Guardian (9 page)

“Be careful, there could be others waiting in ambush for us,” Liam warned, but Val just smiled and walked away with his kid brother.

With as much care as he could, Liam scooped Rylee into his arms and headed into the castle proper, leaving the battlements behind. The walls were dark and cold, the stone fully in the grip of the winter weather. He tried a few doors, finally found a room that had a bed and a fireplace. Putting Rylee into the bed, he covered her with heavy blankets that reeked of witches, but at least they would be warm.

The fire didn’t take long to start, and within ten minutes he had a blaze going. With light and heat taken care of, he turned back to Rylee. She was a bit paler than usual, but otherwise looked fine. His belly rumbled, the shifting back and forth and the power he’d had to exert over the water dragon had drained him. Then there was pushing his energy into Rylee to speed up her healing. But that was the most necessary part of him giving up his energy.

He threw several logs on the fire and then slid into bed with her. His belly could wait; right now he needed to be with her, to convince himself she was indeed all right. She was completely out of it and he took the moment to do something he hadn’t dared before.

Swallowing hard, he slid his hand under her shirt and rested it over her belly button. Fear gripped him as the sound of the tiny heartbeat seemed to fill his ears, even though he knew it was too quiet for anyone else to hear without a medical instrument. How the hell was he supposed to keep Rylee and the baby safe? Telling Rylee she was pregnant would slow her down; he knew her well enough to know that she wouldn’t do anything to harm a child, most especially theirs.

Yet it wasn’t truly Rylee he was worried about finding the truth in regards to her current condition. No, it was all those who would use it as a tool to manipulate and push her to do what they wanted. Or worse, would try to make her miscarry. He let out a groan and tugged her into his arms, his eyes prickling with the love and fear that swelled through his body.

He’d never thought there would be a chance for him to be a father, not even before he’d become a supernatural. His life had always been about helping others, protecting the innocent, bringing justice to those who’d done evil in the world. The idea of his own child being brought into the world, possibly when he wouldn’t be there to protect him or her … a shudder rippled the length of his spine.

There had to be a way to protect both Rylee and the baby. He just hadn’t seen it yet. What he needed was a place Rylee could be safe for a time, a place to give birth and be free from the world and all those who would try to control and use her. From those who sought her blood and her life, and would seek the same from any child she bore.

A soft, barely felt flutter whispered under his hand and he went still. No, it was too soon for the baby to be moving. He did a quick calculation in his head. Too soon, indeed. But then, the baby wasn’t exactly human. With the blood of a Tracker and a Guardian flowing through his or her veins, there was no telling what might be different for the child. Or for the pregnancy. He thought about all the physical damage Rylee had taken over the last few months. None of it had seemed to affect the pregnancy, a blessing in itself. Yet he wasn’t truly surprised; Rylee was tough, and she healed fast. It made sense that she could take more hits than a human woman when pregnant.

With his hand on her belly, he sent a soft thread of energy to the baby, a thread of love and caution. Caution to be as quiet as possible. To keep hidden and safe. The movement stopped and then thrummed several times in answer to his energy, then went silent again. That was the best he could do. The longer he could keep this under wraps, the better chance he would have at keeping both the baby and Rylee safe.

Liam let out a breath, the sound of the baby’s heartbeat steady in his ears as he closed his eyes and let sleep take him.

Chapter Ten

Shit, what a
bad dream. My mind swirled with trying to protect a child I had never met, but one I would give my life for, and the feeling I would fail. No matter how hard I tried, I would lose the salvage, a salvage that for some reason felt more important than anything else. I let out a groan and slowly opened my eyes. The smell of a wood fire and musky scented furs were the first things to get my attention. Next was Liam, lying on his belly, one arm flung across my chest just under my boobs.

“How do you feel?” he mumbled into the mattress.

I reached up to touch the wound above my heart, noting just how close it had come to finding its mark. Still tender, I winced as I probed it. “Better. That bastard nearly got me.”

Liam’s back stiffened and a low growl rumbled out of him. I put a hand on his shoulder and slid it up into his hair. The grumble subsided and he rolled over.

“You ready to go now?”

With care, I stretched, my body protesting the movement, but otherwise, I didn’t feel too bad. “Yeah, let’s get the hell out of here.” Sitting up, I found myself thinking about little Catya. Was she the one I’d been dreaming about? Was she so important that my subconscious would try to scare me into finding her?

A sigh slipped past my lips as I sent a thread to Track her, wondering if she had ever really existed, or if she was just a figment of Fedya’s imagination, a way to dull the pain of life.

So to say I was surprised when I got a solid ping back on Catya was an understatement. “Holy shit, I forgot the kid is here!” I scrambled out of bed, the furs tangling around my legs. They would have sent me to the floor in my haste if Liam hadn’t been there to steady me.

“Wait, what kid?” Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who’d had their brain on shut down.

“Catya, she’s here, in the castle somewhere. But why the fuck couldn’t I sense her? This isn’t that far away from where we were before.” My left arm was all a tingle as the nerve endings that had been damaged came back online and my fingers were pretty much useless.

He bent and tied my boots for me, buck naked and totally unaware of how damn amazing he looked. The curve of his back, the broad stretch of his shoulders beckoned to me, begging me to slide my hands along the taut skin. I shook my head.
Pull yourself together, Rylee, you can play with him later.

Liam stood and grabbed a fur from the bed, wrapping it around his body. He looked more than a little like a warrior from the medieval ages, his silvery golden eyes adding to the image of intensity and otherworldly-ness. I couldn’t look away from him, just drank him in. Damn, if there wasn’t a kid waiting on me I could have stood there all day looking at him.

“Are we going or are you just going to stand there staring at me?” His lips quirked a little at the edges. He knew what he did to me, and he loved it.

“Yeah, going.” I was blushing, but I didn’t care. He was the only one who could make my blood run that hot and having him know wasn’t a bad thing.

Catya’s threads were quite strong, a steady pulse that told me she was healthy and either sleeping or so calm she should be.

“Maybe there’ll be some clothes for you, too.” I glanced around the room, hoping there would at least be some pants. Something. Nope, no such luck. “You could always get that armor, it would probably fit you.”

He snorted. “Thanks, I think I’ll pass on putting cold metal against my boys.”

Laughing, I left the room and started toward Catya. We wound our way through the castle, getting stopped twice by dead ends that I was pretty sure were anything but—the way the walls were set in, the loose stones, the scratch marks in the floor, they all spoke to the kind of doorways the hunters needed to escape quickly. But I didn’t need those pathways to find the kid.

Liam stopped me in front of an open doorway when we were on the first floor. “Clothes.” I peered in after him. The hunters’ stash of winter clothes lined the room. Pants, tops, fur coats and thickly insulated boots. It didn’t take Liam long to find stuff that fit.

“You look like one of them now.” I pointed to a mirror set into the far side of the room. He turned, took a look, and shrugged.

“Nothing I can do about it until I get Peter to show me how to keep my damn clothes intact.”

Eager to get to the girl, I set off at a jog. My muscles had loosened with the walk and now they warmed up even more. The wound grumped at me, but didn’t break open. Not that I was too worried. The hunters were wiped out, and we’d found the kid.

What could possibly go wrong?

Yeah, better that I not ask that question. I pushed it away before it could take root and the fates decided to show me just how badly something could go sideways when provoked.

“I hear Val talking; he must have found the kid. He said he would look for her,” Liam said as we entered a long hallway on the first floor. Light streamed in through windows covered in stained glass. That surprised me. Until I got a look at the pictures inset.

My feet came to a stop in front of the first and my jaw unhinged. “This is fucking sick.”

There were five figures depicted in a forest scene. Four of them were men; the fifth was a woman, her body spread eagle, tied between trees. The woman was completely naked, her belly had been peeled open like an orange, and one of the men was pulling out a baby that looked like a wolf. Actually, it looked a hell of a lot like Alex, a strange hybrid of human and wolf.

The other three men were pressing knives into the woman at the four junctures of her appendages as if that was the next step, to de-limb her.

Liam pulled me away. “You don’t need to see that.” Something in his voice caught my attention.

“What? It goes to show how fucking messed up these assholes really are.”

His jaw twitched and he tipped his head down the hall. “I think Catya may be with Val and his brother.”

That got my attention. I strode down the hallway, doing my best not to notice the rest of the stained glass, each one worse than the last. In that, Liam was right, we didn’t need anything else to cause us nightmares. We had enough shit going on in our lives to last a lifetime.

When I stepped into the room where Catya’s threads beat, I wasn’t surprised to see Val and his little brother Pavel with her. No, the surprise came when she lifted her eyes to mine.

Brilliant golden eyes peered up. She was a werewolf, the youngest I had ever met, but she wasn’t trying to shift and her wolf didn’t seem to be near the surface. No, something was different with her. At best, she was five or six, but she was small for her age. Stunted even. That explained why she looked so young in her picture at least. Her sandy blonde curls were messy around her face, highlighting those golden eyes of hers.

She sat across from Val, but her eyes rested on me, and then went to Liam. That was when she let out a squeak and she leapt from her stool and tried to run out of the room past us. I scooped her up with ease, even though she let out an unholy screech, one that could have sent dogs into pitched fits.

“She’s scared of you and those blasted clothes,” I said to Liam as I wrestled with her. He didn’t say anything, just reached over and took her from my hands.

With no words between them, he put his forehead to hers and the fight went out of her. A little sob slipped from her lips and she slid her arms around his neck, burying her face into the thick fur of his winter coat as if there had never been anything wrong in the first place.

“Well,” Val said. “That was interesting. We could get her to eat, but not speak.”

Pavel didn’t seem all that much better off, his eyes partially glazed over as he stared at nothing in the corner of the room. Trauma in children, it never got easy to see, and my heart clenched at the loss of their innocence.

Catya stayed curled up in Liam’s arms as Val whipped up breakfast. Heavily spiced sausages, eggs, thick-cut homemade bread and huge glasses of ice cold milk. I downed everything in front of me, my body needing the energy to heal. Liam, of course, ate us all under the table, even with Catya on his lap.

“Can you … speak to her?” I asked as I pushed myself back from the table.

Liam gave a shrug. “Kind of. It is more a sharing of images. From what I can tell, she has not had an easy life so far. She is deaf and her father beat her for it thinking she was just being difficult. Her mother killed her father trying to protect her, and they were banished from their village. Catya can shift, but even as a wolf, she is too small to catch much game. The hunters found them and took Catya away; she doesn’t know why.”

I looked to Val, and he looked to me and Liam. “There are things they may have wanted to gain from her. Perhaps an easy wolf to control, one that they could use against the others. We found the body of a werewolf in the same room as her, but it was so badly destroyed I’m not even sure if it was a man or a woman.”

I thought about what Peter said when we first arrived, how they lost one of their pack members when she’d wandered too far from the village to give birth. The woman’s name was Donna. I brought to mind the picture I’d seen of her and sent out a thread, Tracking her. And there she was, in the castle and very much dead. Shit on sticks.

“It’s a woman, Donna from the pack.” I lifted my eyes to Liam and he nodded. “Was there ….” Gods, I didn’t want to ask Val if there had been a baby with the body, though I knew there would be somewhere. “Never mind, I’ll go check.”

Liam stood before I could. “No, you stay here. I’ll check on her and see if there was anyone else.” He handed Catya to me; she happily slid into my arms, snuggling into my lap. Val told him where to find the room; it wasn’t far from where we were. Without another word, Liam left and while I wanted to tell him I could do it, I knew this was just another thing I had to let him do on his own. He was an alpha, and I was learning to let him do what he had to do, just as I did.

Even if I was rather slow at it.

The room Val directed him to was close and the scent of it filled his nose as he drew opposite the door. He’d picked up the smell on Catya, blood and fear under all that dirt. But he’d hoped it was just from being in the castle with the hunters, not because she’d seen anything horrific. No such luck.

He pushed the door open, his eyes adjusting to the dimmer light immediately. With the light streaming in through the windows in the hallway behind him, he didn’t need anything additional to see the horror that filled the room.

A torture room, bodies bound with silver chains to the walls, their skeletons looking for all the world like a Halloween prank gone horribly wrong. The body closest to the door was also the freshest. He let his eyes take it in first. The body was slashed and opened up so the chest and belly were cut wide, not unlike the picture in the stained glass. Some sort of prophecy that a woman would give birth to a monster and the hunters had thought to prevent it. His gut churned with fear that ate at his heart.

Rylee would give birth to something not human. A child with the blood of supernaturals he doubted had ever been combined. His hands tightened reflexively, fingers digging into his palms.

Steeling himself, he took a deep breath, filtering out the smells of blood and death, focusing on the scent of the body itself. Alex would have been better at this, but he could pick the individual tones out. It was indeed a woman, and there was the scent of a child under all that blood. Not alive, not anymore. He backed away from the room, shutting it tightly behind him. They weren’t able to give the woman a proper burial, but Peter and his wolves could come back and do so later.

Back in the kitchen with the others, he just nodded, unable to even vocalize Rylee was right. It was Peter’s missing wolf who’d been tortured and killed.

Catya crawled out of Rylee’s lap and back into his. She lifted his hand and pressed her cheek into it.

Images flashed into his mind. Of the woman holding Catya before she’d been tortured, of the fight that Catya had put up, shifting into wolf form to protect the expectant mother, of being kicked across the room, hurt badly enough that she could do nothing to stop the hunters. And then of the howling grief as her friend had died, her baby dying immediately afterwards, exposed to the darkness and cold of the torture room.