“Yeah? I’m just getting started.” Amaya stopped pulling her punches, and leaped clear of the UnHallowed to get some space to work. She pulled her blades and a vial of holy water free. She popped the cork on the vial and poured the water over her weapons. The vial shattered at her feet. Weapons dripping water onto the asphalt, she faced her opponents.
“Who’s first to die?”
14
Bane stepped out of the house, his power rolling in his gut, sending up a warning. Danger. But that danger wasn’t close and it wasn’t directed at him.
Amaya.
She was in trouble. The kind of trouble she couldn’t walk away from. He wasn’t sure how he knew this, only that he was certain if he didn’t get to her, she wouldn’t be alive by morning. He reached for the shadows and paused, the weight of responsibility halted him. Guarding the Cruor was foremost. He couldn’t leave the land unprotected. Yet, he couldn’t ignore Amaya, not when she was in the same building with him, and definitely not when she was in danger.
For six months, the Cruor had been hidden on the property. It would be safe for one more night. Plus, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d left the farm tonight. Through the shadow conduits, he traveled and zeroed in on her. He marked her, not the first night when they fought. It happened last night when he stroked her bare arms, touched his cheek to hers, and she accepted his caress.
The shadows parted in the parking lot of Lusted and Maximum Effort. He didn’t expect to find Amaya locked into battle with Chayyliél while Scarla, Kushiél, and Daghony looked on.
Chay wasn’t winning. He blocked more than he punched. He was learning her, letting her use him as a punching bag while keeping the other three from joining in. Achingly beautiful, artistry in motion, a prima ballerina had nothing on her. She was deadly and beyond erotic. His cock agreed and kicked in his pants.
The Cheshire grins on both their faces spoke of their enjoyment and pinpoint focus. That ended when Amaya stumbled. Chay eased up. Wrong move. Amaya slipped beneath his guard and sliced deep into Chay’s chest. Black blood poured out of the wound, melting his shirt as he hissed, leaping away.
Scarla reacted before Kush and Daghony. She jumped between the two and connected with a cross to the side of Amaya’s head. Amaya shook it off and Scarla followed up with a spinning hook kick that took Amaya down.
Scarla landed on top of her. She got two punches in, then Bane yanked her off and tossed her to Daghony. Bane reached for Amaya, but she landed a fist to his throat. He caught the follow up and the knife aimed at his gut as she lunged at him. He took her down, back to the asphalt. Lips peeled back in a snarl, blood trickled from a cut to her lip. She licked it away and shook her head, blinked rapidly, and continued to push the blade forward.
“Kill her, Bane,” Scarla shouted.
“Shut her up.” He kept his focus on the female in front of him. “Amaya, it’s me. It’s over.”
She shook her head, blinking hard. “You want me dead, just like they do.”
“I’m here for you. Not to kill you.”
“Liar!” She tried to head-butt him. He squeezed her wrist and twisted until the bones creaked. She gritted her teeth, and didn’t give up. Suddenly, she winced and her head dipped. The fight in her ended. “Let me go.”
“Don’t.” A chorus of voices shouted at him. Bane released her. She scooted back, one hand cupping her right eye.
Tears ran down her cheek as she squinted and raised her weapon.
“What’s wrong? Can’t see, bitch? That’s okay. You’ll still feel my punches.” Scarla approached with the rest of them.
Bane held up his hand. “Stay back.”
“You know her?” Kushiél said as Amaya continued to scoot away until she leaned against a car.
Bane crouched beside her. She had her right eye cupped while her left eye darted from side to side. He smoothed the wisps of wheat colored hair that had escaped her ponytail away from her face. The scent that wafted from her tresses reminded him of a sundrenched meadow and caused his chest to ache for what he used to have. His hand trembled a bit as he tucked the halves behind her ears, exposing her upturned eyes, hollow cheeks, and luscious lips. Her skin, dusted with gold, was flushed. Even when they fought, he’d never seen so much as a trickle of sweat on her brow. A protective growl rumbled in the back of his throat from the panic on her face. “Are you hurt?”
She swallowed and shook her head. “Let me go.”
She lied. He took her wrist. “Let me see.”
Her gaze darted to the UnHallowed and Scarla, who blocked any escape.
“I said I’m fine.” She tried to shake him off.
He applied a bit more pressure so she knew he was serious. “I want to make sure.”
“Well I am sure,” she hissed.
“Then put me at ease and let me see.” He scowled, trying to quell his rising panic.
“It’s just my contact lens.” She stalled.
“Amaya!” He lost all patience. For all he knew, her eye could be hanging out of her head while she played the brave soldier. Finally, her hand dropped to her lap. Okay, her eye wasn’t hanging out of her head, but the stubborn female wouldn’t look at him. She had her chin buried in her chest.
He hooked a finger under her chin and lifted. Perfect, her gaze was still lowered. He needed the patience of a priest to deal with this female. He stroked her cheek and waited. Slowly, her gaze rose and nailed him.
A tremor ran through him. Her left eye was the muddy green he’d become accustomed to. Her right, was a vibrant emerald dissected by a bolt of gold. “Take out the other contact,” he ordered, his voice as cold as his curdled disgrace.
“Not here,” she whispered, and he nodded. This was a secret he had to keep. They had to keep.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Sophie rushed between Kush and Amaya. No one had noticed her arrival.
Chay took Sophie by the arm and dragged her away. “Go home.”
“No, I’m not! The UnHallowed kill Darklings. That’s what you told me. What you all told me.” Her gaze wild, she skimmed over everyone. “We are not going to kill an innocent woman just because she knows about you.”
“I’m not innocent, Sophie. I haven’t been since I was ten years old.” Amaya said, her gaze locked on Bane.
“Shut up! I’m trying to save your life.” Sophie threw her a horrified glance.
Chay gave Sophie a gentle shake. “Look at me.” Her burgundy colored hair flew everywhere as she shook her head. Chay cupped her cheeks and stared straight into her cornflower baby blues. Sophie struggled against his hold. “Go home, sweetie. Go home, take a long bath, and get some rest. Forget you were ever in the parking lot. Forget you saw Amaya inside tonight. Nod in agreement.”
Slowly Sophie’s struggles ceased and her worried expression faded. Her head bobbed and Chay released her. Sophie walked across the street to Maximum Effort, unlocked the door, and disappeared inside.
“You can’t continue to do that to her. She’s going to be a vegetable soon,” Scarla snarled.
“Not now.” Chay returned his attention back to Amaya. “Talk.”
Bane took Amaya by her hands and pulled her to her feet. She kept her gaze down and away from Scarla and the UnHallowed. Wise. They didn’t need to know. The information was for him alone. Bane pulled the shadows to him.
“There’s no where you can take her where we can’t follow.” Daghony’s wings flared. Cool and logical, the former Archangel of Souls was on the top tier of angel hierarchy when he fell. Reasoning, not emotions ruled him.
“She’s mine, Daghony. Mine.”
“She’s a problem that has to be solved,” Daghony replied.
“Permanently,” Kushiél added. The former Archangel of Atonement rested his hand on the weapon at his side.
Bane sliced his head to the left once. “My problem. Not yours.”
“Since when?” Scarla demanded.
Since one week ago when he entered that abandoned house. “Sinc
e right now.”
“Why?” Daghony said.
“Because he cares about her.” Scarla’s voice was full of surprise.
“Another reason to kill her.” Kushiél freed his weapon, his skeletal wings snaked with red veins appeared. Death usually followed at their presence. Daghony threw out his arm and barred Kushiél.
“And we should trust you?” Chayyliél growled.
That was the crux of the issue. Bane was an UnHallowed, but he wasn’t one of them. One of the archangels that fell. And he never would be.
Bane pulled the shadows and Amaya to him. She screamed, “No!” It was too late. Bane had already welcomed the dark.
15
Pain lanced up and down Amaya’s spine. She clung to Bane one second and pushed him away the next. “The dark…the dark…”
“Shhh.” He held her tighter. “We’ll be out of here soon.”
“The d-dark!” She couldn’t stop stuttering, shaking. Ice coated her bones. One million needles drilling into her would’ve felt better. “Bane. H-help m-me.”
Cradled in his arms, she had the sense of movement, but all around her was darkness, the complete absence of light. “Black hole?”
“No, baby. We’re in the shadows.”
She clawed at him to get away. Humans didn’t belong in the shadows. Nothing with a soul could survive in this place. She was dying. He brought her here to kill her. “Let me g-go!”
His grip became a vise. “If I let you go, you’ll be lost. I may never find you.”
“It hurts,” she screamed.
“I know. If I exit now, they’ll find us. I don’t want to lead them back to the farm, so we have to stay in a bit longer.” He brushed his lips across her forehead. “Can you hang on?”
She managed a weak nod, then fisted his shirt and buried her face in his chest. She didn’t want him to see the tears leaking out of her eyes. “Okay.”
Wind caressed her skin and the scent of diesel clogged her nostrils. She peeled open her eyes to a blurry world. Slowly, the green and white sign of a gas station came into focus. “W-where?”
“A pit stop.” He moved so fast through the neighborhood of houses and tree lined streets. Her stomach rolled. Everything she’d eaten crawled back up her throat. She scrambled to get away, then the shadows swallowed her again.
She vomited, and begged Bane to stop between bouts of food hurling out of her mouth. He didn’t. She lost track of how many times he popped in and out of the shadows until she welcomed the darkness and slipped into unconsciousness.
Something wet touched her lips. Water. She slurped it down. Some missed her mouth and it ran down her cheeks to her throat and into her cleavage. It cooled some of the heat roasting her from the inside out.
“Slow down. There’s more.” His voice rumbled close to her ear.
She shifted and realized the firmness under her back wasn’t a mattress. She sat up and a rag slid off her forehead and plopped into her lap. He handed her the water bottle and she drained it, enjoyed the coolness spreading from her throat to her chest and abdomen.
Just doing that sapped her energy and she slumped back against his body. Details of the room came into view. “You brought me to my hotel room? How did you know where I lived?”
“Hotel key in your back pocket.”
She needed to move off his lap. A few more seconds after the lethargy passed, and she would. A shudder ran through her. Bane’s arms tightened around her. The shudders ceased, replaced by sudden awareness of every hard, cool inch of him. Heat traveled to a more intimate area, an area that shouldn’t have any awareness of him.
Amaya scooted away to the opposite side of the bed. “You’re supposed to be guarding the Cruor.”
“You’re more important.”
And the heat was back, causing a mini fire in her pants. When a man says you’re more important than the fate of the world, there really isn’t a response to that. “And your friends? What about them?”
“You’re more important.”
She looked up, down, around, anywhere but at him. “You should have taken me straight to the farm instead of here.”
“Leading the UnHallowed to the farm wouldn’t have been wise. I don’t know what their reaction would have been to the Cruor. Plus, I don’t think Michael would’ve approved.”
That’s an understatement. “How did you know where to find me?”
Instead of answering the question, he said, “What were you doing there?”
Now the interrogation begins. “I went there for a steak and a beer.” She left the bed and sat on the edge of the dresser while he lay propped up against the headboard. His leather trench coat was tossed into the corner chair. His black, short-sleeved tee stretched over his chest and really highlighted his biceps. One leg stretched to the end of the bed, the other rested on the floor. The LED lights of the bedside lamp showed his pale skin and the shine of his hair. He seemed comfortable, completely relaxed, though the bed was too small to accommodate his size.
“What else do you want to know? Do you want to know if I started it? No. I didn’t. Your friends were there and I could see them. They were behind this protective bubble and I could still see them. The waitress noticed, said the word UnHallowed, and shit rolled downhill from there.” She folded her arms across her chest because now it was her turn. “Who are they? Scarla let their names slip. Now, I want their titles.”
His chest expanded on a long inhale and he shifted to the edge of the bed. Elbows on knees, he sat there, his hands folded. He was not getting out of this.
“The one with gray wings, start with him,” she ordered.
He cranked his head around and met her gaze with a scowl. “His name is Daghony, Archangel of Souls. His title didn’t change when he fell. Kushiél, the one with the mohawk and scar, was the Archangel of Atonement. Now, he’s the fallen Archangel of Punishment. Chayyliél was The Powerful One, the strength of God. Now, he’s half his size and has a quarter of his strength.”
She hid her surprise at his unexpected response by ducking her head. “What was your name, your title before you fell?”
“I didn’t have a name or a title in Heaven. I was one of many warrior class angels. None of us had a name. I took the name Bane in the 1700s and added McIntosh because I liked Apple.” She noted the hint of bitterness in his voice. “Enough about me,” he continued. “Remove the other contact.”
Amaya swallowed and thought about defying him. In the end, her shoulders sagged. Fighting the inevitable was pointless when he already knew the truth. She brought her thumb and forefinger to her left eye and scooped out the colored contact and flicked it away. At the last moment, she whirled around. Their gazes locked in the mirror hanging over the dresser, facing the bed. Then she focused on the gold lightning that dissected both her pupils and irises.
His gaze flinty with a thin circle of red, his voice brittle, “Tell me again, Amaya…who fathered you, and this time, I want the truth.”
16
Amaya swallowed down the lump in her throat. “I already told you, he died in a car crash the day I was born.”
“Then who is your mother?”
“My mother died in childbirth. I never knew either of them.”
Bane folded his hands. “Gold dissects your eyes, Amaya. There is only one reason why a human has gold like that in their eyes. I thought you were like Scarla, a Halfling created from a human and an UnHallowed. The contact lenses fooled me. One of your parents was an angel. It’s not Michael because the punishment is death for an angel procreating. So, who?
She snorted. “My parents were human, and they died. My grandparents raised me.”
“I don’t need to see into your soul to know you’re lying. There’s no need when the evidence is in your eyes.”
She shrugged. “If that’s all the evidence you need, then I don’t have to confirm it.”
He sat preternaturally still while anxiety had Amaya practically twitching. She wouldn’t tell him. He could jump to
conclusions, believe whatever his mind strung together as the truth, she would take her secret to the grave.
“You honor Michael with your loyalty when he doesn’t deserve it. Cling to your lies, Amaya. I hope it brings you comfort.”
His words hollowed her out. Her lies didn’t give her comfort, but it was all she had. All she ever had.
At first, the doctors thought she was blind. When they discovered she wasn’t, they tested her to find out how it was possible she could see with such an anomaly. She was an infant, a preemie that shouldn’t have survived. She won’t remember anything we do to her, they told her grandparents.
But she did remember. Braile’s gift made her sentient. She was a preemie that understood the world around her, not just her bodily needs. She understood language, all of them, and the meaning of what was being said. Her mind was light years ahead of her premature body. Her vocal cords weren’t developed enough to speak and when they were, she had to be careful. An infant speaking in complete, complex sentences, the tests would have never ended. She’d have been no better than a lab rat.
His muscles rippled as he rose and reached for his coat.
Her mind lurched back to the present. “Where are you going?”
“Back to the farm. I’ve been away too long.”
Relieved, she glanced at the bedside clock. Four a.m. “I’ll drive you there…damn, my car is at the bar.”
“I’m taking the shadows.” He pulled on his coat and headed for the door.
Amaya hated to say it, but she didn’t want him to leave, and it wasn’t because she had more questions, which she did. He opened the door and paused before crossing the threshold.
Then he leaped over the balcony rail and, between one blink and the next, vanished into the night.
Not so fast, buddy. This conversation wasn’t over. She needed her car and the farm was too far to walk. Damn it. Amaya pulled her cell phone out of her back pocket.
Thirty minutes later, the taxi rolled to a stop in front of the farm house. “This is the old Newton homestead. Nice couple. Didn’t have any children to pass the property on to. You family?” the elderly driver asked.
Only One I Want (UnHallowed Series Book 2) Page 8
