Deliver Me from Darkness: A Novel of the Paladin Warriors (26 page)

Moments later the door opened, Christos entered first, followed by Ganelon and two merkers who took up position inside the door. Great. Did that mean she was going to receive four more beatings instead of one? No. Ganelon would never dirty himself with her blood.

Hence
the
tagalongs, Gabby.

“Hello, Gabriella.” Christos held up a squishy bag of blood, giving it a jiggle.

Her belly rumbled, disgusting her. Why so soon? Christos liked it when she suffered, so long as she eventually recovered. Which, frankly, was just another form of suffering.

She licked her lips, or at least tried. Her tongue was so dry it stuck to the bottom of her mouth. “I’m not taking that.”

A mocking brow lifted. “Oh yes you are. You’ve been quite disobedient of late. Time to prove you’re worth the trouble.”

Ganelon stepped farther into the room. He wasn’t nearly as handsome as Christos, nor did he hold the threatening physique of their third partner, Lucifer. But there was something decidedly intimidating about Ganelon’s presence, an emptiness in his eyes, an indifference in the way he looked at her. He was looking at her like that now, like she was so inconsequential as to be invisible and it was work to bring her into focus. “You’re sure on this? Glena was not exactly a one-man kind of woman.”

“Oh, I’m quite sure,” Christos said, twisting a needle onto the IV.

“She looks nothing like him. Even if she is his, it’s going to be hard enough for me to pull on my old Paladin ties, what with her blood being removed so many generations.”

“Sirens take after their mother. You know that.”

“If you’re wrong—”

“I’m not.” Christos tipped his head to the side, a chilling smile spread across the lower half of his face. “Am I, Gabriella?”

She stared back at him—quite impartially if she did say so herself—but her hands, which were already trembling, began to convulse against her sides.

Christos laughed, reaching out to grab her arm. She tried to jerk away but the slap of his mind on hers had her going limp. “Oh yes, quite sure.”

There was a sharp prick as the needle slipped under the skin of her arm. She couldn’t move, couldn’t scream.

“There. We’ll get you all fixed up, and then…” He leaned closer, pushing her hair off her face. Something hot and wet slipped down her cheek. His grin turned positively evil. “Then I think it’s time that we dropped in to see dear old dad. What say you?”

***

She was back in the park; the imps sniffing out her trail. Her breath hissed in and out of her lungs as she ran on, pressing past the point where her muscles burned, through where her arms became numb, and toward the point where she simply collapsed in a heap on the rotting leaves scattered over the floor of the wood.

Something snapped behind her, a twig. She glanced over her shoulder, saw nothing, and looked forward again, just in time to smack up against a man’s broad chest.

Logan! Oh god, Logan. He’d save her. Papa said so.

Only it wasn’t Logan, it was Valin, and he was looking at her with that dark hunger that said he didn’t give a damn about her, only having her. She tried to pull away, but his arms were locked tight around her. She couldn’t get away, couldn’t even draw enough air to scream.

Over his shoulder, movement caught her eyes. Roland stood there, watching. Unable to call out she merely pleaded to him with her eyes. Please, save me.

He blinked, then, in a move that had her heart ripping out of her chest, turned and walked away.

***

Karissa woke with a start. Her heart wasn’t missing but pounded like a jackhammer in her chest. It was only a nightmare. The whole thing. All of it. She was on her back in her small twin-sized bed staring into the oily blackness of the darkened room…

…with a man wrapped around her, his arms like vises, his leg like a hunter’s trap, holding her firmly in place. And he was…oh God!

The hard ridge of his erection pressed against her hip had her panicking. She twisted her shoulders, trying to free her arms as her lower body bucked against the weight of his leg. “Let go. Let me go. Letmego!”

Her terror-stricken cries had the opposite of the desired effect and he slipped over top of her instead, pinning her down with a full body embrace.

“Shh. Stop. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Not a monster. Not Valin. Roland. Her immediate instinct was to curl up against him and sob into his shoulder, but then she remembered how, for the last twelve hours, he’d done everything in his power to avoid contact with her. She stiffened. Cleared her throat.

“What are you doing in here?”

He grunted, rolling off her and out of the bed. “Want a drink?”

A drink? What the hell. She never drank. But she’d also just had the most effed up nightmare of her adult life.

After a quick trip to the small bathroom attached to the bedroom, she followed Roland into the main part of the cabin. He’d already poured two tumblers half-full of amber liquid and was lounging in one of the two chairs sipping on his.

She grabbed up the second scotch, plopped down in the adjacent chair, and swigged it down.

Bad idea. She choked, barely managing to not sputter the liquid out again.

His eyebrow arched. She could almost see his thoughts. That this was the woman who’d accused him of escaping in alcohol. Yet he didn’t say anything as he reached for the bottle on the table and poured out two more fingers worth into her cup.

“Want to talk about it?”

She shook her head. No, she didn’t want to talk about her dream. Her near escapes, the monsters chasing her, they didn’t matter. What mattered was that, ultimately, she always had to face the monsters alone.

“My mother died in childbirth. And my father, I don’t even know who he is.” She looked over at Roland, but he was a poster child for relaxation, his ankle crossed over the knee of his other leg, the tumbler in his hand resting at a slight angle on the arm the chair.

“My Aahma died three years later. I don’t know how. I was too young to ask and by the time I was old enough I knew better than to force Papa to recount memories that were obviously painful. That left Papa and me. We had only each other, but it was enough.”

She stared down at the glass in her hands, her knuckles white against the clouded glass. The temptation to drink the rest of the liquor Roland had poured her was great, and because of that, she pointedly reached over and set it on the small round table that sat between them.

Before she could remove her hand from the glass, Roland’s hand was there, closing over her wrist. He’d moved so quickly and silently that she hadn’t even seen it.

Lifting her head, she met his gaze; his eyes bored into her steadily, the only sign of his emotion was the slight crease in his brow.

“You don’t have to drink that, but I’d like to hear the rest.”

She swallowed, her saliva tasting like acid in the back of her mouth. “You know the rest; Papa died.”

“How?”

“Because of me.”

Something flashed across his face, echoing down through their bond. Pain, understanding. He released her arm, sitting back in his chair. “I’m sure you’re wrong. It may only seem that way.”

“I led them to our home. I left him there, alone and vulnerable, while I went to work the next day.”

“Did you know?”

“That I’d led them there?” She shook her head. “The cab driver was a vampire. I had him drop me off across town and then got another cab. But he must have followed me. Or had someone else do it.”

“Why didn’t they attack that night then?”

“Papa had the house warded against vampires. They couldn’t enter without invitation.”

“The wards were keyed to your grandfather?”

She nodded.

He tapped the glass with his finger, the small sound pinging in the quiet cabin.

“What are you thinking?”

“That they must have watched you for a while. Then gone back to report. Most likely the merkers expected you to be home the next day when they came.”

“Merker. That’s what you said that thing last night was.”

Roland nodded, then as if anticipating her next question, explained. “Merkers are Ganelon’s get. The offspring is created when he mates with one of the more powerful demons from hell.”

“They’re half demon?”

He nodded.

“But Ganelon…wouldn’t that make them half Paladin too?”

“They are abominations,” he hissed, his lip curling up.

Okay then. She gnawed on her own lip. She had to give him that. That thing last night had been freaky, and demons were just plain bad.

“How do you know it was a merker that killed my papa?” she asked.

“Because I went there.”

She sat up straighter. “And?”

“And I could smell them. I was trying to use my gift to show me exactly what had happened but it was a no-go.”

“You’re a seer?”

“A poor one.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I see things: past, present, future. But I cannot control what I see, and what I do see, I cannot change.”

“Wow. That must suck.”

He laughed, a tell-me-about-it laugh emphasized by an Adam’s-apple-bobbing swallow of scotch.

She frowned, settling back in the lumpy cushions. “So how does it happen? Do these visions come in dreams or through touch?”

“As I said, I have little control over it. I can ride wide open and get a sense of knowing at times. I’ve used that to get a reading on my surroundings, get a bead on a person or where bad events might be going down. But that is very limited both in what it tells me and how far away I can read.”

“Sounds a bit like my being able to read someone’s intent, only I need to touch them.”

“A bit, though I don’t exactly get a sense of intent, more of a Spidey tingly feeling of awareness rather than a true knowledge.”

“Is that how you found me last night?”

“Partly. Once I was in the right part of town I was able to hone in on where something bad was occurring, but it was Gabriella who told me you were still up in South Bronx.”

“Gabriella?”

“She’s a vampire too. But she’s not too fond of her master so she sometimes bats for our team.”

Karissa thought of the redheaded teenage vampire that had warned her and Valin before fleeing. “I think I met her.”

“She said as much.” He stood, grabbed the scotch bottle, and opened one of the narrow cabinets in the kitchen. Discussion over.

Karissa rubbed her palms together. Something he’d said bothered her. “This morning, when I touched you in the bathroom and saw what you were thinking of, was that one of these seeing the future things?”

She couldn’t hide the wistfulness in her voice and was disappointed when he shook his head and said, “That was fantasy. Nothing more.”

“Oh.” She dropped her gaze to her lap. She hadn’t bothered to pull back on her jeans and her legs were bare from mid-thigh down. Goose bumps covered her flesh.

The cabinet slammed shut and she jumped. “I haven’t had a true seeing since the day I was turned.”

Her head snapped back up, her gaze honing in on where Roland was standing, hands planted on the counter, head bowed.

“Tell me.”

He slowly turned around and leaned against the counter, his arms folded across his chest. There was something haunting in the way his eyes were staring through her, beyond her. In evenly distributed, unemotional sentences he began to tell her about the night his entire life had changed. The night the last female Paladin had been killed.

“I knew something was off. Back then I could take that sense of knowing and meditate and normally I would come up with a vision. What I saw…” he trailed off, the first catch of emotion stealing his voice. It took him a minute to compose himself before he went on. “I can’t project. The women were having a gathering at my mother’s house. It was closer than Haven so I didn’t warn the others but rushed over. I wasn’t prepared for the siren who opened the door. She, uh, ensnared me. In the back of my mind I knew she shouldn’t have been there, that the quiet in the manor house was all wrong, but I couldn’t—” He shook his head, then thrust his head back so he looked at the cobwebbed ceiling. His throat bobbed as he swallowed tears.

“Roland…” Karissa stood, starting for him, but his head snapped back down, his hard glare nailing her feet where they were.

“I failed them. I was so blinded by false lust that I didn’t care about anything but what she wanted. And she wanted what Christos wanted. I let them take my blood, and then when she told me to drink from Christos’s vein, I did. All the while they had been dying. Ensnared, I hadn’t even heard the screams.”

Karissa’s heart was breaking for him. She didn’t have to touch him to feel the agony eating him from the inside out. It was tearing her apart too.