Not after he’d led some of the Order’s finest warriors straight to their deaths in the middle of a godforsaken stretch of wasteland.
And for what?
A sense of déjà vu. A curious and compelling vision he’d been unable to shake or explain. Not to his team, and sure as hell not to his scowling father or the equally disapproving chief of the Rome command center.
“What I want to know is what happened after you and your men cleared that bunker,” his father pressed. “Why didn’t your unit report back to base per your orders from Commander Reichen?”
Micah cleared his throat. “Because I issued different orders to my men . . . sir.”
The admission of insubordination was met with silence from the Order elders. They exchanged a grave look before Tegan’s eyes cut back to him. “I hope you’ve got a damn good reason. Especially when you’re the only one left standing. Barely, at that.”
He had never lied to his parents, not once.
He’d never lied to the Order’s leadership, either. As much as he might want to deny the stupid mistake that cost so heavily, he wasn’t about to offer anything other than the truth now. If it meant the end of his time as a warrior, so be it. God knew, he deserved that and more.
“I don’t have a good reason for taking my team deeper into the interior that night. All I had was . . . a sense that I had to go in. I felt as if . . . as if something was pulling me forward, deeper into the taiga. The farther we went, the more barren the terrain became. The foliage disappeared. The trees were black, the ground like loose rubble under our boots.”
“The Deadlands,” his father confirmed, his voice low. “That might explain why your communication links abruptly went silent. About ten years ago, some kind of incident decimated a large swath of land in that region.”
“Hundreds of thousands of acres,” Lazaro interjected. “As I recall, there was a lot of finger-pointing, but no one has ever accepted responsibility or offered a full explanation for what happened. All we know for certain is that someone either fumbled or deliberately deployed a massive chemical weapon in the region.”
“Possibly,” Tegan said, his expression skeptical. He swung that dubious look back to his son. “What happened when you reached the Deadlands?”
“I led the team deeper into the black trees. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew something waited for me. Then, I saw the white doe.”
He stopped there, trying to decide how best to explain the most insane part of the story. Not that he should worry about that. The two commanders were already looking at him as if he’d lost his mind.
Tegan shook his head. “What white doe?”
“The one I’d been dreaming about for more than a week. Every time I slept, the same thing happened. The doe appeared and led me into a barren stretch of woods. It always ran ahead, just long enough for me to reach it, as if it wanted me to follow.”
A dark look stormed in his father’s eyes. “Are you telling me this dream is the reason you ignored mission procedure and a direct order from your commander to go trekking off on your own?”
Fuck. Although he spoke evenly, the incredulity and anger in that restrained tone were obvious. Micah understood it, but he was also fully cognizant of the fact that the two of them were cut from the same cloth. If the situation had been reversed and Tegan had felt the same inexplicable impulse to see what lurked in that forest wasteland, he wouldn’t have waited around for anyone’s blessing or permission, either.
Not that it excused Micah’s actions. Especially when those actions had come at such a steep cost to his friends and comrades.
“This time, the doe wasn’t a dream. It was real. And it wasn’t alone. That Atlantean female upstairs in the mansion was in the charred forest along with it. She ran as soon as she saw me. At first, I was concerned about her being in that place alone. But once I caught up to her and saw her palms glowing with Atlantean fire . . . by then, it was too late. The forest erupted. The light was searing. I heard my teammates scream in agony in the distance behind me as the sky lit up with the heat of a hundred suns. Then everything went black.”
His father said nothing, staring at him in a silence that seemed to roil with unspoken reactions. Shock. Confusion. Perhaps even a small measure of relief that his only son had been spared.
Disappointment in him as a fellow warrior, no doubt.
Micah had made a point all his life to excel in whatever he undertook. He didn’t make mistakes. He was never ruled by impulse or emotion, even to the point of machine-like coldness, according to the reputation he’d deservedly earned.
His instincts as a warrior had been flawless—until now.
“My God,” Lazaro murmured in the quiet that hung in the room now. “What you’re describing is nothing short of hell.”
Micah couldn’t deny that. Yet what he’d endured paled next to the fate of his team.
“I came to sometime later. My skin was blistered, peeling away in sheets with every movement. My throat felt scorched with fire. I could barely see through my burned eyes. All I knew was I needed to find my men,” he said, pushing on with the rest of his report. “I dragged myself back to where they’d been before the blast, but I didn’t see them anywhere. There was only ash and debris under me. It took a minute for the truth to settle in. My unit was gone. Somehow, I’d survived the worst of it, but what was left of my five teammates was scattered over the forest floor beneath me.”
His father’s measured silence didn’t break as he listened. His stern face remained unreadable, utterly still except for the tendon that had begun to pulse along his jaw. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded wooden. “Do you have any idea how lucky you were?”
That toneless question held more emotion than the formidable warrior would ever express in words. Micah knew that. His father was Gen One, among the first generation of the Breed. Hardly the touchy-feely type, even if he wasn’t centuries old and a full half blood-drinking, savage otherworlder.
Micah’s mother was the only one Tegan permitted past his walls. There had been a time when Micah was a boy that he’d known some of that unguarded caring, too, but those years were long gone. The door seemed closed to him completely the day he’d announced his intention to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a warrior.
