“I don’t. Two hours?”
“That’s good.” Damn good. “I can go anywhere in the world from there.”
North, he thought again. He was almost sure of it.
“You’l be home before breakfast,” he said.
“Fine.” She stood.
He should have been happy with his victory. He was getting the hel out of here. He watched her cross to the dresser and open a drawer. Unease tickled his spine. “You can come back, right? They won’t kick you out for giving me a ride?”
“Oh, yes.” He tried not to be distracted by the tumble of her hair, the curve of her butt. “They’l take me back.” Her tone was flat.
“But. ”
She glanced at him over her shoulder. “There are always consequences for disobedience.”
“Right.” His mind weighed, calculated, decided. “Then you can’t come with me.”
“But you just said. ” She turned, scowling, her clothes clutched to her chest. “You need me.”
“I should have said, you can’t come with me wil ingly.
You can’t help me without getting into trouble.”
“So?”
He grinned, suddenly cheerful despite his splitting head.
“So I’l have to kidnap you.”
Lara’s breath huffed out. “Be serious.” “I’m dead serious,” Justin said, and despite his smile, she almost believed him. “I don’t want to see you hurt. Tel Axton I forced you. He can’t blame you then.”
Memory uncoiled inside her, dark and insidious as smoke.
No, Simon would not blame her if she were forced.
She shuddered, her hands closing convulsively on her clothes. “What if he cal s the police?”
“You real y think your buddy Axton wants the cops on his turf?”
“Probably not,” she admitted. Rockhaven was its own community under the Rule, school and glassworks forming an isolated enclave in the rol ing countryside. Simon would not seek help or accept interference from their neighbors.
“But if he thinks I’ve been abducted. ”
“You’l be home before he has time to file a report.”
“He’l stil have questions.”
“So tel him the truth. I broke into your room. I had a knife.”
Justin’s lips curved upward, teasing, daring. “You couldn’t resist me.”
She stuck out her chin, uncomfortably aware of her nakedness under the towel. “I’m not a victim.”
She would not be a victim ever again.
“You think you should struggle?” He cocked his head, as if considering. “Right now, you could probably take me.
But if you want it to look good, we could knock over the lamp or something. Rumple the sheets.”
She flushed. Her awareness of him lay on her like a second skin, twitching with his very pulse, his every breath.
She was exquisitely conscious of the effort it cost him simply to sit upright and smile. The echoes of his pain throbbed in her temples, the bite of the heth gnawed at her own throat. She could feel the sweat at the smal of his back, the faint tremor in his legs of drugs or exhaustion. He must be half dead with pain and fatigue.
And yet he felt more alive to her than anyone she had ever known.
“We want them to think I was coerced,” she said cool y.
“Not seduced.”
“Too bad.” Another glint from those golden eyes. “I was prepared to be convincing.”
Her pulse fluttered. He was weakened and desperate.
How could he flirt with her now? “You convinced me to drive. That wil have to be enough for you.”
For me.
He grinned, undiscouraged and approving. “That puts me in my place.”
It took al her wil not to smile back.
“I have to get dressed,” she said and escaped into the tiny bathroom with her clothes.
He stood when she came out. He fil ed her room, as tal as Simon and leanly muscled. “Where’s your car?”
His size, his sudden shift, took her aback. “I don’t own a car. But I know the code to the garage.”
“Keys?”
“Hanging up inside.”
“Convenient.”
“It’s meant to be.”
There were no thieves among the nephilim. Their vehicles, gray sedans and blue school vans, were held in common.
He nodded once. “Ready, then?”
Be serious, she’d said. But this Justin, with his quick, hard questions and cool, hard eyes, fil ed her with doubt.
A chil chased up her arms. Simon had accused her of endangering the community, of lacking self-knowledge and obedience. What made her think she knew better than the headmaster? Than Zayin?
Justin watched her. Waiting. The black bead gleamed against the burned skin of his throat.
“I’m not sure I can even get you through the gates,” she blurted out.
His gaze remained steady on hers. “I guess we’l find out.”
Her chest hol owed. She poised on the edge of a decision, about to jump.
When she Fel, the moment of choice had passed without effort or reflection. Her act of disobedience had been sheer reflex, a burst of compassion, an impulse born of love.
Why that child, unloved even by the mother who gave her birth? Why that moment, when the girl was almost free of her short, miserable existence? Of al the children Lara had watched and guided over the centuries, what made this one’s pain so intolerable, her life so precious?
Lara didn’t know.
The choice then — her immortality or the child’s soul—
had been no choice at al. But by stopping the girl from taking her own life, Lara had doomed herself to Fal.
She was not that pure anymore. That fearless. She knew now that she could make mistakes. She had learned, in her soul and her fragile flesh, that she could hurt and be hurt.
She had paid for her disobedience by becoming human.
What would the price of disobedience be this time?
And what, she wondered, would it cost her to obey?
She looked at Justin, his lean, stubbled face, his long, amber eyes. The bandage on his head. The lines of pain around his mouth.
“You don’t belong here. You’re not like the rest of them. ”
She was. Oh, she was. Something other, something more than human. Or maybe something less.
Caged.
She had the right to embrace the security of her own bars. But she could not make that choice for him. There were worse sins than disobedience.
She took a breath. Released it slowly. “I’l take you as far as Newark. There are things you need to know.” Even if tel ing him violated the precepts of safety and the rule of silence.
“But you have to promise to listen.”
8
C l o u d s s c u d d e d a c ro s s t h e pi n pr i c k e d s k y.
The trees rippled and sighed. Lara gathered moonlight in her palms, bending the rising air around them, murmuring a quick glamour under her breath. Any student glancing out the dormitory windows would only see two shadows gliding over the lawn.
Beside her, Justin stalked as silent as the night, dimmed to black and silver by the uncertain light.
“Here,” she whispered.
The garage loomed out of the landscape, built two levels down into the side of a hil roofed with trees and sod. She tapped the door code into the keypad.
The double doors hummed. Light slanted across the drive.
“Kil the lights,” Justin snapped.
“They’re automatic.”
He grabbed her elbow. She felt the jolt of his touch before he dragged her under the opening door. Releasing her arm, he mashed his palm on the controls. The mechanism checked. Clunked. The doors lowered slowly.