Darkness Dawns (Immortal Guardians) by Duvall Dianne

Author:Duvall, Dianne [Duvall, Dianne]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp
Published: 2011-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

All was quiet when Seth appeared in his Houston home.

Well, not entirely quiet.

The sound of rapid, jagged breaths drew him upstairs to one of the many guest bedrooms he kept for visiting immortals and their Seconds.

Darnell, David’s Second, stood in the hallway out of sight of the bedroom, brow furrowed. David stood in the doorway, hands raised in a gesture of peace. That, coupled with his height, muscled body, and blood-soaked clothing, however, apparently did little to reassure the object of his attention.

Seth brushed by both men and entered the room, pausing a step inside. No doubt he was equally intimidating, though, for once, he did not intend to be.

Across the room, the young woman they had rescued cowered on the floor, squeezed into a corner between a dresser and the wall.

“What happened?” he asked David, his eyes on the woman.

“She awoke shortly after I began to heal her and panicked,” David murmured. “With those wounds, she shouldn’t move. But I couldn’t bring myself to restrain her. I didn’t want to frighten her.” He shrugged helplessly. “I’ve tried talking to her, but she doesn’t respond. Mine is not the voice she is accustomed to hearing in her head.”

Seth nodded and took a step toward her.

The woman flinched and pressed her body tighter into the corner, knees practically touching her chin. Her red hair had been carelessly cropped and hung in short, lank strands about a pallid face. Dark hollows painted the skin beneath wide, fear-filled green eyes and sharp cheekbones. She was small and frail, so thin as to be skeletal. Clearly she had been starved. But her torture had not ended there.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of cuts, burns, and puncture wounds covered her arms and legs. The two smallest fingers on her right hand had been cut off at the first knuckle, the wounds still raw and unbandaged. Though he couldn’t see her feet now—they were hidden beneath the hem of the robe David had wrapped around her—he knew that two of her toes were missing as well.

The worst of her wounds lay in her torso. When Seth and Marcus had burst into the room in which she had been confined, she had been naked, manacled to a table, her chest laid open as two men in surgeons’ scrubs shocked her exposed heart with small metal paddles. Had he not heard her screaming in his head, Seth might have thought she had died during open heart surgery and that they were trying to resuscitate her. But she hadn’t been dead. And because they hadn’t sedated her, she had felt everything they were doing to her.

“Did you heal her chest?” he asked quietly.

“Not completely. I was almost finished when she awakened.”

Cautiously, Seth took another step toward her, bending so he wouldn’t tower over her quite so much. “Easy,” he crooned when she gave another start. “Easy. We aren’t going to hurt you. We want to help you.”

Do you remember me? he asked her telepathically. Perhaps his voice sounded different when he spoke aloud than it did when he spoke to her in her mind.

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