Jin pursed her lips at the confession, somewhat irritated by it. “Aiden. Do you realize that’s your favorite word? Protect?”
Aiden blinked as if he didn’t agree. “Jon said something crazy like that, too…”
“Well it’s true. Can I ask you a question?”
Aiden nodded.
“Are you sure you don’t feel this way about me because you think I need a protector? That the only reason you’re drawn to me is because you need someone to protect? Do I seem that helpless to you?”
Aiden looked at the ceiling and didn’t say anything for a long moment. When he finally spoke, it was quietly, passionately. “Do I think you’re helpless? Do I think you need protection? Do I think you need me? In the raw definition of the word need—a requirement, a necessary duty, or obligation? No, you don’t. You’re not a requirement and I’m no longer obligated to protect you. My perception on how useful I think I am to you has nothing to do with the fact that I know you don’t need me.”
Jin frowned. “Aiden…I didn’t say that.”
“I know. But it’s okay. You don’t even realize that you don’t. But you are so strong, Jin. It amazes me, and sometimes I think the only thing I can offer you is this pathetic display—”
“Aiden. Stop. You think I don’t understand why you are the way you are? What you’ve been through? I understand. I get it. I just want you to know you are more to me than some kind of he-man superhero. You are you, and you complement me in every perfect way. “
“Do I complete you?” he asked with a goofy grin.
Jin laughed and pushed him away from her. She threw a leg across Aiden’s lap and curled the rest of her body into his side, just to be as close to him as humanly possible. “I sound like a cheap convenience-store romance novel.” Jin whispered as she laid a soft kiss on the shell of Aiden’s ear.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
She sighed. “We’d be here all night if I tried to list it all.”
Aiden hummed in response, pulling her closer to him. “Jin?” he whispered after another spell of quiet when she’d almost fallen asleep.
She looked up from the crook of his neck. “Yes?”
“I’m still mad at you,” he said seriously, glaring at her before he broke out into a grin.
Chapter Fifty-Three
“And that was done without Seraphim blowing a hole into the side of Earth.”
“Are you bragging?” Seff muttered.
“No. I’m just amazed it worked.” Baji glanced out of the window, watching the rain fall in big, fat droplets against the soil. “But I agree, Seff. We’ve experienced some…odd things, but nothing as odd as that.”
“Your level of shock is astounding for two people who saw it on some history reel. Imagine what my heart was doing, considering I’ve seen the real thing.”
Seff shrugged. “That’s because you’re old, Parker. You’ve seen a lot of things, ancient things, because you’re ancient.”
“Watch your tongue, before I snatch it out of your mouth, young man.” Parker wrinkled his nose. “And I’m not old, I’m seasoned. I’m like wine. I age gracefully.”
Seff rolled his eyes.
“More importantly, how long before Kithlish starts asking questions. I could smell the distrust on him, even if he couldn’t,” Parker remarked. “Somehow I feel like the Spanish Inquisition is on the horizon.”
Seff walked over to Baji at the window, glaring at the ugly weather outside. “I doubt they would have willingly brought her here if they’d known. You know how much of a soft heart Key has, despite that sharp tongue of his.”
“Key will be okay, he’s always okay. Soon he’ll learn how to separate compassion from duty. It’s Baji’s fault, anyway. She coddles that boy too much.” Parker ducked as a pillow sailed past his head. “Plus, Seff, you make it sound like we brought her here to die.”
Seff sighed and continued to stare out the window. He hated the rain. He hated weather altogether. It was always the bearer of some kind of news, like a paperweight holding your emotions hostage. It’s raining, be sad. The sun is shining? Be happy. Thunderstorms and you should be scared.
As a long string of electricity crossed the sky, he counted until the resounding boom followed its path. And with that message, he feared.
He turned toward Parker with a defeated frown.
“Well, didn’t we?”
Chapter Fifty-Four
Sleeping in a strange place had always been easy for Jon. His job required him to travel often, so he was used to hotel rooms and all their supposed comforts— awful room service, the hard beds, the terrible selection of shows to watch. Even if it was shitty, he was used to it, expected it, so it was easy for him to fall asleep surrounded by it.
Not here.
The fucking lap of luxury was giving him insomnia. The FBI’s choice of accommodations always included low-end chain hotels and cheap motels, so this splendor should have been a treat. The temperature was perfect, the bed was so incredibly soft that he could melt into it, and it seemed that at the very thought of food someone was at the door with a hot meal. However, nothing helped him fall asleep. Even the sheep dancing above his head laughed at him.
Jon grunted. “This isn’t going to work.” He rubbed the back of his neck and sat up in the bed. He threw the covers off and set his bare feet on the floor. “Time to go.” Realizing he couldn’t roam the halls in only his pants, he pulled on his thin cotton tank and headed for the door. Anything was better than lying on his back and counting the indentations in the crown molding.
The hallways were colder than Jon expected and he rubbed his callused palms over his arms to warm them up. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but he kept walking. The carpet was soft under his feet, fancy-shmancy looking with swirls and patterns—what in this place wasn’t? Oil lamps glowed on top of heavy oak end tables that look like they were carved out of one solid piece of wood. The walls were lined with good-sized portraits of founding fathers, founding angels, founding man-birds…whatever.
They could have given them a tour so he didn’t have to guess. There had been a lot of guesswork recently, and in these past few days more information had been withheld from him than should be legal. Granted, the laws he knew didn’t apply to them. Most of the road blocking was coming from that olive-green-eyed hellion with the cupid-bow lips, but there were others—the bubbly one with the peculiar mood swings, or the tall one with the calculating looks. Even the woman looked like she knew how to keep a good secret.
Jon could, if he wanted, find out on his own. That’s what he was trained to do. Divide and conquer. There was a way—there was always a way—to corner someone to get what he needed. Granted, they were typically human suspects, but whatever. The point was he could. He just knew better.
Something was telling him that he might be unprepared for what he would learn. That a sense of security often lay in what you didn’t know. And although he was decidedly not happy about the situation, he didn’t want to find out how much worse it could get. Full disclosure came at a cost.
When the hallway of stained oak and carpet curved and bent, mirroring his twisted thoughts, his brows knit together. He knew he should turn around, climb back into his bed, and force himself to sleep, but as he turned one final corner, he noticed warm light seeping out under two large doors. It was a judgment call— maybe opening strange doors in a strange place filled with strange people wasn’t the best of ideas—but what’s common sense in an alternate universe?
With a slight tug, the doors swung open silently, sending a gust of humid air rushing toward his face and warming him considerably. Beyond was a set of shoji screens that he slid apart, opening onto a vast dojo with high, wood-paneled walls.
A series of large wood and linen lanterns provided enough light for Jon to see, but it was the moonlight—or what he called moonlight, he was pretty sure there was no moon here—that blanketed the room with bright, pale light. The opposite wall of the dojo w
as inlaid with a long, spotless mirror, and the floor was covered with tatami mats.
He took a few curious steps into the dojo, marvelling at its size and the stark difference it made against the oddly Victorian house it was in. The floor, covered in tatami mats, put a slight bounce in his step. Edging around a column, he noticed a blue tactical-training dummy, with the target area facing away from him, in the center of the dojo floor.
Jon walked toward it, wondering if a few practice punches would help knock him out, when a swoooooosh ripped through the quiet air and a golden knife lodged in the dummy’s neck with a thud. Stunned, he took a step back, his eyes darting around the dojo for some angel-ninja in all black, or an angel-assassin— because, damn it! He’d pissed that mentally capricious man off and they were coming to kill him. Why couldn’t he keep his big mouth shut?—when a second knife hissed through the air only missing the dummy by a hair. The sharp serrated edge of the knife nicked the side of the dummy’s arm and left a substantial gash. The knife continued through the air and skewered the column inches from his head, hilt deep.
Jon reacted instantly, screaming like some idiot B-movie starlet as he hit the floor.
Key glanced up as he flowed out of his body roll with a third knife clutched in his hand, ready for release. “Jon!”
Jon rubbed at his neck, starring at the knife in the dummy, then at the one that had almost made him a human shish kabob before sliding his gaze over to Key. “Evening, Rambo.”
The surprise dropped from Key’s face and was replaced with an unimpressed frown. “You wet your pants.”
Jon looked down, alarmed, before Key’s chuckle floated through the air.
“God, that was the perfect payback for you being a perpetual asshole all of the time.” He sheathed his remaining knife with a flick of his wrist. “What are you doing up? Looking for someone else to antagonize?”
Jon chuckled sheepishly. He always felt this way after he and the angel fought. Like maybe he’d lost his temper and maybe Key was never in control of his. But as angry and hot as the argument always got, it somehow didn’t feel foreign—that the anger Key managed to rile up in him was completely fluent. It was as if the energy bouncing off them was an entirely kinetic connection with enough potential to be…something, anything. Hazardous, probably.
Still, as hard as he tried to deny it, he enjoyed Key’s company, and maybe that’s why sleep twirled out of his grasp. His razor-sharp wit, the way one corner of his smile would edge higher when he was being sneaky, or how, even if he couldn’t own up to it, he was excellent at hiding his intentions but never his true feelings.
He’d watched and learned Key without words because words between them were deadly.
“I couldn’t sleep so I decided to play Russian roulette with the house—” Jon glanced back at the dummy and shuddered. “—and I almost lost. Knives, huh? Somehow I thought you only came equipped with your mouth. Then again, you’ve got those freak hands so...”
Key walked up to the dummy, staring at it dully as he tugged the gold knife from its neck. “I’m trained in about ten different variations of hand-to-hand combat, but when they told me to pick a weapon, gilded steel seemed as chivalrous as I could get without picking up a sword. Then,”—he made a face—“they made me learn how to use a sword.” He pulled the other knife out of the column. “Throwing things around helps me relieve stress.”
Key sauntered across the dojo until he was standing in front of the mirrored wall. He unscrewed the cap off a water bottle before sitting on the bench. With his free hand, he motioned to the space next to him. “Sit.”
“Stress?” Jon said with a bit of disbelief, ignoring the command.
“I rearrange the cosmos to save lives. Yes, stress.”
“How noble of you.”
Key grunted. “I’m not being noble about anything. I’m nothing more than a glorified lifeguard, except I’m armed and more haunted than I care to admit.” The angel looked at Jon expectantly, and then down at the spot on the bench beside him as if he was in no mood to give the command twice.
Shrugging, Jon strolled over to the long wooden bench, taking his time to inspect the dojo before he sat down. He stared into the mirror. The exhaustion showed on his face—dark circles under his eyes, the slight droop in his lids, the scowl that wouldn’t leave. His eyes traveled the length of the mirror to Key. The angel sat rather still, his lids lowered over his sharp eyes and his cheekbones in high relief among the shadows.
“Ever seen someone die?” Key asked suddenly, his eyes still closed and his head cupped in his open palm.
Jon’s brow rose slightly. “Yeah, kind of comes with the job.”
The angel hummed in response while he switched the water bottle from one palm to the other. “I’ve seen it, too. Too many times. This job is a constant reminder of the raw beauty you can find in human beings. Everything here is drenched in this wash of pulchritude, so that you almost take it for granted. What’s a sunny day if you’ve never seen a cloud before?” Key paused and Jon noticed that Key’s nose was rounded at the tip. It was…
Say it, Jon. It’s cute.
“But there is something sacred about mortality. It’s painful and beautiful at the same time. Time after time you’re allowed to fall in love with these wonderful people, and time after time you feel the pain when they die. And maybe it’s motivation, you know? You don’t want to see it again, you don’t want to have to let go again. They mean something to you, however arbitrary and shallow the connection is, so you work hard because it hurts. Every single time. Anything so you don’t have to relive the pain.”
Jon frowned at the strange ache he could hear in Key’s voice. He placed a comforting hand on Key’s shoulder, squeezing gently. “How do you do it then? Get over it?”
Key’s laugh was humorless and dry. “I don’t.”
Jon thought for a moment before opening his mouth to speak again. “I’ve seen a woman escape death every night.”
The angel quirked a brow, his eyes sliding open to regard Jon with confusion.
Jon chuckled and placed his chin in his palm, mirroring Key. “Her husband would come home and beat the absolute shit out of her, I mean really smash her face in. Then he would climb into bed as if nothing ever happened. And she’d wake up, cover the bruises and the bloody lip, and hide her swollen eye behind shades. Like they never existed…and plan. The moment the front door shut when he left for work, she planned. For months, that’s all she did.
“One night, after he’d almost beaten her unconscious over some burnt curry, she buried an axe in his skull as he sat at the kitchen table. The next morning she confessed to it—after she spent the night listening to old trot songs and dancing over his dead body. As they walked her away in handcuffs, she was smiling. It was morbid and I’m sure it was the abuse that drove her to insanity, but the fact that she wouldn’t have to ‘survive’ one more night, reinvent herself or smile when she was hurting…the fact that she’d escaped death… I now think that maybe guys like you have something to do with it.”
Key chewed on his bottom lip as he digested the story. “It doesn’t work like that. She didn’t need us. She was stronger than death.” Key paused and turned his head to look at him. “Why are you telling me this?”
Jon shrugged. “I don’t think anyone has thanked you, you know, for all of this. Especially not me. I spend more time questioning your motives—for good reason—than anything else, but I never stopped and said thank you for my friends’ lives. I owe you.”
Key chuckled as he took another sip of water, catching Jon’s eyes in the mirror before his eyes darted away. “I don’t do it for thank yous, but you’re welcome.”
“I could possibly be of some help if you’d just tell me, you know.”
“Tell you what? How to bend time, reverse it? How to sneak into someone’s life and leave the same way? Render someone’s memories of you as a blank? Even the good ones? No, thanks. I’ve been doing this for centuries, Jon. I don’t need h
elp.”
Jon scoffed. Three times it took them and he didn’t need any help? Right. “Well, what about the stress relief? Your shoulders look tense…or something…” He winced. What the hell was he doing?
“Are you sure you want to help me out with that kind of relief?” Key’s lips curled around his implication with a smirk. “I do need to break a sweat.” He winked lewdly before laughing as heat spread across Jon’s neck and the top of his chest. “By sparring with me, Jon. Sparring.”
Jon pulled a face. “I totally knew that.”
As Jon stood up to stretch, Key gave him a sidelong, skeptical glance and Jon frowned. He bent in half, stretching out the long muscles in his back and enjoying the pops along his spine. When he felt he’d worked out all of the kinks, he straightened—only to shuffle back out of reach as Key’s fist sailed towards his face.
“What the—” He bit his tongue as the angel’s foot followed the fist, nailing Jon across his chin.
“No wonder we’re needed down there! Look at Seoul’s elite,” Key jeered as he followed with an overhand jab. “Too slow,” he yelled as the blow landed hard on Jon’s chest. “I let you hit me last time. Let’s see you bully your way into a win now!”
The next fist connected with Jon’s forearm as he tried to block the flurry of Key’s attacks. He pulled his knee up to counter a kick, thinking, Oh fuck this! He needed to be on the offensive.
Well, he tried.
Jon threw a combination of jabs at Key’s head, but the angel ducked onto one knee and landed a perfectly precise uppercut to Jon’s ribs. Jon tightened just as Key’s knuckles dug into his side. He winced and tried to position his body for another offensive attack, but Key was fast and that was an understatement. The angel moved, blurred almost, gaining on Jon before he could slide into position. Key landed three solid kicks, two to Jon’s back and another to the back of his head. Jon had no choice. He backed up a step to re-evaluate.
The Halo of Amaris Page 24