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My stubborn streak had been handed down from my grandfather. All during dinner, he hounded me, listing all the reasons I should stay with him in California. I’d be safer. I’d be with my own kind. I’d have family. Others would be safer if I weren’t there to draw Protector attention. He even talked about how great the schools were in San Francisco, and how he’d be there to help me through college. But while he spoke, I couldn’t help wondering if maybe he was more interested in how I differed from other Healers. How did I factor into his plans for a new Healer race?

He hadn’t given me a hard time for hurting Alcais. In fact, he hadn’t asked me two questions about it, except to understand how the ability to transfer injuries worked. If my father had heard that I’d used violence on another, he’d have reamed me but good. He would have expected better of me. Why hadn’t my grandfather yelled at me? Why had he let me off without a warning? I tried to convince myself that he thought Alcais deserved it, but the pieces didn’t add up.

Franc left me alone when I locked myself in my room.

I waited until I heard him go to bed, and then I raced out the kitchen door, running for the forest. I needed to see Asher. I’d texted him to meet me up at Inspiration Point, and I hoped he would be there. Too much was happening too fast. My world had shifted in some way, and I wished I could go back to the way it had been before.

I hurried along the trail, moving too fast in the dark, but I couldn’t slow down. Climbing the stairs to Inspiration Point took forever, and the whole way I worried Asher wouldn’t be waiting at the top.

One thing had become crystal clear to me today. When my grandfather asked me to move here permanently, everything in me had rejected the idea. A big part of the reason was my family, but my gut reaction had more to do with Asher.

I loved him. End of story. He would never hurt me. Alcais, for all his connections to my grandfather and this community, was a psychopath in the making. He had tortured his sister out of idle curiosity, and in my eyes that made him no better than the Protector who had hurt Yvette. My boyfriend, on the other hand, had stepped in front of a bullet to save me. He’d put his hand in a blazing fire to help me when I’d been little more than a stranger to him. How could I have forgotten who he was?

I needed to apologize. The shame of my betrayal threatened to choke me, and I prayed I hadn’t screwed up things between us beyond all repair.

The hillside steps stretched on forever, but I finally reached the top. Holding my breath, I faced the overlook, and then exhaled in a gust because Asher was sitting on a bench with his back to me. In a flash, I circled around the bench.

Too late, I saw his eyes widen in panic when they focused on me. He shifted, fighting against whatever bound his hands behind his back, and the lamplight reflected off something shiny covering his mouth. Duct tape.

My mind took ages to comprehend the scene, but when it did I skidded to a stop. Someone had gagged Asher and tied him to the bench. He tried to scream at me, to warn me. His terror-filled eyes were the last thing I saw before my head lit up in an explosion of lights.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

“R
emy, please wake up.”

The sound penetrated the dense black void.

“Wake up!”

Louder now, the voice acted like a flashlight shining in my eyes. Pain ricocheted around my skull, and I wanted to punch the screaming person in the face for amplifying the hurt.

“Please,
mo cridhe,
” the male voice pleaded.

Asher,
I thought. That was Asher’s voice. For him, I could try to push the blackness away. I breathed through my nose. When I could handle the throbbing, I slowly opened my eyes.

More blackness.

“That’s it, love. You can do it.”

His voice drifted toward me out of the shadows to my right. I couldn’t see him, but I thought he wasn’t too far away. I was lying on my back, and I rolled my head in his direction, regretting the move almost immediately when the pounding in my head increased in intensity.

Memories came back to me in a rush. Asher tied to the bench. Someone hitting me over the head.
It had to be Protectors,
I thought. Who else could get to Asher with all his speed and strength? What did they have planned for us? Did they know about me? About what I could do? That I was part Healer? My head pounded more with each question, and I pressed on my forehead to make it stop.

“Asher, where are we?”

“I don’t know. They blindfolded me to bring me here. I can’t really move around much. Can you sit up?”

I levered my elbows under me to raise myself up. I only got so far before I collapsed back again. Something dripped down my neck, and I thought it might be blood. I could swear they’d hit me with a brick.

“Try to sit up again, Remy.”

I wondered how he knew I’d already attempted it once until I remembered he could probably make out my outline in the dark with his Protector eyesight. After a minute of pumping myself up, I tried and managed a crouching position.

Half-dragging and half-scooting across the floor, I pulled myself toward the spot where I’d heard Asher’s voice. I bumped into something. His leg?

“Are you okay?” he asked.

The concern in his voice almost made me fall apart. I cleared my throat to push the tears back.

“My neck hurts from where they hit me, but otherwise I’m okay. What about you?”

His chest moved under my fingers when I finally found him in the dark.

“I’m fine. I wasn’t the one they were after. I was just the bait.”

Well, that answered one of my questions. They knew I was a Healer at the very least. And if I knew Asher, he was beating himself up for getting used as bait. I ran my hands up his chest to his shoulders and then up his arms, which were stretched above his head. They had handcuffed his wrists to some kind of hook burrowed into the cold concrete wall. He had to feel cramped in that position.

“Can you break those?” I asked.

His muscles bunched as he pulled against the wall, but the cuffs didn’t give.

“I’ve been trying for the last hour. No go. These aren’t normal cuffs. I could break those. These are made of a stronger metal.”

“Don’t tell me. It’s Adamantium,” I said lightly.

“Thousand points for the X-Men reference,” he said, some of the frustration easing from his tone as I’d meant it to. “I’d love you even more if you could feel your way around to see if there’s anything we could use to get free. I only saw the room a second before they closed the door.”

I traced my way back to his face, his day’s growth of whiskers rasping against my skin. “Do you? Still love me, I mean?” I asked in a small voice.

I felt like such a silly idiot for even asking at a time like this. But hey, if we were going to die, I wanted to know. He strained against his bonds as if he wanted to hold me. He couldn’t, so I wrapped my arms around him, laying my cheek against his heart.

“Always,” he whispered, rubbing his jaw against my hair. “You?”

“To infinity.”
I’m sorry I doubted you.

I tipped my head to drop a kiss on his lips. I missed in the dark and ended up kissing the tip of his nose. Immediately, I corrected my error and he strained his neck to meet me halfway. The kiss lasted only a second, but I felt all the wildly spinning pieces in me fall back into place. Everything clicked, and my world made sense again.

My needy impulse in check, I got down to the business of escape.

“Can you help me heal myself?” I asked. “I want to explore, but my brain feels like it’s doing a mad tango around my skull.”

Without a word, he sent his energy into me and I grabbed hold of it, using it to close the open wound on my neck. It took longer than I liked to take care of the swelling. I hated concussions. A small throb remained when I backed away from Asher, but the pain had become manageable.

“Thanks,” I said, rising to my feet.

Using one hand to feel my way along the wall, I put the other out to avoid running into any objects. I remembered I’d had my mobile phone and patted my pockets. No luck. They’d taken it.

“How did they find us, Asher?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. I must’ve done something to give myself away.”

I paused. “Wait. That makes no sense. If they used you as bait to get to me, then it had to be me who screwed up.” I thought about it a moment, before a lightbulb went off. “Yvette. I was at Yvette’s after a Protector killed her. They were watching her house. That has to be it.”

“Who’s Yvette?”

Asher had seen glimpses of what happened in my thoughts, but I’d never explained that night. As I walked the four corners of the room, I told him everything that had happened in the last few days, from the car accident and discovering Yvette to hurting Alcais.

“Someone knows about your grandfather’s community,” Asher said when I finished. “I bet they killed Yvette to draw the rest of you out.”

He didn’t bring up how I’d compared what those other Protectors had done to Yvette to what Asher had done to Elizabeth, and I was grateful. I didn’t want to rehash that now.

“But why come after me?” I asked. “Why not go after the rest of the Healers?”

“I don’t know, love. Maybe they’ve figured out that you’re different. Could one of the other Healers have betrayed you?”

I balked at that. “No way. They would never work with the Protectors. You don’t know how scared they are. Nobody would dare break one of my grandfather’s sacred rules.”

Asher didn’t argue. Instead, he asked, “Any luck finding a way out?”

I guessed the room had to be eight feet by ten feet. At the door, I twisted the knob, but either it locked from the outside or our captors had something wedged against it. Either way, it didn’t budge.

“I hate to tell you this, but we are trapped.”

I slid down the wall until I sat beside him on the ground. I dropped my head on his shoulder.

Asher sighed. “I guessed as much.”

Neither of us said anything for a long moment. What was there to say? We’d covered this territory so many times. I had a good idea what the Protectors would do with me, so why go there and scare myself more? I wanted to climb into the denial boat and take a trip down the “let’s pretend everything’s okay” river. If I was going to die tonight, I didn’t want my last moments with Asher to be full of thoughts of the torture ahead of me. Unbidden, a few examples of what might be coming flickered through my mind.

“Please, Remy,” Asher choked out.

It hit me that I’d had my walls down, and he’d been hearing my unpleasant thoughts.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“You’re going to make it out of this. I swear it.”

He sounded so sure, but I couldn’t see how that could be true. I didn’t want to argue, though. No, I wanted something else. If these guys were only after me, then most likely they’d let Asher go once they finished with me. That thought comforted me.

“Asher, do something for me? I don’t want my dad to know what happened to me. Or Lucy.” He started to protest, his entire body jerking, but I kept going to get the words out. “Tell them I decided to live with my grandfather permanently. Tell them I ran away. Whatever you say, don’t tell them the truth about how I di—”

“Don’t you dare say it,” Asher said fiercely. “You’re not going to die!”

“Sh . . .”

Finding his face in the dark, I shifted until I could kiss him. He surprised me by kissing me back with more raw emotion than I’d ever felt from him. I couldn’t read his thoughts, but I sensed his rage at his inability to save me mixing with grief and love. I touched his face, and my fingers brushed wet skin.

Whatever happened when the Protectors opened the door to our prison, odds were against me making it home alive. And Asher knew it, too. Every day he’d been with me, I’d been making him mortal again. Every day he’d begun to feel more, smell more, taste more. What if I could heal him all the way? We’d never tried because of the danger to me, but if I was going to go out, I wanted it to be on my own terms, doing something I wanted to do. Making Asher mortal again . . . that was something we’d both dreamed of. Maybe it was time to take a chance.

I tried to kiss him again, thinking to put my plan in action, but he turned his head away.

“No way in hell are we giving up now,” he said. “Not after everything we’ve been through. You will not give up your life for me. Got that?”

I imagined I could see his green eyes glaring at me. Frustrated, I dropped my hands into my lap. “Sometimes I really hate your ability to read my mind.”

“I’m not sorry. I’m glad I have a way to see what crazy plan your mind is coming up with.”

“Okay, what are we going to do? Just sit around and wait for them to come back for me?”

“I have an idea, but you’re not going to like it,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

Beside me, I felt him shift until he knelt. He seemed to be getting himself situated to get better leverage, but to do what? He’d already tried to break the cuffs without success. I heard him take a deep breath, like I did when I knew I was about to do something that would hurt like the devil. Then I heard a rush of movement and the chains rattling, followed by his muffled groan. A second later he fell forward to the ground, and metal clanked against the brick wall.

He’d freed himself somehow. I reached for him, but he shouted, “No, damn it! Don’t touch me!”

My hand hovered over him, frozen in place. At first, I thought he sounded angry, and it took a moment for me to realize pain had sharpened his voice. Asher didn’t want me to touch him and take on whatever he’d done to free himself.
Come to think of it, how had he freed himself?

I traced a hand along the wall until I found the cuffs. They were intact, still locked. He hadn’t broken the cuffs, which meant . . .

“You idiot!” I shouted, pissed. He’d broken his hands in order to get them out of the cuffs. “What were you thinking?”

“Not so fun when the shoe’s on the other foot, huh?” he teased, gasping.

He’d been forced to watch me hurt myself in order to free myself from Gabe many a time. For the first time, I appreciated how much it sucked being on the other side of that.

I started to reach for Asher again, intending to heal him, but he rolled away from me. “Asher!”

“Remy, if you try to heal me, so help me, I’ll . . .”

“You’ll do what? Spank me? Give me a break.”

“Damn it, think! If you heal me, you’re going to take on my injuries. Even if I help you heal yourself, you’re going to be weak. Too weak to fight them off when they come for you. This way, we can both fight.”

I used the wall to brace myself so I could stand. I could sense him doing the same across the room.

“How the hell are you going to fight if your hands are useless?”

“Babe, I could kick your ass a dozen times over with my hands tied behind my back.”

The smirk in his voice made me want to slap him. Instead, I crossed my arms over my chest and taunted him. “Too bad you’ll be taking on Protectors instead of puny little me then.”

I started to say more, but suddenly Asher stood beside me, tension vibrating through his body.

“They’re coming,” he whispered. “Get ready to run if you get the chance. And don’t look back. Promise me.”

I would never leave him behind. I didn’t get the chance to argue, though, because something clicked, like a lock turning over, and then someone opened the door. I threw up an arm to shield my eyes from the blinding light that entered our prison from the outer room.

By the time I dropped my arm, Asher had shoved me behind him. I peeked around him to see two men standing in the doorway. They were total opposites of each other. One had black hair, olive skin, and stood over six feet tall. The other had pale skin, hair so blond it was almost white, and was a few inches shorter than me. The one thing both men had in common was the grace of their movements, an economy of motion that the Blackwell family all had, too. I guessed it was a Protector trait, seeing these two strangers.

“How’d you get out of the cuffs?” the black-haired one said to Asher. He must have noticed Asher’s injured hands because he laughed. “Shit, Mark. He broke his wrists to get free. He must really like her.”

“Or else he wants her for himself.” The man called Mark entered the room. He called to me in a mocking tone. “You know what he is, dontcha?”

Asher practically growled at the man, and I rested a hand on his back.

“I know exactly who he is,” I told him. “And what you are.”

Mark smiled. “You think you know about your boyfriend there, but I think he’s been holding out on you. Maybe it’s time we show you what he is.”

He made a move forward that Asher countered with one of his own. Mark’s brows shot up as if Asher’s defense of me surprised him. Both Protectors scowled at my boyfriend. They obviously thought Asher had kept his Protector side hidden from me.