His hearing had actually kicked in before his vision did.
The deafening blare of alarms going off throughout the facility was enough to galvanize him.
“Quick! Stand close! They’re liable to shoot the fucking ship out of the sky before Dante can beam us back up!”
Claire was on her feet first—the moment she heard him mention Dante. Maddie was a little slower.
“He’s going to beam …?” Maddie asked, but she didn’t get the entire question out.
Fearing the worst—that the ship would get shot down in the middle of transporting them, Nick activated the tractor as soon as he materialized and realized Dante had set him down practically in their laps. The consuming light enveloped the three of them.
As disorienting as that was in and of itself, that was nothing compared to what happened when they materialized.
They were not on the ship as all of them, especially Nick, had expected.
He didn’t know where the hell they were, but it was definitely not the alien ship!
It was some woman’s bedroom and she was screaming like a banshee!
Glancing quickly around for a door, Nick grabbed Claire’s hand and ran for it. Maddie, a little slower to react, wasn’t far behind them when they charged out of the room and immediately realized they had been transported to the Inn where they’d stayed in Ireland.
Where the hell were Dante and Galen? And how had they ended up back in Ireland?
“Fire!” Nick yelled, inspired by the screeching woman to try to direct attention away from them.
“Fire! Fire!” Maddie and Claire took up the alarm.
People began to open their doors along the corridor the three were racing down. At their yelled alarm, however, they were galvanized to react and began to hurry out the doors, impeding the group’s progress but also redirecting attention away from them—Nick hoped.
“What the hell just happened?” Maddie demanded, echoing his own earlier thoughts, when they managed to make it out of the Inn and disappear into the crowd before the police arrived.
“Where’s … uh … I thought you said …?” Claire stammered in confusion—although she wasn’t so shocked it didn’t occur to her that Nick probably wouldn’t want to discuss Dante.
“I’m damned if I know,” Nick responded, as confused as they were. “Dante handed me this thing and said he was going to beam me inside the prison where they were holding you two and then beam all of us out, but I thought he meant to beam us to the ship.”
“So … you were in the ship?” Maddie asked for clarification.
“Yeah,” Nick responded slowly, it finally having occurred to him that maybe Dante hadn’t brought them back up to the ship because they were shot down by the fighters. Or maybe it hadn’t been intentional at all? Maybe the ship had gone down and the transporter had used last coordinates or something like that?
* * * *
We are going down! Get in here and into your safety harness! Galen commanded Dante.
A moment! They are enroute, Dante responded.
You will not have time to secure yourself before we crash if you do not come now, Galen warned him.
Then I will not! They are enroute. Hold it together until I can finish the transport!
I do not know that I can. The ship is damaged almost beyond controlling it at all. We will be lucky if we are not part of the debris field it is about to create.
Dante had broken into a sweat before he finally saw the reassembly complete alert. The moment he was certain that he had safely transported the trio out of harm’s way he raced from the transporter room and in to the command center.
He was too late, he discovered. Even as he launched himself toward the couch and safety harness, he felt the impact with the ground move upward through his feet until it rattled his entire body a split second before the ship’s momentum and the countering drag of hitting the ground pitched him against one bulkhead and then the ceiling and then the floor. Despite the design of the ship to withstand impact, the exterior of the ship was ripped open and the interior materials shattered and scattered. Dangerous flying bits of debris from both outside the ship and from within the ship began to churn around his tumbling body as if he and the ship had both been tossed into a blending machine. He felt blows against his head, shoulders, arms, belly and back, and legs each time he made impact with parts of the ship that remained solid, as if he someone was pounding on him with a heavy club, and sharp jabs as the broken materials flew at him and pierced his skin, muscles, and drove deeper.
Finally, thankfully, the tumbling stopped and everything went dark.
Chapter Nine
The darkest alternated with flashes of light—silence with the rattle of debris being shuffled, voices. Dante gritted his teeth when he felt the pressure against his injuries released as it was lifted off of him, felt himself lifted without a noticeable degree of regard for the pain it caused and dropped onto a flat surface, felt the movement of being lifted and then each and every jarring impact of the steps the men carrying him on the gurney took. His mind danced in and out of awareness, the dark and light flickering against his eyelids like heavy clouds scudding across the sky to block the sunlight and then reveal it like a blinding spotlight.
Eventually he was aware of the more deafening sound of churning rotors and pried his eyelids open enough to see he was in some sort of open flying vehicle. It occurred to him that he did not know if Galen had survived and he struggled to move his head to see. A sea of hard faces seemed to hover just above him, but he caught a glimpse of a second gurney and decided that Galen had also been pulled from the wreckage.
A hard jolt brought him to the surface of awareness again after some undetermined space of time and he roused enough to feel the painful jolts that followed that as the gurney he was strapped to was pulled out and settled on something with wheels. Thoroughly disoriented, he struggled to lift his head to look around.
Claire?
You sent her away. She is safe.
I did? Why?
So she would be safe.
It comforted him to know she was safe. At the same time it distressed him that she was not there when he needed her. He was going to die and he had not gotten to see the child she was carrying that was his. He had not gotten the chance to win her as a mate.
At least you know that she will live and the child will live.
Galen?
Yes.
You are certain she is safe?
You stayed to make sure. And the warrior, Nick, will keep her safe now.
Anger flickered through Dante, but he was too tired to hold on to it. Good. It is good to know he will keep her and the child safe. He did not believe for a moment that Nick could protect her as he could, or would cherish her as he would have, but it was good to know that she was not alone, that she was with someone who would try to protect her. They are going to dissect us and place the pieces in jars.
Probably. But we will be beyond knowing or caring.
That is a fucking comfort!
He sensed a flicker of amusement in response to his sarcasm and then nothing.
Surprise was the first emotion Dante registered when he drifted toward awareness again, but it was a mere flash, hardly recognized let alone sorted by context, before it was subjugated by the pain that expanded as awareness did.
“Sorry, but we don’t know your physiology well enough to use anesthesia.”
“Use it!” Dante growled through teeth gritted against the pain. “Do you think I care if I do not live with this much agony?”
“Orders. We can’t question you if you’re dead.”
Dante searched his mind for something to say that might convince them to relent and drug him against the pain. “I am half human. That is why I am one of the fallen.”
Silence greeted that shameful confession, the secret he had guarded so carefully most of his life.
“Angels could not mate with humans if we were not already closely related.”
He did not know if the man believed him or not but, thankfully, he gave him drugs and the peace of feeling and knowing nothing.
* * * *
There hadn’t been a lot of time to dwell on the whys and wherefores of their escape directly afterwards. Materializing in the room of the Inn that they’d rented before they were recaptured had been a stroke of genius—she supposed on Dante’s part. But the down side to it was that it had been occupied at the time and the woman spoke terror at the top of her lungs when they’d materialized in her room.
Luckily Nick had recovered fast enough to react quickly and get them out of the room and out of the Inn before law enforcement could be summoned to start the nightmarish cycle all over again.
Claire had been certain that would be the end of their ‘luck’ and that they were living on borrowed time before they were captured yet again. But that was because she had no idea what Nick had been doing while they were in Ireland before when he would go off and leave her and Maddie to their devices.
She discovered he had been making arrangements for passports and setting up bank accounts and searching for a place they could use as a safe house.
As soon as they had made their way out of the alley they’d ducked in to, Nick had headed off along the street with the surety of someone who knew exactly where they were going. While she and Madeline waited anxiously outside of several different seedy looking establishments, Nick went in, reappearing a short time later with various ‘purchases’.
They headed toward the train station when he had finished making the rounds of the mysterious places he wanted to visit—each of them now in possession of a small suitcase—purchased tickets and traveled to the coast. There they’d caught a boat to take them to a small port city in France. When they’d made it through customs, Nick arranged to rent a car and they left the city for a tiny villa near a tiny village in the south of France.
This, they discovered, would be ‘home’ while they tried to figure out what to do next.
This was also where Claire finally found the peace and quiet to drive herself insane trying to figure out what had happened and why it had happened the way it had.
She knew Dante had tried to contact her telepathically even though she hadn’t really been able to ‘talk’ with him. It had been more like an acknowledgement that he’d heard her cries for help. She might have thought she’d simply imagined it—had actually thought that briefly—but Nick hadn’t beamed into their jail cell without the help of the angels. And the three of them wouldn’t have been beamed out without the transporter.
So why had they been transported from the jail cell to the Inn in Ireland instead of on to the ship?
Nick hadn’t adequately explained that.
In point of fact, he’d made it abundantly clear he didn’t want to talk about it and tempers had flared on both sides when she’d persisted in asking what had happened.
He’d told her he had no idea. He’d been particlized and beamed into the prison and then out of it with her and Maddie. How could he know what had happened or why they hadn’t been beamed onto the ship?
That had sounded reasonable—at first. And she’d felt very unreasonable. But the more she thought about it the more certain she was that Nick’s anger was more than jealousy that she’d asked about Dante. He knew something.
She let it go, not because she’d given up on getting the information but because she could see that Nick wasn’t going to tell her anything even if he knew. And, although she thought he did know something, she couldn’t be sure he did and simply thinking he might didn’t seem like an adequate excuse for adding to the tension between the three of them.
She never had gotten the chance to take the pregnancy test, but it didn’t matter. By the time they’d settled in the villa in France she knew positively that she was pregnant.
Unfortunately, she was less certain of whom the father was since she’d been involved intimately with both Nick and Dante at the same time.
Stupid move!
Proof positive that people instantly became lower life forms the minute they went into mating mode—running on instincts instead of brain power!
She believed, however, that it was Dante’s. She didn’t know why she believed that—if there was any logic behind it—but she did.
And that belief left her in a hell of a mess!
She hadn’t heard anything at all from Dante since he’d left her in the fortress and gone off to see what he could discover about the crazed angel that had attacked both of them. She didn’t know if he hadn’t come back for her because he’d thought it over and realized they really didn’t belong together. Or if he hadn’t come back because something had happened to him.
Nick had finally broken down and told her that it was in fact Dante and Galen who had taken him to find her and Maddie and rescue them, although he’d pointed out that he couldn’t possibly have any idea what had happened after they’d beamed him into the prison where they’d been held.
Unfortunately, that seemed to support her theory that Dante had decided to unload her on Nick. That, by sending Nick to rescue her and then leaving her with Nick he was letting her know he’d dumped her and been kind enough to dump her in Nick’s lap.
That hurt! And it pissed her off, too! She could decide who she wanted to be with without any damned help from an ex!
Strange that the minute she apparently had Dante’s blessing to move on and be with Nick, she became convinced that it was Dante she’d wanted all along!
Actually, she didn’t suppose it was strange. She’d been more drawn to Dante from the first. Not that she wasn’t attracted to Nick. She was! But what she’d felt for Dante had transcended the most passionate feelings she’d experienced in her life before him—or after.
It was just that she thought Nick was the more rational choice for her to make. He was human. They could have an ordinary life—maybe even something above the ordinary—but ‘normal’. What kind of life could she have with a winged alien? How would he fit in? How would they have a family life?
They certainly couldn’t live among her fellow humans! What kind of life would their children be able to have?
She felt a little ill at that thought, because she was pretty sure she’d already fucked that up for her baby. He was going to be half angel and if he took after his father they were never going to be able to have a normal life!
“I know it’s weird and crazy, but … You always feel like, when you love somebody, they couldn’t die without you feeling it. Like … your soul is connected to theirs and you’d just have to know if part of it was missing. You know what I mean?”
Drawn from her own dark thoughts, Claire stared at her sister, Maddie, blankly for a few moments, digesting what she’d said, wondering if she would know if anything happened to Dante. Oddly, and insensibly, comforted by the certainty that she would know if he’d been hurt or worse, killed, she finally made the transition from self-absorption to true awareness and realized Maddie wasn’t focused on her concerns but rather her own.
They had settled in comfortable chairs on the back patio of their little bungalow to watch the sun set. Nick had left them a few days earlier to scout out a more permanent place for them nearer a city.
Because she’d, reluctantly, confessed that she was pregnant.
But then she was already beginning to show. It wasn’t like she would’ve been able to keep it secret a lot longer anyway.
He hadn’t asked who the father was and she damned sure hadn’t volunteered the information.
“I know Robert’s ok,” she said, trying to reassure Maddie. “They would have every reason to take good care of him and no reason at all to harm him. Just think of all that scientific material they stole from the map room! They’re going to be busy for years trying to figure it all out and they need people like Robert—who’s at the top of his field!”
They’d had the same conversation a number of times since they’d first been captured and Claire didn’t think Maddie bel
ieved it anymore now than she had the first time—well, or possibly any less. It made sense. It wasn’t a huge leap. But it was cold comfort for Madelyn and she knew it. If Maddie could just talk to Robert! If they could get any real news about him!
A commotion out front drew their attention before they could pursue the conversation to its conclusion and both of them tensed. Claire got up to go check to see who’d arrived just as Nick appeared around the side of the house.
“Didn’t smell anything coming from the kitchen and figured I’d find you two out here.”
Claire chuckled dutifully. “You didn’t expect to find us in the kitchen?”
Maddie snorted. “Cooking? Playing house? Sorry, but neither Claire nor I are the domestic type.”
Nick grinned. “I noticed. Not much for it myself.” He moved toward Maddie and dropped a newspaper on her lap. “I brought you a present. Read French?”
Maddie glanced from the paper to Nick and then did a double-take and gasped. “Robert!”
“What?” Claire exclaimed, uncertain of whether she should be alarmed or elated from Maddie’s expression.
A broad smile lit up Madelyn’s face. “He’s alright!”
Claire moved closer, trying to read over Maddie’s shoulder. Unfortunately, her French was sketchy. “What is it? Something about a break-through?”
Madelyn looked torn between excitement and fear and disbelief. “He’s being credited with a breakthrough in his field that’s expected to advance space travel by decades.”
“But …. That’s wonderful! Fantastic! All this time you’ve been so worried about him and here’s proof he’s ok!”
Maddie nodded and then forced a smile. “I think I’ll go for a walk and see if I can find some dirt to dig in.”
Dismay flickered through Claire, but Nick stopped her when she would have tried to stop Maddie. She glanced at him questioningly and with a touch of irritation. “She needs some alone time … to digest what’s in that article.”
Exiles Page 13
