Burned (House of Night #7)(77)

Unbidden, the words of Darkness echoed through his mind: You are your father's son. Like him, you have chosen to champion a being who can never give you what it is you seek most.

"Father championed Nyx," Rephaim spoke to the night. "She rejected him. And now I, too, have championed one who rejects me."

Rephaim launched himself into the sky. His wings beat up, up. He wanted to touch the moon - that crescent that symbolized the Goddess who had broken his father's heart and set about the sequence of events that created him. Perhaps if he reached the moon, its Goddess would give him an explanation that would make sense - that would be balm to his heart, because Darkness was correct. What I seek most, Stevie Rae can never give me.

What I seek most is love . . .

Rephaim couldn't speak the word aloud, but even the thought burned him. He had been conceived in violence through a mixture of lust and fear and hate. Most of all hate, always hate.

His wings stroked the sky, lifting him ever upward.

Love couldn't be possible for him. He shouldn't even want it - shouldn't even think of it.

But he did. Since Stevie Rae had touched his life, Rephaim had begun to think of love.

She'd shown him kindness, and he'd never before known kindness.

She'd been gentle with him, bandaging his wounds and tending his body. He'd never been cared for

before the night she'd helped him out of the freezing, bloody darkness. Compassion . . . she'd brought compassion into his life.

And he'd never known laughter before he knew her.

Staring up at the moon, beating the wind with his wings, he thought of her incessant babble and the way her eyes sparkled with humor at him, even when he didn't know what he'd done to amuse her, and he had to choke back unexpected laughter.

Stevie Rae made him laugh.

She hadn't seemed to care that he was the powerful son of an indestructible immortal. Stevie Rae had ordered him around as if he was anyone else in her life - anyone who was normal, mortal, capable of love and laughter and real emotions.

But he did have real emotions! Because Stevie Rae made him feel.

Had that been her plan all along? When she'd freed him from the abbey, she'd said he had a choice to make. Was this what she'd meant - that he could choose a life where laughter and compassion and perhaps even love truly existed?

Then what about his father? What if Rephaim chose a new life, and Kalona returned to this world?

Perhaps that was something he should worry about when it happened. If it happened.

Before he knew what he was doing, Rephaim slowed. He couldn't touch the moon; it was as impossible as it was for a creature such as he to be loved. And then Rephaim realized he was no longer flying to the east. He'd circled and was retracing his path. Rephaim was returning to Tulsa.

He tried not to think as he flew. He tried to keep his mind utterly clear. He wanted only to feel the night under his wings - to have the cool, sweet air brush his body.

But Stevie Rae intruded again.

Her sadness reached him. Rephaim knew she was crying. He could feel her sobs as if they were in his own body.

He flew faster. What had made her weep? Was she crying because of him again?

Rephaim flew past Gilcrease without hesitating. She wasn't there. He could feel that she was away, farther to the south.

It was as his wings beat the night air that Stevie Rae's sadness changed, shifting into something that at first confused him, and then when Rephaim realized what it was, his blood boiled.

Desire! Stevie Rae was in the arms of someone else!

Rephaim didn't stop to think like a creature of two worlds who was neither man nor beast. He didn't remember that he'd been born from rape and sentenced to know nothing except Darkness and violence and service to his hate-driven father. Rephaim didn't think at all. He only felt . If Stevie Rae gave herself to another, he would lose her forever.

And if he lost her forever, his world would go back to the dark, lonely, joyless place it had been before he'd known her.

Rephaim couldn't bear that.

He didn't call on his father's blood to lead him to Stevie Rae. Rephaim did the opposite. From deep within him, he conjured an image of a sweet-faced Cherokee maiden who hadn't deserved to die in a flood of blood and pain. Keeping the girl he'd dreamed as his mother in his mind, he flew on instinct, following his heart.

Rephaim's heart led him to the depot.

The sight of the place sickened him. Not simply because he remembered the rooftop and how close Stevie Rae had come to death. He hated the place because he could feel her there - inside - under the earth, and he knew she was in another's arms.

Rephaim tore the grate from the opening. Without hesitation, he strode through the basement. Following the link that bound him to her, he entered the familiar tunnels. His breath came hard and fast. His blood pounded through his body, fueling his anger and despair.

When he finally found her, the boy was atop her, rutting against Stevie Rae, oblivious to everything else in the world. What a fool he was. Rephaim should have hurled him from her. He wanted to. The Raven Mocker in him wanted to slam the fledgling against the wall again and again until he was battered and bloody and no longer a threat.

The man within him wanted to weep.

Flooded with feelings he could neither understand nor control, he found himself frozen in place, staring, with horror and hatred as well as desire and despair. As he watched, Stevie Rae readied herself to drink the boy's blood, and Rephaim knew two things with utter certainty: first, what she was doing would break their Imprint. Second, he did not want their Imprint to be broken.