“This will be a bit sturdier than your birch bark paper,” she said.
“Yes. Yes, it will. Thank you, Lex.”
He kissed her again, his arms around her, his grip tight enough to hurt. She squirmed and he eased off, finishing the kiss with a tender brush of his lips against hers.
“See you tomorrow,” she said, getting to her feet.
“I can’t wait.”
…
After bringing Jett a breakfast of maple oatmeal and stealing several minutes of kisses as she had for the last month, Lexine climbed into bed for her weekly sleep. Her body ached from that day’s session with Raphael, but she’d gotten better, so much better, in a month’s time. She’d even landed a strike to the back of his wings today, an accomplishment mixed with thrill and horror. But of course, her teacher had been pleased, not offended. She shut her eyes and drifted, her slumber peaceful.
Until the dream.
It started the same as it had in the past. A strong sense of love and happiness. Her mate, with the tattoo and claw marks, at her side. From there, the scene took a devastating turn. Between one breath and the next, Jett fell to the ground. Blood drenched his clothes. He held her until he lost consciousness, his hands falling from her shoulders.
Nothing could wake a demon from sleep. Even though she knew, somehow, that she was dreaming. She remained trapped in the nightmare, crying and screaming at Jett’s side as his blood spread out over an unusual mosaic floor of orange fish on a blue, green, and brown background constructed of tiny glass tiles.
When she woke, she screamed some more.
No.
No!
She fought free of her tangled sheets only to collapse to her knees on the floor. No, she vowed. This future would not become reality. She didn’t care what she had to do. She would stop this.
Chapter Twenty
“Dr. Lawrence? Are you all right?”
Victor Lawrence opened his eyes, lifted his forehead from the wall, and forced a smile for the nurse. “Fine, Alice. Is he resting comfortably?”
“He’s asleep.”
“Good. Will you call me if anything changes?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you.”
Victor left the ICU and headed for the discrete elevators tucked behind the vending machines. He swiped his key card, pressed a button, and waited until the doors opened on the research lab floor. Technicians and graduate students crowded the lounge, coffee cups in hand, arguing over the best growth medium for cell culture, or who would come in to count cells for the 1:00 a.m. time point.
If only basic experiments where his biggest problem. Victor rubbed his temples, hurried through his lab and into his office. He shut the door behind him.
He threw his marble paperweight against the wall.
He slumped into his desk chair and his fingers brushed beads of sweat on his brow. Over twenty years of research, massive amounts of groundbreaking data, yet nothing close to a treatment for the broken young man in the ICU.
If a demon had suffered such injuries, he’d be well on his way to being healed by now, twelve hours after a vicious motor vehicle accident. A high fever, a significant amount of pain, and he’d have walked out the hospital the next day. As it was, the human kid would never walk again, if he lived at all.
The rapid healing inherent in demon biology couldn’t be replicated or harnessed. He’d finally come to accept that. Indeed, there was a better way. The golden egg. The ace. The miracle.
But, it’d been fucking stolen! He slammed his fist on the desk. The damned demons had taken the archangel right before Victor’s experiments were to begin. It had been such a perfect plan. Thornton Bailey would get the son. Victor would get the father. However, the demons had taken both archangels back to that colony in Vermont.
Granted, the opportunity for newborns now presented itself. Far more preferable than an adult. The young ones could be raised to comply. They’d be much easier to handle than Raphael ever would have been. And twins, no less. Perfect for scientific study.
But, could he get them in time to help the teen and the other patients in ICU? Every day, he watched people die, people who could have been saved so easily. His own daughter-in-law was losing her fight with cancer. That such a simple cure existed, so far out of his reach…
He couldn’t stand it. He had to find a way into that colony.
The phone on his desk rang. Speak of the devil, and all that. “Hello, Miriam. How are you?”
“Andrew is missing,” his daughter-in-law said, her voice thin and raspy from months of sickness.
“What?” Lawrence got to his feet, stretching the phone cord.
“He’s been gone since this morning! He left a note saying he was going to find help for me.”
“Find help?” Lawrence paced as best he could with the infuriating landline. “What did he mean?”
“I have no idea. The counselor at his school said he’s been increasingly obsessed with cancer, reading books that are far over his head.”
Sweat beaded on Lawrence’s forehead. Miriam had been diagnosed with cancer a decade ago, then gone into remission. The cancer came back recently, not long after the car accident that killed Andrew’s dad. His grandson had taken the double blows like a rock, but recently, it looked more and more like the boy had kept the true extent of devastation hidden. Twelve-year-old Andrew wouldn’t do anything foolish, not when he still had his mother. “Well then, perhaps he came here, to the medical center. I’ll call security and go downstairs to have a look myself.”
“What should I do? Should I call the police?”
“Not yet. Let me see if he’s here. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”
…
Jett patrolled the grounds around the archangel house—the first time doing so, solo, for an appreciable amount of time—as Lark spent the evening inside with Raphael. His skin prickled. Nerves, or something more?
He shut his eyes and inhaled through his nose and his mouth, tasting the scents of the forest on his tongue. The scent of pine overpowered everything else. Damn, are those trees always so strong?
They sure as hell hadn’t been that potent every other time he’d been at the house, he decided. Or even five minutes ago.
“Scent is your best tool,” Lark had lectured. “No matter how skilled a human is, they leave a trail. They’ve tried to mask their scent. Never assume unusual odors in the woods are benign.”
Keeping to the darkest shadows, Jett closed the distance to the stand of young, puffy pines that hugged the lawn below the west-facing flight decks. Light spilled from the wraparound windows of the house. Anyone hiding in the trees would have a clear shot if one of the archangels came out. Hell, with an excellent weapon and aim, they could try to shoot through the windows.
He drew his combat knives. Damn it, he should have scented them before they got this close. Should have heard something.
Pausing at the base of the first balsam tree, he heard breathing. Rapid, shallow panting. Not a calm professional, then. Interesting. An amateur with enough dumb luck to get this far?
Guided by the sound, Jett sprang ahead. The human, who lay on his stomach between two trees, dressed in green camouflage, rolled over just in time for Jett to bring the blade down toward his throat.
The human screamed. The honest-to-God terror in the sound brought Jett’s hand to a halt, the blade an inch from the jumping pulse in the poacher’s throat.
No, not a poacher. A kid. A short, bright-eyed, human kid, the ample freckles and reasonable build marking him as the bike-riding, baseball-playing variety of human child. Jett withdrew the blade. “What the fuck are you?”