Demon Bound (17 page)

And he wouldn't be pressed into service, she realized. “You were frightened that you'd be killed?”

He gave a silent little laugh. “Way things turned out, I should've been.” His smile lasted for another second, then he shook his head. “And, yeah, that was part of it. But most of it was I just didn't believe in anything we were doing over there.”

“But you didn't leave America or marry her?”

“No. I ended up with a list of reasons to go—but it came down to just a few. I knew how everyone in town would be looking at my grandparents if I took off for Canada. A small town like that . . . and there'd already been enough talk. My mom ran off when I was just a kid, and my dad was the town drunk.” A dull flush tinged his cheekbones, and he abruptly stood. “Anyway, they'd have been okay with whatever I did, but it would have been hard on them. And getting out of a draft wasn't a reason to marry someone, either. Especially Barbara, because she was a great girl—but she wanted to spend the rest of her life right where she grew up. One of us would have gotten screwed.”

His discomfort was acute, almost like a physical pain. Alice looked away from him, but she heard the slide of fabric against skin as he shoved his hands into his pockets, his slow tread as he crossed the chamber. She couldn't conceive why he was baring himself in this way. How could it possibly be relevant to what he'd discovered about her bargain?

Yet he must think so—and even though he obviously thought what he exposed was something shameful, or perhaps foolish, he was determined to share it.

But Alice wished that he wouldn't. She didn't want to see this side of him. Didn't want to know that he'd made these choices with the grandparents he'd loved in mind. Didn't want to think of all the people she'd known—men, women—who would have used another person to secure their own future, married another person without considering his or her desires and needs. Without ever seeing who that person was instead of what they wanted that person to be.

Jake had managed to distract her, but she hadn't wanted understanding and admiration to follow. Yet she knew that even if she asked him to stop, he'd continue.

She was too intrigued to ask him to stop now, anyway. “So you went, though you didn't believe in it. I'm not condemning you,” she added when his shoulders stiffened. “I'm simply curious.”

He shrugged. “By then, I'd convinced myself that I might be wrong. I was nineteen years old—so what did I know? And the only way to find out for sure was to go. It wasn't the fighting, wasn't going into service. I'm not a pacifist. If I was, I wouldn't be doing this now.”

“No.” A Guardian couldn't keep his weapon sheathed, and expect to survive. “Were you wrong?”

He faced her, his expression clearing—and, she thought, taking on an unexpected amount of amusement. That boundless energy seemed to roll through him, and he strode to her side, went down on his heels again. “It's probably best not to get me started. What I will say is that I felt sick to my stomach all the time. Not so bad when I was in Basic, but once we shipped out, it was just—” He made a fist in front of his abdomen, then twisted his wrist. “All the time. Then you get out in the boonies, and it's worse, because you're scared on top of it—and wondering what the hell you're doing out there. Then there's the other times, when it's half-fun, because the guys you're with are ranging from ice-cool to batshit crazy, depending on the day and how you look at them. Mostly, you're just trying to stay alive. And you're doing whatever you can to make it right in your head, even if means making demons out of the other guys, joking about it any way you can. Then you kill one and you're puking your guts out.”

He stopped, and his gaze leveled on hers. “I don't do that when the demons are real,” he said.

“No.” She smiled faintly. “I noted that you employ other methods of celebrating when you slay one.”

And the memory of that spontaneous kiss seemed to weave silk threads within her chest; his slow grin pulled them tight.

“I went too fast,” he said. “It was sloppy.”

“Yes, well. First times usually are.” Oh, dear—how breathless that sounded. And her heartbeat had not quickened, but it was pounding unusually hard. She firmed her lips and replied, “
Decapitations
usually are. With more experience, you will know to expect some messiness.”

He turned his head to the side, his jaw clenching. Then he stood and moved away again.

She watched him, absurdly grateful that he was no longer close. What a ninny she was. She shouldn't let him have this effect on her. Nothing would come of it—and unreciprocated sexual attraction was a distraction she
didn't
need.

Perhaps she'd been in this room for too long. When he'd finished with this, she'd ask him to take her to Caelum. A hot bath, time to settle her nerves—then she'd be ready to return to work here.

For now, it helped to recall how easily he'd dismissed her as a real woman. That memory did not loosen the threads in her chest, but bound them. Still, the purpose was served—her voice was neither breathless nor prudish when she asked him to continue.

He looked at her over his shoulder, nodded. “So one night, we were assigned a simple extraction from a village, just escorting an officer out—but it all got fucked up. And next thing, we're on our knees, and they're deciding whether to shoot us or to use us for leverage.”

“They must have chosen the second option.”

“Yep. They took my communications equipment, stuck us in a cage. Bamboo, but strong. And the second night was when all the really bad shit went down.” He paused to examine an empty, horizontal niche that had been cut deep into the wall, then turned to face her. “We heard the first screams coming from the perimeter of the village. Women, men. Machine gun fire, but it never lasted long. Then there were just more screams, kids and people running everywhere. Every now and then we'd see something going past the cage—but so damn fast we didn't know what the hell it was. Then it came right up, splintered the bars just by squeezing them.”

Oh, dear heaven. “A nosferatu?”

As strong as a demon, but bloodthirsty—and without the Rules to govern them. Both demons and Guardians would hunt nosferatu down, kill them on sight. Fortunately, they were easy to identify—the hairless, pale behemoths couldn't shift their shape. The monsters usually stayed hidden away in caves, but when one did venture out, it could easily massacre hundreds of humans in a single night.

“Got it in one,” Jake said. “Of course, we didn't know
what
it was. And it came into the cage . . . just ripped our lieutenant to pieces. But it left the rest of us alive.”

Her brow furrowed. She'd been certain he was telling her how he'd been killed: the sacrifice he'd made of his own life to save another's—the sacrifice that allowed him to be transformed into a Guardian. They'd all done the same; it was the one act that linked them. “And you escaped the cage?”

“Got out of there as fast as we could. It was nearing dawn by then, too, so we could see what had happened. Everyone, torn apart.” He swallowed hard, shook his head. “Everyone but the kids.”

Alice squeezed her eyes shut, tried not to imagine. “Don't tell me what it had done to them.”

Jake was silent for a second; then he gave a short laugh. “No. I mean, it left them alive, too. It didn't do anything
different
to them. But it also destroyed all of the communication equipment, anything I might have used to call in help. The nearest village was ten clicks south. We, uh, ended up deciding to take the kids there.”

She studied his face, thought about what he probably wasn't revealing. A team of soldiers could have traveled the ten kilometers in a relatively short time. But if they had—and even if they'd made contact and a helicopter had come in to retrieve them—she knew there was very little chance help would have been sent to those children. “How long did it take to decide?”

“I prefer to think the guys who wanted to leave the kids behind just went temporarily crazy.” His smile was grim. “So it took us half the day to get that settled, to round up the kids and as much ammo and munitions as we could carry, and get out of there. And with most of the kids holding toddlers or babies . . . we didn't get there by nightfall.”

Alice breathed a small sound of dismay.

“And it started grabbing us. Not the kids. There were eight of us left after the lieutenant—but it didn't mow through us like it had the village. It'd pick our guy up, then take him out where we could hear what was happening to him. And we were moving those kids as fast as we could, but when the screams stopped, that was when we knew to huddle down and keep watch for it again. Our grenades were useless. By the time we'd throw them in its direction, the damn thing would be around the other side of us. And even when we got lucky enough in our aim to shoot it, it just kept on coming.”

He met her eyes, said evenly, “I was scared. No—beyond scared. For myself, for the other guys, for those kids. Nothing else I'd seen over there came close.”

Did he think he shouldn't have been frightened? “Understandably so.”

“Maybe. But the thing is, that sickness in my gut was gone. We were losing our men, we had no fucking chance against this thing—but what we were trying to do was exactly right.” He gave a quick, self-disparaging smile. “Of course, that was the only thing that was clear. I was thinking the craziest shit, making all these deals with God, the devil. Buddha got thrown in, too. Thor and Superman. I honestly would have done just about anything to get out of there—and worried about the consequences later.”

She looked down at her hands. If only her circumstances had been as noble as saving a group of children. But willful ignorance could not be so easily excused. “I can imagine,” she said quietly. “And then?”

“It took Thompson—which left just me and Pinter, the FNG. So—”

“FNG?” Alice glanced up. “A weapon?”

He crossed the room, laughing to himself and shaking his head. “The fucking new guy. A month before that, I'd been promoted to spec-4—a communications specialist—but I still had the title. So it was a good day when Pinter came along.” Jake lowered himself next to her again. “And he was the only one who got out of there. Maybe. Could be, he got wasted the second he and the kids made it to the village. Dunno.”

“Because you didn't make it.”

“Nope. Because by then, we'd figured out that it was choosing us by age—or rank, maybe. Working its way down, and just playing with us before it went after the kids. So after it got Thompson, I knew I was next. And a part of me was hoping that Thompson wouldn't ever stop screaming.” That flush covered his cheeks again, but he didn't look away from her. “But it wasn't just dying that scared me. I had a pretty good reason to get back home in one piece. But I knew it wasn't going to happen—and that somehow, I was going to have to take that thing out with me. So I wrote a letter to my girl, had Pinter and the kids huddle up, then went out to wait for it.”

She tried to interpret the smile that began to form on his lips. Half pride, she thought, and half disbelief—or embarrassment. “What did you take with you?”

“A grenade,” he said, then grinned before he stood and moved to the middle of the chamber, hopping up on the dais behind the lantern. His shadow loomed across the ochre-washed wall. “But just as a diversion. Because Thompson had tried that, and the nosferatu swatted it out of his hand before it went off. But I had two land mines—and I dug out a hole for them and covered them up. And when Thompson stopped screaming, I stepped on them.”

“But didn't they—”

“Nuh-uh. Because they had mousetrap detonators—pressure release—that could be rigged so they don't blow until you lift your foot. So I'm standing there like this—” He spread his legs shoulder-width apart, hunched his shoulders, and widened his eyes. “Shaking like crazy. And thinking how stupid it would be if dawn came before the nosferatu did, and I was stuck there the whole flippin' day.”

Alice's startled laugh pealed from high in her throat. “Yes,” she agreed, nodding. “That would have been unfortunate.”

“Yeah, but it didn't happen.” He abandoned his stance, and shrugged. “The nosferatu came, I went boom! And it did, too. Then there was Michael, showing up and asking me to come be a Guardian. And I thought, ‘What the hell.' Better than singing in Heaven. Or Hell, if I was headed there instead.”

“Yes.” The vestiges of her laughter fell away, and she sighed. “Jake, if you told me this in order to lead up to Michael, and make an argument about why I shouldn't kill him—”

“No. That's not it. Because after I got over being pissed, I realized what you were doing at Teqon's place. Trying to get out of your bargain, right? You don't want to kill Michael any more than I do. That's why you told Teqon to reconsider, and threw that heart at him. Which, by the way, was both badass and creepy.”

“It got my message across.”

“Yeah. Which is why I'm here.”

“It is?” She was utterly lost.

He stepped down from the dais. “I know what it's like to be stuck, when you've only got two or three really bad choices. Or no choice.”

“Oh. I see.” Her back stiffened. “Thank you for coming to offer your sympathy.”

“Ah, there you go with the porcupine again. But I'm not here out of pity; I'm here to help.”

“Help?” She stood in a quick movement, and her voice had a sharp edge. “There is nothing that can be done—I will either decide to fulfill my bargain, or I will not. So you are better put to use elsewhere.”