The Warrior

by Rebecca Royce

  Bending over, I grabbed the backpack I stored at my feet. Keith had given us both five sleeping pills in case we had to rest during the day while the other one drove. I hated the stupid things. I always woke up groggy, and they made me have weird dreams. Even knowing all that, I decided unconsciousness was better than sitting in silence as Chad silently fumed.

  As I swallowed my pill, I sat back in the seat and waited for it to take effect. It had been a few months since I’d taken one, and I’d hated it then, too.

  I closed my eyes as I felt my lids getting heavier. There was no good way to sleep in the car except to simply close my eyes and do it. I was sure I would wake up with a stiff neck.

  I think that was my last coherent thought, because the next thing I knew, I was standing on a cliff as I looked down at a rushing river below. I wore a long black gown that kicked up with the wind. I’ve never worn a dress in my life, so I knew I had to be asleep and dreaming. It was an odd feeling—surreal—that I wasn’t awake and totally aware of that fact at the same time.

  But then it didn’t matter that I dreamt, because the dream moved forward without my consent. I bent over, knowing I needed to climb down the cliff and get in the river. If I didn’t, it would be too late for me to swim away. The water was going to move on without me.

  A hand grabbed my shoulder and I whirled around. Chad stood in front of me, dressed in a suit, except for his bare feet. Looking down at the strange outfit, I noticed that my own toes, with red nail polish on them, were also bare. The grass felt cool against my exposed feet.

  “Are you going to go down there or stay here with me?”

  I had no idea what he talked about. “I don’t understand, Chad.”

  He nodded. “That’s what I thought.” He looked down at the river and then back up at the sky where the sun looked like it was about to set. “It’s time for me to go, Rachel.”

  “Go where? Aren’t we supposed to be going to Liberty?”

  He cocked his head to the side. “It’s too late for that, Rachel. I’m sorry. I would have loved you forever.”

  I jerked awake, tears streaming down my face and gasping for air. The car had come to a halt and Chad’s arm was on my shoulder.

  “Rachel, are you okay?”

  I rubbed at my face as I tried to take deep breaths. My heart raced hard. “I had a bad dream.”

  Well, it wasn’t a bad dream, not really. I lived a bad dream. Monsters chased me in real life. All I had dreamt about had been an odd scene between me and Chad on a cliff where we wore dressy clothes. Why was I so freaked out?

  The car wasn’t moving. I guess that meant we were parked.

  Chad pulled me into his arms over the center console until my legs draped over the center console. Our faces were close. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  I shook my head. “No, it wasn’t anything, really. For some reason it felt kind of ominous.”

  “It’s because you took that stupid pill. They always make me feel like I’m going on crazy adventures.” He rubbed the side of my face. “I was trying to wake you for five minutes.”

  “I’m sorry.” I sniffed. “I guess I was really out of it.”

  “No.” He touched the end of my nose with his index finger. “I’m sorry. I never should have said anything about your father. I mean, whatever happened, it made you who you are, so I have no business judging his decisions. And….”

  I put my hand over his mouth. “Stop. I overreacted. I was exhausted. It was nothing. You didn’t really say anything.”

  He kissed my hand and I smiled. This was better. This was so much nicer than fighting with him. What was wrong with me anyway? Why had I jumped down his throat?

  “What you said earlier—about none of us coming to see you—you’re right. I don’t know why we didn’t. It was like you came to us every day and you were part of our family. I would watch you with Tia or Micah and then you would leave. We would miss you, but then you’d come back. It never occurred to us to visit, or that you would want us to.”

  His chocolate brown eyes bore into mine, and I wanted to lose myself in them. But then we were moving our heads closer together until his warm lips pressed into my own. I closed my eyes. Wow. The little pecks Chad had managed to give me in the past were nothing like this.

  We were alone in the car, just the two of us pressed against each other with our body heat fogging the windows. His hands were everywhere, and I knew I had to stop him before this got out of hand.

  I pulled my head back to stare at him. Grabbing both his cheeks in my hands, I finally found my voice again. “Chad, I have to tell you something.”

  He breathed hard, his eyes heated. “What?”

  “I’m not ready for any kind of sexual relationship yet. I’m just not. I never have been and I need, I don’t know, time and no pressure.”

  He squirmed beneath me. “What exactly does that mean?”

  “It means I have every intention of keeping my clothes on for the time being.”

  He sat up a little straighter, his hands under my shirt touching the bare skin on my back. “You didn’t, you know, do it with the Werewolf?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “No. I didn’t, how did you put it? Do it with the Werewolf. I kept my clothes on with him, too.”

  “I guess I kind of thought, because you got so upset about your break up with him, that you must have been having sex.”

  I shook my head as I sighed. Why was I surprised? Guys were always guys, weren’t they? Even the ones who were super smart and amazingly talented still thought about things like they had the emotional capacity of a two-year-old.

  “I loved him, but I didn’t sleep with him. He was the first person I gave my heart to.”

  Chad pulled his hands out from under my shirt and placed them on my thighs. My skin felt warm under my pants where his hands lay and my back still tingled where he’d touched me.

  “That’s not true. Your first love was my brother. Or have you forgotten about poor Micah already?”

  I laughed because his tone was light and it seemed the thing to do. “That was different. Micah was a fantasy, not love. A crush, I guess would be the right word.”

  Chad nodded. “So no kissing then?”

  “Oh.” I shook my head. “I didn’t say that.” My cheeks heated up as I realized how silly I sounded, how anxious I must seem for more kissing. But Chad’s grin told me he liked what I said.

  “So kissing is fine, but for right now, I leave your clothes where they are, and I don’t pressure you. Those are the rules.”

  I nodded. “In a nutshell.”

  “Okay, I can live with that if you promise me you’re mine. No more thinking of Wolf-boy off in the distance and no more of whatever it is between you and Deacon. You send the guy from the cage off to find a different girl.”

  I leaned over to kiss him on the lips. “Do you think I would be doing this with you if I was involved with someone else?”

  “No.” He kissed me back and my heart fluttered. “But I want the reassurance just the same.”

  “Fine, I promise, no one else. You’re it, Chad. My heart, it belongs to you.”

  The SUV jerked abruptly to the right as it toppled over, hitting the ground with a loud bang that deafened my ears. I think I screamed but I’m not sure because I couldn’t hear myself. All I know is that something had happened to us while we’d been foolishly getting mushy with each other in the driver’s seat.

  And now we were under attack. My ears rang as I tried to ignore the high-pitched sound resonating through my eardrums. None of my senses that warned of monster attacks were going off at all. But, of course, I had been wrong before. I hadn’t known Jason and his family were Wolves based on any physical alert.

  Chad banged on the car door with his legs. He was strong, and it budged enough that I was able to jam my shoulder into it, making it fly open. We climbed over each other until we were outside.

  My heart raced as my feet hit the solid ground. The pain in my ears
was excruciating, and the ringing I heard would drive me crazy if I let it. I couldn’t hear anything else, which would have been terrible in better situations than this one. Now, it might prove to be a lethal issue.

  Chad shoved me behind him as a group of people emerged from the woods around us.

  I did a quick head count of our new visitors and stopped when the number reached thirty. We were outmanned, and they clearly had some kind of weapon that had taken out our car. The ringing in my eardrums lessoned and now I could make out the sound of the wind swishing around us.

  “Rachel,” Chad shouted, and I knew his ears must be ringing, too. He never would speak this loudly in a fight situation. “Are you getting any monster sense off these guys?”

  “No.”

  I pushed at him until he let me stay next to him. I appreciated the gesture of protection but I was a trained level One Warrior. I wasn’t just some girl he needed to take care of.

  I shouted so he could hear me. “But then I’ve been wrong about Wolves in the past.”

  He digested this news with a flinch. Finally, he nodded. “I’m not getting Wolves.”

  “We’re not Wolves.”

  A man stepped forward from the group. He looked human to me. Tall and dark-skinned, he was completely bald and I realized, too slowly for my liking, huge. The fact that I hadn’t placed the fact that he was well over six-foot-five-inches tall first meant that perhaps my brains had gotten a little jostled in the crash. Right now, I couldn’t seem to process much beyond the ringing in my ears and the desire to sit down.

  Chad grabbed my hand and squeezed it tightly as he spoke to the man. “What do you want from us?”

  The stranger pointed at the car. “What is that thing? How did you get out from the inside of it?”

  I swallowed before I spoke. “It’s a car. It’s electronic. I think. We turn it on and drive it. It’s a machine.”

  Whispers started around us and got increasingly loud. I didn’t like this, not one bit.

  A tick started in Chad’s jaw. “Who are you people, and how did you knock over our vehicle?”

  The man who had spoken to us regarded us silently before he spoke again. “We have weapons.”

  “Obviously.”

  I squeezed Chad’s hand, hoping it would make him take the attitude out of his voice. We were in deep-deep trouble. I really didn’t need him to get macho right now.

  “Look….” I let go of Chad’s hand and stepped forward. “My name is Rachel and this is Chad. We’re on our way to Liberty, the habitat. We didn’t think there were any other habitats around. Where do you all live?”

  A woman stepped out to stand next to the huge man who had spoken to us. She was small, with a full head of grey hair and skin that looked like sandpaper. “We don’t have a habitat. I don’t even know what that is. You use funny words.”

  The woman spit on the ground and all of the others followed suit, spitting at the dirt.

  “Um….” I tried to focus on something other than the spitting. It was hard. “Where do you live?”

  “Like we’re going to tell you where we live.” The woman laughed in between every word.

  Okay. I’ll admit it. I was scared. I faced Vampires, Werewolves, and a drunken father on a daily basis. I had a new boyfriend I wasn’t convinced was going to be all that cool about the no-sex thing and a Werewolf ex-boyfriend who had destroyed my heart. I had rescued a room full of humans about to be used as Vampire food from cages and brought them miles through the snow to Genesis.

  And nothing had ever freaked me out like these humans.

  Something was very, very off here.

  Chad finally spoke and when he did, he sounded less like the crazed-kill-someone guy who had made me nervous earlier and more like the cool-headed-handle-anything guy I saw at Genesis.

  “How do you live out in the open? How do you fight the monsters?”

  They gasped and the tall man stepped forward. “Why would we want to fight them? We worship the Gods. We feed them and they take care of us.”

  I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek to keep from screaming. I’d thought things were bad, but once again I’d learned a lesson. When you think things couldn’t get worse, they almost always do.

  We had been ambushed by monster-worshiping human beings who hadn’t known what a car was. We were so royally screwed.

  Chapter Six

  Before I knew what was happening, the huge man who had spoken to us first hauled me forward. As if he’d done it a hundred times, he tied my arms behind my back. Behind me, Chad cursed and struggled against the men who restrained him.

  I suppose I could have fought too, but it just seemed pointless. They were going to win. There were more of them than there were of us, and they weren’t monsters, so we didn’t have the advantage of our monster-destroying genes kicking in. When it came to fighting humans, I had a lot of training, but I was still a five-foot ten-inch woman, and the man holding me had at least a hundred pounds and six inches on me.

  If I was going to get us out of here, it was going to be a cerebral victory, not a physical one. I bit down on my lip and wished I spent more time paying attention in strategy class. Once again, here I was, completely unprepared for what happened to me.

  Oh well. It might be a new set of circumstances, but at least it was still the same old me. I had one second to realize how weird it must be that in this life-threatening situation I was thinking these kinds of thoughts. Then someone shoved a bag over my head.

  I sucked in a hard breath as my calm fled and I tried not to lose it. Turns out, I’m claustrophobic. I never had been before, but hey, in the last year I’d been locked in a cage, nearly killed by countless Vampires, and put in jail for a crime I didn’t commit. It was, I suppose, completely normal that I would start to develop issues. I just wasn’t sure why I had to develop them right now.

  I struggled against my restraints. All thoughts of going quietly and using my brain to out-think them flew out into the woods. I needed to get this bag off my head. Immediately. If not sooner.

  Life became, for me, nothing but one agonizing second after another trapped inside the sack swallowing my head. I could hear Chad behind me screaming something to me as I gasped for air and struggled. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t make out anything he said. He might as well have been background noise for all the sense he made.

  I wished the pixie tattooed on my back could have warned me what was going on, because I had no idea I was about to get whacked on the head. I had two seconds to gasp at the excruciating pain before the world went black.

  I woke up with a raging headache.

  Wow.

  I’d been whacked once before but it hadn’t hurt like this. This sucked. Big time. I blinked and was relieved to discover that my head was uncovered. Turning my head to the left, I saw that Chad sat next to me, his arms bound, eyes closed. He leaned against a wall behind us. Not sure if I could trust my eyesight for a second, I finally decided I wasn’t crazy and his face was, in fact, swollen and beaten up. My heart fell to my chest before it raced like I’d been outside running.

  Glancing around as far as I could see, I was happy to see we were alone even as my mounting terror about Chad drove nails into my stomach.

  “Chad.” I called out his name a few times before his eyes opened. His smile lit up my life. Maybe it was stupid, maybe I had no idea about anything, but I couldn’t help but think if he could smile like that—a big toothy, happy grin—then he’d be okay, eventually.

  My hands were still tied behind my back so I couldn’t reach out and hold him. I’d wasted so much time with Chad being hung up on Jason. Why couldn’t I have gotten over Jason earlier? Then Chad and I could have been together at home instead of finding each other just seconds before being assaulted by these strange people. My eyes filled with tears. I couldn’t help it.

  What had I ever done to deserve a life like this? Had I pissed someone off before I was born?

  “Now, none of that, Rachel.
Not while I’m tied up and can’t touch you.” He scooted closer to me.

  Our hands were both tied, but we could still sit side-by-side if we maneuvered ourselves properly. His body heat felt nice and I tried to drown in it instead of focusing on the direness of this situation. Sniffing, I managed to get a hold of my pathetic tears, for the moment, at least.

  “What happened?”

  He raised an eyebrow and winced. “You mean to my face? I went a little crazy when they whacked you and they took turns making me sorry for my temper.”

  I sniffed. “Are you okay?”

  “No.” He grinned. “But I’ll live, which considering the circumstances is the best we can ask for.”

  A sudden coldness filled my body, and I closed my eyes. I knew what the chill meant. I was surprised it had taken so long to find me: Vampires.

  Chad groaned. “I’ve been plagued with the Vampire sense since I got here.” I opened my eyes to regard Chad’s passive face. “Did you only feel it now?”

  “Maybe the whack to the head screwed with my Vampire senses.” I bit down on my lip. “What good will I be if I can’t sense them early anymore?”

  I could hear it in my voice. The tears were back to the surface threatening to spill again.

  Chad turned his head to kiss my temple. “Maybe you’re hurt and not functioning at one hundred percent. And by the way, even if you never sense another Vampire from a greater distance than the rest of us, you are still one of the best Warriors—one of the best people—I’ve ever known.”

  It took me a minute before I could speak because I wanted to get control of the tears in my eyes before I continued. If Chad could be brave looking like he’d fallen out of the tallest tree and landed on his head, I could manage not to make another scene. I’d already done enough freaking out when they put the bag on my head.

  Finally, I could smile. “You’re only saying that because you’re in love with me.”

  He sighed. “I am in love with you, but it doesn’t make it any less true.”