My Darkest Passion (7 page)

She pressed the side of a loosely held fist to her mouth. “He said he had to. He said he had no choice.”

“He didn’t,” Kynan said.

Her attention snapped to Kynan. “Neither did I.”

Harsh took out his phone and his earpiece. He was hitting one of his contacts when he stopped. He switched off the earpiece and put it away. Instead he held the phone flat on his palm and put his call on speaker. No one said anything while it rang on the other end.

“Harsh. What’s the word? Mayhem, yes or no?”

“You’re on speaker, Iskander.” Harsh watched the phone screen. “I have Kynan here.”

“Hey there, warlord,” Iskander said. He sounded as cheerful as always. “You still an asshole?”

“Fuck you.” Kynan supplied a gesture to go with his rejoinder.

“I also have Addison O’Henry with me as well.”

“Yeah? Who’s that?”

“The woman we removed from the compound.”

Iskander didn’t answer right away, and when he did, he didn’t sound quite so cheerful. “What’s the word?”

“Take both teams out to that compound and sever every mageheld there. Have Paisley deal with Infante. You have my authorization on that. Level the place. Don’t leave anything standing.”

“Consider it done.”

While he disconnected and put away the phone, Kynan went ahead and made everything worse.

“Harsh,” Kynan said in a low voice, “What the hell are we supposed to do if she’s pregnant?”

7

P
regnant.

The water in her stomach turned to lead. She squeezed her eyes closed, but a horrible reality caromed through her head. What Bejar had done to her, what Infante had put into motion, wasn’t over.

Pregnant
.

Impossible. Not. Not. Not. No.

Except it wasn’t impossible. It wasn’t impossible at all. She was on the pill, but, obviously, not since Bejar. The interruption was right near the beginning of the cycle, too, so that was nearly three weeks without protection. She forced her eyes open because there was no way she was going to let them think she was weak.

She opened her mouth to say something but found she didn’t have words that would give voice to what had been done to her. To actions and deeds that lead to the question
what are we going to do if she’s pregnant
. Had she ever known the statistics for pregnancy after unprotected sex? She ended up wiping her lips with two fingers of one hand, a nervous habit. God, her hand shook.

Harsh was in one of his thoughtful silences. “Under normal circumstances,” he said at last, “and depending where you were in your cycle, the chances of pregnancy after an incident of unprotected sex could be as high as nine percent.”

Oddly enough it helped that he was so clinical. She could be talking to her doctor in private. “But these are not normal circumstances,” she said.

“No.”

“What does that mean? Not normal circumstances.”

“For most human women in your situation, near certain, regardless of use of contraception.”

“But I’m different.”

“What data I have suggests you are unlikely to be different enough.” He went on, in his detached way, about how the demonkind reproduced with humans and about evolutionary strategies that had arisen over the millennia and really, she couldn’t listen to him. She couldn’t get her mind around what he was telling her. The enormity of what he was saying in no way matched the plans she had for her life, none of which had included having a baby. Under any circumstance.

She covered her head with her arms and there was no stopping the tears. They welled up, hot with despair and rage and fear and brought on the conviction that her body had betrayed her. She shook so hard she couldn’t breathe and maybe she would just die from that. But then this calm settled around her, and she caught a breath and then another, and then she was as free of emotion as she was free from feeling pain.

Harsh said, “There is a shower upstairs. Afterward, if you don’t object, I’ll take a look at your injuries. We’ll get some food into you and discuss what happens next.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to take a shower if—” She was flailing mentally. At the limit of her ability to cope. “You know, because of evidence, I mean.”

Harsh crouched beside her. She flinched, but he didn’t touch her. “Please,” he said. “Shower. You’ll feel better.”

She had to crick her neck a little to look at him, too, and her heart turned to sand at the same time a corner of her soul burned away.

Harsh licked his lower lip, and she wondered if he had more than one physical appearance, and if he did, whether it was monstrous, too. He stroked the tips of his fingers along his forehead in what was, for him, a graceless motion. Like he hadn’t meant to move at all and when he had, he wanted to take it all back.

“For us, Awesome, justice works differently. We don’t need the kind of forensic evidence humans do, for one thing.”

She believed him. She believed him to the core of what was left of her soul. She nodded and met his gaze. “I’m going to kill Infante someday.”

His moved back and held out a hand to her. Offering. Not insisting. She didn’t want to touch him. Didn’t want anyone touching her. So she fisted both hands in the hem of her shirt while she stood. Kynan, still shirtless, stayed well back. “Up the stairs,” Harsh said. “First door.”

She saw the bottom of the stairs and walked out of the room, fingers gripping Kynan’s shirt as if it were capable of saving her life as long as she never let go. On the stairs, they were out of sight, but she couldn’t shake her awareness of the two men. They were beacons in her head, a vibration in the center of her chest. The world was different now. Her place in it had been shattered and remade. All the nerve endings in her skin and the receptors in her brain had been transformed in some fundamental way that was no longer mutually compatible with her previous reference points.

As she headed upstairs, her awareness of Harsh and Kynan remained in the back of her head and that echo in her chest wouldn’t stop. At one point, she stopped walking, a hand pressed to the wall and concentrated on emptying her mind of them. She couldn’t.

The knowledge wasn’t just a general
there are other people in the house
. The two were separate points of awareness, alive in her head, and she wanted to be downstairs with them. But she wasn’t. She was here. Alone. Losing her mind. Or maybe just living in her new normal.

She found the bedroom Harsh had told her about, the one with the shower, but she didn’t make it inside. She stood in front of the door, paralyzed by the certainty that if she went in there, into that box, she would be trapped the way she’d been trapped in the shed. A bigger prison, but a prison all the same.

Her paranoia was broad-based. Yes, she was afraid of being trapped again. She was also afraid of being alone. Terrified. She didn’t give a damn if her fears were irrational, and, after all, how irrational was it to not want to be alone after days of solitary imprisonment?

What if she couldn’t get out of the room?

What if that crawling sensation in her head never went away?

She leaned against the wall outside the bedroom door because she didn’t trust herself to walk without falling down. The vibrations in her chest weren’t going away, either. She pressed her back to the wall while she waited for something to change. Nothing did except the intermittent problem she’d been having with her vision since she’d been locked in the shed. The lines of the hallway no longer met in neat angles, and there were colors she didn’t have a name for. Dizzy, she slid to the floor and concentrated on forming a plan for how she’d navigate a physical space she couldn’t trust.

If she could convince herself to move.

If she could just believe that she could be alone like this without breaking down.

She surveyed the corridor and gave up trying to force what she saw into what she expected to see. Doing that helped. From having seen the house before her vision went all crazy like this, she knew this was an older structure, with all the beauty of a Victorian’s proportions: high ceilings, crown molding, and tall windows. The wooden floor had been lovingly cared for. The area rug pulsed with brilliant colors. She no longer cared if they were colors she could name.

Her pinpoint awareness of the two men downstairs shifted. Until now, they’d been in the same room. Now, the one called Harsh Marit separated and headed for the stairs. How odd that she knew where he was and that, whatever his destination, he was headed her direction. And that her reaction was not horror that he might be coming after her but
thank God
.

She clapped her hands over her mouth to stop the sob that rose in her throat. She couldn’t let them know she was falling apart. Weakness was dangerous. Fatal. She could not allow them to think she was weak. Rank mattered. It mattered more than anything because rank meant power and people without power got hurt.

At the same time, she wanted him to come upstairs to find her, not go somewhere else in the house. The air around her crackled. A spark burst into being in front of her face and flared out. The tiny ember floated down and landed on her arm. She didn’t feel a thing. The center of her chest resonated, and she knew it was because Harsh was heading her way. She didn’t need to see him. Or hear him on the stairs. She knew where he was.

Harsh appeared at the top of the stairs. “Ms. O’Henry.” His voice was deep, slightly growly. He felt
real
and that sense of calm around him touched her, too. God, she was just so grateful not to be alone. She lowered her hands and wrapped them around her drawn-up knees. She was cracking up. Going nuts. Already nuts. There wasn’t any such thing as people who weren’t real people. No one could do magic and demons existed only in stories. Except they were real. Magic and demons were real.

He walked toward her, and she didn’t care that she was practically naked and probably flashing him. She went on alert, because if he thought he was going to do anything to her she didn’t want, he was wrong. She’d rather die.

Harsh averted his eyes. “We thought you might need some company.”

She clutched her legs to her torso, but she accomplished that by muscle memory. As for what he was doing here, well, she could accept he was serious without giving up the possibility that he wasn’t. She tried to smile, but she suspected the muscles of her face did not cooperate. Somewhere along the way she’d lost most of the connection between her mind and her body.

“Thanks. I guess.”

He shifted his gaze to her, but kept his eyes on her face. “We’re a social species that does not thrive in isolation. As with humans, it can eventually do us grave harm.”

“Okay.” He was a lot bigger than she was. Physically stronger. The center of her chest vibrated again, and—coincidence? Harsh took a step back.

“Our uneasiness about being alone is, at least in part, related to our need to be around others like us. We all feel it to one degree or another.”

She nodded like he was making sense. If he made a move on her, how the hell was she going to protect herself?

“We take comfort from touch. It doesn’t mean what it means between humans or between the magekind. Sometimes, one or another of us prefers not to be touched. No one takes offense.” He held out a hand. “Eventually, though, we all need contact.”

She stared at his palm.

He let his hand fall to his side. “Can you stand?”

She pushed off the floor with her injured arm. In the back of her head, she knew she was bleeding again, but all she felt was the damp slide of blood toward her wrist. When she was on her feet, she wobbled, and she punched a hand toward the wall to steady herself. Her thoughts slid toward his, reached out without her knowing how or why. Or even if the experience was real. In her head, he was a burst of color in a landscape of gray. She flashed on the fact that, in terms of power, she outranked him, and hated not knowing what that meant or if it was even real.

A smile curved his mouth. “Oh, it’s real enough,” he said, just as if he’d read her mind. Maybe he had. Demons did that. They could get into your head and take over. They could make you do things, see things, feel things you hated.

“No,” she whispered. “No.”

Her sense of him diminished, but he went on talking like nothing had happened. “Kynan Aijan is what Infante would call one of the ancient demons. Like Bejar, one of the Entelechy. It’s accurate enough to say that Kynan outranks you.”

She turned her head and glared at him. “No he doesn’t.”

He continued in the same calm tone. “It is the case, however, that the nature of my work for Nikodemus means that Kynan’s rank has no bearing on my authority over him. Just as what you are or how you got this way has no bearing on my authority over you while you are in our territory.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” God, she was dizzy.

“You should.” Both syllables were razor sharp. “Nikodemus is a warlord who accepts the responsibilities of his rank. I have sworn an oath of loyalty to him, and that’s not to be taken lightly.”

“Bully for you.” She tried to walk away but lurched like a drunken sailor and banged into the wall.

“You are alive because Nikodemus does not punish unfairly.”

She pressed her back to the wall. “Tell him I said thanks for everything.”

“Addison,” he said softly. “You will have an easier time if you stop processing the world according to what you used to be.”

“I’ll just do that.” Her mind folded around a new way of balancing and with that success came a glimmer of connection to her body. She shut down because she didn’t want to feel anything. But it was too late. The truth burned through her; she was badly injured, and even with her mind shut down hard, the memory of the pain made her stomach curdle. She wanted nothing to do with it.

“Pain exists to tell us something is wrong.” He considered her as if she were a lab specimen he was holding up to the light. “You might do yourself permanent damage if you continue like this.”

“Right. I’ll just stop all that now.”

He walked to the bedroom door a few feet past where she stood. She wasn’t about to take her eyes off him, and didn’t.