Forbidden (26 page)

But it was not. It was actually a little frightening, something he could admit to himself only because Ramses had taught him long ago that admitting fear was always the first step in defeating it. Ram had taught him that only a foolish man never felt fear. And considering his fearlessness and his overinflated sense of being
a badass had nearly ended his life, it was a lesson that had been very much needed.

Not that he was paralyzed or anything. He wasn’t the type. But every so often he felt as if it were hard to breathe. Usually when he stood between two hallways and had to make the choice to go left or right. He’d been so used to a consensus on these decisions … making them on his own was the starkest feeling he had ever known, next to lying there bleeding and dying and watching a piece of scum shoot his sister and nephew in the head … and doing it only five feet away from him, just to be sure he saw every second of it.

What had been born of that was something he and Ram shared down to their mutual bones. Failure was not an option. He would not fail this nascent Body-walker, and he would not fail Ramses. And more than that, he wouldn’t fail the thousands of people waiting with bated breath for their pharaoh to be reborn.

Oh, and yeah, she really did have a nice ass.

Okay, so sue me,
he thought as he put a hand on said ass and gave her a boost up a wall. It could have been worse. It could have been the way Ramses reacted to her. Though, he had to admit, there had been something very electric about the feel of her mouth against his. That was honestly the impetus behind giving her that little smack on the lips earlier. He’d wanted to demystify it for himself. Or maybe find a way to blame it on Ram’s presence inside of him. Because he, Vincent, had never felt anything like that storm of need and vibrant sensation before in his life. It had felt almost mystical. So of course it made sense to blame it on the only source of mysticism in his life.

But even that quick little smooch had been ridiculously stimulating. No Ram. No Hatshepsut. Just him and this poor kid who’d been thrown into a tempest. And if he was going to be really honest, the kiss hadn’t
even been necessary. He’d been strung up behind her with a nice A-line view of her backside and her curiously stimulating little feet.

I mean, really! Who the hell has sexy feet?

Not that they’d be very sexy after this little escape. She was barefoot in the snow, her shoes lost somewhere … and dawn was going to break any minute now. He had no choice but to force her to run through woods and bracken, her exposed feet set up to take the worst of it.

But they couldn’t be caught out in the daylight. Not in this weather. Even if by some miracle the sun didn’t kill them, a Bodywalker was capable of freezing to death on the forest floor. There was no healing from being a solid block of ice for several hours. The only thing working in their favor was that there was no chance in hell Odjit would risk her precious little life running after them, and her minions would be just as susceptible as the rest of them. Even the Gargoyles that served her needed to be back at their touchstones and turned to stone before dawn struck … or else they risked a kind of madness that went far beyond the power-mongering lunacy of the Templar bitch.

And she wasn’t the worst of it. If she had been reborn, then that meant the Templar high priest wasn’t too far behind … if he had not yet been born already. And as bad as she would be when she finally reached full strength, he was worse. And the two of them in tandem …

He had neglected to tell Docia some of these details, knowing that Ramses’s wisdom about not overwhelming her with everything at once had been well-founded, not just with her, but with others in the past as well.

Strange, but with the amount of light filling the gray, pre-dawn sky, he ought to have begun to feel the strange tingling sensation in his extremities that was a precur
sor to the Rapture, the paralysis that crippled a Body-walker caught in the sun. He knew instantly it had something to do with this Suspension Odjit had inflicted on them, but the knowledge gave him little comfort, even though it might mean they could make it much farther than he might have anticipated. Nothing that reminded him Ramses was not with him could make him comfortable.

But he pushed it aside, his practiced eye tracking the woods and the sun’s cresting point, his ears seeking the sound of traffic or water to bring it all together. Running along the road might be dangerous, but they needed to get indoors somewhere, quickly. Since the Suspension had not been fully cast, there was no telling when Ramses would return, and with him the weakness of the Rapture. Perhaps Docia would not fall victim to it as severely, because she was not yet Blended, but she would not be safe continuing on without him. She had no idea how to survive against these people, and her desire to return to her brother proved it. No doubt the Templars already knew everything about her previous life and would be watching her brother, anticipating reacquiring her there at some point. It was common for confused newly fledged Bodywalkers to try to cling to their old lives, the things they knew and loved.

But it was best not only for her but for them that she keep her contact with them to a minimum … or better yet, severed all ties completely.

“My God, it’s so cold,” she gasped, stumbling to a stop and wrapping her arms around herself, dancing in the snow from one foot to the other as if it would give relief to her stinging, aching feet. The pain she was in was so strong, he could practically feel it crackling along the edges of his awareness, and he hated himself for having to do this to her, for forcing her to suffer like this. It was, after all, his fault. He should never
have left the house with her. He should never have trusted anyone else with her safety. Even if it was Hexus, one of Stohn’s most trusted soldiers, it had not been Hexus’s duty. His duty was to serve and protect Windham House and anyone his domini ordered him to protect, true, but Vincent’s duty to protect her superseded Kasimir’s authority. He should have gone with his instincts.

Their
instincts. His and Ram’s.

He stilled. There it was. The first sign. The moment he stopped thinking of Ram’s goals as his own, the moment he forgot to separate the two except as an afterthought, that was the moment he knew Ramses was coming back. And right on the back of it was the start of that tingling sensation, the warning along the edges of his skin that the sun was touching it and that the Rapture was imminent.

He drew breath to speak, then smelled it. Wood fire. They were far enough from the old Spanish church where Odjit and her followers had been holed up, so it wasn’t originating from there. He had to assume it was from somewhere else, a dwelling of some sort.

“Come on,” he encouraged her, reaching out to her.

She didn’t even hesitate to put her hand in his, and for some reason that made him smile inside. That she took a step into the snow readily told him just what a trouper she really was. And despite Asikri’s judgment of her as a whiner, he knew she was anything but. Nor was she the coward he had accused her of being in order to get a rise out of her. She honestly had to be one of the bravest of creatures, in his opinion, to keep adapting so quickly to her precipitously changing situation again and again. A lesser person would have just collapsed into a ball … would have stayed in the nice warm church, no matter what it might mean.

He yanked on her given hand, whipping her up hard
against his body, grinning down at her when she gasped with surprise. Then she groaned, a surprisingly sexy little sound, followed by an equally sexy little wriggle into the warmth of his body. He wished he had the luxury of time to enjoy it, but he did not. Instead, he scooped her up in his arms and began to double-time it through the woods in the direction of the smell of smoke.

She burrowed her ice-cold nose and face against his neck, under his hair, her hot breath gasping out against him in puffs and shivery words.

“Y-you’re so w-warm!” she groaned.

“You will be, too, in a minute,” he promised her, although he wasn’t as confident as he sounded. His lips were going numb, and it wasn’t from the cold. In fact, he was feeling less and less cold by the second, which meant he was feeling less and less, period. He wasn’t prone to panic, knowing it was the fastest way to get himself killed, not to mention her, but he’d be lying if he were to say he was perfectly calm about it.

When his foot hit the gravel driveway leading up to a pointy little A-frame house nestled into the woods on one side and the edge of a cliff on the other, he wanted to shout with triumph. But he didn’t want her to think he hadn’t had it all under control all along. Sunrise had broken about twenty minutes ago, and there was no time for celebrations.

He barreled into the door of the cabin, not bothering to knock, not even calling out. He dropped Docia straight to the floor, knowing the element of surprise would be fleeting but crucial to gaining control over whoever was in the house.

It wasn’t until he was inside the house that he realized it was pitch-black inside.

“Oh shit,” he said.

“Yeah. ‘Oh shit’ is right,” declared a defiant female
voice, right before she flung a ball of mystic green energy straight at his head.

But this wasn’t the red-tinged energy of a Templar. It was something else completely. And as he dodged the opening volley, as she dissolved into smoke only to reappear elsewhere behind him, he knew exactly what she was.

“Wait! I’m not here to hurt you!”

“Then you’d have knocked, now, wouldn’t you? I knew it! I knew it wasn’t safe here anymore with a bunch of Bodywalker Templars running loose in the valley!”

“We’re not Templars!” Vincent insisted as he dodged a second, far more wickedly accurate volley of energy balls, only to have the energy change into little winged dragons that immediately set on him, chomping through both legs of his pants and one arm. The fourth one heading for his other arm he sent batting away, like a line drive over third base, and this time
she
had to duck to be missed. “We’re their prisoners!” He reached up to rip off one of the eager little lizards, its razor-sharp teeth like needles in the meat of his thigh. He grabbed the head of the thing and flung it, too, in her direction. This time, though, instead of dodging it, she leapt up and caught it. She held the little thing to her chest.

“Oh sure, you big fat stupid bully! I’ve heard that before!”

“Really? What, are we dropping like flies on you or something?” Docia said, trying to sound sarcastic through chattering teeth. She reached up for the little dragon latched on to Vincent’s other leg and grabbed it by its head. “Knock it off or I’ll break its little neck!” She grabbed tight to prove it, and Vincent ground out a vicious curse as the teeth dug deep into him.

“Jesus Christ!” he spat.

“No, wait! Don’t hurt her!”

“Don’t hurt
her
?” Docia and Vincent echoed in differing levels of disbelief. Vincent’s was obvious, since he was the one suffering; he assumed Docia simply couldn’t figure out how the little beast was obviously a
her
.

“If you didn’t want her hurt,” Docia said, shivering, “then you shouldn’t be using her and her friends like watchdogs.” She struggled to her knees and then gently pried the dragon’s teeth out of Vincent’s leg. She looked at it, inspecting it, just shy of lifting its tail to look for private parts, Vincent could only assume. “It’s kind of cute. What is it? A dragon?”

The dragon squeaked as if she’d insulted it, spitting at her in a garbled combination of chatter that, when run together like that, sounded like cussing. Then the little booger showed its teeth at her and made a production of licking Vincent’s blood off its lips and making yummy sounds.

“It’s a dragonlet. Dragons are like, three tons heavier than an elephant. Duh.” The dragonlet’s owner rolled her eyes because, clearly, that ought to be obvious to anyone. “Now, can I have her back?” She held out one hand, the other continuing to cradle her first catch to her breast as one might a kitten. And, like a kitten, it began to purr. Loudly.

“Call the other one off of Vincent first.”

The cabin owner twisted her lips to the side, clearly nibbling on the inside of them as she fretted between getting her pets back and letting Vincent possibly have the opportunity to get the upper hand.

“Seriously, if you think these little rats would have stopped me if I didn’t want to be stopped, then you don’t know a damn thing about Bodywalkers.” Vincent felt the need to point out.

“Shh!” Docia said, elbowing him in his kneecap.

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” Vincent ground out.

Docia got to her feet, and Vincent could honestly
imagine how difficult a task that had to be for her. He watched her step across to the other woman, and it took everything inside him not to scream at her to stop. But when he saw the bloody footprints she was leaving behind on the wood-plank flooring, he didn’t have the heart to countermand her efforts.

“Here she is,” Docia said, holding up the dragonlet. Its wings flapped, the spiky little fingers at the crested points of those wings wiggling toward the safety of its caretaker. Docia handed it over without remembering, it seemed, to make the other woman call off the last of the little monsters still dug into his arm. Vincent pulled his forearm up to his nose and glared into the dragonlet’s glassy green eyes.

“Are you having fun?” he growled at it. “And you do realize I can snap your scrawny little neck, right?”

The gnawing stopped, at least, but that didn’t keep it from surreptitiously licking the blood it had drawn from its lips with a rapid little forked tongue.

“How do you know it’s a girl?” Docia asked about her recently abandoned charge, eaten up with curiosity.

“Oh!” The little blond woman, barely an inch over five feet, he guessed, and maybe a buck five soaking wet, smiled puckishly. “The girls have an extra joint on the top of the wing. Right here, see?” She gently stretched out the wing of the new acquisition, counting out the joint bumps along the ridge of it aloud. Then she cuddled that one close and compared the wingspan of the first she’d been holding. “See? Three on the boy. Four on the girl.”