Warrior Rising - By Pamela Palmer Page 0,25

Rith sang a second time, they didn't want to be in the air. The thought of it turned his blood to ice.

The elevator came quickly and he realized they were almost certainly the only ones in the building awake and walking.

Harrison held the elevator door, letting her enter first. "King Rith may not have found all seven stones, Ilaria."

"What do you mean?"

"The stones weren't hidden in one place. They were split up. Could he have pulled this much power from just a few of them?"

A thoughtfulness entered her eyes. "I don't know. To my knowledge he's never had his hands on any of them before. My mother guarded the stones carefully."

"Except from you."

"Yes. To her eternal regret."

They took the elevator down to the garage beneath the building. As the doors slid open, the blare of a car horn tore through his eardrums. Harrison held Ilaria back, pushing her behind him. But he saw no movement and heard nothing but the horn.

"Let's go."

Together they made their way across the garage toward the space where he'd parked his car a few hours before. As they rounded the corner, he saw the source of the racket. An old minivan had crashed into one of the concrete uprights, and crashed hard, by the looks of it. The driver, a young woman, lay across the steering wheel, a trickle of blood running down her cheek from her temple. In the backseat, a toddler slept, or lay unconscious, in her car seat.

His stomach clenched, his fatherly instincts leaping. They needed to reach the Dupont Circle fountain as quickly as possible, yet no way could he walk away from a child in need. He started toward the minivan, surprised to find Ilaria right beside him, her face set in worried lines.

"I have some healing skill," she said, as if reading his thoughts...or sharing them.

He glanced at her, seeing a startling compassion in her eyes, and nodded. "We can't help everyone who needs it. There are too many."

"We can help these two." Her quiet words held a thread of steel. Their eyes met. For once they were in complete accord.

"Get the child," he said as they reached the van. Ilaria would never have the strength to lift the woman out.

As she reached for the back door, Harrison wrenched open the front. He pulled the woman off the horn, the night turning blessedly silent, then pressed his fingers to her neck, checking for a pulse. Nice and strong. He unfastened her seat belt while Ilaria climbed in the back. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her pulling ineffectually at the car-seat straps that pinned a dark-haired little girl.

"The belt release should be between her legs," he told her. "Press the red button and lift the straps up and over her head."

He pulled the woman free from the seat, lifted her out and laid her on the pavement. As Ilaria backed out of the car and turned, the child in her arms, he stilled. For one horrible moment, the child was Stephie, the pale hands holding her, Baleris's.

Stephie's screams tore through his memory, echoing over and over as his stomach clenched with cold fury. For one tense moment he nearly lunged at Ilaria, the need to rip the child out of her pale hands almost more than he could control.

Ilaria froze, the girl cradled tightly against her. Protectively.

"Harrison?" the princess asked softly.

His gaze lifted to hers, to eyes filled with neither malevolent intent nor cruelty, but warm with compassion, and the fury inside him drained away. Something inside him shifted. Ilaria. Not Baleris, not King Rith. Not pale, homogeneous evil. They weren't all alike any more than humans were. He knew that. Kade had shown himself to be good and honorable, even when ordered by his king to kill the Sitheen.

He supposed he hadn't been sure exactly where Ilaria stood on that line between good and evil. Perhaps he still wasn't, but he was a damn sight closer to understanding her. No one who insisted on saving a child could be all bad.

With a last wary look at him, Ilaria laid the child beside her mother, then moved to squat at their heads. As she lifted her hands, she eyed him with question.

"I can help them."

He stared at her, unsettled by his momentary lapse of control. But as he looked into her eyes - into Ilaria's eyes - he trusted her to do what she could. He trusted her.

He nodded and she placed a pale hand on