Embraced (Eternal Balance) Read online

  “Samantha is ours,” the woman insisted with conviction. The ferocity in her voice was unmistakable. “No court is going to take her away from us and give her back to those—those horrible people.”

  Sam had been adopted? Not that it mattered. Chase and I had been adopted. It never meant anything more than someone out there had cared enough to want us. To want me. Our own parents, the little I remembered about them, had been hard on me. My father, especially. I never blamed him. Somehow he’d known what I was from the start, exactly what I would become. He’d taught me to hate myself before I even truly understood what that meant.

  Sam would feel the same way I did. The Merricks had wanted her. Even if I’d known nothing about them from Sam’s perspective, I could see it in their eyes now. The man spoke the truth. He’d kill anyone who tried to take his child. And the woman, Toni, would defend her with the last breath in her body.

  The scene changed. It was the same house, but the couple was nowhere in sight. The furniture was different, too. Newer. It was still night, and by the door, two tall figures crept toward the stairs.

  I moved to follow, but something came out of the shadows—a man swinging a long, thin weapon that whooshed as it sliced through the air toward the intruders. One of the two men caught it and, with a laugh, ripped it effortlessly from the assailant’s—Sam’s father—hand. There was a scant beam of moonlight filtering through the window, and when one of the invaders stepped into it, I realized what they were. What this was.

  Demons. This was it. The home invasion that took the life of Sam’s parents and ultimately landed her in my life.

  The taller of the two demons grabbed Sam’s father by the throat and spun him toward the wall. “Where is the girl?” It gave a guttural snarl. “Tell me and I will let you live.”

  Not thinking, I rushed forward and tried to pull the demon off him. My hand went straight through it.

  “What girl?” Mr. Merrick’s voice was raspy as the demon’s hand closed tighter around his throat. “There’s no girl here.”

  The demon took a deep breath, then laughed. “I can smell her,” it drawled. “So much energy. So pure…”

  “How?” Sam’s father stuttered. He winced as the demon pulled him back, then slammed him into the wall again. “How did you find her?”

  The demon leaned closer, lips parting with a cruel smile. “The biological parents told us where to find the child, in exchange for their lives. You are being given the same opportunity. Choose wisely.”

  The man leveled his gaze at the demon. There was no fear in his eyes. No regret. Still trapped in the demon’s grip, he drew himself up as straight as possible and said, “Do what you have to. There is no child here.”

  The movement was fast. A quick snap of the demon’s hand and Sam’s father’s head rolled to the side, his eyes wide and unseeing.

  “The child is upstairs. With the woman,” the shorter demon said. It led the way and I followed, wishing to hell I could do something more than simply watch this play out. What was the point of this? To show me Sam had been adopted? To tell me that her real parents were monsters for having given away her location—which, going by what I knew, seemed impossible. A Pure was undetectable until death. That’s what Heckle told us.

  They seemed to know exactly where to go. In one of the bedrooms, Sam’s adopted mother sat on the bed with her hands folded in her lap. She portrayed a sense of calm, but her eyes betrayed her. I’d seen terror in my day—been the cause of a lot of it. There was never anything like this. I realized it wasn’t for herself. She wasn’t afraid of what they would do to her, but that they would find her child.

  “Your husband is dead. If you don’t want to follow him to the grave, tell me where the child is.”

  She turned, clinging to the illusion of calm, and asked, “What child?”

  What followed made me sick. They tried to scare her into giving Sam up, and when that didn’t work, they switched to other methods. They violated her in every way imaginable. It was brutal and senseless and even Azi wasn’t interested. Through it all, she maintained her will. She refused to give up her daughter.

  Through it all, I knew Sam, hidden somewhere in the room with us, watched. I’d known this had been traumatic, but it wasn’t until that moment that I truly understood what she’d gone through. What it’d done to her.

  The scene faded.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sam

  I was inside Rick’s house. I would know it even with my eyes closed. It always smelled like paint thinner and tobacco, with the soft sounds of jazz drifting through the rooms. “Jax?” I tried, hoping that whatever this rollercoaster was, it would eventually bring us together. But there was no answer.

  “Where’s Rick?” a voice asked. I whirled around, for an insane moment thinking the child was talking to me. He wasn’t, of course. He was talking to another boy. They were younger versions of Jax and Chase.

  Jax shrugged. “Dunno. He said something about going to the basement.”

  Chase nodded and bounded down the hall. He looked to be about nine or ten.

  Chase pulled open the door to the basement and peered into the darkness. “The lights are off. You sure he’s down there?”

  Jax walked up behind his brother. For a minute, he just stood there, staring at Chase’s back. It was like he was fighting some internal war. I saw it in his expression—the moment he decided to act. Like with the turtle, his eyes took on an eerie spark, part excitement and part regret. He raised his foot and, planting it in the middle of Chase’s back, shoved with more strength than any child should have.

  I didn’t have time to be surprised. As Chase’s shocked scream faded, the scene changed, and I was up in Jax’s room. He sat on the bed, staring down at his hands. There was a knock on the door, and a moment later Rick came in.

  He sat on the bed next to him. “You wanna tell me what happened?”

  “I dunno,” Jax said. He didn’t look up from his hands, but his brows furrowed with genuine confusion. “Chase fell down the stairs.”

  “He had some help,” Rick said.

  Jax took a deep breath. Without turning to his uncle, he asked, “Is it—is he okay?”

  “He’s got some broken bones and a headache. Nothing life threatening. You understand this is serious though, right?”

  “Dad said I was bad. He told mom I shouldn’t be allowed to live.”

  The surprise on Rick’s face was evident. Looking sick, he gritted his teeth. “He—it doesn’t matter. Your dad was confused. He didn’t understand you.”

  Jax finally lifted his head. “And you do?”

  Rick smiled. It was easy in that moment to see the relationship they’d had. It must have torn Rick apart when Jax left, even though he knew there was no other choice. “Of course I do. But you need to understand something, too. You are not bad. Not even a little bit. You need to get a grip on this thing, though.”

  A single tear rolled down Jax’s cheek. “I can’t. I don’t have a choice. I’m bad.”

  This time, Rick did raise his voice. He jumped off the bed and pulled Jax with him. “You listen to me and listen good! You are not bad. You are a little boy stuck in a horrible circumstance. You have a choice! You can choose to fight this.”

  “I wanted to hurt Chase,” Jax said. He turned to stare out the window. A shadow passed in front of the upstairs window next door. My room. “What if I hurt her?”

  Rick followed his gaze. “Who, Samantha?”

  Jax nodded.

  “Jax, I’ve seen you with Sam. You won’t hurt her.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Sam is your North Star, kid. You know you won’t hurt her.” He poked him in the chest. “Deep in here, you know it.”

  He nodded again, then turned toward the window. “I care about her.”

  “I know you do, and that’s good. It’s good. So you fight this for her. You make a choice to be good.”

  “I can choose to be good,” Jax said
as if trying to convince himself. “For Sammy.”

  The scene abruptly changed again. This time I was standing behind Jax. Not child-Jax, but an older Jax, yet not quite as old as he was now. This was sometime after he’d left home, I guessed. We were in a dark alley, and we weren’t alone.

  Jax had a man pinned against the brick wall by his throat. It was dark, but because of the streetlight overhead, I could still make them out clearly. The man struggled to breathe, his color changing from pale to reddish as he thrashed about. “You think it’s funny now, fucker?”

  The man clawed at Jax’s hands, but made no progress. A moment later, his eyes rolled up. When his body went limp, Jax let go, and the man fell to the ground. The slight rise and fall of his chest told me he was still alive, but he’d been beaten. Badly. His lip was split in several places and both cheeks were raw. Patches of bright red decorated his arms, and thick trails of blood below his ears and nose were half dried, like this had been going on for a while. Already there were darkening bruises and places where the skin was turning purple.

  Jax stood over the man, a towering figure, so vengeful and cruel. When he turned to leave, he looked right at me. He didn’t see me, but I saw him. The right hand corner of his upper lip curled slightly, and there was a spark of excitement in his eyes. Of utter satisfaction. As he started forward, everything went dark.

  Again the scene changed. This time I stood on the outer edge of a bedroom. It didn’t look familiar, but the two people on the bed were. Jax and me. His shirt was off, as was mine, along with my jeans.

  “Oh, God,” I moaned, arching into him. My fingers raked across his back, and he let out a hiss of pain followed by a wicked laugh.

  Despite the fact that this wasn’t real, that I was merely a spectator in Michal’s weird peep show, the sound sent shivers down my spine and goose bumps jumping up all over my skin. This wasn’t the past. I’d only been with Jax once. The future maybe? Was it possible that Michael was showing me that there was hope for us?

  Between the kisses Jax trailed down my neck, he whispered, “Just how badly do you want it, Sammy?”

  The me on the bed gave another ecstasy filled moan.

  “Say it,” Jax demanded, nipping the flesh at the hollow of my throat. “Tell me how bad you want it. Tell me to take you.”

  “I—” The other me gasped as he slipped his hand into the satiny material of my panties. “No. We can’t—it’s…”

  “We can,” he insisted in a deep, seductive tone. “We will. Your body is giving me all the answer I need, Sammy. You want me.”

  “I want you,” I said in a breathy whisper. “But—”

  He swallowed the rest of whatever protest I was about to make with a scorching kiss. It wasn’t really me being devoured by those lips, yet I felt it from the bottom of my toes, to the tips of my hair.

  Another voice floated from the darkness. A hulking form, vaguely female, stepped from the shadows on the other side of the room. “Do it,” the thing cackled. “Take the prize, Azirak.”

  My pulse spiked, heartbeat humming through every inch of my body.

  “Claim the Pure!”

  I blinked. That was all. The quickest flutter of my eyelids. When I opened my eyes, all our clothes were off, and Jax was inside me. And by me, I meant me. I had taken vision-me’s place on the bed beneath Jax.

  The moment it happened, I felt it. A single moment of utter surrender was all it took. The air in my lungs froze. Solidified. The world fell away. The pain was unlike anything I’d ever imagined. A million teeth tearing at my flesh. Ten thousand dull knives digging at my skin. A scream tore from my throat, but there was no sound. There was nothing. In that moment, I stopped existing.

  “Sam?”

  I whirled around, losing my balance and ending up a heap on the concrete in the same spot across the street from Rick’s house where I’d started. A vision. None of it had been real. Michael’s sick idea of a bad joke. Still, as Jax—the real flesh and blood one this time—reached for me, I couldn’t help scooting along the ground to avoid his reach.

  “Sam, you’re shaking. What the fuck just happened?”

  He reached for me again and I scrambled to my feet, putting as much distance between us as possible. “Don’t!” I forced in a breath. Yeah. Breathing was good. Necessary. “Don’t… Just give me a sec.”

  “You’re scaring me,” he said. But he stayed where he was.

  “I’ve been seeing—”

  “Scenes from our past, right?” He looked worried.

  “Your past, mostly,” I said.

  “What have you seen in my past?” There was a note in his voice that left me cold.

  “Nothing I didn’t already know.” It wasn’t a total lie. I figured the point of this was to show me that Jax wasn’t the docile, warm and fuzzy person Michael assumed I thought he was. I knew all that, though. I saw Jax clearly. He wasn’t a saint, but he wasn’t a hell spawn, either. He was flawed, but in that imperfection lay the man I loved.

  “That doesn’t answer my question, Sammy.” He moved in a little closer. “Was that—is that why you were near hysterical? Because of something you saw?”

  “No matter what I saw, it changes nothing.” And that was true. The vision wasn’t real. It hadn’t happened. It didn’t change my feelings for him. But, it had freaked me out. There was a reason I’d been shown that, and the motivation behind it is what scared me. “If you’d just give me a min—”

  “Bullshit,” he snapped. “If you think—”

  A rumbling noise cut him off, and the ground beneath us began to shake. Jax grabbed my arm and pulled me up, but it was too late. The concrete opened up and swallowed us whole.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jax

  One minute Sam and I were on the street, the next we were being choked down by the earth. It took a moment, but as my eyes got used to the dim light, I was able to see we were in someone’s kitchen.

  Sam stood next to me, rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand, and to her left was…Sam. A younger version, fourteen or fifteen. She stood in front of Kelly, head bowed and shoulders rigid.

  “I want the truth,” Kelly screamed. “Tell me who was driving.”

  “I was,” Sam insisted. She lifted her head, eyes meeting her aunt’s with a spark of challenge. “It was me.”

  “What is wrong with you?” Kelly raged.

  “Rick said I could pay him for the damage over time. He said—”

  “Do you think I’m a fool?” her aunt demanded, dropping her voice. “That I don’t know who was really driving?”

  “It wasn’t—”

  Kelly slapped her. The sound echoed through the room, and even though the moment was long gone, I was still furious. This was the aftermath of the night I’d crashed Rick’s car. Sam and I had both been drinking, and I’d been an asshole, insisting I was fine to drive. A deer ran out in front of the car, and I swerved to miss it but ended up veering into a tree. Sam made me switch places before the police arrived, telling them it’d been her behind the wheel. I’d already been in so much trouble. One more strike would have landed me in an entirely new pot of hot water.

  “You told me she was pissed, but that it was no big deal,” I said as calmly as I could manage. “She hit you, Sammy. She fucking hit you.”

  Sam ignored me, watching the scene unfold.

  “You’re going to let him ruin your life, Samantha,” Kelly barked. “The police chief says this will go on your permanent record. For what? To protect some loser who will knock you up the first chance he gets and then leave you hanging?”

  Kelly had always hated me, and I couldn’t give a shit, but I’d never heard such venom directed at Sam before.

  “I did what I had to do,” the Sam beside me said softly, looking away from the scene. “You can’t fault Kelly. She never knew you like I do.”

  I didn’t get the chance to respond. The room changed again, this time dumping us out in an open field. Michael stood in the shadow of a la
rge tree, arguing with another man.

  “You cannot do this,” said the one I didn’t know. He placed a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “It will tear our kind apart.”

  “It is already done,” Michael said, brushing the other’s hand away. “The inequality is unacceptable, Gabriel. It ends now.”

  “Angels,” Sam whispered. She stepped around me and walked toward them, enthralled by their presence. “But if we’ve been seeing things from our past, why show us this?”

  I shrugged and joined her closer to where they stood. “Who the hell knows? This whole thing is a mind fuck, if you ask me. That bastard doesn’t know anything about getting that thing off your wrist. We need to cut our losses and go find—”

  “Shh.” She waved at me and leaned closer to the arguing pair.

  “What brought this about, brother?” Gabriel took a step back and shook his head. “Things are as they have been for eons.”

  “Exactly,” Michael said. “We will fight for our right to be more than just drones. To matter.”

  Gabriel took a step back, stunned. “This will lead to exile.”

  “Then so be it,” Michael said, resolute.

  Everything grew blurred and watery. I thrust my hand out, blindly searching for Sam, but caught nothing but air. When it all cleared, I was someplace else, thankfully with Sam beside me.

  “Now what?” she said, glancing around. We were outside in the middle of a thicket. Several men approached from a distance.

  I took her hand and pulled her from the path. “No choice. We wait it out.”

  There were four of them, Michael at the front. Not humans, but angels. They stopped a few feet from us as two more came from the other direction to meet them.

  “Is it true?” One of the two asked. He was tall with blond hair and a thin mustache.

  Michael nodded and bowed his head. “I am afraid so. We are exiled. Fallen from His grace.”

  The rest said nothing, but there was a profound sadness in the air. Despite the fact that none of this was real, it stirred the demon, making Azi rumble with hunger.