Kindred of the Fallen (9 page)

Her gaze flickered up to his, her eyes bright amethyst jewels. Crimson suffused her cheeks. The color flushed her face and neck. She glanced at Abbadon from the corner of her eye. Her grip on the shirt tightened.

Cyrus pushed her exposed bra strap up her arm and tucked it underneath the shirt. “Are you all right?” He caressed her shoulder.
 

Understanding coaxed the anger from him.

She nodded and he wrapped his arm around her, guiding her away from the vehicle. She tensed but didn’t pull away.

Time was not his ally today. He wanted to comfort her, answer the torrent of questions that must be flooding her mind, and make her feel safe.

She pressed into his side, quivering like a leaf in the autumn breeze. Her warm frame seemed fragile in his arms. The scent of her skin tantalized him, making his passion flare.

Abbadon stood in his path, arms folded, silently reminding him to hurry. With the team separated, the mission would be twice as difficult and dangerous.

Duty first.

Serenity stood beside Cyrus, desperate for answers and for a shred of anything he’d said earlier to make sense. First mercenaries had tried to abduct her, now lover boy had dragged her off to goodness knows where. He wasn’t going to hurt her, that was for certain, but given another opportunity he’d have her naked and on her back, longing for more.

And next time she might not have the strength to resist him.

She clutched her shirt tighter, wanting to shrivel up from the embarrassment of being caught in the midst of such an indecent moment. She wasn’t
that kind
of woman for crying out loud, the kind who had casual sex or slept with a guy on a first date or cheated. It’d taken Evan six long years to get into her panties and she’d almost betrayed his trust in the back seat of a car with his client.

“Serenity, this is Abbadon. He’s a close friend and stays here at the house when we’re in town,” Cyrus said.

Abbadon stood a tad shorter than Cyrus, dressed in navy fatigues, a sleeveless shirt and boots. Bare sinewy arms accentuated his lean, muscular frame. He’d only spoken for a moment to Cyrus, but his disposition seemed as unyielding as his stiff stance.

Cyrus dropped his arm from around her shoulder, leaving her exposed, unprotected. She edged closer to him, wanting to snuggle into the shelter of his chest. He was the reason she had almost been kidnapped by thugs and thrust into harm’s way, but she’d never felt safer than enveloped in his warm embrace.

“And this is my ward, Cassian.” He turned to the young man, who hurried over. “He’s Talus’s brother.”

“Ward?” Her cheeks burned hotter. “You raised both of them?”

Cyrus nodded.

How silly to be jealous of Talus.

Cassian swooped in and shook her hand in a firm two-handed grip. Charged current nipped her fingers. She waited for the undulations of her core to give her a glimmer of the boy’s soul, but there was only his ecstatic grin and handshake for her to go on.

“Go to the city and keep your sister company,” Cyrus said to the young man.

Cassian cast a glance at Serenity. “How long do we have to stay away?”

“You’re not being exiled. You’d think you two might appreciate a couple of days off.”

She wasn’t sure the other evening, but now she was certain of it. Cyrus didn’t have an accent of any kind, his diction crisp and intonation fluid. He spoke like a man who either had no roots or belonged to the whole world.

“So you want us to stay gone for two days?” Cassian asked.

“Go have fun. And take a car. I don’t want you on a motorcycle.”

Sighing, Cassian traipsed away.

Abbadon eased forward. Sharp eyes the color of the ocean after a storm studied her. At first glance he appeared bald, but a thin layer of dirty blond hair covered his oval head.

The same electric clip she had felt from Cassian brushed her
before
she shook Abbadon’s hand. She sifted through the layers of her core, scanning for something, but her internal barometer was kaput. Any sense of what to make of them, besides the exterior they presented, had been masked. She was blind around them.

Abbadon looked at Cyrus’s chest. “Trouble?”

Cyrus picked at the hole in his shirt. “I took care of it.”

They stood in front of a stone path running through trimmed hedges on the side of a Mediterranean style villa. A vibrant green lawn sprawled to the right. A seven bay garage ran along the left side of the mansion.

“Where are we, exactly?” she asked.

“My home in Valhalla.”

“We’re upstate?” She took in more of the lush surroundings. Trees with long limbs stretching from the base of the trunk lined the drive she had missed coming up, forming an archway of emerald foliage that scattered the light. Clusters of purple azaleas adorned the path.

“Not quite. We’re in Westchester, near White Plains.”

“If we’re not in one of the five boroughs of NYC, then we’re upstate.”

Cyrus took her by the hand and headed toward the veranda.

“We should call the police and file a report,” she said as they ascended the steps.

Abbadon tilted his head to the side, his expression a tangle of curiosity and amusement as if the suggestion had been outlandish.

Cyrus breezed through the front door. She twirled around the opulent foyer, trailing him, soaking in the gleaming cherry hardwood floors with marble insets and a dome ceiling so exquisite it must have been hand-painted.

“Involving more humans, especially police, would only complicate things,” Cyrus said.

More humans.
There it was again, that razor sharp distinction.

Those mercenaries had told her he wasn’t human before he’d unloaded about being Kindred. And she had witnessed impossible things, like him stopping the blade of a sword with his arm and surviving the blast of an energy gun from a sci-fi movie.

She grabbed the sleeve of his shirt that been cut by the sword and stopped him. “I’m willing to consider that you’re not human. You and those mercs might be crazy, but I don’t think you’re lying. Not about that. But I’m not Kindred. I’m an ordinary human. A red-blooded American.”

A deep chuckle rolled from Abbadon’s chest. “I see you have your hands full, Cyrus, but duty calls. I’ll meet you outside.”

Cyrus nodded in acknowledgement, scooped her arm in his hand gently and led her upstairs. “Deep down you must know how far from ordinary you really are. Have you spent your entire life trying to convince yourself that you’re like everyone else? How many years have you spent struggling to blend in?”

Failing miserably to blend in was more like it. She had the closest thing to an ordinary life she could create with Evan and it was unraveling in a tailspin. She could never hold down a normal job and her current profession was about as far from conventional as possible.

They climbed a curved staircase, passing a stained glass window of two lions seated back to back, a half disk rested in between them.

“You’ve always had a stream of energy, anima or life force, flowing inside of you,” Cyrus said. “Have you ever felt it in another person before you met me?”

“No. You were the first.” Her feet slowed. “It felt so good to find someone like…” She shook her head. “I’m not like you. You survived that gunshot with only a wound on your shoulder. It tore through metal just like it would have torn through my body if I’d been shot.”

He quickened his pace, urging her down a long hallway. They headed toward an ornate door with detailed etchings. Déjà vu struck her like a sledgehammer to the chest. A painting of that door hung in her apartment. She had struggled to reach it in every dream before the darkness won. Fear spurted up in her gut.

That couldn’t be the door from her dreams. There were probably hundreds, no thousands of doors in the world that looked similar.

“You are Kindred, but you’re also right,” Cyrus said. “You’re not quite like me.”

He opened the door and marched through an office. He gently let her go and flung open the double doors to an adjoining room, revealing a luxurious four-poster bed.

“There are two classes of Kindred. The vast majority are warriors like me. We’re stronger and faster than humans. Our skin is more resilient, tougher. Those of the Psi class, such as yourself I suspect, are endowed with unique abilities. Cassian, for instance, is a healer.” He strode into a walk-in closet. “Some are empaths, who can read feelings. The more advanced empaths can sense thoughts.”

“They can read minds?” she asked, trailing behind him.

He hurried out of the closet, throwing navy fatigues on the bed. “No, it’s dependent upon how strongly they sense your feelings.”

Cyrus unbuttoned his shirt, throwing it to the floor and whisked down his pants. He didn’t have on a stitch of underwear.

Her breath caught in her throat as her gaze roamed over sculpted buns, chiseled hamstrings, cut biceps and a well-defined back. Growing lightheaded, she reached out to grab hold of the doorway.

“Ecological empaths,” he continued, unabashed by his nudity, “sense the well-being of an environment, healing a plot of land to make it fertile.”

“Yes, quite virile,” she muttered, half certain of what he’d said.

Scorching masculinity radiated from him, heating her body in a delicious way, sparking wicked desire. The only man she’d seen naked was Evan, but Cyrus was sheer perfection.

Her gaze traveled the length of his strong neck, across his smooth chest and ripped abdomen. He had a rugged build, supple flesh over granite muscles she wanted to caress with her fingers and tongue. His erection bobbed stiff and inviting.

Strumming three fingers on her lips, she forced herself to look away.

The adjoining office spun as she strained to focus on some soft, non-phallic object. She stumbled into the room, groping for a sturdy piece of furniture to hold her up. Her hand caught the top of a wingback chair.

Files rested on a desk angled toward a fireplace. Above a loveseat hung a painting of a falcon, its left eye the sun and its right a crescent moon, clutching a double-bladed sword.

The distress from her dreams crept up in her chest. Choking on the lucid memories, she wobbled backward.

Cyrus entered the office wearing fatigues. He slipped knives in various holders and strapped a sheathed sword across his back. The sight of him quelled her trepidation and settled her nerves. He smiled, strutting closer, but stopped an arm’s length shy of her grasp.

Her feet edged toward him and with each step, buoyancy lightened her limbs. She glanced at the painting. “I’ve seen this before. What does it mean?”

“It represents Heru, an ancient Egyptian god of the sky. It’s the symbol for House Herut, my clan.” He curled his hands about her shoulders and his breath grazed the nape of her neck.

“I’ve dreamt of this, but not as a painting.” Even her voice was now light as a whisper.

Caressing her shoulders, he turned her to face him. “I wish we had more time, but I have to leave.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have to euthanize one with
sangre saevitas
.”

“What’s that?”

“If we don’t merge our life force with our
kabashem’s
, our mate’s, over time our energy becomes poisonous,” he explained. “One of two things eventually happens. Those of the Psi class tend to get severe melancholia, which we call the dark veil while warriors are prone to suffer
sangre saevitas
…blood rage.”

Goose bumps prickled her arms.

He lowered his head and wavy locks fell forward. “With blood rage we have violent fits of madness and lose all sense of compassion and reason. We destroy everything in our path.”

“Why euthanize them? Isn’t there a cure or some kind of medication?”

“Connecting to the anima of one’s
kabashem
, even just once, seems to stave off the affliction, but not all are lucky enough to have their mate born in the same lifetime. Neith, the Great Historian, tries to help by tracking births and our marks to make meeting at least possible, provided politics don’t get in the way.”

She struggled to process the outpour of information. “So blood rage and the dark veil are untreatable, some sort of terminal illness?”

“Kindred are cursed to suffer until our souls are redeemed. There’s a way to break it and save our people…but it’s complicated. More and more are afflicted every day, and at an earlier age. It’s escalating. It’s almost like over generations as our
ingeniums
, our special gifts, have evolved and grown stronger, the torments of the curse have worsened. Soon we’ll be extinct.”

“Cursed for what?”

“We’re descended from ancients, extraordinary beings created before humans. They were cursed for their wickedness and hubris. We’ve found being on our own makes us more susceptible to the affliction. The energy of the collective helps us to fight it. If we’re not with our
kabashem
, we stay in groups.”

“Is the energy of the collective similar to what I’ve felt with you?”

“No, it’s very different, more communal. I’m not sure how to explain it. The energy from the group supports and stabilizes, but it doesn’t nourish and enhance like our connection.”