A hand clamped around his throat and he found himself blinking into those damn crimson eyes again. “So help me, Valin, if you don’t tell me where she is…”
“Ganelon doesn’t have her,” he said, wrenching the hand from around his esophagus. He couldn’t say she was all right. Not after he’d seen what she was doing to herself. Roland must have made the assumption though because he nodded, his breathing easing as he took a step back, the crimson fading from his pupils. The nearly black eyes that replaced those glowing coals were almost as harsh looking as the freaky red had been, but still…the shape, the tilt.
He cleared his throat, cringing mildly at the burn. Fucking bastard.
“How is she?” Roland asked.
Yeah, still not going there. “I never asked what happened that night.”
Roland’s brow furrowed. “What night?”
“The night you were turned.”
It was kind of interesting watching the vampire shut down, his mouth cramping up into a hard line in his face. A knot of muscle rolled across his jaw, his teeth grinding once, twice, before he responded. “It’s not something I share.”
“Especially with motherfuckers like me, right?”
Roland’s mouth quirked up, a self-depreciating chuckle rumbling in his chest. “Takes one to know one.”
Hell yeah it did. And if what Gabby told Valin were true, then perhaps Roland’s silence had been as much out of compassion as anything else. Valin sobered. “Tell me just this one thing.”
Valin could see the tension pulsing through Roland’s body simply by the stiff set of his shoulders, but somehow the ex-Paladin managed to grind out a, “What?”
“Was there a succubus involved? Maybe one with red hair?”
“What the fuck does that have to do with Gabriella…” Roland trailed off, his face paling as all sorts of light bulbs and connections flared to life in his brain. Oh, yeah, darkness was indeed bliss.
Valin rubbed a hand down his face. “Shit. I’d kind of hoped I was wrong. But damn if she doesn’t have your eyes.”
Roland stumbled back, grabbing the arm of the couch to find his way down.
Valin shook his head. Wasn’t this fucking priceless? Gabby must know who her father was. And he was Paladin. The question was if she’d known, then why the hell hadn’t she come to Roland for help instead of fucking over her own soul?
“Congrats, daddy.” Valin slapped Roland’s stiff shoulder, counting on the fact that the man was too shocked to say anything as Valin passed by him and dived into the innards of the rumbling fridge. In fact, Valin made it all the way to the door, the squeak of the ancient knob the thing that finally drew his former Paladin brother’s attention.
“Where are you going?”
He hoisted up the sack of A-negative, the liquid squishing and slurping in his hand. “Going to go have a little talk with your daughter.”
And then? Then he’d have her over his knee for a good spanking.
Valin didn’t get very far. He made it two feet down the hall before he was brought up short by a rather awkward obstacle: clothing, or rather the lack thereof. The need for something other than a puke-green wrap became obvious when he’d stepped out of Roland’s apartment and been greeted with a shocked gasp. He’d spun around in time to see a pair of wide eyes topped by a towering white bun duck her head back into her apartment. Luckily the door to Roland’s apartment had yet to close behind Valin, and a few moments later he tried the trip again armed with both the blood bag and an outfit that could be termed flasher-chic at best: a long dark duster…and nothing underneath.
He’d chaffed at the admittedly minimal amount of time taken up by the task of raiding a still-stunned Roland’s hall closet. But worse was the sweltering cab ride that he’d suffered through smothered in the fully buttoned duster during more than a few blocks of clogged up cross-traffic. How did people stand to travel this way?
He’d finally made it back to the right end of town, and in another frustrating, but necessary, action had the cabby drop him off a few blocks away from the old school. When he was assured of no tail, he’d hastened to the base and managed to have a break of luck when the guard at the back door recognized him.
Once inside, it didn’t take him long to track down Gabby in the old nurse’s office. The place was amazingly quiet, the door propped open with one of those wooden triangles, and only two people in the room: Gabby and Aaron. She sat in one of those child-size chairs, her knees bent up uncomfortably as she leaned over an unconscious Aaron, both of her hands wrapped around his bandaged one, as if by holding tight enough she might keep him there.
Valin wasn’t proud of the twist of jealousy that rose—the man looked like he was on death’s door, for fuck sake—and ruthlessly squelched the mating instinct that all but screamed for him to go caveman and drag her away from Aaron.
“How is he?” he asked instead, folding his arms across his chest as he leaned against the doorframe.
Gabby jerked, swiveling in the chair to blink at him. As if she’d been dozing, that or crying, her eyes were suspiciously red and swollen. Either way it was equally obvious that she hadn’t expected to see him again. If the shock on her face wasn’t readable enough, then the zap of surprise he felt across their tentative link certainly was.
Or maybe it was the outfit. The dirty jeans, which he’d scooped up from the floor of his cramped room, didn’t exactly add much to the ensemble other than to upgrade him from flasher to well, he wasn’t sure what. With no shirt and the black duster jacket that—damn Roland’s height—didn’t so much as flare around him as drag on the floor, he probably looked like a kid playing dress-up in his parent’s closet. Oh yeah, the outfit was damn comical in a how-sad kind of way.
Gabby recovered, dragging her gaze away from his exposed chest, and looked back down at her patient. “Oh, um. Better. Shae gave him enough painkillers to knock out a giant. She says as long as she can fend off any potential infections that he’ll survive.”
“And the burns? Will they scar?” he asked, flexing his own slowly healing arm. The ribs were coming along nicely, barely tender really, but something about fire—especially merker fire—seemed to resist the Paladins’ innate healing capabilities.
She drew in a lungful of air, her shoulders shaking delicately as she let her breath back out. “Shae’s powers aren’t suited for burn therapy. She was able to start the healing process on the most life-threatening wounds but…” She trailed off, the misery on her face telling him all he needed to know. Poor fucker was going to look like a monster for the rest of his life.
“Would he be better off in a hospital with a good burn unit?” he asked gently.
She shook her head. “He’s a power sink. If they hooked him up to anything electrical and he wasn’t alert enough to control it, he’d automatically draw. Potentially he could black out the entire area.”
“That makes things complicated, doesn’t it?”
She nodded even though his question had been rhetorical. He fidgeted in the awkward silence that followed.
Gabby let out a sharp breath. “If you’re wondering about your knife, the answer is yes, I grabbed it for you after you took off. It’s in my room, as yours doesn’t have a working lock and I figured you’d be pissed if someone came along and took the pretty magical relic hostage.”
He blinked, glad the doorframe kept him from rocking back on his heels in shock. His knife? Crap. That just went to show how messed up he’d been that he hadn’t even thought of the blade until now. Some Paladin he was. Not that he’d let on to Gabby how much their little encounter earlier had gone to fucking with his mind.