I wasn’t going to worry about that. Not yet. I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen anything. Definitely not a pale purple twinkle that had to be a star.
Running into the living room, I grabbed a throw pillow and then went back into the kitchen, tucking it in behind his head to support it a little.
Finally, I dropped back to my knees, back to struggling to catch my breath. I’d thought I was in better shape than this. Then again, when the hell had I ever trained to push someone this heavy around?
Never, that’s when.
I was going to need to go to a chiropractor. Maybe get an X-ray.
After a moment, when my chest was still rising and falling like crazy but I could actually breathe through my nose almost steadily, I lifted my head and planted my palms against my thighs. Then I shuffled around.
In front of him.
The Defender’s head was drooped, but his frame wasn’t shaking as badly as it had been.
Maybe that wasn’t a good thing though.
Setting my hand over his wrist, I snuck it under and pressed my fingertips to where his pulse would be and waited.
A thump.
One second, two seconds, three… one too many before another.
One, two, three, four, more and more, and then another thump.
“Are you kidding me right now?” I choked. I hoped that was normal. I mean, he wasn’t human-human, so his heart shouldn’t beat the same way, right? Easing my fingertips away, I sat back on my heels and finally got a good look at him.
The familiar suit was mostly torn away from his body. A lot of tan chest was exposed; his bottoms clung to his legs for dear life. The entire right side of his cape was gone, like someone had ripped it right down the middle out of anger.
That wasn’t terrifying.
Okay. No reason to worry about that. Lifting my gaze—
Oh.
It suddenly made a lot of sense why his face was so blurry in pictures and videos. It almost didn’t seem possible to me either to be seeing what I was seeing, and I was looking at him, face-to-face. I had to blink twice for my eyes to absorb him. Maybe camera lenses couldn’t handle what they focused on. What he really looked like.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. The Primordial was beautiful, and The Centurion looked like he could have been some kind of sun god to an ancient civilization. He was unbelievably handsome.
But The Defender…
He was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.
Gorgeous wasn’t the right word to describe the smudged, dirty face. Thick, dark eyebrows highlighted a smooth forehead and sharp, lean cheekbones. His hair was so dark I wasn’t sure whether it was brown, black, or a shade in between. His perfect nose, rectangular jaw, and the fullness of his mouth tied all the pieces of him together into a package that was almost too fucking much. He was rugged and elegant at the same time.
He was big. Not hulking. Not bodybuilder sized, just… muscular but proportionate. Like a light heavyweight boxer that wasn’t actually light weight.
The most surprising part about him though was his bright red, almost sunburnt cheeks.
His eyes opened, and I stopped breathing.
The Defender’s irises glowed purple like stained glass held up against the sun.
Not blue, not gray, purple-purple. Violet maybe. Intense and bright, and 100 percent not human.
I felt like a deer in the headlights as that intense focus settled on me.
“Are you okay?” I asked like an idiot once I’d snapped out of it, like I hadn’t just seen him struggle to simply move. “Should I call an ambulance? I don’t know if I can get you into my car, but I could probably drive you to the hospital, even though I’m sure the military or someone would come pick you up in a helicopter. Or… or The Primordial would come get you. Or The Centurion.”
I was rambling. I was fucking rambling, but I couldn’t stop. It was a curse; it always had been. There was a reason I didn’t initiate talking to strangers. I had no self-control.
I had a big mouth.
Once you got me going, it was almost impossible to stop me. Everything just started coming out. What I’d watched on TV, what I liked eating for dinner, how bad the flies were. And then under pressure? I was scared and fascinated, and my body didn’t know how to handle either. It wasn’t just my brain in shock; it was every part of me.
The Defender—The fucking Defender—stared at me with glowing purple eyes, and I was pretty sure they were watering from pain. His chest rose and fell in small gasps that were terrifying. Those eyes moved to a spot just behind my head, locked there for a moment, before they fluttered closed. His mouth moved, but nothing came out.
Was he dying?
I choked. “Please tell me what to do,” I begged, desperate.
“No hospitals,” the being gritted out. Bright white teeth flashed in a bared expression that wasn’t a smile, making me gulp. “My… back…，” he confirmed in a hiss I barely heard, the muscles at his cheeks flexing on and off as he let out a rattling, weak exhale. “Weak…” His throat bobbed roughly.
I stopped breathing.
Pale lavender lids framed with pure black eyelashes fluttered over those unreal eyes as another savage groan ripped its way up his throat.
“You need help. The hospital, something, someone,” I whispered, scared. He couldn’t be dying. He couldn’t. He was invincible, wasn’t he? What in the hell could hurt him this badly?
His head barely moved, but I took it to be him shaking it, telling me no. Then he confirmed it. “No. Tell… no one.”
He wanted to stay here? In… in secret?
I already knew this was a shitty idea, and part of me knew damn well I was going to regret it, but…
So much of my life had been determined by the choices of others. Literally, almost every aspect of it had. All I had to do was look around to see the signs of it.
But I had made my own decision a long time ago. It was a small one, but it was mine. It lived in the back of my head every day with every beat of my heart and most of the thoughts in my brain. I knew exactly who I wanted to be. Who I should be, even if it battled against every paranoid, protective instinct that had been built up in my body over the years.
This man wasn’t just a man. He had helped millions. He was an icon. A hero. What kind of person would I be if I didn’t help him?
I knew that kind of person, and I fucking refused to be it.
The Defender didn’t want help, didn’t want a hospital, didn’t want… anything, it seemed, other than secrecy. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know how this had happened or what danger we might possibly be in.
It couldn’t matter. I’d worry about it later.
If there was a later.
Because I couldn’t tell him no. I couldn’t have left him out there. Not even for my grandma.
Even though he couldn’t see me, I nodded at the man who had been made into little action figures that graced countless little people’s bedrooms. The man who had inspired characters in television shows and movie after movie. A champion of the earth, he’d been called.
There was a giant statue of him in S?o Paulo in gratitude for his help after a massive earthquake.
And the same son of a bitch was in a wheelchair in my kitchen, injured and asking me for help.
“I’ll help you,” I promised him. Promised myself. “Tell me what to do. What do you need?”