The engine was still running with a sickening whine. The cabin of the Jeep filled with the scent of burning oil.
Coughing, I pushed the deflated airbag out of my face and unbuckled my seatbelt. I rubbed my itchy eyes as smoke filled the cab. “Julian?”
“Shh.” He reached over and covered my mouth with his hand.
I blinked, but kept quiet as he took his hand away and turned the engine off. We were surrounded only by the hushed sounds of the drizzly forest, the whoosh of the highway a distant undercurrent.
Then I heard something else, and the hair all over my body bristled. A whistling wind came from the direction of the thick trees on the hillside, a rustle and crack of branches moving with it.
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. All my words choked back down with fear. I grabbed for Julian’s arm, beseeching some explanation for the threat closing in on us.
“Force Agents.” He said it like a curse, and dove with lightning quickness into his pile of weapons in the back of the Jeep.
Petrified to absolute stillness, my ears focused on the sound coming down the hillside in our wake, getting louder. The Grigori. “What do we do?”
Julian shot forward and grabbed me firmly by the shoulders, forcing me to look into his face. “We do whatever we can. If you have to, use your powers.”
“But, I thought—” The rest of my argument was lost as he shook me.
“Forget that. They already found us. Now we have to get out alive. Use whatever you can, Alex. They’re more powerful than Undead, but they’re mortal. All we can do is outlast them.” With that, he thrust a gun into my hand and crooked his finger for me to climb in the back with him. Then he made a sign like he was plugging his nose.
I held my breath and climbed into the back with him.
Julian made me lay down. He stretched out beside me, half covering my body with his. The rain splattered on us through the broken windows. For the first time, I was thankful I didn’t have a heartbeat, because it would have been pounding in my chest, making the whole situation feel even more tense.
The gun was cold and heavy in my grip. I held on to it like a lifeline, rubbing my fingers along the ridges of the handgrip to keep them from freezing stiff with fright. My whole body trembled, and my teeth chattered.
The sounds in the forest stopped. An eerie quietness engulfed us and stretched on for an eternity. And then the top of the Jeep ripped away from above us with a screeching jerk and flew into the trees.
I screamed.
Julian sat up, his gun already firing. He leapt out of the Jeep just as the voices assaulted me again, louder and stronger than they had ever been. Words were discernible this time.
Come with us, they said. You’re one of us. Be one of us.
I wanted to cry out for Julian, but outside of my mind everything was chaos — objects hurtling overhead, gunshots ringing out. The rain fell harder, and the wind whipped at the treetops. Surges of energy assaulted my senses in every conceivable way. All sounds were magnified, there were too many scents, and it was as if I was seeing the world through a webbed haze of auras. I felt blind, deaf, and useless.
When I heard Julian’s howl of pain, my eyes finally focused long enough to see him slam into a nearby tree trunk and fall to the ground. Without thinking, I rolled from the Jeep and stumbled to him. I tipped him onto his back and as soon as I touched him, the voices in my head cut off. My vision cleared, and I could think again.
“Julian,” I said from behind a wash of rain and tears. He was all I had — I couldn’t lose him now.
“We don’t have to hurt him,” a voice said from a few feet away. A woman crouched in the shadows, only slightly older than me, her bobbed blond hair falling to one side as she cocked her head. She reminded me of an owl, with large golden eyes and snowy skin, peering at me from the dark. The aura surrounding her was a swirl of black, scattered with winking diamond sparkles. “If you’ll come with us willingly, we can leave him unharmed.”
A twig snapped behind me. I turned to see another silhouette among the trees over my left shoulder, another starry-cloud aura. My hands shook. I had to swallow twice before I could speak. Julian stirred, but I pressed a hand to his shoulder, willing him to stay down. “What do you want?”
“We want you, Alex,” the first lady answered, her voice light and wispy. It barely reached me over the heavy plopping of raindrops in the soft mud. “We’ve been looking for you.”
“So I’ve heard.”
She blinked at me with her large eyes. I half expected her head to turn around or wings to sprout out of her back. When I reached out with my Undead senses, I heard the man behind me inching closer. I did my best to hang on to my confident mask. The only thing I had going for me at the moment was that they didn’t seem to know what to expect from me. Once they knew I was ready to pee myself, Game Over. “What if I don’t want to go with you?”
“Then we’ll take you by force,” Owl-lady said.
Right. I had been expecting an answer like that. Think, Alex.
“Enough talking, Sandra,” a gruff voice called out from the shadows at my back.
We both ignored him. She never took her eyes from mine. I could feel her trying to reach into my mind, and I could also sense her confusion at not being able to. I was merely thankful. Whenever I touched Julian, I was safe from the voices and more in control of my own thoughts. One more reason they weren’t taking me anywhere away from him.
Julian jolted awake beside me, but he didn’t move otherwise. Very slowly, I dropped from my kneeling position to sit beside him, pressing the gun in my hand between us until he grabbed it. And then I stalled.
“Why do you want me?”
“You’re one of us.” Sandra narrowed her eyes at me as if she weren’t quite sure of that. “We only want to take you home.”
The other Agent shifted impatiently behind me, but Sandra fixed him in place with a subtle glance. She was obviously the one in charge. All I had to do was keep her talking.
“I’m an Undead too. Did you know that?”
She answered with a serene smile. “We know everything about you, Alex — even more than you do.”
Terrific. I held my hand out in mock innocence. “Then you already know what I’m going to say.”
Sandra’s head tilted the other way as she regarded me, and it was plain on her face she didn’t, and that bothered her. Her hesitation stretched just long enough for Julian to yank me down beside him and fire the gun through where my head had been, straight at the man at the edge of the clearing.
Sandra’s enraged shriek sliced through the air. “Kade!”
The man fell back, half of his face blown off. The other half hung agape in permanent surprise. I watched it happen in slow motion — a splatter of black-red blood in the dark, his pale hands reaching at air as his body deflated to the ground.
Sandra growled as she rushed us. She threw her hands out in front of her.
I did the same, on reflex.
She lifted from the ground and flew through the air in a high arc, a scream tearing from her throat. On the way down, nearly thirty yards away, she hit some tree branches. Her scream was cut off by a loud smack and crack that made me shudder. Her body stayed down, and the stars in her aura blinked out in unison.
The ground spun underneath me in reverse, and I bent over and puked. I waited for the voices, but they never came. Before I could even take a breath, Julian was pulling me up by the elbow. He bee-lined for the wrecked Jeep, grabbed his duffle bag arsenal, and dragged me up the steep thicket-covered hillside towards the highway.
I followed in a strange sort of shock that left me my motor functions but kept me oddly detached from everything else. Glancing over my shoulder as we climbed, what I could see of the forest behind us looked like a battleground, strewn with rubble and torn to pieces.
Down there were two dead bodies. One of them was dead because of me. I had killed someone with a simple gesture. I hadn’t even meant to.
>
What have I become?
We reached the top of the muddy slope to find a car parked on the shoulder as if someone had pulled off to the side of the road to use the bushes. Aside from the dented guardrail, there was no sign of our vehicle, or our accident. No sirens, no onlookers.
“But…there were witnesses. The other cars…” I fumbled for words as I looked around at the highway. Cars rushed by, oblivious.
“They’re psychics, Alex.” Julian jerked me forward as if he expected that statement to explain everything. He opened the passenger door of the abandoned grey sedan and shoved me inside. “They don’t leave witnesses.”
“They killed them?” I gulped, feeling the nausea rise again as he settled into the driver’s seat.
“Probably just wiped their minds and created an illusion.” He grunted with pain as he reached for his seat belt. He started our second stolen car in as many hours and didn’t look back as he pulled onto the road.
Julian drove like the devil himself was at our heels, and I sat in stunned silence the whole time, wondering how I was supposed to function in society when a flick of my wrist could send someone soaring to their death.
How could anyone possibly want me around? My powers terrified me. And now Julian had a whole army of Force Agents on his ass and a totally ignorant one clinging to him. Why was he still trying to help me? Maybe he was crazy after all. My mind felt like mush. Globular masses bobbed at the surface, but no coherent thoughts could bubble out, except one.
It doesn’t matter where I go — I’ll never be safe.
We arrived in Seattle just before sunrise. Julian didn’t speak, and neither did I. I could barely keep my eyes open. My exhaustion stemmed from more than just the sun cresting the horizon. Your mind can only reel with guilt and shock for so long before completely shutting down.
I took little notice of our surroundings as Julian guided us through the rain-slicked streets. We parked down a narrow non-descript alley. A few minutes later we were standing in front of a red-painted steel door holding all of our possessions, which consisted of some books, clothes, and a whole lot of guns.
Julian pounded on the door, and we both huddled under his coat waiting for it to open. My Undead Knight murmured something in French to the man who answered, and he beckoned us inside. A waft of warm air smelling strongly of incense overtook me, and I collapsed into Julian’s arms.
I stirred awake sometime later, tucked into a soft bed and covered with thick blankets. My eyes shot open and I jerked up, forgetting where I was. Julian wrapped me in his arms, pulling me close.
“Sleep,” he murmured, smoothing my hair with one hand. I eased back against him and slowly relaxed my tense muscles. “You’re safe.”
Consoled by the warmth of his body against mine, I let myself believe him, even though I knew better. “They won’t ever stop looking for me, will they?”
“No.”
The Grigori had more reason to hunt me now than ever. Even when I’d shacked up with one of their enemies, they had tried to play nice, to reason and bargain with me. My answer had sent a pretty clear screw you.
I thought about Sandra, whom I had killed within five minutes of meeting. She said she wanted to take me home. What did she mean by that? I didn’t have a home anymore. But she’d said she wouldn’t hurt me, and then I had killed her. She would have killed Julian without hesitating. They wanted me, but he was just another Undead, one that was in their way. I had saved him, like he had done for me. That didn’t make it right, but it made it easier. I wondered if I would do the same again — kill to save someone I cared about?
The vision of her shocked face haunted me, her wide amber eyes as she flew towards her death…my fault.
“We’ll always have to fight from now on,” I said into the darkness.
“It doesn’t matter.” Julian’s answer was soft, but held a sharp, definitive edge. “I’ll protect you.”
Despite the fact that I knew next to nothing about him, I didn’t doubt he meant it. But he couldn’t protect me from what I was. How long could we run? How hard could he fight? We were just two people, and I was more of a handicap than a help. Both the Cloak and the Grigori wanted at least one of us dead. The offer to leave Julian unharmed had probably expired with Sandra’s last breath. I didn’t know what the psychics wanted from me exactly, but if I had to choose between torture and being swallowed into that wave of dark whispers…I’d take my chances with Option C: run, fight, repeat.
Only, what was I supposed to do with these powers? I had no control, and every time I used them, we would be on the run again.
It didn’t matter, Julian said. I didn’t think that was true, but I trusted him nonetheless. I sighed and pressed back against his solid presence. Without him, I would be lost. Despite all the other confusing feelings he stirred up, I owed him a debt of gratitude. Asking him to keep risking his life didn’t seem like fair repayment. Why was he so willing to lay everything on the line for me? Why would he be willing to spend the rest of his very long life hiding and fighting? That part I didn’t trust. In the back of my jumbled thoughts, something didn’t add up.
But I had no choice — he was all I had. What if I lost him too?
For the first time since I’d died, I felt well and truly dead. An aching emptiness yawned in my chest, and thoughts of my uncertain future chilled my skin. Only Julian’s body nestled up to mine kept me from trembling, or screaming. I didn’t want to let it, but sleep finally pulled me down again, with a faint whisper lingering on my lips.
“I’m sorry.”
Chapter Eight
The room I woke in was small but clean, a perfect square with no windows and only one door. It would have felt like a cell, except for the decadent furniture. Auburn and plum shades of silk curtains clung to the walls, interspersed with candle sconces. A thick, lushly appointed mattress sank into the teak floor in one corner. In the other, a tile sink beckoned. I stretched and rose to my feet.
The only sign Julian had been there at all was his duffle bag, bulging with implements of death and staring at me from another corner of the room.
I washed my hands and face, then, anxious to find Julian, slipped on the sandals someone had lined up neatly along the wall. I chuckled softly to myself that even in a state of emergency, Julian was tidy. As I reached for the door, someone knocked from the other side. I opened it and peeked out.
A young blond woman with wide green eyes and a quick smile stood in the hallway. She didn’t seem surprised to see me, and showed herself into the room carrying a bundle of clothes and towels.
“Hi, I’m Dawn.” Her voice held a warm, gentle twang, and I couldn’t help smiling back at her. “I brought you some fresh clothes and some towels and things. It’s Alex, right?”
“Right.” I shook her offered hand and then nodded at the pile of clothes. “Thank you.”
She smiled wider, bouncing on her toes. “Oh, sure. I’m right down the hall, if you need anything else.”
“Um, do you know where the guy I came with is?”
“Julian? Of course.” She winked, though it seemed like an unconscious gesture, and I liked her more for it. “He left about an hour ago. Said to tell you he’d be back later.”
“Thanks.” I frowned. I’d heard that line before. Would Julian really just leave me, after assuring me he wouldn’t? I wanted to think not, and yet here I was: waiting for a guy I barely knew, with no idea where here was.
“Don’t worry, hon.” Dawn patted me on the shoulder. “He’ll be back. Julian keeps his word.”
I nodded, giving her a reflexive smile. So far, I had been selling Julian short, letting my issues and past color my opinion of him. Maybe he really was coming back. “Thanks for the clothes. I really would love a shower.”
“You betcha. The bathroom is two doors down on the left. Make yourself at home.” Dawn waved as she backed out of the room.
I picked up the bundle she’d brought and followed her out. I couldn’t tell if I was in a
really nice hotel or some sort of high-end institution. Was this what they called a safe house? Everything was nice, earthy with a touch of luxury. But there were no windows. My instincts told me we were underground, but I had no sense of direction. I found the bathroom where Dawn had promised.
I slid thankfully into a hot shower and washed away the toil of the past day and a half with expensive fragrant soap. My body was pain free, and the slash of bruises across my chest from the car accident had pretty much vanished. It felt strange, with the wreck and battle of the night before so fresh in my memory. I could still re-live the pain, like a phantom of what it should be…I just didn’t feel it anymore.
I wiped the mirror when I got out and stared at my reflection. Other than a little tired, I looked normal. It felt wrong, like an illusion. On the inside, I was battered and completely worn out. Exhausted. Bereft. But the girl staring back at me was just the image of calm.
“Go figure,” I muttered as I combed out my hair.
Women’s clothing — what a novelty! I pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt that were used, but clean, and much closer to my size. I bundled Julian’s borrowed sweats into a tight ball, but kept the sandals. The hallway was empty and quiet as I slinked back to my room, and I decided the next thing on the agenda was some exploring. Getting clean and dressed had lightened my mood considerably. Plus, I didn’t want to be sitting around waiting for Julian to show up — I’d been that girl too many times before. Time to get proactive.
My plan stalled when I found a boy sitting cross-legged on one of the floor cushions in my room. I looked around, thinking I had taken a wrong turn, but there was Julian’s duffle bag of pain, and the bed I’d just vacated. “Uh…hi.”
“You must be Alex?” My unexpected guest stood, and I saw he wasn’t a boy. He was over six feet of slender muscle when he unfolded himself from the floor, and his voice sounded deep and manly, though he still had a smooth baby face.
Cloak of Deceit: An Alex Moore Novel Page 9
