Carved (The Road to Hell Series, Book 2) Read online

  “Gather your things,” I said, far more brusquely than I’d intended.

  My eyes fastened on her mouth when she tilted her head back to look at me. I recalled the sweet taste of her lips as the fresh rain and earthy scent of her filled my nose. My cock swelled as my desire for her increased.

  The fading marks on her flesh almost caused an involuntary snarl to tear from me. My hands fisted, my claws lengthened as I resisted the impulse to grab hold of her and claim her again. Demons would still recognize her as my Chosen without my marks on her. They would scent me on her, but I wanted the humans to know too. She was mine.

  “What are you doing?” she cried when drops of blood spilled from my palms to fall on the earth. “Kobal, stop it!”

  I snatched my hand away from her when she went to take it. Her touch was too much right now; I couldn’t handle it. “Don’t!” I hissed from between my teeth. “Don’t touch me right now, not unless you’re going to welcome me inside of you again.”

  The color drained from her face as she glanced between my hands and my face. She radiated distress, yet the scent of her increased with her growing hunger for me. She may have told me to get out of her life, but she would never be able to deny her attraction and need for me.

  “Kobal—”

  “I am on the verge of taking you right now, River, so either say yes and I’ll have you naked faster than you can blink, or get your stuff and let’s go.”

  Her body swayed instinctively toward mine before she took an abrupt step back. Disappointment crashed through me. All of my demon instincts screamed at me to take her, to claim her, to mark her once more. Beneath my skin, the hounds rippled as they howled their discontent.

  I didn’t know how, but somehow I managed to keep myself restrained from dragging her against me and crushing my mouth to hers. Unable to deny the desires of her body and her demon instincts, she would yield to me, but then I’d only have moments of release before her human side came back into play. Her anger with me would return, and she’d hate me more for it.

  I wanted her back, but she would be in my bed again because she chose to be there, and not because we both lost control of ourselves.

  “This isn’t what I wanted it to be like between us,” she whispered.

  “Isn’t it?” I grated.

  She recoiled from me. “No, never.”

  “Go, River.”

  She hesitated before spinning on her heel and fleeing for the other tent. She looked back at me from the flap and opened her mouth to say something but stopped herself then ducked out of view. My breath exploded from me.

  This was going to be an excruciating journey if I didn’t get her back soon.

  CHAPTER 5

  River

  When I finished packing and left his room, I discovered Kobal was no longer inside the tent. Walking outside, I found him waiting for me a few feet away and looking more in control of himself as blood no longer dripped from his palms. The sun beating down on him brought out the lighter strands of brown in his dark hair and emphasized the muscles in his arms and shoulders.

  Love and desire swelled forth within me, but I quickly tamped them both down. I’d seen the ravenous gleam in his amber-colored eyes as he’d watched me just minutes ago. More so than his bloody palms, those amber eyes gave away his lack of control. I knew they only turned that color when he was highly aroused or ready to kill. Since I knew he would never hurt me, it could have only meant one thing.

  The amount of restraint he’d shown only made me love him more, but I couldn’t give into the needs of my body and heart. It felt as if my heart had been carved from my chest and stomped into the ground when I’d turned away from him in the tent, but it was the best for us both, wasn’t it?

  My gaze went to his neck. My heart sank and something inside of me screamed when I saw the bites I’d left on his neck had completely healed and faded away. Any demon would know I was his without his marks on me, but would they know he was mine without my marks on him?

  It shouldn’t matter, but it did.

  He never looked back at me as he led me toward the twenty vehicles waiting to make the trip. Most of them were pickups, but a few cars were going too. The decision had been made to leave the heavy-duty military vehicles behind in case we failed in our mission.

  They would need the vehicles here to defend the wall and to recruit new volunteers if we died. Plus, it would be easier to carry enough gas with us for the smaller vehicles, and if one or more of them broke down along the way, we’d have backups. All of the vehicles were loaded with food, water, and gasoline. I felt like we would be riding in ticking bombs, but it was better than walking the whole trip.

  We’d been told all of the radiation from the nukes our government had released on the center of the country had been absorbed into Hell, where it had no effect upon the demons and creatures within.

  I didn’t know who the human guinea pigs were that tested that theory, but we’d been assured their skin hadn’t fallen off and they hadn’t sprouted tails. They’d also taken radiation samples and found nothing in the air. There had been some radiation detected in the ground still, but not enough to be a health risk or to warrant biohazard suits, though I still would have preferred one. I was strange enough without growing a third eye or an extra hand.

  What effect the radiation had on the life in and around the surrounding area before being absorbed by Hell had been minimal. Again, this is what we’d been informed, but I still couldn’t rid myself of the certainty we’d come across skyscraper-sized spiders and mosquitos, or people who had turned to cannibalism and now resided in the mountains.

  I shuddered at the possibility. They had said we would encounter many horrors during our journey, and after the madagans and revenirs, I knew they would be bad. I really hoped they were all demonic horrors and not man-made ones too.

  How much my view of the world had changed in two months was not lost on me. One day, I’d been hoping to catch a fish. Now I was hoping not to encounter mutated creatures but only things from Hell on our way to Hell.

  “We’ll be riding in this one,” Kobal said to me and slapped the bed of a white pickup truck before walking away with his shoulders set rigidly.

  With a sigh, I tossed my bags into the bed of the truck before walking around to the passenger side and the man standing by the door. I recognized him from the group of human soldiers I’d been training with for the past week, but we’d never spoken to each other and I didn’t know his name.

  He’d always stood out to me more than the others because he’d been the one to defend me to Eileen before she tried to kill me. He was also one of the men to have had the unfortunate experience of holding one of Eileen’s arms while Kobal ripped off her head.

  His indigo gaze ran over me as I neared. His dark brown hair had been shaved down to stubble. With his shoulders thrust back, he looked like a proud military man; the opposite of me. Extremely handsome with a square jaw and chiseled features, he had to be at least six feet two inches of solid muscle, but for some reason he appeared small and boring in appearance to me.

  A shadow fell over us, drawing my gaze to Kobal as he stepped next to the driver’s side door of the truck. He was why everyone looked so much smaller and less attractive to me now. His gaze raked over both of us before he tugged the door open.

  “Get in,” he commanded gruffly.

  “You first,” I said to the man and gestured at the door.

  I refused to be stuck in the middle of the two of them and so close to Kobal. I didn’t trust myself around him, especially not after what had just transpired in the tent. He was too much of a temptation, one whose lap I might climb into and tear the clothes from in order to get at the flesh underneath.

  The man looked like I’d told him to climb into an occupied coffin, but he opened the door and slid into the middle. Thankfully, the truck didn’t have a hump in the middle of the floor; otherwise, I would have felt bad for making him sit there. I slipped off the katana on my b
ack and placed it in the bed of the truck before adjusting the holster and guns at my side. Taking a deep breath, I slid into the truck and closed the door once more on life as I’d known it.

  The man hunched his shoulders up in an attempt not to touch Kobal or me. I didn’t feel insulted by it, everyone did that around me now, but I was beginning to rethink asking him to sit in the middle. The poor guy wasn’t going to be able to move after today if he sat like that the whole time.

  I ignored the hard stare Kobal gave me as I rolled down my window and draped my arm out to rest it on the hot metal of the door. I questioned Kobal’s ability to drive a vehicle until he turned it on and shifted the handle on the steering column into drive. Not like it would have mattered if he couldn’t drive, I didn’t know how to do it, and I wasn’t so sure Hunchy beside me did either. When Kobal wrapped his hands around the wheel, I was relieved to see his three-inch-long claws had retracted and his black fingernails were now back to normal.

  Kobal led the way out of town. He drove onto the broken roadway I’d often seen winding into the vast nothing of our country from the practice field where we’d spent hours training since I’d arrived. I now realized it was literally the highway to Hell.

  Looking in the mirror, I spotted the large group of volunteers, soldiers, and demons who had been left behind to protect the wall gathered to watch us go. There were so many counting on us not to fail. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath to steady myself. This had to work. I had to succeed, somehow.

  We’d barely made it a mile before the charred remnants of homes began to mar the landscape around us. Red and gray brick chimneys rose into the day from a few of the remains. Some homes had porches untouched before their crumpled walls, and others had half a house still standing testament to the lives that had once filled them.

  A lump formed in my throat when we passed a playground. Green grass had grown up to brush against the bottom of the swings as an unseen breeze blew them gently back and forth. The metal of the swing set sagged in the middle, bending beneath the weight of the rust eating away at it. The castle made of tires and wood had buckled and nearly touched the ground.

  Even falling apart, Bailey would have loved to play on the castle, and I could almost hear the echoing laughter of the children who had once run through here.

  I turned away from the playground and focused on the rutted and broken road before the reminder of Bailey made me cry again. Kobal slowed the truck to only ten miles an hour to navigate the road. We’d been told that if everything went well, we’d make it to our destination in a week.

  I highly doubted everything would go well, but I kept my pessimism to myself. I was already on the blacklist, adding a gloom and doom personality on top of everything else would only make things worse.

  My teeth clacked together, and my knee hit the glove box when we bounced over a large rut. Beside me, Hunchy hissed in a breath when the jarring impact almost caused him to touch me. I wondered if the humans would be so wary of me if they knew I was part angel as well as demon, but I’d been told to keep the knowledge of what I was a secret from them.

  To the humans, I was some sort of freaky human who could set things on fire and had been sleeping with the head-ripping demon.

  I wouldn’t have talked to me either.

  CHAPTER 6

  River

  A good hour passed with Hunchy trying to stay as still as a statue and Kobal glaring at the road like it was the enemy. The tense silence was starting to grate on my nerves when I finally decided I should stop calling him Hunchy. “What’s your name?” I asked the man beside me.

  He flinched at my voice. After all this time, I should have been prepared for others’ reactions to me, but I wasn’t as his flinch caused me to recoil. Turning toward the window, I fully expected him to pretend he hadn’t heard me as I tried to shake off the lingering pain his reaction had caused. They hated me so much that they even hated the sound of my voice.

  I lifted my hand to rub at my temples while trying to ignore the man at my side.

  “I’m First Sergeant Sue Hawkson,” he said from beside me.

  My eyebrows shot into my hairline when he spoke to me. “Sue?” I asked in disbelief, certain I’d heard him wrong.

  He flinched again, but I realized it wasn’t my voice causing his discomfort. It was my question. Turning toward me, his indigo eyes relentlessly held mine. “Yes.”

  I closed my mouth and blinked at him a couple of times. He had the weirdest name I’d ever heard for a guy, but who was I to judge? I was the descendent of ‘Don’t call me Lucifer’ Satan.

  “And I thought my mom made an odd choice with River.”

  His full mouth actually quirked into a smile. “My mom was worse.”

  “What’s so wrong with Sue?” Kobal took a break from glaring at the road to glare at us.

  Sue’s shoulders shot up to his ears as he leaned away from Kobal. I bit back a laugh at the motion clearly meant to protect his head and neck. Kobal must have recognized the same thing as he scowled at Sue before turning to focus on the road once more.

  “Sue is usually more of a girl’s name,” I explained.

  “Let’s not sugarcoat it. Sue is a girl’s name,” Sue replied.

  “Why would your mother name you after a woman?” Kobal demanded, ever the one for tact.

  Sue relaxed enough to let his shoulders down in a shrug. “She was a big fan of Johnny Cash.”

  Now he’d lost me. I stared at him questioningly, hoping he would explain further, but unwilling to push him in case he stopped talking.

  Sue ran a hand over the stubble on his head before speaking again. “One of his songs was, A Boy Named Sue.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m not sure I know that one.”

  “The father leaves, but before going, he gives his son the name Sue to make him tougher,” Sue explained. “My father was killed in a plane crash before I was born.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He waved a hand dismissively. “Years ago.”

  “I do remember that song a little.” I smiled at him, happy to have a human talking to me again. “So your mom believed the name Sue would make you tougher?”

  “She did, and like I said, she loved Johnny Cash.”

  “Why didn’t she name you Johnny then?”

  He released a snort of laughter. “I’ve asked myself that same fucking question many times over the course of my life.”

  “I guess I can see her reasoning on it if she believed the name would make you stronger.”

  “Can you?” he inquired. “Because I can’t. Most people call me Hawk, because of my last name, but having the name Sue was a lot of fun in grade school.”

  I bit on my lip to keep from laughing and leaned against the door of the truck. My gaze fell on Kobal’s white knuckled grip on the steering wheel as he stared between the two of us. He looked almost comical, crammed inside the vehicle. His head was bent to avoid hitting the roof, and if he’d had horns, they probably would have dented the roof if not pierced through it. His knees brushed against the bottom of the steering wheel.

  “Where are you from?” I asked Sue.

  “Falmouth.”

  “Really?” I perked up when he said the name of the town next to the one I’d grown up in. Not only was he talking to me, but he would also remember our home and the ocean. My fingers slid over the shells on my necklace as memories of the briny scent of the ocean water teased me. “I’m from Bourne.”

  He broke into a wide smile. “Neighbors. We used to kill you guys at baseball in middle school.”

  “Before my time,” I said. “After the bombings, I took care of my family, so I didn’t get a chance to go to school again for long, much less play sports.”

  “That’s the whole reason I volunteered when I could, so my mom and little sisters would be taken care of. My stepfather died of cancer when I was fourteen. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two, you?”

  “Twenty-five.”

&nbs
p; We fell into a conversation about home and what we missed the most. We talked of what things were like before the war and how awful those months after had been when uncertainty and chaos ruled. I couldn’t believe how good it felt to talk to someone who understood what it was like to leave home, to be here.

  Kobal didn’t speak or look at either of us, but I knew he listened to every word as his body became more rigid and his grip tightened on the wheel.

  ***

  Kobal

  Sue had been unmoving, barely blinking or breathing since River’s head fell onto his shoulder an hour ago. He looked like he might try and burst through the windshield to get out of here as he struggled to decide what to do with her and me.

  I would have found his dilemma and the expression on his face almost amusing, if the idea of her touching him didn’t have me so on edge. Instead of laughing, I was trying not to shove him through the back window so I could have her head on my shoulder.

  He seemed to understand the jeopardy he was in. I could hear his heart jackhammering in his chest, sweat beaded his forehead, and the pungent aroma of fear wafted from him. He hadn’t moved an inch the entire time she slept propped against him, too afraid to touch her in order to push her away.

  I could clearly recall how it felt when she’d rested her head against me in the past. The warmth and suppleness of her body, the smell of lemons and fresh rain that drifted from her silken skin had all become a part of me. Scents had always been something I was acutely attuned to, and in all my years, I’d never smelled or experienced anything as magnificent as River. Her body moving beneath and over the top of mine had been the most exquisite sensation I’d ever felt in my fifteen hundred and sixty-two years of existence.

  Having her hand over my heart and her lying beside me trustingly had been humbling. She was the only woman I’d ever slept beside for the night, the only woman I ever would. Being inside of her and claiming her had changed something within me, and then I’d lost her.