Once Broken (Dove Creek Chronicles) by H. Henry

near-drunken state. “I’ve got nowhere to be. I’ve got my trusty werewolf here to look after me. I don’t see a problem.”
    “It isn’t good for you,” he answered as he plucked the bottle easily from my hand and set it aside. “Your wounds are deep. They will never heal if you continue to allow them to fester.”
    I looked at Alex for a long moment. He was right and though I wanted to scorn his rationality, my hazy brain came up short of a rebuttal.
    “We were talking about you , not me.” I settled for redirection.
    “What do you want to know?”
    “Where were you born?” I rattled off the first question that came to mind. Alex’ origins had long been unknown by me, and none of the other Amasai seemed to know. I wondered if anyone had ever even asked him.
    “Macedonia. After the great King Alexander died and before the Romans took hold.”
    “King Alexander, as in Alexander the Great?”
    “Yes. I was named for him.”
    “That means you’re very—”
    “Old, yes,” he said.
    “But you’re still in Purgatory.”
    Alex’ smile was rueful. “It was a time of war. I killed many men.”
    “How did you die? You must have redeemed yourself somehow.”
    I watched the wry expression fade from Alex’ face and immediately regretted the question. “That is a story for another time,” he said. He wasn’t angry with me, that much I could tell, but that didn’t mean he would tell me what I wanted to know.
    I stopped prying into his past. “The other night, you stepped between me and Valan. Why?”
    “He would have killed you.”
    “But I was about to kill him,” I argued.
    “He wasn’t as weak as he let on.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Valan is ancient, older than me. He knows every form of trickery. You’ll need more than a few silver needles if you ever face him again.”
    I tried very hard not to feel foolish. There was no way I could have known what Alex just told me, but I had also run into the melee headfirst without stopping to think about the implications.
    “Where do you think he’s been? We haven’t seen him around here in years.” Three, to be exact.
    “That, I cannot say.”
    “How is it that you’ve never killed him?” I asked, thinking that if both the vampire and the werewolf were so old, they were bound to have faced each other more than a time or two.
    “He has a talent for disappearing at just the right moment. He would rather save his skin than stand and fight. And the last two times I’ve seen him, I was protecting you,” Alex said. He didn’t say it as an accusation, but as a matter of fact. To him, there would be more opportunities to destroy Valan and he had the luxury of patience on his side.
    “Gabriel and I would probably be dead if you, Meg, and Gio hadn’t shown up when you did. I shouldn’t have questioned you like I did.”
    Alex held up a hand as if to say that he understood. “Your father was a handful as well. Trouble always had a way of finding him, as it does you.”
    “Yeah, well apparently it’s in the genes. I didn’t ask for all of this, y’know.” I waved a hand vaguely at our surroundings, though I wasn’t referring to the empty lot. In that moment, it represented the life I had been living before. The life that had come to feel like a dream from which I had been awakened.
    Or maybe this was the dream. One long, crazy dream.
    “He left,” I said, quiet and cold. “He knew what was here and he left.”
    “John did his duty for many years. Do you not believe he deserves a break?”
    “A break from the life, sure. But he took a break from his family, too.”
    “To protect you.”
    “Helluva lot of good that did.”
    “You are a strong woman, Remington Hart. Your father believes it,” Alex paused. “ I believe it.”
    In the light of only a half moon and the Milky Way, Alex’ deep brown eyes were merely pools of darkness. Still, I found something there that I hadn’t seen before: Tenderness and understanding.
    I leaned toward