We were six hours north of Port Phoenix before I dared slow down even a little.
The rig’s dim headlights piercing deep into the darkness ahead of us, I glanced out the side windows, trying to get some idea of where we might be. The night was fathomless on all sides of us. Nothing but stars overhead and vast forest wilderness encroaching on the broken pavement of the seldom-used highway.
No one behind us, either, which I figured was about the best luck we could hope for at the moment. I didn’t suppose that luck would hold out forever. Tonight I’d put a giant target on my back, and I had been in business with powerful, dangerous people long enough to know that a stunt like the one I’d just pulled would not go uncontested.
“You look tired,” Drakor said from beside me.
He’d been quiet most of the trip. Pensive, I thought, having caught him staring out into the dark more than once since we’d been on the road. I knew he had to be as exhausted as I was; he’d confided in me along the drive out of Port Phoenix that his body was depleted after being starved for food and thirst during his captivity. Breaking out of the crate had drained him even further.
But I didn’t think it was any amount of physical fatigue that had him so still and brooding. His mind was burdened, perhaps his heart as well.
“I’m fine,” I told him. “And we need to keep moving.”
“No, Nisha.” In my peripheral, I saw his dark brows lower over those shrewd canary-yellow eyes. “I want you to have rest. Find someplace to stop the vehicle now.”
There was an air of command in his voice that almost made me obey simply on instinct. Almost. “We can’t afford to stop until we’ve put more distance between my client’s men and ourselves. They could be following us even now, gaining on us. We have to push onward.”
He reached across the cab, his strong, elegant fingers closing over my hand where it was locked in a death grip on the wheel. “Nisha, we go no farther until you rest. It is not a request.”
I gaped at him, astonished by his arrogance. “Last I knew, I was the one calling the shots around here. Unless someone died and made you king, I’ll thank you to sit back and let me handle the situation.”
He removed his hand from mine and I found I instantly regretted the emptiness left in its place. Drakor settled back into his seat and gazed out the window. “My father passed one hundred and fifty-seven years ago, after centuries of a peaceful, noble reign.”
I threw a sharp look at him. “Excuse me? Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
He sighed remorsefully and glanced back at me. “My father’s death made me King of the Strange. Or would have, if I’d actually been worthy of accepting that mantle of responsibility. Either of my elder brothers would have been far better suited, but they were both dead from war with mankind by the time my father took his last breath. I was little more than a stupid boy, unfit to rule.”
I hit a rut in the ruined old road and had to jockey to keep my rig on course. When I was able, I stared at him again, incredulous. “If you haven’t assumed your father’s place in all this time, who has?”
“I was twelve years old when I relinquished my power to his court. I believed our kind would be better served with someone other than me.” He grunted then, a soft, wry exhalation. “Apparently someone else in my homeland felt the need to make certain I could never change my mind. I suspect it was someone in the court who betrayed me to the person who hired you.”
I was outraged--not only by the thought of Drakor being sold out by a traitor under his own roof, but also by the notion that he would have so readily accepted it. “So, you are willing to let yourself die rather than risk failing as king?”
He looked at me for a very long moment, a storm seeming to brew beneath the burnished gold of his gaze. “I was willing.”
“And now?” I asked him.
“Much has changed since I was shackled inside that box and shipped across the ocean to this place, Nisha. Now I find myself questioning quite a lot of things.”
Although he was contemplative and hard to read, I sensed the flicker of determination beneath his calm demeanor. He would make a dangerous adversary, I had no doubt. His kindness and intellect would make him a formidable, but fair, ruler.
“It seems to me that you could better serve your people by being the leader they need, Drakor, not a martyr.”
“Indeed?” He smiled at that, only the subtlest curving of his sensual mouth. “I think you may be wiser than any of my long-lived counselors and advisors, Nisha the Heartless.”
For some reason I didn’t care to examine, it stung somehow to hear him refer to the cold reputation I’d prided myself on for so long. I wasn’t heartless--not when it came to him. I looked at Drakor and felt as though my entire being was made of awakening emotion and sensation, not the logic and fear and mistrust that had been drummed into me from a very young age.
I cared for him.
If I didn’t watch my step, I worried that I might very easily find myself in love with him.
“Do you have somewhere that you can go?” I asked him, needing to steer my thoughts back to the situation at hand. “It won’t be safe for either one of us on the road any longer than we have to be.”
He nodded, grim. “There is a hidden enclave of my kind in this region of the new continent. They haven’t yet been discovered by man. No human has been near their settlement, but if I asked it of them, they would provide us shelter.”
I wasn’t sure I was ready to think about relying on the Strange for any form of protection, but I didn’t tell him that. “Do you know specifically where they are?”
“The place was once called Colorado.”
“It’s not far from here,” I said, recognizing the old name from the time long before I’d been born, when most of this land had been comprised of unseen borders hemming in and uniting areas known as states. “I can take you there.”
Drakor seemed to consider for a moment. “In the southwest region of that place, there are ancient dwellings built into the side of a cliff. Tribes of humans once lived there, before their modern brothers drove them out and used the dwellings as parkland. Now, the Strange hold it.”
I nodded and looked back out to the road. Even though I wanted to put another couple of hours behind us before we stopped to rest, my arms were heavy and my eyes were burning from staring into the darkness.
“I have some old maps in the back,” I said. “Maybe we should pull over and see if we can find where your people are located.”
Drakor gave me a silent nod of agreement. I slowed the truck and detoured off the empty old highway, taking us toward a thicket of woodlands several hundred yards from the road.