Roark shot to his feet, followed by the flash of steel and the swing of his arm. Shit, shit, shit. Hand on my arm sheath, I freed the blade, reared back to throw it, too slow. Black blood sprayed the surrounding foliage, accompanied by an inhuman squeal.
The sword lowered, and a mutated body slumped from behind a tree. I spun the blade at the severed head, nailed the eye, certain I saw it blink.
Fuck, what was I thinking? I’d felt that damned bug before it arrived and mistook the sensation for arousal? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I drew in a calming breath and with it came a fume of raw decay. Coughing, I breathed through my mouth, my pulse a heavy beat in my ears.
Roark retrieved the dagger from the stinking thing and nudged the carnage with a steel-toed boot. Then he looked down his freckled Irish nose at me. “Distracted, love?”
A few feet away, Jesse lowered a nocked arrow and vanished into the thick growth of trees.
I didn’t encourage Roark with a response. Though he grinned, sexy and smug standing there in the afterglow of saving my ass, we both knew dropping my guard was a serious fuck up.
He wiped his sword and my blade on the hem of his cassock. “While ye were goggling the Lakota’s arse, ye missed one of me best moves.”
“I doubt it. You’re much better with your fists.”
Watching him pound an aphid in the British pub the night we met had done things to my girly bits. Things a Catholic priest had no business doing. But times had changed with the virus, if my unorthodox, complicated relationships were anything to go by.
He reached for my hand, returned the dagger to the arm sheath, and pulled me up. “It’s worth noting…” That sexy grin grew. “The Lakota throws ye a’ the beasties, and I save ye from them.”
I turned toward the trail. “This isn’t a competition, Roark.”
He muttered something about a wanker and followed me through the thicket. Spindly branches crowded the trail, no evidence of Jesse’s pass through.
A long one-hour later, the brush thinned and gave way to a clearing. There stood the sagging cabin, sheltered by Appalachia pines. Jesse emerged from the tree line beside us.
The shock of being here again still hadn’t released its claws from my heart. I was a different person the first time I came to West Virginia, broken and alone. Wandering into these mountains lush with life and mystery, I’d met Jesse Beckett and his Lakota brethren. Not long after, I followed some strange intuition to this cabin and found the nymph within.
The hellacious trip that followed had taken me across the Atlantic and back. I’d come full circle to stand here again, with a cure, facing yet another journey.
I adjusted the carbine on its sling and studied the crumbling cabin, the blooming life in the surrounding woods, and the rocky ridge beyond. “I’m ready to leave the mountains.”
Jesse gazed down at me. “There’s a lot of cliffs out there.”
I blew out a breath. “Yeah. And a lot of worse things than cliffs.”
“Like priests?”
“That was uncalled for.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. How old were they? Five?
Roark glared at Jesse, his stance all tall, broad, and fierce with a hand on the pommel of his sheathed sword.
His eyes softened as he looked down at me. “Ye won’t be alone, love.”
As long as I lived, I would be protected and cherished. I vowed to do the same in return, even if my guardians tried to strangle one another behind my back.
We approached the cabin’s porch, and a harvest of orioles took flight from the roof. The door opened, and Michio stepped out, followed by Elaine, our living proof of the cure.
Michio leaned against the railing, the rustic wood at odds with his exotic looks. Striking brown eyes clinically roamed my body as my doctor, then they affectionately lingered on my face as my lover. We shared a suspended moment of eye-contact, a sweet kind of torture, that begged to be reinforced with a passionate kiss, a shredding of clothes, and a rough fuck on the creaky porch. But privacy was a rare luxury.
Elaine placed a hand on his forearm. With the other, she twirled a dark lock of hair. Color bloomed in her cheeks. No hint of the gray complexion she suffered only a month earlier when I’d found her again, still holed up in this cabin. I shivered at the memory of her matted hair, all-white eyes, and skeletal limbs crouched over the corpses of her children.
No child survived the airborne virus. The madman who created it bragged about its success while he imprisoned me on Malta. He was delighted when every woman on the planet contracted the infection and transformed into a nymph. Every woman except me.
Nymphs appeared more human than aphid, but they didn’t escape the insectile mouth. And it was the nymph’s bite that initially spread the infection to men. The bite that turned both victim and nymph into aphids. Two years later, aphids outnumbered humans.