“Sorry about Storm,” Nathan said as they left the Rink’s parking lot behind. “He worries. My getting shot during the battle at HQ reminded him how fragile humans can be, and I think having someone to worry about is still an unfamiliar experience to him. He means well.”
Isaac remembered that. He’d been standing in the crowd of paladins, watching the demons and their human lovers inch away from the site of the battle. Two of them—Wolf and Malachi, he knew now—had been wielding guns to keep the paladins at bay. Guns they’d just been using on the possessed humans to keep the demons from escaping their broken bodies. And among them, Nathan had torn off his ring and thrown it to the rubble, bleeding from a stomach wound they were all certain would kill him.
“Did you have his blood in you at that time?” It was the only thing that made sense.
“No.” Nathan tipped his head back thoughtfully. “I think they pulled over on the side of the road as soon as they were away from HQ. They laid me out in the seat of Storm’s truck, dug the bullet out of the wound, and then Storm fed me his blood. It heals us quickly, as you know, so I was mostly fine after that. Groggy from blood loss, which seems to be one of the few things it can’t replace right away, but mostly whole.”
“Sloan blames you guys for that attack. Says you must have told the demons how to breach the wall, because it had never been done before paladins started joining the demons.”
Nathan scoffed. “That doesn’t surprise me. His hatred for all of us is insidious. It’ll eat the whole guild alive if he doesn’t stop it.”
Perhaps it would. Isaac didn’t know where the hatred stemmed from. Was Sloan too prideful to let them go peacefully? Was it a blow to his ego that some of his soldiers had walked away to find happiness with what he perceived to be the enemy?
“What do you think will come of all this?” he asked. “If they don’t stop hunting us, where will that leave us?”
Nathan smiled. “Us.”
“What?”
“You said ‘us.’ Shadrach won you over, after all, didn’t he?”
Isaac turned away, flushing with embarrassment. “No,” he said defensively, then realized he didn’t mean that at all. “I mean—he did, I guess, but I don’t?—”
Nathan chuckled. “It’s okay. It wasn’t that long ago that I was in your position, you know.”
“You and Storm?” he prompted, eager to hear if it was as messy and confusing for someone else as it had been for him.
“Yep. I asked Sloan to give the ‘traitors’ a chance, and he allowed it because I think he wanted more information about them. And they tasked Storm with being my point of contact. The moment I laid eyes on him, I felt differently. I’d never even thought about men like that in the past, but something about him drew me right to him.”
Isaac hummed, and Nathan glanced over at him.
“The same for you?” Nathan guessed.
Isaac bobbed his head from side to side. “Not the men thing, no. Sex in general, really. I’ve always found it… weird. Uncomfortable.”
Nathan laughed lightly. “It definitely can be, yes.”
“Shadrach just blew past all my defenses somehow. Right away, he saw the best and worst of me. I didn’t feelexposed or uncomfortable with him. Or—I did, but it didn’t feel like a bad thing. Letting those walls come down with him felt like a relief.”
He looked up to find Nathan studying him curiously.
“What?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you speak this much before, that’s all.”
Isaac frowned. “You get treated like a freak for long enough, you stop trying to make friends.”
Nathan’s face fell. “Did Maxwell really diagnose you with psychopathy?”
“No, but only because that’s not an actual diagnosis. He put it in my file anyway, because the guild doesn’t really care about what the rest of the world says. It was true to them, and that was all that mattered. Shadrach doesn’t believe it.”
“I’m not sure I believe it, either.”
“They used it as justification for the things they did, though. The punishments. The hard lessons.”
Nathan’s mouth tightened into a thin line. “My concern is that they did that for another reason.”
Isaac’s thoughts tumbled to a stop. “What? What kind of reason?”
