He had to bend his head forward to hear her whispered reply.
“Yes.”
“Yet you were forced to reveal yourself to them because no one came to your aid.”
“No,” Raven said. “I didn’t reveal any more of myself than I had to, and what I did that night could be rationalized by them. Perhaps the links in the cuffs were weak or not properly set. Fear might have given me extra strength. I was also used to working with metals. Perhaps I knew some special trick.” She paused. He felt the deep breath she drew in, then again as she exhaled against his skin. “What I didn’t want to reveal was that I wouldn’t have burned in that fire. That is what Justice knew and wanted everyone to see.”
Blade pondered the ramifications of that. The Godseeker wanted Raven alive. He also wanted to prove that spawn truly existed. But he could not have both by exposing her to the Godseekers, could he? They would never allow her to live.
There had to be more to this. Blade did not know what it might be and was at a loss as to how to extricate her from her current position.
She had enormous faith in her friend Creed’s ability to do so, however. She seemed to have no doubts at all that he would be willing to protect her. Roam’s message reinforced her conviction. Blade wished he could share in her confidence, but he had learned long ago that few people deserved such a high level of trust.
“Why were you there?” she asked him, interrupting his thoughts. “In Goldrush, that night?”
They were again approaching murky areas he had no wish to explore. “I needed supplies,” he hedged. “And a bath.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d spent several months crossing the desert, and I didn’t smell very good.”
She continued to press him. “I mean, why were you crossing the desert in the first place?”
“I had nothing better to do, so I thought I might look for the goddesses’ boundary and see if it can be crossed. I’ve always been curious about what’s on the other side, and if anything of the Old World remains.”
“That’s not the real reason you came here,” she said.
She was intuitive and knew too many things about him already. He discovered it did not bother him as much as it might if she were anyone else.
“What do you think the reason is?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
He knew she was frowning. By the subtle tightening of her body against his, he also knew she had just lied to him.
“I’ll let us both know if I find out, then,” he said. “Go to sleep.” He tucked the blanket more securely over them both.
If her father came for her again tonight, he would not find her alone.
Chapter Nine
Raven lay with her cheek pillowed on Blade’s arm, the rise and fall of his chest steady against her upper back. Despite his efforts to make her comfortable and her overwhelming fatigue, she could not find sleep. He had said she owed him nothing, and she believed he’d meant it, but the cost to him for helping her was too large to ignore.
She knew he searched for peace, and that was something a man like Blade would never find by helping a woman who was half demon.
Black mountain peaks cloaked in midnight leered over her. Every breath of beating wings or rustle of leaves and grass left her heart racing. She shifted, not wanting to wake Blade, but she had not yet overcome her fear of the dark and all that it harbored. In the demon world she had no choice but to repress it. Here, she slid her fingers into his hand, burying her face into the crook of the arm nestled beneath her. With his body wrapped protectively around hers, she permitted herself to acknowledge the true source of her fear.
The blackness of night was isolating. And she did not want to be alone in it for the rest of her life.
Blade’s hand tightened over hers. His other fingers touched the curve of her cheek, tucking a curl behind her ear. He did not sleep either, then.
He freed his arm, braced himself on one palm, and pushed up to examine her. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
She rolled to her back and gazed up at the harsh, shadowy outline of his face, and wondered what had led him to become an assassin. Despite his facade, the role did not suit him. He was a caregiver by nature, someone who looked after others. Not much wonder he had run from such a life. The real question was why had he come back here, especially if it was inner peace he sought?
“What was your childhood like?” she asked.
She felt him retract the memories that surfaced at her question, to bury them even deeper than before so she could not explore them. He was very good at hiding what he did not want her to know.
“It was difficult,” he said. “But no more so than yours.”
She suspected that was not true, although hers had been difficult enough.
The fingers that explored the curve of her cheek dipped to her neckline, then wandered along her collarbone. A sharp, delicious thrill shot through her midsection.
He was trying to distract her from her questions. That made their answers all the more significant. She wanted to know him, to understand him better. She had only the short time until they reached Creed to do so. “Do you remember your mother? Your father?”
His fingers stopped their casual exploration. He did not want to answer, but she knew he would.
“No,” he said. “I don’t remember them at all. I was raised by an uncle.”
“What was your uncle like?”
“He was a Godseeker. A favorite. A lot like your stepfather.”
“You hated him,” Raven said. She could feel it in him, which told her the extent of the emotion he carried.
“Very much,” he admitted. His hand had curled into a tight fist where it rested near the base of her throat. She doubted he knew he had clenched it. “I eventually grew too big for the beatings, and when I was fourteen, I killed him. Unfortunately, he was a successful mine owner. After his death, the mines failed, jobs were lost, and I was blamed. So I left.”
He sounded so matter-of-fact when he spoke that Raven decided it was the memory of those beatings she sensed he was having difficulty dealing with. His treatment by people who should have helped an abused child and the fact that he had murdered his uncle did not seem to trouble him as much. She understood.
“That was when the assassin trainers recruited you?” she asked.
“Not exactly. I trained on my own at first, taking work a Godseeker assassin wouldn’t touch.”
She drew her fingertips over the back of his fist. Fractured memories came through to her now, whispers of things of which he didn’t speak but chose to share with her now. Her heart ached for him. “You were a boy. Alone at fourteen.”
“I knew right from wrong. I wanted to live.”
“If you only wanted to live, why did you leave the security of the temple after the trainers recruited you? You could have had a good life with them.”
“I never formally left them,” he said. “I went off to fight demons and never returned.”
“That was brave of you.”
“No. It was arrogant and ungrateful of me.”
He turned his face to her in the darkness, and she knew whatever had happened to him during that period of time was the root of the fear he had found so difficult to suppress in the demon world. One name drifted to the surface of his thoughts.