Page 74 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
“You must be cut somewhere, Olivia, that’s all,” Leander reassured her gently.
“Th-this is different. I can feel it—”
“No.” Leander interrupted her, his voice flinty cold. He repeated it again as he reached out to squeeze Olivia’s arm. She looked up at him, open-mouthed, white-faced, trembling. “You’re obviously just slightly injured. A scrape, a small break in the skin—you know it can be anything. There’s a cut you can’t see somewhere, something you did during our travel. Perhaps in the canoe; it was a bumpy ride. Even a splinter would suffice, you know that.”
The Alpha was staring at Olivia in unblinking intensity, radiating authority . . . and something much darker. Something that had Grayson prowling forward, his own hackles raised.
“It’s all right, everyone,” Leander reassured the group in a controlled voice. “I’ll stay behind to travel with Olivia and Grayson.” He broke eye contact with Olivia to regard the group of six guides. “One of you can travel with us, to show us the way. The rest of you can proceed ahead with the remainder of my group. I don’t want to delay the majority from reaching the colony and settling in.”
There was a moment of indecision, a slight hesitation. But they were accustomed to taking orders, so even though there was an unspoken consensus that something was definitely amiss, Edward and the other refugees from Sommerley followed as five guides turned and vanished back into the lush green landscape from whence they came.
Before stepping into the humid, leafy unknown, Edward glanced back one final time.
Leander still had his hand on Olivia’s arm. Grayson, still in animal form, stood beside her, a low growl rumbling through his chest. The lone remaining guide still waited patiently at the edge of the forest for the trio to move.
And the twins were still looking at him.
Smiling.
Three days. She can’t lie. This is what I’d do every day if I could.
The chaos inside Hawk’s skull was composed of howling winds, volcanic eruptions, and those fifteen words, repeating themselves with such vehement, shrieking force he wondered if he’d slipped over the fine line between sanity and insanity, and had finally lost his mind.
It definitely fe
lt like it.
Clumsy and distracted, he trudged blindly down the hill from the priest’s cave, bumping into everything as he went, not even bothering to slap away the low-hanging tree branches from his face.
Three days. This couldn’t be happening!
She can’t lie. That can’t be possible! Can it?
This is what I’d do every day if I could.
That one was the worst. That was the clincher, the lighted beacon atop this towering skyscraper of disaster. Combined with the impossibility of numbers one and two, number three was sheer madness. Because oh Dios mio . . . what if it were true?
What if it were all true?
Groaning aloud, Hawk put his head into his hands, which was why he didn’t see what lay on the ground in front of him. He walked right into it, stumbled, and fell flat on his face.
“What the . . . ?”
He leapt to his feet, shook his head, and looked around, hoping no one saw this display of complete idiocy, and realized he’d arrived home far more quickly than he realized, wrapped as tightly as he was in the tumult inside his mind.
But this didn’t look like his home.
In a circle all around the base of the large tree he called home were strewn flowers, a riot of orchids, water lilies, and passion flowers that carpeted the ground, thick and fragrant. Atop the flowers were bowls of fruits of every shape and variety, handmade soaps wrapped in squares of fine linen, candies made of boiled sugar and dried fruits, pottery and figurines carved from rare wood and jewelry . . . so much jewelry laid out on swaths of embroidered silk as fine and intricate as a spider’s web that the air glittered in fractured rainbow prisms of light.
He stood stunned, uncomprehending, until Morgan appeared, bearing a package in her arms. She came and stood beside him, surveying the scene.
“Well,” she said after a short silence, “I can see they beat me to it.”
Hawk managed a weak, “Huh?”
“You’ll have to preserve most of this fruit, though. There’s no way the two of you can eat it all before it spoils.”
“Uh . . . uh-huh.” He stared at the bounty laid before them, words failing him.
