Page 24 of Helsing: Demon Slayer (The Dragon’s Paladins #1)

At last, she sat back in the driver’s seat and studied the injured warrior slumped in the seat next to hers, the one who’d saved her life more than once. The man who’d declared that he’d die to protect her.

She couldn’t—she wouldn’t —let this larger-than-life man who’d made her believe in heroes and love again bleed to death. Not now. Not now that she’d finally found him.

At that thought, Dianne snapped the seatbelt across her lap, turned on the car’s engine, and headed back to the highway going south.

Ryan’s awareness slowly returned to Dianne’s muttering and an almost-imperceptible motion of the speeding car.

His side burned and ached, the pain radiating throughout his entire torso and sending red-hot tendrils along the nerves of his arms and legs.

Despite this, everything felt leaden, even his eyelids.

He couldn’t open them. He’d never felt this weak before, and that alone should have scared him, but he didn’t have the energy for it.

His head swam. He couldn’t even form a rational thought.

Instead, he focused on Dianne’s mellifluous voice.

At first, he couldn’t make out the words, but the sound soothed the fiery pain in his gut like a cool balm.

After some vague amount of time, Ryan found himself exploring the connection between his harmonic system and the nanotracker that he’d put on Dianne, the one keyed to her fundamental frequency.

In his mind’s eye, it took on a soft, glowing purple hue that revealed a twisted cord of many strands.

When he traced it back to his own harmonics, he found to his shock that the threads had started to interweave with his own system in a complex pattern that made it impossible to tell where his frequency ended and Dianne’s began.

He hadn’t experienced this during his short stint as the Kastriotis’ chief of security, and he didn’t know what it meant.

But, right now, when his body hurt almost to his soul, he clutched at the connection as if it were a lifeline.

And slowly, painfully, he beat back the enervation keeping his eyes closed as he imagined pulling himself, hand-over-hand, along the braided cord between them.

“Hey,” she said when he looked over at her. “We’re almost at the hospital. I found a pharmacy and got directions. It’s not far from the highway.”

For a moment, Ryan couldn’t comprehend the meaning of Dianne’s words. All he knew was that he could listen to her voice for hours.

And then he took in the word hospital . “No,” he said. Or rather croaked. He blinked several times trying to clear the lassitude still fogging his brain. “Not while my system is offline. I won’t be able to sense daemons .”

Even as he said this, he remembered the feeling of being connected to Dianne.

That was a good sign. It meant that the daemonic attack hadn’t blown out the receptors on his harmonics.

They were recharging. He’d be able to contact the ops center once they got to the threshold necessary for long-distance communications.

“‘Sense daemons ’? What do you mean? What system?” She glanced over at him, an endearing little line between her brows. “Is that how you talked to my sister before?”

Ryan still felt woozy, but his thoughts had cleared even more as Dianne talked.

“Keep speaking,” he said.

“What?”

“Say something else. Anything. Just keep speaking. How long have I been out?”

“Not long,” she said. “Just a few minutes, if that’s what you’re worried about. Long enough for me to buy some supplies and bandage you.”

Yup. Her voice sent a little jolt through him, and it wasn’t entirely due to their sexual chemistry. That was just physical. This was on the harmonic plane.

Sighing, he shifted in his seat and felt at his side while he answered her.

“To answer your questions: I’ve been equipped with Elioud tech that allows ordinary humans to use harmonics—sound and light waves, heat, motion, basically any physical properties that underpin Creation.

It’s what gives angels their unique powers. ”

“Okay,” said Dianne, clearly trying to understand. “That’s what lets you talk to Olivia without a cellphone?”

“Yes, and it’s what protects you in that tunic. And gives the chocolate its healing powers.” His fingers felt a bulky padded outline beneath a damp section of his T-shirt. “Good work, Markham. You’d make a fine medic.”

“Thanks.” She didn’t sound grateful for the recognition, however. “The rest of the chocolate bar is in the center console along with some juice.”

“Copy that.”

As Ryan reached for both items, Dianne went on. “You said your system is offline. Does that mean that it’s fried like your cellphone?”

Ryan took a large bite of the chocolate before answering. “I thought so, but I’ve started to get some minor feedback. Normally it’s self-charging, but it got so depleted it just didn’t have a chance to recharge.”

Ryan didn’t want to tell her that he thought his system had somehow managed to draw a charge from her tunic.

That would be a little too complicated to try to explain, especially as he didn’t know why that would be himself, though he suspected it had to do with the nanotracker he’d put on her back on the ship.

It might be acting as an amplifier for another harmonic source, namely Dianne.

They should have both been overwhelmed in the last attack, but maybe she had a little angel blood like her sister.

He took another bite of the savory-sweet paprika-infused dark cocoa, letting it melt on his tongue and fill his nostrils. It really was deeply, deeply invigorating beyond the expected effects. And it crowded out any lingering desire for Dianne.

“So we just need to keep driving until you can contact Olivia?” said Dianne, interrupting his thoughts. “What happens if we get to the border first?”

“We do what your parents told you.” Ryan shoved the remainder of the chocolate into his mouth, feeling energy surging through him as he chewed and swallowed.

“What?” she asked, sounding startled. She looked at him, those mesmerizing eyes of hers making him lose his train of thought for a moment. “Don’t accept candy from strangers?”

Reluctantly, Ryan pulled his gaze to the highway visible through the windshield and nodded at the vehicle in front of them. “Look for the helpers, Markham. Look for the helpers.”

Dianne hadn’t expected the ‘helpers’ that Ryan mentioned to be a tour bus.

She did as Ryan instructed and kept the bus in sight, although it chapped her ass to drive past the exit leading to the hospital.

Then again, Ryan seemed better after the chocolate and juice, at least as far as she could tell because he’d apparently used all of his conversation reserve and quit talking to stare, narrow-eyed and clenched jaw, around them.

After half an hour, the tour bus left the highway unaware of its tail and headed toward the small town of Vrgorac.

Dianne, who’d stewed in curiosity the entire drive, wondered why Ryan thought that the coach bus would be of any use to them, especially when it turned into a parking lot behind a picturesque white-stone church dominated by a belltower.

Another tour bus already sat in the lot, and dozens of people milled around.

She parked next to a small gray car filled with four middle-aged women.

“‘Meduhgorge’?” she asked, struggling to pronounce the word Me?ugorje written in black letters on the bus’s side.

“Medyougoria,” he said, correcting her. “It’s a pilgrimage site in Bosnia-Hercegovina where the Virgin Mary appeared a few decades ago." He gestured toward the buses. “These faithful tourists are our ticket across the border.”

Before Dianne could question him, Ryan opened his door and got out. After grabbing his backpack from the backseat, he bent over with a wince and said, “You coming, Markham?”

Markham . He wanted her to call him Ryan, but he kept calling her by her last name. She wasn’t one of his damn soldiers. She wanted something more.

She got out of the car and followed him as he joined a knot of tourists chatting next to a coach bus. By the sounds of their accents, they were American.

Well, that was a good sign. But Dianne still didn’t understand how they would infiltrate this group, especially when a tall, middle-aged man approached.

But he seemed to think that they were a couple he had on his list and greeted them warmly.

Dianne said nothing as Ryan drew her into his injured side, presumably to hide it, and spoke to the guide.

Despite her tension, the warmth and strength of his arm around her made her feel safe. Cherished even.

She never wanted that feeling to end.

Twenty minutes later, they boarded the second coach bus with the others and found a seat in the back where they listened to the tour guide describe how the Virgin Mary originally appeared in these mountains to six young believers in 1981.

It was only after they’d crossed the border into Bosnia-Herzegovina that Dianne remembered the two men near the church in Trnbusi.

Making it past the border without incident sure counted as a blessing in her book.

“Here,” said Ryan, who sat next to the aisle. He held out a wrapped bar. “I can hear your stomach. It’s been a while since you had anything to eat.”

Dianne realized she was hungry as he said this. When had she eaten anything? Right. The mall outside of Split. She accepted the candy, suddenly heartily sick of sweetened cocoa. What she wouldn’t give for a hamburger. Maybe once they’d found another car, they could stop somewhere and eat.

Acutely aware of Ryan’s thigh pressed against hers, she watched the scenery outside her window as the bus, now in a long line of buses, climbed the mountains to Me?ugorje.

In the small Balkan city, buses lined the traffic circle next to St. James Church, where countless pilgrims streamed toward an outside space capable of seating five thousand faithful during worship services.

Today, the exterior overflowed, even in the sweltering heat of midsummer.

More people appeared in the distance like ants, climbing the site of the first Marian visions, known as Apparition Hill, as well as a nearby hill known as Cross Hill.

Perhaps it was the earlier events as well as Ryan’s shocking claims that Mihàil and Olivia had angel blood, but something washed over Dianne as they joined the masses of people behind the church. Something that touched her heart as the voice of the second man outside Trnbusi had.

Uneasiness brought her to a halt on a broad paved walk leading away from the church. Ryan, looking down at her, had a wide-eyed expression that looked totally foreign to him. He appeared decades younger under the rough stubble and scattered lacerations. Softer. More innocent.

Dianne reached up and touched his jaw. He placed one large palm over her fingers as their gazes locked. She caught her breath and waited.

Humming so low that she felt it in her bones filled the air around them as people stilled, expectant, gazing toward Apparition Hill.

Static electricity danced over her skin and sent her hair fluttering in an invisible current.

A palpable sense of raw power permeated everything—an exhilarating yet slightly unsettling sensation, as if every molecule around her vibrated with potential, ready to discharge at any moment.

A sound—not just a sound, but a melody woven into the very fabric of the air—rose, ghost-like, between the stillness and the coming shift.

It wasn’t music in the ordinary sense, but something older, deeper, rawer, reverberating beneath her skin, threading through her bones.

A harmony just outside perception, one that had always been there but never recognized until now.

As the luminous hum swelled, the world seemed to align around it , each breath falling into the unspoken cadence. It was his frequency, his essence, wrapping around hers in invisible strands, pulling her toward a truth she hadn’t dared to speak aloud.

Ryan’s gaze dipped to her mouth. A moment later, he gripped the back of her head and brought his lips to hers.

The pressure of his kiss, the warmth of his breath, the tremor of his touch—all of it resonated in sync with that song, a symphony only they could hear.

A current rippled through them, electric, harmonic, inevitable.

And then, silence descended as everything using electricity quit working.