“Yeah, that curse was about my mahmen, not that female.” V patted around his pockets like he was looking for a smoke. “I swear, the more you know…”
Rahvyn saved me, too, Lassiter thought. But she’d done that way before now.
And it was strange. He hadn’t known she was coming into his life, or what she would do now that she was here. Though he’d been able to see that gunshot going into the bouncer at Dandelion so clearly—he hadn’t seen Nate being killed and what Rahvyn had done in response.
“Well, she wasn’t the only one saving people tonight,” V said in a quieter voice. “Xcor and I know what you did for Balz at that bookshop. There’s no way that human woman plugged up an arterial bleed with just the life line on her palm.”
Lassiter shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Fine. But Xcor wants to talk to you.”
“Then Xcor can come and find me whenever he wants.”
There was a moment of awkwardness, and Lassiter frankly enjoyed the way V squirmed under the surface of all his intellectual, better-than, BDSM-hard-ass. The brother couldn’t handle the fact that he felt indebted to a fallen angel who was perpetually on his last nerve, but he also couldn’t ignore the devastation that would have happened if Balthazar, valued member of the Band of Bastards, had bled out on the floor of that messy storage room in the back of that bookstore.
Everyone at the mansion would have been affected, and some of them permanently.
V was sooo stuck.
“You know,” Lassiter murmured, “I really wish I had brought my cell phone right now. Your face is such a picture. It’s the kind of thing I’d like to have as my lock screen.”
* * *
Rahvyn did not know what woke her up. Nor did she know that she had fallen asleep.
But then she recognized that there were voices. Just outside the door to her healing room.
As she sat up in the bed, she pushed her hair out of her face.
You’re saying that female is as powerful as my mahmen?
Now another male: No, I’m not.
Now murmuring.
The second voice stuck with her, and gave her a surge of awareness: That male with the strange, beautiful eyes and the blond-and-black hair had come to see her… and it was his absence, rather than his arrival or the voices, that had disturbed her unexpected repose.
His presence had eased her. His departure had roused her—
She is the Gift of Light.
As the next words he uttered registered, Rahvyn felt a cold rush hit her head, and when the chill permeated her body, she wrapped her arms around herself.
Those words… spoken in that tone of awe. She recognized the latter, even as she dreaded it. She had caught a similar tilting of emotions in all kinds of different syllables, uttered by different males, different females. Ever since she had been a young, and “oddities,” as her parents had called them, had occurred in her presence, there had been hushed conversation, and darting eyes that had returned to her quickly, and wonderment and reverence among the villages back in the past, in the Old Country.
And now she was here, in what was the present for those brave males outside in that white corridor, an ocean’s distance, as well as several centuries, away from where she had been birthed and lived for a time… and the same thing was happening.
The male who had come to see her was wrong, however.
He was very dangerously wrong.
She was not the Gift of Light.
Perhaps she had once been. But the night of her cousin’s brutal death, when the loss of her innocence had been so violently imparted, had changed that.
Closing her eyes, she eavesdropped upon the rest of what was said. When the fighters dispersed, she thought perhaps the one with those arresting eyes would come in once again. He did not.
And that was just as well.
She needed to leave this place and time, and the fewer ties she had, the easier that would be. She did not belong here, with these people, in this year.
She feared that she did not belong anywhere.
But at least she could not hurt anyone if she departed. These kind souls here, of which there were many, would be so much safer without her.
Though she had a feeling it would break her heart to be without them.
Especially the one they called fallen angel.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
A dawn of pinks and yellows rose in Caldwell’s eastern sky, the rays spearing through the dark gray petticoat of cloud cover that was departing along with the night’s black velvet skirt.
As Erika stood on the shallow front porch of her townhouse, she had a steaming coffee cup in her palms, and an ache between her legs that was the kind of thing that pulled a secret smile out of her mouth. And while the other people in her neighborhood headed off to work, she stayed where she was.