Tempted (19 page)

The shed, perfumed by Rephaim and his blood, smelled like the darkness that had surrounded her after she had un-died and her humanity had been almost totally destroyed. It reminded her of that black time and those days and nights that had been filled with nothing but anger and need, violence and fear.

She stifled a little gasp of realization as she made the rest of the scent connection. The red fledglings, those
other
red fledglings—the ones she was so reluctant to reveal to Zoey—had this same scent about them. It wasn’t a perfect match, and she doubted whether a nose less keen than hers could even draw the connection, but she could. She did. And the connection made her own blood cold with foreboding.

“Again you come to me alone,” Rephaim said.

Rephaim’s words drifted to her out of the darkness. Without seeing the monster he was, his voice had a quality that made him sound hauntingly, heartbreakingly human. That was, after all, what had saved him the day before. His humanity had reached Stevie Rae, and she hadn’t been able to kill him.

But today he sounded different, stronger than he had before. That relieved and worried her at the same time.

Then she shook off the worry. She wasn’t some helpless kid who went running for the hills at the first sign of danger. She could definitely kick some bird butt. Stevie Rae straightened her spine. She’d made the decision to help him get away, and that’s dang well what she was gonna do.

“And who’d ya expect? John Wayne and the cavalry?” Pretending to be her mom when one of her brothers was being sick and annoying, Stevie Rae marched forward. The shape that had been a dark blob hunkered in the back of the shed came into focus and she gave him her best no-nonsense look. “Well, you’re not dead and you’re sittin’ up. So you must be feelin’ better.”

He cocked his head slightly to the side. “Who is John Wayne and cavalry?”

“
The
cavalry. It just means the good guys comin’ to the rescue. Don’t get excited, though. There isn’t an army comin’. All you got is me.”

“Don’t you consider yourself one of the good guys?”

He surprised her with his ability to have an actual conversation
with her, and she thought if she could close her eyes or look away from him, she might almost fool herself into thinking he was just a normal guy. Of course she knew better. She could never close her eyes around him
or
look away, and he definitely wasn’t a normal anything.

“Well, yeah, I’m good, but I’m not exactly an army.” Stevie Rae made an obvious show of looking him over. And he did still look like crap—definitely battered and bloodied and broken—but he wasn’t lying on his side in a crumpled heap anymore. He was sitting up, leaning, mostly on his uninjured left side, against the back of the shed. He’d arranged the towels she’d left with him over his body like pieces of a blanket. His eyes were bright and alert and never wavered from her face. “So, you
are
feelin’ better?”

“As you said, I am not dead. Where are the others?”

“I told ya before, the rest of the Raven Mockers left with Kalona and Neferet.”

“No, I mean the other sons and daughters of man.”

“Oh, my friends. They’re sleepin’ mostly. So we don’t have much time. This isn’t gonna be easy, but I think I figured out how to get you outta here in one piece.” She paused, and stopped herself from picking at her fingernails. “You can walk, can’t you?”

“I will do what I need to do.”

“Now what the heck does that mean? Just give me a simple yes or no. It’s kinda important.”

“Yessss.”

Stevie Rae swallowed hard at the sound of his hissed word and decided she’d been wrong about the whole if-she-didn’t-look-at-himhe’d-seem-normal thing. “All right, well, let’s get goin’ then.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“All I could think of was that I need to get you someplace where you can be safe and heal. You can’t stay here. They’ll find you for sure. Hey, you don’t have your daddy’s problem with bein’ underground, do ya?”

“I prefer the ssssky to the earth.” He sounded bitter, practically biting off the words and adding a special hissing emphasis to “sky.”

Stevie Rae put her hands on her hips. “So does that mean you can’t go underground?”

“I prefer not to.”

“Well, do you
prefer
to stay alive and hidden underground, or up here and about a minute away from bein’ found and dead?”
Or worse,
she thought but didn’t say aloud.

He didn’t speak for quite a while and Stevie Rae began to wonder if maybe Rephaim didn’t really want to live, which was a thought she hadn’t considered. She guessed it might make sense, though. His own folks had left him for dead and the modern world was like a zillion times different than it had been when he’d been alive and in the flesh before—and terrorizing Cherokee villages. How badly had she messed up by not just letting him die?

“I prefer to live.”

By the look on his face, Stevie Rae thought that maybe his announcement was as much a surprise to him as it had been to her.

“Okay. Fine. Then I need to get you outta here.” She took a step toward him, but stopped. “Do I need to make you promise to be good again?”

“I am too weak to be a danger to you,” he said simply.

“All right, then I’ll just consider your word that you gave me earlier still holding. Just don’t try anything stupid and we might get through this.” Stevie Rae walked over to him and squatted down. “I better take a look at your bandages. They might need to be changed or tightened before we leave.” She checked him over methodically, all the while keeping up a running verbal commentary of what she was doing. “Well, the moss looks like it’s workin’. I don’t see much blood. Your ankle’s pretty swollen, but I don’t think it’s broken. Can’t feel any breaks, anyway.” She rewrapped the ankle and tightened his other bandages, leaving the shattered wing for last. Stevie Rae reached behind him and started to straighten the bandages that had come loose and Rephaim, who had been silent and perfectly still during her examination, flinched and groaned in pain.

“Ah, shoot! Sorry. I know the wing’s bad.”

“Wrap more of the cloth around me. Tie it more tightly against
my body. I will not be able to walk if you do not completely immobilize it.”

Stevie Rae nodded. “I’ll do what I can.” She ripped more lengths from one of the towels and then he leaned forward so that she had access to his back. She gritted her teeth and worked as quickly and gently as she could, hating the way he trembled and kept stifling moans of pain.

When she’d finished with the wing, she ladled out some water and helped him drink it. After he stopped trembling, she stood and held out her hands to him. “Okay, let’s cowboy up.”

He gazed at her and even in his strange face she could read confusion. She smiled. “It just means stepping up and doin’ what you need to do, even when it’s hard as hell.”

He nodded, and then slowly reached up and clasped her hands. Bracing herself, she pulled, allowing him time to shift his weight and gather himself. With a painful gasp, he managed to stand, though he put little weight on his hurt ankle and he didn’t seem very steady.

Stevie Rae kept hold of his hands, giving him a chance to get used to being upright, and while she worried that he might pass out, she thought how weird it was that his hands felt so warm and so human. She’d always thought of birds as cold and flitty. Actually, she didn’t like birds much—never had. Her mom’s chickens tended to scare the bejesus outta her, what with their hysterical flapping and stupid squawking. She had a brief flashback of gathering eggs and having one fat, grumpy hen peck at her and just miss her eyes.

Stevie Rae shivered, and Rephaim dropped her hands.

“Are you okay?” she asked to cover up the awkward silence that gathered between them.

With a grunt, he nodded.

She nodded, too. “Hang on. Before you try much walkin’, let’s see what I can find to help you.” Stevie Rae looked through the garden stuff, finally settling on a good, sturdy wooden-handled shovel. She came back to Rephaim, measured it against him, and in one swift motion, snapped the handle from the spade end and handed it to him. “Use this like a cane. You know, to take some of the weight off your bad ankle. You can lean on me for a little while, but once we get
in the tunnel you’re gonna have to go on by yourself, so you’ll need this.”

Rephaim took the wooden handle from her. “Your strength is impressive.”

Stevie Rae shrugged. “It comes in handy.”

Rephaim took a tentative step forward, using the handle to help carry his weight, and he was actually able to walk, though Stevie Rae could see that it caused him a lot of pain. Still, he hobbled by himself to the door of the shed. There he paused and looked expectantly at her.

“First, I’m gonna wrap this around you. I’m countin’ on no one seeing us, but on the outside chance that some nosy nun is gawkin’ out a window, she’ll just see me helpin’ someone wrapped in a blanket. Or at least that’s what I hope.”

Rephaim nodded, and Stevie Rae wrapped the blanket around him, positioning it over his head and tucking it into the side of the bandage across his chest to hold it closed.

“So here’s my plan: You know about the tunnels we’ve been stayin’ in under the depot downtown, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I kinda added to them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My affinity is for the element earth. I can control it, more or less. At least some aspects of it I can control. One of the things I recently found out I can do is to make it move—as in creating a tunnel through it. And I did that to link up the depot to the abbey.”

“It is this type of power that my father spoke of when he talked of you.”

Stevie Rae definitely didn’t want to discuss Rephaim’s horrible daddy with him, and she didn’t even want to think about why he might have been talking about her and her powers. “Yeah, well, anyway—I opened up part of the tunnel I made so I could climb out of it and come here. It’s not far from this shed. I’m gonna help you get there. Once you’re in the tunnel I want you to follow it back to the depot. There’s shelter there, and food. Actually, it’s pretty dang nice. You can get well there.”

“And why are the rest of your allies not going to find me in those tunnels?”

“First, I’m gonna seal up the one that connects the depot to the abbey. Then I’m gonna tell my friends somethin’ that’s gonna make sure they stay outta the depot tunnels for a while. And I’m hopin’ that ‘a while’ translates into enough time for you to get well and get yourself away from here before they start pokin’ around.”

“What will you tell them that will keep them from going into the tunnels?”

Stevie Rae sighed and wiped her hand across her face. “I’m gonna tell them the truth. That there’re more red fledglings—that they’re hiding in the depot tunnels—and that they are dangerous because they haven’t made the choice for good over evil.”

Rephaim was silent for several heartbeats. Finally he said, “Neferet was right.”

“Neferet! What do you mean?”

“She kept telling my father that she had allies among the red fledglings—that they could be soldiers in her cause. These red fledglings are the ones she was speaking of.”

“They must be,” Stevie Rae murmured miserably. “I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to believe they’d eventually do the right thing—choose humanity over the darkness. They just needed some time to get things straight in their heads, that’s all. I think I was wrong.”

“It is these fledglings that will keep your friends from the tunnels?”

“Kinda. Really, it’s more me that’ll keep them out. I’m gonna buy time—for you and for them.” She met his eyes. “Even if I’m wrong.” Without saying anything else, she opened the door, went to his side, lifted his arm, wrapped it around her shoulders, and the two of them stepped out into the icy dusk.

Stevie Rae knew Rephaim had to be in terrible pain as they walked haltingly from the shed toward the opening in the ground she’d created to the tunnel. But the only sound he made was his panting breath. He leaned heavily on her, and Stevie Rae was again surprised by his warmth and by the familiar feel of a guy’s arm around her shoulder, mixed with the feathered body she was helping to support. She kept
glancing around them, almost holding her breath in fear that someone, like annoying gotta-prove-how-macho-I-am Erik, had slipped outside. The veiled sun was setting. Stevie Rae could feel it leaving the ice-shrouded sky. It was just a matter of time before the fledglings, vamps, and nuns started to stir.

“Come on, you’re doing good. You can make it. We gotta hurry.” She kept murmuring to him, encouraging Rephaim and trying to calm her own guilty fears.

But no one yelled after them. No one ran up to them, and in much less time than Stevie Rae had anticipated, the opening to the tunnel gaped at their feet.

“Climb down backward, with your hands and feet. It’s not far. I’ll hold on to you for most of the way to help steady you.”

Rephaim didn’t waste time or energy on words. He nodded, turned, flung the blanket off of him, and then, as Stevie Rea held on to his good arm—glad that though he was big and appeared strong and solid, he actually weighed less than she did—with her help he slowly and painfully disappeared down into the earth. Stevie Rae followed him.