by Jamie Magee
“I heard rumors; they knew each other before.”
“True. But Talon made sure Reveca landed in his arms.”
“Did what?”
Judge put his cup down and stood again, then went back to his pacing. “He fucked Tisk—you remember her, I’m sure—and Reveca caught him. He wanted to be caught.” He let his words sink in before he continued. “Your theory on Reveca starving him may have some truth. She surely wasn’t fucking him anymore. But in her defense, can you blame her?”
He almost regretted his last words because it struck too close to his dilemma, and the confident sway of Adair’s head told him she was in full agreement of punishment via abstinence.
“Talon has no death wish, not really,” Judge said. “If he was avoiding sleep, he had a damn good reason to do so.”
“Do you know why?”
He shook his head.
“So I put him in danger?” Adair felt sick.
“Miriam convinced you to put him in danger.”
“She tried to stop me.”
“D’she?” His doubt was clearly present in his expression as he glared from over his shoulder, then again when his pace turned him to face her once more.
Adair didn’t know. It surely seemed as if she had at the time. Add kill whoring BFF to your to-do list. “What else would the ghost want from me then?”
“The what?”
“Ghost. The haunt in the house. It keeps telling me to save a Phoenix. I thought it was Scorpio at first, but it wasn’t, then I was sure it was Talon.”
Judge raked his fingers through his short, blond locks. “The vision. It was the first I ever had. I was still in transition. It scared the shit out of me. I couldn’t lose him.” Judge smirked. “I was sure I loved him more than my own father. He’d taught me more.” His gaze nearly turned boyish. “He’d pushed me more. He was this sun I wanted to soak in. I wanted to be him.”
Adair hesitantly smiled. She could remember him alluding to such things in the past but never outright saying it. “So this...doom, it’s been forecasted for a long time?”
Judge shook off her assumption. “I told him about it. Over the ages, when it came, I’d watch him. Even when he and Reveca were enduring their longest breaks, he never seemed vulnerable.”
“Until now.”
“Until now,” he agreed. Judge cussed under his breath. “I feel like I don’t even know him now.”
“You,” Adair said with sly lift of her lip, not quite a grin, but close.
Judge sat down before her on the coffee table, and leaned forward, he even grasped her hands as if he had grave news to report. “What you saw, what your spell conjured about Talon and your mother—I was there.”
Though he had been freely showing his immortal oddities throughout the night, this was the first time he had pointed out how long his life had been. In the past, he had used careful words like years back or when I first became a Son. Nothing stating a time. She’d thought he was twenty-four, which was close enough to how old he was when he became immortal.
She also thought his nightmare, losing his family, was fresh because he was so young. And in some way it was, for it takes a lot for an immortal to really feel something. Therefore, they never forget it. They hold on to it with all they have. No matter if it’s loyalty, love, or hate. It’s theirs once they feel it. Forever.
Right now, he had to point out the long years he had lived to put forth how impossible what her spell had revealed was. He could not understand how she was conceived. Either someone was lying, or his knowledge on the supernatural elements had proved to be vastly under qualified.
“I know. You said so.” Adair’s tone was guarded; she clearly didn’t want to know the details of what he was going to say.
Right now, Talon being her father and the timeframe were things she wasn’t sure she comprehended. Not without more tea, more something.
He shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense—it was at least two hundred years ago.”
Curiosity fluttered over her emerald gaze, but it faded as she clenched the numb feeling she had gripped.
“I suppose my mother being a Lady of Death or even the Voyager vessel stuff had something to do with it.”
He gripped her hands. “Do you understand what a Lady of Death is?”
“I don’t think I want to.”
Judge wasn’t sure how to respond, but apparently his expression had said enough because he felt her deflate ever so subtly.
“Has she come to you? Did you know of her before tonight?”
She shook her head slightly. “This is bad, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “Reveca has dealt with many over the years. She’s never really had anything good to say about the matter.”
She squeezed his hand. “Does any of this make sense to you?” Her glance flicked to the window. “I don’t understand what King was saying before. When he spoke of my mother or whatever, at least...” Her words perished in her throat. Under it all, it made sense, it was just too unbelievable to comprehend.
He returned her tight hold. “I’m not clear either, but King lets me read him, sometimes he all but writes what he wants me to see on the wall. A silent warning.”
“Warning?”
He shook his head. “I keep the calm ‘round here. They know I can see shit coming. Not long after King came here, he showed me his past with Reveca, what he knew of it at the time.” His hands gripped hers tighter. “And he showed me what he endured when he was entrapped with Crass, a Lord of Death. He made it clear to me he thought this was all just a reprieve at the time.”
“Not now?” Adair asked as her soul seized. She felt protective of King too, which was crazy. She had no history with him, only random dreams with his likeness—but she was a seer, random dreams were markers in her life.
“Not now, no. He’s preparing for something, but I don’t know what it is. I just know he loves Reveca. He never stopped, and she didn’t either,” he shook his head. “We’re off point.”
He leaned forward a bit. “When you were asleep, he talked to me. He told me I could wake you if I wanted to. And he spoke about this dual family. I don’t understand what I saw.”
“What?” she whispered when his pause as too long.
He swallowed. “It was your soul, it was free in this vast space, one with all—this energy. Then this force came from two different directions. It twisted then swirled into you.” He squinted his eyes closed trying to see it all the more clearly. “Then you were born. Into the flesh.” His gaze met hers. “I think he was saying before Talon and this Lady of Death, you had spiritual parents that infused you with some kind of power, something that made you stand out from the ordinary.”
In a lame attempt to break the tension, Adair tried to make joke. “I’m a poster child for a dysfunctional family.”
He didn’t find it very funny. At all.
“I think what King said was right though, about your grandmother, or vessel or whatever. She was just a host. I passed her at the cavern the night Talon met her. When I first saw her, she was...sweet. Shy.” He looked away. “Hours later she wasn’t. Her being possessed—that makes sense to me. This other stuff—spiritual parents and where you were for two hundred years. I don’t get it.”
Adair had her theories, more than theories—gut feelings, but speaking them sounded insane.
She was doing her best to remain calm and not give any indication she was freaking out on the inside.
Her deep sleep had revealed all when it came to supernatural entities that roamed this realm. She knew how Escorts were created. Though her life itself didn’t match how they all lived as mortals, what Judge had seen did line up.
Normal Escorts are old souls. In transition, if their soul craves to be a voice, a change, and their lives prove them to be fierce, a sovereign may hear them, and may call them into their flock.
Their essence aligns with the soul, and lies dormant through most of the mortal life. In life they are subtl
y taught to invoke an emotion they crave. And then, either death or a time of testing, if not both, comes and they become immortal dark angels. Ones who were never meant to be dark.
Right now, Adair was holding on to the thin thread of hope that there was no evil lurking deep inside her. And if there was, King, along with Dagen and Gwinn, could help her overcome it.
“Do you know what King is?”
Judge looked away, dipping his head.
“You do, but you don’t want to. You’ve always known.”
His hands shook a bit, the slightest tremble. “How do you do it?” he inquired as his guarded blue eyes lifted to hers.
“What?” she asked across a breath.
“Read me?” His eyes searched hers. “I can’t see a damn thing.”
Her hands clenched his and then slowly released them and eased up his arms. His stare stayed riveted on her, his entire body was overwrought.
Her bandaged fingertips skirted across his chest, lingered above his heart, then with a feathery touch moved up his neck.
He held his breath, and his gaze became all the more intense.
The tips of her fingers that were not bandaged, traced his jaw, earning her a breath of pleasure from him. She drew her touch upward outlining his profile, then his temple, before falling to his lips and tracing them.
Right then, there was no lost time between them. This was years ago, and he’d just come in from one of his mysterious nights out with the Sons—one of the nights where death and regret were in his eyes, and blood may or may not have been on his clothes. And he needed a safe harbor where he could be him, only him, bared to the bone.
“I feel you,” she whispered. “I watch you...I sense everything there is to be sensed.” She leaned her head against his forehead and could feel his breath skirting down her neck. “That’s how I see you, Judge, that’s how your soul speaks to me.”
The tremble that shook her made her wonder if he was crying, but she didn’t have the chance to open her eyes to know. His lips were on hers.
It was an inhaling kiss. His hands were on either side of her face and he was breathing in as he kissed her. Her heart thundered in response, her sensitive skin tingled—she was almost sure some unseen force in her was reaching out for him and devouring this emotion he was feeling.
The tips of her fingers told her how much emotion was held in is expression, how his eyes were tensed closed.
One would think he had weathered a horrific storm and finding his way here again was something he was too scared to hope for—and now too scared to abandon.
Just as he deepened his kiss, he pulled her forward. His, once unexplainable, strength lifted her legs and wrapped them around his waist.
There was nothing provocative about it. He just wanted her against him. He wanted to surround her and for her to feel surrounded all the same.
Carefully, she combated the aggression she felt in his touch and preached with every sway of her lips that although she didn’t understand what made him divide them—or even where they were now—there was something bigger than she could ever explain between them.
It refused to be shelved. Ignored.
Kiss after kiss, his touch eased. The emotion was no longer dictating his every move. He’d found some kind of peace, and now he wanted more. He wanted all of her.
When he picked her up laid her across the couch she gave in for a moment. He was feeding a gnawing craving she’d had since she had awoken, especially when his hands moved across her as if he still knew her body better than she did. His hand squeezed the cup of her breast then swiftly slid down to the curve of her ass and clutched it as he rocked into her.
Heaven.
His well-skilled hands would have been erotic to any female on earth, as it was to her long ago. But now Adair was damaged. Now she could not feel the rush of an orgasm or the touch of man without excruciating pain.
Feeling him rock into her and the taste of his kiss made her head spin almost enough to dare her to grin and bear the pain. To give him what he needed, some sense of acceptance, maybe forgiveness. At the very least, it would break this divide between them and help them find a way to solve every hellish mystery occurring right now.
But her body betrayed her. The second his hand rushed between her thighs, she tensed.
He did too. His lips moved from hers, and slowly he pulled away and sat next to her. His head was bowed between his hands.
This was one of his I’m sorry, but I’m not moments.
There were a lot of people and issues between her and him on this couch, and what started out as a groundbreaking chance to draw them forward had catapulted them apart.
She was embarrassed by the pain and grabbed onto anger, furious that she was broken and humiliated, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
She thought to blame him. To say if she had never lost her memory and knew she endued more than an accident, then she could have found a spell to heal herself, repair the damage she still didn’t understand, that her modern doctors didn’t understand. But she was too numb to it all now. Blame was not getting her anywhere.
She pulled herself up and leaned on the arm of the couch, and as hard as it was, she kept her stare on him, reading, listening.
“I can’t help it,” she finally confessed as the minutes ticked onward and he hadn’t said a word.
She knew the pair of them had always connected and communicated deeply when they held each other. There were times when she was sure it was an out-of-body experience. Now, like everything else, that part of them was broken.
Chapter Four
Long moments had passed. Though her eyes never left him, she had reached for her blunt once more, passed to him, at first he refused it, he didn’t want to look up, but she refused to drop her arm until he gave in. Stubborn as ever.
Judge’s voice was destroyed when he finally spoke. “I understand. I’m a sinner. There is more than time between us...”
Neither one of them said Miriam’s name, but she crossed both their minds.
“What bothers you the most? The time or...the people?” She knew if they could ever hope to communicate the way they had in the past, then pushing through this agonizing barbaric notion of conversation was their only hope.
“The time is barely noticeable.”
She flinched, feeling the sting of truth.
“I was here,” he said as he exhaled a long cloud of smoke and glanced around her loft.
“I didn’t know you were.”
He shook his head slowly, even though he knew he could have sworn, at least a handful of times, she had mumbled his name in her sleep. Nothing as dominate as she had used earlier in the night, but it was there, a whispering thought.
“It was a long time, Judge. People grow.”
He ducked his head as he squinted his eyes closed. “It didn’t feel the same to me. It just happened.”
“Because of this long life you have, because you saw me anyway and you could pretend for a few hours a night all was well.”
He swallowed harshly and went to stand but then, seeming to force himself, kept his seat.
She pressed the balls of her feet into his thigh, a silent acknowledgment that yes, she wanted him to stay where he was, even if it was at the tip of her reach.
“I didn’t spend the nights pretending...I spent them taking in salvation.” His troubled gazed moved to her. “You always brought me out of it. You made things I see out there, mortal or not, bearable.” His pause was long, his hands knotted together into one harsh fist. “After the accident I was worse than I ever was when we were together. I wanted to avenge you, and I was sure I could, then...everything just stopped. The war, all of it. Reveca was stagnant. We had no proof Zale had spelled Talley, but we knew he had. And it made no sense that he had struck that deeply and then just grew as silent as Reveca had.”
He glanced to his side. “Seeing you helped me sort it out, let me know you were fine. You were healing. The thing is, right w
hen the heat was put back in the fire—when I had a chance to make it all right, you came back. Not only back, but the focus of it all and—and it’s shredding me.”
“I didn’t heal.”
He glanced down to her waist as if he could still see the gore of her scars that tattoos now covered. “Maybe not all the way.”
“Not at all. Look,” she said sitting up. “We’re fucked. Ten ways to Tuesday. I have every right to call you every name in the book and kick you out of here. We can both be jealous and mad about what we did apart. And to be honest, I was ready to lay Talley down and leave, never look back. Curse this culture you call family—I can’t say how far I would’ve gotten before the burning question of who you were to me ate me alive.”
Her gaze watered as she stared at him. “Then everything else happened. I figured out what you were to me—and it didn’t make me feel better, it hurt. It makes me feel replaceable.”
He went to rebut but she held her hand up.
“Then this stuff with Talon, however I was born—these odd feelings inside. This is my truth. I need you right now. I let very few people all the way in. You are the only one alive that knows me, really knows me, and unless I’m wrong, you understand me. You may not agree with me, but you understand, because Judge, that’s what you do, you understand.”
“I don’t understand you,” he admitted, scarcely meeting her eyes. He looked away. “ I lov—whatever.” He shook his head. “You had something real with Scorpio years back, and you migrated to him again natural this go ‘round. So, what does that mean?” He tensed his shoulders. “You need me to get you through this and that’s it?” His striking gaze slammed into hers. “Because Adair, you don’t have to play nice for that to happen. Fuck, fighting with me would make it easier.”
“You want me to commit to some forever? Like I did when I was twenty?”
Judge’s gaze shifted from her before she could read him too easily. The truth of the matter was, the vow Talley asked Judge to keep this night was far greater than committing to someone forever.
The urgency behind Tally’s plea was confounding. It was almost as if this occurred, he’d be able to be the walking dead—without the vengeance, but even that didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense.
