“But–but you let them take me.” My anger was coming back, and I was sobering.
“I was listening. I could hear everything that was said. If I had thought you weren’t going to be able to handle them, I would have interfered. As it was, if you hadn’t drawn the bartender back there by shooting one of them, I would have waited until you had finished with them and come back out. Even then, I thought about waiting to see if you’d take care of the bartender, too.”
“You were waiting to see if I was going to get myself out of that jamb? They were going to rape me!”
“No, they thought they were. I heard you cast that healing spell. I knew if you had the presence of mind to cast it then it would clear the Rohypnol out of your system. Once you were in control of your own body, I figured it would only take you a minute to handle a couple mundanes.”
I was torn between kicking the shit out of my mentor and just sobbing into my pillow. I felt the emotion racking my body and then I felt Rafe’s hand come back to lightly grip the top of my bare thigh. With the physical touch, I could feel his emotions, and I knew he could feel mine. He felt relieved. I didn’t need to ask why. His relief was because he’d been worried I wouldn’t be able to handle the rapists.
The anger eased out of me. Perhaps, he’d been right to see if I could get myself out of trouble. He’d told me that Wanderers had to handle whatever came at them. We don’t have others to bail us out of a tough situation. It was a lesson I was going to have to learn if I was going to become a Wanderer.
He gave my thigh a squeeze as he felt my own emotions.
“I will never let anything hurt you if I have any power to stop it. I may let you fight your way out of a jam, but if I see you can’t handle it, I’ll interfere.”
I thought back to that biker, standing between my spread legs, his erect penis pointing at my vagina. A test? A chance for Rafe to see if I could handle myself well enough to be trusted on my own? Damn it. I knew Wanderers led a life of danger and adventure, but I hadn’t thought that rape would be part of it.
I lowered my face to Rafe’s, and our lips met in a warm, comforting, kiss.
Lying back down, I put my arm back across his torso and pulled myself tight against him.
“Goodnight, Boss,” I said.
“Goodnight, Apprentice.”
Chapter 9
Raphael
I awoke and found myself on my back with a bare feminine arm lying across me. Turning my head, I saw Tess’s face against my chest. She’d drooled a little spot of saliva onto my left nipple. It would have been amusing, but then last night’s events came back to me. My anger welled up again. I had wanted to rip those rapists limb from limb. Only the presence of my apprentice had kept me from doing it. I’m not a man of great restraint when it comes to slime bags masquerading as humans. While Wanderers try to stay out of human affairs that don’t involve one of Fate’s summonings, we don’t, as a rule, allow true evil to exist in our presence.
Over the years, I’ve killed more than a couple of humans that made the mistake of showing me just what kind of creatures they were. Some were users of night magic, those I killed out of hand when I found them. Damn few people ever use night magic without turning its power to evil. I’ve found it better to nip that sort of thing in the bud rather than waiting to see how it will turn out.
The other examples of slime-bag-hood that I separated from their bodies had usually done something so horrendous that it caught my attention. That’s not an easy thing to do since I rarely follow the news. However, a couple of times I’d gone out of my way to locate a few people that were wasting the life they’d been given. One had been a serial killer. I caught wind of him outside Omaha when I overheard a couple of truckers talking about his latest victim. It had taken me three days to track him down.
I’d found the body of his latest victim at the morgue before the body had been released to next of kin. The body belonged to a ten-year-old girl. She had been savaged in manners that I don’t like to think about and would never repeat. The police hadn’t had a lead, but they knew that this girl, Elizabeth Lynn, was his sixth victim. Each child had been treated harsher than the one before.
I broke into the FBI’s evidence locker to find the one DNA sample belonging to the suspect that they had recovered. I used it in a locator spell and tracked the man to a home in up-state New York. Confronting the man, a family man with a wife and three children of his own, I forced him to confess by using a truth potion and then dragged him out of his home without waking any of his family. I’d been torn between leaving him dismembered in the town square with a sign describing his sins and just making him disappear. His children made up my mind. I couldn’t bring back the ones he’d slaughtered, but I could at least protect his own children from learning what kind of beast their father was.
In the end, his death was far easier than his victim’s deaths. He suffered–oh, I made sure of that–but not on the same scale as the suffering he’d visited on those children. I
