Besides that, this was Menes’s house and this man, as it happens, was Menes’s best friend.
Jackson. He was still wont to call him Menes, but in this lifetime, this incarnation, he preferred to be called Jackson. How odd that was, he thought absently. He had never conjoined with the soul of his host enough to want to take his name in place of his own. In fact, all Templars subjugated their hosts, pushing their second soul into dormancy and submission. It made him wonder…what if…?
Kamen shook his head. Now was not the time for contemplating follies that would eat up his focus and his energy.
“I will keep your friend safe while you are away,” he said to Leo, even though he knew the human male despised it when he addressed him directly. “If this house is attacked again I can get everyone to safety quickly.”
“Remember,” the Angel said, “do not move him unless absolutely necessary.”
Kamen nodded his understanding, then turned and left their sight.
CHAPTER FOUR
Leo couldn’t focus on his driving. They had climbed into a truck, one of the many vehicles kept available on the property, and she had told him to head east. So he was heading east. That was all she said. “Head east.” And not another word since then in the thirty minutes he had been driving. Now he was distracted because she was distracted. She kept turning her hands over, inspecting them front and back, touching her nails, watching them go white when she pressed on them, and then pink again as her capillaries refilled.
She was also fidgeting with the knee-length dress Docia had scrounged up for her. It was a pretty heather blue one with little blue and yellow cornflowers all over it and dark blue buttons running from neckline to hem. Clearly it had come from Marissa’s wardrobe, it being far closer to the Angel’s height and weight than anything of Docia’s would be. Docia was short and curvy, whereas Marissa was tall and…well…curvy. Though apparently not as curvy as the Angel beside him. The dress was pulled tightly over her br**sts accentuating their shape and heft.
Okay, he had to admit it. She was hot. Like scorching head-on-fire hot. Albinism aside, the minute she had fully turned parchment-paper white, he had finally been able to distinguish her looks in their entirety. Beforehand, with all that monotone blackness, he couldn’t see that she was…well…hot.
Gorgeous, actually. From gracefully rounded shoulders to her well-defined calf muscles, she was the kind of hot that would have kept her off all the fashion runways because she had curves and blatant female sexuality, not the stick-thin figures and drolly waiflike starvation victim look that supermodels were always striving for.
Oh yeah. She had booty. She had just enough junk in her trunk to make a man crave using it for handholds as he—
Whoops. No, no. Not that, he thought hastily to himself when, out of the cold blue tundra that had been housing his emotions and feelings lately a sharp streak of arousal began to stab through him, heading right for his heavily dormant c**k and the twin brothers attached. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.
Come on, man. Focus, he thought fiercely. He looked at the stark road laid out in front of them. Once they had left the city limits and caught the main highway out of Portales, New Mexico, they had left what most would call “civilization” behind. Traffic was nearly nonexistent and it could make for a pretty boring drive. So, it stood to reason that his attention might wander. With that and the fact that he was tired, he excused himself. After all, he had been up all night long, having shifted his own sleeping cycle to coincide with those of the others in the house. Maybe it was like when women got together and their periods started to synchronize. It had nothing to do with the fact that every time he closed his eyes…
So, mix in a pretty girl with all of that and a man was wont to let his thoughts wander.
Oh…wait…she was so not a girl. A woman, yes. But there was nothing girlish about her. In fact, now that he’d had some time to study her and replay his short acquaintance with her over in his head, he would actually say she was a very…sexual creature. A sexual creature trying to not be a sexual creature. With her severely swept back hair and her very correct posture she was as uptight as they came, on the outside of it.
That she worked so hard at presenting a precise sort of exterior told him a lot about what she might be hiding beneath the façade. And once he had started looking, he had begun to find things.
For instance, the way she kept touching her own hands and arms, the way she brushed her palms down the length of her skirt and the fact that she did both very slowly told him she was deriving a tactile pleasure from her own actions. Her fingertips brushed absently at the nape of her neck, the small touch tugging at the short tendrils that had not been long enough to be caught into the twist of her hair. There was only the barest dusting of them, but she pulled them between her fingers and rubbed at them. Again, just for the sake of feeding herself tactile sensations.
“So…” Leo cleared his throat of the awkward roughness that barked out of it. “So, tell me a little about Night Angels,” he said.
She immediately frowned and narrowed her eyes at him. Those strange pink irises were so disconcerting in that endless sea of whiteness…white skin, white sclera, white hair…that he found himself missing that cat-yellow color they had initially been. They had been so unique, so intriguing…
It was clear she was second-guessing his motives. No doubt she was studying his spotlight thing and reading words that told her things he probably would prefer she didn’t know.
“What would you like to know?” she said at last.
Good question, he thought. He wanted information, but he had to be careful how he did it.
“Well…the foremost thing on my mind is about that light you said we all have. Is there a way someone could maybe, I dunno…lie to you or hide the words the light might show you?”
“We call the light a scroll. And everyone’s scroll is different, unique, and varied. There can be no absolutes and no way to make scrolls uniform. However, you cannot lie to me if you are not lying to yourself. You can trick me into perceiving a script—the words we see—that is untrue if you put a strong effort into it. For example, if you are feeling fear you can overshadow that script by putting a huge mental emphasis on the strength you will use to face your fear. But that is something only the most disciplined minds are capable of. There are very few people, both human and Nightwalker, who can deceive a Night Angel.”
“What does that mean…‘not lying to yourself’?”
“Let’s say that you were grieving a loss. Often a stage of loss is denial. A person can lie to themselves about a given truth. If you firmly believe and feel a lie is true, it will appear on your scroll as though it were a truth. We aren’t lie detectors. The ability is flawed sometimes.”
“I see. Still, it seems like it is a handy skill to have. I wouldn’t mind having it at my fingertips.” Especially lately, he thought, the understanding making him frown. It would be so much easier to know where he could put his trust if he could read what was really in the hearts of those people who surrounded him.
“This is a gift that can fall into the ‘be careful what you wish for’ category,” she said, all seriousness. “Sometimes it is better that you not know what is really in the soul of a person. It can be very…disillusioning.”
Leo could see how that would be. For instance, he wouldn’t want Docia to see past the image he worked so hard at projecting for her. He didn’t want the darkness in his life to spoil the way she felt when she looked at him and smiled. If she could read the truth on his scroll, she might never trust him again. She might look at him and see a monster. A murderer.
“I understand,” he said. He quickly pushed away from that topic and all the thoughts it evoked. He felt na**d enough around her. He didn’t need to help her see the darker parts of himself by mulling them over right in front of her perceptive eyes. “Where do Night Angels live exactly? I mean, given your coloring, it’s not as though you can walk freely in the human world.”
“No. The only time we can walk in the human world is when we are like this,” she held out her white arms in indication. “But even this draws unwanted attention.”
He could see that, too. People were obnoxious and cruel. They would stare and whisper, even in the age when seeing weird people and the things they do to themselves might be generally expected.
“So…?” he prompted.
“We live all over the world in special enclaves. Like the Bodywalker house in Portales, the homes are in the midst of a huge property, land acting as a buffer to the outside world. We tend to pick places with naturally occurring barriers, like mountains and cliffs…huge estates butted up against a beach and ocean or a great canyon. A dense forest or vast desert goes a long way to discouraging the average hiker. Then it’s only the above-average ones we need to be cautious of, and luckily those sort are fewer and farther between. And anyway if they made it to the property they would most likely be greeted with barbed wire and electrified fences.”
“Fortresses,” he said quietly. “It must be difficult, living in constant fear of discovery.”
She burst out laughing, the shock of it ringing against his ears in spite of the quick hand she lifted to cover her mouth. At his inquisitive look, she tried to press back her laughter. “Do you really think so? Nature has her ways of camouflaging her creations. Believe me when I tell you that we are equipped with all the means necessary to protect the outside world from learning about who and what we are.”
“I’ll definitely take your word for it.” He found himself smiling again. Seeing genuine humor on her changed his perception of her. It added a vibrancy to all that colorlessness, the smile accompanying it lighting her eyes as well as her lips. “Are there a lot of you? Does this,” he indicated her appearance, “mean that any albino I meet is actually a Night Angel?”
“No,” she said, more merriment in her eyes. “Human albinism is very much in existence. I would resist going up to an albino on the street and whispering ‘I know you’re an angel!’ You’d probably get packed up and shipped to the funny farm if you did that one too many times.”
That made him laugh, and he realized that was twice now that she had delighted him in under thirty seconds. It was such a strange feeling. For the past week he had felt like Chatha had hollowed him out, figuratively as well as literally, and that he’d been stripped of all emotion except for fear and anger. The latter caused by his acknowledgment of the former. He had never thought himself above fear, but he had never expected to be overwhelmed by it. Paralyzed by it.
When he came back from that too close examination of his demons, he realized he was rubbing taut fingers against his abdomen. Just the feel of his own hand against one of those tender spots made his entire body clench with a crippling anxiety he’d never known before. And that had little to do with the runnels of freshly made scars tracking over his belly and chest. It was more about the scars Chatha could not heal away.
That had been his sadistic power. The ability to heal. And he had used it over and over again to bring Leo back from the brink of death, making him as new as he had been in every way…save his mind. But the last healing had been done haphazardly, at Kamen’s command moments before he had made off with Leo, running from the god he had brought into this plane of existence.
He hoped…no…he prayed that thing found Kamen one day and quartered his limbs from his body…and then had Chatha heal him afterward.
The thought sickened him. Literally sickened him. He veered off the road, slamming on the brakes, the tires scraping in a skid over stone and dirt. He barely had the truck in park before he lunged out of the door, got his feet on the ground and puked his guts up. He hadn’t eaten much, his lunch having been a Jack and Coke, so there wasn’t much to give back. That was probably why it hurt so much. That and the fact that he was still healing from Chatha’s last time in the playpen so all the muscles he’d just used to reject his lunch made him feel like he’d been playing tic-tac-toe on his chest with Wolverine.
God, don’t ever let me wish that on even my worst enemy again, he thought, his eyes clenched as tight as his stomach was. I will not let him make a monster out of me!
His ears were pounding with the sound of his own blood pressure, so he didn’t hear her come up beside him. She touched him on his biceps and he jumped. It took everything he had not to grab her and throw her out in the middle of traffic. Throw her away. Just away…from him. Not touching him. He couldn’t stand being touched anymore. And he was damn sick of everyone’s compassion and pity.
“Leo,” she said softly, ever so gently as her hand went back to rest on his shoulder, brushing a path down his arm. “Your script is—”
Jackson. He was still wont to call him Menes, but in this lifetime, this incarnation, he preferred to be called Jackson. How odd that was, he thought absently. He had never conjoined with the soul of his host enough to want to take his name in place of his own. In fact, all Templars subjugated their hosts, pushing their second soul into dormancy and submission. It made him wonder…what if…?
Kamen shook his head. Now was not the time for contemplating follies that would eat up his focus and his energy.
“I will keep your friend safe while you are away,” he said to Leo, even though he knew the human male despised it when he addressed him directly. “If this house is attacked again I can get everyone to safety quickly.”
“Remember,” the Angel said, “do not move him unless absolutely necessary.”
Kamen nodded his understanding, then turned and left their sight.
CHAPTER FOUR
Leo couldn’t focus on his driving. They had climbed into a truck, one of the many vehicles kept available on the property, and she had told him to head east. So he was heading east. That was all she said. “Head east.” And not another word since then in the thirty minutes he had been driving. Now he was distracted because she was distracted. She kept turning her hands over, inspecting them front and back, touching her nails, watching them go white when she pressed on them, and then pink again as her capillaries refilled.
She was also fidgeting with the knee-length dress Docia had scrounged up for her. It was a pretty heather blue one with little blue and yellow cornflowers all over it and dark blue buttons running from neckline to hem. Clearly it had come from Marissa’s wardrobe, it being far closer to the Angel’s height and weight than anything of Docia’s would be. Docia was short and curvy, whereas Marissa was tall and…well…curvy. Though apparently not as curvy as the Angel beside him. The dress was pulled tightly over her br**sts accentuating their shape and heft.
Okay, he had to admit it. She was hot. Like scorching head-on-fire hot. Albinism aside, the minute she had fully turned parchment-paper white, he had finally been able to distinguish her looks in their entirety. Beforehand, with all that monotone blackness, he couldn’t see that she was…well…hot.
Gorgeous, actually. From gracefully rounded shoulders to her well-defined calf muscles, she was the kind of hot that would have kept her off all the fashion runways because she had curves and blatant female sexuality, not the stick-thin figures and drolly waiflike starvation victim look that supermodels were always striving for.
Oh yeah. She had booty. She had just enough junk in her trunk to make a man crave using it for handholds as he—
Whoops. No, no. Not that, he thought hastily to himself when, out of the cold blue tundra that had been housing his emotions and feelings lately a sharp streak of arousal began to stab through him, heading right for his heavily dormant c**k and the twin brothers attached. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.
Come on, man. Focus, he thought fiercely. He looked at the stark road laid out in front of them. Once they had left the city limits and caught the main highway out of Portales, New Mexico, they had left what most would call “civilization” behind. Traffic was nearly nonexistent and it could make for a pretty boring drive. So, it stood to reason that his attention might wander. With that and the fact that he was tired, he excused himself. After all, he had been up all night long, having shifted his own sleeping cycle to coincide with those of the others in the house. Maybe it was like when women got together and their periods started to synchronize. It had nothing to do with the fact that every time he closed his eyes…
So, mix in a pretty girl with all of that and a man was wont to let his thoughts wander.
Oh…wait…she was so not a girl. A woman, yes. But there was nothing girlish about her. In fact, now that he’d had some time to study her and replay his short acquaintance with her over in his head, he would actually say she was a very…sexual creature. A sexual creature trying to not be a sexual creature. With her severely swept back hair and her very correct posture she was as uptight as they came, on the outside of it.
That she worked so hard at presenting a precise sort of exterior told him a lot about what she might be hiding beneath the façade. And once he had started looking, he had begun to find things.
For instance, the way she kept touching her own hands and arms, the way she brushed her palms down the length of her skirt and the fact that she did both very slowly told him she was deriving a tactile pleasure from her own actions. Her fingertips brushed absently at the nape of her neck, the small touch tugging at the short tendrils that had not been long enough to be caught into the twist of her hair. There was only the barest dusting of them, but she pulled them between her fingers and rubbed at them. Again, just for the sake of feeding herself tactile sensations.
“So…” Leo cleared his throat of the awkward roughness that barked out of it. “So, tell me a little about Night Angels,” he said.
She immediately frowned and narrowed her eyes at him. Those strange pink irises were so disconcerting in that endless sea of whiteness…white skin, white sclera, white hair…that he found himself missing that cat-yellow color they had initially been. They had been so unique, so intriguing…
It was clear she was second-guessing his motives. No doubt she was studying his spotlight thing and reading words that told her things he probably would prefer she didn’t know.
“What would you like to know?” she said at last.
Good question, he thought. He wanted information, but he had to be careful how he did it.
“Well…the foremost thing on my mind is about that light you said we all have. Is there a way someone could maybe, I dunno…lie to you or hide the words the light might show you?”
“We call the light a scroll. And everyone’s scroll is different, unique, and varied. There can be no absolutes and no way to make scrolls uniform. However, you cannot lie to me if you are not lying to yourself. You can trick me into perceiving a script—the words we see—that is untrue if you put a strong effort into it. For example, if you are feeling fear you can overshadow that script by putting a huge mental emphasis on the strength you will use to face your fear. But that is something only the most disciplined minds are capable of. There are very few people, both human and Nightwalker, who can deceive a Night Angel.”
“What does that mean…‘not lying to yourself’?”
“Let’s say that you were grieving a loss. Often a stage of loss is denial. A person can lie to themselves about a given truth. If you firmly believe and feel a lie is true, it will appear on your scroll as though it were a truth. We aren’t lie detectors. The ability is flawed sometimes.”
“I see. Still, it seems like it is a handy skill to have. I wouldn’t mind having it at my fingertips.” Especially lately, he thought, the understanding making him frown. It would be so much easier to know where he could put his trust if he could read what was really in the hearts of those people who surrounded him.
“This is a gift that can fall into the ‘be careful what you wish for’ category,” she said, all seriousness. “Sometimes it is better that you not know what is really in the soul of a person. It can be very…disillusioning.”
Leo could see how that would be. For instance, he wouldn’t want Docia to see past the image he worked so hard at projecting for her. He didn’t want the darkness in his life to spoil the way she felt when she looked at him and smiled. If she could read the truth on his scroll, she might never trust him again. She might look at him and see a monster. A murderer.
“I understand,” he said. He quickly pushed away from that topic and all the thoughts it evoked. He felt na**d enough around her. He didn’t need to help her see the darker parts of himself by mulling them over right in front of her perceptive eyes. “Where do Night Angels live exactly? I mean, given your coloring, it’s not as though you can walk freely in the human world.”
“No. The only time we can walk in the human world is when we are like this,” she held out her white arms in indication. “But even this draws unwanted attention.”
He could see that, too. People were obnoxious and cruel. They would stare and whisper, even in the age when seeing weird people and the things they do to themselves might be generally expected.
“So…?” he prompted.
“We live all over the world in special enclaves. Like the Bodywalker house in Portales, the homes are in the midst of a huge property, land acting as a buffer to the outside world. We tend to pick places with naturally occurring barriers, like mountains and cliffs…huge estates butted up against a beach and ocean or a great canyon. A dense forest or vast desert goes a long way to discouraging the average hiker. Then it’s only the above-average ones we need to be cautious of, and luckily those sort are fewer and farther between. And anyway if they made it to the property they would most likely be greeted with barbed wire and electrified fences.”
“Fortresses,” he said quietly. “It must be difficult, living in constant fear of discovery.”
She burst out laughing, the shock of it ringing against his ears in spite of the quick hand she lifted to cover her mouth. At his inquisitive look, she tried to press back her laughter. “Do you really think so? Nature has her ways of camouflaging her creations. Believe me when I tell you that we are equipped with all the means necessary to protect the outside world from learning about who and what we are.”
“I’ll definitely take your word for it.” He found himself smiling again. Seeing genuine humor on her changed his perception of her. It added a vibrancy to all that colorlessness, the smile accompanying it lighting her eyes as well as her lips. “Are there a lot of you? Does this,” he indicated her appearance, “mean that any albino I meet is actually a Night Angel?”
“No,” she said, more merriment in her eyes. “Human albinism is very much in existence. I would resist going up to an albino on the street and whispering ‘I know you’re an angel!’ You’d probably get packed up and shipped to the funny farm if you did that one too many times.”
That made him laugh, and he realized that was twice now that she had delighted him in under thirty seconds. It was such a strange feeling. For the past week he had felt like Chatha had hollowed him out, figuratively as well as literally, and that he’d been stripped of all emotion except for fear and anger. The latter caused by his acknowledgment of the former. He had never thought himself above fear, but he had never expected to be overwhelmed by it. Paralyzed by it.
When he came back from that too close examination of his demons, he realized he was rubbing taut fingers against his abdomen. Just the feel of his own hand against one of those tender spots made his entire body clench with a crippling anxiety he’d never known before. And that had little to do with the runnels of freshly made scars tracking over his belly and chest. It was more about the scars Chatha could not heal away.
That had been his sadistic power. The ability to heal. And he had used it over and over again to bring Leo back from the brink of death, making him as new as he had been in every way…save his mind. But the last healing had been done haphazardly, at Kamen’s command moments before he had made off with Leo, running from the god he had brought into this plane of existence.
He hoped…no…he prayed that thing found Kamen one day and quartered his limbs from his body…and then had Chatha heal him afterward.
The thought sickened him. Literally sickened him. He veered off the road, slamming on the brakes, the tires scraping in a skid over stone and dirt. He barely had the truck in park before he lunged out of the door, got his feet on the ground and puked his guts up. He hadn’t eaten much, his lunch having been a Jack and Coke, so there wasn’t much to give back. That was probably why it hurt so much. That and the fact that he was still healing from Chatha’s last time in the playpen so all the muscles he’d just used to reject his lunch made him feel like he’d been playing tic-tac-toe on his chest with Wolverine.
God, don’t ever let me wish that on even my worst enemy again, he thought, his eyes clenched as tight as his stomach was. I will not let him make a monster out of me!
His ears were pounding with the sound of his own blood pressure, so he didn’t hear her come up beside him. She touched him on his biceps and he jumped. It took everything he had not to grab her and throw her out in the middle of traffic. Throw her away. Just away…from him. Not touching him. He couldn’t stand being touched anymore. And he was damn sick of everyone’s compassion and pity.
“Leo,” she said softly, ever so gently as her hand went back to rest on his shoulder, brushing a path down his arm. “Your script is—”
