The Lawgivers: Gabriel Read online

  And then he simply dropped her.

  She landed on her ass hard enough it felt like she’d driven her tailbone through her skull.

  “The penalty for running from a lawgiver ….”

  Lexa grabbed a handful of dirt and rocks and flung in the direction of the voice then lurched to her feet and tried to run again.

  “The penalty for assaulting a lawgiver …,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “I didn’t do nothin’!” Lexa growled at him as he grabbed her again.

  “Why did you run?”

  Lexa gasped in outrage. “I left!” she growled. “I had every right to leave! I didn’t do nothin’ wrong!”

  “Then you have nothing to be concerned about,” he said evenly.

  “Except rape by some … freak with wings!” Lexa snarled.

  He dropped her on her ass again.

  Chapter Four

  Surprise, revulsion, a wholly unexpected and unwarranted twinge of guilt, and anger hit Gah-re-al in quick succession. He released the female as abruptly as if he’d grabbed a molten piece of metal. “I am the Lawgiver, Gah-re-al …,” he began stiffly, so outraged by the suggestion that he would consider fucking a human at all, let alone a scrawny, filthy savage like the one at his feet, that he responded to the accusation before it occurred to him that the suggestion was so beneath contempt it didn’t deserve a response at all.

  “Jeee-zus Christ!” Lexa snapped, too drunk with fatigue and unnerved to consider the wisdom of a verbal attack—or lack of wisdom. “I got the name already, Gabriel!”

  “My name is Gah-re-al,” he said through gritted teeth. “I am required to identify myself—by name—and state my rank and purpose. And I am a Lawgiver. I only fuck women who want me to fuck them. It is against my code—both personal and professional—to rape—women. And I wouldn’t fuck a primi … human female if I wanted sex.”

  Lexa stared at him, struggling to decipher the accent and then comprehend what he meant even when she’d figured out what he’d said. “Sooo … females are off limits? But not males?” she asked more carefully for clarification.

  Even in the darkness she could see his face change colors. “Rape is off limits. There are always plenty of willing partners and that isn’t against the law. I don’t break the laws. I enforce them.”

  “But you said ….”

  “Get up!” he growled.

  “I’d already be up if you didn’t keep dumping me on my ass,” Lexa muttered, getting to her feet with an effort and rubbing her abused posterior.

  He stared at her coldly for several moments.

  “What?” she demanded irritably, as unnerved by the look as she was resentful of it.

  His lips tightened. “The village is that way.”

  Lexa stared into the darkness glumly. She was still tired. She didn’t think she could possibly have slept long before he’d woken her. “How far?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Maybe not to you,” she muttered resentfully. Sighing loudly, she gathered her belongings and headed in the direction he’d indicated since she was pretty sure she couldn’t gather enough strength to make a break for it even if the opportunity presented itself. She could see the dark outline of what she assumed was the outermost buildings of the village and it looked like a very long walk to her.

  “Is there some particular reason you’re walking that way?”

  Instantly insulted all over again by the tone of his voice, Lexa sent him a resentful glance. She hurt all over. No surprise when she’d been in three different scuffles in a matter of hours and had had just enough time to begin to feel the muscle strain and bruises. She was tired, both physically and emotionally from her recent visit to the village they were approaching and it was the last place she wanted to go so she was in no great hurry. “Like what?”

  “The shuffling.”

  “My boots don’t fit all that good.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they aren’t mine,” she retorted irritably.

  “Stolen?”

  Lexa felt her heart skip a beat at the tone. Reminded abruptly that he was some self-appointed judge-jury-and-executioner, she regretted her bluntness. “He wasn’t using them no more.”

  “You traded for them.”

  “I asked him nicely,” she said sarcastically since he hadn’t seemed to notice, or at least hadn’t taken violent exception, to her lack of respect.

  “And he was alright with you taking his boots?” Gah-re-al asked sardonically.

  “It seemed that way to me. He didn’t complain when I took them.”

  “Because he was asleep? Or unconscious?”

  “Because he was dead. Looked like he’d been that way for a while, too. He was all rotted and shit,” Lexa retorted bluntly.

  He made a sound that drew her attention, but it was too dark to tell what emotion had prompted it. “You removed the boots you’re wearing from a rotting corpse?” he said in a strange voice.

  “Don’t tell me there’s a law against that, too? Because if there is, I didn’t know, so you can’t say I did nothin’ wrong.”

  “Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” Gah-re-al retorted coldly, although why he was so repulsed by her robbing the dead when, in the scheme of things, that wasn’t as bad as murdering to rob, he didn’t know.

  Lexa stopped abruptly and gaped at him. “You are shitting me, man! You’re saying I could be penaltied for breaking a law I didn’t even know about? Well that’s just …. That’s just completely stupid!”

  “Move! The word is penalized. Primitives don’t even know their own language anymore,” he muttered under his breath. “You know right from wrong?”

  Lexa glared at her toes. It wasn’t hard to figure out that he meant her when he said primitives. Arrogant bastard! “You’re saying it’s wrong to take things from dead people that don’t need them no more? And I should be penalized because I shoulda known that it was wrong and done without shoes so these could rot with him?”

  It flickered through Gah-re-al’s mind that the khabler robbed the dead. They didn’t see it that way, naturally enough, because the ‘graves’ they robbed where generally those of ancient civilizations and they were in pursuit of knowledge that could only be obtained that way. It was quibbling, though, to argue that that was right because it was the pursuit of knowledge and what the primitive had done was wrong when it pertained to her survival.

  It wasn’t his place to approve or disapprove of the laws, though, he reminded himself. He’d been given them and ordered to enforce them.

  It made him uncomfortable, however, to find himself questioning the unyielding nature of the law, to have it even flicker through his mind that there could be circumstances where it might be wrong to uphold the letter of the law.

  “Do you have a name you’re known by, human?”

  Lexa sent him a look of surprise. “Why?” she asked suspiciously, more unnerved by the thought that he could use it to identify her than flattered that he’d apparently condescended to consider her an individual worthy of being called by name.

  Annoyance flickered through Gah-re-al. “I’ll need it for my report,” he hedged.

  “That’s what I thought,” Lexa muttered.

  He sent her a look that was a mixture of surprise and irritation. “You understand report?”

  Not exactly, but she wasn’t about to admit it. The comment seemed to bear up her suspicion, though, that he just wanted to be able to identify her. She’d seen posters here and there in her travels offering rewards for bad people that had done very bad things. It always had a drawing of the person’s face and a name when they knew it. “Because of the boots?”

  He stared at her blankly for a moment. “I haven’t ascertained what crimes you have committed … yet. That’s why I’m taking you for questioning.”

  Lexa felt her belly cramp at that. She’d seen the way Ralph questioned people that had information he wanted. She tensed all over, scanning the terrain for any possibi
lity of escape.

  “So you are guilty of something,” he commented coolly.

  “How the hell would I know?” Lexa snapped crossly. “I don’t know your laws!”

  “But you thought about running as soon as I mentioned questioning you.”

  “I seen the way Ralph questioned people. Didn’t make no difference what they said, he just kept right on torturing them till they died or he got tired.”

  “Who is Ralph?” he asked sharply.

  Lexa felt her heart jerk in her chest and cursed herself inwardly for giving him something to identify her with when she’d been determined she wasn’t going to. “A man I ran into once,” she said reluctantly.

  “Ran in to? So brief an encounter and yet you know his name?”

  Jesus! She didn’t need to talk to him at all! She couldn’t open her mouth without giving something away! She decided to keep her mouth shut. She needed to focus on figuring out a way to escape, not giving him more stuff he could use against her to figure out a penalty.

  He said nothing for a time. “I could simply assign a name.”

  Lexa wasn’t entirely certainly she understood, but she thought he was saying he was going to name her. She considered it, trying to decide whether it would be less of a threat, and it occurred to her that very few people knew her name. She kept to herself as much as possible because it was just plain safer to do so, but she had been seen each time she’d been forced to trade for goods and none of them knew her by name. They might remember what she looked like and they might not. She’d always dressed as a young man when she’d gone to trade, because there was less chance of catching some man’s eye and ending up under him with him grunting and sweating all over her.

  So how much did it matter whether he knew her name or not? He knew what she looked like—in disguise—and he could describe her for any posters they might put out.

  “Lexa.”

  He didn’t actually smile but she had the sense that he was pleased with himself. She felt like kicking him.

  “Sir called me Lex.”

  “Who is Sir?”

  Pain lanced through Lexa unexpectedly. She didn’t know if it was because his asking reminded her that Sir was dead or if it was because Sir had never allowed her to call him father as he had the little ones. She’d never completely understood why she wasn’t allowed to call him father when her sister and brothers were supposed to but it had always hurt—always made her feel left out and unwanted. “The father—my little sister and brothers’ father.”

  He glanced at her, frowning slightly. “He shortened it to Lex because …?”

  “Because it sounds like a boy and he always had me dress like one so no men would try to take me until he was ready to trade me.”

  Gabriel halted abruptly. “Your father sold you to a man?”

  “He wasn’t my father. And he didn’t get the chance to. The raiders took me.” She thought about that incident in a different light for the first time. “Guess it was just as well King Ralph wasn’t fooled. He might have killed me instead of taking me as his woman.”

  “How old were you?”

  Lexa lifted her brows at the anger that seemed to permeate his voice, but she didn’t see how he could charge her with anything Sir had done—particularly when he hadn’t actually gotten around to doing it. Even so, it was hard to provide information she didn’t know. She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d got the curse.”

  “Curse?” he echoed blankly.

  Lexa felt her face reddening, although she wasn’t sure why it made her so uncomfortable discussing something that was, after all, not only perfectly natural but as mundane as breathing. Everybody did it. Everything did it as far as she knew—well, that was female. Unless it was because he wasn’t human and she got the feeling that his interest might not be a good thing for her. “You know. The woman thing.”

  “So you reached maturity? You’d just reached maturity? Or this was some time after that?”

  He was starting to make Lexa really uncomfortable. She felt guilty and she didn’t even know why, felt like his probing questions meant that there was something about what had happened that broke one of his laws and she was going to be in trouble for it. She didn’t see how. It wasn’t like she’d wanted to do it. But his ideas of wrong didn’t exactly mesh with hers she’d already discovered, not closely enough for her comfort, at any rate. She shrugged, trying to act nonchalant about it. “I don’t know. Actually, I guess it was a while after. A few months, at least, I guess.”

  She glanced at his face, trying to read his expression and decide if that sounded acceptable to him, but it was really too dark to tell much beyond the fact that he seemed angry. On the other hand, he didn’t exactly have a sunny disposition from what she’d seen so far.

  “Might have been a year or two. It was a long time ago,” she added a little lamely.

  Outrage suffused Gah-re-al and it was all he could do to keep it to himself. Primitives! Savages! He doubted his superiors had any inkling of just how backwards the humans were, but as far as he was concerned nothing more surely labeled them as backwards savages than their tendency to prey upon the weak of their own kind! Small wonder they were growing in numbers so rapidly if it was commonplace to begin breeding the females as soon as they were capable of being bred! He was no longer convinced, as a matter of fact, that they even waited to see if the females were old enough to be bred before the males took them.

  It wasn’t as if he hadn’t known, or at least suspected, that women and children were regarded as little more than bartering goods. For that matter, Lexa’s story didn’t necessarily prove that his suspicions were correct. Her situation might be unique, and yet the way that she spoke of it certainly seemed to indicate just that. At least, as far as she knew, it was the norm not the exception.

  The urge to simply drop the subject smote him. He was a lawgiver, however, he reminded himself. As distasteful as he found it, it was his duty to be as certain of his facts as he could be. “Your father planned to sell you—trade you to a man knowing what the man wanted with you?” he asked, keeping his voice carefully neutral.

  Lexa frowned, confused now. She supposed it was splitting hairs to remind the angel that he hadn’t been her father. He didn’t seem to care about that. “Uh. I guess he figured it was for breeding. That’s what he said, anyway. He caught mother to breed on her. He didn’t have nobody to help him with chores, but then I don’t guess he counted on it taking so long for them to get big enough to help, ‘cause he complained about that.”

  “So this is common practice? Bartering females for breeding purposes?”

  Lexa blinked at him. It occurred to her that she didn’t know, for certain, if it was common or not. It seemed to her that they weren’t that keen on trading for women in general. Sir hadn’t and Ralph hadn’t. They’d just taken. “I guess. Ralph didn’t … not to get me anyway. He just came with his raiders and took everything. Later, though, he said he was going to trade me off ‘cause I wasn’t no good for breeding.”

  She regretted that statement almost as soon as she’d said it. It certainly didn’t make her look particularly valuable, she realized, to admit she hadn’t been able to produce. She didn’t know why it was important to assure him that she was of worth. She didn’t examine it too closely either. “I never believed that, though. I got three babes. They just died. I figured it was ‘cause Ralph had a nasty habit of kicking me when he got pissed off and he did it. But he said it was me so I don’t know.”

  “What happened to Ralph? Did somebody else kill him to claim you?”

  Lexa sent him an uneasy look, wondering if it was safe to admit that she’d run off, but when it came right down to it, Ralph had stolen her and he’d been pretty clear that stealing was a punishable offense. “No. I just ran off. He was talking about giving me to his man, Clarence, and Clarence was worse than Ralph.”

  He studied her for a long moment in a way that made Lexa distinctly uneasy, made her wonder if she’d figured
wrong. “Well, he didn’t pay, you know!” she pointed out defensively. “He didn’t really own me. So it wasn’t stealing. He stole me!”

  He didn’t respond and that made Lexa even more uneasy, but she was just too tired to worry about it for long. His legs were longer than hers and he didn’t slow his stride that she could see to allow for her shorter one. She thought they made better time heading back than she’d managed heading out. She was all but staggering with fatigue when they finally reached the packed dirt streets of the village and too exhausted to question what he had in mind for her, tired enough she was beyond caring at that moment.

  That state didn’t last. When he took her to the local saloon and up the stairs to a room and told her to lie down on the bed, fear zoomed to the forefront of her mind again and she looked around a little wildly for a route of escape. His look of disgust didn’t soothe her any.