Darkness Bound

38

Hawk dropped his hand from her face and nodded, and in the span of one moment to the next, it felt as if they’d come to some sort of silent agreement. A subtle change took place; there was a tacit understanding that they were no longer enemies . . . but neither were they friends.

What exactly they were was a subject Jack wasn’t inclined to investigate.

Turning her attention to the lovely array of fruit presented to her by this maddening, confusing, beautiful predator she was so determined to hate but unfortunately didn’t, Jack selected a dusky fig, pear-shaped and perfect, and began to eat.

They made better time through the verdant maze of the rainforest than Hawk had anticipated, primarily because Jacqueline was in incredible shape. Her endurance was remarkable, matched by surprising sure-footedness and that stoic resistance to uttering anything resembling a complaint.

To be fair, she wasn’t saying much of anything at all.

After she’d shocked him—again—by apologizing for her snide remark about his fangs, there had been a moment when Hawk had felt certain they’d reached some sort of new understanding. But she’d retreated from it like a snail curling back into its shell, and had barely spoken a word to him in the two days since.

Considering his conviction to keep his emotional distance in spite of their forced proximity, he should’ve been grateful. But gratitude wasn’t the word he’d use to describe his feelings about the silence that stretched between them. No. It was closer to raw discomfort, paired with a gnawing compulsion to ask her again who Garrett was.

He guessed therein lay the key that would unlock the thousand closed doors she kept around her heart. Though he knew he should let them stay closed, finding out what made her tick was like an itch he needed to scratch.

Maybe when he had all the pieces to her puzzle, the itch would be satisfied, and he could finally leave it be.

So when she started asking him questions—tentatively posed, as if both fearing and needing the answers—Hawk abandoned his prior game of tit for tat and simply gave her straightforward answers.

“How many of . . . you . . . are there, where we’re going?”

He held a thick, low-hanging branch aside for her, waiting as she passed beneath it. They were deep in the ancient heart of the forest now; everything was a tangle of roots and trees and fast-running streams, cloaked in humidity, teeming with an opus of birdsong. The occasional low rumble of thunder shivered the canopy high above, and, as it did most afternoons at this time, it had begun softly to rain.

“I couldn’t give you an exact number, but it’s probably quadrupled over the last three months.”

“Why’s that?”

He released the branch and moved ahead of her, careful to point out a log, on which she might twist an ankle, half buried in leaf litter. She fell into step behind him as he led them up a gently sloping hill, the trees above dripping water onto their heads.

“The other colonies have been evacuated here.”

“Other colonies?”

He stopped abruptly and turned to her. She halted and stood eagerly awaiting his answer while brushing tendrils of hair, mermaid damp and curling, off her forehead.

“Who, what, when, where, and why,” he said, debating. “Ever the reporter, aren’t you?”

A wry quirk of her lips. “Don’t forget ‘how.’ ”

Ah yes, as in, how much should he tell her? He wondered what Alejandro would have to say about him divulging this kind of detailed information to a woman who wrote for one of the world’s largest newspapers, then decided that Alejandro could go straight to hell. If he didn’t want humans knowing Ikati business, he shouldn’t have come up with this stupid plan in the first place.

“Five total, including mine. But only three of the other four have relocated here.” He turned and began to trudge ahead. She followed, right on his heels.

“Why hasn’t the fourth one relocated?”

“Because they’re ruled by a group of unusually stubborn males, that’s why.”

“So you—your kind—are ruled by groups of males?”

He chuckled. “No. Until recently, as a matter of fact, each colony was ruled by a single Alpha, chosen by Bloodline or the winner of a ritual power challenge. The males of the—” Hawk almost blurted out “Roman colony,” but caught himself in time. It would be sheer stupidity to give away specific locations. “The colony ruled by the group of stubborn males is an anomaly. Their Alpha was killed, and his personal retinue of guards decided to rule as a united council instead of selecting a new Alpha. But that’s not the norm for the Ikati. We’re very hierarchical. Something like your military, with everyone having specific positions and orders coming down from the top. We’re not a species prone to democracy,” he added sourly.

“You said ‘until recently.’ What happened recently?”

Sharp as a tack. No wonder she made a good reporter.

“Recently,” Hawk drawled, ducking under a tangle of vines hanging down from the thick stand of trees that flanked them, “we crowned a half-Blood Queen with a fondness for more . . . progressive ideals.”

“What’s a half-Blood?”

“A crossbreed. Half human, half Ikati.”

Jack stopped dead in her tracks.

He turned to look at her, and she was staring at him in utter astonishment, her eyes popped so wide he could see white all around her irises.

“Yes, we can breed with you,” he said in response to her obvious shock. “And to answer to your next question: no. There aren’t many half-Bloods. It’s forbidden for us to mate with humans, as a matter of fact, but it does occasionally happen.