Darkness Awakened (Primal Heat Trilogy #1) (Order of the Blade) (21 page)

“Yeah. They drank.” Quinn held up his arm, showcasing his brand. “And they became us.”

“Dude, yeah, so cool.” Drew interrupted, trying to get Grace’s attention. “They were total badasses, see? They went back and killed the king.”

“And Evangeline?” she asked. “What happened with her?”

Quinn met her gaze. “By the time Ezekiel got to her, she was dying from the king’s abuse. She died in his arms. Ezekiel went mad and cut down everyone associated with the king. Women, children, animals, everything the king had ever blessed with his poisoned hand.” Quinn thought of the dead man by The Gun Rack, and his desire to plunge his sword into the bastard’s chest for hurting Grace. It had been a small slight, with no lasting impact, yet Quinn had wanted to kill for it. It was an extreme response, out of character for him, and he wasn’t even bonded with Grace.

How much had it taken to make Ezekiel cross that line from a heroic rescue to deranged insanity? Even his brief contact with Grace made Quinn realize that the capacity to go rogue to protect his female was already there inside him, inside every warrior, just as the legends stated. For the first time, Quinn began to understand the true power of the
sheva
bond they were facing. For two thousand years, no warrior had triumphed over it, not even the strongest, most powerful, most honorable men he’d known.

They were warriors that had started like Quinn: strong, determined, faithful. Men that had begun with the honor and courage of his uncle. Men that had lost, men that had somehow, unbelievably, utterly abandoned who they were simply because of a woman.

Quinn had always figured they weren’t strong enough. He’d assumed Ezekiel started off with a poisoned mind. But now, after Grace, his brief interaction with her, it made him wonder. Had the men been too weak, like he’d always claimed? Or was the bond and the Calydon dark side simply too strong, like history had proven?

“When Ezekiel tried to kill the king’s young daughters, Caleb restrained him,” Drew said, picking up the tale with a curious look at Quinn for stopping the story. “Caleb wouldn’t condemn his brother, but he wouldn’t join him in his insane quest, either. So he took their mother and sisters and left, starting a new life away from all the misery they’d grown up with.”

Grace nodded in understanding. “A new start,” she said softly. “I understand that.”

“But that’s when the shit went down,” Drew continued, his eyes glowing with the excitement of a youth who didn’t understand the significance of the story he was telling.

Quinn got it. As he absorbed Grace’s tense expression, saw the moonlight flicker across her cheeks, watched the wind lightly toss her hair, and felt his body respond even though he knew damn well what a bad idea it was? Yeah, he was starting to get it in a way he never had.

He sensed Vaughn watching him, and he glanced at the other man. Vaughn’s eyes were mostly brown, only the faintest hint of green, but his stare was intense, as if he were analyzing every breath Quinn took and cataloging his weaknesses. Vaughn attention drifted toward Grace, then back again as he raised one dark eyebrow in question.

Shit. Vaughn already realized that Grace was Quinn’s vulnerability.

“Ezekiel went crazy,” Drew continued. “He got this idea that if he could just get rid of all the bad people in the world, then no one would have to suffer like he had, like his family had, like Evangeline had.”

Quinn walked away slightly, listening to Drew’s enthusiastic rendition of a tale that was always told with a veil of doom in official circles. With Drew’s phrasing, for the first time, it made sense to him what Ezekiel had wanted to accomplish by cleansing the world of what he considered to be evil. It was what the Order did, in a way. Ridding the world of taint before it could destroy others, before it could hurt innocents. The Order’s mission was based on exactly that which had driven Ezekiel to insanity, what the world had condemned him for. Was the Order so different from the man who’d been vilified as the enemy of all creation?

Quinn looked back at Grace, at the soft curls drying on her shoulders, at the delicate curve of her nose. She seemed small and vulnerable. If he knew she was going to suffer, would he do whatever it took to cut that threat down before it could come after her? Yeah. He would. He’d break the damn rules, and he’d do whatever it took to make it happen. “Ezekiel knew he wasn’t strong enough to take down the whole damn world,” Quinn said, “so he recruited some other malcontents and took them back to the stream. Again and again he went back there, drinking with his team each time he created more of them.”

Grace looked over at him, her face troubled. “Their strength came at a cost, didn’t it? The river was tainted.”

“Demon magic. He got stronger, yeah, but so did the darkness inside him.”

“The darkness that continues to haunt you all to this day,” she said. “The side that makes you all turn rogue.”

Quinn flashed his sword. “You got it, babe. We’re no angels.”

“Wow.” Grace leaned back against the bumper of the truck, as if she was overwhelmed by the story, by the truth of what he was. “So, what happened?”

“Ezekiel bled evil,” Drew said. “Literally. He could walk down the street and living things would just keel over on the spot. He was contagious, like poison, and people started turning on each other, like he’d gotten into their heads, you know?” He shrugged. “He became paranoid, seeing evil in everything. He’d wipe out anything that he thought dripped of taint. No one could stop him, because, seriously, he was stoked up on demon power, right? What could stop that?”

“His brother.” Vaughn spoke for the first time, having been silent until now. He was standing in the shadows, out of range of the headlights. “As twins, they are the light and dark of the same coin. His brother had to become as powerful as Ezekiel was.”

Quinn looked in surprise at Vaughn. “You have a brother.”

Vaughn looked at him. “I
had
a brother.”

Dead? Killed? Or exiled? Vaughn was more than what he seemed. Quinn would watch him carefully. Being screwed over by family could mess up a guy.

“Caleb came back,” Grace guessed. “To stop his brother.”

Quinn paced the road, on edge as he recalled the rest of the story. “Caleb understood the dangers of that stream, so he took with him his insurance policy, the one thing he could count on to keep him sane.” He looked at Grace. “His wife. The woman he loved.”

Grace met his gaze. Something hung in the air between them, and he understood why Caleb had taken his woman with him. He’d always thought Caleb was a fool to have brought his wife into that situation, but now Quinn understood the need to keep something pure in his life when the shit was poisoning everything else. Grace was changing things for him, changing everything.

“Did it work?” she asked.

“It did until Ezekiel showed up to get more water and saw them,” Drew said, oblivious to the rising tension between Grace and Quinn. “The dude fell in love with his brother’s wife on the spot, kicked Caleb’s ass and took his wife.”

“Oh.” Grace’s hand went to her chest. “It’s like the
sheva
destiny. Once he finds her, he will lose her and it will drive him mad,” she said, repeating the words Quinn had told her in the tunnel.

“Yeah.” All this talk of losing women was making him crazy. Quinn strode across the tarmac toward Grace and pulled her against him, needing to touch her. “Ezekiel drew first blood when he took his brother’s wife. After that, all that mattered to Caleb was getting his wife back.”

“Caleb selected twenty soldiers. They drank from the stream, then destroyed it so no one else could become tainted by it,” Drew said. “His team took out Ezekiel’s army, but it was one on one between the brothers. It shook the whole earth, the battle they had.”

“He didn’t kill him,” Vaughn said suddenly. “Caleb wouldn’t have killed his brother.”

Loyalty again. Quinn narrowed his eyes at Vaughn. “No, he didn’t. He got some magical assistance and locked him up in a prison. Ezekiel has been stewing in there ever since.” He looked around at the dark woods. Until now?

Grace looked at him. “Did Caleb get his wife back?”

Quinn shook his head. “No happy endings, sweetheart. She got killed in the battle. Caleb lost his shit, and his team had to take him out.”

And he understood. For the first time in the hundreds of years that he’d heard the tale of their origins, Quinn grasped Ezekiel’s need to fix the world to atone for failing his woman, and he got why Caleb couldn’t hold his shit together after he lost his.

The fact Quinn actually understood where they were coming from was unnerving as hell. If he could empathize with their choices simply because Grace had knocked aside some of his shields, what was next? Was he truly destined to follow that same path? Did the holy grail Quinn had been pursuing for so long really exist, or if he bonded with Grace and then she got hurt, would he be exactly like his ancestors, and all the Calydons since?

“And there, the legacy begins,” Grace said quietly as she pulled out of his grasp. She walked away from him, hugging herself, and he let her go. Distance between them felt like the right choice right now.

Quinn turned and strode away from the group to keep himself from going to her. From being distracted by her. He faced the woods and listened to the night, opened his mind to the dark energy that was Ezekiel, but all seemed safe. Illusion?

Vaughn was pacing restlessly, his body almost seeming to overflow with an energy Quinn didn’t recognize. His eyes were glowing again, and he carried the dangerous aura of a protector whose charge had been threatened. “Tell him the rest, Drew.”

Quinn turned to Drew as the kid answered. “He said someone’s helping Ezekiel get free.” He looked at Quinn. “He thinks it was someone from the Order. Betrayal from within.”

Quinn closed his eyes. Elijah? Someone else? “Did he give you a name?”

“Dante didn’t know who it was,” Drew said. “But you were the only one he felt certain about. He said you would know what to do.”

“Do you?” Vaughan’s challenge was harsh in the night, and Quinn opened his eyes. “Do you know who it is?”

Vaughn had stopped pacing and was staring at him. “No. I don’t.” Why the hell would Dante have put this on him? Quinn’s driving motivation for the last five hundred years had been to invalidate Dante’s edict to kill rogue Calydons on sight, to shred the hold that the
sheva
destiny had on his people. If there was anyone who wouldn’t stand by the Order, it would have been Quinn, yet he was the one Dante had chosen to trust.

Vaughn came to a stop beside Drew, his fists bunched by his hips. “Who’s hunting Drew? You know who the traitor is. I can see it in your eyes.”

“I don’t know who it is.” Suddenly, Drew’s earlier comment that someone was after him took on much larger significance. The youth was wanted. Why? For his weapons like the trainee? As a tool to kill others, like Elijah? Quinn knew suddenly that Dante had sent Drew to him for a reason.

Drew wasn’t simply a kid that needed help. He was the clue Quinn needed. He was the screw that everything turned on. “What happened when Dante disappeared?”

Drew’s gaze settled on Grace. “It was the night that the girl with silver eyes like yours made the night scream.”

* * *

Grace stiffened, shocked by Drew’s comment about the girl with silver eyes. She’d been so immersed in making not-so-feel-good comparisons between Calydon history and her own future that she hadn’t been considering whether Ana had been a part of Dante’s death. “Ana?” She grabbed Drew’s arm. “My sister was there? What happened?”

Vaughn growled and Quinn pulled her back from Drew.
I don’t trust Vaughn. Stay behind me.

She saw the pulsing emerald shine of his eyes, and she reluctantly moved back to a spot beside Quinn’s shoulder. Vaughn and Quinn exchanged glances, and she knew they were bonding over their common need to protect their charges. Great for the manly men, but dammit! She wanted to find out about her sister. “Tell me about Ana,” she urged Drew. “What happened?”

“I was at the river working out with the boulders,” Drew said, “when my dad warned me to stay away from the camp, you know, with that mind thing.”

Quinn laughed softly, as if he knew exactly what Drew’s response to that order had been. “As soon as you got that message, you hauled ass to get over to camp as fast as you could, right?”

Drew flushed, his reaction reminding Grace how young he was, even though he had his weapons and the emerging muscles of a Calydon warrior: deadly, but still a child. Just as she had been that night she’d heard the screams of her parents dying. Like Drew, how fast she’d run toward them, praying she could get there in time, praying she could save them. She knew all about how time could stand still during that run, how the heart could break into a thousand pieces from sheer, raw terror.