Of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (6 page)

“Um, no.” As long as she let him read it when she was done. That looked like the seventh book; he hadn’t read that one yet.

Jericho joined the end of the line while Dahlia marched right past him and up to the counter, bypassing the line of three customers who were already waiting. She dropped her book on the counter. The grumbling from the customers got the clerk to turn around from closing the previous order. The young Hispanic kid’s mouth was open, ready to keep law and order in his shop, but then he laid eyes on Dahlia.

His mouth went slack for a fraction of a second, and then it slowly spread into a lecherous smile. He swaggered up to the counter, leaned on Dahlia’s book, and stared straight down her shirt. “Anything else I can get for ya, mama?” he asked.

Jericho clenched his fists and was charging toward the counter before his brain had finished telling his legs to move. Dahlia’s mouth was open to make her reply, but he cut her off. “Yeah, we’ll take these,” he ground out as he pulled a box of Clif bars across the counter. “For us to eat later. When we’re together. ’Cause we’re together.”

What the fuck?

He could feel Dahlia staring him down, but he refused to look at her. He was too focused on what in the hell had possessed him to go primal all over the gift shop. He bet it had something to do with the fact that, even though he despised her, Jericho was aching to touch her body with every fiber of his. Literally aching. The pain was growing unbearable.

The clerk completed the order with clumsy fingers — apparently Jericho was doing a pretty good job of being terrifying — and handed the bag with his purchase to him without another wayward glance in Dahlia’s direction. Jericho gently gripped Dahlia by the back of her arm, careful to make sure he only made contact with her t-shirt, and turned to escort her out of the gift shop while studiously ignoring the warmth of her flesh beneath the fabric.

She let him get as far as just outside the door before she jerked her arm from his grasp and snatched the bag from his hand. “Well, that was eye-opening, Tarzan. Wanna throw me over your shoulder and carry me to the train, too?”

He glowered at her. “Can you go anywhere without causing trouble?”

Her eyes flashed. “What would be the fun in that?”

He pinned her with a warning glare, and she remained blessedly quiet while Jericho purchased his train ticket. Then they were on the train. No sleeper cars this time. Definitely no sleeper cars. That dream was still too vivid in his mind.

Just as they both settled in to their seats, across from each other and next to a window, Dahlia opened her book and began to read. Within seconds, Jericho was bored. Damn, he’d been too busy keeping an eye on Dahlia to consider getting a book himself. Well, this was going to be an uncomfortable trip.

He reached for a Clif bar and pressed his head back against the seat as a wave of agony from the Impulse poured over him.

• • •

Jericho was fidgeting.

Out of the corner of her eye, Dahlia had been watching him shift back and forth in his seat for the past hour. She knew exactly what it meant. He was feeling the Impulse.

Damned, stubborn man
. He should have listened to her last night. Then again, maybe she should have listened to herself. If he was feeling it, she would be soon as well. Observation so far had shown that the male always reacted to the Impulse more severely, but the female was always quick on his heels. She had a lot to look forward to.
Oh, goodie.

Over the next several hours, an uncomfortable, itchy feeling began to seep into her limbs. She idly scratched her arm, her leg, her neck several times while trying to focus on her book. More often than not, the words blurred before her eyes as she longed to take sneak peeks at Jericho. She hadn’t allowed herself to look at him under the unproven hypothesis that actually seeing him would make the Impulse worse. It sounded like a plausible theory. And so, she’d read about half of the final Harry Potter book without understanding a single word. Which only made her more irritable. She’d been looking forward to this book for a while.

Dahlia finally gave up and allowed herself to close her eyes for a little cat nap. She hadn’t slept the night before, and she needed her energy for the next step in her plan. She set her infallible internal alarm clock to go off in a couple of hours and slid into a light slumber.

When she opened her eyes again, it was pitch black outside. Her first cognitive thought was that of need. She moaned softly as she shifted and pain shot up through her limbs. The Impulse was acting out in its full glory.

Shit
. A quick glance at her watch showed her it was about midnight. Just perfect. It was show time, and instead of making a getaway, Dahlia wanted to straddle Jericho and go to town until she felt better.

She braced herself and glanced at the man. Her heart lurched. Damn but he was fine. He had fallen asleep, too. His head listed to the left, and his blond hair stuck out at all angles. He must have been running his fingers through it repeatedly. His mouth had fallen wide open, but even this didn’t detract from his attractiveness. His face had softened in sleep, and he looked young, peaceful —

Edible
. The irritation from the Impulse surged.

Dahlia grunted. She had to get a grip and get going. If she were away from him, maybe the pain would lessen?

Working off that thought, she glanced around the train car to make sure it was empty. It was: a good sign that luck was with her. She hefted the Harry Potter volume in her hand, weighing it and finding its balance point, before launching to her feet and braining Jericho on the side of his head with it.

She studiously ignored the devastation her action brought to the pit of her stomach as he made a soft sound in the back of his throat and then slumped down further into his seat. Out like a light, and without even a struggle.

That had been easy. Well, relatively so considering the action had made her feel about as bad as she’d ever felt in her life. And now she had to drag his rather substantial weight into a hiding place. She located a little nook behind the final bench in the train car. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t far, so it won out over trying to find another supply closet.

She walked behind Jericho’s chair, placed one hand on each of his shoulders and pushed quickly — before she could turn the contact into a caress. He slid to the floor. She walked around to his back, grabbed him under his armpits and began the long haul to the back of the car.

Overwhelming guilt niggled at her conscience as she dragged him across the filthy floor. Had there been another option? Any other way for her to get to her destination without anyone knowing?

She cursed. “Getting soft,
chica
?” she asked herself out loud. Other option or not, she had planned for this one. There was no time to regroup. And since when did violence bother her anyway? It was the most effective course of action, and she had a lot on her to-do list.

When she got Jericho to the nook behind the seats, she unlaced his boots and did a fairly decent job of hog-tying the man to the metal supports for the chairs. She stepped back and checked to make sure he wasn’t visible to the casual passerby. Assured that she had done the best that she could, she strode to the emergency door, flung it open, and leapt out into the night.

Jericho’s pounding head woke him from a dead sleep. He moaned as he opened his eyes and the light stabbed his retinas. He cranked his lids closed again. He waited a few moments, and then opened his eyelids once more, slowly this time.

He blinked several times to clear his vision, and still it took a while for him to comprehend that he was staring at a vivid display of chewed-up gum stuck to the bottom of a seat. He jerked back in disgust only to be brought up short by his wrists and ankles, which refused to move.

“What the — ” He gave a tug and quickly found out that, yes, he was bound to the metal brackets of the seat with what appeared to be his own shoelaces. The fog cleared, and he snapped to attention.

“Dahlia?” he called cautiously. When she didn’t answer, Jericho’s temper snapped. “Damn it to hell!” he roared as he broke the shoelace holding his wrists with one powerful movement. He fumed out loud as he untied the impressive knot keeping his ankles immobile, and within seconds, he was free and storming around the car.

Nope, no Dahlia. But there
was
a partially read copy of Harry Potter resting in his old chair. Jericho brought his hand to his temple, felt a goose egg the size a seven-hundred-page boy wizard could cause, and cursed again.

“I’m going to kill her. With my bare hands.” It didn’t matter that it wouldn’t stick. That just meant he’d get to do it again.

The emergency exit door was a wide open beacon, and Jericho stepped over to it and thrust his head out into the night air. The breeze the train created slapped him in the face, waking him further and clearing the last of his cobwebs. He eyed the embankment, saw that it would make for a soft-ish landing, and jumped.

As soon as he hit the ground, he tucked and rolled with his momentum. After bouncing and jolting over the terrain for what felt like hours, he stilled. He’d landed on his back, and he gasped up at the star-speckled sky as he pondered what in the world had led him to believe he was facing a soft-ish landing.

When he could breathe once more without passing out, he sat up slowly and took stock of his body. He was pretty banged up. He could feel bumps and bruises all over and there were some minor lacerations on his forearms from the desert brush. Also, he was pretty sure he’d hit a rock at some point with his elbow, which had swollen to grapefruit size. Luckily, the minor scratches were already beginning to heal. And as an added bonus, this new pain was pushing the pain of the Impulse to the side. Since he didn’t have any time to waste, he dragged himself upright and began to hobble down the tracks. It wouldn’t take long for his immortal body to heal itself. He would heal as he walked.

He forced a painful pace. Trains traveled at about seventy-nine miles per hour, so if he had been out for any length of time, she had a huge head start on him. He had to hoof it.

After about a half hour, Jericho had healed enough to move to a slow jog, and after forty-five minutes, he was sprinting across the desert despite the fact that he wasn’t quite back to par. He found the point where she’d jumped after an hour, approximately ten miles from where he himself had jumped. So, he hadn’t been out for too long.

His eyes trailed her path. Looked like she’d rolled farther than he had. He winced at the sight of blood in several spots, then dismissed the momentary concern with annoyance. He would not be feeling sorry for her.

Her trail was easy to follow. She hadn’t been covering her tracks at all. Overconfident in her incapacitation of him, or did she just plain not care? She had set out across the desert toward the soft glow from a tiny town in the distance.

Keeping his eyes on her clear tracks to make sure he stayed on her trail, Jericho set off after the woman he was learning to hate.

The tracks got fresher and fresher — he was gaining on her — and when he entered the town after another hour, he estimated he was about fifteen minutes or so behind her.

He picked up the pace. Tracking her in an urban setting would be much more difficult than in the sand of the desert. By some stroke of luck, he spotted a blood pattern on the pavement and saw another one several feet away.

If she was still bleeding, she must have been hurt pretty badly. He was all healed up, and he’d hit pretty hard. Again, that concern flared, and again, he shoved it aside. That was just the Impulse rearing its ugly head. The only thing he felt for this woman was blind rage.

As he rounded the corner into a dark, dangerous neighborhood, he spied a figure limping down the street about a quarter of a mile away. Immediately, he knew it was her. He took off like a shot, his boots slapping the pavement as they flopped around loosely on his feet.

She heard him and looked over her shoulder. Even from a distance, he could see panic streak across her face. She shouted in alarm and put on a burst of speed herself, her limp causing her to list all over the road.

She was shouting in Spanish at the top of her lungs, and several neighbors came out onto the porches and watched the proceedings with varying expressions of boredom.

Dimly, Jericho realized that none of them were jumping to the aid of a woman being chased by a man, and wondered where in the hell Dahlia had taken them.

She cut across the overgrown lawn of a dilapidated house and tore the door out of the hands of an older Hispanic woman.

He could still hear Dahlia shouting as he followed in her footsteps past the wide-eyed homeowner clutching her faded floral nightgown to herself and standing where Dahlia had left her. He sprinted through the sorry excuse for a living room and rounded the corner into an empty bedroom, opening his mouth to yell at this woman who was causing him so much trouble and terrifying innocent people.

He skidded to a stop.

Dahlia was huddled on the ground in the corner of the bedroom. Her back was to him, and it was shaking with the force of her sobs, which echoed around the room. They were the most gut-wrenching sobs he’d ever heard, containing an entire world of sorrow, and they were so out-of-character that they drew Jericho up short.

A tiny hand appeared over Dahlia’s shoulder and curled into her hair. Dahlia continued to sob and mutter in Spanish as a shock of black hair peeked up over her other shoulder. Below the hair, two bright, brown eyes peered at Jericho in interest. Those eyes widened, and the little head rose higher revealing a crooked smile without two front teeth.

Jericho’s world tipped dangerously, and then the small boy spoke.

“
¿Papá?
”

Jericho collapsed into the wall behind him.

• • •

Dahlia heard Gabriel whisper to the man who had been chasing her through the night, and she knew it was over. She’d failed at her one job in life.