by Dark, Raven
Her cheeks reflected a paleness that had nothing to do with the half-moon’s light. Her sweet mouth was turned down, and her back felt too tense under my fingers.
My fist tightened at the thought of Julian, whose men were out there, no doubt searching for her. Waiting to snatch her off and drag her to him. I wanted to find Tahmi and destroy him and every last one of his men with as much fury as I felt for Damien and what he’d done to her and to Sheriff. It pissed me off that at least part of her fear stemmed from Julian and his soldiers, but if I knew her, she barely spared a thought for them right now.
A much more immediate fear held her in its grip.
I guided her into the entrance of my cave and then turned her to face me. “Kitten, are you all right?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing, Master.” Her eyes were large and bright in the darkness, purple jewels in the night. A small crease appeared between her brows. “I know how close you and Sheriff are.”
It occurred to me then that none of us had ever told her about the one event in our pasts that connected the four of us deeper than anything to do with the club. The thing that had made us The Four. That moment hadn’t been something we’d hidden from her on purpose, but rather it was something so personal, so profound that it had to be said at the right time, and that time hadn’t yet come. To be honest, we weren’t even sure how to tell her. She knew there was more to our friendship than club bonds, but nothing specific. It was a dark truth none of us had ever told anyone. Not even Dice knew.
In reality, she didn’t know how deep our bond went. She couldn’t know that until she knew why.
Thinking of that single moment in time which had inexorably connected us made my chest feel as if something heavy was pressing on it. As though I’d already lost something I had yet to lose.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, Sheriff was blind not dead.
I framed Setora’s cheeks with my palms. “Talk to me, Kitten.”
“It’s just…” Her gaze settled on my chest. Away from my eyes.
“Just?”
Her chest expanded heavily before she looked up at me. “I know what it means if… If he doesn’t get his sight back.”
I blew out a breath and drew her close, cupping the back of her head and resting my chin on the top of it. “I know you do, Kitten.”
“What’s the old MC saying?” She buried her cheek in the vest of the J’nai uniform I still wore. I’d been so caught up in everything, I still hadn’t taken the damn thing off.
I put my nose in her hair and inhaled, losing myself in the scent of her, but it didn’t take away the emotion that sliced at me, thinking of that same saying.
“If you can’t ride, you can’t lead,” I said softly.
And a blind man couldn’t ride a fucking bike.
Fuck, I wished I’d taken a lot longer killing Damien. I wished I could have cut him limb from limb and decorated that damn house with his entrails, Yantu rational be damned.
Setora’s breathing hitched. “Master. He’ll…” She sniffed and pulled back but didn’t look at me. “He’ll never be happy if he’s not the General.” Her voice broke. She blinked, her eyes suddenly wet. “It’s who he is. His life would be—”
“Hey.” I tipped her chin up with the crook of my finger. “Look at me.”
She shook her head. “This is my fault, Master. This wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t come for me.”
“Kitten.”
“No, Master, it’s true.” Tears trailed down her face. “What would happen if you were stripped of your Yantu rank? How would you feel? Losing his rank would be the same thing for Sheriff. He—”
“I know. It is, but look at me, Setora.” I cupped her neck with my palms. She finally met my eyes as if the words pulled her gaze to me. I massaged her cheeks with my thumbs and told her the same thing I’d been telling myself for the last few hours, the same thing I’d keep telling myself until we were out of options. “We’re not there yet, okay? We’ll be at the temple in less than a week. I’ll get Master Leif to help him, and I’ll do everything in my power to make sure Sheriff will see again. I promise you this.”
She nodded once, then again more forcefully.
“So…what happens now? I mean, until we get to the temple, can he still—”
“Hawk?” Bear put his head into the entrance to the cave. “Sheriff’s awake. He wants to see you now.”
I scowled. “I thought Doc said he would be asleep for hours yet.”
“He was supposed to be.” Bear shrugged. “Doc says he must have miscalculated the dose. Sheriff’s wide awake and talking to Doc now. He’s fit to be tied, I tell you.”
I shook my head. “I’ll be there in a minute.” I took Setora’s hand, the renewed worry in her eyes cutting at my heart. “Come on, Kitten. You can stay with Pretty Boy and Steel for now while I see him.”
Sadness flickered across her face at my words, and I cupped her nape, wishing I could give her what I knew she wanted and let her see Sheriff. If I did, it would only make him madder.
Setora nodded, but I could tell it took effort not to argue.
Once I’d left her with Pretty Boy and Steel to watch over her, I made my way to the infirmary cave.
As soon as I entered, my brows went up.
Standing by the foot of the bed he should have been lying on, Sheriff had just swung his fist at Doc’s face.
“Hey!” Doc sidestepped, and Sheriff missed. I suspected the blow would have landed if he wasn’t blind. Doc stumbled over a crate of medical books, sending them sliding across the floor. “What the hell was that for?”
“You know why,” Sheriff snapped. He swung again, this time catching Doc in the nose. A lucky shot, judging by the startled looks on both their faces.
Doc grabbed his nose, blood pouring between his fingers. I started toward them, but Doc put up his hand, shaking his head at me.
Stay out of it, his eyes warned. You’ll make it worse.
I halted. He was right.
“I had no choice, General.” Doc pinched his nose to stop the bleeding, his voice nasally, the way one’s voice sounded with a cold. “You needed sleep.”
“If you ever drug me when my back is turned like that again, I’ll do more than bust your nose, Doc. Get out.”
Doc looked at me, silently asking if I wanted him to stay.
“Go ahead, Doc. Wait, Doc, here. You all right?” I handed him a cloth for his nose.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll just make an appointment with myself.” He took the cloth, shaking his head in disgust. “Hawk, make sure he stays in that bed.” He stomped out.
As soon as Sheriff stepped awkwardly backward to the foot of the bed, he fell back slowly onto the furs and passed out once more.
“Stubborn ass.” I smiled and shook my head, then headed out to get some sleep myself.
Chapter 3
The Dreaded Pause
I had a fucking fever again.
Again, or was it the first time?
Confusion screwed with my head, distorting my sense of time until I wondered if I was in the past or the present. I had the persistent feeling that right here and now was the first time I’d ever been sick like this, and yet under the surface, memories flickered, memories of another time when I’d been just as sick or sicker than I was now.
Whatever the case, I lay in an uncomfortable bed on what felt like a mattress older than grit, with weak light streaming from somewhere, stabbing through half-opened eyes fuzzy with early morning sleep.
Voices drifted close by, several of them overlapping. There were at least two male voices and a woman’s. For some reason, one of those voices sent a bolt of panic through me. The kind of panic that belonged to a child.
The kind of panic a little boy feels when he’s alone in the dark and he thinks there’s a monster under his bed waiting to bite off his leg the minute he puts his feet on the goddamned floor. The kind of panic a grown-ass man who was the leader of an MC would rather cut out of
himself before he let himself feel it.
What the fuck was going on?
I cracked open my eyes a little more. The shadows of two people, both out of focus, stood haloed in morning light like ghosts of the past.
I could see.
A jolt of elation hit me. I wasn’t supposed to be able to see. A moment ago, I’d been as blind as a fucking bat. Had that only been a nightmare?
Lifting my head, I looked down at myself. What the…
The body I was looking at wasn’t mine. It was a boy’s body, no more than ten years old. It was also painfully frail, eaten away by whatever sickness was making me feel like I was sitting in a furnace.
I turned my head to see who was in the room. At the side of the bed, one of the men was dressed in healer’s robes. The other man…
The other man was Dice, except that his hair, which should have been grey, was jet black. He looked no more than thirty, youthful and strong like he’d been when I was younger. Both hands and arms were still intact, just like back in the day.
I smiled, security calming me. Dice. Young and whole. Fuck, and he was still the General, his cut bearing the patch of his rank as the leader of the Reapers.
The patch I was supposed to be wearing.
What the hell was going on here? And why was Healer Deetry there? Mount Dire already had a doctor, but then I remembered that the healer—more a shaman than anything—only showed up once a month to give comfort to the ancient people in the village who still subscribed to the Old God’s ways. But I had a bad feeling he was there for me.
He was there because I was dying.
That child-like panic started to climb up into my throat, and I pushed it down, trying to focus on what the men were saying. I couldn’t make it out.
I’d heard a woman’s voice and looked a little to the left. There. She was sewing a patch onto someone’s leather cut. My eyes widened, taking in her red-tinted brown curls, her face pale with worry. A tear or two streaked down her face.
Mother…
How the hell could she be there? She was supposed to be dead. She was supposed to be…
“General Dice, you have to consider the obvious here. He’s been sick for too long. He won’t come back from this.”
Healer Deetry. He’d said that when things had gotten bad. When they didn’t think I’d make it.
“You can’t know that,” Dice snapped. “Scratch can’t know that, either.”
Scratch. The club’s doctor.
My mother said nothing. She should have jumped up, throwing the kind of tantrum that a good slave never dared. She should have fought. Instead, she sat there, her needle going up and down through the leather cut and patch, her expression absurdly blank.
“I’m sure your doctor would agree, General,” Deetry said, overly reasonable. “Even if the boy lives to see another year, he won’t be the same. He may never walk, and he’ll never be able to speak.”
Deetry’s voice was all wrong. It was familiar, frighteningly so, but it wasn’t his. And he sounded almost… thrilled.
He wanted me to die.
I tried to tell him no, that I was still there, still alive. I’d make it. I tried to tell my mother to snap the fuck out of it. Nothing came out. I tried to force myself to stand, but my body wouldn’t move.
“That’s not going to happen. He’ll make it. That boy is strong,” Dice said roughly.
“You’re being unrealistic, Dice. Look at him. You need to start planning for what comes next.”
I looked at myself again. My mouth opened in a silent shout. There were straps across my legs and chest, holding my arms down. Leather straps no one here would use. For a moment, the white-washed walls and aging room…flickered, and I caught a glimpse of something else. The devices of a torture chamber, devices with shackles on them, cutting tools, metal boxes for restraining limbs. The bed under me had become a metal table.
Deetry’s voice drew me back to him, still sounding like it belonged to someone else. “I’d be happy to end it. To put him out of his misery, pirate,” Deetry said pleasantly.
What the fucking hell?
“And I’ll gladly take her off your hands.” He nodded to my mother who was still sewing away. “She belongs to me. She doesn’t belong here with your kind.”
Deetry wanted to buy my mother? No, it wasn’t him. It was someone else…
No! You can’t!
Once more, I struggled to get up. I was trapped, and I couldn’t protect her. She was about to be sold, and I couldn’t stop it.
“You’re about to lose everything,” Deetry went on. “I can make sure she is cared for, that she has the life she should have. War is coming, Sheriff. I am the only one who can protect her. From him.”
Her. He wasn’t talking about my mother now. He was talking about—
Stop! I tried to scream the word, but nothing came out. I won’t let you take her!
Deetry said something to Dice, and before my eyes, the healer changed, his face and body morphing into those of another, so fast I couldn’t make him out.
Deetry came closer. “Do you understand what’s happening to you, boy? I don’t want you to be afraid.” His voice was deep and raw and monstrously charismatic.
His image cleared, becoming familiar again, but the kindly old face wore a smile that was all wrong, almost evil.
Over in the corner, where my mother should have been, was a woman, her violet hair flowing, white frock covering her slender frame. Hands and ankles in shackles.
A Violet. The woman I was supposed to protect.
Don’t give up, Sheriff. Come back to me, my love.
“I will take both of them from you, Sheriff,” Deetry said warmly.
Son of a bitch.
“I will care for them. You cannot help them. Look at yourself,” Deetry’s fucking voice went on. “You are useless, blind. I will give your woman everything you can’t.”
I sat up—my body the way it should have been, grown and muscled and full size—ready to strangle the life out of him before he took everything I loved. Then I saw his face and I froze.
His face had become the face of a younger man, smooth and strong. A symbol on the breast of his red silk jacket, a yellow sunburst gleamed.
Damien…
Damien’s hands lifted, lowering a strange looking funnel toward my face. His other hand grabbed my head and he was shoving the funnel onto my mouth. A funnel for water torture.
I howled through the funnel as water filled my lungs, thrashing, but I was lying down again, straps across my legs and chest, my arms pinned.
“She belongs to me. Your men will die, boy, and I will take her, just as I took your mother. War is coming, and she is my weapon, Sheriff. Mine. Everything you have is mine.” Damien grinned an evil grin.
Setora…no…
I twisted and screamed. And screamed, and screamed…
“Sheriff. Sheriff, wake up.”
Doc’s voice, and someone’s hands were on my shoulders, but when I opened my eyes, I couldn’t see him. The world was black, all dark, and I knew—I just knew it wasn’t real. Doc wasn’t really there, it was Damien, and the fever was still fucking with my head.
I swung at the face that, by his voice, I knew was right in front of mine.
“Sheriff!” Doc snapped. Hands were pushing me down into a bed of thick fur, pinning me there with what felt like every ounce of strength Doc had. “Sheriff, wake up, man. It’s me, it’s Doc.”
Doc. He was really there. My chest heaved, my breathing harsh in my ears.
“Damien. Where’s Damien?”
“He’s dead, Sheriff. Hawk killed him. It’s over.”
Dead. Hawk killed him?
“Setora.” Her name croaked out of me.
“She’s fine. She’s with Pretty Boy and Steel.”
As soon as he said this, the tension leaked out of me like water out of a wrung-out sponge. The words acted as a salve on the rage with Damien that ate at my soul.
Damien, dead.
Voices drifted from a close distance, sounding as if they were coming from outside whatever room I was in. Bear’s and Hawk’s voices. Doc had said Setora was with Pretty Boy and Steel. They were all there. I wasn’t a boy, and I wasn’t at Mount Dire, the memories of my near-death from Ryman’s Fever and Damien’s buying my mother and then stealing Setora, all blending into a single nightmarish present-day hell. My family was all there, and the nightmare was over.
A sudden urge to cry clawed at me, making my chest feel as if someone was squeezing it in a vise. Fuck. I’d been screaming a minute ago. It was bad enough that I couldn’t see a damn thing, but I’d also been screaming like a fucking woman. And Doc was watching all of it.
Kill me now. Just kill me.
Doc had released me, and I heard wood groaning lightly as he sat beside me. I turned my head, looking in the direction of that sound. There was a draft, suggesting I was close to an entrance that led outside. I listened to the reassuring crackle of a fire nearby. Hating the blackness that surrounded me, leaving me to guess where Doc was, what he was sitting on, and where we were. I wanted to kill the darkness, to claw and tear at it until the light shattered it, flooding my world in the brilliance that was mine.
Brilliance I might never see again.
My fists tightened until I thought they would break.
I swallowed. “How long have I been out, Doc?” My voice came out hoarse.
“Three days.” Whatever he was sitting on creaked again as he stood up. The furs I was lying on shifted with him sitting down beside me. “You’ve been having fever dreams a lot of the time.”
“Three days?” I sat up a little, and weakness flooded me until I lay back down, resting my head on a roll of furs for a pillow.
This was the kind of bed we used when we camped in caves, or out in the open. I wasn’t used to being so out of the damn loop that I didn’t know everything that happened with my club at every second of the day.
I ran my palm down my face. “What’ve I missed?”
“We’ve been traveling most of the time. In the carriages. You woke up for parts of it, but only for minutes at a time. You had a fever for a lot of it. Obviously you don’t remember it.”
