Caretaker

by Laken Cane

  When we were alone…

  I stepped toward him and lifted my face to his. He bent his head and kissed my lips with a tenderness that belied the fierce need in his eyes.

  “Hurry home,” he said, gruffly.

  I drew Silverlight from her sheath. “Take care of her until I get there.”

  He took the blade. “Go now, sweetheart.”

  Shane gripped my right arm and together, we walked toward the line of waiting ambulances. EMTs rushed toward us, and we allowed them to help us onto cots and load us into separate vehicles.

  And as things began to calm, the reality started to sink into my dazed mind. Angus was free.

  That’s what I needed to dwell on. I needed to think about the fact that Angus was free so I wouldn’t think about the bad shit. Because if I lingered on the bad shit, I would break down.

  “Clayton,” I murmured.

  “Ma’am?” the EMT asked. The scent of alcohol hung in the air as he scrubbed the bend of my elbow.

  I closed my eyes as they worked, wishing I could talk to the captain to get some idea of what was going to happen in the coming days. The humans had created that mess. The humans had murdered people on that island. Perhaps the humans would be blamed for it, for once.

  But somehow, I really doubted it.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I went home with a cast on my arm and a big bottle of painkillers. Luckily, only one bone was fractured, and surgery hadn’t been required.

  Good thing, too. I didn’t have time for surgery.

  Shane was staying in the hospital for another night—maybe longer, depending on how he did the next day.

  The nurse called a cab for me, but when she wheeled me out of the hospital the sun was shining and Angus leaned against his truck, waiting for me.

  “What are you doing here?” I sounded drunk. My voice was slurred and my eyes were heavy, and I drifted in and out of a soft, fuzzy sleep.

  He lifted me from the wheelchair and carried me to the truck. “Taking you home.”

  “News?” I rested my head against the back of the seat and drifted, and then the sound of the engine turning over startled me awake. “I’m out of it,” I told him. “So tired.”

  “I’ll get you home and put you to bed.”

  I was asleep again before he’d finished talking. The crisis had passed, and I was exhausted. I’d also been pumped full of pain medication. Yeah, I was out of it.

  I woke up again, sort of, when Angus lowered me into bed. “Sleep, baby,” he murmured, tenderly, and brushed my hair off my forehead. “I’ll take care of you.”

  It was six o’clock that evening before I sat up in bed, my mouth dry and full of cotton, my brain still fuzzy. I frowned, disoriented. I wasn’t in my room.

  Angus had put me to bed in his room. His bed. And the other side of the big bed was rumpled. I recalled foggy visions of a heavy arm across my stomach, a quiet voice soothing me when I’d been startled awake by bad dreams, and the constant warm scent of…Angus. It’d wrapped around me, cocooning me in safety, and I’d sunk down into it and slept. Recovered.

  “I put Leo in your room.”

  Angus stood in the doorway, watching me.

  “How is he?” I rubbed my eyes, yawned hugely, and tried to crawl out of the fuzzy arms of sleep that still wanted to hold me.

  He sat down beside me and handed me a glass of icy water. “Don’t worry about him. How are you feeling?” He reached into the bedside drawer and withdrew a prescription bottle.

  I stopped him when he started to twist off the cap. “I’m okay. No more pills. They make me fuzzy.”

  He grinned but tossed the bottle back into the drawer. “I like you fuzzy.”

  “Angus.” I handed him back the empty glass. “What’s the news? Any sign of Clayton or Alejandro? Rhys?”

  He sighed, then leaned forward and kissed my forehead. “The city is in an uproar. I don’t know what’ll happen once they sort everything out, but Crawford called twice today already, wanting to talk to you.”

  I put my right hand to my chest. “He got off the island? He’s okay?”

  He squinted at me. “Yeah, he’s okay, Trin.” He looked like he wanted to question me further, but shrugged and dropped the subject of Crawford. “Rhys is home.” He pointed his chin at the vase of flowers on the chest. “He had those delivered for you. Said tell you to rest. He has not heard from Alejandro.”

  “Dammit,” I whispered. “I hope Al’s okay.” I hadn’t really been worried about Rhys. I’d known he’d escaped the island, because he’d carried us across. And I was more curious than ever about the mysterious and obviously powerful Rhys Graver.

  “No sign of Clayton,” he said gently. “I called Miriam and when she didn’t answer, I went to her house. She looked like hell. She said she’d tried calling him home and he hadn’t appeared.”

  And we both knew what that meant. “No.” I put my hand to my mouth, trying to keep my sobs contained, but they burst free anyway. “He can’t be dead. All she has to do is find him and put him back together, just like always. Isn’t that right? Did she say she would?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think she’s bringing him back.”

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed, then realized I was dressed only in my underwear. “Give me my phone. I’ll make her bring him back.”

  He didn’t even try to talk sense into me. Didn’t tell me that Clayton wanted to die, that he would finally find his niche, that the torture was over.

  He knew I understood all that.

  But my heart was breaking.

  Miriam didn’t answer, and I wasn’t surprised. “I’m taking a shower and then going to see her,” I told him.

  “I’ll run you a bath. You don’t want to get that cast wet.”

  “I don’t have time for a bath. Give me a plastic bag. I’ll manage. Fuck.” I bent forward, clutching my belly, and burst into fresh tears.

  “You love the golem,” Angus said, tiredly. He stood, and I really looked at him for the first time since we’d gotten off Byrd Island.

  He was dressed in a suit—tie and all. I understood. He was eager to reclaim his identity, his wealth, his power. He wanted things to go back to how they’d been before he’d been taken.

  But I knew that beneath that suit was a burned, tortured body, and I closed my eyes in shame. Angus had been through the darkest hell. I should have been taking care of him, not the other way around.

  I snagged his hand and he helped me stand. My legs were only a little wobbly, a little weak. “Angus. God, Angus.” I wrapped my arms around his waist, staring up into his face. “Do you not know that I love you, too?”

  I needed him to be normal. To roar and laugh and say things that made me want to punch him. To order me around like the sexist bastard he was.

  His stare sharpened and he drew in a sharp breath. He said nothing. Maybe he was afraid to. But there was doubt and vulnerability deep in his eyes, and I wanted only to make it go away.

  “I love you,” I said. “I love you.”

  It was the truest thing I’d ever said. I loved him.

  I also loved Clayton.

  And I fucking loved Shane.

  Love for Rhys might come. I cared so much about him already.

  I even felt something for Amias. Something I could not bear to call love, and probably never would. But it was something powerful. Something protective, possessive, fated. Maybe I couldn’t call it love, but whatever it was, it was undeniable.

  They were mine. All of them. I knew with certainty that they were mine. And I was theirs. It didn’t have to make sense. It just was.

  I was meant for this. Born for it.

  “You’re mine,” I told Angus.

  His hands tightened on my upper arms, his grip so hard it would leave bruises, but he wasn’t aware of that. “Trin,” he murmured.

  I swallowed hard. “Do you care about me, Angus?” Maybe I was fishing, but I wanted to hear the words fall from his lips.r />
  His eyes were shiny and damp. “Damn you.” His voice was so rusty I thought it would have hurt this throat. “I love you too fucking much.”

  I swallowed another round of tears and something deep inside me began to ease.

  His stare was sober and fierce, but sadness lurked in there, too. “You’ve had me since the first day you walked into my shop and looked at me with those big gray eyes of yours. From that very second. There’s something that pulls us together. You feel it.”

  I nodded. Supernaturals never questioned the mysterious something. The world was full of magic. They didn’t doubt it. “I do.”

  “And now,” he said, his voice so deep and dark I couldn’t help but shiver, “you’re finally…” He broke off, swallowed hard, then leaned down to rest his forehead against mine. “Finally.”

  “Then why does it make you sad? I see it in your eyes.”

  He didn’t answer for a long time, just stood with me, barely breathing.

  “Angus,” I whispered. “Why?”

  “Because someday you will be gone, and I will have to live in a world that no longer holds you.”

  Someone knocked on the bedroom door, sharply, and I jumped. Without releasing me, Angus turned his head and shouted, “What is it?”

  Just like the old Angus.

  I smiled a watery smile and relaxed in the circle of his arms.

  The mother of one of his children—Cheryl something or other—stuck her head into the room. She frowned at me, then looked at Angus. “I made you some dinner. Come eat with me? Afterward, I will change your bandages.”

  I stiffened and stepped out of Angus’s arms.

  “Trin…”

  I ignored him and looked at the woman. “Pack your things and go home.” She opened her mouth and I held up my hand to stop her. “Pack your fucking things and go home. Angus is out of the baby-making business, and his cock is spoken for. Nod if you understand what I’m telling you.”

  She gaped, then looked at Angus. “Angus!”

  “She’s telling the truth.” His voice was mild but when I glanced at him, there was such a bright spark in his eyes it was like a fire had started in his skull. “Do as she says.”

  There would be no other women for Angus.

  He was mine.

  And as Shane had pointed out, I was not the type to share.

  Chapter Thirty

  I would like to have crawled back into bed, but I’d already wasted too much of the day, and there were too many things yet to do. Too many people to check on.

  I would like to have found out what it was like to have Angus inside me, too, but we both needed to recover a little before that happened. Having sex with Angus Stark was going to be intense. Demanding. Hot.

  And both of us needed to be healed and ready for it when it happened.

  I didn’t eat at the house—just got a quick, awkward shower, then climbed inside the captain’s car without a word to anyone, and went to seize the night.

  Captain Crawford called as I was driving toward Miriam’s house, my mind on the ordeal ahead. I didn’t believe Clayton was dead, not really, because I knew Miriam could somehow find what she needed of him and bring him back. She could.

  Maybe she wouldn’t, but I refused to consider that.

  I didn’t feel the loss of him, though. I didn’t feel that he was not in the world.

  I put my phone on speaker. “Captain. I’m glad to see you made it off the island.”

  “How are you?” he asked. “I was told you broke your arm.”

  “I’m okay. Wearing a cast, which is a pain in the ass.” I hesitated. “What’s going to happen now, Frank? For the supernaturals?”

  His voice was tired. “It’s too early to know. But I’m going with the story that no supernaturals made it off that island.”

  “Captain…you mean—”

  “The ones who escaped are free, Trinity. Don’t worry about Angus Stark. He’s paid for his crime and then some. I learned some disturbing details about what they did to him.”

  “You mean the cage fighting?”

  He paused. “No. The cage fighting was the least of it. They—”

  “No,” I interrupted, my voice thick. “I can’t. Not right now.”

  I could almost see him nodding. “I understand.”

  I took a deep breath, then blew it out and moved on to something else. “The judge and Madalyn?”

  “We took them out in a helicopter. Lewis is all right. Madalyn is not. I don’t expect her to live. They took too much from her.”

  “Blood?”

  “Everything.”

  I slapped the steering wheel with my cast, then flinched at the pain. “Has she regained consciousness?”

  “No. Even if she did, I don’t think she’d be able to tell us anything.”

  “They were using her as a pure blood food source for the vampires they kept there,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He seemed strangely hesitant, and it was a few seconds before he spoke again. “There’s big money in blood sport, Trinity. Men came from all over. Wealthy men. How do you think Lewis Bennett got most of his money? Not from being a judge.”

  “Oh my God,” I murmured. “It’s his fault Madalyn was taken.”

  “Indirectly. He kept her apart from all that. Protected her. But in the end, it didn’t matter.”

  “They didn’t know who she was?”

  “I don’t know. The warden talked. His story was that one of his men picked up Madalyn, she told him she’d been taken by a vampire. Didn’t tell him who she was.” He paused, and I knew he didn’t believe that any more than I did. She’d have told her rescuer exactly who she was.

  He’d taken her anyway.

  “She told the man enough for them to realize she was pure?”

  “I think so.” He sighed. “Before the infection, they took people to the island to use as feeders for the vampires. Humans in prison, runaways, homeless people.”

  I stared unseeingly out the windshield. “You knew that?” I know he heard the ice in my voice.

  “It was under investigation,” he snapped. “It was being looked into. Don’t judge me, Sinclair.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “Why shouldn’t I judge you for that shit, Captain?”

  “Trinity.”

  “I saw Gordon Gray there,” I said. “You gave him to them to fight, didn’t you?”

  “It was standard practice.” But his voice was a guilty murmur. “It’s tough to catch vampires. When they’re brought to us, we send them to the island. It’s easier than killing them. They’re fucking vampires, Trinity. No one cares.”

  “No,” I said. “No one does.” I hung up, unable to say another word.

  I arrived at Miriam’s house in a dark, dark mood.

  She opened the door before I could knock, almost as though she’d been watching for me. Her eyes were swollen, her nose red, and her hair hung in lusterless strips over her pale face. “Trinity,” she said, hoarsely, then broke into heartbroken sobs and flung herself against me.

  The fierceness of her embrace knocked me off balance and I stumbled back, but she wrapped her arms around my waist and steadied me.

  “Miriam,” I whispered. “Bring him back. You have to bring him back.”

  “I’m alone,” she cried. “Now I’m alone, and I can’t be alone. I really can’t.”

  “Then bring him back,” I begged.

  She pulled away and scrubbed her face with the hem of her shirt, then took my right hand and led me inside. “How can I? I don’t have a single piece of him to regenerate. He’s gone, Trinity.” She burst into tears once again. “He’s gone.”

  “I’ll take you the island,” I said, my desperation as strong as my grief. “We’ll find him.”

  She shook her head and sat on the couch. I sat beside her, still unwilling to believe he was gone. I couldn’t accept it. I wouldn’t.

  My chest felt tight, my lungs full. I couldn’t get in enough air—and what I did pull in was stagnant, d
ry, and tasted like…evil. The air in Miriam’s house tasted of evil.

  “It’s not possible.” She grasped my hand. “I called his parts to me. They did not come. I’m truly sorry, Trinity. I know you cared about him, even though he was such a monster.”

  “I love him,” I told her, regardless of whether that might make her angry. “I love him too much to let him go.”

  She looked at me, her eyes large and blue and filled with a hurt so deep I knew that in her twisted, fucked-up way, she loved him too. Rhys had been right. Hate, love…it was all the same, and she felt the loss of it.

  “No,” she said. “You don’t love him. He’s not worthy of love. How can you love him when you’d rather he be here with me than finding his peace in death? You don’t love him.” Her voice was accusing, and I couldn’t blame her.

  “I don’t want to mourn him,” I said, my heart heavy with grief. “I want him here. I want him in the same world as me.”

  “He’s dead.” Her voice was soft, mournful, and totally convincing.

  And then a vision of him tortured and cut and burnt and at her cruel, cruel mercy cut through the cotton of fog in my brain, and I got to my feet, gasping.

  “What is it?” she asked, standing with me. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just realized something.” I pressed my fist into my stomach, wishing I hadn’t eaten, thinking I would never eat again.

  Clayton was dead.

  He was truly dead.

  I lost my breath for a second, but Miriam tugged my hand. “What did you realize?”

  “That I truly do love him.” I smiled through my tears, but my smile wasn’t for her. “And I’d rather he be safe in his niche than alive at the end of your wicked fucking chain.”

  She recoiled, her face paling further, her hands latched over her heart, a moan of pain and denial digging its way from her throat. “Fuck you,” she whispered. “No. You can’t love him. Not after what he did to me.”

  “It’s not always about you.” I turned away from her and walked toward the door. “I don’t want to see you again, Miriam.” I stopped to look at her, a little flare of pity in my heart, despite everything. “I wish you were in hell, paying for everything you ever did to him. Don’t come near me again. I know I can’t kill you, but I can hurt you.”