Angels of Darkness (21 page)

Karina struggled to sit up. She felt the steady heat of her slowly burning, low fever. At least she was alive. She forced herself all the way up. Her head swam and the dizziness nearly took her back down.

And now she was talking to herself. Outstanding.

Karina walked to the shower, swaying on wobbling feet. She'd rinsed her underwear last night, and it still hung on the towel hook where she'd left it. Karina touched it. Dry. She slipped the panties on and went to use the bathroom.

A couple of minutes later she made it to the sink. A new toothbrush, still in its case, waited for her. Karina stared at it.

Lucas hadn't kidnapped her. He hadn't forced her into human slavery at gunpoint. She'd been attacked by Rishe and the shark-toothed man, and she'd been given a choice: to die or to live on Lucas's terms. She was a victim of circumstance. That didn't change the fact that Lucas owned her now.

The House of Daryon had stripped every shred of independence from her. She depended on Lucas for everything: her food, her safety, her clothes, the safety and survival of her daughter. He had the power to tell her when to go to bed, where to sleep, when to shower . . . He was protecting her and Emily from some sort of terrible enemy she couldn't understand and he could kill them both at a moment's notice. Any relaxation of the rules became a kindness on his part. A small thing, like a toothbrush, seemed like some great favor. But it wasn't, she told herself. It wasn't. It was a basic necessity for any human being.

Then again, she could've been a slave without any freedom at all. She could've lost her daughter. She could've been raped. All he had to do was say, “I'll give you your daughter,” and she would've done anything. The very fact that he thought to leave her a toothbrush was a small miracle.

Her own drive to survive was interfering with her sense of reality. Her instincts drove her to forge an emotional bond. The more Lucas liked her, the less likely he was to murder her or Emily. The more she liked him . . .

Karina took a deep breath. Lucas was physically overwhelming. The memory of his arms around her flashed before her. Lucas was . . . He was . . .

She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror.
Just say it. Say it, acknowledge it, and walk away from it.

Seductive. Desirable. Shocking. He was masculine in the way women fantasized men to be: powerful, strong, dangerous. If she had met him at a party or in a professional setting, when he wore a suit and she wore something other than his T-shirt and a pair of underwear she'd washed in the shower, she would've sought him out. If he had spoken to her, she would've been flattered.

For a while, after Jonathan's death, she was so wrapped up in guilt, and in Emily's well-being, she forgot men existed. It took almost a year before she became aware of them again: a man with a nice smile in the checkout line, a random stranger in good shape stepping out of the car in the parking spot next to her. A small part of her wanted to be noticed again and checked to see if she was. She was vulnerable and the way Lucas looked at her left her no doubt that if she gave him the tiniest indication that she wanted him, he would rush to oblige and mow down whatever stood in his way.

There was an odd desperation in Lucas under all that violence. Karina sensed a deep overpowering need to be . . . not accepted exactly, but to be liked. If she were ruthless, she would seduce him to make sure he would become dependent on her, but that kind of manipulation was beyond her. She couldn't bring herself to do it.

Karina looked at her reflection. She could practically see him in the mirror next to her. She could recall him with crystal clarity: every powerful line of his body; the promise of raw violence in the way he moved; the precise curve of his mouth, almost sardonic; the look in his eyes, the wild, unfiltered look of pure male lust. No, more than lust. Need.

Thinking of him was like playing with fire.

She had been married; she knew very well that a healthy relationship hinged on respect and constant compromise. With Lucas there could be no respect and no compromise, because they were not equals. He owned her. She was his property and once she opened the door to a relationship, he wouldn't let her close it.

Karina shut her eyes. She could picture herself wrapped in those powerful arms. It would feel safe, so safe. Her life was broken like a mirror and the shards kept cutting her fingers. She was desperate to forget that she was little more than a slave. She craved that illusion of safety as if it were a drug and she had to score a hit. She wanted to feel the heat of his strong body warming her skin. And she wanted to see him bend, to find out what it would be like to see the vulnerability of intimacy in those hard eyes. She was completely powerless and she needed to feel powerful, as a woman does who is wanted so badly by a man, he would do anything for her.

There it was. All of it, out in the open.

You're sick
, she told her reflection.

Well, now it was out. She owned all of it.

She had to keep things in perspective. He was strong and she was weak and vulnerable and not in her right mind. She would take it one day at a time, wait until the last of the poison cleared out of her system, and when a chance to escape presented itself, she would take it—and they would never find her and Emily again. And if she let herself buy into her own lies, she would never wonder what it would have been like to feel him inside her . . . She cut off that thought. The less she imagined it, the better.

Karina opened the toothbrush. She would brush her teeth, locate her jeans, and check on her daughter. And then she would go out there and make a chocolate cake.

 

 

E
mily seemed to have no memory of Lucas and Daniel's fight the previous night. She slept well and when Karina had come to get her, she got a hug. The violent episode had passed her daughter by completely. Karina held her for a long time, breathing in the scent of her hair. They were both alive. She would get to keep Emily with her. It would be okay. It would be hard and painful, but it would be okay.

Karina took Emily to the kitchen. Sunlight poured in through the open window. Nobody waited for her. Nobody demanded breakfast. The house was quiet and serene. Karina exhaled her tension, pulled the ingredients from the pantry, and started mixing the cake batter.

Henry walked into the kitchen, looking a bit lost. “Good morning!”

“Good morning!” Emily chirped.

“I have something for you.” Henry put a drawing pad and a set of watercolor pencils on the table.

“For me?”

“For you.”

Emily pried at the pencil case.

“What do you say?” Karina murmured on autopilot.

“Thank you!”

“You're welcome.” Henry offered her a small smile.

“Where is everyone?”

“They've gone to check the perimeter net. What is it you're making?”

Karina glanced at him. “A chocolate cake. Did they go to check for signs of those people who sent the lizards to spy on us?”

Henry nodded.

“Lucas called them Ordinators. Henry, who are they? Who are you?”

Henry smiled again and slid his glasses up his nose. “It's a long and complicated explanation. It's better to wait a couple of days. Too much new information too fast will only make things worse.”

“I'd like to know.”

He shook his head. “You've been through a great deal of violence in the past two days and you've been exposed to things that conflict with your worldview. I don't want to be the one to add to it.”

“Henry, not knowing is worse. All I'm asking is that you don't treat me like a slave who is told where to be and what to do and isn't owed any explanation.”

“No,” he said quietly.

They looked at each other over the table. Karina held his gaze. It might not have been wise, but she wouldn't back down now.

“Look, Mom, I drew Cedric!”

Karina looked down at the ball of brown fluff that looked like a sheep with a sabertooth's fangs. “That's looks very nice, Emily.”

When she looked up, the kitchen was empty. Henry had escaped.

 

 

T
he cake smelled of chocolate and vanilla. When Karina took the two round pans out of the oven and set them out to cool, the familiar scents floated through the kitchen, so reminiscent of home and happy times, she almost cried.

A door banged. She looked up just in time to see Lucas loom in the doorway. His face was grim. He glanced at the cake, then at her. She stared back, suddenly terrified that all her thoughts would pour out through her eyes.

He didn't seem to notice. “Would you like new clothes?”

“Yes.” Oh, God, yes.

He jerked his head toward the door. “They have some things prepared for you at the main house. I didn't know what size, so you have to come and try them on. Come on, I'll walk with you.”

“Can I come?” Emily slid off the chair.

“Yes,” Lucas said. “They have clothes for you, too.”

“And Cedric?”

“Cedric doesn't need clothes,” Lucas said.

“Can he come with us?” Karina asked.

“Sure.”

Karina washed her hands, wiped them on a towel, and followed Lucas out. The sun shone bright. Cedric already waited for them at the foot of the stairs. Emily stepped down and the bear-dog rolled to his feet and trotted next to her, nearly as tall as she was.

Lucas led them out of the yard and down a dirt path. It wound around the hill, flanked on the left by stunted oaks and shrubs climbing up the slope and rolling off to the prairie on the right. Cedric and Emily pulled ahead a couple dozen yards. Karina watched them, aware of Lucas striding next to her, like some tiger who had learned to walk upright. The air was dry, and the heat beat down on them from the pale, burned-out sky, painting the path in stripes of bright yellow sunshine.

“We're in a fragment of reality,” Karina said.

“Yes,” Lucas said.

“Why is the sun shining? Why is there air?”

“Because the fluctuation occurs on the universal level,” Lucas said.

“So it's a duplicate sun?”

“No, it's the same sun the Earth has. We just get access to it on a different level. Think of a house with many rooms. We walked out of the main room into a smaller side bedroom, but we're still under the same roof.”

Karina sighed. “It makes my head hurt.”

“Don't talk about dimensions to any Rippers, then,” Lucas said.

“Rippers?”

“They make inter-dimensional rents that let people like you and me travel back and forth. You get one of them started on the subject and the insanity pours out until you want to stick your head in a bucket of water just to wash it out of your mind. When a man has to continuously cut himself, because pain helps him punch through dimensions, you can't expect him to be lucid anyway.”

Karina glanced at him. “You seem irritated.”

Lucas's thick black eyebrows knitted together. “We found out how the lizard got through the net. It tunneled under it. A long, deep tunnel, almost twenty-five meters.”

“And?”

“There was more than one tunnel,” Lucas said.

More than one tunnel meant other lizards. “Did you track them down?”

Lucas nodded.

“Did they transmit what they saw?”

Another nod.

“So the enemy knows where we are?”

Lucas grimaced. “Difficult to say. The Rippers are saying there was too much inter-dimensional interference for the transmission to have gone through fully. But it's possible.” He clenched his teeth, pondering something, and said, “We had perimeter alarms, infrared, microwave, and frequency sensors. The sensors are very specific: if you look on Cedric's collar, you'll see a transmitter. The transmitter broadcasts a code. The sensors check this code against the database and if the code is active, the sensors don't register an alarm. For some reason someone loaded an old set of codes into the system. The lizards came through fitted with transmitters of their own and when they broadcast the outdated set of codes, the system didn't flag them.”

“How did they know which codes to load?”

Lucas's eyes turned darker. “There was a woman. Galatea. She was a donor like you.”

He said her name like she was a plague. “Was she your donor?”

“Yes. She defected.”

He'd clenched his teeth again. There was more to this story. “Were you lovers?”

Lucas stopped and for a moment she thought she might have pushed him too far. “We fucked,” he said.

Aha. She kept pushing. “For how long?”

There was a short pause before he answered. “For four years.”

“That's some long fucking,” Karina said. He'd loved Galatea. He was in love, and she betrayed him, and now he wanted to kill her. Any woman past the age of fifteen would've connected these dots. He must've been young—it had obviously left a deep scar. “What was she like?”

Lucas took a step toward her. A wild thing looked back at her from his eyes, the thing full of lust and aggression. She realized that in his mind he was peeling off her clothes and thinking of what it would be like, and suddenly she was back in the tub, naked, sitting two feet away from him and afraid he would cross the distance.

He stared at her. “Would you like me to tell you about it?”

She squared her shoulders. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then.”

He turned and they sped up to narrow the gap between themselves and Emily. Karina kept the pace, exhaling quietly. He had no brakes, at least not the ones she was used to as a woman. Ordinary men didn't end dinners by breaking the table with their brother's spine, they didn't kill lizards by caving their heads in, they didn't turn into monsters, and they didn't feed on women. Ordinary men didn't behave like this outside of movie screens and when they did it on the screen, other men ridiculed them for it. This was a game she couldn't afford to play, because he held the best cards. She had to survive this.