Lover Uncloaked (Stealth Guardians #1) - By Unknown Page 0,45

he’d been wrong about her. Maybe she was stronger than he suspected.

Easing the car into traffic, he thought briefly about where to start. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything: what they look like; their motivation, strengths, weaknesses, where they hide, how they operate—”

“Whoa, whoa, that’s quite enough to start with. Besides, I don’t have answers to all of your questions.”

“How can you still hide things from me after all that . . . ” She tossed her head toward the window, indicating what they’d left behind. “. . . that happened there?”

He looked at her, his heart rate spiking at her accusation. Why did he even care what she thought of him? Yet he couldn’t deny that he did. He didn’t want her to think of him as the enemy.

“I’m not. I don’t have all the answers. Do you really think we wouldn’t have taken the demons out if we knew where they were hiding?” He kept his voice calm despite the storm that was raging inside him.

“Oh.” She wrapped her arms around her torso and looked straight ahead. “Then how about all the other stuff?”

He lifted a hand from the steering wheel and ran it through his hair. “They’ve been around since the Dark Days. Nobody knows how—”

“What are the Dark Days?” she interrupted.

He sighed. “I’m getting to it. Patience.” When he looked at her, he noticed how tightly she clamped her arms over each other. Instantly, concern flooded his cells. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong? Isn’t that pretty clear? Demons killed my boss, and now they’re after me. What if they catch up with us and see me? I’m not invisible anymore.”

He opened his mouth to correct her, but before he could find the right words, she gave him a pleading look.

“Please.” Her hand slid onto his thigh. “I need to stay invisible.”

The warmth emanating from her palm seared his flesh. It felt good, way too good to admit now that she’d been cloaked all along, ever since he’d caught up with her at her lab. He should come clean right now and not leave her in this false belief, tell her that it wasn’t necessary for her to touch him.

“Leila . . . ”

“The demons . . . ” she prompted.

Aiden cleared his throat, but he was unable to make a confession cross his lips. Was it rasen that made him react like this when he should tell her the truth about cloaking instead? Yet he couldn’t. He admitted it to himself: he was weak. And when Leila touched him, he couldn’t think clearly.

“The demons . . . ,” he answered instead, “they live in a place we call the Underworld for lack of a better term. They enter and exit it through portals, but we don’t know whether these so-called portals are stationary or not, or where they are. We’ve only seen them when fighting demons, but we’ve never been able to go through one, and it seems that they vanish when the demons disappear.”

He glanced at her, making sure he hadn’t lost her with his talk. “Have you ever watched Stargate?”

She nodded.

“It’s a little like that. The demons step through it, and they’re gone. Presumably to their lair in the Underworld.” He deliberately didn’t mention a word about the fact that he and his kind also had portals. It was better that she didn’t know about that. She would never get to see one, and there was such a thing as too much information.

“So they come out at will?”

“Pretty much.”

“How do you fight them?”

“They’re immune to human weapons,” he continued and heard her mutter softly.

“Figures.”

“However, the Stealth Guardians have weapons against them. Any weapon, blade, dagger, sword or the like that was forged in the Dark Days has the power to injure or kill a demon. It’s the only thing they are vulnerable to.”

From the corner of his eye he noticed her part her lips and instantly figured what she wanted to ask.

“The Dark Days? It was when Stealth Guardians came into existence. Our race is descended from a tribe in the Outer Hebrides, off the Scottish mainland. They were knights, warriors who protected their islands from intruders by shrouding them in a dense fog that no eyes could penetrate. Any would-be invaders simply sailed past them, never knowing there was any land in sight.”

Leila sucked in an audible breath. “Is that what you do? Hide people in a cloud of fog?”

Aiden cast her a quick smile. “No. Our powers have evolved over the centuries. We no