Darkness Bound (32 page)

He was choking it. Quite successfully, it appeared. It listed and fell sideways, and Hawk squeezed harder.

Leander reached Jenna. He slung his shirt around her shoulders, quickly buttoned it to cover her nudity, then crushed her to his chest. They shared a passionate kiss, ignoring everyone, then the Queen buried her face in his neck.

After a moment she raised her head. Over Leander’s shoulder, she locked eyes with Jack, and it took everything Jack had not to take a step backward.

The Queen turned and looked behind her. She shouted, “Stop!” and Hawk froze. He looked up, and his face hardened.

Could it be possible he hadn’t noticed her? No, Jack realized, as Hawk released the panther and straightened, putting his shoulders back. He’d seen her all right. He’d just chosen to ignore her.

A hysterical giggle threatened to burst from Jack’s throat. He’d chosen to ignore the arrival of a white dragon, in order to continue his fight to the death with a black panther. The world had gone entirely mad.

There was utter silence in the clearing, so she was able to hear with perfect clarity what the Queen said next.

“Tell me,” she said to Leander, looking at the two men.

Leander, even in profile, looked as if he’d had better days. His relief was palpable. “A challenger to the Alpha,” he said, sounding out of breath. He spread his hand over the small of Jenna’s back, as if to reassure himself she was really standing there.

The Queen cursed, and Jack decided she liked her.

“What’s your name?” she said to Hawk, ignoring the panther, who had crawled several feet away, and was shaking. It shook its head, coughed, and sprawled over the ground.

“I’m called Hawk,” he replied, in a tone of impatient disrespect.

Leander growled, but the Queen simply held up her hand, staring at Hawk. She flicked a glance to the panther. “Stand down, Hawk. This contest is over.”

He snarled, “I’ll never stand down to the man who hurt my woman.” His eyes met Jack’s.

My woman
. Dear God.

The Queen turned to look at her. From somewhere in the crowd, Morgan’s voice rang out. “I can explain everything!”

The Queen’s gaze found Morgan, and a faint smile crossed her face. She nodded, said, “I can hardly wait to hear it.” Then she looked back at Jack and her voice turned hard. “But not just yet. First I have business to attend to.”

Leander bent his head to her ear, murmuring, “You’re exhausted. You look pale, and you’re shaking. Whatever it is can wait until after you’ve res—”

She broke from his arms without waiting for him to finish, and made a beeline toward Jack.

Jack took one horrified step back, then another, until she realized the Queen wasn’t looking at her, but at something right behind her. Weak with relief, Jack pressed to one side and let her pass, and then the Queen stood before Weymouth.

He was still bleeding. Red splatters decorated the front of his shirt in an erratic pattern, lurid against the white. He bowed, sniveling, his hand covering his nose. “Welcome, Your Highness!” he said nasally. “
So
wonderful to see you. And please don’t worry about me, it’s just a little—”

The Queen’s hand shot out, and she grabbed him around the throat. “Traitor!” she hissed. Then the woman disappeared in a flash of glittering mist, power blasted through the clearing in a heated wave, her white shirt was shredded to confetti, and the dragon was there again, looming over them all.

Weymouth was clutched in one of its powerful claws.

His scream was high and piercing. The dragon flung him to the ground and he lay there, gasping, blood flowering through his shirt where the points of five sharp talons had punctured his skin.

He tried to scramble away. His glasses fell off, as did one shoe. The dragon reared high above him, inhaled a breath, and opened its muzzle, revealing row upon row of gleaming, pointed teeth.

Weymouth looked over his shoulder. Comprehending what was about to happen, he rolled to his back, pulled the same blade from his pocket he’d held to Jack’s throat, grasped it with both hands, and plunged it, hilt deep, into his chest. He made a gurgling sound, hideous and wet, which was summarily drowned out when the dragon stretched its neck and exhaled.

A molten stream of fire roared from its mouth.

Weymouth was incinerated.

It was over within seconds. When the smoke cleared, a charred husk lay unmoving on the ground, the earth all around it scorched black.

The dragon turned back to woman, who delicately burped a tiny flame. She covered her mouth and said, “Excuse me.” Then her eyes fluttered closed and she slumped to her knees, caught before falling all the way by Leander, who ran up to gather her in his arms.

Jack didn’t see anything else after that because the ground came up hard to catch her, and the world faded to darkness.

The rage inside Caesar felt like a nuclear bomb detonating in his bowels. He’d been staring at the satellite phone in his hands for long blank minutes, shaking with fury, needing to beat something bloody, thinking the same two words over and over.

That.
Bitch
!

This Queen of theirs was craftier than he’d given her credit for.

With a curse, he threw the phone at the wall, whereupon it immediately shattered with a satisfactory crash, spraying bits of plastic and metal over the dusty stone floor. He began to pace, seething.

“Filthy spy! You think you can come here and sneak around? You think there won’t be consequences? You think you can outsmart
me
?”

He knew it was her now, that night when the desert air felt alive. Weymouth had just warned him in his hushed, hurried call that she wasn’t with their party in the jungle, and was probably headed his way.

He wished he’d known earlier to watch out for anything
white
.

“Fucking falcon!” he shouted to the empty room. “Fucking SPIDER!”

She’d heard everything. She knew everything. Now there was only one thing left for him to do.

“Marcell!” Caesar roared. In moments he appeared, bowing, in the doorway of Caesar’s chambers.

“Sire?”

“We’re going into Marrakech. Tonight. You, me, that mercenary friend of yours who’s such a good tracker. And the big bald one, the deserter from the Nepal colony who recently joined us.”

“The Firestarter?”

“That’s him.”

Marcell’s brows lifted.

Caesar said, “There’s been a change of plans. We need an airplane.” His eyes met Marcell’s and his lips, cold and red, curved to a smile. “We’re going to make a little unscheduled visit to Brazil.”

Hawk had a lot of experience repressing his feelings. Before he met Jacqueline, he was profoundly uncomfortable even admitting he
had
feelings, and went to great lengths to smother, bury, or otherwise ignore them out of existence. Feelings were for the weak. Specifically,
tears
were for the weak.

He never cried. Never. Even as a boy, when his father gave him a vicious beating for some infraction, imagined or real, he bit his tongue and endured it, dry-eyed as a marble statue adorning a grave.

Only now, listening to the Queen speak, he thought he would.

“. . . as soon as possible. I understand why you did it, Morgan, I know your heart was in the right place, but it’s not for us to make a believer from a critic with kidnapping and coercion. She leaves first thing tomorrow morning.”

Morgan stood in front of Jenna, head lowered, looking appropriately cowed.

Directing her fierce gaze in Hawk’s direction, the Queen quietly added, “And those pictures will be destroyed. Immediately.
Tonight
.”

Her tone indicated exactly how despicable she considered him for his part in the whole wretched operation . . . an opinion with which he wholeheartedly agreed.

“It’s already been done.” He felt as though he’d been swallowing rocks. His voice sounded like it emanated from the depths of a well.
Pull yourself together!
he screamed silently to himself.
You knew Jacqueline would be leaving! You knew this would come!

He just didn’t think it would be happening quite so soon. He began a serious discussion with himself about the merits of slitting his wrists versus saying or doing something to make the Queen turn him into a charcoal briquette, as she had with Weymouth, eventually deciding he deserved nothing more than to live a long and healthy life, alone, wallowing in his own misery.

He deserved to suffer. How he could’ve gone along with the plan in the first place was making him too sick to even consider.

Along with him and Morgan, all the other Assembly members and the Alphas from each colony had gathered in the Queen’s lavish new home. The tri-level structure was built around the trunk of a Brazil nut tree so large it would take ten men with outstretched arms to encircle its massive girth, and the tree grew right up through the center. Hawk and Morgan stood before Leander and Jenna, who were seated together on a cushioned settee in the main living area on the second floor. Though it was upward of eighty degrees, Jenna was wrapped in a thick blanket. The occasional shiver wracked her body, and Leander, beside her, looked tense and unhappy, as he watched her with a frown.

As they were rocked listlessly by Olivia Sutherland, whose haunted eyes stared out of a wan face, the twins cooed happily in a bassinette nearby.

“That’s what prompted his challenge against the Alpha.” Morgan shot Hawk a sympathetic look. “He refused to turn over the pictures to Alejandro when ordered to do so. He’s become very . . . fond of Jacqueline.”

Fond.

Hawk closed his eyes. He wasn’t fond of her. He was balls-out, soul searingly, madly in love with her. And she didn’t even remember him. And she was leaving tomorrow.

What a bitch Fate turned out to be.

He opened his eyes to find the Queen staring wide-eyed at him. “Your challenge was prompted by your
fondness
for a woman who argued we should all be exterminated?”

Put that way, it did sound less than reasonable. “Given enough evidence that their prejudice is unfounded, people can change.”

She studied him. “True enough. And you think you changed her?”

He said gruffly, “We changed each other. She wasn’t the only one with stupid ideas.”

There was a long, weighted pause while the Queen examined his face. “
When I asked you to stand down, you said that you’d never stand down to the man who hurt your woman. I’d like you to explain that. How did Alejandro hurt her? How did you grow to become so . . . protective of her?”

So Hawk told the story. He began at the very beginning and told it through to the end, leaving nothing out, including Jacqueline’s memory loss.

When he finished speaking, the Queen closed her eyes and exhaled a long, heavy breath. “So you’re in love.”

Scoffs and chuckles and gasps of horror rose from around the room. Hawk went rigid with anger. He said between clenched teeth, “I don’t care that it’s forbidden! You can give me as many lashes as you want and it won’t change my—”

“Forbidden! Oh for God’s sake, that stupid rule has caused more misery!” she interrupted, cross. She pointed at her chest. “Did you know that my
mother
was human? And my father was Alpha—and he was put to death for loving her?”

Everyone knew that. Her father was the most powerful Alpha ever, the Skinwalker himself. His treason was the stuff of legend. Hawk nodded.

“And did you know that I grew up on the run, hiding, hunted, until the day my father was taken away—and after that my mother drank herself to death? And after
that
I was alone and scared and even more miserable than before?”

Hawk opened his mouth, then shut it again. The room had become very quiet.

“And my unborn nephew is a half-Blood, like me—should I sentence him to a lifetime of running and hiding? Of eventually watching one or both of his parents die, as I did?”

“Nephew?” Hawk held very still, sure that whatever would next be spoken would have a monumental impact on them all.

With an unhappy look as if this was a secret he’d rather not share, Leander explained, “My brother, Christian. He lives in Barcelona with his wife. His
human
wife. They’re expecting their first child.”

Several soft gasps arose from behind Hawk. Clearly he wasn’t the only one floored by this information.

Drawing herself tall, the Queen said, “Love is
never
forbidden, not as long as I’m in charge. I don’t care if you’re in love with a human woman or an
Ikati
male or a damn goat—love is love. The Law of single species mating is hereby abolished.”

The silence that followed this statement was so profound Hawk’s heartbeat sounded like thunder in his ears.

“And another thing. This whole Alpha business of fighting to the death—that’s so dumb it gives me a migraine! Why does everything have to be life or death? Where’s the common sense? Where’s the middle ground? Here’s an idea we’ve been far too slow to adopt: democracy. From now on, these contests will be decided by a vote from all the colony members. No one will be ruled without his or her consent.”

A jolt of such shock went through Hawk that he felt as if he’d been electrocuted. Tension began to mount in the room. Men exchanged glances, there was a restless shuffling of feet. But the Queen wasn’t done yet.

“And I’m abolishing corporal punishment. What you described about the punishment tree is . . . well, it’s disgusting, honestly. We’re done with all of that.”

Amid the obvious shock this declaration caused, Leander drawled, “How do you propose we punish traitors and deserters, then, love? Shall we roast them alive instead?”

A flush of color rose in her pale cheeks. “We won’t have to,” she said quietly. “Because there won’t
be
any more traitors and deserters. From now on everyone is free to go.”

Into the stunned hush, LeBlanc, the Alpha from Quebec, said politely, “Excuse me, Your Highness?”

Jenna rose. She looked around the room, her gaze settling on each person in turn. In a strong, clear voice, she said, “Anyone who wants to leave this colony, can. They won’t be apprehended, or punished. There will be no retaliation for leaving, or living among humans, or breeding with them. All the old Laws designed to keep us safe and hidden have failed. We don’t need them anymore. If we’re going to survive, we need to adapt.” She paused, took a deep breath, and said, “We’re not going to hide anymore. We’re going to fight.”

“Fight?” Leander jolted to his feet, radiating tension.

Jenna turned to him. Her eyes were vivid with anger, the set of her jaw was hard. “They know we’re here, the Expurgari and Section Thirty, most likely the rest of the world. Caesar clued them in because Weymouth clued
him
in. I don’t know how soon they’ll strike, but I know one thing . . . I’m not running away from them. In fact, I’m in the mood to kick some serious
ass
.”

Hearing this, Hawk endured a moment of scalding fury, chased by a sense of loss so deep it felt bottomless. All the years, all the long centuries of hiding, all the sacrifices made in the name of safety, undone by a single weak link in the chain. By one traitor, whispering words into the ear of the enemy.

The room erupted into cries of disbelief and anger, shock prickling the air, but Hawk could only stare at the floor, dumb with hate. He was sorry now the Queen had roasted Weymouth; the need for revenge was a pulse of heat in his palms, a drumbeat in his blood.

Eventually the tumult died. The Queen assured everyone she’d hold a proper meeting in the morning, after they’d all rested, and plans would be made. When the last of the crowd had filed from the room, he was still standing in his posture of defeat, staring blankly at nothing.

He heard a gentle voice say his name. He looked up to find Jenna staring at him from across the room with something like concern. “You’ll want to leave with the reporter, I suppose.”

In a voice low and dangerous, Leander said, “This is
madness
, Jenna.”

She lifted a shoulder. “Such is life. If our end is here, if that’s what’s meant to happen, so be it. We’re all on a ticking clock, and life in a cage isn’t a life worth living.”

“You sound like Morgan!” he exploded, but his wife remained calm as morning.

“Thank you.”

“It wasn’t a compliment! This isn’t only about us! About
our
safety,
our
future! What about the girls?”

She sent him a look that would have had Hawk’s testicles shrinking up into his abdomen. But Leander was apparently a stronger man than he; he didn’t even flinch.

“This
is
for the girls. For their future. So they don’t have to grow up like I did.”

“But how in God’s name are we supposed to protect them from—”

“The children can protect themselves.”

Hawk looked up, arrested by the odd note in the voice that had spoken.

It was Olivia Sutherland; she hadn’t left with the others. She stared down into the bassinette by her side with the strangest combination of awe, affection, and fear. She glanced up, looked between Jenna and Leander, and finally let her haunted gaze rest on Jenna. She whispered, “You know that.”

Leander looked confused. Jenna stood, walked slowly to the waist-high railing that spanned the perimeter of the room, brushed aside a gauzy curtain, and stared off silently into the starry, humid night.

“What do you mean?” demanded Leander, striding to the bassinette. Two pairs of small white arms waved in the air as the twins reached for their father. He lowered his hand into the crib and stroked their faces, cupped four tiny hands within the broad expanse of his palm.

Without turning from the view, Jenna said, “They took your Gifts.”

Olivia answered, “Yes.”

“What?” said Hawk and Leander in unison.