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If I ever had to run, I was going to have to run. Not jog. Not sprint. Run like my life depended on it, because it would.
It wasn’t like it mattered where I went. It was time to bounce. It was one of the rules I’d been raised with after all: Don’t stay in one place for too long.
It had been a long time since my stomach had done this funny shit. It doesn’t mean anything. It was the cheddar. Or maybe it was a sign that, yes, I needed to get out of here at some point in the very near future. That made sense.
I’d always wondered if angels were real. Some people said they existed—and I mean, if you really thought about it, there were superhumans or whatever the Trinity were, why wouldn’t there be angels? When I was little, we lived in a house that my grandma swore was haunted. But angels?
missed hugs. I missed them a lot. Hugging yourself didn’t release any oxytocin in your body, so it didn’t have the same effect as getting one from another person. I knew that from experience.
As long as you keep your head down and tell no one, you should be okay. That was another rule: keep your head down.
If I had to pick, that would be at the top of the list of things I’d want—someone. He’d have to be okay with me being… me.
A flash of pure purple light through the blinds that had me flinching it was so damn bright. And it was a split second after that, that I felt it—the rumble. The frame of the single-wide shook. My cup rattled. The walls trembled. What in the hell was that? WHAT THE HELL WAS HAPPENING? The interview on the TV suddenly popped up in my head. Was it… an angel? No, no. It wasn’t. Was there a meteor shower tonight? Was a plane falling apart? Oh shit. Oh shit, shit, shit.
There was a body there. On the ground. In the dirt. A human body. A big one.
I recognized the color of the suit that was more than half ripped off the body there. Charcoal. I knew exactly what shade of blue the cape was too. The whole world did. Cobalt fucking blue. There was only one person who wore a cape and a suit with those colors, and it wasn’t a character from a Shinto Studios movie or comic book. It was…. It was…. One of the members of the Trinity. It was…. The Defender. It was The fucking Defender.
But of the three of them, The Defender was the one people knew the least about. He’d been the last of the Trinity to appear. He never did appearances. Never, ever, spoke to the media. He just… did what he did and disappeared afterward.
Footage of him was rare.
For whatever reason, every photo and video of him came out distorted. He was the only one of the Trinity that came out like that. Some people speculated they were all capable of it, but he was the only one who did it.
It was him. Normal people didn’t wear capes and boots around. Their bodies didn’t fall from the fucking sky. It was him.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. The Primordial was beautiful, and The Centurion looked like he could have been some kind of sun god to an ancient civilization. He was unbelievably handsome. But The Defender… He was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.
The fact was, the less I knew about him and he knew about me, the better. And saying nothing was easier than lying. It was how I’d gotten through life without giving away the things that needed to stay a secret.
And just as quickly as I processed that, the most ferocious fucking scowl formed over that gorgeous face while I crouched there. I almost wanted to look over my shoulder to make sure there wasn’t some kind of demon behind me, but there wasn’t. What the hell was with that expression?
I’m Gracie, formed on the tip of my tongue, but I changed my mind and swallowed it down. The less information, the better. Right. That was another rule I’d followed my whole life.
How he managed to tell me to fuck off with my turkey breast without actually moving his lips, almost impressed me.
I’d always thought my grandma’s glares could say a million words, but from the look of it, she wasn’t the only one with that power. Unfortunately for him, I thought he was amazing but not amazing enough to drive in the darkness to go buy groceries.
Because my gut said this man wasn’t a ball of sunshine. I had a feeling he wasn’t even a night-light. What he was, was seeming like a pain in the ass, if I was going to be totally honest, and that made me feel like a criminal for thinking that of someone in the Trinity. I was going to have to think about this.
“I can get out of this chair,” he said slowly, his nostrils flaring. “Every bone in my body could be broken… and I would still be stronger… than every human on this planet.” He’d said human, hadn’t he?
I was going to undress The Defender. Me. Gracie. I gulped. It was going to be a sacrifice in the name of humanity. And it was the closest I’d been to a man in a really long time.
And really, maybe it was the pain—I hoped it was—but he was seeming like he really might be—I whispered it in my head just in case he could hear me—kind of a dickhead. Thinking it felt like blasphemy, but also like the truth.
“You’ll be under my protection for the rest of your life. You understand?” The rest of my life? “You mean until we figure things out?” He shook his head, gaze intent. “They’re never going to stop looking for you, Gracie.” He nailed that coffin shut. “You laid on top of me to save me, even though you knew nothing they could have done would hurt me. For. The. Rest. Of. Your. Life.”
“Friends don’t let friends die. Everything’s gonna be fine. You’ve got something better than that knife. You’ve got me.”
Alex looked at me for a long, long moment. “It annoys me when you’re fucking cute.”
“What’s with all the sudden touching?” I asked cautiously. “I don’t mind touching,” he said, giving it another tug like he’d done it a hundred times before. “Since when?” “Always.” I kept watching him. “Touch is important. I just don’t welcome it from everyone.” I eyed him cautiously. “What? You’re fine with it from me now?” He didn’t even think about it. “Yeah.”
Hiromi had confirmed that my “talent” for languages was part of my Atraxian gift.
Selene had taken my hand and told me about a cousin of mine that she’d found in Costa Rica named Valentina. One year ago, this Valentina deposited ten thousand dollars into her bank account in cash. Almost immediately, she used every penny to pay a hospital bill. I couldn’t even muster up that much anger over it. If she had given away my name to pay off her debt, I understood. I was no one to her but a name. She was a traitor, but I didn’t blame her.
He’d been the first person in a long time to show me care and kindness, and my poor, deprived heart had only reached toward him with open arms once I’d started to feel safe around him. I could dream a little dream. Rebuild my life step by step. That’s what I was focusing on.
“I didn’t think I could really feel that alone anymore, but they made it go away. I like them a lot. They’re nice.” Something about my words must have not been what he’d expected to hear because those elegant features suddenly went stricken. “You were lonely?”
My skin buzzed with his energy. Alex’s head tilted to the side as he gave my ends a tiny tug, and I didn’t think I imagined the way one corner of his mouth went up. It took me two damn tries, but I finally got it out. “What are you doing?” “Nothing,” he replied just as Selene and Hiromi parted through the crowd, on their way back. But my stomach… my stomach disagreed. It didn’t feel like nothing.
I wasn’t going to be sad. We were together because of some fluke of fate. Because I had an ancestor who had had an ancestor that had been special. His grandma had dropped him into my life—literally—but life did have choices. And you couldn’t control them all; I refused to believe that.
I wanted fucking everything. I wanted to live my life, I wanted sex, but I wanted love more. It was why I’d waited. Why I hadn’t settled for just anyone.
“All right, I’ve got one. If you could have another power, what would it be?” “Nothing. I’m already perfect,” he said, with a straight face too. There was no hesitation. I reached under my head, pulled the pillow out, and whacked him in the face with it. Well, I tried to. He grabbed it right before it touched him.
“Zero.” “Zero?” He side-eyed me. “I told you we only marry once.” No. No. Was that possible?
“Picking on each other isn’t bickering. We’re having fun.”
Alex kissed me like the world was fucking ending and this was it. The last moment of our lives.
I was just there, in the air, with The Defender. And I thought, My heart is going to burst. I was in awe. I couldn’t fucking believe it.
“There are some places where the clouds hang low, and I used to go out there when I was tired. It reminded me of why we do this. It’s to protect humanity, but it’s mostly for this planet. We’re here to take care of her too. Some day we won’t exist, and we won’t be able to help, but we have to try while we can.”
It was a thousand times better than skydiving could ever be. Not for a single second did I feel a pinch of fear. I trusted him. I trusted him completely, I realized. And it was then that I knew without a single fucking doubt, as I screamed my lungs out, that I was in love. Not just a little bit either. My-life-will-never-be-the-same love. And it had nothing to do with the vision or being Atraxian or the Trinity or my safety. It just had to do with Alex.
Alex’s eyebrows rose and stayed up, and I knew I didn’t imagine the growl that came from deep within his chest. “You can’t be that dense,” he sighed suddenly. Uh, rude. “Excuse me?” “You can’t be that blind,” he repeated with a scowl that might have made me want to hide if he hadn’t just played with me for half an hour. “Hey, fuck you, I’m not dense,” I spat. “Yeah, you are,”
“It hurts my feelings that I’m right here, that you’re right there, and you still think that you’re ever going to be alone again.”
“I told you I didn’t end up at your house on accident. Told you my grandmother made it happen. I heard her tell you that we were supposed to meet before then.”
“I missed your three thousand questions and the way you hold my hand. I missed my little monster. Missed her a lot,” Alex admitted with a huff, like he couldn’t believe it but it didn’t bother him after all. “I was never going to leave you, but I needed to be sure, Gracie, of what we were going to be to each other. And once I was, I made myself think about you. How fair would it be for me, for my family, to take that kind of decision away from you?” he asked.
you’re not supposed to be anyone else’s Gracie,
“You’re one of the only people on this world, in this entire fucking universe, who never has to be scared of me.”
“There is no place I wouldn’t look for you. Seven miles deep in the ocean. On a planet in a distant galaxy. I would go anywhere for you if someone took you, Gracie,”
“You’re talking about mass destruction, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so attracted to you.” His laugh was another puff against my skin.
