by Honor James
“If I can, absolutely,” he whispered, lifting her hand. Pressing a kiss to her fingers, he smiled. “Whatever this is, I will be with you, Lilly.” He looked to Briar, “Can you check her blood sugar, too? She was acting a little off in the lab before I brought her down here.”
Briar nodded. “Can and will do. Go. The captain will likely have your balls for a trophy, but I didn’t know who else to call. I have insulin should she need it, too.” She added, “Now get the hell out of here so that she and I can go and have a nice lunch.”
He nodded and looked to Lilly. Another kiss to her fingers and he let her go before heading out the door again. He even paused in the doorway to look at her for a long moment. Then he was gone once more.
Lilly looked at Briar and sighed. “I think that I’m losing my mind.” A confession, pure and simple. “I’m losing time again. This is just is not good. I swear I do not recall coming down here, and earlier, Artaxias said that we had been in my lab for hours. I think that I need to make a call.” Back to DC, back to the docs that had treated her the last time this happened.
“Later. First, you are going to eat. Right after we test your glucose,” Briar told her, pulling on her arm. “We’ll feed you, test again, and give you some insulin if needed. But I think we should wait for Artaxias before you make any calls, Lilly.”
“If you are certain.” She didn’t look behind her, fear of falling down another rabbit hole too heavy in her mind. Instead, she let Briar lead her to her office where she had her glucose levels tested, and then to the cafeteria where they could have something to eat.
* * * *
When Artaxias reappeared, she’d just finished her meal. He walked toward the table but paused a couple feet back. “Is it okay if I join you?” He was looking at Briar when he asked. Only when she gave a nod did he finish walking to the table, sitting at the end closest to her and furthest from Briar. “Feeling better?”
“I am. A great deal,” Lilly said with a smile. “I have no idea what happened, but I really do need to make some phone calls,” she told him softly. “I might end up needing to return to DC.” She hated to think about it, but if she was losing time, well, hell. That just wasn’t good.
“No you don’t,” Gavriel said as he walked in. “Sorry I’m late, got hung up,” he muttered to Artaxias as he sat down. “Hey Briar.” He grinned at her before turning his disconcerting gaze onto Lilly. “Artaxias gave me a call when he was heading back to see the captain. He wanted me to check a few things with a couple of contacts and he was right, mostly.”
“Okay…” Lilly trailed off the last of the word. “I’m kind of at a loss here, so what are you talking about?” They couldn’t possibly know about her missing time, her small break in reality. No one knew about it. She had kept it very, very well hidden with the help of her bosses and her bosses’ bosses.
“I’m letting Artaxias explain because I’d never even heard of it before now. But he’s been alive a hell of a lot longer than I have,” Gavriel told her. Then he stood. “I need a drink, I’ll be right back.”
As Gav walked away, Artaxias let out a breath and ran a hand over his face. “When I was younger, working for one king or duke or whatever, I’d heard a rumor floating around. Only it turned out not to be such a rumor. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The rumor was surrounding a woman, can’t recall her race, not that it matters. She was apparently wed to some high-powered sort, maniacal in nature, if the story’s to be believed. Cruel, loved to torture his victims and foes, hated everything and everyone except for her. But he didn’t trust her. So he apparently hired a Vhampire and a Spiryte to create an effect in her mind. It was to keep her from ever straying or thinking of straying, and to keep her always in love with him.”
He paused as Gavriel rejoined them. “The only side effect was that if she ever thought of leaving him she’d go into this odd trance, focusing on something, anything, for a time until someone or something snapped her out of it. But she always lost that chunk of time. A blank spot in her memory. If she fought against the programming she’d actually black out, sometimes even go into convulsions and have bleeding from the nose and ears.”
“Okay, but I’m not that person. And I’ve never met a Spiryte before. So I think that you are wrong.” She looked down at her hands and shook her head. “I’ve lost time before. I had a break in DC,” she admitted softly. Damn, she hated to tell them this, but she had to. “I seriously, like, lost my mind. I guess that I somehow actually managed to kill a Luhpyne in the process. No, trust me, I’m not anyone that would have something like that on them, I’m just someone who has lost her damn marbles and seems to be losing them again.”
“Hello”—Gavriel waved a hand—“Spiryte.”
“You have met one, actually two,” Ax said quietly. “While those of the races don’t like the contacts you people use or the version we ourselves have, they can be used to change their eyes. They are pretty distinctive, obviously.” He waved a hand to Gavriel. “But it can be done. What I need to know from you is, when was the first blackout and what happened prior to it? It would be something that knocked you about or put you into a highly emotional state that you’d need care.”
Frowning, Lilly began to think. “It was a case in DC.” The line between her eyebrows drew into a heavy crease. Her hand began to shake and she began to think. “I found a talon, like the one that would go with the shard that came from the body.” Chewing her lips, the woman continued, hands visibly shaking, leg beginning to bounce, and frustration clear in her voice.
Briar went to reach for her but stopped when Ax shook his head. Instead, she listened and watched. “I reconstructed the claw into the weapon that it came from.” She began to sweat. “My partner died soon after that. I was taken and I don’t recall much of that time,” she whispered. “But that is more than likely because of the torture,” she admitted quietly. “But when I got out, was found, there was a body.” Her head exploded in pain, a soft cry escaped her lips, and she dropped her head into her hands. “Tattoos, and then nothing. I woke in a mental ward.” She whimpered with the pain.
A large hand was on her neck, massaging her tight muscles slowly. “Let it go, Lil,” Artaxias said right next to her. When she lifted her head, he was crouched next to her. “Slow, deep breath and just let it all go away.” He looked over the top of the table to Gav. “We need the pics of the guy’s tattoos. The body she found and any tats on the guy down in the morgue. We need to run them for similarities and then pick them the fuck apart.”
“I’ll get them, one way or another,” Gavriel said, standing up. Leaning over the table, he touched her cheek. “We’ll figure this out, Lilly, promise.”
Lilly nodded and licked her lips. “I really need to make that call, though.” She had to let them know that she was falling down the rabbit hole again. She desperately needed to tell them so that they could at least send someone to check her out, or maybe medications, something. “You need to let me up so that I can go and make that call. I have to make it from a clean line, a secure line.”
“No calls,” Artaxias said, cupping her face. “Lilly, you are not going to make any phone calls until I say so, all right? You have to promise me. No calls. I have a really bad feeling, darling. You and I are joined at the hip until further notice. For now, we’re going to go up to the office and you are going to take a nap on the couch.”
“No.” Lilly felt a little on the panicked side. “I need to call them. I have to let them know. Don’t you see, Ax? I could be a danger to you guys. I should have never come here to begin with. I knew I was too unstable and I’m sure that they did, too.” She sobbed. “Please, I need to make that call.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Lilly, it’s a compulsion, likely part of whatever they did to you. If you give in to it, the Gods only know what will happen, baby. I’m sorry, but you cannot make that call until we know more. Once we do, we’ll be right there with you to figure out what this part of it’s all about.”
/>
“Compulsion?” She felt as if her head were about to explode. “Okay, sleep. I can do this.” She leaned into his large frame, the heat of the man beckoning her. “I really, really think that maybe I will feel better after sleep. I’ve ate, I just need to retest my glucose levels and then sleep. Later I will have to take my shot, but for now, I think sleep sounds marvelous.” Even if it was a nap. Maybe her head would feel less like a pressure cooker.
His hand stroked down her hair slowly. “Let’s go up to the office. I’ll pull the blinds and we can relax on the sofa. We’ll wait on Gavriel to come back with his findings and we’ll go from there. Come on, darling.” He straightened, pulling her up from her chair. “A nap does sound good doesn’t it?” he said softly. “Close your eyes, let all the day’s worries and troubles just float away. I’ll even tell you a story to help you relax if you wish, something from Gav’s childhood, if you’d like.”
Lilly grinned. “Why not something from yours as well? I would really like to get to know both of you. I want to know everything that there is to know about you both.” She walked along at his side, her eyes closed so she didn’t see the odd looks they got from their coworkers or the even odder look from their captain.
“That I can do, though mine was so long ago I doubt I can recall it with any true clarity. I will try for you, though, Lilly. Just be warned, it wasn’t as happy as Gavriel’s. So perhaps I will share my story first before I tell you one of his,” he said, walking her toward their office. He shut the door at their backs and nudged her forward. “Settle on the sofa while I get the blinds.”
Lilly forced herself to talk to the sofa. “If this is what you say it is and I’m not going crazy like I am sure that I am, will we be able to do something about it?” she asked and looked up with him, agony in her gaze, mental and physical pain both warring inside of her. “God, I bet that you are just really hating life because you were settled with not only a defective human, with my diabetes, but also one that’s crazier than a june bug.”
“You are not defective, and I have no idea what a june bug is,” he told, her moving around the office. He turned off all but one lamp before he joined her on the sofa. Grabbing a blanket, Artaxias shook it out. “Wrap up in this and snuggle in. You are perfect as you are, Lilly. You are not crazy, no matter what they might have tried to convince you of. I will bet everything I have that while you were unconscious, they planted something in your head. A program of sorts that is controlling you in these situations. Something not your fault.”
“I don’t know.” She wanted to believe, with all her heart, she wanted to believe that he was telling the truth, but she wasn’t so sure that she truly could believe. She was defective, and she knew it. She snuggled up close to him and sighed. “I like that you think that I’m not, though. It gives me hope.” She had only just met this man but already he meant far more to her than she could ever have imagined, and it was frankly terrifying.
He pressed a kiss to her hair as he squeezed her closer. “When I was perhaps just a few summers old, before I began my training, I was on an outing. The woman who gave me life passed me off to one of the nursemaids for the day, thank the Gods. She took me to a pond near my place of birth. I won’t say my home, because it never truly was. We went for a picnic and for a swim,” he said softly. “It was the best day of my life, full of sunshine, laughter, and fun. It was also the last day of my childhood.”
“What happened?” Lilly found herself wrapping in closer to Artaxias. She found herself needing to be closer to him, to feel him and know that he was actually there with her. “After your day full of sunshine and laughter, what happened, Ax?”
“I was sent to be trained in the ways of the Vhampires before me and after. We are soldiers, mercenaries, killers by trade. We hire ourselves out to those that have a war they want won yet don’t want to waste their own men. I was placed in a warlord’s home and trained hard, brutally hard, to be the best or to die.” He gave a shrug, “I obviously learned well. I survived many a skirmish on many a world within the realms. Then I got my rather cushy job of watching after the precocious Gavriel and keeping him, or rather, trying to keep him out of trouble.”
“Wow,” she whispered and shook her head. “Does he know that you refer to him like that?” she asked with a grin. Moving so that she could lay her head on his shoulder, she asked, “Does it always feel like this? This comfort, the way that I feel with you two? The attraction and I don’t even really know you?”
“He knows, I’ve used the term on him more than once.” He chuckled softly. “The rest—” He shrugged. “Mates are naturally comfortable with one another. Even when they know next to nothing about one another, the level of awareness is there. It’s a visceral knowledge of the soul of the one that belongs to you.”
“And that is something that I feel. The awareness, the knowledge that you guys are mine. It’s weird, but I know it. I know that you are mine and I am yours. I like that feeling. It helps the pain in my head lessen to know that you are here with me, too.” Lilly liked it, too. She liked the comfort, the feeling of well-being with being there with him. “I have no idea what happens next, but in this moment in time, I’m happier than I have ever been in my life.”
“First we figure out what’s happening with you and who is messing with you. I know you think this is medically explained. But I honestly believe that someone is screwing with you. I don’t know why, I can’t explain my feeling on this, but I know it, deep down. I’ve seen a lot in my time, Lilly, and this is not outside the realm of possibilities, at all.”
“I don’t know. I really did lose my marbles there for a time, Ax. I know that I did. Hell, why else would I wake up in a padded white room in a straight jacket?” She barked out a laughter born of sorrow, filled with pain. “I’m crazy as a loon, Ax, and I’m so sorry you have been stuck with me as a mate.”
“You are not crazy,” he said softly, his fingers holding her chin tightly. Not painfully, but he wasn’t letting her look away from him. “You are a sane woman in the middle of something you do not have the defenses for. A war of sorts, where you are the casualty being hoisted about. Someone is using you, Lilly, and when I find them…” His eyes started to glow and his next words sounded harsh through his lengthening incisors. “I will tear them limb from limb, piece by piece, as they beg for mercy they will never get.”
That had her shivering, but she nodded. Licking her lips, she looked up at him and said, “I trust you. I know you would never, ever do anything to hurt me.”
Artaxias looked away and let out a slow breath. “Sorry,” he murmured a moment later when he looked her way again, his eyes and teeth back to normal once more. “The idea that someone is hurting you without you even realizing makes me angry. I don’t tend to get angry very much. It’s a mostly useless emotion for my people since it shows a lack of control. But for you, I’m more than willing to go through angry to homicidal.”
She nodded and then frowned. “I find it odd”—she moved so that she was once more leaning into him—“that I am not wanting to tap into my phone at my ear. I find it very strange that I only want to go to a hard line, not the one that I have inside of me.” She didn’t understand that. At all. Why was it that she only wanted to do a hard line?
“Personal lines can’t be traced unless you have the identification codes that are over sixty characters long. The only people that have them are one representative from the realms and one guy in an AEDA office in California. Hard lines can be traced, new tech can’t be.” He was pointing out the obvious. “They instructed you to call from a landline because, depending on the information you pass, they then know where to come and grab you if needed. I’ll bet they even have a code word they can throw into the conversation to put you out and leave you just laying there waiting.”
“I don’t like this,” Lilly admitted. “At all. I hate that I might be someone’s mole into operations here. Please promise me that if I am unsavable you will stop me? If I try to hurt you o
r Gav, you will make sure that I never do just that? Promise me?” she whispered softly.
“You won’t hurt us, little mate. And you are going to be just fine, we’ll figure this out, there is no other outcome acceptable.” He shifted slightly and the lamp went out. Then his arm wrapped around her again. “Close your eyes and rest, darling.”
Lilly did just that. She closed her eyes and relaxed into him. She sighed happily. “I think that I can do just that,” Lilly whispered and then dropped off into a very uneasy sleep.
Chapter Five
“Hi.” Gavriel smiled down at her as she woke. “No, you’re not crazy. Yes, you fell asleep on Ax, but he had to go and do a few things so I sat in for him.” He gave a chuckle at his own words and shook his head. “How are you feeling, Lilly?” Those words were serious and concerned.
“Like I have been hit by a truck,” she admitted softly. “I do not have any idea what’s going on, but I do feel slightly better, so that’s a good thing, right? At least I am not all but climbing out of my skin to make a phone call,” she muttered, more for herself than for him.
“Artaxias mentioned that, and as often as it pains me to admit, he was right about it being a compulsion. We don’t know who did it, so we can’t undo it, not yet. I’ve made some calls to fellow Spirytes and we’re hoping that, with your assistance, we can figure out what they did.”
“I don’t know how much help I can be, but I will try. I want to try because I want to be free of this…well, whatever it is.” She wanted to be free, she wanted to live her life with the men that she thought she might be able to one day love. She already felt a bond with the two men, and wanted more.
“You’ll be a huge help. Sit up with me and I’ll explain, since you need to know what will happen, may happen, and the risks. And yes, as with anything involving magic, there are risks.” He let her settle in under his arm and gave her a squeeze. “As I mentioned, I contacted a few friends who will help me. I am fairly young in comparison to many of the races, so I’ve not yet fully reached my magic potential. They will know better than I what we are looking for, even though none of us know exactly what to expect.”
