by Jade Kerrion
She pulled out a pocket-sized electronic tablet as she slipped into a cab. The rarely used device was registered under the name of a fourteen-year-old boy in Wisconsin. No one had yet noticed that the device tended to access public records that no fourteen-year-old boy from Wisconsin would logically be interested in.
As she expected, Danyael Sabre was listed in the New York City public directory. Many mutants—especially those with secure day jobs—did not opt out of public records. They wanted to blend into the population, not give their critics additional ammunition against them by insisting that they had something to hide. Danyael fell into that category. She gave the cab driver his address in Brooklyn and then leaned back against the PVC-covered car seat.
She looked out of the window as the city flashed by. She hated New York City and had never been able to pinpoint exactly why. The unending crush of humanity packed into the filth and squalor of many of the poorer neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx were certainly among the driving reasons. Unfortunately, that was where Danyael lived and where she was headed.
On Christmas Eve, no less.
She ground her teeth in frustration and damned him for making her make a trip into one of the worst neighborhoods in Brooklyn for—what? To make sure he was all right? Danyael was an alpha mutant. He was powerful, gifted with abilities humans could only dream of. He did not need, would not want any help from her.
She did not want to help. The merest thought of him made her skin crawl in revulsion. She did not want to be anywhere near him, so why was she here, in a city she hated, on Christmas Eve, in a cab of questionable cleanliness, trying to locate a single person she despised in a city of ten million people?
She had lost her mind. No question about it.
How much of what I feel is real?
The cab deposited her outside a converted warehouse in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The brick façade was grimy, dark from pollution. Just wonderful, she noted, paying the cab driver and then stepping out of the cab. No security; heck, the main entrance was not even locked. This wasn’t a place where locks did any good, she suspected. The only defense was not to have anything worth stealing.
She took the stairs—there was no elevator—to the fifth floor, and then walked down dimly lit corridors, naked bulbs swinging from ancient electrical connections, to Danyael’s apartment. She heard the sound of laughter coming from one of the adjacent apartments, probably a family celebrating Christmas, apparently happy in spite of living in a dump. She knocked, absently noting the peeling paint on the door. No answer. She hesitated for only two seconds. The corridor was empty, so she picked the lock with easy expertise and pushed open the door.
He wasn’t there.
Her eyes narrowed. He had at least an hour’s head start on her. He should have been home. She stepped into his tiny studio apartment, closing the door behind her, and flicked on the light switch by the door.
So this was his home. Clean—she had not expected that—but in spite of that, downright depressing. The narrow, poorly lit entryway was dismal. The tiled bathroom had ancient fixtures, and the shower was so tiny that it was almost claustrophobic. The kitchen was small, with barely enough space for a two-burner stove, a refrigerator that looked at least twenty years old, an equally old microwave, and a small sink. A few dishes and cutlery lay in a drying rack next to the sink; an empty pot and frying pan sat on the stove. The attached dining area was large enough for a square table and two chairs. A light blinked on the phone that had been placed on the table announcing voicemails. She ignored it and proceeded to explore the rest of Danyael’s pitiful home.
Two steps led up to a marginally larger room with exposed brickwork on the exterior wall. There wasn’t much in that room, just a folded full-sized futon on a wooden frame, a tall bookshelf that held books on two of the top shelves and neatly folded clothes on the lower three shelves, and a laptop on the small coffee table next to the futon. Two pillows and a folded comforter, somewhat threadbare, lay on the futon. A book on the coffee table had a white tag on its spine, indicating that it had been borrowed from a library. The single radiator in the apartment was cool to the touch.
Life lived on the cheap, and ugly.
There were no carpets to break up the monotony or absorb the chill of the gray cement floors, other than the rug outside the bathroom near the entryway to the studio. No pictures. No photographs. Nothing transformed the studio from merely a place to eat and sleep, to a home.
It was as colorless and as bland as the personality of the man who lived there.
It was where she was apparently spending the night.
Scowling, she searched the kitchen, and within five minutes, she settled down on the futon—the only semi-comfortable chair in the apartment, and that wasn’t saying much—with a ham sandwich and a glass of milk. Poor fare for Christmas Eve, but there wasn’t much else in Danyael’s home, and she was reluctant to leave the apartment when she did not know when he would return. She wanted to be there when he walked in.
She would give him a piece of her mind and rake him over hot coals. It was the least he deserved for dragging her away from family and friends on Christmas Eve.
Then maybe, just maybe, she would consider thanking him for what he had done for Galahad.
~*~
It was almost nine at night when Danyael slowly made his way out of the terminal of Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. Lucien’s private jet had landed several hours earlier, and Danyael had managed to get off the plane but his fading strength gave out on him as he made it to the terminal. He spent a few hours curled up on an uncomfortable chair in a corner of the waiting area, struggling—and largely failing—to work through the pain on his own. Passengers moving through the airport took him for a homeless vagrant and ignored him. Finally a bored security officer told him to get moving, and he complied, leaving the terminal and getting into the only cab waiting at the curb.
“Where to?” the cab driver demanded impatiently.
“I—” He searched the pocket of his jeans, of his jacket, found keys and cell phone, but no wallet, no ID, no credit card, and no money. He squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed hard, a flicker of bitter resignation twisting his features. Not this, not now. So tired.
He needed to get home, needed to rest. More than anything, he desperately needed a break in his run of bad luck. “I’m sorry, I’m just going to walk.”
“Don’t fucking waste my time, man.” The driver cursed at him as Danyael stepped out of the cab.
Danyael exhaled shakily and raised his face to the cold night air that cut right through the minimal warmth afforded by his old leather jacket. The icy fingers of the wind caressed his face, and he welcomed the physical discomfort as a desperately needed distraction from the emotional torment.
He turned and started down the street. It would take hours to walk back to his home in Brooklyn, but he did not have anywhere else to be, anyway. His psychic shields were so tightly locked in place that it actually hurt to breathe. Take one step at a time. He stared down at his feet, feeling the chill of the freezing rain through his sneakers.
He felt cold, sick and hungry. He could barely think past the shafts of pain pounding through his skull or the deep, raw ache in his heart. He flinched when he caught a glimpse of his reflection in a store window, his bleak eyes haunted by a dark and wrenching pain that no amount of control or willpower could conceal.
He fought down the waves of revulsion that churned deep in the pit of his stomach. Where had it come from? How could he hate himself so viciously and with such fierce desperation?
Wrapping his arms around his cramping stomach to hold himself together, Danyael ground down on his teeth as if it would hold the pain in, pain that made him want to curl up on the sidewalk and pound his fists into the earth until they bled. Desperate to talk to the only friend he had, he reached into his jacket pocket for his cell phone. The battery indicator flashed red, perhaps enough for one call, if that.
The call went straight to
voicemail. Danyael closed his eyes as he heard Lucien’s familiar voice asking the caller to leave a message. What could he say? How could he say what was truly on his mind and in his heart? What happened? You sent for me. What the hell did you do to me?
Two days of unexplained hell warred against sixteen years of friendship. For a single tormented moment, their friendship and their future hung in the balance.
Ultimately, friendship won. Faith won.
Danyael breathed out a shaky sigh. “Hi, Luce.” The familiar childhood name calmed him enough to blurt out the words before he changed his mind. “I…just called to wish you a Merry Christmas.”
He disconnected the call and shoved the cell phone back into the pocket of his frayed denim jeans. Hunched against the freezing night wind, he walked slowly past groups of revelers celebrating Christmas Eve with friends and family. He tried to staunch the emotional bleeding as love and laughter flowed freely all around him, flowed past him.
Despair rose up to shred him, but something flashed through the chaotic swirl of his emotions and drove back the despair—something so unfamiliar it took him several moments to put a name to it.
Love.
It anchored him, its radiant and steady glow a lighthouse in his emotional storm.
His mind reeled. I fell in love.
Danyael searched his fragmented memories for a face, for a name, but found nothing. Whoever she was, he had lost her along with his memories. His breath caught in his throat. Did you love me too? Would you look for me?
Will I ever find you again?
Without offering answers, love embraced him, shielding him from the worst of the emotional maelstrom trying to tear him apart.
I’ll be all right.
Still, it was going to be a long way home.
PERFECT BETRAYAL
You can defeat your enemies, but can you defeat your friends?
Danyael Sabre, an object of desire, would much rather not be. An alpha empath by birth, a doctor by training, and an empathic healer by calling, he is stalked by the military that covets his ability to kill, not heal. Bereft of two days of memories, he goes on the run under the protection of an assassin, Zara Itani.
The more he uncovers of his lost hours, the more he doubts everything that once anchored him. He knows only that he endangers those around him and that he is falling in love with Zara, who hates him for reasons he no longer remembers.
As forces--both powerful and ruthless--threaten those he cares for, Danyael has only two options. He can betray his values and abandon the path of the healer, or he can wait to be betrayed, not by enemies, but by his friends.
CHAPTER ONE
Danyael Sabre fought a losing battle against fatigue and the wet chill of a New York winter storm. As the minutes ticked by slowly, he slipped past extreme exhaustion into mindless automation. The neighborhood deteriorated, the deeper he traveled into Brooklyn. The icy drizzle could not mask or wash away the stench of cheap alcohol and urine in the streets. He paused at the pollution-stained façade of an apartment complex. It was a welcome sight; home, at last.
Danyael unlocked the door of his apartment, slipped in, and quietly shut it behind him. He leaned his head against the door and closed his eyes. His shoulders sagged. He was alone; he could relax. With a soft sigh, he lowered his psychic shields. The suffocating weight of emotions he did not understand and could not remember flowed out of him.
A woman’s shriek of panic ripped through the silence of the apartment and shattered his lethargy. His dark eyes flashed open. I’m not alone!
She hurled herself at him. Instinctively, he caught her wrists as she clawed at his face. The swirl of long dark hair, swaying wildly, concealed most of her face, but he caught a glimpse of unreasoning terror in her eyes, terror he had put in there.
He struggled to contain the emotions he had released. The effort plowed through him, a punch to his stomach. It tore the breath out of his lungs. He convulsed, doubling over, the strain too much for a body pushed to its limits. His grip on her wrists loosened. She lunged away from him and raced to the kitchen.
“No, wait.” He grabbed her before her fingers wrapped around the hilt of the knife in the drying rack. His empathic powers surged, irresistible as the tides. They snaked, graceful tendrils of living vines, through her psyche and siphoned out the emotions he had unwittingly forced on her. To his relief, rationality seeped into her wide violet eyes. He started to ask if she was all right, but before he could utter a single word, scorching pain ripped down his spine.
Only his training suppressed the scream of agony. He flung himself away from her and crashed into the sink. Violent shudders wracked his body. He gripped hard on the countertop to brace against the spasms of pain.
What the hell?
He gritted his teeth and tasted blood in his mouth. He had not been prepared for her roiling emotions. Targeted at him, her emotions sliced through his defenses with devastating precision, anger and hate, vitally alive, scalding hot. They flared when he touched them, punished him when he tried to absorb them from her. He had to work through them. There was no other way. The alternative—returning the emotions to her—was not an option.
His eyes closed. Trembling, he focused on each breath burning in his lungs. As he shakily exhaled, he unclenched his fists. Release the pain.
Most of the time, the technique worked flawlessly. He had years of practice.
That day, it nearly didn’t.
Minutes passed before the red haze of pain obscuring his vision thinned and eventually wafted away. He looked up to find her staring steadily at him, the passion and fury he had briefly witnessed now perfectly regulated beneath an icy-cold façade.
“Are you all right?” he asked hoarsely.
Her eyes narrowed. She tilted her head but did not answer. She merely looked at him as if he were insane for asking the question.
“Are you all right?” Danyael asked again. He leaned against the old fridge. His quiet tone concealed his exhaustion. A quick empathic probe confirmed she was calm and rational, but her lack of response worried him. He thought he had reabsorbed the poisonous brew of his emotions before they sank into her psyche, but perhaps he had not been fast enough. Had he hurt her?
“I’m sorry. I know you’ve had a shock. Would you like to sit?” He paused; the aloof distance in her demeanor caused him to hesitate. He tried for a smile, though fatigue limited it to a faint curve on the edges of his lips. “I’m Danyael Sabre.”
“Zara.” Her answer was brusque. She did not offer a last name.
The name toyed on the edge of his consciousness, as if he had heard it before, but he was certain he did not know her. There was no way he could have forgotten someone as attractive as she was.
His mind mocked him. Who was to say what he could have forgotten? After all, he had no memories of the prior two days.
He crushed the flicker of panic as he focused on what little he could still handle. Danyael averted his gaze as his mind chased a fleeting memory from years past. Lucien and Zara. “Zara…Itani,” he murmured as the memory sharpened. He glanced at her. “You’re Lucien’s friend.”
She nodded.
“What are you doing here? How did you get into my apartment?”
“I picked the lock.” Zara pushed away from the wall and walked past him to sit at the table. She crossed her legs gracefully, hooking one ankle behind the other. “What do you remember?”
He tensed; without memories, he had to play it safe. “Nothing.” His tone was carefully neutral.
“What took you so bloody long to get back here? I know the plane landed twelve hours ago.”
“It’s a long way from Teterboro, New Jersey.”
“It’s an hour away.”
He glanced at the digital clock on the microwave oven. “It took eight hours to walk, and I had a late start.”
She frowned. “You walked?”
Without probing, he could not tell if her reaction stemmed from annoyance or incredulity, and he
was too tired to keep probing. Somewhere, somehow, he had lost his wallet, leaving him with no means of paying for transportation, but there was no point in explaining. Something in her cool eyes made him feel like a fool for trying; she had already judged him and found him wanting.
Damn it, why? Questions pounded through his mind, but he had no answers. He shook his head and stepped away from the refrigerator. He needed food as badly as he needed rest, but he was too tired to eat and too hungry to sleep. He yanked open the refrigerator door, removed a loaf of bread, spread a thin layer of butter over two slices of bread, and placed them in the toaster oven. He pushed on the tiny lever and turned to her. “Would you like something for breakfast?”
“There’s nothing in there I want.”
That was just as well. The little food he had in his apartment would have to last until he replaced his driver’s license, credit cards, and ATM cards. The toaster oven pinged softly. He removed the slices of bread from the toaster oven and placed them on a plate. He would have joined her at the table, but his empathic senses warned him to keep his distance. A woman’s bad mood was more trouble than he needed at that time. Instead, he stood by the kitchen counter and ate his breakfast, washing it down with tap water. Some of the tension eased out of his shoulders as the grinding pain in his stomach slowly dissipated.
Rest would help too, though most of his tension had nothing to do with the lack of food or rest. He would have to deal with the churning madness of emotions he could not understand. He would come to terms with them, likely neither gracefully nor well, but he would survive. He was almost certain of it.
His meager meal completed, he rinsed the plate, placed it in the drying rack, and turned to face her. He met her coolly assessing gaze. How can you find me wanting when you don’t even know me, he wanted to ask, but with two days of missing memories, he could not assume anything anymore. Considering the intensity of her anger, he suspected that the better question was How badly did I piss you off?
