Darkness Bound (13 page)

Jack watched him with the sinking feeling she wasn’t on the right side of this argument.

Her anger fizzling, she looked down at the food he’d brought her, and sighed.

What did it matter if she’d offended him?
He’d
tricked
her
.
He’d
used
her
. She should be the one filled with righteous outrage, but somehow it had gotten so turned around that she felt . . . what? Sorry? Guilty? Why should she feel guilty for upsetting him? She hated him!

Jack stared at the muscled, rigid lines of his back.
I do hate him . . . right?

She pinched the bridge of her nose between two fingers, realizing that what she felt for him wasn’t what could accurately be called hate, and that was unacceptable.

When did all her convictions go squishy in the middle? Why did this man/not-man continue to confuse and confound her?

More important: Why on Earth did she care?

Too many questions, not enough answers. Jack supposed she could go round and round with herself like this for days, without getting anywhere. In the interim, it seemed there was only one right thing to do.

“Hawk,” she said softly. When he didn’t turn or respond, she said his name again.

“What?” The word was hard, wintry cold.

“I apologize.”

Slowly, he lowered his hands to his hips. His head turned a fraction, and he stood there in silent profile, waiting, a breeze ruffling his dark hair. The rising light gleamed soft off his bare back and broad shoulders, and she thought he looked like a pagan god in a sky kingdom of green and gold and sapphire blue.

“That wasn’t nice of me. That comment about your . . . um . . . fangs.”

Wishing he’d put his shirt back on so she wouldn’t have to wrestle with the compelling desire to ogle his spectacular physique, Jack dropped her gaze to the fruit. “My dad always ridiculed me for not eating meat, and it sort of felt like . . . like you were doing the same thing.”

After a moment, in a voice slightly less frigid than before, Hawk said, “I wasn’t.”

For some reason, Jack actually believed him. She said, “Okay,” and sat there with her shoulders rounded in a posture of defeat, wondering if the world would ever make sense again.

She heard a low, vexed exhalation, the sound of feet brushing leaves. Then he was standing before her once more. He crouched down and put a knuckle under her chin, forcing her to meet his eyes.

He said solemnly, “We’re not all like Caesar. We’re not all bad. Most of us just want to be left alone to live our lives in peace.”

Jack whispered, “Ditto.”

Hawk dropped his hand from her face and nodded, and in the span of one moment to the next, it felt as if they’d come to some sort of silent agreement. A subtle change took place; there was a tacit understanding that they were no longer enemies . . . but neither were they friends.

What exactly they
were
was a subject Jack wasn’t inclined to investigate.

Turning her attention to the lovely array of fruit presented to her by this maddening, confusing, beautiful predator she was so determined to hate but unfortunately didn’t, Jack selected a dusky fig, pear-shaped and perfect, and began to eat.

They made better time through the verdant maze of the rainforest than Hawk had anticipated, primarily because Jacqueline was in incredible shape. Her endurance was remarkable, matched by surprising sure-footedness and that stoic resistance to uttering anything resembling a complaint.

To be fair, she wasn’t saying much of anything at all.

After she’d shocked him—again—by apologizing for her snide remark about his fangs, there had been a moment when Hawk had felt certain they’d reached some sort of new understanding. But she’d retreated from it like a snail curling back into its shell, and had barely spoken a word to him in the two days since.

Considering his conviction to keep his emotional distance in spite of their forced proximity, he should’ve been grateful. But gratitude wasn’t the word he’d use to describe his feelings about the silence that stretched between them. No. It was closer to raw discomfort, paired with a gnawing compulsion to ask her again who Garrett was.

He guessed therein lay the key that would unlock the thousand closed doors she kept around her heart. Though he knew he should let them stay closed, finding out what made her tick was like an itch he needed to scratch.

Maybe when he had all the pieces to her puzzle, the itch would be satisfied, and he could finally leave it be.

So when she started asking him questions—tentatively posed, as if both fearing and needing the answers—Hawk abandoned his prior game of tit for tat and simply gave her straightforward answers.

“How many of . . . you . . . are there, where we’re going?”

He held a thick, low-hanging branch aside for her, waiting as she passed beneath it. They were deep in the ancient heart of the forest now; everything was a tangle of roots and trees and fast-running streams, cloaked in humidity, teeming with an opus of birdsong. The occasional low rumble of thunder shivered the canopy high above, and, as it did most afternoons at this time, it had begun softly to rain.

“I couldn’t give you an exact number, but it’s probably quadrupled over the last three months.”

“Why’s that?”

He released the branch and moved ahead of her, careful to point out a log, on which she might twist an ankle, half buried in leaf litter. She fell into step behind him as he led them up a gently sloping hill, the trees above dripping water onto their heads.

“The other colonies have been evacuated here.”

“
Other
colonies?”

He stopped abruptly and turned to her. She halted and stood eagerly awaiting his answer while brushing tendrils of hair, mermaid damp and curling, off her forehead.

“Who, what, when, where, and why,” he said, debating. “Ever the reporter, aren’t you?”

A wry quirk of her lips. “Don’t forget ‘how.’ ”

Ah yes, as in, how much should he tell her? He wondered what Alejandro would have to say about him divulging this kind of detailed information to a woman who wrote for one of the world’s largest newspapers, then decided that Alejandro could go straight to hell. If he didn’t want humans knowing
Ikati
business, he shouldn’t have come up with this stupid plan in the first place.

“Five total, including mine. But only three of the other four have relocated here.” He turned and began to trudge ahead. She followed, right on his heels.

“Why hasn’t the fourth one relocated?”

“Because they’re ruled by a group of unusually stubborn males, that’s why.”

“So you—your kind—are ruled by groups of males?”

He chuckled. “No. Until recently, as a matter of fact, each colony was ruled by a single Alpha, chosen by Bloodline or the winner of a ritual power challenge. The males of the—” Hawk almost blurted out “Roman colony,” but caught himself in time. It would be sheer stupidity to give away specific locations. “The colony ruled by the group of stubborn males is an anomaly. Their Alpha was killed, and his personal retinue of guards decided to rule as a united council instead of selecting a new Alpha. But that’s not the norm for the
Ikati
. We’re very hierarchical. Something like your military, with everyone having specific positions and orders coming down from the top. We’re not a species prone to democracy,” he added sourly.

“You said ‘until recently.’ What happened recently?”

Sharp as a tack.
No wonder she made a good reporter.

“Recently,” Hawk drawled, ducking under a tangle of vines hanging down from the thick stand of trees that flanked them, “we crowned a half-Blood Queen with a fondness for more . . . progressive ideals.”

“What’s a half-Blood?”

“A crossbreed. Half human, half
Ikati
.”

Jack stopped dead in her tracks.

He turned to look at her, and she was staring at him in utter astonishment, her eyes popped so wide he could see white all around her irises.

“Yes, we can breed with you,” he said in response to her obvious shock. “And to answer to your next question: no. There aren’t many half-Bloods. It’s forbidden for us to mate with humans, as a matter of fact, but it does occasionally happen. Doing so is punishable by death, however. Actually, strike that,” he amended, thinking of the Roman colony who had an entire caste of half-Blood soldiers bred by the murdered Alpha. “The one colony I mentioned that’s ruled by the stubborn males?”

Her head bobbed.

“Their dead Alpha didn’t see any problem with mating with humans.” Hawk’s voice turned dry. “He didn’t see any problem doing a lot of forbidden things. Then again, he didn’t know they were forbidden. Not that he’d have cared,” he added as an afterthought, and turned and began walking again, knowing Jacqueline would follow, which she did.

“Why didn’t he know? Why wouldn’t he have cared? Can the half-Bloods do what you do? You know, turn into a . . . a . . .”

“Panther?” he supplied when she faltered into silence.

At her small, hesitant sound of acknowledgment, Hawk smiled. He’d have loved to have seen the look on her face when she viewed the video of him Shifting. “The ones who survive the Transition can.”

They walked in silence for a moment, listening to the rain pattering on the leaves and the calls of the birds high up in the canopy. Then Jacqueline said, “You don’t really need me to ask, do you?”

I just like hearing your voice.

Startled by the thought, he didn’t answer for a moment. He held the words in his mind, turning them over and over like an interesting artifact he’d unearthed from some ancient tomb.

What a strange revelation: he liked the sound of her voice. He liked her northeastern American accent, the broad
a’
s and tensed
o’
s and taut pronunciation, the way she said “fahrest” instead of “forest,” the way “Mary,” “merry,” and “marry” would all sound alike. It made her seem exotic to him, like a rare species of bird, China white and crimson red and freckled.

He tried to remember ever noticing or caring about the particular cadence or tone of a woman’s voice, but couldn’t.

“The Transition is a do-or-die event for half-Bloods that occurs at the age of twenty-five. No one knows exactly why, but human and
Ikati
blood is ultimately incompatible. They survive for a while, but just like a clock ticking down to zero hour, there’s an expiration date for those of mixed Blood. Which is one of the many reasons it’s forbidden: having a halfling child is basically condemning that child to an early death. Only every once in a great while, it isn’t. The half-Bloods survive their Transition—their first Shift—and they go on to lead a normal life with their Shifting abilities intact.”

Hawk didn’t add that the dead Alpha of the Roman colony—a brilliant geneticist in spite of being a homicidal maniac—had developed a serum that allowed all half-Bloods to survive the Transition. Which even at this moment, his insane, immortal son was using to develop a half-Blood army with which to wipe out the entire human race.

He didn’t think it would be prudent to mention that particular detail.

“Why didn’t the Alpha know it was forbidden?”

Hawk shrugged. “We only just discovered this colony a few years ago. The four confederate colonies have known about each other’s existence since our ancestors were hunted to near extinction in Egypt under Caesar Augustus. The remaining few fled and settled in small, isolated communities around the world—”

“Hunted? Egypt? Caesar Augustus?”

They came to a clearing in the thick underbrush. Through the trees, Hawk saw the waterfall he’d been able to hear during the past twenty minutes of their ascent up the hill. In spite of her ability to keep up with him, Jacqueline was tiring, evidenced by her breathing, which had become labored the higher they climbed. He gestured to a large rock several feet away, shaded by a corozo palm.

“Let’s rest a while.”

She sat with a groan, unlaced her boots, pulled them off, and began to massage her feet.

“So—you were saying?” she prompted, wincing as she pressed on the arch of her left foot. “Hunted?”

“This isn’t the first time you’ve wanted to wipe us off the face of the planet,” Hawk said wearily, stretching his neck. “Even before Cleopatra, our interactions with humans were . . . treacherous, at best. One of you is always trying to exterminate us.”

Jacqueline had stilled. Holding her foot in hand, she stared at him with a look of incredulity. “Cleopatra? You’re saying Cleopatra was one of
you
?”

He smiled. “One of
you
, too.”

“Another half-Blood Queen?”

He nodded. “Clever and cunning, and extraordinarily powerful. Like all the Queens, including the new one. An
Ikati
Queen doesn’t come along often, but when she does, great changes swallow us.” He added darkly, “No doubt this time will be the same.”

“Why?”

Jacqueline stared at him with such laser-like intensity, Hawk felt as if he were a fly trapped in a web. A fly who almost—almost—didn’t want to escape.

Stupid, self-destructive fly. Serves you right if the spider eats your dumb ass.

“A Queen is always the most powerful of all of us, even more powerful than the Alphas. Because of that, she’s above the Law. She can do whatever she likes, without consequence. Combine all that power with complete freedom . . . let’s just say it’s never gone well.”

She sat a little straighter, her expression avid. “Would I know any of the others?”

Hawk debated for only a moment before deciding to be truthful. “Marie Antoinette.”

Jacqueline gasped. “No!”

“Yes. And you see how well that ended. Aside from those two and the new one, there hasn’t been a Queen in millennia. But you’d probably recognize a few others of our kind who’ve successfully lived among you.”

Jacqueline waited, unblinking, attuned to his every word. Hawk began to tick a list off his fingers.

“Sir Charles Darwin, Sir Isaac Newton, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni—”

“No!” Jacqueline exclaimed, louder.

He sent her a sardonic smile. “Yes. Michelangelo. One of your lauded examples of humanity in that lovely article you wrote.”

In a voice so hollow it sounded as if it emanated from the depths of a well, Jacqueline asked, “Michelangelo wasn’t human?”

“That doesn’t devalue his accomplishments. In fact, considering he lived with all the pressures and complications of successfully managing a secret life, I think it makes him even more impressive, don’t you?”

Jack looked at him for several long moments, examining his face. Her expression wavered somewhere between defeat and despair. “You’re telling me the truth.”

“The truth stings, doesn’t it?”

The sorrow in her eyes welled up again as if his words had summoned it. “Almost always.” In a haunted whisper, she added, “You’d think I’d know that by now.”

She stared off into the trees, lost in thought, and Hawk felt again that odd compulsion to know what she was thinking. The compulsion that seemed to be quickly turning into need.

He knew himself well enough to understand that this dangerous desire to get inside her head went hand in hand with the equally dangerous desire to protect her. He didn’t like either, but he wouldn’t deny these urges existed . . . nor would he pretend both these urges weren’t linked to an intense physical attraction he felt for her. An attraction that grew stronger the more time he spent by her side.

He just didn’t know what, if anything, to do about any of it.

She confused him, which made him feel helpless and off balance, feelings to which he was unaccustomed, and ill-equipped to handle.

She turned her head and pierced him with a look. She blurted, “Was it your idea—the setup? The blackmail?”

Something in her eyes told him this was important to her. So when he answered, it was with a twinge of pride that he could deny it. “No.”

Hawk sensed her relief, which flooded him with guilt, and the terrible compulsion to tell her the complete truth.

“But . . .”

She looked at him sharply.

“The pictures.” He cleared his throat, willing himself not to look away. “Using your camera was a little . . . improvisation on my part. I had a small camera of my own available, but when I saw your camera on the nightstand . . . I knew you’d be more likely to play because it would seem so much more natural. And using your own camera against you would make our revenge all the sweeter . . .”