Including Justin?
She stopped, a tight, fluttery feeling in her chest, trying to remember what Miriam had said. Forty-eight hours to recover from the concussion. And then what?
“Even if I set him free, he’d be lost. ”
She dragged herself the rest of the way to her room. She closed and locked the door. Stripping her filthy T-shirt over her head, she dropped it with a sigh to the floor.
As a proctor, she had her own closet-sized bathroom.
She turned the shower as hot as she could stand, letting the pulse pound her tight muscles, the water sluice over her head, desperate to rinse away the stink of the mews and her lingering sense of guilt. Steam bil owed in the air, slicked the tiles, condensed on the mirror. She breathed in the moist, shampoo-scented air. Released it, expel ing tension on a sigh.
Wrapped in a towel, she opened the door to her room.
The window was open. Night whispered against her bare skin. Her body hummed with awareness.
A sound, a breath, a disturbance in the air.
Her mind blanked in terror. It was her nightmare, a man in her room, in the dark.
She sucked in her breath.
“Don’t scream,” Justin said from the direction of her bed.
7
H e c o u l d s e e i n t h e d a r k. “ C at ’ s e y e s, ” Captain Rick had said the first time he’d watched Justin climb the rigging at night.
He could see her now, Lara, silhouetted against the slanting light from the bathroom, the quick rise of her breasts above the knotted towel, her smal hands curled into fists at her sides.
He could smel her, soap and fear, and under that her skin, her scent, female, sweet. Arousing.
“Don’t be scared,” he said hoarsely, which was a crock—
she should be scared, she barely knew him. And what she could probably make out was hardly reassuring.
His head hurt. His throat burned. For seven years, his past had been a blank to him. Now his brain seethed with unfamiliar images. With questions. Something had changed within him, and the one person he trusted for answers was braced in front of him, watching him with wide, wary gray eyes as if he were about to jump her.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
Her body remained tensed, slim taut lines and the gleam of her breasts against the darkness of the room. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I won’t go back to the cel ar.”
“This is the first place they’l look for you.”
“I’ve got nowhere else to go.”
“Don’t say that,” she snapped.
It was true. So he said nothing, watching her.
She wet her lips. “How did you get in?”
He nodded toward her open window. “Climbed.”
“But the heth. you couldn’t get past the threshold before.”
His memories were al mixed up, but he remembered sprawling half out of the cel ar door, a weight on one leg like a cement cast, a noose around his neck.
He remembered that bastard, Axton.
He remembered her lips, her scent, her hair fal ing down to brush his face. Her breath fil ing his lungs.
“Yeah, I figured that out.” Slowly, so he wouldn’t spook her, he straightened his leg, stuck out his ankle. “I got rid of one.
Cut it off.”
Her eyes widened. “What about your throat?”
He shrugged. “I can breathe.” Her kiss had done that much for him.
“You removed Zayin’s spel?”
Her talk of spel s made his skin crawl. He didn’t believe in magic. But he had a sailor’s healthy respect for luck. Not to mention some kind of voodoo charm hanging around his neck like a fucking albatross. Under the circumstances, he was prepared to be open-minded.
“I don’t know about spel s,” he said. “But I’m stil wearing the necklace. Every time I tried to get the blade under, I damn near slit my throat.”
She switched on the lamp that stood on her desk. He squinted in the sudden yel ow light. Christ, she was lovely, al that milky skin rising above the towel, her slim, bare legs, the curve of her hip under the terrycloth.
“Show me,” she said.
Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.
Wordlessly, he tugged on the neck of his T-shirt.
She made a soft, distressed sound.
He didn’t know what it looked like, but he could feel the cord, a line of fire around his neck, the bead a burning coal in the hol ow of his throat. His skin felt hot and swol en.
He smiled crookedly. “I don’t suppose you want to try that kiss of life thing again?”
He thought she’d refuse. Hel, he thought she’d run.
She took a hesitant step toward him. “When I opened your airway, it must have turned the magic outward. Do they know? Did they see you like this?”
He wanted to say yes, to play on her sympathies, to buy her loyalty by any lie at his disposal. He had to get out of here.
But faced with her anger and concern, he went with honesty.
“It didn’t start to feel this way until I got outside.” He angled his head to give her a better view. “Is it bad?”
“It looks painful. How does it feel?”
He shrugged again, pul ing the tender skin. “About the way it looks.”
Stil wearing the towel, she approached him and the bed.
“I’m not a healer.”
“Your healer Miriam’s been keeping me drugged and locked up in a basement. I trust you.”
She sat beside him, the mattress dipping beneath her slight weight. She leaned away to avoid rol ing against him, but his gaze was drawn to the knot of her towel, the shal ow indentation between her breasts, the pulse beating just there beneath her jaw. Her hair smel ed damp and clean.
He had to close his eyes, dizzied, distracted by her nearness.
She laid cool fingers on the raw skin of his throat. Her touch drew away the heat and the pain.
More magic? He didn’t care. He wanted to rub himself al over her for comfort like an animal. Catching her wrist, he pressed his face into her palm. Her hand trembled against his cheek. He inhaled her, smel ing her fear and the faint notes of her skin, fresh as lilies in the rain.
“What do you want?” she whispered.
You.
“Help. Answers.”
She eased back from him, her hand slipping from his grasp. “I’l tel you what I can.”
He couldn’t think of any acceptable reason to grab her again, so he said, “Just tel me the truth. What is this place?”
“A school. A private boarding school.”
“For what? Wayward girls and boys? The criminal y insane?”
“Nephilim.”
He forced his gaze from the pale swel of her breasts.
“Neff. ”
“Neh-fil — eem,” she pronounced careful y.
He tested the word against the echoes of his dreams like a man dropping a stone into a wel to test for depth. But there was no ripple, no memory, nothing.
“What’s that, like a cult?”
“The Fal en children of air.” She searched his eyes.
“You real y don’t remember? Anything?”
When she looked at him like that, with those clear, dark-lashed eyes, he wanted to say yes. To a drink in a bar, to a ride in her car, to sex on her narrow white bed.
“Justin?”
“I remember the sea,” he said.
The sea and a sense of loss.
“That’s it?”
“A dog.” A flash of memory, tal as a wolf, graceful as a deer, with a thin whip of a tail and a narrow, bearded muzzle. Justin smiled. “I remember a dog.”