Read Online Beyond the Darkness by Jaime Rush - Free Book Online Page A

him. He had other scars, too, faint lines and scratches across his back. He turned and held out his hand for his shirt.
    “You were only a child.” Her gaze went to his chest again, beautiful, yet marred so viciously. The thought of it . . . twelve. She had to swallow it down, get hold of herself.
    “It was a long time ago,” he said. “Stop looking so mortified.”
    She blinked, erasing the horror from her expression. “Let me put some antibiotic on your scratches. God knows what that thing had on its claws.”
    “I washed with tea tree oil soap. It kills germs.”
    So that’s what she’d smelled on him. “Still, we should—”
    He took both her hands and his shirt in his grip. “I’m not a child anymore.”
    No, he wasn’t. If his broad shoulders and tensed biceps weren’t sign enough, the hardness in his eyes was.
    She released the shirt. “I’m a healer. It’s what I do.”
    He picked up a black plastic thing on a cord and put it around his neck. That’s what she’d felt earlier.
    “What is that?”
    “Knife sheath.” He shrugged into the white cotton shirt with a swirling black design on the back. The white set off his skin and made it look darker in contrast. He pulled a belt from the kitchen table, along with what she guessed were two more sheaths.
    “You’re . . . well armed.”
    He looped the two sheaths and the belt through his loops. “I prefer working with knives, but in hand-to-hand combat, they can be knocked out of my grasp. So I have backups.”
    She put her hand to her chest. “God.”
    “We’d better go. It’s not safe to stay in one place for long.” He dropped into the driver’s seat and started the engine.
    They headed back onto the highway. He fiddled with the stereo and turned up a Green Day song. She listened to the words to “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and knew Cheveyo had turned it up on purpose. The lead singer sang of walking alone, his shadow the only one who walked beside him, his shallow heart the only thing beating.
    She flicked on the overhead light, dug a Cosmopolitan from her bag of purchases, then opened it to the table of contents. A second later she closed it and laid it on her lap. “Cheveyo.” His name floated on the air for a moment.
    He glanced at her in acknowledgment but said nothing.
    “You knew where I lived.”
    “Yes.”
    “You knew where my bedroom was.”
    A slight hesitation before, “Yes.”
    “You’ve been in my townhouse?”
    “A few times.”
    She didn’t know whether to be shocked, violated, or exasperated by his lack of both chagrin and further explanation. “And why would that be?”
    His focus was on the traffic. “I check on you from time to time.”
    He would have just left it at that, too. She gave him almost a full minute to elaborate. But no.
    “You break into my home?”
    “If you want to be technical. I slip in, while you’re sleeping, make sure you’re all right.”
    The realization shivered through her, tingling down to her extremities. The image of him standing beside her bed, while she’d probably been thinking about him before she drifted off, mad, angry, frustrated. Gawd, had she said his name in her sleep?
    She slapped her hand on the magazine. “Do you get how wrong that is? You can’t be bothered to pick up the phone and call me. No, you sneak in like a thief.”
    “There was no point in calling you. Now you know why staying away from all of you is in your best interest. I told you I would watch over you. That’s all I was doing. I never checked on you while I was engaged, just so you know.”
    “Engaged? You’re engaged? ” Okay, her emotions were slipping into her voice, pitching it up a notch.
    “In battle with an Otherling.”
    “Oh.” Duh. She swiveled her chair to fully face him. “You once told me that we were psychically connected, like Amy and Lucas are. Lucas said he felt their connection since they were children. But they’d met as children, and that was why. How did we come