She looked away from the human, from where Zacharel stood, and stared somewhere far away. Tears shone in those otherworldly eyes before she blinked them away. She would not break this eve; and really, this man would not break her for many months or even years. But she would hurt this eve. Badly.
CHAPTER THREE
THE MOMENT ZACHAREL FLEW out of the room, the fissure inside his chest elongated, and he would have sworn he heard ice cracking. Would a few words with the doctor truly be considered interfering? he wondered, slowing down. Afterward, he could return to his cloud, forget the female and continue on the way he had always continued on, alone, unaffected and unconcerned. The way he liked it. The way his Deity probably preferred it.
Very well. He was decided.
Zacharel returned to the room and materialized in front of the human male. A male who deserved to die for his crimes. But Zacharel would not be the one to harm him. He could only content himself with the knowledge that the doctor would one day reap a harvest of all the evil he had sown. Everyone always did.
Before the man could panic, Zacharel peered deeply into his eyes and said coldly, “You have something better to do.”
The doctor flinched and, snared by the ring of truth in Zacharel’s tone, replied, “Something better. Yes. I do.”
See? Zacharel wasn’t interfering as much as helping the doctor rediscover…whatever he considered better than harming one of his patients. “You will leave this room. You will not come back. You will not remember this night.”
A nod, and the man turned on his heel, rapped on the door.
Zacharel shielded himself inside a pocket of air as a surprised guard stepped into the room and looked the girl over. “All done, Dr. Fitzherbert? I thought you said you’d take a while.”
“Yes, I’m all done” was the monotone reply. “I will leave now. I have something better to do.”
“O-kay.”
Once again Zacharel found himself alone with the girl. He stepped from his shelter.
“I thought you weren’t going to save me,” she whispered, still looking somewhere outside the room. What did she see with those eyes?
Beautiful eyes, if he cared about that kind of thing—which he did not. “You asked if I had come to save you, and I had not. I came for another reason.”
“Oh.” She cleared her throat, swallowed. “Well, thank you anyway. For sending him away, I mean.”
Huh. Zacharel liked hearing thank-you from her lips. As rusty as her tone had been, he suspected she had not uttered those words very often. Perhaps she simply hadn’t had reason to—and why was his chest aching again? “What would he have done to you?”
Silence.
“Hurt you, then.” That, Zacharel had already guessed. “Has he hurt you before?”
More silence.
“That’s a yes.” Killing humans wasn’t something Zacharel usually enjoyed, but it wasn’t something he detested, either. He would do anything to anyone and never experience a moment of remorse. However, ripping the doctor’s heart out of his chest might have given him a small thrill. “Correct?”
And even more silence.
I’m being purposely ignored. Never before had he been disregarded. Not even by his men! Feral as they were, even they listened to him—before blatantly disobeying him. And his former leader, Lysander, had taken his every word under advisement. What’s more, the only beings outside of his race that he counted as…what? Not friends, but not potential targets for elimination, either. The demon-possessed immortals known as the Lords of the Underworld had fought beside him and earned his respect for resisting the evil of their demons so forcefully. They had always watched him with rapt fascination. The few humans to see him throughout the centuries had been utterly mesmerized.
That this tiny fluff of nothing so easily dismissed him was baffling.
Before he could decide how best to handle this, Thane walked through the far wall. Fury crackled over his expression the moment he spotted the girl. He did not question Zacharel, however. A small blessing.