Violently yanking the plum-shaped yellow fruit from the low-hanging boughs of a camu camu tree as if it had personally offended him, Hawk mused over what his strategy should be. Obviously he needed a plan to move forward; he couldn’t just march ahead blindly, allowing his emotions to take charge. What he needed was distance, but that was an impossibility in their current circumstances.
Physical distance is an impossibility. But emotional distance . . .
Right. Emotional distance. Keep the walls up. Don’t talk about anything personal. Stop wondering what was going on in that mind of hers. Don’t look at her, either, he chastised himself. Every time his gaze lingered too long on that incredible mouth, that fiery hair he’d gripped fistfuls of as he’d shoved himself deep inside her—
Hawk stilled, closed his eyes, and hissed an aggravated breath through his teeth.
This was going to be harder than he thought.
By the time Hawk returned half an hour later, Jack was in much better control of herself. She’d dried her face, combed her fingers through her hair, and smoothed her wrinkled clothing; and she was sitting with her back against the trunk, legs crossed, with what she hoped was a cool, unreadable expression on her face.
Hawk was carrying an enormous, glossy monstera leaf, the scalloped edges gathered in one fist, center bulging. He set it in her lap.
“Eat as much as you can,” he said curtly. “You’ll need the energy. We won’t be stopping for another break until late tonight.”
Jack looked down at the big leaf unfurling between her legs, and gasped in surprise.
Orange and red and green and yellow, smooth skinned and freckled and shiny and rough, the variety of fruit and berries he’d gathered was astonishing. There were passion fruit, figs, mangoes, and prickly pear; there were bananas, Brazil nuts, and purple-blue acai berries still on the vine. There was a dozen more varieties she’d never seen before, all of them unblemished, as if he’d selected only the most perfect specimens and left the rest to the birds.
“This is amazing!” Jack inspected the bumpy skin of a canary-yellow star fruit with awe. “Do you know how much this stuff costs in a grocery store? What’s that one? And that?”
Hawk took a seat across from her. “There are more than three thousand different kinds of fruit in the rainforest. The vast majority of them are unknown in the Western world.” He pointed to each in turn. “That’s chirimoya, and the small red ones that look like cherries are capulin.”
Jack’s mouth began to water. Her stomach grumbled its discontent.
“Okay, well . . . here.” Eager to dig in, she lifted the leaf and its contents from her lap, spread it on the hammock between them, and picked up a fig. “I’m a good eater, so you better dig in before it’s all gone.”
“No.”
Surprised, she glanced up at him. He shook his head and gestured to the food.
“That’s all for you. I already ate.”
“Oh.” They stared at one another. “What did you eat?”
One corner of his mouth quirked. “I doubt you’d want to know.”
Of course. He was a carnivore. Her appetite vanished when she pictured the poor little animal that had been his breakfast, and was now being digested inside his stomach.
“Well.” She cleared her throat. “Thank you for not making me have what you had.”
“I knew you wouldn’t be interested. Even if I’d cooked it.”
When she looked up at him, laughter glimmered in the depth of his emerald eyes.
He’d eaten it—whatever it was—raw? Ugh. Nasty times one thousand.
“How do you know I wouldn’t have been interested in . . .” Her nose wrinkled. “Meat?”
He lifted one dark brow. “Generally vegetarians aren’t.”
She frowned at him and asked, “How did you know I’m a vegetarian?”
Hawk looked away and for a moment Jack thought he wouldn’t answer. He stared off into the canopy of trees, a muscle in his jaw jumping. “Veggie burger,” he said, his voice empty. “No cheese.”
How he’d remembered that small detail from the night they’d met became insignificant compared to the grating realization that this macho, George of the Jungle carnivore probably thought her an idiot for choosing not to eat meat.
Something he had in common with her father.
Anger began its familiar march across her nerve endings, advancing with breakneck speed.
Jack said acidly, “Yes, I think it’s unethical to consume sentient beings. Especially when there are so many other choices that don’t involve the systematic torture and murder of millions of animals every year. But I can see how someone like you wouldn’t get that, what with your big fangs and all.”
Hawk turned his attention back to her, and it was so focused and menacing it was like being caught in the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle.
“You’re lecturing me about ethics? Hypocrite.”
Blood rushed to Jack’s face, but before she could respond, Hawk continued.
“I happen to agree with you that the way your species deals with feeding itself is disgusting. My species, on the other hand—the one you so despise—has no need for slaughterhouses and meat-packing factories and fast-food restaurants that serve poison packaged as food. We consume what we need, and no more. We hunt when we’re hungry, not for sport or entertainment, and we respect the lives we take—lives, I might add, that were spent the way Nature intended. Outdoors. Not in a cage, awaiting a painful, horrible death. So don’t talk to me about ethics, Red. Your entire race is unethical.”
He shot to his feet, turned his back on her, and went to stand at the far edge of the hammock of boughs he’d constructed using nothing but his bare hands. He raked those strong hands through his hair, and stood there like that for several long moments, fingers clenched, back rigid, silent, and quite perceptibly seething.
Jack watched him with the sinking feeling she wasn’t on the right side of this argument.
Her anger fizzling, she looked down at the food he’d brought her, and sighed.
What did it matter if she’d offended him? He’d tricked her. He’d used her. She should be the one filled with righteous outrage, but somehow it had gotten so turned around that she felt . . . what? Sorry? Guilty? Why should she feel guilty for upsetting him? She hated him!
Jack stared at the muscled, rigid lines of his back. I do hate him . . . right?
She pinched the bridge of her nose between two fingers, realizing that what she felt for him wasn’t what could accurately be called hate, and that was unacceptable.
When did all her convictions go squishy in the middle? Why did this man/not-man continue to confuse and confound her?
More important: Why on Earth did she care?
Too many questions, not enough answers. Jack supposed she could go round and round with herself like this for days, without getting anywhere. In the interim, it seemed there was only one right thing to do.
“Hawk,” she said softly. When he didn’t turn or respond, she said his name again.
“What?” The word was hard, wintry cold.
“I apologize.”
Slowly, he lowered his hands to his hips. His head turned a fraction, and he stood there in silent profile, waiting, a breeze ruffling his dark hair. The rising light gleamed soft off his bare back and broad shoulders, and she thought he looked like a pagan god in a sky kingdom of green and gold and sapphire blue.
“That wasn’t nice of me. That comment about your . . . um . . . fangs.”
Wishing he’d put his shirt back on so she wouldn’t have to wrestle with the compelling desire to ogle his spectacular physique, Jack dropped her gaze to the fruit. “My dad always ridiculed me for not eating meat, and it sort of felt like . . . like you were doing the same thing.”
After a moment, in a voice slightly less frigid than before,
Hawk said, “I wasn’t.”
For some reason, Jack actually believed him. She said, “Okay,” and sat there with her shoulders rounded in a posture of defeat, wondering if the world would ever make sense again.
She heard a low, vexed exhalation, the sound of feet brushing leaves. Then he was standing before her once more. He crouched down and put a knuckle under her chin, forcing her to meet his eyes.
He said solemnly, “We’re not all like Caesar. We’re not all bad. Most of us just want to be left alone to live our lives in peace.”
Jack whispered, “Ditto.”
Hawk dropped his hand from her face and nodded, and in the span of one moment to the next, it felt as if they’d come to some sort of silent agreement. A subtle change took place; there was a tacit understanding that they were no longer enemies . . . but neither were they friends.
What exactly they were was a subject Jack wasn’t inclined to investigate.
Turning her attention to the lovely array of fruit presented to her by this maddening, confusing, beautiful predator she was so determined to hate but unfortunately didn’t, Jack selected a dusky fig, pear-shaped and perfect, and began to eat.
They made better time through the verdant maze of the rainforest than Hawk had anticipated, primarily because Jacqueline was in incredible shape. Her endurance was remarkable, matched by surprising sure-footedness and that stoic resistance to uttering anything resembling a complaint.
To be fair, she wasn’t saying much of anything at all.
After she’d shocked him—again—by apologizing for her snide remark about his fangs, there had been a moment when Hawk had felt certain they’d reached some sort of new understanding. But she’d retreated from it like a snail curling back into its shell, and had barely spoken a word to him in the two days since.
Considering his conviction to keep his emotional distance in spite of their forced proximity, he should’ve been grateful. But gratitude wasn’t the word he’d use to describe his feelings about the silence that stretched between them. No. It was closer to raw discomfort, paired with a gnawing compulsion to ask her again who Garrett was.
He guessed therein lay the key that would unlock the thousand closed doors she kept around her heart. Though he knew he should let them stay closed, finding out what made her tick was like an itch he needed to scratch.
Maybe when he had all the pieces to her puzzle, the itch would be satisfied, and he could finally leave it be.
So when she started asking him questions—tentatively posed, as if both fearing and needing the answers—Hawk abandoned his prior game of tit for tat and simply gave her straightforward answers.
“How many of . . . you . . . are there, where we’re going?”
He held a thick, low-hanging branch aside for her, waiting as she passed beneath it. They were deep in the ancient heart of the forest now; everything was a tangle of roots and trees and fast-running streams, cloaked in humidity, teeming with an opus of birdsong. The occasional low rumble of thunder shivered the canopy high above, and, as it did most afternoons at this time, it had begun softly to rain.
“I couldn’t give you an exact number, but it’s probably quadrupled over the last three months.”
“Why’s that?”
He released the branch and moved ahead of her, careful to point out a log, on which she might twist an ankle, half buried in leaf litter. She fell into step behind him as he led them up a gently sloping hill, the trees above dripping water onto their heads.
“The other colonies have been evacuated here.”
“Other colonies?”
He stopped abruptly and turned to her. She halted and stood eagerly awaiting his answer while brushing tendrils of hair, mermaid damp and curling, off her forehead.
“Who, what, when, where, and why,” he said, debating. “Ever the reporter, aren’t you?”
A wry quirk of her lips. “Don’t forget ‘how.’ ”
Ah yes, as in, how much should he tell her? He wondered what Alejandro would have to say about him divulging this kind of detailed information to a woman who wrote for one of the world’s largest newspapers, then decided that Alejandro could go straight to hell. If he didn’t want humans knowing Ikati business, he shouldn’t have come up with this stupid plan in the first place.
“Five total, including mine. But only three of the other four have relocated here.” He turned and began to trudge ahead. She followed, right on his heels.
“Why hasn’t the fourth one relocated?”
“Because they’re ruled by a group of unusually stubborn males, that’s why.”
“So you—your kind—are ruled by groups of males?”
He chuckled. “No. Until recently, as a matter of fact, each colony was ruled by a single Alpha, chosen by Bloodline or the winner of a ritual power challenge. The males of the—” Hawk almost blurted out “Roman colony,” but caught himself in time. It would be sheer stupidity to give away specific locations. “The colony ruled by the group of stubborn males is an anomaly. Their Alpha was killed, and his personal retinue of guards decided to rule as a united council instead of selecting a new Alpha. But that’s not the norm for the Ikati. We’re very hierarchical. Something like your military, with everyone having specific positions and orders coming down from the top. We’re not a species prone to democracy,” he added sourly.
“You said ‘until recently.’ What happened recently?”
Sharp as a tack. No wonder she made a good reporter.
“Recently,” Hawk drawled, ducking under a tangle of vines hanging down from the thick stand of trees that flanked them, “we crowned a half-Blood Queen with a fondness for more . . . progressive ideals.”
“What’s a half-Blood?”
“A crossbreed. Half human, half Ikati.”
Jack stopped dead in her tracks.
He turned to look at her, and she was staring at him in utter astonishment, her eyes popped so wide he could see white all around her irises.
“Yes, we can breed with you,” he said in response to her obvious shock. “And to answer to your next question: no. There aren’t many half-Bloods. It’s forbidden for us to mate with humans, as a matter of fact, but it does occasionally happen. Doing so is punishable by death, however. Actually, strike that,” he amended, thinking of the Roman colony who had an entire caste of half-Blood soldiers bred by the murdered Alpha. “The one colony I mentioned that’s ruled by the stubborn males?”
Her head bobbed.
“Their dead Alpha didn’t see any problem with mating with humans.” Hawk’s voice turned dry. “He didn’t see any problem doing a lot of forbidden things. Then again, he didn’t know they were forbidden. Not that he’d have cared,” he added as an afterthought, and turned and began walking again, knowing Jacqueline would follow, which she did.
“Why didn’t he know? Why wouldn’t he have cared? Can the half-Bloods do what you do? You know, turn into a . . . a . . .”
“Panther?” he supplied when she faltered into silence.
At her small, hesitant sound of acknowledgment, Hawk smiled. He’d have loved to have seen the look on her face when she viewed the video of him Shifting. “The ones who survive the Transition can.”
They walked in silence for a moment, listening to the rain pattering on the leaves and the calls of the birds high up in the canopy. Then Jacqueline said, “You don’t really need me to ask, do you?”
I just like hearing your voice.
Startled by the thought, he didn’t answer for a moment. He held the words in his mind, turning them over and over like an interesting artifact he’d unearthed from some ancient tomb.
What a strange revelation: he liked the sound of her voice. He liked her northeastern American accent, the broad a’s and tensed o’s and taut pronunciation, the way she said “fahrest” instead of “forest,” the way “Mary,” “merry
,” and “marry” would all sound alike. It made her seem exotic to him, like a rare species of bird, China white and crimson red and freckled.
He tried to remember ever noticing or caring about the particular cadence or tone of a woman’s voice, but couldn’t.
“The Transition is a do-or-die event for half-Bloods that occurs at the age of twenty-five. No one knows exactly why, but human and Ikati blood is ultimately incompatible. They survive for a while, but just like a clock ticking down to zero hour, there’s an expiration date for those of mixed Blood. Which is one of the many reasons it’s forbidden: having a halfling child is basically condemning that child to an early death. Only every once in a great while, it isn’t. The half-Bloods survive their Transition—their first Shift—and they go on to lead a normal life with their Shifting abilities intact.”
Hawk didn’t add that the dead Alpha of the Roman colony—a brilliant geneticist in spite of being a homicidal maniac—had developed a serum that allowed all half-Bloods to survive the Transition. Which even at this moment, his insane, immortal son was using to develop a half-Blood army with which to wipe out the entire human race.
He didn’t think it would be prudent to mention that particular detail.
“Why didn’t the Alpha know it was forbidden?”
Hawk shrugged. “We only just discovered this colony a few years ago. The four confederate colonies have known about each other’s existence since our ancestors were hunted to near extinction in Egypt under Caesar Augustus. The remaining few fled and settled in small, isolated communities around the world—”
“Hunted? Egypt? Caesar Augustus?”
They came to a clearing in the thick underbrush. Through the trees, Hawk saw the waterfall he’d been able to hear during the past twenty minutes of their ascent up the hill. In spite of her ability to keep up with him, Jacqueline was tiring, evidenced by her breathing, which had become labored the higher they climbed. He gestured to a large rock several feet away, shaded by a corozo palm.
Darkness Bound (A Night Prowler Novel) Page 12
