Warrior's Heart: Iron Portal Series (Paranormal Romance) Read online

  Darius!

  The roar in her head sounded like a freight train. No, baby, no!

  Without a second thought, she took off at a dead run in his direction. Just as she rounded the corner to the elevator banks, the military man stepped out of the stacks. Right in front of Darius.

  Adrenaline surged in her veins. Fuck the artifacts. Fuck trying to keep her ability a secret. No one stood between her and her baby.

  She dropped the heavy book and tunnel-visioned her son, ignoring the sound of the knife clattering to the floor. All she had to do was touch Darius to make both of them disappear. She’d never told him about her ability. He wasn’t old enough to keep the secret yet. He’d be scared, but that couldn’t be helped.

  “Zara?”

  That voice—there was a hint of something familiar.

  She grabbed Darius’s hand and centered herself. They’d disappear in three, two, one—

  “Zara, it’s me. Asher.”

  Asher? Her brother? She hadn’t seen or talked to him in years. And never on this side of the portal. Was this a trick?

  She whirled around to see the man drop to his knees, and he instantly became less formidable. Some of his dark hair was braided into thin plaits and gathered at his nape. He wore jeans, boots, and a plain black T-shirt.

  Tears sprang to her eyes. It really was him. “Asher!”

  Before he could reply, Darius wrapped his arms around her waist. “Mom, are you okay? What’s wrong?”

  “Shhh, baby,” she said, stroking his hair. “It’s okay.” Unlike many ten-year-olds, he was still okay with her mommy displays of affection.

  Asher reached out a hand. His face was pained. “I didn’t mean to frighten you, Z-Boo. I wasn’t sure that was you. It’s…it’s been so long. I’m sorry.”

  No one had called her that in years.

  “And you’ve…got a son,” he said, a tinge of awe in his tone. She could tell he wanted to say more but was hesitant because Darius was clearly rattled.

  She kissed the top of her son’s blond head. “Everything’s fine, buddy, okay?”

  “It is?”

  Nodding, she picked up the book and the knife. “This is my brother. Your uncle Asher.”

  At that, Asher dropped to all fours like a horse or a dog and gave a goofy grin. Darius laughed.

  “Why is he on his knees, Mom?” Darius stage-whispered. “He’s kind of big to be doing that, don’t you think?”

  Before she could answer Darius or ask how Asher had found her, a woman came up behind him.

  “Yeah, he is kind of big for this, isn’t he?” she said warmly, her reddish-brown hair tumbling over her shoulders. “I’m so sorry, Zara. This is completely my fault. I, of all people, should’ve known better than to come barging in here like this. Ash wanted to wait for you upstairs, but your co-worker told us you were down here.” The woman had the most beautiful mismatched eyes.

  A million questions popped into Zara’s mind, so she decided to start with the simplest. “Who…who are you?”

  Asher got to his feet and gave Zara a big hug. Then he introduced her to Olivia, his fiancée.

  Her brother, the I’m-never-settling-down guy, was getting married? Could this night be any more bizarre?

  Olivia glanced around quickly to make sure no one else was listening. “Zara, I think you may know my twin brother.”

  “Your brother?” Doubtful. She didn’t know a lot of people over here, and Olivia didn’t look familiar. “What’s his name?”

  “Vince Crawford.”

  For the second time tonight, her heart nearly stopped.

  Chapter Three

  Zara’s apartment was located above a detached garage in a quiet part of town. Asher had brought his dog, a deerhound named Conry, who—surprise, surprise—was a big hit with Darius. Her son had been wanting a pet forever.

  After setting Darius up with a movie in the other room, she tried to keep her hands from shaking as she returned to the kitchen.

  Asher and Olivia were sitting at the small breakfast nook, which looked even smaller in contrast to her brother’s big, broad physique. One muscular arm was looped around Olivia’s shoulder and they were whispering intimately.

  Zara’s heart swelled. Her brother had had a hard time growing up with their cruel and abusive stepfather. They both missed their real father, but Asher had been particularly close to him. Their stepfather was a poor substitute. It was nice to see that the Fates had finally been good to Asher.

  She slid into the seat across from them.

  “We've got a lot of catching up to do,” Asher said.

  Yes, they sure did. She wanted to jump right in and ask about Vince, but she forced herself not to. “How did you think to look for me over here and not back home?”

  “I’ve been looking for you for months. Both here and over there.” He pointed a thumb at his fiancée. “She was the one who found you.”

  “I am still so sorry for freaking you out like we did,” Olivia said, shaking her head guiltily. “I lived for years with the fear that someone would discover me, so it was stupid of me not to realize that you might have the same concern.” She went on to explain that she was a Healer-Talent and that she’d spent years trying to stay under the army’s radar.

  Zara assured her that everything was fine. She liked the vivacious young woman and didn’t want her to feel guilty. “That basement always makes me a little jumpy anyway, so no worries. The building used to be a hospital, and the basement was the morgue.”

  Olivia looked relieved. “Okay, that makes sense then. Mariah called it the morgue, too.”

  “You know Mariah?” Zara asked, confused. Olivia was from Pacifica, and Mariah was from Cascadia and a member of the Taghta sisterhood.

  “I met her in Cascadia when she…um…helped me out with something.” Olivia’s smirk was subtle yet unmistakable. There had to be a story behind that.

  Asher grinned. “Mariah showed her how to kick my ass. So, yeah, I hate that woman.”

  Zara took a sip of her tea and steeled herself for her next question. As much as she enjoyed catching up on everything, their reunion could wait. “So you’re Vince’s sister. Is that…uh…why you’re here?”

  Olivia took a deep breath, glanced at Asher. “Where do I begin? Well, you know he liked to draw, right?”

  Zara nodded. She’d spent hours with him while he sketched. He was a very talented artist.

  “I had some of his framed artwork in my apartment,” Olivia continued. “Drawings of a girl and a mountain.”

  “The instant I saw them,” her brother said, “I recognized you.”

  Vince had mentioned that he drew pictures of her when he went home, but Zara hadn’t known that he’d framed them. “So you had pictures of me, some random girl, in your apartment? How bizarre.” She laughed, trying to make light of it even though her stomach was twisting into knots. How could she tell Olivia what Vince had done to her? Was there a tactful way to tell his sister—his twin sister—that her brother was a total asshole?

  Olivia continued. “When we got word that Vince was still alive and I mentioned your name to Mariah—”

  “Wait,” Zara interrupted. “What do you mean still alive? Why would you think he was dead?”

  Olivia looked confused, like Zara should’ve known this. “After the army came and took him away, we never saw him again. At first he sent a few letters, some poetry, but they were monitored, with blocks of text blacked out. Then one day, they stopped coming. After a while, my mother and I assumed the worst and came to the horrible conclusion that he must be dead. If he had been deployed somewhere, he’d have found a way to write or call.”

  Zara’s heart skipped a beat, then started pounding like crazy until she could hardly hear anything else. “How…how long ago did this happen?”

  “Almost ten years ago now.”

  She felt sick, dizzy, like she was hurling through the air, trying to find something to hold on to. Anything.

  “Z-boo, w
hat’s wrong?” Asher asked, looking over at her with concern. “Are you okay?”

  “Ten years ago?”

  Olivia nodded.

  She clasped her hands together to still the incessant shaking. It was as if someone had just told her that the world was flat. She’d built her life over here based on the belief that she’d been abandoned by the one person she trusted the most. She’d come to believe that the only safety nets in these two worlds were the ones you made yourself.

  But now…?

  “Ten years ago…” She looked at her brother and her voice caught. “Well, things were really bad at home after you left. Mom pretty much checked out from life, and Henry’s drinking got worse. So I spent as little time there as possible.” Tears pricked her eyes and she hitched in a breath. “That’s when I met Vince. I was tending to the animals when he stepped out of the forest, confused and disoriented. If it weren’t for the fact that he was naked, I would’ve assumed he was a local boy who’d been smoking too much prath.” She attempted a light-hearted laugh, but it came out sounding flat, stilted.

  Asher reached across the table and took her hand. “He came from the mountains behind the field? That’s where the portal is?”

  She nodded.

  Asher cursed under his breath. “A portal. Literally under our noses. Can you imagine what Henry would have done had he known?”

  Even though all known portals were tightly controlled by the Iron Guild, Zara had no doubt their stepfather would’ve figured out a way to exploit it.

  “Vince and I—” She swallowed convulsively. “He came through the portal a lot and we fell in love. He was my best friend. My soul mate. We decided to run away together, but on the day he was going to bring me back to Cascadia, he never showed up. I camped out near that old ogappa tree forever, thinking that maybe I had mixed up the days or the time—easy to do when you’re crossing between the two worlds. But he never came for me. So I figured he’d changed his mind.”

  She seriously felt like she could throw up.

  “Oh my God, Zara,” Olivia said. She lowered her voice. “He’s Darius’s father, isn’t he?”

  Zara nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

  Olivia let out a long, slow breath. “So all this time, you thought my brother had deserted you, when in reality, he never came for you because the army took him away.”

  Zara’s world was spinning. She felt as if she were hurling headfirst through a mental portal where everything in front of her was vastly different from what was behind her.

  Olivia came around the table. The woman had a warm, soothing touch, not surprising for a Healer-Talent. “He would’ve come for you, Zara.”

  Part of her wanted desperately to believe it, but the past ten years hadn’t been easy. Anger and resentment weren’t easy bedfellows to kick to the curb at a moment’s notice.

  Olivia continued to rub Zara’s back. “For weeks, he’d been talking about someone he wanted me and my parents to meet. I assumed he meant one of his fishing buddies. He’d been doing a lot of fishing. Or so he said. Now that I think about it, I remember how he cleaned his room the day before the army showed up. He even made sure the toilet in our shared bathroom was clean, which—trust me—was something he never did.” An affectionate smile curved her lips. “At the time, it struck me as odd, but I didn’t think to question him. He was just my stupid brother. Then the army came and—well, our lives changed forever after that.”

  Zara shuddered. All this time, she’d thought Vince had changed his mind about her. Didn’t want to be a father at such a young age. Left her, a teenage girl without a loving home or any support system, to raise their baby on her own. After all, he’d never come back through the portal after finding out he was going to be a father.

  “The army took him,” she repeated, trying out the words for the first time. “Took him away from Darius and me.”

  Vince, the boy she’d fallen hopelessly in love with, who was the father of her son, had been wrongly imprisoned for ten years.

  Ten years!

  The pain inside her began to morph into something different. Growing and swelling until it felt like a giant balloon in the center of her chest that was ready to burst.

  She glanced around the tiny, familiar kitchen. Cheery yellow walls she’d painted herself. Gingerbread trim on the cabinets. Colorful tea towels hanging over the oven handle. In a matter of minutes, her whole world had changed and yet everything looked the same.

  “Do you have any idea where he is?” she asked, her voice trembling.

  “We think he’s being held at a high-security facility outside of New Seattle called the Institute,” Asher answered. “It’s where they take all the Talents who refuse to work for the army.”

  She scowled at her brother. “You think he’s there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you haven’t confirmed it?”

  Asher explained that Rickert, his Iron Guild commander, was betrothed to a former army agent who said the Institute was where they took Talents who refused to join the army. “Neyla is waiting for confirmation from one of her former co-workers.”

  Zara folded her arms and stared at him. “And then what?”

  “And then we’ll try to drum up support within the Iron Guild to organize a raid.” He talked about what weapons they would need and surmised how many men it would take, but Zara quickly tuned him out.

  Wait? Try? Organize?

  The words left a sour taste in her mouth. Vince had waited long enough.

  * * *

  Vince stuffed the last bite of stale bread into his mouth and rose from where he'd been sitting cross-legged on the railroad tracks.

  Palmer leered at him from his perch in the back of the truck bed, a fitting throne for such an ass. “Where are you going, Crawford?”

  “To water the flowers.” Vince gathered up the length of chain and stepped over Sean’s legs.

  “I’ll be watching you,” the overseer growled. He curled his upper lip and spat out a long brown stream of tobacco juice between the gap in his teeth.

  “Enjoy the view then.”

  Chain in tow, he ambled down the tracks toward a large cedar tree at the edge of the woods. The doctor had been pumping him full of drugs, so he’d been drinking a lot of water to flush them from his system. The doc wasn’t kidding when he said that crap gave you a new kind of high.

  When he was finished and starting to walk back, something on the tracks caught his eye. Several small flowers were lying on top of the steel rails that hadn’t been there a minute ago.

  Okay, who was messing with him? Keetch?

  He glanced down, but the poor bastard was sitting on the stack of railroad ties, right where Vince had left him.

  How strange. He must’ve walked right past the flowers without noticing them. Had some kids been playing here earlier and left them there? Although they were out in the middle of nowhere, he supposed it was technically possible. A gust of wind stirred the flowers, and a few petals blew away. No, he decided. They hadn’t been there for long.

  He bent and picked them up. Small white daisies with orange centers, the kind that grew like weeds on the side of the road, with their stems braided together.

  A lump caught in his throat. Zara used to make daisy chains for him. Bracelets, rings, crowns. He’d spent hours sketching her as she braided the wildflowers she’d gathered. Cocking his head, he could almost hear her calling his name with the wind.

  He shook his head to clear the memory. Because of the drawings, the doctor had asked all sorts of questions about Zara, so it made sense that he was hallucinating about her now. “Stupid fucking drugs.”

  “Vince,” the wind whispered again. “It’s me. Zara.”

  All the air left his lungs in one big rush, and he nearly fell to his knees.

  Impossible.

  He needed to get ahold of himself. It had to be a trick by the doctor to make him think he was talking to his long lost love. Get him to spill all his secrets, tell wh
ere the portal was located. Well, he wasn’t going to fall for it. He spun on his heel to leave.

  “Vince, wait. It’s really me. I can cloak myself, remember?” Something cool touched his cheek, sending a jolt of awareness through his body.

  He grabbed at the air and his fingers actually brushed against what felt like soft flesh. He tried to make out some sort of ripple in the air around him, but there was nothing.

  She laughed softly. “Figures. I haven’t seen you in ten years and the first thing you do is grab my boob.”

  “Zara?” he rasped, her name coming out in a scratchy whisper.

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  His heart hammered in his chest as he scanned the empty space in front of him. “What the fuck? How did you—?” He wanted to pull her into his arms and push her away at the same time. If the doctor found out that the girl from the drawings was here, the girl he’d been protecting… A cold sweat broke out on his forehead. “Do you have any clue what they’ll do to you if you’re caught?”

  “They'd have to see me first, and that’s not going to happen.”

  Before he could say anything else, the sound of vicious barking filled the air. The dog was still tied to Palmer’s truck, but he was looking in this direction, the hair on its back raised like a mohawk. The wind had shifted direction. The dog had picked up Zara’s scent.

  Vince tensed and looked around in front of him, but he still couldn’t see anything. Zara was completely invisible. “You need to get the hell out of here.”

  “Crawford,” Palmer yelled from the truck, jerking at the dog’s leash. The animal stopped barking. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Vince cursed under his breath. “What's it look like I’m doing?” he retorted. “Knitting a blanket?”

  Zara chuckled softly.

  “Then stop dicking around. We've got work to do.” The dog started barking again and Palmer kicked it.

  “Tell him you’re sick,” she whispered.

  “Zara, you really need to—”

  “Just tell him.”

  “I’m sick,” he called.

  “What?” Palmer replied, his hand cupped to his ear.