The Lawgivers: Gabriel (24 page)

Lexa frowned. “What’s that?”

Gah-re-al looked at her blankly for a
moment and struggled with a definition she might understand.
Finally, he grinned wryly. “Pretty much the same thing I do now. A
little different. When I was a soldier, I was part of a larger
group that enforced the peace.”

“Oh. Were you born here?”

He glanced at her and then looked away.
“No.”

“So you’re one of the angel-demons that
came from the stars?”

He sent her an amused glanced.
“Angel-demons?”

“That’s what my people call yours …
because of the wings. They got it out of a book.”

Gah-re-al looked a question.

Lexa shrugged. “Sir said. He never said
what book only that the star people looked like the beings called
angels in this book and that’s what everybody called them. They
were like gods, I think.”

Gah-re-al lifted his brows in surprise.
“If that’s true, I don’t think I understand why your people seem to
hate and fear mine.”

Lexa glanced at him with amusement.
“They weren’t nice, I don’t think. They brought the wrath of god in
a war on the earth and stuff like that. Mostly they punished people
for doing things god didn’t like.”

He grimaced. “I think I see what you
mean. We had no purpose in coming, though, except to find a place
for our people to live.”

“So you came when the others
came?”

“No. I came only a few years ago.
Before that I was on another world—a colony like this one. Not the
home world.”

Lexa stared into the distance, trying
to wrap her mind around what he’d said. “What’s home
world?”

He grimaced. “Overcrowded,” he said
wryly. “It’s called Narthia.”

Lexa glanced at him curiously.
“Overcrowded? You’ve seen it?”

He grunted. “Far too many people living
there. Yes. I was sent there to become a soldier when I came of
age. They only keep children in the orphan facilities until they’re
of age and then they send them to learn a useful trade—‘useful’
generally means becoming a soldier.”

Lexa puzzled over some of the things he
said, unfamiliar with a lot of the words he used. She got the
general idea, though. He’d been sent away as soon as he was old
enough to a place he hadn’t liked. He didn’t have to tell her that
he hadn’t. There was no pleasure in his face when he told her about
it.

“They didn’t ask you if you wanted to
be a soldier?” she guessed.

He uttered a bark of a laugh that held
no humor. “They didn’t ask. Orphans are suited to the trade,
though, since they have no families—and they’re accustomed to the
rigid discipline required of a soldier.”

“What was it like?”

He glanced at her in surprise, but he
smiled faintly. “Do you really want to know?”

She realized she wasn’t just curious
because he’d spoken about things she really didn’t understand. She
wanted to know about him—anything he was willing to tell her. She
nodded.

She discovered that it was easier to
understand the life he described than she’d expected. It certainly
wasn’t the wonderful life she’d thought he must have had. He hadn’t
had to worry about food, water, and shelter as she had, but he
hadn’t had choices either. He’d had officers always telling him
what to do until he’d become one himself.

And he’d had to fight to
survive.

It sounded to her as if he had spent
most of his life fighting to survive. It was no wonder, she mused,
that he was so very good at fighting.

That thought gave rise to more
curiosity about him and she frowned. “How did you learn to be so
very good at fucking then? Did they teach you that,
too?”

His face reddened but he laughed, this
time with genuine amusement. Gathering her into an embrace, he
grinned down at her. “You think I’m very good at it?”

She blushed, certain she’d said
something that had amused him, but not sure what it was.
“Yes.”

“So you won’t mind if I wanted to do
that again?”

“No. I wouldn’t mind.”

His amusement slowly faded. “But only
me.”

Lexa felt as if her chest had suddenly
caved in. “You want me for your woman?” she gasped.

He stiffened, his hands tightening on
her for a moment before he released her. “Fuck!” he muttered under
his breath.

As embarrassed and dismayed as she was,
Lexa was more confused. She studied his face a little anxiously.
“You didn’t mean it that way?”

He shook his head.

“Oh,” Lexa said, feeling deflated and
more embarrassed. “I thought … you said you didn’t want me to fuck
another man.”

He looked angry, looked as if he would
say something and then decided against it. Instead, he glanced up
at the sky. “We should find shelter. It looks like there’s a storm
gathering.”

* * * *

It was as well that making camp was so
ingrained that it required no real thought. Gah-re-al was too busy
kicking himself to spare time for anything else.

He didn’t even know why he’d said that
to her. One moment he was teasing, the next ….

He knew why he’d said it, he realized
with disgust. As soon as she’d told him she wouldn’t mind if he did
that to her again it had flashed through his mind that, in her
world, among her own kind, the men took what they wanted. She
wouldn’t deny herself to any man that demanded it. She wouldn’t
have survived as long as she had if she wasn’t smart enough to know
that any man that wanted her could, and probably would, force his
will upon her.

She might not want anyone else to touch
her but there was nothing she could do to prevent it.

He’d wanted his ego stroked, though.
He’d wanted to hear her say she didn’t want anyone else touching
her like that.

Where had it come from, he wondered in
angry disgust? It was almost as if he’d been flirting with an udai
woman, had completely forgot for a handful of critical moments that
she was human.

If she’d been an udai woman it would’ve
been a stupid thing to say!

He was a Lawgiver. He couldn’t have a
woman. There was no place in his life for one. There was certainly
no way he could have a woman like Lexa, a human.

Even if it was allowed—and he knew
damned well it wouldn’t be—he had no place for her. He couldn’t
take her to live among his own people, and if he left her with hers
….

He thrust the thought from his mind,
angry that he’d even gone so far in his thoughts as to consider the
impossibility of it and the inadvisability of it. Where the hell
had such thoughts come from anyway?

He’d enjoyed fucking her and he wasn’t
the least bit averse to doing it again—as often as she was willing
and he felt like it, but he could say the same for any of the women
he’d bedded.

He paused and stared hard at the
armload of materials he’d gathered for making a fire, his mind
going back over the women he’d fucked. He was damned if he could
remember half the names or any of the faces.

Well, except Maya … and Phil-a-shee,
but he didn’t think he would’ve remembered Phil-a-shee if not for
their most recent, and unpleasant, encounter.

He couldn’t recall that he’d ever
wondered who or even if they’d shared their bed with any other man.
He was fairly certain he hadn’t cared enough to consider it. He
certainly hadn’t cared enough to consider demanding exclusive
rights.

That was tantamount to a commitment and
he didn’t make commitments beyond the moment—mostly because the
moment was all he could count on.

So what the hell had possessed him to
say such a thing to Lexa?

Impulse? He didn’t act on impulses.
Acting without thinking could get someone killed really
quickly—especially in the wastelands of the new world.

Chapter Thirteen

Lexa was so embarrassed and
uncomfortable after she’d stuck her foot in her mouth all she
really wanted to do was find someplace to hide. That wasn’t
possible, of course. She was stranded in the city with Gabriel and,
in any case, there was no place she could hide from him that he
couldn’t find her.

And his mood had shifted so radically
after her stupid assumption that she didn’t think trying to
disappear was a good idea at all. He hadn’t had any trouble
tracking her down when she’d ignored his orders before and left.
She didn’t think he’d have any difficulty now and that was almost
guaranteed to piss him off. She’d long since decided that it wasn’t
going to be safe to attempt an escape until he ceased to watch her
so closely … or went back to tracking.

After a while, though, she realized
there wasn’t even any point in trying to hide. He’d become so
distant she might not have been there at all.

In any case, scrambling to find what
they needed to make camp before the storm hit occupied her enough
to allow her unsettling emotions time to calm. They’d found a place
that was relatively intact, almost like a deep cave. The windows in
the front were no more than a gaping maw, of course, but the sides
and back seemed solid enough and there were several floors above
the one they chose that also seemed solid. It made Lexa’s flesh
creep to think about the building above them, particularly
considering how many collapsed buildings she’d seen, but she did
her best to put it from her mind.

The rain had already begun to fall
before they’d gathered enough to keep even a small fire going
throughout the night, only a few drops here and there, but big, fat
cold drops that encouraged her to move faster without any
prompting. Dropping her last load next to Gabriel, who was busy
building a fire, with a sense of relief, she headed to the very
back corner of the building and sat down with her back wedged in
the V the back and side wall created. She was damp and shivering.
The wind came with the rain and howled around the building like
banshees, blasting chilling gusts into their sanctuary that whipped
the flames of the fire as it caught and nearly put it
out.

Gabriel looked around when he finally
had the fire going satisfactorily. He spied her almost immediately
even though Lexa knew she had to be almost completely cloaked in
shadows. “You aren’t going to get warm back there,” he said
coolly.

“I’m fine,” Lexa responded, struggling
to keep her teeth from clacking together.

He studied her for a long moment and
finally got up.

Her heart skipped several beats, but he
headed toward the front of the building rather than in her
direction, standing just beyond the curtain of water that had
replaced the spattering drops that had chased her inside. Relieved,
Lexa studied him for a while and finally transferred her attention
to the rain.

It was unnerving to see so much water
falling from the sky. It was even more unnerving that the rain was
accompanied by almost blinding, flashing light and great explosions
of sound that, at times, made vibrations travel through the
seemingly solid rock beneath and behind her. She’d never seen the
like of it—nothing so powerful and frightening, at any
rate.

It rained in the desert occasionally.
Quite often only enough rain fell to dampen the ground, though, and
her clothes, making her thoroughly miserable since she rarely found
much in the way of shelter in time to avoid getting drenched. She’d
even seen the flashes of light and heard the booming that seemed to
accompany it several times, but usually far into the distance. The
only time she’d seen anything even close to the storm crashing
around them now was when she’d been a small child and she’d had her
mother to cuddle her and protect her then.

Of course her mother had been nearly as
frightened by the storm as she was, but it had still been
comforting to be sheltered in the warmth of her mother’s embrace,
curled in a tight ball next to her younger sister and
brothers.

She wondered if her little sister was
still alive or if she’d died long ago—either in childbirth or at
the hands of the man Ralph had traded her off to.

She wondered if there was any chance at
all that her little brothers were still alive. Ralph had suggested
he’d killed them, but now she wondered if that was what he’d really
meant when he’d said he’d disposed of them or if he’d only said
that to torment her.

She hadn’t allowed herself to think
about them. Every time the memories tried to surface, she beat them
down and forced them to the back of her mind again because allowing
herself to think about them only made her cry. And that was not
only a useless waste of energy, it was dangerous to allow herself
to be distracted.

Abruptly, though, the things Gabriel
had said seemed to assemble themselves into a much larger picture
than she’d seen before.

The angel-demons—the udai as he called
them—were gathering her people together to teach them the things
they’d lost. If that truly was the case, then they would bring her
little sister and brothers to the same place, wouldn’t
they?

Assuming they were still
alive.