FIFTEEN
Aiden’s stomach twisted as he led Leila back to where he’d parked the car.
He’d told her that he would never hurt her. What a lie! If his mission demanded it, he would have to kill her. Should the council alter their votes and decide at a later time that Leila needed to be eliminated to keep humankind safe, he would have to follow their orders, knowing that if he didn’t, two things would happen: he’d be punished for disobedience, and humans would be in a hell lot of trouble. The first consequence he could handle; the second one was unacceptable.
However, would he really do it? Would he be capable of driving his knife into her sweet body and draining the life from her, when what he really wanted was to see her live, laugh, breathe, and most of all, love? Would he waver in his duty in the end because she meant something to him?
He tried to shake off the thought, but it only pushed another problem to the forefront.
He’d told her that by touching her, he could make her invisible. He hadn’t lied outright, but he’d simply omitted that he could also render her invisible just with the power of his mind. No touching would be necessary. He let her believe that if she wanted to remain invisible to the demons, she would have to allow him to touch her. He should correct his omission right now.
He hesitated for a moment. If she believed that she needed to remain physically close to him to be cloaked, at least it would be easier to protect her. She wouldn’t bolt again. And it would save him from divulging even more information about Stealth Guardians than he wanted to give. But she had a right to know the truth. He would correct her assumption as soon as they were at a safe place where he had time to explain everything to her, lay out the ground rules, and answer the many questions she would surely have.
“Where are we going?” Her voice trembled as she rushed to keep up with his long strides.
“A safe house.”
There were several in the city: inconspicuous and staffed with humans loyal to their cause, humans who owed them something.
Aiden pulled his smartphone from his jacket pocket and punched in a code. A moment later, an App loaded. He entered another code and allowed the system to calculate. While he knew each safe house in this city, since this was his home base, he didn’t know if any of them were already taken. It would be against protocol to go to a safe house when another Stealth Guardian had already taken one of his charges there. It would only endanger others.
When a map pulled up, only one red dot blinked: the only safe house available to them. He swiped his finger over it to claim it and thus alert them to his imminent arrival. A bubble appeared on the screen, reading Notify second?. He pressed yes, then switched off the phone, so nobody else would be able to track him.
“Let’s go.”
He ushered Leila into the car, and she complied without protest. Maybe seeing her boss’s dead body had finally driven reality home and made her understand that she had to trust him if she didn’t want to meet with the same fate. Aiden turned on the engine and hit the gas, leaving Inter Pharma and the police in his rear view mirror.
“Tell me about the demons.”
He tossed her a sideways glance, surprised at her question. He’d thought she would want to block out everything she’d seen and not talk about it. Apparently he’d been wrong about her. Maybe she was stronger than he suspected.
Easing the car into traffic, he thought briefly about where to start. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything: what they look like; their motivation, strengths, weaknesses, where they hide, how they operate—”
“Whoa, whoa, that’s quite enough to start with. Besides, I don’t have answers to all of your questions.”
“How can you still hide things from me after all that . . . ” She tossed her head toward the window, indicating what they’d left behind. “. . . that happened there?”
He looked at her, his heart rate spiking at her accusation. Why did he even care what she thought of him? Yet he couldn’t deny that he did. He didn’t want her to think of him as the enemy.
“I’m not. I don’t have all the answers. Do you really think we wouldn’t have taken the demons out if we knew where they were hiding?” He kept his voice calm despite the storm that was raging inside him.
“Oh.” She wrapped her arms around her torso and looked straight ahead. “Then how about all the other stuff?”
He lifted a hand from the steering wheel and ran it through his hair. “They’ve been around since the Dark Days. Nobody knows how—”
“What are the Dark Days?” she interrupted.
He sighed. “I’m getting to it. Patience.” When he looked at her, he noticed how tightly she clamped her arms over each other. Instantly, concern flooded his cells. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong? Isn’t that pretty clear? Demons killed my boss, and now they’re after me. What if they catch up with us and see me? I’m not invisible anymore.”
He opened his mouth to correct her, but before he could find the right words, she gave him a pleading look.
“Please.” Her hand slid onto his thigh. “I need to stay invisible.”
The warmth emanating from her palm seared his flesh. It felt good, way too good to admit now that she’d been cloaked all along, ever since he’d caught up with her at her lab. He should come clean right now and not leave her in this false belief, tell her that it wasn’t necessary for her to touch him.
“Leila . . . ”
“The demons . . . ” she prompted.
Aiden cleared his throat, but he was unable to make a confession cross his lips. Was it rasen that made him react like this when he should tell her the truth about cloaking instead? Yet he couldn’t. He admitted it to himself: he was weak. And when Leila touched him, he couldn’t think clearly.
“The demons . . . ,” he answered instead, “they live in a place we call the Underworld for lack of a better term. They enter and exit it through portals, but we don’t know whether these so-called portals are stationary or not, or where they are. We’ve only seen them when fighting demons, but we’ve never been able to go through one, and it seems that they vanish when the demons disappear.”
He glanced at her, making sure he hadn’t lost her with his talk. “Have you ever watched Stargate?”
She nodded.
“It’s a little like that. The demons step through it, and they’re gone. Presumably to their lair in the Underworld.” He deliberately didn’t mention a word about the fact that he and his kind also had portals. It was better that she didn’t know about that. She would never get to see one, and there was such a thing as too much information.
“So they come out at will?”
“Pretty much.”
“How do you fight them?”
“They’re immune to human weapons,” he continued and heard her mutter softly.
“Figures.”
“However, the Stealth Guardians have weapons against them. Any weapon, blade, dagger, sword or the like that was forged in the Dark Days has the power to injure or kill a demon. It’s the only thing they are vulnerable to.”
From the corner of his eye he noticed her part her lips and instantly figured what she wanted to ask.
“The Dark Days? It was when Stealth Guardians came into existence. Our race is descended from a tribe in the Outer Hebrides, off the Scottish mainland. They were knights, warriors who protected their islands from intruders by shrouding them in a dense fog that no eyes could penetrate. Any would-be invaders simply sailed past them, never knowing there was any land in sight.”
Leila sucked in an audible breath. “Is that what you do? Hide people in a cloud of fog?”
Aiden cast her a quick smile. “No. Our powers have evolved over the centuries. We no longer need the fog to hide ourselves or the people around us. We simply render them invisible.”
And could do so selectively. If he chose, he could keep her cloaked from the demons, yet visible to humans.
“What do the demons want?”
He sighed. Leila was a veritable waterfall of questions. Knowing that she was a scientist, he should have guessed that would be the case. “What does anybody want? Power, domination, survival.”
She made an impatient hand movement, dismissing his answer. “No, what do they really want? They must have an agenda, a mission.”
“That is their mission: to gain power over humans, to seduce humans to do their bidding, to fuel the fear in this world, so they can feed off it.”
“They feed off fear?”
“That’s what makes them stronger. The more fear there is in this world, the stronger the demons. In times of war and uncertainty, they grow more powerful. During the Cuban Missile Crisis we had our hands full. Only the actions of a decisive leader were able to turn the situation around.”
“The Stealth Guardians defused the crisis?” she asked.
“Only indirectly. We don’t interfere in your world directly. We’re only there to protect those humans who can in some way help their own race get stronger again. We protected several key figures in the US government, who were instrumental in reaching an agreement with the Russians to end the crisis. We made sure the demons had no influence over them.”
“You mean you can somehow stop them?”
Aiden shook his head. It wasn’t that easy. “All we can do is hide those humans who your race can’t do without and help them achieve their purpose in life, whether that is to act as a peace keeper, a brilliant inventor, or a scientist. But the rest is up to the humans. We can only guide them on the right path; we can’t force them to stay on it.”
He glanced at her. Their gazes clashed, and he noticed that realization had suddenly sunk in.
“What happens when the human you’re protecting can’t fight off the influence of the demons?”
Aiden pressed his lips together. He hadn’t expected her to ask him this question. And he wasn’t prepared to answer it.
“Tell me. What happens to those who do what the demons want?”
Her eyes drilled into him, and he knew she wouldn’t rest until he gave her an answer. And for once, he couldn’t lie.
“We are forced to eliminate them.”
Before they kill one of our own, he wanted to add. Like they’d killed his sister. But he couldn’t confide this in Leila. And he shouldn’t want to feel this need to explain his reasoning to her. But for some inexplicable reason, he wanted her to understand why he had to do what he had to do. And he didn’t like that feeling of vulnerability it evoked in him.