Tempting the Enemy (32 page)

No, he was right about that.

Dee Tenorio

281

But every darkness had a dawn.

“It ends now, Challen-Rouge.”

She gave rein to all her emotions, allowed them to blend and roar through her. All her pain, all her anger, all her love. Her sense of self disappeared, became blinding.

Pure, perfect white. Total silence. Exquisite bliss. She hung there, not a person, not a being, time a lost concept.

Yes, this was what she’d been meant for. Born for.

Brilliant, unending light.

Except…a speck of darkness remained.

She reached into it, felt it struggle futilely, heard it scream with impotent fury, but soon give way. The thread of darkness bled away, burning into nothing, leaving a mewling shell behind. Around her, she felt others, joy, relief…rapture. Before they disappeared, there was one, a sadness, a mother’s caress…and then they were gone.

She contemplated the shell again. Its empty uselessness could be burned to dust. Should be destroyed.

Yes. Until nothing of it would ever be remembered.

“Jade.” A deep voice, less than a whisper and yet, compelling, stayed her hand. “No, Jade. It’s enough.”

No, it wasn’t. That thing needed destroying.

Deserved punishment.

“Come back, Jade.”

Back to what?

“Come back to me, little Wolf.”

Pale
. Her heart called out to him, colors flying in all directions. Wolf.
Her
Wolf. She remembered his touch, his kiss, the heated blue of his eyes. Yes, she wanted to go back to that. Back to him.

But the power… The glory of all this power. She could feel it pulling her apart, separating her. She struggled, but the light had taken on a life of its own. Too 282

Tempting the Enemy

long it had been trapped. It raged around her, growing and taking her with it. “Pale!”

But what could he do? She looked down, saw him standing in the glow of her own light, wind she couldn’t feel whipping his hair around, his hand reaching out to her.

No, there was something there. Something that shone, reflecting her light into a thousand different colors.

More.

She reached for him, drawn to the man, while the power focused on the stone, siphoned into it. As it receded, she could feel herself coming back together.

Solid, sentient. Loved. She wrapped her hand around the gem, for the first time realizing that she had truly become something different. Her hand glowed, not as flesh but as clear light. She floated in front of Pale, looking into his haunted eyes. All around him, his own color was a storm of blue, reaching for her with so much longing, so much love, that if she could have cried, she would have.

“Don’t leave me, Jade.”

“I don’t want to.” But if she came back, she could never stay. Selfishly, she didn’t want to face the pain of life without him. Her mother had chosen to keep her child, keep her mate, and had paid the ultimate price, leaving Jade to face the consequences alone. Could she do that to him? To everyone he protected?

“I love you.” He wrapped his hand around hers. She heard it burning, felt his pain, but he didn’t let go. He’d
never
let go.

With that knowledge, the decision was made.

Power dimmed, concentrated on his injured hand until the burns were gone, then faded. She drifted down, Dee Tenorio

283

slipping into the silken hold of the man who’d called her name. She felt the familiar slide of a cape over her shoulders, fabric he clamped in his hands as he held her against his heart and pressed his nose into her unbound hair. She held on to his shoulders, wishing she could somehow be closer. Touch him everywhere.

“For a second there, I thought you’d left me,” he murmured. If his hold meant anything—and she knew it did—he needed to touch her too. To assure himself she was really there.

“An eternity,” she whispered, also knowing he could never understand.

“I guess you didn’t need my protection after all.” He looked around with a self-deprecating laugh.

“Oh yes, I did.” She wrapped her arms around his neck. “You protected me from myself.” Her eyes fluttered open and she finally realized they stood in a crater. Where had that come from?

She looked up, following his perusal of the cabin, but nothing was as it had been. The blackness was gone, destruction in its wake. Had the light been a dream?

Maybe some kind of explosion had knocked her unconscious? No, it couldn’t be, that would have hurt, and her body had no pain anywhere. She searched the ground, remembering the shell that had seemed so small. So insignificant. “Where’s Challen?”

“If you mean Jorgensen,” said another voice she vaguely recognized as belonging to Pale’s captain, “he’s right here.” He was applying handcuffs with what looked like zeal to an unconscious man in the dirt. “What’s left of him, anyway.” He seemed to have trouble looking at her.

Was he afraid?

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She glanced around again, not an easy task with Pale holding her so tight. The remnants of a cabin sagged high above, looking as if something had burned a hole right through it. All around her, demolished materials were pushed outward, leaving a bowl shape of fine white ash, disturbed only by Pale and the captain’s footprints. The room used to be a basement. Or maybe a prison. Red robes hung in a glass case against an untouched wall.

Not a prison.

A trophy room.

Challen moaned from the ground. The captain helped the naked Rouge to a sitting position. Challen looked stunned. He glared at the cabinets in front of him. When nothing happened for long seconds, he tried to lunge at her, but only managed to slump face first into the ash.

“What did you do to me?”

Jade looked down at him, feeling no remorse. Not even pity. Just a weariness that pulled at her to the bone.

“I only did to you what you planned to do to me. You’ve been bled, Challen-Rouge. The spirits you stole were freed. You’re empty again. As you were
truly
meant to be.”

No more playing at God, she thought. Not for either of them. She remembered how badly she’d wanted to wipe his existence from the earth. From time itself. If it hadn’t been for Pale, she would have. She turned her gaze away, unable to think about what she’d almost done.

About what she did do.

Challen mumbled incoherently, no longer acknowledging her either. Simply mourning to himself.

“What do we do with him now?” Pale asked.

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285

Jade laid her head on his shoulder. “Arrest him as the Woodsman. He can’t hurt anyone now. The mayor has his killer, he doesn’t need to know about the victims. The Tribunal will see to his judgment for his crimes against the Order as well as the Wolves. It’s over.”

With those words, the last of the adrenaline finally seeped out of her. She melted against Pale, her limbs so heavy she wondered how she didn’t weigh him down.

Sleep beckoned, swooping over her like a spell. Her lids closed and she relaxed, safe in the arms of her Wolf.

Chapter Nineteen

“They don’t look right this way,” Jade murmured, rubbing soap over her hands. Her normal, human-looking hands. The claws at each tip had been replaced with normal, nearly flat nails, the pink of her flesh visible through part of them. They felt so…light. So defenseless.

“We’ll get used to them.” Pale massaged soap into her hair, gathering the ragged edges around her face and mixing them into the suds. Challen had cut it off, a fact she hadn’t realized until she’d woken up in the helicopter and found Pale frowning down at a chin-length scrap. She should have expected it, since her hair was as much a mark of a Sibile as her
volo
. Now both were gone. Even healing light couldn’t fix what wasn’t there to repair.

In that way, at least, Challen had his way. She wasn’t the Sibile she’d been raised to be. She never would be again.

Pale massaged gentle circles into her scalp. He’d used too much soap, the bubbles dripping off his hands to plop at their feet or slide down her back. His efforts to make her feel right again were more endearing than helpful. But sweet. Very, very sweet.

She put her hands down, unable to nod under his ministrations. Her tongue sought out the familiar lengths of her fangs, finding only typically sized teeth instead. It was easily the twentieth time she’d done that and been disappointed.

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If it weren’t for the fact that she could still feel Pale’s soul tied inextricably to hers, she’d wonder if any part of her was still a Wolf.

He turned her around, lifting her chin so the soap would rinse out of her hair. She smiled up at him, memorizing his face, even with his brooding concentration. She’d miss it, no matter how much she’d complained. He was right. Brooding was just the way he was made. A part of him she loved. How had he become so important in so short a time? So important that she wasn’t sure she had the strength to leave him behind.

She reached out and touched his hair, fingering an end. “I think yours is longer than mine now.”

He frowned. “I’ll get it cut tomorrow. And yours will grow out in a few months.”

She let him rinse her, the sadness in her heart no doubt all over her face because he stopped working his hand through her hair. He just stared at her, the knowledge between them clear as day. They didn’t have a few months together.

“It’s the only way to protect you,” she finally said, wishing with all her heart that there were any other way.

“To protect them all,” she added, thinking of his brothers, his charges. Even Emmitt, the little boy who had no one else left to care for him. “I have to go back.”

“If I had to choose between them or you, there’s no contest. They don’t matter. One of the others can take over. They’re strong enough.”

“But the others aren’t the Alpha. You are. They’ll die without you.”

His mouth pressed into a hard line.

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“And you know they matter. They all matter to you.

Everyone you’re trying to save, everyone you’re
going
to save.”

“I can’t save them all.” His deep voice was more rumble than words. His brows furrowed together and his jaw worked back and forth. “There are more than you know. We started out with just Vayere’s jewels and twenty kids. It took years to get everything hocked for the right value. To get the youngest ones somewhere safe.

Then we got to work, trying to turn it into more. All of us.

When we had enough money, we bought a mountain out in the middle of nowhere and ever since, we’ve been doing whatever we had to to keep everyone safe there. To make them a life. But I’ve lost count of how many there are now. How many are coming. It’s more than Wolves. If they can shift, they come, and I have no idea how I’m going to save them all. I don’t know if I can, least of all without you.”

She ached for him, but she couldn’t change her mind about this. “You can try. For both of us.”

“What about you?” Those eyes of his burned as he stared into her, demanding as ever. “What happens to you? To our pup, if you’re pregnant?”

She didn’t have an answer that would satisfy either of them. “If I run, they’ll find us. Find you. Find all of them. Could you live happy, knowing that our children will face the same life we had? That we’ll die, and they’ll be all alone, desperate to survive?”

“Death finds us all, Jade.”

“Not like that. Not when there’s something I can do to stop them.”

Dee Tenorio

289

“Oh yeah? What? What can you do to stop the entire Tribunal?”

Power rose at just the thought of them bringing harm to him. To any part of him. “I’ll destroy them.”

He froze, his gaze both approving and pained. “I guess you’ve finally figured out what you’re worth after all.”

“No,” she answered honestly, thinking of her mother’s choice to stay with the man who was the other part of her soul, just as this man was the other half of Jade’s. She finally understood why. “I just realized that dying is easy. Some things are worth living for.”

His smile was small, but she felt it inside her. He picked up the cloth from the rack and poured more soap onto it. With a heavy sigh, he finally asked the question they both dreaded. “How much longer do we have?”

A heartbreaking acceptance. She tried to smile for him, already sliding her hands up around his neck. Their slick bodies met, breast to thigh, and she lifted her lips for his kiss. “Love me ’til morning, Pale.”

He shook his head once before dipping his lips for a taste, one of his hands framing her face. “I’ll love you for always, Jade-Scarlet.”

His kiss started softly, but wasn’t long before it turned devouring, sending her blood singing, her body warming for him. He turned her back against the wall, hands now making a leisurely path over her to cup her breasts. Her fingers tingled as she tightened her hold around his neck. He jolted back suddenly, tugging her arm down to look at her hand with a frown.

“What?” she asked, breathless. “Why did you stop?”

He lifted her fingers pointedly.

Blinking, she realized her claws were back.

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His lips curved, too sexy not to set her heartbeat skipping.

“Does it always tingle when you shift?”

He nodded.

She felt her lips turn up to match his. “Do you think…do you think the light fixed me?”

“I think you’re perfect either way.” He kissed the tip of one claw. “This just means we’ll have more fun.”

She laughed, touched his still-prickly cheek and gave herself permission to forget the rest of the world. For this last night, all that mattered was him. The man she loved.

The man who loved her.

As was always the case for things that mattered most to her, the hours passed too quickly. Before long, he was driving her back to the enclave, wordless and grim. The car stopped, the now-familiar cranking sound of the brake engaging as he parked. They sat in silence for endless minutes, both ignoring the wrought iron gates and the brick wall beside them.

“What happens now, for you?” she asked, ignoring the hoarseness of her own voice, picking at the black set of clothes they’d haphazardly washed so she’d have something to wear. “With the squad, now that they know what you are?”