“Where is New York?”the knight asked next.
“It’s over twelve hundred miles from here on the eastern side of the country,” she replied.
The information Fate had instilled inside him told him how far away that was.“We’ll need to verify whether the human is talking about my brothers or if he’s just delusional,” Arkas decided.“Can you take me to the place where you heard the radio?”
“Sure,” Oaklie said with a grimace.“We can take a lovely stroll to town during a lightning storm.”
“It’s a pity you can’t wield lightning,” he teased her.“That sort of talent could have kept us safe from the humans who attacked us.”
“You’d be surprised what I can do with my skills,” she retorted.
“I can’t wait for you to educate me, female,” he said silkily.
Oaklie narrowed her eyes, then drank more tea.Clearly, she was wary of him now.He wished he hadn’t been so quick to judge her, but instinct had driven him.He’d been killed by her kind in past wars and they’d just been children.He shuddered to think what fully grown cambions might be capable of.
“I don’t think the storm will last very long,” the artist said when their silence stretched out.
“Did the trees tell you that?”he joked.
“I’ve lived in Tennessee my entire life,” she said.“I know what the weather is usually like.”Her tone was dry and lacked humor.“Then again, everything’s been out of whack for the past few years.The entire world has been in an upheaval with natural disasters, wars, famine, plagues and other problems.At least things seem to be settling down again now that the apocalypse has finally arrived.”
Sympathy replaced Arkas’ amusement.“Tell me about your family,” he requested, since they had time to kill.“You mentioned one of your brothers was evil.Eli?”
“Yeah,” she said with a scowl.“Not even I knew how horrible he really was.He stopped picking on me when I stood up to him, but our little brothers and sisters weren’t as strong as me.I caught him trying to assault one of my sisters a few years ago.”
“He was beating her?”Arkas guessed.
“I’m not talking about that kind of assault,” she said bleakly.“He was trying to take her virginity in the barn.”
Rage suffused the knight at the injustice her sister had endured.“What did you do to him?”he asked, clenching his fists on his thighs.
“I grabbed him by the back of the neck and hauled him over to the fence,” she said, gaze going distant as she recalled the event.“I pinned Eli against the logs and warned him that I’d kill him if he ever touched any of our siblings like that again.”
“Did he heed your warning?”he asked.
“Eli was evil, but he wasn’t stupid,” she confirmed.“He didn’t try to violate our sisters again, but he killed my favorite dog in retaliation.”
“What happened on the day of the Rapture, Oaklie?”he asked, still trying to control his anger.“You and Eli were both left behind?”
“I woke up at around midnight when I felt something weird happen,” she recounted.“I checked every bedroom and saw my family was gone.Eli was still sound asleep in his bed.I went into a panic, thinking they’d been kidnapped and searched the house and barn.I even ran to town to look for them.A few people were shouting that their families were gone.By morning, everyone in town who was left knew the Rapture had taken our loved ones from us.”
Her voice had gone husky with sorrow.He wanted to reach out and comfort her, but she was sitting too far away.“What did Eli do when you returned home?”he queried.
Oaklie drained the rest of her tea, then put the mug on the coffee table.She folded her hands on her lap and refused to meet his eyes.“I found him masturbating in my bedroom,” she said.“He thought I’d vanished as well.”
“That must have been confronting,” he said, wrinkling his nose.
“I said his name and he turned around to face me,” Oaklie said, squeezing her fingers together tightly.“His face lit up with evil joy, then he leaped at me.He grabbed me by the shoulders and shoved me against the closet door.He said he was going to choke the life out of me while he violated my body.”
She took a shuddering breath and Arkas snapped.He was scooping her into his arms before she even registered his movement.She didn’t fight him as he sat down on her chair and cradled her to his chest.“Tell me what happened, female,” he said gently, running his hand up and down her back soothingly.
“I lost control,” Oaklie confessed guiltily.“I’d always hated Eli and there was no one left to watch me take my rage out on him.I spun us around until his back was to the door, then I used my power to murder him.”
“How?”he asked, sensing she needed to confess it all to get the poison out of her system.His cambion was harboring deep pain and guilt over what she’d done.
“I did the same thing to him that I did to you,” Oaklie said tearfully, pressing her hands against her face.“The door formed shackles and held him in place.I looked him dead in the eye as I turned his body into a human pin cushion.”
Arkas could picture it clearly.Just like the men and women who were strung up on trees, she’d used the wood as spears to destroy her foe.“You did the right thing, female,” he told her as she sobbed.“Eli deserved his fate.You were merely defending yourself.”
