Roaring a battle cry, he lunged and ripped her assailant off her to throw him to the wall so hard something broke with an audible snap. He grabbed Jessamy with his other arm in the same movement and kicked the door shut. “Stay,” he ordered, perching her on a table and swinging out with his sword as he felt the air move at his back.
Fangs bared, one of his shoulder bones having punched through his shirt to gleam rust white in the air, the vampire screamed in bloody defiance and cut a line of fire down Galen’s chest with a heavy hunting knife. Galen ignored the scratch and the other male’s head was rolling off his neck to land on the floor with a wet thud the next instant, blood gushing out to spray the wall as the man’s body spasmed before collapsing.
Damn.
Jessamy would probably make him clean that up, he thought, watching the corpse continue to twitch. Vampires were almost-immortals, but—regardless of the sporadic motions of the body—they couldn’t survive decapitation. Still, he made the kill certain by walking over and thrusting his sword through the dead vampire’s heart, cutting it up into tiny pieces inside his chest.
Only then did he turn to the woman who sat on the table, face white and eyes huge. Having wiped his sword on the vampire’s clothing, he slid it into the sheath on his back and crossed the distance between them to place his hands on either side of Jessamy’s slight body. “Look at me.”
Jittery brown eyes met his. “You have blood on you.”
Cursing inwardly at the evidence of vicious violence, violence that was an integral part of his life, but no doubt a stranger to her, he would’ve drawn away to take care of it—but she pulled off some kind of silky scarf thing from around her waist and began to wipe his face clean. It carried her scent.
Locking his muscles, he stayed in place. His eyes fell to the graceful curve of her neck and to the straps that held up the bodice of her gown, the knot tied at her nape, streamers of fabric falling gracefully down her back. A single drop of blood marred the fine blue, but her gown had otherwise escaped damage.
“Done?” he asked when she dropped her hand, raising his own at the same time to angle her face to the light so he could examine the cut on her temple. Already healing. Good. But he borrowed her scarf to wipe away the streaks of red that enraged him, the scent of her blood a vivid thread in spite of the carnage.
Taking the cloth when he returned it, she reached out to run it over his chest. “Do you own any shirts?”
Enjoying the tender touch quite unlike those of other warriors who might have sewn up dangerous injuries in battle so he could continue to fight, he said, “Yes. For formal occasions.” Though in Titus’s court, even those occasions hadn’t often required a shirt.
Jessamy laughed… right before her face crumpled. Gathering her into his arms, he stroked his hand over her back as she wrapped her own arms around his neck and sobbed. He was careful to avoid the sensitive area where her wings grew out of her back, the feathers there a rich, evocative magenta that faded into blush, then pure cream in the body of her wings. To steal that intimacy would be to devalue its worth—he would wait until Jessamy invited the touch.
Her breath, ragged and hot, blew across his skin as she tried to get even closer. Nudging his way between her knees, the gossamer skirts of her gown frothing around them, he cradled her tight. So slender was her body, so terrifyingly fragile. But not bony, he now realized, for all her appearance of painful thinness. It was as if her frame itself was so very fine that the flesh upon it need only be the gentlest of layers. There was a sensual grace to her, exquisite and beautiful.
“He can’t hurt you now,” he said in her ear when her sobs quieted, her hair as soft as fur under his hand, against his face.
A hiccupping breath before she sat up again, drawing her dignity around herself like a shield. “Thank you.” Glancing down, she colored at the way her knees spread on either side of his thighs.
He stepped back so she could close her legs, settle her skirts. Barbarian or not, he understood that as a warrior needed his weapon, Jessamy needed her pride. “Who was he?”
“I don’t know,” she said, wiping away her tears until her face bore no evidence of the emotional storm that had just passed. “He came into the house while I was in the kitchen—I thought it was one of my students. They know to knock, but the littlest ones sometimes forget.”
“Did he say anything?”
“That I knew too much,” Jessamy said, forcing herself back into the nightmare. “They couldn’t take the chance.” The vampire had fallen on her before she’d realized the import of his words. Driven by instinct, she’d managed to cut him with the small knife in her hand before he hit her head against the edge of the door he’d ripped open, dazing her enough that he’d almost succeeded in shoving her out onto the unforgiving rocks below.
Jessamy was more than two thousand years old, and while not the strongest of her kind, she was in no way weak—the fall wouldn’t have killed her, but it would have shattered her into so many pieces that it would’ve taken years, perhaps a decade, for her to recover. In the interim, she’d have lain mute and still as death. Plenty of time for anyone who didn’t wish his plans exposed to bring them to fruition. “You saved me from terrible pain.”
Even as she spoke, she waited for Galen to berate her for having a clifftop residence when she couldn’t fly. How could she explain to him that she had the same soul-piercing hunger for the sky as her brethren, the same need to soar? Her house was as close as she could get to the clouds. However, the expected recrimination didn’t come from this warrior male who’d stroked her with shockingly gentle hands, his voice low and deep against her ear. Instead, he frowned, his attention on her attacker. When he pulled away from the table, she had to bite down on her lower lip to keep from begging him to stay.
The rawness of her need rocked her. She’d been on her own for decades even before she reached the hundred-year mark that constituted adulthood among angelkind. It was highly unusual for an angel to request emancipation as an adolescent, but the constant presence of her mother’s guilt had been a shroud that threatened to suffocate Jessamy. Keir had spoken for her with Caliane—into whose section of the Refuge she had been born, convinced the archangel Jessamy was mature enough to be trusted on her own.
Over the years, her aloneness had become something she’d embraced, as much a part of her as her twisted wing and brown eyes. But today, she wanted nothing more than to be held, to be protected by the big stranger who was currently going through her assailant’s pockets with grim efficiency. She should’ve hopped down from where he’d put her, ordering her to “Stay” like she was a pet or a sack of potatoes, but the truth was, she wasn’t sure her legs would support her.
“What have you found?” she asked when he withdrew something from the vampire’s pocket.
Rising, he walked over to hand her the piece of paper. She opened it, felt her heartbeat shudder. “It’s a time and a place. My house, at this time of day—I often come home to eat something before going to the library to work.” It was in the mornings that she usually taught, though she did sometimes change the lessons to the afternoons, especially when the days grew dark and cold. The children never wanted to wake up.
“So,” Galen said, his shoulder flexing as he put one hand on the table beside her hip, the primal heat of him unfamiliar, but not unwanted, “someone either knew, or watched you long enough to learn your patterns.”
Her eyes lingered on the dead vampire’s body. “What a waste.”
“He made his choice.” With those pitiless words, Galen looked at the body again, at the wall splattered with red congealing to black. “I’ll clean that up, but first, I have to inform Dmitri. We’ll fly to him.”
“No.” She pushed at his shoulders when he went as if to gather her up in his arms.
Galen’s scowl turned the pale green of his eyes into stormy seas. “I won’t drop you.”
“It’s not that.” Her resistance to being flown had its genesis in the agony of a realization she’d had long ago—that each taste of the sky only deepened the bruise of loss. Not even the best of friends could ever take her flying for as long as she needed. “I don’t fly with anyone.”
“I’m not leaving you here alone.” Deep voice, a wall of unyielding muscle.
“I’ll be fine.” Her eyes skated away from the bloody ruin of the corpse. Fighting the bile burning her throat, she said, “I’ll wait in the front yard.”
Galen snorted, put his hands around her waist, and picked her up so her toes hung above the ground. Grabbing onto his shoulders, the heat of him burning through her palms, she said, “What are you doing?” her voice breathless.
He answered by carrying her out of the kitchen—to her silent thanks—and to the paved courtyard she’d bordered using colorful pots spilling a wild cascade of blooms. Where he finally put her on her feet and glared. “Wait.”
“Stay. Wait,” she muttered to his broad back as he strode inside, doing her best to be insulted—but the truth was, he’d not only saved her from unimaginable agony; he’d made her feel safe enough that she’d cried… and then he’d held her with a sweet, rough tenderness. Anger was not the dominant emotion she felt toward Galen.
When he returned with her sandals and went down on one knee to slide them onto her feet, his wings a rich, dark gray against the paving stones, she started to argue that she could do it herself. But Galen, as she’d already begun to learn, was an irresistible force when he wanted something, and he had her feet in the sandals moments later, the skin of his hands callused, the touch intimate in a way that made her abdomen clench. Rising, he took her hand, enclosing it in his own. “Come.”
She didn’t break the proprietary hold, vestiges of the terror she’d felt as she fought not to be thrown into the serrated jaws of the gorge continuing to whisper cold and oily through her veins. “My closest neighbor, Alia, is through there.” She pointed to the narrow pathway between the rocks up ahead. “I’ll stay with her, while you fetch Dmitri.”