Unfaithful (37 page)

“All of them,” I replied when I opened my eyes again.

“All of them?” Evan asked, curious.

“Does it surprise you?”

“I thought you’d say summer, or winter,” he said, “like anyone else would.”

“But I’m not anyone else.” I watched the raindrops fall onto the lake.

“You definitely aren’t,” he answered with a smile.

“I think nature is perfect. Winter lasts just long enough for me to want summer to arrive and vice versa. I couldn’t live in a world with only springs or summers. Each season has its scents, its colors, its charms.”

Evan laughed. He seemed fascinated by my explanation. “So you really don’t have a preference?”

I thought it over. “This,” I told him, jutting my chin at the landscape around us. Evan frowned. It felt like a century had passed since I’d barely avoided death, but it had only been a matter of hours. The sun was about to set behind the clouds and only a few strong beams shone through.

“What do you mean?” he asked, puzzled.

“This. The summer rain. When the seasons combine. I like the strong smell of the damp earth.” I breathed in the cool air. “The thunder sounds different, more comforting. Do you think I’m weird?”

Evan smiled to himself, but I wasn’t lying. I’d always had a strange connection with nature, as if it were a part of me and I of it. When I was a little girl and got mad at my parents I would run off into the woods. After a couple of hours I would forget everything and go home. It was as if the forest spoke to me.

“You’re adorable.” He leaned in to kiss my forehead as I continued to stir the earth with my fingers.

We sat in silence for a few minutes, giving ourselves time to put our ideas in order. I continued to draw meaningless figures in the dirt as Evan stared at some vague point across the lake. Despite the distant, blank look on his face, it wasn’t hard to imagine what he was thinking about.

My fingers mechanically clasped a little stone. I picked it up and studied its gray, angular details, then drew my arm back and threw it into the lake. It hit the surface with a soft, harmonious
plop
, raising a tiny splash. Spying another stone—a flatter, smoother one—beside my foot, I reached down to grab it, but Evan snatched it up first, our hands touching for a second. He gave me a sweet smile and stood up. “Want to see something?”

The rain was falling more gently now. It dripped onto his dark hair as I watched him pull back his hand with a studied movement and skip the stone across the water.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Plop
.

A gasp of admiration escaped me. I’d never seen anyone skip a stone so many times before. In any case, if there was a rock-skipping record, I knew Evan could beat it with his eyes closed. He turned to look at me with a smug expression.

“Beginner’s luck,” I teased. My sense of competition wouldn’t allow me to let him see how much he’d impressed me. Or more likely, it was my pride. I could never match that. Chances were my stone would sink without skipping even once. “Bet you can’t do it again,” I said. He looked so handsome with his damp hair clinging to his forehead.

“How many do you want?” he asked calmly, accepting the challenge.

I ventured an impossible number: “How about twenty-five?”

He smiled as if nothing could be easier. God, his smile was gorgeous. I wasn’t ready to lose it forever. For a moment it had made me forget how sneaky he could be. By controlling the elements he could keep the stone from sinking into the water and make it skip across the surface forever if he wanted to. He continued to smile at me as I realized I’d lost before the challenge had even begun. Turning his back to me, he held a stone between his fingers and threw it confidently. I felt a tickle on my neck and shrugged my shoulder without taking my eyes off the skipping stone.

“Check it out,” he told me, sounding pleased, a little smile on his lips.

I didn’t reply, distracted by the annoying tickle on my back.

“ . . . Seven . . . eight . . . nine . . .” Evan said. “Do you want to count or should I? Twelve . . . thirteen . . . fourteen . . .”

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a strange blur on my shoulder and realized the tickling sensation was coming from right there.

“ . . . Seventeen . . . eighteen . . .”

Evan’s voice faded to a confused murmur. Focused on the tingling sensation, I wasn’t paying attention to him any more. I tilted my head back and the blur moved into my field of vision. The tingle instantly spread throughout my body, galvanized by an internal shudder that triggered a wave of bone-chilling terror that ran through me from head to toe. The blur had suddenly taken shape and become clear.

A tarantula. I shuddered again. There was a tarantula on my shoulder.

“Evan.” My voice was a mere thread. Or maybe I’d only imagined I’d said his name. I wanted to scream but couldn’t produce any sound. I was paralyzed. Spiders had always been one of the things that terrified me most, and the knowledge that such a huge, hairy one was on my shoulder froze every muscle in my body.

“. . . Twenty-four . . . twenty-five!” Completely unaware of what was happening, Evan turned around with a giant smile, but his face instantly blanched when he saw my imploring gaze. He stood without moving for a second, his eyes glued to the creature.

“I—I have a tarantula on my shoulder.” My voice trembled, my head filled with racing thoughts. Old memories suddenly resurfaced.

“Don’t move,” Evan said cautiously as if to avoid scaring the creature. The thought of its hairy legs on my skin made me itch all over, but I found the strength not to move a fraction of an inch.

My pleading gaze was locked onto Evan’s. I swallowed slowly, afraid even that tiny movement might set it off. Though fear clouded my mind, I tried to make a mental list of everything I knew about tarantulas. From what I could remember, they weren’t poisonous. Also, they were black, whereas this one was brown. Then again, I’d never seen one with my own eyes before so I couldn’t know for sure. Still, I was certain their venom wasn’t deadly. So why did Evan have that look on his face, as if a mountain lion were about to pounce on me?

“Don’t move.”
His voice was ice cold. “That’s not a tarantula.”

I stiffened. Something in his tone told me it was even worse than I’d imagined. I began to have trouble breathing. “Evan . . .”

“It’s a Brazilian wandering spider,” he said matter-of-factly as if I should know what that was. “It’s very fast, very aggressive, and—most importantly—very poisonous.”

My heart was caught in an iron vise and an uncontrollable trembling threatened to overwhelm me, but I forced myself not to move even a muscle. I saw the spider raise its front legs and panic left me breathless. It was preparing to attack.

“Evan!” My voice broke in a desperate plea, my eyes brimming with tears.

Evan’s expression hardened, his eyes trained on the spider. He rushed at me at warp speed, snatched up the creature, and flung it across the lake into the distant treetops on the opposite shore.

My heart trembled with terror. I still couldn’t breathe. When I looked at my hands I saw they were shaking.

Evan turned back to me, looking worried. “Did it bite you?”

I shook my head but instinctively looked back to check.

“That kind of spider has the natural ability to control the amount of venom it injects into a victim. It regulates the dose based on the circumstances. A Death Angel could make it inject a fatal dose.” He sighed and hung his head, then looked up again, his gaze fiery. “It lives in the jungles of South America,” he explained grimly as if the information might be useful. Right now, its origins seemed totally irrelevant to me. “It wasn’t here by chance,” he explained, his gaze resting on mine.

The more alert part of my brain grasped his meaning and I shuddered. Neither of us wanted to believe it. For my part, I hadn’t wanted to see reality. Fear is like a boomerang: no matter how far you throw it, it always comes back at you. Sometimes it feels like the best thing to do is ignore what frightens you, but all that does is make the blow even more devastating. It’s not a choice, though, but rather, a defense mechanism our brain automatically activates to try to protect us. I was being hunted again. Neither of us wanted to accept it.

Evan didn’t move a muscle. His eyes narrowed to slits, scanning the trees, carefully observing every last inch of the forest surrounding us. All at once he seemed to hone in on one spot in particular, too far away for me to make out. His eyes still fixed on the forest, a corner of his mouth rose and his expression turned sharp, threatening.
Lethal
.

“Gotcha,” he hissed. Before I could open my mouth he disappeared into the forest, leaving behind a cloud of dust and cold air that sank into my bones.

A suffocating ache in my heart, I stared at the spot where Evan had disappeared. There was no sign of him, as if he’d vanished into thin air. Somewhere inside me I shuddered violently. Right now Evan was with another Soldier of Death. Not just any Executioner, not like Faust, but one who was more prepared, more aware
, more dangerous
.

I couldn’t bear the idea that something might happen to Evan. Faust hadn’t known what he’d been up against, but this other Subterranean certainly wouldn’t be caught unprepared. He would have taken precautions, and the awareness that Evan was running this risk for my sake hurt me all the way down to my bones. I would gladly have surrendered to my hitman rather than put Evan in danger. His life mattered more than mine.

I shifted awkwardly in my spot, my eyes wandering nervously around, looking for some sign of him—any movement among the trees would be enough—but everything was still. Evan seemed to have disappeared. The forest had swallowed him up. The woods were silent, listening to my desperation. Tears welled up in my eyes in spite of my efforts to hold them back. I couldn’t see anything any more. Forcing down the lump in my throat, I continued to focus on trying to spot him.

Deep in the forest, a sudden movement made my heart leap. I wasn’t sure whether I had actually seen him or just imagined it, because when I looked closer everything was perfectly still. My anxiety rose by the second, preventing me from thinking straight. I didn’t know what to do. My impulse was to set out and search for Evan as long as I had air in my lungs, but it was possible that might just complicate things. One way or the other I always managed to do that.

There was nothing to do but wait. Yes, I would wait for him, heart in hand, until he reappeared safe and sound. He was destined to come back, I was sure of it.

Another movement distracted me. This time I was faster and caught sight of it before it disappeared among the trees. Two dark figures that shot back and forth across the forest like bolts of black lightning. The movements were blurry and confused.

I squinted but they were too far away and the light was too faint for me to make them out clearly. It looked like one of them was chasing the other, but I couldn’t tell who was who. The rain plastered my hair to my face. Finally I heaved a sigh of relief. Evan wasn’t the one being pursued—he was chasing the other Subterranean. I couldn’t explain how exactly I managed to figure that out, but I knew I wasn’t wrong. I could feel it inside. They were too fast for my human eyes to follow their movements. At times I saw them disappear and then reappear in another spot farther off in the forest.

Evan was always on the verge of catching his adversary, who always managed to elude him. He was fast, faster than Evan, but he seemed afraid to stop and fight. Every time Evan popped out in front of him, the other Angel disappeared and the endless chase resumed. It got harder and harder for me to tell them apart. Sometimes their shapes seemed to merge together.

Gusts of cold air shook the trees, reaching me as they rustled the leaves on the branches. What the hell was going on? Suddenly I couldn’t see them any more.

The terrifying silence made me shudder down to my bones. I trembled like the leaves on the trees had a moment ago. Shifting my weight from one leg to the other, my body began to move forward on its own, driven by instinct—or, more likely, my heart. Another step, and another, as my gaze darted through the trees in search of any sign of them, no matter how small. Only when my breathing accelerated did I realize I was running. I couldn’t feel my muscles at all any more. My mind was honed in on a single thought and my body had reacted to that thought, desperately seeking Evan.

A flash of light caught my attention and my eyes shot in that direction. At that precise instant, an explosion hit me in the chest and hurled me into the air, knocking the breath from my lungs. I collided with a tree and crumpled to the ground. I felt disoriented, as if my brain had momentarily been switched off.

 Moving my head slowly from side to side, I felt a sudden pain in my chest that didn’t feel like a normal physiological response. This pain was tearing me up from the inside, crushing my heart as if someone had it in his hands and was squeezing it, suffocating me. Where was Evan? What had happened to him? I sank my fingers into the earth and clenched my fists so tightly they throbbed as the first tears streaked my skin and the rain coursed down my bloodstained hair.

I couldn’t have said how long I lay there on the ground. I had no idea where Evan was, what had happened to him, or what the blinding light had been. Something had exploded. It had been too far away for me to make out what it was, but it had sent out a shock wave powerful enough to send me flying.

My palms and knees sank into the damp earth as tears silently slid down my face and spattered the ground like raindrops. I snuffled and forced myself to reason. No explosion, no matter how powerful, could have killed Evan. Only a Witch’s poison had the power to do that. So why was my heart in tatters?

“Gemma.”

His voice sounded gently beside me as the rain continued to course down my hair. My eyes went to his face. “Evan!” A wave of relief hit me more powerfully than the explosion had, filling my whole body and wiping away every trace of pain. I pulled myself up and threw my arms around his neck, almost afraid he was only a mirage, a projection of my anxious mind. “Evan,” I sobbed into his chest, the word muffled.