Savage Bond (The Fallen) (12 page)

No one knew.

"Move out," he snapped. "Because, if those rogues saw you—and I'm betting they did— they'll be here in under an hour. You move, or you die."

Ria moved.

He'd expected that. Her would-be rescuers were dead and she still wanted to live. So she let him push her at a brutal pace. He kept an eye on the horizon, though, and there was no missing the small figures chewing up the air.

The rogues were coming.

An hour, tops, and that tail caught up with them and all hell broke loose. He planned to have Ria well over the wall before that happened. He didn't know how he kept the rogues from simply flying over and after her, but he'd figure it out. He had to.

The trees came to an end and they were face to face with the wall.

Vkhin stopped the steady up-and-down and she cartwheeled, trying not to plow into his back. She was too close. Going too fast.

"We're here," she said, even though what she was seeing now required no explanation. The wall had been growing larger and larger, a big bad motherfucker slowly filling up the empty horizon. Three hundred yards away, there was no ignoring what that wall meant.

She was almost home.

The wall was the dividing line between the Preserves and civilization. He didn't understand why so many of his kind had described the wall as a thing of ugliness. That wall was goddamned beautiful in his eyes, because the brick-and-mortar magic of it was going to make sure he did the right thing here. Even if he wanted to, he wasn't following Ria Morgan out of here. He couldn't touch that warded wall for long and he'd be dead before he hit the top.

"Now what? We go over?" He knew he should disabuse her of this idea she wouldn't give up. They weren't getting out together. He wasn't going anywhere.

"You do. I stay here." He strode over to the wall, looking for the rungs set into the smooth surface. He'd give her a leg up, she'd climb, and that would be that. They were out of time. "But first you've got something to give me."

Simple.

The look on her face warned him she wasn't on board with the plan, however. "You can't stay here." Her fingers open and closed by her sides and she didn't move. "That's suicide, Vkhin."

Maybe she hadn't got the memo that he'd been fighting his own battles for millennia. He looked down at his own body and he could see the power there. The weapons bristling from his back and sides. Yeah. He wasn't precisely a helping of helpless, so she shouldn't be worrying about him.

"I can hold my own," he said. Which was an understatement. He didn't plan to leave one of the rogues shadowing them alive. "But, even if I couldn't, I can't go over the wall."

"Can't or won't?"

"Can't." He found the rungs, set deep into the wall. She'd have to stretch a little because the handholds had been placed with a male in mind, but she'd be able to do it. "Come over here and start climbing."

"No." Her feet didn't move, so he headed back towards her. He'd put her on the damned wall himself, but first he had to part her from that vidstick.

"This is where I belong."

"Why?"

"I've killed," he hedged.

"You're a warrior," she countered. "Isn't a body count expected?"

He didn't want to remind her about his dead bond mate or see the truth reflected in her eyes. She looked at him like he was still one of the Heavens' warriors, an anointed savior who could do no wrong—which couldn't have been further from the truth. Before the Fall, the Dominions had been brutal fighters. They'd held the line in the constant battle between good and evil, but at least they had been on the side of good. Now that they were Fallen, he knew
precisely
which side they were on.

The wrong side.

No. He wasn't doing that to her.

Someone had set metal rungs into the wall. With enough upper body strength and lung capacity, any accidental human could climb on out. Those rungs were a primitive back up system, but right now he was grateful for them, because the sky was still clear. No rescue chopper hovered overhead. Maybe, the Fallen got there soon, but daylight was burning and Ria Morgan need out. Now. Before the rogues caught up.

"I can't cross it," he gritted out. "No paranormal can touch that wall. The whole wall is warded—those sigils are one big keep-off-the-grass sign as far as I'm concerned. I touch that wall, I burn."

Her look was
yeah-right
, so he laid the back of his wrist against the glowing surface of the wall. Sure enough, the skin started burning away before her eyes. The pain was a good wake-up call, too, reminding him he needed to get his head back in the game. Stop fantasizing about an impossible future where he and Ria Morgan got it on.

"Stop it," she cried, and for a moment he wondered if she'd got inside his head, knew the thoughts he was thinking.

He pressed harder. "This is just a taste," he said, as if she hadn't spoken. "The longer I touch the wall, the more I burn. No way I make it to the top."

She lunged towards him, pulling his hand away. "You've made your point." Her fingers cupped the back of his hand, supporting his injured wrist as she tilted his arm left and then right. He probably could have handled his big reveal better, because she was looking at his hand if what she saw hurt her. She was a soft touch, he thought.

He needed her to
move
, so he gave her more of the truth. "No, I haven't. You remember what happened to my last bond mate? I killed her."

She chewed on her lower lip. "I thought you couldn't kill your bond mates."

Cold smile. "We're not
supposed
to kill our own mates, no. That's the final line, sweetheart. When one of the Fallen can't control his soul thirst anymore, when he drinks that last little bit, then he's perfectly capable of killing, Ria. He wants to kill. You have any idea what a soul tastes like, pumped full of all that fear and adrenaline? Pure ecstasy," he growled. "Pure addiction."

"You couldn't stop or you wouldn't stop?"

"Either. Neither. When I let her go, she was dead," he said flatly. "I bonded with her. My help with a favor she needed—in exchange for a taste of her soul. Well, I took a hell of a lot more than that, Ria. I took it
all
. For any other Fallen, that would have been a death sentence." She shakes her head mutely. "Yeah." He watched her carefully. "We do police our own. Once a Fallen gives in to the soul thirst, once he goes rogue, we hunt that rogue down like a rabid dog and we make sure he doesn't hurt anyone else."

"You're still here," she pointed out. "Your two and two aren't adding up here, Vkhin. Either you didn't kill her, or you did and you got away with it. Which is it?"

He eyed her, but she clearly had to have the whole story. Wanted to hear his shame at the reprieve he'd been handed. "Zer needed me. We had a deal—once he'd got the whole leadership situation under control, he'd take care of me."

Zer hadn't been ready or willing to take on the leadership of the Fallen. He'd wanted an assist and Vkhin had provided it. On that one condition.

Zer had found his soul mate and stepped up to the plate, heading up the Fallen like he'd been born to play the part. That made it payback time.

Ria watched him like she knew exactly what he was thinking. "Kill you."

Those memories had tormented him for decades and laying them down would be a relief. Here in the Preserves he didn't need to hide that dark side of himself any longer. Here, he could admit he was no better than an animal and go about the business of dying or holding out until the soul thirst destroyed every last vestige of his sanity.  He was almost done here.

"I have every intention of paying that price," he assured her.

Her anger surprised him. "Well, your death wish is going to have to wait, isn't it?" 

Not for long
. "You, however, don't belong here," he growled. "So you hand over the vidstick and I'll give you a leg up and you can start climbing now." 

She looked like she wanted to say something else, but then, thank God, she shut the hell up and came over to the wall. "When I get to the top," she said stubbornly. "Once I see it's clear, then I'll give you the vidstick."

       He nodded, even though she undoubtedly was entertaining foolish thoughts of double-crossing him.
Elsewhere, there were watchtowers and human military, but not here. And he didn't have time to take her further up the wall in search of her own kind.

       "Get up, get over and start walking," he ordered. "Don't stray from the wall. You'll set off the sensors when you cross but, if no one comes out here a second time for you, another ten miles and you should hit a tower. They'll get you back to M City."

       "And then what?"

       He shrugged as if he didn't care. "You get on with your life, Ria. You want to keep sending out your little drones, you do that. But my job here ends when you hand over the vidstick and cross that wall."

Before she could argue further, he cupped his hands to give her a leg up. She hesitated, then stepped into his hands and reached for the first rung.

And screamed.

Christ almighty, she screamed. Panting, he caught her body as she arched away from the wall, pressing her hands against her body.

"What. The. Hell," he roared.

"Vkhin," she whimpered. "That hurt. You didn't warn me it would hurt."

Her palms were smoking, the skin there cherry red. Like
his.
Before his head could process the intel his eyes were sending, she reached for the rungs again. As soon as her palm slapped against the metal, the smoking started right back up again.

He ripped her away from the wall, peeling her hands off the rungs. Fuck. This was all wrong.

She backed away from the wall double-time, staring down at her injured hands as she sat down, hard, on the ground. "Why can't I touch the wall, Vkhin?"

"I don't know." He pulled off his t-shirt and crouched down next to her, tearing the white cotton into strips and wrapping them around her reddened palms. Not a hygienic choice, but his only one right now. His mind raced, examining and discarding possibilities. There was only one, of course.

"You're not human," he said. "At least, not entirely."

"Excuse me." Her hands jerked in his and he held on tight. "I am one hundred percent human. You think I wouldn't know if I had a paranormal parent? My father was a crotchety old bastard," she said, "but he was human. So was my mother. Find another theory."

"No." He shook his head. "If you were one hundred percent human, you'd be able to climb that wall, baby. Somewhere, somehow, you got a little piece of us." He didn't like where his thoughts were taking him. Three of his brothers had found soul mates—and those women had been human women, with a genetic kicker. Their ancestors had all come from a lost tribe of Israel and who had a mutated strand of DNA.

"How well do you know your family tree?" he asked. "Because, I'm betting, if you go back far enough, you're going to find a female in there who has Israeli roots and whose history got so lost in a diaspora millennia ago that you don't really know where she came from. That she was born to the thirteenth tribe of Israel and marked for us by an archangel."

She eyed him, eyed the wall. The sky overhead was still too damned empty, so eventually she got back to looking at him. "Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that all that's true. What does it mean?"

"It means," he said, "that the archangel Michael tagged your people millennia ago as mates for mine."

Ria Morgan was a soul mate. This was something he'd never considered. Sure, she was beautiful and he'd wanted her from day one, but that just meant he had eyes in his head and knew how to use them. He'd never believed in any of the predestined mate crap the archangel Michael had spouted, but he'd seen Zer, after the male had found his soul mate and that was a thing of beauty. Those two felt something for each other, something Vkhin knew he didn't understand and could never have. That bond wasn't just sexual and it was sure as hell complicated.

It took no-holds barred opening up—
love
—for a Fallen angel to get his wings back. Vkhin wasn't sure he was capable of that. Strike that. He knew he wasn't and hadn't been for centuries and possibly even longer. Still, just the thought of Ria Morgan finding
that
with another male had him growling and that was bad. She was off-limits. He was the transportation, nothing more.

Except that he was the only Fallen on the scene and Ria Morgan needed an out, now. If he bonded with her and she was a soul mate, their bond would give him back his wings.  If he had wings, he could fly her over the wall. Keep her safe. Take her
home
.

Was it even possible?

"So?" She glared at him and he figured he'd better make the explanations fast. They were out of time and she was out of patience. Not that he blamed her. Finding out she wasn't completely human had to be a shock.

"So, when the archangel Michael tossed our asses out of the Heavens three millennia ago, he tossed in a redemption clause, too. Michael swore that he'd give each one of us a special mate, a female of worth who could redeem her male." Explaining wasn't his best idea, but there was no way to force her to do this thing. She wanted words— he'd give her words.