Deliver Me from Darkness: A Novel of the Paladin Warriors

by Tes Hilaire

  Karissa swallowed hard, bobbing her head as if to agree.

  Logan watched the exchange with narrowed eyes but wisely didn’t say anything.

  “Thank you for your aid,” Roland told him.

  “I can get you guys set up—”

  Roland shook his head, cutting Logan off. “No. I have a place in mind.”

  “Going to tell me where that is?”

  “Nope.”

  Logan’s lips thinned, but he eventually nodded.

  “What? Not going to argue with me?”

  “Nope.” Logan dropped his eyes pointedly to the long knife lying against Roland’s thigh. “You have the right to protect your own.”

  ***

  Christos looked around the high-rise apartment building, the wind whipping at his silken shirt so it billowed and flattened like a twisted parachute. The blood bond had led him here, courtesy of one Thomas Rhodes. Christos had considered it fate when Ganelon had contacted him, informing him that one of his merkers had found a connection to his wayward creation. Even better was that Thomas had a list of minor priors…and an address. It had been child’s play to get one of his human lambs to break into the man’s home and scoop him up. And baby’s work to overpower his mind, searching out the pathways of the blood bond that linked a lamb to its master. He’d used that pathway to pinpoint the locale of the rebellious vampire who thought himself special enough to severe their ties. Then, no longer needing the human, Christos had disposed of him—whiny bastard that he was. Cried like a big baby, peeing his pants when Christos had sucked the life out of him.

  Filled with energy, Christos was ready for the confrontation with the vampire that thought he could escape his rule. The penthouse was an obvious choice and picking his way up the façade of the building via a stepladder of balconies had been easy. More difficult was breaking down the tinted bulletproof glass. Almost impossible was tearing down the lead-lined walls that housed the inner sanctum of the sheep that got away. It took another favor from Ganelon for that, which racked his tab up to a demon on loan, a dead merker, and Thomas Rhodes’s location. And now this. When it was over, he was going to be up to his eyeballs in debt. Unless he could actually track down the Paladin woman, then, well then the payoff would be worth it.

  So far, though…He closed his eyes, taking in the scents of the vacated apartment.

  Empty. The place was fucking empty. Sometime between late that morning when he’d sucked the location and life out of Thomas and that evening when it finally got dark enough to make his move on the place, Roland had left…and taken the woman with him. At least they knew for sure that the woman had been here. And, if the imprints of scents were correct, that she and Roland had left before the virtual army of Paladin had trashed the place for clues.

  Seems everyone wanted the girl. Well, he wished the Paladin luck, bad luck. Christos knew Roland well enough to know the tricky vampire would not have left his former brothers any clues. Christos, on the other hand, didn’t need luck. He had his own personal ace in the hole.

  With a smile pulling his lips practically to his ears, Christos spun about and leapt out into the night.

  Chapter 18

  It was an hour past sunset when Roland and Karissa stumbled across the threshold of the safe house. Karissa wasn’t sure who was holding who up. It had been a harrowing journey. Being as powerful as he was, Roland could stand a certain amount of sun, but they’d done all they could to reduce it: traveling by subway, then renting a van. He’d ridden in the back, burrowed under a cloak, but he’d still gotten a distinct red cast to his face.

  The daytime journey weakened him, no doubt. Her exhaustion was more of a bone-deep wariness. Part of it, she was sure, came from being up and running for more than seventy-five percent of the last couple days. But the other part was purely her sagging spirit. She felt deflated. The roller coaster ride she’d been on since she slid into the vampire’s cab ended with a major crash on the final spiral S curve.

  Her mate didn’t want her.

  Three days before, she hadn’t even know him, never dreamed she could have such a soul deep connection to another being. But it was there, and to take it away now would be akin to ripping her heart out of her chest. Vital. Life-giving, or deadly.

  Her mate didn’t want her.

  The truth of that had come through the developing link. Every time she had to touch him it was a slap in the face as his anger, his frustration, and his disgust rolled over her.

  Her mate didn’t want her. And so, as soon as they made it into the slightly sagging structure, the thick pine door swinging shut behind them, he untangled his arm from over her shoulder and lurched a good ten feet away.

  Too bad the cabin was so small. Just a simple log structure in the middle of the woods. Light-blocking shades with—she glanced past the cracked door to the right—one windowless bedroom. And one too small bed. Two people would have to be awfully close to share that bed. Like on top of each other close. Or take turns.

  Ships passing. To think she’d once wanted that.

  “You can have the bed. I need to…” he trailed off, removing the backpack cooler that he’d filled back at his loft. Blood. The backpack was filled with pints of blood.

  She swallowed hard, trying not to squirm under his penetrating gaze. It shouldn’t bother her. The concept itself—that he used Red Cross discards to sustain himself—didn’t. It was simply that she’d been raised to believe there were firm lines between good and evil, and according to Papa, all vampires were evil.

  She knew now it wasn’t true. The man who owned her soul, who had earned her trust with his honorable nature, was not evil.

  I only need to prove it to him.

  “You’re tired too.” She took a step forward, determined to close the gap that had arisen between them, both physically and emotionally. “I’ll grab the rest of our stuff from the van and have dinner with you and then we can both—”

  “No!” He spat the word like an oath, his eyes flashing red for a moment before receding back to black.

  She flinched. She’d closed eight of the ten feet and started to raise her hand to rest it on his arm. Now she dropped it, looking away. Guess his vow to keep her safe had a limitation clause. Keep her safe, as long as he didn’t have to touch her.

  Without a word she turned around and made her way into the bedroom where she kicked off her shoes and filthy jeans, and then slid into the chilled sheets—alone.

  ***

  A deep, gut-wrenching moan filled the room, pulling Gabriella from her personal hell and into the real one.

  How long had she been out? Judging by the ripping pull in her stomach and the violent shaking of her muscles, it had been long enough to get the worst of the healing process over with. It would slow down now. Her body had used up all of its reserve energy to mend the broken bones, bind back together the ruptured organs, and smooth over the shredded skin. What was left was bone-deep bruising and an all-over fatigue that would keep her lying here on this cold floor until she got the blood she needed to rejuvenate her strength.

  Christos was pissed. No, pissed was too tame a word. There were no words to describe the fury with which he’d torn into her flesh. Toward the end, she’d been sure that he’d lost all control, that when she did pass out he’d keep on beating her and that this time, maybe, just maybe, there would be no waking back into the nightmare that was her life. No such luck.

  With a groan of agony, she rolled over onto her back and then lay there, staring at the ceiling and breathing in the stagnant smell of her own blood. She was still in the corner where she’d cowered through the last half of the beating, but at least her room was empty. Christos must have decided there wasn’t anything else he could strip her of: information or dignity-wise.

  It was now out of her hands. She’d tried. Damn it, she’d tried. And really, she didn’t think any of the information he’d extracted from her was enough to matter. Christos already knew the Paladin would be raised into a war frenzy over t
he female Paladin. Knowing Roland had a thing for her too wasn’t all that much more. They still had to catch her. And judging by the snit Christos was in when he came after Gabriella, the woman had somehow managed to slip through his net. She could be anywhere now. With Roland or the Paladin. Either one made her virtually inaccessible.

  Gabriella was still lying there when an oppressive blanket of evil settled around the room, making the stagnant air even more difficult to gulp down. She knew that presence: Ganelon. But why would he have lowered himself to come here? Christos was his partner of sorts, but Ganelon held all the power.

  Moments later the door opened, Christos entered first, followed by Ganelon and two merkers who took up position inside the door. Great. Did that mean she was going to receive four more beatings instead of one? No. Ganelon would never dirty himself with her blood.

  Hence the tagalongs, Gabby.

  “Hello, Gabriella.” Christos held up a squishy bag of blood, giving it a jiggle.

  Her belly rumbled, disgusting her. Why so soon? Christos liked it when she suffered, so long as she eventually recovered. Which, frankly, was just another form of suffering.

  She licked her lips, or at least tried. Her tongue was so dry it stuck to the bottom of her mouth. “I’m not taking that.”

  A mocking brow lifted. “Oh yes you are. You’ve been quite disobedient of late. Time to prove you’re worth the trouble.”

  Ganelon stepped farther into the room. He wasn’t nearly as handsome as Christos, nor did he hold the threatening physique of their third partner, Lucifer. But there was something decidedly intimidating about Ganelon’s presence, an emptiness in his eyes, an indifference in the way he looked at her. He was looking at her like that now, like she was so inconsequential as to be invisible and it was work to bring her into focus. “You’re sure on this? Glena was not exactly a one-man kind of woman.”

  “Oh, I’m quite sure,” Christos said, twisting a needle onto the IV.

  “She looks nothing like him. Even if she is his, it’s going to be hard enough for me to pull on my old Paladin ties, what with her blood being removed so many generations.”

  “Sirens take after their mother. You know that.”

  “If you’re wrong—”

  “I’m not.” Christos tipped his head to the side, a chilling smile spread across the lower half of his face. “Am I, Gabriella?”

  She stared back at him—quite impartially if she did say so herself—but her hands, which were already trembling, began to convulse against her sides.

  Christos laughed, reaching out to grab her arm. She tried to jerk away but the slap of his mind on hers had her going limp. “Oh yes, quite sure.”

  There was a sharp prick as the needle slipped under the skin of her arm. She couldn’t move, couldn’t scream.

  “There. We’ll get you all fixed up, and then…” He leaned closer, pushing her hair off her face. Something hot and wet slipped down her cheek. His grin turned positively evil. “Then I think it’s time that we dropped in to see dear old dad. What say you?”

  ***

  She was back in the park; the imps sniffing out her trail. Her breath hissed in and out of her lungs as she ran on, pressing past the point where her muscles burned, through where her arms became numb, and toward the point where she simply collapsed in a heap on the rotting leaves scattered over the floor of the wood.

  Something snapped behind her, a twig. She glanced over her shoulder, saw nothing, and looked forward again, just in time to smack up against a man’s broad chest.

  Logan! Oh god, Logan. He’d save her. Papa said so.

  Only it wasn’t Logan, it was Valin, and he was looking at her with that dark hunger that said he didn’t give a damn about her, only having her. She tried to pull away, but his arms were locked tight around her. She couldn’t get away, couldn’t even draw enough air to scream.

  Over his shoulder, movement caught her eyes. Roland stood there, watching. Unable to call out she merely pleaded to him with her eyes. Please, save me.

  He blinked, then, in a move that had her heart ripping out of her chest, turned and walked away.

  ***

  Karissa woke with a start. Her heart wasn’t missing but pounded like a jackhammer in her chest. It was only a nightmare. The whole thing. All of it. She was on her back in her small twin-sized bed staring into the oily blackness of the darkened room…

  …with a man wrapped around her, his arms like vises, his leg like a hunter’s trap, holding her firmly in place. And he was…oh God!

  The hard ridge of his erection pressed against her hip had her panicking. She twisted her shoulders, trying to free her arms as her lower body bucked against the weight of his leg. “Let go. Let me go. Letmego!”

  Her terror-stricken cries had the opposite of the desired effect and he slipped over top of her instead, pinning her down with a full body embrace.

  “Shh. Stop. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Not a monster. Not Valin. Roland. Her immediate instinct was to curl up against him and sob into his shoulder, but then she remembered how, for the last twelve hours, he’d done everything in his power to avoid contact with her. She stiffened. Cleared her throat.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  He grunted, rolling off her and out of the bed. “Want a drink?”

  A drink? What the hell. She never drank. But she’d also just had the most effed up nightmare of her adult life.

  After a quick trip to the small bathroom attached to the bedroom, she followed Roland into the main part of the cabin. He’d already poured two tumblers half-full of amber liquid and was lounging in one of the two chairs sipping on his.

  She grabbed up the second scotch, plopped down in the adjacent chair, and swigged it down.

  Bad idea. She choked, barely managing to not sputter the liquid out again.

  His eyebrow arched. She could almost see his thoughts. That this was the woman who’d accused him of escaping in alcohol. Yet he didn’t say anything as he reached for the bottle on the table and poured out two more fingers worth into her cup.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  She shook her head. No, she didn’t want to talk about her dream. Her near escapes, the monsters chasing her, they didn’t matter. What mattered was that, ultimately, she always had to face the monsters alone.

  “My mother died in childbirth. And my father, I don’t even know who he is.” She looked over at Roland, but he was a poster child for relaxation, his ankle crossed over the knee of his other leg, the tumbler in his hand resting at a slight angle on the arm the chair.

  “My Aahma died three years later. I don’t know how. I was too young to ask and by the time I was old enough I knew better than to force Papa to recount memories that were obviously painful. That left Papa and me. We had only each other, but it was enough.”

  She stared down at the glass in her hands, her knuckles white against the clouded glass. The temptation to drink the rest of the liquor Roland had poured her was great, and because of that, she pointedly reached over and set it on the small round table that sat between them.

  Before she could remove her hand from the glass, Roland’s hand was there, closing over her wrist. He’d moved so quickly and silently that she hadn’t even seen it.

  Lifting her head, she met his gaze; his eyes bored into her steadily, the only sign of his emotion was the slight crease in his brow.

  “You don’t have to drink that, but I’d like to hear the rest.”

  She swallowed, her saliva tasting like acid in the back of her mouth. “You know the rest; Papa died.”

  “How?”

  “Because of me.”

  Something flashed across his face, echoing down through their bond. Pain, understanding. He released her arm, sitting back in his chair. “I’m sure you’re wrong. It may only seem that way.”

  “I led them to our home. I left him there, alone and vulnerable, while I went to work the next day.”

  “Did you know?”


  “That I’d led them there?” She shook her head. “The cab driver was a vampire. I had him drop me off across town and then got another cab. But he must have followed me. Or had someone else do it.”

  “Why didn’t they attack that night then?”

  “Papa had the house warded against vampires. They couldn’t enter without invitation.”

  “The wards were keyed to your grandfather?”

  She nodded.

  He tapped the glass with his finger, the small sound pinging in the quiet cabin.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “That they must have watched you for a while. Then gone back to report. Most likely the merkers expected you to be home the next day when they came.”

  “Merker. That’s what you said that thing last night was.”

  Roland nodded, then as if anticipating her next question, explained. “Merkers are Ganelon’s get. The offspring is created when he mates with one of the more powerful demons from hell.”

  “They’re half demon?”

  He nodded.

  “But Ganelon…wouldn’t that make them half Paladin too?”

  “They are abominations,” he hissed, his lip curling up.

  Okay then. She gnawed on her own lip. She had to give him that. That thing last night had been freaky, and demons were just plain bad.

  “How do you know it was a merker that killed my papa?” she asked.

  “Because I went there.”

  She sat up straighter. “And?”

  “And I could smell them. I was trying to use my gift to show me exactly what had happened but it was a no-go.”

  “You’re a seer?”

  “A poor one.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I see things: past, present, future. But I cannot control what I see, and what I do see, I cannot change.”

  “Wow. That must suck.”

  He laughed, a tell-me-about-it laugh emphasized by an Adam’s-apple-bobbing swallow of scotch.

  She frowned, settling back in the lumpy cushions. “So how does it happen? Do these visions come in dreams or through touch?”