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

to have this connection?”
    “I have always felt connected to you. I saw visions of you, felt your pain, your loneliness, your joy. It was like some part of me was missing, and when I saw you, I realized you were it. Our connection is probably because Lucas and I share the same father. Through our DNA connection, I saw you.”
    She was his missing part. Did he realize how those words stabbed her heart? No, not a clue. For years she’d had a crush on Lucas, who’d come to live with them when his sole parent died. She never had the courage to tell him how she felt, and then Amy came along and it didn’t matter anymore because they were clearly meant for each other. Now she wondered, had she transferred her innate feelings for Cheveyo onto Lucas? They had similar features. Hm, interesting.
    “What are you going to tell your boyfriend?” he asked, pulling her from her thoughts.
    Was he fishing for information about Greg? Well, fish away, buddy. She could play that noninformation game as well as he could. “What if you’d come sneaking into my home and found me in bed with a man?”
    He kept his expression neutral, but his eyes darkened. “I wouldn’t have stayed as long.”

Chapter 5
     
    S ometime in the middle of the night Petra felt the RV slow. She’d been lying on the bed dozing, as close to sleeping as she could get. Not easy since she could smell his scent on the sheets. Every time she drifted off, she dreamed of him lying next to her, touching her.
    She sat up and pushed the curtain aside. A dead exit, only a closed gas station that hadn’t seen a customer in years. She stumbled toward the front as Cheveyo pulled around to the back of that building and parked.
    “What’s going on?” she asked, hearing the fear in her voice. “Is someone following us? He found us, didn’t he?”
    He walked to the bedroom. “Calm down. Everything’s fine.”
    She released a breath. “Sorry.”
    “I’m stopping to grab some sleep.” Using his thumb, he pressed buttons on his cell phone. “The alarm will go off in two hours.”
    “Two hours? That’s not enough. I can drive—at least I think I can—so you can get more sleep and we can keep going.”
    “I only need a couple of hours at a time, and never more than four or five.”
    He stripped out of his shirt as he walked back toward the stairs leading up to the loft. Stooping, he set his cell phone and shirt on the floor next to the mattress, leaving the knife around his neck in place.
    “You threw away your clothes earlier,” she said, following him.
    “Bad energy, and for the Glouks, an even worse scent. You can never get it out.”
    Ah, the musky scent.
    ”Speaking of bad energy . . .” He opened a cabinet and pulled out a large shell that contained what looked like a fat joint but without the rolling paper. The flame of a lighter set the tip on fire briefly, leaving it in embers. He took a feather and used it to fan the musky smoke over himself and then her.
    “What, exactly, are you doing?”
    “Burning sage. It gets rid of bad energy.” He pressed the tip into the shell to snuff out the embers and returned it to the drawer.
    He cat-walked onto the bed, his hips swaying in liquid motion. Then he turned and dropped as though his bones had melted. Damn, he looked good, hair fanned out on the pillow, chest bare. The scar, though, reminded her of seeing him as a boy in the flashes of images. She liked the way the sleepy glaze in his eyes softened them, the way his features relaxed and made him look just a bit boyish.
    He tapped his hand on the bed, inviting her to join him. “You weren’t asleep for very long.”
    She knelt on the bed, her hand only a quarter inch from his. The urge to know him, to touch him, overwhelmed her. She held her breath to quell it, because she instinctively knew he would shut her out. To protect her. Because he hunted Otherlings.
    Maybe he would let her in a little. “Your father was a Native American, right? That’s where