by I. T. Lucas
Kian nodded. “I wonder if Turner knows about it.”
“The place itself is not top secret,” Jin said. “Many people probably know that it exists, but they think it’s only a doomsday shelter facility. They don’t know how large it is or what it is used for.”
Kian’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “I don’t get envious often, but I would like to have a place like that at my disposal in case of a catastrophe. Knowing that I had a safe shelter that I could move all of my people into would make me sleep better at night.”
41
Arwel
The jet Turner had arranged to pick them up was so old that Arwel felt wary about boarding it.
“Trust the Fates.” Yamanu chuckled and clapped him on the back. “It only looks old. I’m sure Turner wouldn’t put us in danger.”
Kian went past them with a suitcase in each hand. “It belongs to an ex-Air Force pilot. You have nothing to worry about.” He climbed up the stairs with Syssi right behind him.
So far, their luck had held.
They had encountered no roadblocks, and the one police car blaring its siren had shot past them in pursuit of a speeding car.
“Nebraska, here we come.” Arwel slung the strap of his duffle bag over his shoulder and picked up one of Amanda’s suitcases.
“Welcome aboard the Thomas express,” the pilot said with a heavy southern accent. “We might be low on luxury, but we are high on hospitality. You will find refreshments in the cooler.” He winked. “You are in for a surprise.”
“Let’s have a look.” Anandur popped the lid and grinned. “Hallelujah, bless Turner.” He pulled out a Snake Venom beer bottle. “Who wants one? There is plenty for everyone.”
Arwel lifted his hand. “Toss it.”
He caught the bottle and hugged it to his chest. “Thank the merciful Fates.”
Yamanu chuckled. “Now you thank them.”
“Is it good?” Richard asked. “I’ve never heard of this brand.”
“The best.” Smiling evilly, Anandur tossed him a bottle. “Catch!”
Arwel expected Richard to read the label and realize the alcohol content, but the dude just popped the cap and took a swig. His eyes bugged out, but he swallowed it and only then looked at the label. “What is this shit, and how can you drink it?”
Yamanu clapped him on the back. “It’s from Scotland, our homeland,” he said, letting his Scottish accent out.
Standing up, Amanda lifted her hand to get everyone’s attention. “We didn’t have time for proper introductions at the rest stop, and not all of our team members were present.” She pointed at Julian. “This is our doctor, so if you have any medical emergency, Julian is the guy to turn to.”
As the introductions continued, Arwel walked over to where Jin and Mey were sitting, took the seat behind them, and popped the cap on his beer. Lifting it to his mouth, he took the first swig and then another, enjoying the pleasant burn as it went down his throat.
Regrettably, he couldn’t allow himself to get drunk with Jin present. He wanted her to think of him as the clan’s amazing empath, not the clan’s drunk.
Besides, he didn’t even have a good excuse to indulge.
Immortals didn’t broadcast their emotions as loudly as humans, and surprisingly the paranormals didn’t either, so it wasn’t about drowning out other people’s feelings. This time it was about drowning out his own.
On the way, he’d listened to Mey telling Jin an abbreviated history of the clan, and Syssi and Kian had answered some of her questions.
It irked him that he hadn’t been the one to reveal the immortals’ secret to Jin.
In Arwel’s mind, the telling of the clan’s story and how it had all begun was part of the bonding process between a Dormant and her or his immortal truelove. And even though he hadn’t dared hope for a mate, he’d secretly been rehearsing the reveal and imagining her awed responses.
He should have been the one to tell the story to Jin.
But that was water under the bridge and not really relevant at this point. When they reached the keep, he would step up his game and try to spend time alone with her, but since Mey and Yamanu were moving into the one-bedroom apartment, that wouldn’t be easy either. The sisters would want to spend every waking hour together, and he would have to steal moments here and there.
Surprising him, Jin got up as Yamanu walked over with a beer in his hand. “I’ve monopolized enough of Mey’s time. You two should sit together.” She moved to the seat next to Arwel.
Yamanu remained standing. “I don’t mind. You have a lot of catching up to do.”
“That’s okay. I think Mey wants to take a nap, and I’m sure she’d rather snuggle with you.”
He smiled. “You’ve said the magic word. I can’t say no to snuggling.” He sat next to Mey and draped his arm over her shoulders. “Did you miss me, love?”
Leaning, she kissed his cheek. “I missed this.”
As the smooching began, Arwel tried not to look, but it was impossible since they were sitting in front of him. He could either look out the window, which would be rude to Jin, or look at Jin and hope that his fangs behaved.
Jin grinned. “I love seeing her like that.”
“Same here. Yamanu has been lonely for a very long time.”
She arched a brow. “Really? A handsome guy like him? He probably had to walk around with a fly swatter to keep the girls away.”
Yamanu chuckled and turned his head to her. “You know that I can hear you, right?”
“So what? I’m not revealing any big secrets. You are one hell of a hunk.”
It was good that Yamanu was happily mated. Otherwise, Arwel would have had a big problem with his buddy.
“But you have the most gorgeous eyes of them all,” Jin whispered in his ear.
Had he been so obvious?
“Thank you. But that’s okay. I’m used to turning invisible when Yamanu is around, and not because he is shrouding me.”
“You are not invisible.” She leaned her head against his shoulder and sighed. “You are very handsome too.” Sighing, she closed her eyes.
The girl wasn’t shy, that was for sure. Or maybe she didn’t think of him as a potential boyfriend and therefore was treating him just as a friend. Concentrating, he tried to read her emotions, but she’d fallen asleep already.
That wasn’t a good sign.
He could have never dozed off next to a woman he was craving, which meant that Jin had put him in the damn friend zone.
For now, he would go along with that, but in time he was going to change her attitude. When they reached the keep, he would ask Amanda to stay and give him a haircut.
Someone had to order clothes for the four escapees, and knowing Amanda, she would want to be in charge of that. He could ask her to order some nice stuff for him because if he did it, he was going to end up with the same loose cargo pants and button-downs he always got.
Then again, he shouldn’t look as if he was trying too hard or making too many changes to impress the girl.
Stifling a groan, he took another swig from his beer.
Why did things have to be so complicated?
Couldn’t he just point to his chest and say, ‘Me Tarzan,’ then point to her and say, ‘You Jane,’ throw her over his shoulder and carry her off to his jungle lair? Or in this case, one of the keep’s upper floor apartments?
42
Kian
“Thank you so much.” Syssi smiled at the pilot who’d graciously helped them unload their luggage despite their protests.
Kian offered the guy his hand. “Thank you.” Looking into the pilot’s eyes, he thralled him to forget their faces, implanting other ones in his mind.
Not that Turner’s buddy was going to talk, but Kian preferred to play it safe. Just like the previous pilot who had taken them to Nebraska, this one would remember a middle-aged, nothing-special group of people.
A few minutes after the plane took off, their own jet landed. It wa
s like a well-synchronized dance.
“Hello, everyone.” Charlie stood at the top of the stairs. “Welcome aboard.”
Kian walked up. “Thank you for picking us up.” He shook Charlie’s hand and leaned to whisper in his ear. “Don’t mention our destination in front of our guests. I don’t want them to know where we are taking them.”
Charlie lifted a brow. “Any idiot can recognize L.A. from the air.”
“I’m going to have Yamanu and Julian put them to sleep.”
“Roger that.” Charlie saluted.
Kian came back down, and as the rest of the group started boarding the aircraft, he put his hand on Yamanu’s shoulder. “I need a word with you before we board.” He waved Julian over as well.
Nodding, Yamanu followed Kian a few feet away from the plane, with Julian joining them a moment later.
“I told Charlie to keep quiet about our destination. As soon as we are in the air, I want you to put our guests to sleep, and I don’t want them to wake up until we put them in their beds in the keep.”
“No problem. I can thrall Richard and Wendy, and they will sleep until I tell them to wake up, but you’ll need our esteemed doctor to take care of Jacki.”
“I can do that,” Julian said. “I can either give her a shot or put something in her drink.” He chuckled. “I have plenty left over from dear Aunt Eleanor.”
“I was meaning to ask you about that. You mentioned complications?”
“Nothing major. There was a guy who seemed to be able to see through Brundar’s shroud. He was staring in our direction as we carried Eleanor into the lobby. But it turned out to be a false alarm.” Julian raked his fingers through his hair. “Well, not exactly false but close. He was looking at a woman, and then we walked right in front of her, and she got accidentally shrouded as well, so she disappeared from his view for a moment. I noticed that and told Brundar to keep going with Eleanor to the room, while I went back and thralled the guy’s memory of the incident away.”
Yamanu shook his head. “That’s the problem when I’m not around. When I shroud, I don’t only hide things from view, I also substitute so there are no gaps.”
Unfortunately, Yamanu could not be in two places at once, and his skill had been more needed at the mall. “I hope no one else noticed anything.”
Julian shrugged. “There weren’t many people in the lobby, and Brundar took the emergency stairs. So, I think we are good. Eleanor is not going to wake up until tomorrow morning, and when she does, it will be in a room full of drug paraphernalia.”
“Good job.”
“I heard that Arwel had trouble thralling the talents,” Julian said. “Perhaps I should put the other two to sleep with a shot or pills instead of Yamanu trying to thrall them.”
“It’s not going to be a problem for me,” Yamanu said. “They are calm now, so they don’t have their defensive walls up, and if they need additional calming, I can sing them a lullaby.”
Kian chuckled. “That would put everyone on the plane to sleep, including the pilot. Your lullabies are dangerous.”
That was an exaggeration, but not a big one. Yamanu’s voice had a hypnotic quality to it even when he was just talking. When he sang, the effect was almost overpowering.
“I’ll sing quietly, so only our four new friends will hear me.”
“You don’t have to put Jin to sleep,” Julian said. “She knows where we are heading.”
“I’ll do it for Arwel. Poor guy seems like he wants to crawl out of his own skin.”
“Why is that?” Kian asked. “I get that he is attracted to Jin, and that’s great, but why does it make him miserable instead of happy?”
Yamanu shrugged. “Maybe he is insecure. Guys get weird when they really want to make a good impression on a girl and don’t know how. It’s easy to be confident with casual hookups because they don’t mean a thing. But when you know that your future rests in the hands of that one lady, it can get stressful. Especially when a guy isn’t sure that she reciprocates.”
Frowning, Kian pushed his hands into his back pockets. “It is obvious to everyone that she likes him. That’s a good start. Besides, can’t he feel her emotions? As an empath, he doesn’t need to guess.”
Yamanu rubbed a hand over his jaw. “I don’t know whether Jin is subconsciously muting the broadcasting of her feelings, or she just doesn’t feel much in general. She also might not be as intensely attracted to Arwel as he is to her. Which makes me think that we shouldn’t take it for granted that she is his fated mate. When it’s meant to be, the powerful attraction is mutual. It doesn’t seem to be the case here.”
Julian shook his head. “Maybe Lokan didn’t remove the compulsion entirely. When Ella seemed less passionate about me than I was about her, I thought that it was because of the trauma she’d been through, and so did she. But it turned out that Lokan had compelled her to feel attraction only toward him and no one else. Once that was removed… well, things changed.”
That was an interesting thought.
She was no longer attracted to Richard, so that part of the compulsion had been overridden, but maybe Marisol had done more than compel Jin to want Richard?
“You might be on to something. Lokan freed Jin from the compulsion to crave Richard, but there might be another component to it that he didn’t address. Perhaps Marisol compelled her to ignore all other guys.”
Yamanu shook his head. “She isn’t ignoring Arwel. Jin likes him, just not with an all-consuming passion, and that’s what is bugging him. He knows that something is off, but he doesn’t know what it is.”
“That’s exactly how Ella was,” Julian said. “She liked me and wanted to be with me, but the passion was lacking until Lokan removed the compulsion.”
Kian didn’t comment, leaving things at that. He hoped that Julian was right, but he couldn’t dismiss the possibility that Jin wasn’t Arwel’s fated mate.
Not everyone got so lucky.
43
Kian
Yamanu’s observation about Jin kept bothering Kian throughout the flight from Alabama to the clan’s airstrip.
If Jin wasn’t Arwel’s fated one, the guy would be devastated, and there was nothing Kian could do about it.
The thing was, Yamanu was right.
By now, there had been enough fated matings in the clan for the pattern to be clear. Aside from Ella, who had had several factors working against her, all of the mates had felt a powerful attraction to their partners.
There could be four possibilities why Jin didn’t seem as passionate about Arwel as he was about her.
The first and the most obvious was that so much was going on in her life that it was a wonder the girl still appeared relatively calm and collected. Jin was either one hell of a tough cookie, or she was great at putting up a façade.
Still, it was possible that Jin was interested in Arwel, but she wasn’t his fated mate.
The other explanation could be what Julian had suggested. Perhaps Marisol had put an additional compulsion on Jin, which was acting as a suppressor on her arousal toward any guy who wasn’t Richard.
The fourth option was that Jin’s feelings weren’t as transparent as a regular human’s.
Kian wasn’t an empath, so it was difficult for him to gauge the level at which Jin broadcast her feelings. And Arwel was too emotionally involved to make an objective assessment.
Perhaps Wendy could help with that?
He could ask her to assign projection scores to different people as a test of her skills and include Jin in it. That way, Arwel wouldn’t realize what he was attempting to do.
Damn, this wasn’t something that he should stick his nose into, and it made him feel like a yenta. This was more up Amanda’s alley. But Kian cared about Arwel.
The guy was just as deserving of a boon from the Fates as Yamanu.
Instead of choosing an occupation that didn’t expose him to constant contact with humans or working from his home as many of the clan members did, Arwel had ch
osen to serve the clan in the best way he could. And by doing so, he put himself through constant suffering.
That sacrifice deserved a big-ass reward.
Then again, if Jin could dim the broadcasting of her emotions as a human, as an immortal she would be an impenetrable wall and the perfect mate for Arwel. If that was the case, the Fates were even better matchmakers than Kian had given them credit for.
As the jet came to a stop, Anandur opened the door and lowered the steps. “I can’t wait to get home.” He glanced back at their sleeping guests. “But first, we need to unload the cargo at the keep.”
As people started getting up, Kian lifted his hand. “My apologies for dragging everyone to the keep, but it makes more sense for Okidu to pick us all up with the bus rather than have several people come with their cars.”
“No problem,” Callie said. “I want to see what Ingrid has managed to do with the dungeon to make it look more hospitable.”
“Yeah, I’m curious too.” Amanda stretched and yawned. “I napped, so I’m good to go.”
Once the luggage and the sleeping guests were loaded on the bus, the rest of them got in. Charlie stayed behind to service the plane, but he had his own vehicle parked next to the hangar.
As Okidu put the bus in drive, Kian pulled out his phone and called Onegus.
“Welcome home,” the chief answered. “How was your trip?”
“Long. We are on the bus on the way to the keep. Is everything ready?”
“Ingrid got the five additional cells furnished and decorated. The bars are stocked with snacks and drinks, the bathrooms have towels and toiletries, and the closets are filled with new stuff from Anandur’s favorite store.”
“Walmart rocks.” Anandur high fived Wonder. “You can get everything you need in one place and without breaking the bank.”
Amanda snorted. “Yeah, if you have no standards.”
