Demon Night (34 page)

Ethan pushed her hair back from her face. “You stiffened up a bit with my Gift; it didn't hurt you?” When she shook her head, he pressed, “And the rest went all right, too?”

“Yes,” she said, and he looked at her again so seriously that suddenly she was laughing. “Stop that. I'm okay.”

But it struck her now that something in the way he had asked was expectant, as if he'd anticipated that there would be a change.

Her amusement faded, and curiosity had her rising up on her elbow. “Did you do something differently?”

“Well, I didn't resist it at all, Charlie—what you make me feel when you're drinking from me.” He rolled onto his back, cocked his arm up behind his head to prop it up. “But don't you worry that you still can't have the feeding separate, if you want it. I figure I can control myself well enough.”

“That doesn't sound like a very good plan.” She leaned down to swirl his flat nipple with her tongue, to scrape her fangs over the small nub. “I think I could get used to feeding this way.” She glanced up with a wry smile. “Probably
too
used to it.”

“That's fine by me.” He shuddered beneath her mouth, and an instant later his unbuttoned shirt was covering his torso, and she was teasing cotton.

She lifted her head, narrowed her eyes. “That's cheating.”

“I'm just awful scared of being naked with all these snakes and scorpions crawling about.” His gaze dropped to her breasts, and their peaks tightened when his lips widened in an appreciative grin. “But I'll protect you real well, so you ain't got to worry none.”

But he must have been concerned that she was uncomfortable; an instant later, a big shirt landed in her lap. She pulled it on, smiling. The hem almost reached her knees. “Would I have to worry if I was bitten?”

“No. You could shoot bleach into your veins and it wouldn't do much but burn a little.” He sat up, caught her mouth in a hard kiss before pulling back. “Unless I'm drifting, I ain't much for lying around. You feel like taking a walk?”

She did, and it was odd—marvelous—to stroll barefoot across the desert sand under the moonlight as easily as she might have a beach and the sun.

And there was little need to block. There were only the sounds they made—and the occasional scurrying of feet, the beat of tiny hearts. When she stopped, tried to locate the source of a strange, whirring chirp, Ethan pointed out the bat hunting insects.

Charlie watched its flight over a distant mound of flat, stacked stones, every motion of its small body clear to her in the darkness—and she was suddenly, stupidly overwhelmed.

She didn't turn away fast enough. Ethan cupped her face, frowning down at the tears that spilled over her cheeks. Yet it was a laugh that broke from her, and she didn't think she could relate the absurdity of it. But she managed to say, “It's so ugly. But
not
. It's not at all.”

He smiled, and she smoothed her thumbs over the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Oh, it's an ugly little thing,” he drawled. “But they have their charms. And I reckon that one sings ‘
Nessun dorma
' on his way back to his cave and his belly full of mosquitoes.”

She couldn't help but picture that, and fell against him, laughing. He was still smiling when she finally got ahold of herself, and her gaze fell to his scar. Her amusement faded.

“You going to kiss me now, Miss Charlie?”

“No.” Her fingers traced the line of his upper lip. “I was just thinking—Caleb gave you this?”

He stood motionless beneath her touch. “That he did.”

“When you were in the desert.”

“Yes.”

She hesitated for a moment. “What happened between the two of you and Sammael?”

He brushed her hair behind her ear. “You're wondering how it is that I like it out here, if I also died out here.”

“No. I can see why you enjoy it. But because there is a connection, it made me think of what Jake told me about you…and what he didn't tell me. But maybe I shouldn't have brought your brother up.”

Ethan shook his head. “It's no problem, Miss Charlie. And I'll give you the choice between the long version and the short one. Just remember I ain't much of a storyteller—”

“Long,” she said.

“Well, hell,” he said, but she didn't hear any real displeasure behind it. He turned, began walking again, and she fell into step beside him. “All right, then. So you know my ma and da bought a place outside Leadville?”

“Yes.” She watched him pick up a small stone, skip it across the sand as if it were water. “After your dad got out of a P.O.W. camp.”

Ethan's brows rose, and he glanced over at her. “Jake dug that up?” At her nod, he chuckled a little and continued, “Hell. Well, yes. And it changed my da, so as he couldn't tolerate being hemmed in or the crush of people in the city. So we headed on out west.”

“That must have been hard on your mom.”

“I reckon so. But you'd never have known it.” Ethan shook his head, smiling. “You saw my da at Cole's, Charlie. So it won't come as a surprise to you when I tell you she was an Amazon of a woman. Both Caleb and I favored her—though Caleb, he wasn't quite so tall.”

Charlie pulled at his dangling suspender. “She must have been a handsome, sexy woman.”

“You hush.” He grinned at her. “And she sure as hell was. My da, he loved her more than any woman had ever been loved, and she did him more than any man. I figure that's what got them through some of those early days. We had a big spread of land, and didn't do much with it—we had money, so we didn't need to work it to live off of—but still, them first years were hard, with a lot of adjusting. And then Ma took on our schooling after Caleb and I ran into some trouble in town.”

“What kind?”

“Just the kind that boys get into when they talk in a way that sets them apart from the other boys,” Ethan said. “We weren't so big then, and we got into one fight after another. Usually lost, too, due to numbers. So Caleb and I both figured if we couldn't beat 'em, we'd just fit in—but the first time she heard us talking like that, my ma took us out of the school.” He slanted a glance at her, then skipped another rock across the sand. “Of course, Caleb and I still practiced, and it came in right handy when I was working later. I couldn't disguise my height, but I could cultivate the image of a dude with all of the newsletters and stories that were spread about me—and so when I rode into a town looking for someone, dressed like this and talking real simple-like, folks often caught on too late as to whom they was speaking to, and I got the information I needed before they clammed up.”

Charlie stopped, and sized him up. “I'm trying to imagine you on a horse. I just can't. But the wings look right.”

“The wings suit me fine.” He sent another rock skipping, and looked back at her, the humor slipping away from his expression. “In those years, most everyone near us was invested in mining somehow—either working the mines, or depending on the money from it for their businesses. One company owned by a man named Billings approached my ma and da, and there was some prospecting done on the property. They found one hell of a lode running up our side of the mountain. Billings made an offer, even talked partnerships—but my da, once he realized it'd mean people coming and going, the mountain getting torn up, he just backed away from it. And nothing much happened for eight or nine years, except Caleb and I both went east to study, and then came back west to work.”

“And Caleb started practicing law?”

Ethan nodded. “I didn't want to be cooped up in an office, but he thought it was all right. And after Caleb and I had gone, my da and ma had begun taking on more help, using the land a bit more, making it a working concern. So they were supporting a few families—and my da had grown real attached to the property. But the mines in the area, they were hitting some hard times, and my da was getting pressure from Billings to sell the rights to that lode.”

“But he didn't?”

“No. And both Caleb and I had to step in a couple of times when the hassling got bad. Billings was sending in thugs to spook the women, poisoning some of the livestock. But there wasn't much proof. And we weren't getting much sympathy from the town, because so many of them wanted the mountainside opened so as they could keep working. Caleb and I went in and warned Billings several times, telling him to back away—but there wasn't much else to do. And for a while, it died down.”

Ethan picked up another rock but didn't toss it. He looked at it lying in his palm before he closed his hand. “And then I got word that my ma had been hurt. A couple of Billings's men had come upon her when she was alone, and—” Dust was falling from between his fingers, and his voice was strained when he continued, “And they hurt her real bad. But she hung on…as long as she could.”

His throat worked, and he shook out the handful of dust. Her chest aching, Charlie watched him struggle for his next words. He finally met her eyes.

“You look awful torn up, Charlie,” he said hoarsely. “You want to come over here so I can comfort you a bit?”

She was in his arms less than a second later, and he was holding on to her tight, burying his face in her hair. He spoke through clenched teeth. “Son of a bitch. A hundred and twenty years, and it still rips my guts.”

Her fingers curled in his shirt. “Ethan, I'm so sorry,” she whispered against his throat. “I shouldn't have asked—”

She broke off as he pulled back, shaking his head.

“No.” His thumbs smoothed across her cheeks, wiped away the wet from her skin. “She ought to be remembered. And she ought to be cried over.” He drew a long, shuddering breath. “We did, Charlie, but then we got to work. She'd told us not to go off half-cocked—told us to do right by her. And so we did. All by the book. And when Caleb and I were done, we had a right solid case. Not just against those that was hired, but Billings, too. But Billings had real deep pockets, and he bought himself a jury. And my da…” His brow furrowed. “After my ma passed, I can't call what my da was doing ‘living.' And on the day Billings and his men were acquitted, my da took a walk out to where she was buried, and he didn't come back in.” Another breath shook from his chest. “My da sure taught me a real good lesson about what it means to love a woman so powerfully, Charlie.”

That to let himself feel so much was inevitably self-destructive? What was safe then—friendships and fuck buddies?

But contemplating it would only hurt, and this was about Ethan, not her. She laid her cheek over his heart again, held on. “What did you and Caleb do?”

“We went off half-cocked. Made certain each one of those men wouldn't be hurting a woman again. But we let them live, because that was worse than dying. Then we tried to go after Billings.”

“Tried?”

She felt his nod, and looked up at him as he said, “He knew we were coming, and we weren't just coming to hurt him. Because he may not have been one of those who'd murdered my ma, but he ordered it, and we had every intention of stringing him up. So he got out of there, and under a whole lot of protection. When we realized we wouldn't be able to reach him, we targeted what would hurt him the most, and what he'd killed my ma over: his money. For a long while, we didn't take anything but what was his—and we took a lot of it.”

She smiled a little at the note of satisfaction in his voice. “When did you realize he was a demon?”

Ethan's brows shot up. “A demon? No, Charlie—Billings was human.”

“Oh.” She blinked a few times. “Did you eventually get a chance to kill him?”

“No.” A deep sigh moved through him. “No. What happened instead was that Caleb and I became something just as bad. We shot back at Billings's men, because we figured it was us or them. Then the lawmen started coming after us—men who weren't much different than Caleb and I had been. We didn't put up a fuss when we saw it was them, but went along. And they knew what kind of man Billings was, knew the truth of some of it—so the first couple of times we were brought on in, they still treated us like we was one of them, and our busting out a bit of a joke. But then one day, it wasn't one of Billings's men we had to shoot back at, and we knew they weren't going to bother bringing us in any longer.”

His lips compressed, and he stepped back, running his hands up and down her arms before turning and picking up another rock, tossing it across the sand. His gaze followed its bouncing path, his profile set in a hard line.

“At night, Caleb and I would be hiding out in places not much different than this, wondering how we'd come to such a state. I'd sit there thinking that I'd overturned every one of my principles—and I still couldn't figure if what we'd done was wrong, because when we went the right way, there wasn't any justice in it. But before long it wasn't about justice at all, but just doing everything we could to stay alive. Because you've got to keep living. If you give up, you're swinging at the end of a rope, and that seems just as much a betrayal of your principles as killing the lawmen coming after your head.” He turned back toward her. “And I'll tell you that I still don't feel a bit of remorse for what I did to Billings's men—but I'd give anything in the world not to have the blood of good men on my hands.”

“But you can't.”

“No. So I got a lot to atone for—but I also reckon that I'll be doing it on my terms, and relative to how bad I figure what I did was. Which means I'll be a Guardian for an awful long time.” A faint smile curved his mouth, and he looked down at his feet before slanting a glance at her. “And the only reason I can atone at all is because Caleb and I rode into the wrong town.”

She remembered that he'd mentioned it before. “Eden?”

“Eden,” he echoed softly. “It had a reputation for being real clean, full of upstanding citizens. Particularly the sheriff, Samuel Danvers, who'd gotten rid of the bad elements in the town—men like Billings—and renamed it Eden about two or three years before we arrived.”

Charlie's eyes widened. “He was the
sheriff
?”

“With a passel of human deputies who'd do just about anything for him,” Ethan said, nodding. “And on the surface, everything looked just fine. But we found out real quick it wasn't.”

“What happened?”

“Well, he was waiting for us at the saloon, Charlie. He was awful polite, and I was tired of shooting my way out of a town. So we walked right into that cell, figuring I'd let us out just as soon as I could. Only Danvers, he never slept, or went to drink or eat, or even take a piss. He just watched us from his big rosewood desk.”

Charlie's flesh was crawling. She knew that feeling too well—of being under constant observation, of never having a moment alone.

“And then someone in the town found a girl who'd been hurt and left to die out in the desert. She named one of the deputies as the one who did it.”

Charlie hugged herself and shivered. “Sammael wouldn't have liked that.” When Ethan glanced at her, surprised, she said, “In his car, with Henderson—Sammael couldn't tolerate the idea of him touching me, and he thought anything sexual was dirty unless there was love involved.” She swallowed the sickness that rose in her throat. “I guess he's probably the reason I wasn't raped.”