Lover Uncloaked (Stealth Guardians #1) - By Unknown Page 0,2

the woman behind him. What he saw turned his stomach. Sarah’s dagger had hit the child in the head. Blood seeped from the gash onto the tiny white sweater and onto the hands of the mother who was trying desperately to save her baby.

God damn it! He should have killed Sarah the moment he realized that she couldn’t be saved. Now she’d killed an innocent. And he was to blame, because he hadn’t acted fast enough. He’d let her live because he’d hoped he could save her.

He’d failed again. Feeling his past reach for him, he forced the painful memories of his first-and-only other failure down and concentrated his energy on his erstwhile charge. Without hesitation, he aimed. The ancient dagger lodged in Sarah’s neck, arresting her movements. Blood spurted from the fatal wound as she fell into the vortex.

The demon’s cries of frustration filled the alley, and charges of light illuminated the dark night. A moment later, the air and fog stopped churning, and everything went quiet, except for the sobs of the woman whose child lay dead in her arms.

Aiden glanced at her, his eyes filling with moisture as he felt her pain. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, his heart full of compassion.

When he walked to the spot where Sarah had fallen, it was empty. The vortex had swallowed her up. Only his bloody dagger was left as evidence that he’d killed her. He’d had no choice but to do so. It was better than allowing the demons to use her. Better for her and this world. It was the reason he couldn’t regret his action. He only regretted that he had delayed the inevitable and not acted sooner.

Never again would he hesitate to kill a human he had reason to believe had been compromised already. It was better for one human to die than for the demons to capture another soul or for an innocent to suffer, as this child had—and its mother. Next time, his dagger would find its target the moment he suspected that a demon was influencing his charge. He wouldn’t hesitate again.

Humans were too weak. They should be eliminated as soon as they represented a danger. The Council was wrong to try to protect them when clearly they would turn against their protectors, against the Stealth Guardians who only wanted their best. Sarah wasn’t the first one who’d proven that to him.

Old memories, yet fresh as ever, reminded him once more that he could never be allowed to waver again. His hesitation had cost him too dearly many years ago. As a result, his entire family had suffered; they’d lost a loved one, and it was his fault. His heart clenched painfully as guilt about his past mistake resurfaced. He could never make the same mistake again. Evil had to be eradicated swiftly, no matter in what form it presented itself: demon or human.

TWO

Leila lifted her head from the microscope when she heard an urgent knock at the door to her lab.

“Dr. Cruickshank? Are you still there?”

She smoothed her lab coat down and caught her reflection in the glass cabinet over the work bench she was hunched over. Her pony tail was still holding back her long, brown hair, but several strands had struggled free and now curled around her face. It looked almost as if a hair stylist had taken great pains to arrange her hair like that. Of course, that wasn’t possible. She hadn’t been to a hair salon in months. How could she waste precious time worrying about her appearance when she had such important work to do?

Over the last few months, she’d made huge progress. The clinical trials were promising, and it appeared that there was only a little more fine tuning necessary until the drug would do exactly what she wanted it to: stop Alzheimer’s Disease, a disease both her parents were suffering from, in its tracks. The drug even appeared to show some promise of being able to reverse some of the effects of the disease, even though chances of eradicating all damage Alzheimer’s had already caused were slim.

For her parents, it was a race against time. There were times when they seemed perfectly well, yet at other times, their memory lapses were glaring, and she could sense them slipping away. If she didn’t finish her research soon, the damage to their brains’ neurons would become too severe for even her wonder drug to reverse it. The earlier the drug was administered, the higher the chances of some