Eternal Rider (36 page)

“I don’t understand.”

“You said I was weak—”

He captured her hand. “God, Cara, I’m sorry.”

Her full, sensual lips parted on a smile. “Don’t be. You were right. But I’ve found my strength again.” She pulled his hand to her and kissed his palm. The tender gesture laid him out, knocked his emotions into a tailspin that he doubted he was going to pull out of. “See, back home, I’d been in a bad place for a couple of years. I was about to lose my house, I’d lost confidence in myself, and my boyfriend left me.”

He had to bite back a growl at the mention of the male. “What happened with your boyfriend?” Another long silence stretched, so long that he thought she’d fallen asleep. “Cara?”

“Yeah.” She wriggled in tighter against him. “Jackson left. He couldn’t deal with the attack.”

“Attack?” The way she said it set off alarms inside him. She’d flipped out earlier when he’d asked if she… oh, fuck. He’d asked if she
liked
being attacked. Yeah, he was ready to kick his own ass.

“I’m sure you don’t want to hear the gory details.” She shifted to look up at the star-strewn sky. “I love this place. I’d spend all my time outside.”

“That’s why I live here.” He feathered his fingers over her shoulder, loving how velvety smooth her skin was under his callouses. “And I do want to hear the gory details.”

A tremor went through her, and he tugged her closer. “Jackson was my realtor when I moved to South Carolina. I was recovering from my father’s death, and he was there for me. We dated, pretty whirlwind. He moved in after just a couple of months and helped me with my holistic vet business when the real estate market slowed down.”

“And?”

“And one night I’d come home from taking care of a sick horse. I walked in on three men robbing my house.” She swallowed audibly. “I tried to run, but they caught me and dragged me inside. They tied me up…”

“What did they do to you?” His mind worked overtime on the horrible scenarios.

“Nothing at first. They mainly just scared me. But then Jackson came home.” She shivered, and he grabbed the blanket off the back of the sofa to cover her. “They beat him, and then they made him watch while they…”

Something in his chest tightened into a cold fist. “They
what
?”

She nibbled her lower lip thoughtfully, as if searching for the right words. A decent man wouldn’t have pressed. But Ares wasn’t decent. And he wanted to know what happened, because he wanted to know who he had to kill.

“Cara?
They. What
?” Silence. His gut turned inside out. “Did they violate you?”

“No.” Her voice was small, and experience told him her trauma was big. “I think they were going to. They threatened me at first. Like they got off on my terror. It made
them laugh to see me cringe when they pointed a gun at my face and threatened to blow my brains out. They slapped me around a little. Stuff like that. And Jackson had to sit there and watch.”

Ares had to force himself to breathe. The bite of shackles cutting into his wrists as he was gutted by helplessness and horror came back to him in a rush. He could even smell the tang of blood in the dank dungeon air where he’d been chained so he could witness his wife being murdered.

“Then what?” He was pretty damned proud of the fact that his voice was level, even if his emotions weren’t.

“My gift… the one I use to heal…”

I’ve killed with it.
Oh, Jesus.

“One of them told me to strip. When I refused, he hit me. Fractured my cheekbone, I found out later at the hospital. The other men laughed.” She covered her ears as though hearing the laughter, and shit, that was enough.

“Cara, hey, it’s okay. You don’t have to say any more.”

But she was on a roll, as if she needed to spill it all before her time limit ran out. “He unzipped his pants and I… I… he died.”

“How did he die?” he asked quietly.

“The other men ran.” She didn’t answer the question, but Ares let her keep going. “They were gone and Jackson called the police.” Her breathing became ragged, and he ran his hand up and down her arm in a futile attempt to soothe her. “It’s kind of all a blur.”

“How did the man die?” he repeated, and she swallowed.

“The official report said heart attack.”

“And unofficially?”

Her entire body trembled. “I felt my ability surface, but
it was different. It felt kind of… oily. When he grabbed me, I tried to push him away, and it just… happened. Like he’d touched a power line.” She closed her eyes, but Ares knew from experience that doing so didn’t block out the visions. “I killed him.”

“You did what you had to do, Cara. When your life is at stake, you can’t take any chances. Better him than you.” When she said nothing, he had a feeling she was torn on that point. “There’s something more, isn’t there?”

“Yeah.” She cleared her throat a couple of times. “Your brother, he asked if I got off on it.”

Ares growled. “My brother is an asshole for saying that.”

“No.” Her fingernails dug into his chest, and he wondered if she even realized it. “You’re going to think I’m awful.”

“Never.” He tipped her face up, forcing her to see the truth in his eyes. “There is nothing you could do to make me think badly of you. Understand?”

Her nod was full of uncertainty, and he wished he could do more to ease her fear. “Thanatos was right. It was horrible. But some part of me liked it. I can’t ever do that again.”

The guilt she’d been carrying around with her must have eaten her alive. “Cara, listen to me. What you felt was a rush of adrenaline, mixed with relief that the monster was dead.”

“But it felt good,” she whispered brokenly.

“Fuck yeah, it felt good. Felt good that the asshole was dead and never going to hurt you again. It’s okay to feel that way.” He doubted he was going to convince her that what he was saying was true, not in one five-minute coun
seling session, but he’d let her digest that for a while. “So what happened after that?”

Tension bled out of her body. She was obviously relieved to be off the subject of killing the guy. “The two other men ran off. Jackson and I did the police and hospital thing, but our relationship was never the same. He refused to talk about what he’d seen me do, and he couldn’t ever deal with the fact that he’d been helpless and unable to save me.”

Ares got that. But he also got the need for revenge-therapy. A sharp blade worked a lot faster than sessions with a shrink. “Did he find the assholes and kill them?”

In his arms, Cara jerked. “Of course not. The police caught them.”

Jackson was a damned puss. Ares would have hunted those fuckers down and showed them how justice was served back in his day. Which was why Ares had sworn on his very soul that he would see Chaos die.

“Are they in prison?”

“They served their time,” she said quietly, and he detected a note of bitterness. Ares made a mental note to do a little research into the crime and these guys. Maybe Hal would like in on the action too. Excellent way for them to bond. And Christ, he was thinking of getting buddy-buddy with the kind of creature he hated most?

Let a woman too close, and while she sucked your cock, she sucked your brains and manhood right out of you, too
. An enemy had told him that, back in Ares’s human days. They’d called a truce between their armies, had shared wine as they negotiated terms of battle. In truth, Ares had liked the guy, and had they not been fighting on opposite sides, he might have called him friend.

One week later, in the thick of the fighting, Ares had shoved a blade through the man’s skull.

“So basically,” he continued, “this Jackson asshole abandoned you, and the guys who tortured you spent a few months in jail?”

“Basically.”

Damn, she’d taken a lot of blows in a short amount of time. “How long before the puss, ah, Jackson left?”

“He made it a couple of months. He couldn’t look me in the face or deal with my issues.”

Maybe Ares would hunt down Jackson after he found the punks who had traumatized Cara.

They sat in silence for a few minutes. The quiet was comfortable, though, something that had never happened between Ares and a female. It was nice.

Until Cara brought up the one thing he really didn’t want to talk about. “Ares… you have a lot of guilt about your family, don’t you?” She pushed up on one elbow so she was looking down at him. “Guilt that your wife and children died, and you never told them how you felt about them.”

He tensed. “I loved my children.”

“I don’t doubt that you did.” Her soothing voice brought him down a little, and then she traced her finger over his sternum, and he settled even more. How did she do that? He’d seen her turn a damned hellhound into a gentle ball of fur, had witnessed her charming Battle right down to his hooves. “But you’re afraid they didn’t know that. So you built a shrine to them, but you don’t want to actually see it.”

He seized her hand, stilling it. “Stop with the psychology bullshit. What makes you an expert on shrines, anyway?”

A breeze made her hair fan out over his skin. Felt good.
Too good. “After my mom died, I had all these things of hers… weird things, like ponytail holders. Her toothbrush. I packed them away, but I never looked at them.”

He frowned. “Because you felt guilty about her death?”

“Because I don’t remember telling her I loved her. I was little, so I probably did, but I don’t remember. I guess I didn’t want to keep her stuff where I would be reminded of that, you know?”

Yeah, he knew very well. But he didn’t like that Cara saw so easily through him.

“Ares!” Ares jackknifed into a sit and twisted his body to shield Cara from Limos, who popped out of the open door between the patio and the bedroom. “Ares, we got—” She cut off, a blush coloring her tan cheeks. “Oh, um, hi, Cara.”

“This had better be important,” Ares said.

“Well, duh,” Li huffed. Then she flashed a broad grin. “We nabbed a fallen angel.”

Ares’s heart skipped a beat. “Where?”

“He’s hanging out in the great room. Thanatos popped
Armageddon
in the DVD player for him to watch. You know, a reminder.”

“We’ll be there in a minute.”

Limos winked at Cara and flounced away.

“Does this mean what I think it does?” Cara asked, and it was Ares’s turn to grin.

He’d been afraid to hope for this, for so many reasons. Yes, the end-of-the-world thing had been his primary concern, and it still would be; transferring the
agimortus
to the fallen angel didn’t change the fact that Ares and his siblings would still have to go on the offensive to protect the guy. But transferring it meant that Cara would live.

And he would no longer weaken around her. His armor would shield him from emotion, which was exactly what he needed. Except he wouldn’t need it, would he? If she was no longer his
agimortus-
bearer, he had to get rid of her, or she’d be a target for Pestilence.

The thought hit him like a blow to the solar plexus, knocking the wind right out of him. This was good news, so why did he feel like someone had died?

Dammit, he had to get his head on straight. His focus was to A, protect the world from a premature Armageddon, and B, destroy the hellhound he’d been after for centuries. The first problem wasn’t going to be easy, but the second… for the first time in a long time, there was hope. Cara might be exactly what he needed to get Chaos’s head mounted on his wall.

“Ares?”

He blinked, shaking himself out of the wreck of his tangled emotions. “Yeah,” he rasped. “It means exactly what you think it does. Your life is saved.”

“One last push.” Eidolon, Kynan’s brother-in-law and head doctor at Underworld General Hospital, spoke in a comforting voice that joined the sound of Gem’s panting breaths in the hospital’s delivery room. His dark head was partially hidden beneath the drape of the sheet over Gem’s legs, but when he looked up, his black eyes were bright with both confidence and exhilaration. He didn’t normally deliver babies, but Gem wouldn’t allow any other doctor to touch her. Kynan had been on board with that. He wanted only the best for his wife and child.