Chapter eleven
Idon’t feel his men anymore, and I pray it’s distance, not death.
We arrive at the edge of the highway after what feels like hours in the bitter cold but was probably only a few minutes.
Micah cuts us onto the pavement and barrels toward an eighteen-wheeler sitting in the emergency lane, the door open.
Micah launches the snowmobile up the ramp, and then we’re under shelter, blessedly out of the winter elements.
The instant we clear the door, lights flicker on, and by the time my gaze reaches behind us to find no one has followed, the door is shut.
Another second later, the truck sways and begins to move.
With energy I wouldn’t have believed I possessed at this point, I scramble off the seat, preparing for confrontation. I have no idea who this man is, if I can really trust him, or what he wants from me.
He slicks his wet hair away from his face and dismounts the snowmobile with agility no one should possess after the arctic travel we’ve endured.
And when he turns to face me, I’m again struck by his predatory grace, a panther always on the hunt for prey.
Brutality beneath his surface as raw as his masculinity.
I oddly find myself drawn to that part of him, and I am terrified. “Who are you, and where are we going?”
“Micah Amor,” he says simply, as if the equally simple name explains everything when it explains nothing.
He walks to the corner of the truck and flips a switch.
Heating elements glow to life around the floorboards.
“Take your wet coat off,” he directs, opening a long, wooden cabinet attached to the wall. “You’ll never warm up with it on.”
He’s right. It’s heavy and cold, but I really don’t care right now. I need to know things. I need to know everything. “Why were you at that coffee shop? Who are you?” I repeat.
He abandons the cabinet to face me again. “I told you. I’m Micah—”
“Okay, no.” I hold up a hand I can barely feel for the cold-laden numbness. “What are you?”
“At my core, I’m just a man trying to do what’s right by saving a damsel in distress and figuring out how she got on Jeremy’s radar.”
“That’s…complicated,” I say, barely getting the words out for the chatter of my teeth. “It’s…cold.”
“Don’t be stubborn. Take the jacket off before you get hypothermia.”
I don’t push back this time. I shrug out of the heavy weight of it, and only then do I remember that my shirt is torn and my bra is all that covers a portion of my body.
I hug myself, flashing back to Ryker on top of me, pawing at me, a spawn of Jeremy, a demon and a sexual predator.
My lips tremble, the sound of movement jerking my attention to Micah, who’s approaching me with a blanket in his hand.
Still rattled by the Ryker memories, I step backward, distancing myself from him. With a clench of his jaw, Micah halts in response. “All right, then,” he says, “have it your way.” He tosses the blanket at me, but I miss it.
“I can’t feel my hands,” I whisper, and when I squat down to grab the blanket, just like in front of the coffee shop, he’s there with me.
He snatches up the blanket, and I sway, losing my balance. I tilt forward, catching myself on his knees. The awkward intimacy I’ve created is dashed by me smacking my forehead into his. “Ouch. Sorry.”
But when I would tug my hands from his knees, he covers them with his, the headbutt obviously not what is on his mind. “I’m not one of them.”
His hands on my hands could feel like a trap. Instead, they’re warm, and his touch radiates through me in a familiar way that I cannot explain. He’s not a demon. He’s not a man. He’s a Seer, I remind myself. Whatever that is. “What is he?”
“You already know that answer.” His long fingers splay on my upper arms, and he stands, taking me with him.
I’m instantly, intensely aware of my nearly naked breasts between us, though, to his credit, he’s a perfect gentleman.
He simply wraps the blanket around me, holding the ends together.
And for a moment, he just stares down at me, his blue eyes—so like my own—mesmerizing, and I feel that familiar feeling swell between us again.
Almost Deja vu. As if he too feels it, he abruptly captures my hands and places them on the blanket fold.
Once I’ve wrapped my fingers around the cloth, he steps back, placing space between us, but the truck jolts, and he grabs me again.
“You okay?” he asks, steadying us both, and his voice is somehow sharp and gentle at the same time.
“Yes,” I say, and at least in the moment, with him holding onto me, it’s true, but it won’t last, nor do I pretend the man I barely know is my salvation. Only I can be my salvation, and knowledge is power. And right now, I understand absolutely nothing.
“There’s a strap on the wall near the floor,” he says, “a safety measure in case the truck makes sudden movements.”
“For when the demons chase you?”
“Like I said, you do know what he is.”
“Demon,” I breathe out.
“Yes.”
“And you are what?”
“For simplicity’s sake, at least for the moment, call me a demon hunter.”
“He called you ‘Seer.’”
“Another name. Same me.” The truck jumps again, and he holds me steady and then motions to the wall. “It’s safer by the strap.”
Considering I desperately crave something to hold on to that feels real, something I can control, I happily head that direction, sink into a corner, and test the strap above me.
Micah shrugs out of his jacket and tosses it on the snowmobile, his wet shirt clinging to the hard lines of his obviously well-trained body, which, as a woman, I appreciate.
As a woman who is on the run, I value his conditioning as pure survival and decide it’s time I learn to protect myself and protect myself well.
Until I make that happen, and I will, this man has become my sanctuary.
If a Seer is even a man. I don’t know what he is.
I don’t know what I am. That’s the terrifying part of this equation.
Micah crosses to join me again and crouches next to me, turning on a small portable heater and pointing it at my feet.
Once it’s cranked, he returns to the cabinet, where he grabs a small drawstring bag.
I almost expect him to distance himself, to leave me in this desolate corner with no answers and no companionship, a stark contrast to Ryker throwing himself on top of me.
I squeeze my eyes shut against the memory, and when they open, Micah is squatting in front of me again.
“You need to know that when I first found out you were in the company of Jeremy, I marked you for death.” My heart leaps, and when I would dart away from him, all he does is hold up a finger that somehow stills me. “There’s more. If you want to hear it,” he adds.
“If you planned to kill me,” I say, “why didn’t you?”
“I put myself in your path at the coffee shop, and I sensed no evil in you despite the evil I’d found all around you.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“We both have questions, but I’m going to need my answers first. Do you know what you are?”
“If you had asked me that yesterday, I’d have said the foolish attorney who represents Jeremy, but that’s not what you mean, is it?”
“No. What are you, Ember?”
I hold up my hands and drop them again, at an utter loss. “I really don’t know how to answer that.”
“Did you sense evil in Jeremy? Did you know he was a demon?”
“Demon,” I repeat, and the word is poison on my tongue.
“Demon,” he confirms. “Did you—”
“No,” I say quickly, “but I’m a good reader of character. I don’t know how he fooled me. That’s why I went to his apartment that day we met. I needed to find him and do something to stop him.”
His brow inches upward. “Something? What?”
“I don’t know. I was compelled to go after him. I let him get away, and he killed those women.”
“What changed your mind about him?”
“At the end of the trial, he touched me, and—it was awful.” My voice is hoarse, and I barely recognize it as my own. “He showed me the murders. He showed me in gruesome detail. And I’m not crazy.” My tone firms. “It was real. It was so damn real.”
“That’s when you knew he was a demon?”
“I didn’t know he was a demon. That’s a horror movie, not real life, or that’s what I thought.”
“Then what did you think?” he presses.
“I was still trying to get a grip on what it meant. I thought either he was different or I’m different. How else could he put those images in my head?”
“It was a vision. Some of us get them.”
“Some of us?”
“You really don’t have any idea what you are, do you?”
“What does that even mean?” I ask, exasperated at this point, barely able to sit here like this. I need to move. I need to do something.
Incredibly, he seems to read me, capturing my shoulders and standing us both up. “Better?”
“As better as it gets while being hunted by a demon.”
“Demons,” he amends. “He has an army of followers. And when you don’t want to be hunted, you become the hunter.”
“Okay.” I give a choked laugh because I’m on edge, really on edge. I still need something. Answers will do. “Why do we have the same eyes?”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. That’s the right question, and your obsession with asking me about my eyes is part of the reason you won me over. You’d run from that part of me if you were corrupt. You did not.”
“Are we family?” I ask.
“No.” His lips twitch, a hint of light in his striking eyes. “I don’t think we feel like family, do you?”
No, I think. No, that is not what this weird Deja vu thing I have with this man feels like at all. It’s fire and light and something I cannot name. “Then why do we have the same eyes?”
“There are Seers, and there are Crystal Seers. We carry the crystal gene. Crystal Seers are a rare breed. We are the few. We are the leaders of our kind, so imagine how shocked I was to find you in the company of Jeremy.”
“I’m so confused right now. I’m not—”
“You are. Crystal Seers can sense other Seers. I can one hundred percent confirm that you are a Crystal Seer. Buried deep inside you is the ability to judge the same of me.”
“And why exactly is that ability buried?”
“Do you really want me to explain that to you right now? Tonight has been—”
“Hell. I know. Jeremy is the answer, right?” The question rasps from my throat, rough with dread. The road is steady for now, but my emotions are all over the place.
Micah’s hands slide to my upper arms, and he bends at the knees to meet my stare. “Ember, we can do this when we get out of the truck.”
“No. Please. Just tell me.”
He straightens and studies me, those otherworldly eyes assessing my mental state, I assume, which is a test I surely fail, but he gives me what I want anyway.
“We have gifts we’re born with, we call them assets, but it’s not until twenty-seven that we come of age.
That translates to us becoming powerful in ways I won’t explain right now. ”
The fortune teller, I think, my belly clenching. She said I was the end of the world. She said at twenty-seven I would be the end of the world. “I’m there now.”
“Right. This next part you will not like.”
“It gets worse?”
“When you’re past this, knowing the truth will be more important than everything you’ve lost. From what I’ve pieced together, the two people you know as your parents are part of the Corrupt.”
I go still, a tremble in my belly. “What is the Corrupt?”
“You’ve heard the human tales of the Illuminati?”
“Yes. People who sell their souls for fame and wealth.” I know where this is going, and it’s a bad place.
“They’re the same thing as the Corrupt. They’re human servants to demons who are paid in unique ways for their loyalty.
And yes, in this case, to Jeremy. I believe you were kidnapped from your real parents, and your powers were bound until they could be somehow manipulated and used when you came of age. ”
My hands go to my face, and my chin lowers.
This can’t be real, and yet, some deep, barely reachable part of me is screaming with victory that I finally know the truth.
Micah eases my hands down, and his touch speaks to me in ways I do not understand.
It’s familiar when I do not know. It’s right when all of this is wrong.
Because we are alike, I think.
“It’s a lot to take in,” he says softly.
“I think I’m numb. Or in shock. Or losing my mind. Where are you taking me?”
“You’re not losing your mind. I’m taking you to one of my garrisons.”
“And a garrison is what to you?”
“A secure facility under my command.”
“A prison?”
“No. It’s a compound of sorts where we live, train, operate, and most importantly, where Jeremy cannot get to you, should he follow.”
“Will he follow?”
“We need to regroup and figure that out.”
His cellphone rings, and he pulls it from his pocket, stepping away from me and offering me his back.
I rotate Micah’s direction, just in time to watch his spine go ramrod stiff.
Something is wrong. Oh God. Oh no. His men.
The phone slides back in his pocket, and he runs a hand over his hair before his gaze lifts skyward, and in that moment, I can feel him as I have never felt another.
Pain. Guilt. Rage. Rejection.
Death.
His men didn’t make it.
I don’t think. I don’t hesitate. I rush his direction and step in front of him, and when his eyes meet mine, all of those emotions he feels slam into me with a mighty force.
I don’t understand this Seer link or how it makes me feel this with him and for him, but my hands flatten on his sides, as if I might steady him, this stranger I’ve barely come to know.
“Jeremy killed them.” It’s not a question. His men are dead.
But even though I know it’s true, when he confirms, “Yes. Jeremy killed them,” it destroys me.
My hand goes to my mouth, and tears well in my eyes. “They were trying to save me,” I whisper and drop my hand. “Death has become me. You can’t take me to your garrison.”
He cups my face and tilts my gaze to his. “No. You didn’t do this. Jeremy did this. I told you he wasn’t responding to our normal techniques. He would not die. He is not what I thought he was, or he’d be dead and they’d be alive.”
“What is he then?”
“I don’t know. Not yet, but I will. But you, Ember Thorne, need to learn right now that death is a part of life.
Our job is to save as many as we can. Blame and guilt will destroy you, and it might even lead to more death.
The only way to make this right is to kill him. And you have my vow. I will kill him.”
Nothing has ever felt so right, I think, swiping at the dampness on my cheeks, rejecting them. They are the last tears I will shed.
Ever.
Killing Jeremy is all that matters now.