I squirm in my seat. “I mean, yeah? What woman doesn’t, at least to some degree?”
He nods slowly, gears turning in his head. “Then I’ll take care of that, too.” Before I can ask questions, he turns to Z. “So, Zayd. Are you really feeling okay?”
Zayd glances away. “Better than I’ve been, but it’s still there. Like a darkness in my peripheral vision, always waiting to creep in and drag me under.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
He offers me a sad, resigned smile that breaks my heart a little. “You’re my personal starlight in a desolate wasteland, giving me a light to find my way out, and my reason to fight like hell to get back to the man I used to be. Just keep being you, angel.”
“But maybe with less hurting yourself,” Stryker grumbles under his breath.
Brow furrowed, Zayd picks his words carefully, almost as if he has to search the deep recesses of his fractured memories for every one of them. “The Angel of Mercy.”
Stryker nods. “Yeah, our girl has built up one heck of an impressive reputation. Now we just need to get to the root of why it hurts her to use abilities she was born with, because I’ve never heard of that happening before. There’s got to be a reason, a way we can get her help before it does permanent damage.”
Zayd’s frown only deepens, eyes glazing over as he gets lost in his head. “I have. Someone came to my sister for help; an earth elemental. Every time he used her abilities, it drained him, and took longer and longer to recover over time.”
I sit up straight. “What happened to him? Can we call your sister?”
“I never memorized her number, everything was in my phone. I made sure to destroy it during the… fight.” Pain flashes across his face, eyes darkening.
Shit, shit, shit!
“I’m so sorry, Z, I didn’t mean to bring up a sore subject, we don’t have to talk about it.”
He shakes his head, that lost look still in his eyes. “It’s what they want, tried to get the location out of me.” He slams the heel of his hand into his temple and growls in frustration.
Dread grows in my gut as I share a worried look with Stryker. He approaches him slowly, careful not to make any swift movements. “How about you go lay down for a while? We can talk more later.”
But Zayd is devolving right in front of our eyes, wrestling with the painful memories that drove him feral in the first place. And I’m helpless to do anything to save him.
Some healer I am.
“You have to keep her away from them,” he pleads, whipping his frantic gaze up to meet Stryker’s. “I caught one of their scents around town. If they find me, I’ll survive it. But you can’t let them find out about her; they’ll never let her go.”
“Who?” he demands.
“Blood orange and leather. Red suns and swords.”
My heart skips a beat before kicking into hyperdrive. I’ve seen the twin swords behind a red sun a few times now. Once when I saved a griffin from a truck. Another when I rescued Yukina. And tattooed on the man that tried to kidnap me last night.
Which begs the question, if supernatural traffickers want whatever secret Zayd’s guarding…
His sister might be in even more danger than me.
Chapter 30
Devlin
I’ve never felt the level of cripplingrageas I did when my mate came home covered in blood and filled me in on her night of disaster. She clearly glossed over the worst of it to try and downplay things, but I’m not stupid. If Stryker hadn’t intervened, she would have been taken from us last night. Taken fromme.
I vowed to take care of her, and she was nearly kidnapped because I was careless.
Maybe Iamstupid. Otherwise I never would have trusted her brother to look after her.
Gonna have to put a tracker in that girl. Then no matter what kind of trouble she gets into, I can always bail her out.
The chaos surrounding me helps curb my murderous impulses. It didn’t take long lurking in the walls at the scene of the crime to overhear one of the cops saying they suspected the men belonged to the human trafficking organization they’ve been trying to nail for months, but every lead they chase down winds up a dead end. From there, I spent half the night hunting one down, because really, it’s not that hard.
