Savor by Alyssa Rose Ivy Page B

for?” I attempted to keep my tone light so he wouldn’t get suspicious. I couldn’t risk setting off warning bells.
    “Just a standard trip away. All of our men and women do it.”
    “And women?” That got me thinking. “Taliana did too?”
    “Yes.” He picked up his pace.
    “At the same time as yours?”
    “No. She was a few years younger.”
    “Did she go alone?”
    “No. She went with a friend.”
    “Chris?” I took a chance even though the name could set Gareth off.
    “Is there a reason you’re asking me so many questions?”
    “It’s how I get when I’m nervous.” That sounded plausible even though it was completely untrue. I never got nervous.
    “She did do her sabbatical with Chris. They were as close as siblings growing up.”
    If I’d been doing an interrogation, I’d have pushed him. I’d have asked him how that made him feel, but this wasn’t an interrogation. I wasn’t the one running things, and if I wasn’t careful I was going to lose any good grace I had with my host. “Oh. I bet this is a pretty great place to grow up.”
    He bought my insincere words—at least he seemed to. “It’s the best.” He looked at me. “Not that New Orleans wouldn’t be exciting.”
    “How’d you know I was from there originally?”
    “The king wouldn’t choose an outsider to run his security, now would he?”
    “Not by choice.” Who knew what he was going to do now? I’d left a few guys in charge, but none of them were ready to take over completely. Still, Levi was smart and resourceful, and he had the best advisor around.
    “You don’t need to be so suspicious. The ‘mystery’, as you called it, isn’t for any nefarious plan.”
    “I wouldn’t think it would be.” In other words, I knew he wasn’t going to admit to it.
    “Yet you admit to being nervous.”
    “Nervous about the whole situation.”
    “I see.” He continued walking up the steep terrain.
    After another twenty minutes he switched back toward the east, and we entered another wooded area.
    “We’re almost there,” he called over his shoulder. I’d let him walk ahead.
    “Great.” I wondered what kind of place he could be taking me that was worth all the theatrics and the distance.
    We walked deeper into the woods, until the canopy of trees was so thick it completely blocked out the sun. There was something almost magical about this forest, a hazy feeling in the air that immediately put me off. Where the hell were we?
    “We’re not as far away from the main compound as you think.”
    “Yes, we did quite a few switch backs.”
    “And the walk home will be much shorter. We’ll cut through the barracks.”
    “The barracks?” There was only one kind of barracks I knew of and it involved military.
    “Yes. Where we house our soldiers.”
    “I wasn’t aware you had a formal military here.”
    “How else would we defend ourselves?”
    “I knew you had soldiers, but not the formality.” Paranormals generally didn’t bother with it.
    “The Society would be wise to make things more formal.”
    “You are aware of our set up?”
    “Yes. I understand you have the intelligence and strength, but do you really believe that will be enough in an all-out war?”
    “Are you anticipating such a war? There hasn’t been a true paranormal war in centuries.”
    “Whatever has happened once will happen again.”
    A chill ran through me, and I was never cold. There was something nearly prophetic about his words. My only question was whether he planned to start that war himself. “A war like that would destroy us all, including the humans.”
    “Some victors would survive and repopulate. As I said, it’s happened before.”
    “I’d like to believe we’ve come farther in the last few hundred years and no one would be stupid enough to risk the fate of so many.”
    “You make the mistake of equating stupidity with rash decisions. They are two different things.”
    “Yes, but they overlap.”
    He laughed lightly.