Protect Her: Part 4 Read online

  Protect Her: Part Four

  By Ivy Sinclair

  Copyright 2014 Smith Sinclair Books

  ebook Edition

  Cover Design by Indie Author Services

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  CHAPTER ONE - Riley

  “Take off your shirt.”

  “I never expected to hear a nun say that,” I replied. I thought my joke was quite clever. Judging by the withering look that Alice gave me, she wasn’t as amused.

  “If you want to try getting those wounds treated in the ER and try to explain them, be my guest. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were at least one or two Hytrol demons waiting outside to make sure you don’t make it there. You’ve certainly stepped in quite a mess.”

  “You think that Proctor is going to bother with me anymore?” I leaned against the side of the doorway leading into the kitchen of the Sister of St. Joseph’s convent. It wasn’t the first time that Alice had to clean me up after a fight, and those weren’t particularly pleasant memories. I wouldn’t admit that I was stalling though. Alice got the job done, but there was a reason her God had called her to the nunnery instead of pursuing a career in medicine. Her brisk bedside manner combined with her not-so-gentle handling would have guaranteed that she didn’t have any patients.

  “I think that as long as you have any kind of emotional tie to the girl, Proctor is going to view you as a threat. You and Benjamin both. And let’s be honest. You’re human, so you’re the far easier one to pick off,” Alice said, staring at me with her arms crossed over her chest.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence on my survival chances, Alice.” Neither point was anything that I needed to be reminded of. Benjamin was the strongest archangel currently in residence in the human world. And in the angel and demon hierarchy, a human necromancer straddling both words, which I was, made me the lowest man on the totem pole. I was a human with some odd, and slightly scary innate magical powers, which was the only reason they hadn’t killed me yet. As long as I was useful, I was given some leeway.

  “I’m just being honest, Riley. You’re ill-prepared for the kind of battle you have jumped into with both feet. Frankly, I’m surprised to see you’ve entered it at all. It’s not like you.” She pulled out one of the chairs from the dining table and set it in the middle of the room directly under the florescent light. She pointed at me and then at the chair with an expression that told me she knew that I was stalling and wasn’t pleased. Then she turned away from me and moved across the kitchen. There was a small pantry door in the corner, and she flung it open with a sigh of exasperation.

  Reluctantly, I crossed the threshold into the kitchen and sat down in the chair. I understood what Alice was saying although it bothered me a lot more now than it would have a week ago. Five years ago, I had disentangled myself from most of the human race. I kept my nose out of anything that held even a whiff of dangerous politics. There was plenty of dirty work to be had with both angels and demons alike. I just took jobs that kept me off the radar of any of the higher-level officials, like Bruno Proctor. It was still an extremely lucrative line of work.

  “You haven’t seen me in five years, Alice. How would you know anything about what I would or wouldn’t do?” I wasn’t trying to be deliberately argumentative, especially when she was right. But I hated how transparent my life was when it came to my mentor.

  “Just because you stopped speaking to me doesn’t mean that I haven’t been keeping track of what you’ve been up to.” The nun was hidden inside the pantry, but her matter of a fact words still hit me like a punch in the gut. She hadn’t approved of what I had been doing before Proctor killed my mother and sister. Afterward, my dealings got even more questionable.

  “I’m not getting into that right now,” I replied. “The only thing I’m concerned about right now is finding Paige and killing that son of a bitch who took my family away from me.”

  There was a long sigh as Alice emerged from the pantry. Her arms were full of several different jars and containers. Some of them I recognized and others I did not. Alice truly was the best healer in any realm, but I knew enough about the craft to be dangerous. I frowned and looked down at my body.

  “I’m not in that bad of shape, Alice. It looks like you might be going a little overboard.”

  “You’ve left a trail of blood droplets all the way from the sacristy into the convent, which I will be expecting you to help clean up before you go,” Alice said. She dropped the contents of her arms onto the kitchen table in front of me. “This isn’t all for your wounds. You asked me for help in finding the girl. I will give you what help I can, but the rest of the legwork you’ll have to do on your own.”

  I frowned. “A locator or linkage spell seems to be well within your talents.”

  “There is something dark about her, Riley, whether you want to recognize it or not. You heard her concerns about being possessed by the Goddess. She was terrified when she showed up on my doorstep three years ago. Now she’s been taken by a demon official to parts unknown. I think we can be certain he did not keep her anywhere in our realm. I know you are willing to cross many questionable boundaries in your quest, but I am not.”

  “You are the one who taught me about my abilities to begin with.” It was the start of an argument that had existed between us since the day my mother left me in Alice’s care. “There is darkness in them, and you are the one who showed me how to control all of it.”

  “And you took that knowledge and have been using it in a twisted, horrible way against the dead,” Alice replied. Her voice raised a notch. “I did not teach you to stand in judgment of any soul. The dead need to be respected just as they were in life. What you do, Riley, is an abomination.”

  “What I do gives me the funds to live in relative safety in an unsafe world,” I countered. “You know as well as I do that there are plenty of demons out there who would gladly remove me from the equation.”

  “You don’t make that any easier by continuing to thumb your nose at them by conjuring up their buddies’ souls and destroying any afterlife for them,” Alice said. Then she slammed her palms down on the table. “We’ve gone far afield of what we are trying to accomplish right now.”

  My temper was stoked, but I clipped the next words coming out of my mouth. She was right. We sat on different fundamental sides when it came to my abilities. It had been the first crack in our relationship all those years ago that grew into a wide divide. What I had done, since Bruno Proctor killed my mother and sister, was nothing but widen that divide into a canyon. I wouldn’t have involved Alice at all if I hadn’t thought she was the only one who could help Paige.

  “Now, I already asked you to take your shirt off.” Alice was clearly done talking about our previous topic. She crossed her arms over her chest again and stared at me.

  It was time for the inevitable. I swept my shirt up and over my head. There were twinges of pain across my torso as I did so. When I noticed how much light was coming through the holes the shirt I held up in the air, I looked down at my arms and chest. I grimaced as I realized that I had lost track of the scratches and scrapes after ten.

  “We don’t know if any of the weapons the demons used were poisoned. So even the smallest scratch I’ll have to tend to,” Alice said. “Are you ready for this?”


  “Of course,” I said through clenched teeth. “The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can start tracking Paige.”

  Alice nodded with a grim smile. “Then let’s begin. Hand me your right arm.”

  I obliged raising my right arm in the air. I couldn’t be certain, but I was pretty sure the blood trail Alice mentioned earlier was coming from the rather large gash that I saw there. The adrenaline from the fight was finally cooling in my system, and with its ebb the pain from my wounds was starting to come on full force.

  She took my arm and then lifted it even higher under the light as she inspected it. “This cut goes all the way to the bone, Riley. You should be feeling lightheaded and weak.”

  “I have ways to mitigate the pain during fights,” I said. I didn’t bother elaborating. I had spent several sabbaticals over the last five years with monks in remote mountaintops in Tibet learning how to detach my mental consciousness from my physical body. Being human meant that I had that weakness, and there were times that I couldn’t afford to be slowed down by the idea that I might have incurred a mortal wound. Not if I could take my enemy down with me. “Can you fix it or not?”

  Alice sniffed. “Of course, I can. But it’s going to hurt.”

  That was the part that I wasn’t looking forward to. Absorbing pain and ignoring it was one thing, but sitting still while someone used a unique blend of herbs and magic to knit my skin together was another.

  She reached behind to her pile of herbs and medicines on the table and picked up what could easily have been taken for a saltshaker. “You might want to bear down on something.”

  I kept my eyes tightly focused on her. “Do it.”

  The slightly familiar words that were not of this world spun from her lips, and then she shook the flakes of the compound of herbs from the shaker into the gash on my arm. A sharp ripple of pain fled up my arm and, as soon as it hit my brain, light exploded behind my eyes. I bit down hard on my tongue and tasted blood, but I didn’t let anything more than a low growl escape my lips.

  Instead, I pulled forward one image and focused on it with all of my mental power. Paige Matthews. I thought about sitting across the table from her after she made us breakfast at Benjamin’s cabin. I thought about her smile and the way that she cocked her head to the side and studied me as if she thought I was some kind of strange animal. I thought about the softness of her lips the first time I kissed her.

  As Alice continued her chanting and making her way across my skin, I drowned myself in everything I could remember about Paige. The pain of healing ebbed to the edge of my consciousness, and I felt myself relax.

  Things weren’t right. In fact, they were terribly wrong, but I’d find a way to fix it, just like Alice was fixing my flesh. When I had a purpose, I was a force to be reckoned with. Proctor wasn’t going to get away with this. Not this time.

  I had no idea how much time had slipped away as I thought about Paige. Alice was right. Paige Matthews had created a crack in the walls I had built around my heart the day my family died, and it wouldn’t take much to burst right through. I was terrified of it, but at the same time, I realized that it was something that had been missing in my life. Caring about someone else. Tending to someone else. Life was so short, and that wasn’t something to take for granted.

  But Paige’s destiny seemed as if it would be a problem to any kind of future between us. It was a bridge I’d worry about crossing when I knew that she was safe again.

  It took several minutes for me to return to a semi-consciousness state and realize that Alice’s progress had stopped. She was behind me now, having taken care of all the cuts and scrapes on my arms and chest.

  “Are we done?” I clenched and unclenched my fists testing the knits that had been created. The pain was still there, but far more tolerable.

  “Where did you get this tattoo?”

  It was an unexpected question, and I turned to face her. “What tattoo?”

  Alice pointed. “The large one on your back.” She sounded annoyed and something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  My hand crept to my shoulder blade. I couldn’t feel anything, but then I wouldn’t. “I don’t have a tattoo on my back.”

  A strange expression crossed Alice’s face. I shot to my feet and pushed around her. My destination was the small powder room just outside the kitchen. I stopped in front of the mirror and turned my right shoulder to the glass. I caught sight of heavy lines of black ink.

  “What the hell?” Turning completely around, I swung my head over my shoulder. A design that reminded me of a sting ray covered both shoulders and slid all the way down my spine ending three-quarters of the way down my back.

  Alice appeared behind me. Her eyes met mine in the mirror. “You didn’t get that tattoo?”

  “That wasn’t there yesterday.” I stared again at the image on my back in disbelief. “What the fuck is it?”

  Alice sighed, but I caught her shiver before she left my line of sight. “I think it’s time to make another pot of tea.”

  CHAPTER TWO - Paige

  My dreams were bloody and dark. I thrashed about trying to escape them, but there was nothing that I could do. I was trapped, and there was no way out. Screaming at the top of my lungs did nothing but burn the back of my throat, and my cheeks had long ago dried from the tears that no longer came. Then I curled into a small ball and wished for death.

  I felt his arms around me then whispering soothing words in my ear. I curled my fingers into the front of his shirt and buried my face in his chest. As I felt his hand stroking my hair, my breath evened out. I didn’t know why I thought I had lost him, but Riley was here with me after all. He wouldn’t let me go. I could relax.

  “You are mine.” The voice changed into a harsh, cold tone. The arms tightened around me, and I couldn’t breath. I wasn’t safe. Not at all.

  My eyes flew open, and, for a moment, I wondered if I had finally died after all. At first, all I could see was inky blackness, but when my eyes finally adjusted I saw that I was lying on the floor of a dimly lit room. A crackling noise behind me caused me to spin over to investigate. The noise was coming from the dying embers of a fire in a huge stone fireplace.

  “You are awake, excellent.”

  The words seemed to boom in my ears, and I yelped as I drew my palms to the sides of my head to block them out.

  “That won’t do any good. I can just switch to this.”

  It was then that I realized the latter words were being spoken in my mind.

  “I apologize for the roughness of your journey here. The poison from a gargoyle’s talons is incredibly toxic and has some rather unpleasant side effects.” The words were being spoken out loud again. “It’s a good thing that you appear to have some quite remarkable constitution.”

  I knew both of those things, because I had experienced this situation before. I knew where I was now. I had been there before, three years ago. I pushed myself up onto my knees. The last thing I remembered was the flood of memories that overwhelmed me as I stood in the church. I had saved Riley and Benjamin from a gargoyle attack. Even with my memories intact now, I didn’t know why they had chosen that moment to return

  “I’d take it easy if I were you. You’ve been out for quite awhile, and it appeared you were having some rather horrible nightmares. The impact of your waking consciousness on your senses can be quite jarring.”

  I ignored the voice and the demon it belonged to. I needed to get my thoughts in order. I was in trouble, and I knew it. Riley wasn’t going to be able to protect me here. Now that I understood what I had been running from, I knew that we had both been fools to think that he could. There was a much larger game at play, and I felt a keen sense of guilt that I unwittingly had dragged Riley into it at all.

  That was new. The old Paige inside of me recognized that. She had lived for several years alone on instinct and the strong desire to survive. That meant that she didn’t have time for feelings like guilt and empathy toward h
er fellow man. The humans she moved in time with had been nothing but pawns for her manipulation. But for the last three years, this new person that I was had lived without the knowledge of that darker time in my life. I had friends. I had a home and a simple life. Then I met Riley and brushed up against another emotion. Passion. Yearning. The first tentative roots of what could possibly grow into love.

  These two halves of my psyche, old and new, were at war as I considered the fact that I had once again fallen in Bruno Proctor’s trap. I was operating at half-effectiveness at best, and I was certain he knew that.

  Slowly, I pushed myself to my feet. Then I started to dust myself off.

  “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?”

  Finally, I turned. There were two large wingback chairs facing the fire. In one of them sat the man who had torn me away from Riley. His minions would have killed Riley in the church if I hadn’t intervened. I wished that I knew how to harness that power once again. I’d send the demon official someplace where he’d never hurt me again.

  “I can guess what you’re thinking,” Bruno said, shaking his finger at me. He had a glass of what I hoped was red wine in his other hand. He set the glass down on a small table next to his seat and pushed forward so that he was sitting on the edge of the chair. “You are wondering how you can conjure up that little spell that you used on my gargoyles. I admit, that was an unexpected trick, but I’ve addressed that problem for the time being. You won’t be able to use it against me.”

  “What are you talking about?” I couldn’t keep the disgust out of my voice.

  “Tsk, tsk, my lovely. Your tone would lead me to believe that you are unhappy with your present company. I can make you much more malleable, and you should remember that. I’m giving you the ability to move about now as a courtesy and a hope that we can come to a more reasonable agreement than last time.”

  “Last time, you tried to kill me by trapping me in a box and dumping me in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,” I said flatly.