Crave the Night: A Midnight Breed Novel (35 page)

She had no sooner said the words than the air stirred outside the open French doors to the terrace.

In the blink of an eye, a pair of immense males materialized there. It was apparent they were soldiers. Obvious they had come for her, just as Zael said they would.

Each man held a long, gleaming blade much like the one Zael now raised in front of him, as he swiftly ushered Jordana behind him.

Nathan wasted no time waiting for the attack to come. He drew one of his guns and opened fire on the two Atlanteans.

The larger of the two, dark-haired and snarling, staggered back on his heels under the sudden barrage of bullets that ripped into his chest and skull. His companion, a copper-haired warrior with piercing, determined green eyes, took a couple of rounds in his torso before vanishing into thin air.

Nathan kept firing on the big male, blasting holes into the bastard until his tattered, unmoving weight tumbled right over the railing of the balcony.

Jordana’s scream jerked Nathan’s head around. The other soldier had reappeared farther inside the villa and was now bearing down on her and Zael.

Zael put his body between Jordana and their attacker, raising his blade as the other male’s sword came slashing toward him. The Atlantean weapons clashed in a screech of metal and a brief shower of blue and green sparks. Zael went down on one knee, driven low by the sudden, wrenching thrust of his opponent’s arm.

Nathan dropped his empty pistol. Using the speed of his Breed genetics, he flashed across the room and came up behind the copper-haired soldier. He grabbed the Atlantean’s head in both his hands and gave a violent twist. Vertebrae popped like firecrackers. The soldier let go of his blade and slumped to the floor in a lifeless heap.

As the body fell away, Zael opened his mouth in a shout of warning.

Too late.

Nathan felt a sharp length of ice impale his torso from behind.

The blade withdrew and he wheeled around on his heel, astonished to find the dark-haired Atlantean standing there. Blood was all over the soldier, but not a single bullet wound remained.

The immortal had come back from the gunfire and the fall. His gleaming sword was dripping, stained scarlet from the hole that now bled from Nathan’s back and abdomen.

The wound was bad, but it wouldn’t kill Nathan. It did, however, severely piss him off.

And before he could regroup and retaliate, Jordana’s terrified cry rent the air.

“Oh, my God. Nathan!” She lunged from behind Zael.

The dark-haired Atlantean’s hand shot out and grabbed hold of her, merciless, unrelenting. His long fingers wrapped tightly around her arm. Nathan saw that he wore a thong around his wrist similar to Zael’s. The crystal emblem affixed to it now began to throw off powerful, fiery light.

He was going to take her away. Back to their realm. Back to their queen.

Jordana’s wild, terrified gaze shot to Nathan.

No. He couldn’t lose her
.

“Goddamn it, no!” Nathan shouted.

He reached for her other hand and held on tight. He couldn’t bear to let her go.

And at that same moment, in no time at all, he felt a heat begin to surge through Jordana’s fingers. The energy was immense, awesome.

Not of this world.

“Release me,” she growled at the soldier who captured her. The power within her expanded, growing swiftly. In a blinding flash, it erupted out of her as she roared the command again.
“Release me!”

The Atlantean guard flew off her as if torn away by an unseen force. Nathan too was staggered by the sudden blast of light and power that surged through Jordana’s hands.

He let go, only because he noticed that the dark-haired male had dropped his sword in that moment. Nathan grabbed for it, at the same time Zael hurled himself at the soldier, tackling the guard while his reflexes were dazed from Jordana’s defensive strike.

But now the second of the Atlantean soldiers had come back from his injuries.

Although Nathan had broken the male’s neck, the copper-haired immortal shook it off with a menacing chuckle as he got to his feet. He swiveled his head, popping his spinal column back into alignment.

Nathan vaulted up from the floor, pivoting around at the same time. The dark-haired immortal’s sword held in his hands, he swung it around as the second guard charged at him.

Steel met flesh and cleaved in deep, sweeping the immortal’s head off in one sure, lethal blow.

Behind him, Zael’s sword was also biting into muscle and bone, the head of the other Atlantean hitting the floor with a wet, final thud.

“Nathan!” Jordana flew across the carnage toward him.

Her heart lodged in her throat, panic and relief swamping her at the same time, Jordana raced to Nathan’s side and threw her arms around him.

He was wounded and bleeding, but still standing. He was alive.

He had saved her—he’d likely saved Zael as well—and nothing could have kept Jordana from embracing Nathan and burying her face in the living, breathing warmth of him.

“Oh, God,” she murmured against his chest. She clung to him, needing to feel his body against hers, whole and hale. “I’ve never been so scared, Nathan. When that soldier ran his blade through you, I thought he’d killed you—”

“Shh,” he soothed, his palm stroking her back as he dropped a kiss on top of her bent head. He held her close, his pulse drumming beneath her ear. So strong and steady, so comforting. “I’ll heal soon enough. I’ve survived worse than this before.”

He lifted her chin, both his fingers and his gaze tender on her. “It would’ve taken a hell of a lot more than that blade to stop me. I wasn’t about to let them have you. I don’t give a fuck if the Atlantean queen and her entire army think they have any claim on you. They’ll all have to come through me first.”

He lowered his head and kissed her. Not a tentative kiss but a fierce, possessive one.

Jordana melted into it, savoring the taste of him, the feel of him. The
unearthly energy that had poured through her veins during the battle stirred again, but with a different power, as Nathan’s mouth moved over hers in a deep, passionate joining.

Would she always respond so easily to his touch, his kiss?

Or now that her Atlantean genetics were awakening, becoming part of her, would she crave him with an even greater need?

She hoped she’d have the chance to find that out.

She hoped she’d have an entire future ahead of her with Nathan to find that out.

But right now, his injury needed tending, and across the room, Zael was standing over the corpses of the two Atlantean warriors.

Nathan broke contact on a low moan. As he raised his head to regard Zael, he brought Jordana under his arm in a protective stance. “Will more soldiers come?”

Zael gave a sober nod. “Once it’s determined these men have failed and are lost to her, Selene will send out more. She’ll keep sending out more. The queen does not accept defeat easily. She forgives even less.” Zael’s gaze slid to Jordana. “The best place to elude her is in the colony.”

“Or through a blood bond,” Jordana pointed out.

“If you remain in the mortal world, that’s all that would protect you. But only if Selene’s legion doesn’t find you first.”

“And she has me.” Nathan said it like a vow: firm, unwavering.

“True,” Zael acknowledged with a level glance, but his grave tone stopped short of encouragement. “Unfortunately, nothing can be as certain as the asylum the colony can provide. It’s hidden, known only by a small few outside the realm. I am one of only a handful trusted with its location, aside from the exiles who live there in seclusion under the colony’s protection.”

“What kind of protection?” Nathan asked.

Zael indicated the silvery crystal he wore on the leather thong at his wrist. “This is crafted from a larger source of energy belonging to our people. The colony has one, and so does Selene. At one time, very long ago, the realm had five of these crystals, much larger than this small, harvested piece. The crystals are sacred to the Atlantean people. They shielded us from the world outside and kept the realm safe from enemies who would want to destroy us.”

Beside Jordana, Nathan studied Zael’s bracelet with narrowed scrutiny. “That material’s nothing found on this Earth.”

“No,” Zael said. “My people, like the Ancients who fathered your kind, the Breed, were from somewhere else. The two races were at war, in fact. Even before fate brought them here.”

Nathan swore under his breath. “Is that why another of your kind, Reginald Crowe, recently boasted before he died that the Atlantean queen has been plotting a new war—one against both mankind and the Breed?”

“Selene is a bitter queen.” Zael grunted. “Worse, she’s a scorned woman. I can’t say what she’s plotting, but it’s rare that she’s not looking for reasons to fight or enemies to destroy. It wasn’t always that way with her.”

“What happened to make her that way?” As much as Jordana feared the woman who had driven her mother to suicide and ordered her soldiers to hunt down and execute Jordana’s father, she felt compelled to try to understand something about the queen if she could.

“Selene changed after our first settlement was destroyed,” Zael explained. “Two of the realm’s crystals were stolen, and our enemies—your Ancient forebears,” he said to Nathan, “used the crystals’ power to annihilate us. Selene fled Atlantis with as many of our people as could escape the destruction of all we’d built and the giant wave that swallowed up the rest.”

“Just like the myth,” Jordana whispered. “That story has been in place for thousands of years.”

Zael gave an acknowledging shrug. “More or less. And Selene’s had little but mistrust or hatred for anyone since that day.”

Nathan frowned. “So the colony has a crystal, and the queen has one also. Two were stolen before the attack by the Ancients. And the fifth?”

“No one knows for certain. It vanished about twenty-five years ago.” Zael glanced at Jordana. “There were rumors Cassianus had taken it with him when he fled with you …”

“But you don’t believe that?” she asked.

Zael’s brows lifted in contemplation. “Cass would’ve had the balls, that’s a given. But to make off with an object with that magnitude of power? To keep it hidden all this time would’ve been quite a feat. He’d have had to shield it somehow.”

“The way he wanted to shield my power with a blood bond,” Jordana said. “Would he have any reason to take something like that with him when he left the realm?”

“Anyone who understood how valuable the crystal was would have reason to want it for himself.” Zael thought for a moment, then chuckled softly as he looked at Jordana. “Or for someone else, if he thought it might prove useful in some other way.”

“A bargaining chip,” Nathan suggested. “Leverage against the one other person who wanted it the most. Wanted it maybe more than anything else.”

Zael grunted. “Well, even if Cass did take it, he can’t tell anyone where to find it now. The missing crystal is most likely lost forever.”

Regardless of whether Cassianus escaped with a valuable Atlantean treasure or not, and regardless of any motivation he may have had to do so, Jordana felt a wave of renewed sorrow for the father she never knew. She mourned her mother too, for the love she lost and the family she never had the opportunity to enjoy.

There was even a small part of Jordana that pitied her grandmother. After all, what kind of lasting emotional pain must it require to turn a woman into the kind of unfeeling, destructive monster Selene seemed to be?

Nathan looked to Zael in question. “If Cass worried so much about Jordana and her safety, why not take her to the colony as an infant and stay there with her? Why would he risk her future—Jesus, why risk her life—by leaving her to grow up among the Breed and mankind?”

“Because if he brought her to the colony, Cass understood that like the others who live there, she’d have to remain under its veil for her entire existence. He didn’t want to make that choice for her. Exile to the colony was a last resort, only if the worst should happen and time was running out. Cass wanted to give his daughter the chance to find her own path.”

Nathan’s dark gaze settled on Jordana. He’d never seemed uncertain, not in all of the time she knew him. But now there was a hesitance in his eyes. A quiet dread in his voice. “If I hadn’t come here to find you tonight, what would you choose?”

“She already had chosen,” Zael interjected gently. “Jordana decided even before you arrived. We were preparing to leave around the same time you came in.”

Nathan’s head drew back slightly, doubt flickering across his typically cool, controlled features. “I came that close to losing you?”

She shook her head, emotion nearly choking her. “Zael was going to
bring me back home to Boston. Everything that matters to me is there … and right here in front of me.”

His exhalation sounded heavy with relief. “I came to find you because you’re everything that matters to me.”

On her tear-thickened, happy laugh, Nathan pulled her into his arms.

When he spoke next, his voice was reverent and solemn, his hands on her the tenderest they’d ever been. “I will protect you with my life, Jordana. Always. And I’ll protect you with my blood bond, here and now, if it means men like the ones who came for you tonight will never find you again.”

That he would make such a promise moved her deeply. She loved him for that alone.

God help her, she loved Nathan for that and a thousand other reasons.

Jordana could hardly summon her breath as he gently stroked her cheek, his stormy gaze flecked with a galaxy of amber stars.

“Don’t think I’m offering this out of duty or anything half as noble. You know I’m a selfish bastard who demands things go his way. I don’t settle for anything less than what I want. And what I want right now, forever, is you.” His eyes glowed bright with tender emotion. He held her face in his hands, searching her gaze with an intensity that made her blood heat beneath her skin. “I’m offering my bond because I love you. Because I need you, Jordana, and I don’t want to know what life without you will feel like ever again.”