The Lawgivers: Gabriel (30 page)

For herself, Lexa thought it was their
attitude of superiority that spawned it. Before, very few of them
had had any sort of contact with the udai—they were mysterious,
powerful, unknown entities that gave rise to fantastic myths and
inspired terror. Now that they’d all had a chance to see them day
in and day out and interact, they knew the udai weren’t gods or
god-like. They were very little different than the people they so
clearly despised and considered inferior and they had the same
flaws and weaknesses.

They didn’t feel inferior to the udai,
but they did feel just enough inferiority to resent the udai
thinking they were superior and that had led them to begin
ferreting out their weaknesses, at first just to reassure
themselves and then because they despised being driven from dawn to
dusk and lectured until it felt as if their heads would explode. If
this was what the udai considered improving their lot then they
wanted no part of it! Nothing was wrong with the way they’d lived
before—it was their way—and the damned udai didn’t
belong!

Lexa pushed her unpleasant thoughts to
the back of her mind as she spied the gleam of moonlight on water
ahead of her. Forgetting her weariness, she rushed the last few
yards and looked around hopefully.

There was no sign of Maura and her
heart plummeted with disappointment. A nearly overwhelming desire
to burst into tears swept over her. Swallowing with an effort, she
looked up and down the banks of the stream as far as she could see
for any sign of her sister. This was the place where she’d been
told she could bathe, but maybe there were other places where
people from other groups had been told to bathe?

Weariness settled heavily over her when
she considered walking up and down the banks in search, but she’d
only had a few moments with Maura and it had been so long since
she’d seen her!

What if Maura had only been delayed,
though? What if she walked down the bank and Maura came, decided
she hadn’t come, and left again?

There were so many people now it
wouldn’t be easy finding her again, not when the udai watched their
movements so closely and kept them at task!

Finally, deciding she just couldn’t sit
still and wait when the anxiety was riding her that Maura had meant
another place, she began walking along the bank. She’d gone only a
few yards when she heard above her a great fluttering of wings.
Whipping around, she searched the darkness of the sky fearfully and
almost immediately spied an udai man. Her heart skipped several
beats, first in fear, and then in dawning gladness.
“Gabriel?”

She didn’t wait for him to acknowledge
her. The moonlight bathed one side of his face in just enough light
for her to identify him. The thrill that went through her banished
any sense of caution. She rushed toward him, halting abruptly a few
feet away when the realization hit her that he wasn’t her man. It
might feel like he was—to her—but he’d made it clear that he wasn’t
her man and never would be. To her surprise, he closed the distance
between them, striding toward her and sweeping her into a tight
embrace. “I never told you how much I like the way you say my
name,” he said, his voice husky but threaded with amusement. “It
annoyed the hell out of me at first, but I’ve missed hearing you
say it.”

Relieved that he seemed as glad to see
her as she was him, she struggled to curl her arms around him. “I
don’t say it right?” she murmured.

“You say it just right,” he murmured,
loosening his hold on her and dipping his head to skate his lips
along her cheek in search of her mouth.

Lexa met him eagerly, desperate to
familiarize herself with his taste and scent again, almost as
anxious to tear her clothes off and feel him against her bare
skin.

She didn’t hear the sound that prompted
Gabriel to release her and push her to one side so abruptly that
she nearly fell down, but she heard the second sharp intake of
breath.

“Lexa?”

The voice penetrated her confusion.
“Maura?” she asked, peering around Gabriel. She saw her after a
moment’s search, cloaked in shadows near the tree line. “It’s ok.
It’s Gabriel.”

“He’s one of them!” There was fear in
Maura’s voice, but far more loathing. “I recognize him. It’s the
bastard that dragged us to this hellhole!”

The confusion, barely cleared away,
descended again as Lexa’s mind went wild with many realizations at
once. Gabriel had fulfilled his promise to her! Maura wasn’t
grateful. She was furious. Guilt flooded her. “He did it for me,”
she said a little lamely.

Maura gaped at her. “You! You sent him
after us! Why? Why would you do that?”

Sheer stupidity? “I was afraid you were
dead! Afraid of what was happening to you if you were still alive.
They’re trying to help us have a better life. I wanted that for
you.”

Maura stared at her a long moment and
then turned hate filled eyes on Gabriel. “You didn’t used to be so
stupid! The only ‘better’ life they’re offering is the afterlife!
They’re gathering us all together so they can wipe us out. I can’t
believe you’re with him! I’d heard rumors, but I didn’t believe it
was you they were talking about. I would never have believed it if
I hadn’t seen you with him!”

Chapter Sixteen

Anger abruptly cleared away the
confusion and the guilt. “He’s a good man,” Lexa said stiffly. “And
he’s been kind to me. He only went to look for you because I begged
him to.”

Gah-re-al shifted uncomfortably beside
her. “As much as I’d like for you to believe that, the truth is
that we just made a sweep of the areas you showed me. I didn’t know
she was your sister. She looks nothing like you.”

Lexa glanced at him as he spoke, but
before she could respond, Maura spoke again.

“You showed him the
villages?”

“Maura ….”

Maura shook her head. “I don’t know you
and I don’t want to know you! They killed my man!” Her face
crumpled. She uttered a harsh sob that stabbed Lexa like a knife.
“I loved him and he’s dead and it’s your fault!”

Horror washed over Lexa. She thought
for several moments after Maura had whirled around and run away
that she would puke. She dropped weakly to the ground, covering her
face with her hands and burst into tears. “Oh god! What have I
done? I didn’t mean it!”

Gabriel stared down at her a moment,
debating whether to leave or try to comfort her and try to explain.
Finally, he knelt in front of her. “You haven’t done anything
wrong.”

Lexa snatched her hands down. “I did! I
told you where to find them! I trusted you!” she screamed at him.
“And you killed her man! She’ll never forgive me! And why should
she? I would never forgive her if she did that to me! If you’d been
….”

Gah-re-al felt some of the heaviness
lift from him. “If I’d been …?”

Lexa sucked her bottom lip in and shook
her head angrily.

Gah-re-al grasped her upper arms.
“There was a battle no one anticipated,” he growled. “Three of the
lawgivers were killed in the skirmish.”

Fear squeezed Lexa’s heart painfully,
fear for Gabriel, but in a moment her guilt and anger overshadowed
it. “How many of my people died?” she demanded angrily.

Gah-re-al released her abruptly and
stood up. “You asked me to find your siblings. I promised that I
would try. Beyond that, my orders were to round up all of the
humans I found for rehabilitation and relocation. We walked in to a
trap—with no notion that we would find anything different than
we’ve found in every other village—amoral tyrants brutalizing the
innocent. Instead, we discovered that they not only knew we were
coming, they’d prepared to fight to the death—and they knew about
our weapons and they knew how to get around them.”

Lexa stared at him for a long moment,
wavering, torn by her guilt over having a hand in Maura’s loss and
the realization that Gabriel could’ve died.

And all of it was her fault!

“I trusted you. I believed in you.” Her
chin wobbled so hard she couldn’t speak for a moment. “I would have
done anything for you. I loved you, but you only wanted to use
me.”

Gah-re-al swallowed a little sickly.
“But you feel none of those things anymore?”

Lexa discovered she couldn’t bring
herself to confirm it—because it wasn’t true. She wasn’t going to
give him the satisfaction of knowing just how thoroughly he’d duped
her, though!

“If you’d felt any of those things,”
Gah-re-al growled after a long moment, “it would take more than the
words of a woman you haven’t seen since she was a child to convince
you! You don’t know her!”

Lexa swallowed with an effort around
the knot in her throat, struggling with the urge to believe him,
with the doubts he’d given rise to.

But he’d abandoned her as soon as he’d
deposited her here—without a word or a backward glance. “I don’t
know who to believe anymore,” she said finally. “All I know is that
it wouldn’t have hurt so much if I’d never found Maura again. I’ve
lost her twice. And now I have no one.”

The urge to tell her she had him was so
strong, hit him so abruptly, that it was a struggle for Gah-re-al
to prevent himself from uttering it. Distrust of the impulse kept
him silent. He didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry for his
restraint when she turned and left him abruptly.

The sense that he was falling into a
dark pit he would never escape swept over him, the feeling that he
would deeply regret it, forever, if he didn’t say something. But he
couldn’t bring himself to stop her even while everything inside of
him screamed at him to do so.

When she’d vanished from sight he
realized it was cowardice that had kept him silent, not wisdom, not
caution. He was afraid she’d reject him, fling it in his
face.

He didn’t think he could handle
that.

No, he knew he couldn’t.

As long as he didn’t push it, didn’t
force her to reject him outright, there was a chance that she would
think it over and come back to him.

Anger spawned by a strong sense of
mistreatment wasn’t long in coming. She obviously had no clue of
how much he’d risked to see her! And it wasn’t just his career that
was on the line—although that damned well wasn’t unimportant. It
was his livelihood. He’d be damned lucky if they only fined him and
busted him down in rank to the lowest echelon! He could be facing
imprisonment. They might decide to ship him to a combat position on
another colony.

Although they might not need to go to
those lengths to put him in harm’s way.

The commander had been furious about
their losses in the skirmish with the natives. He’d wanted to
declare war—and probably would have except for the politicians.
They’d been angry, as well, but more inclined to dismiss it as an
isolated, if unpleasant, encounter—something to be expected now and
then given the fact that humans were such savages.

He could see their point in a way. It
wasn’t as if no lawgiver had ever been killed in the line of duty.
He’d been appointed, himself, to replace a lawgiver who’d lost his
life.

There were two problems to turning a
blind eye to the incident, though. It was the first time so many
lawgivers had lost their lives in one engagement. It was the first
time the humans had attacked as an organized group. And he, for
one, thought they were completely wrong in thinking it was over and
done with.

Even the social workers were becoming
uneasy with the tension that seemed to be building. They hadn’t
expected the humans to be grateful or to embrace them. They hadn’t
expected them to be able to see the ‘big picture’ and realize that
it took work to build a civilization but would be worth it in
time.

But they also hadn’t expected the
humans to begin to hate them instead of fearing them and more than
one had expressed their opinion that that was the case.

He thought Maura’s verbal attack was a
very bad sign. No one had dared to contradict them or argue with
them, and certainly not accuse them … before. To him, her boldness
seemed an indicator that there’d been a radical shift in the
perceptions of the natives.

Of course, Lexa had been prone to argue
with him from the start. He supposed it might simply be a family
trait, but he’d never sensed the hostility in Lexa that he’d sensed
in her sister.

Possibly, that could be explained away
by her loss, but he was far less inclined to dismiss any sign of
rebellion than he would’ve been a few months before.

His speculation about the restlessness
of the natives didn’t occupy his mind long, unfortunately, before
it went back to worrying over the encounter with Lexa. The sense of
being ill used mounted. He didn’t suppose he’d actually expected a
warm reception considering he’d left without telling Lexa he would
be back.

Mostly because when he’d left he’d had
no intention of coming back. He’d been ordered to stay away from
her and as much as that pissed him off he hadn’t thought scratching
his itch with her was worth throwing away a career he’d worked
damned hard for.

He’d managed to convince himself of
that—almost. He’d thought he had anyway.