will be.”

  “At least until you have to leave my body. And you will. You won’t have a choice.”

  He looked as if I’d slapped him. “Summer, it’s not like trading you for the next trophy wife…”

  I gestured, waving off his attempt to explain. “Look, I understand. I’ll eventually start slowing down. You can’t afford that, and I don’t want to get you killed.” He’d have to vacate my aging body to take up residence in my child. It didn’t matter how much he loved me, or how much he’d regret it. He’d eventually need a faster, stronger, younger body. Nothing personal. Just survival.