“Ada, seriously, I think you should let me handle this.”
Ada waved him off without even slowing down. “I’m fully capable of telling a bunch of drunks to beat it.” It wasn’t like this was the first time, although something in Ada’s gut told her this time was different. She shook off the feeling, chalking it up to the disappointment from the earlier part of her evening, and stepped around the ejected partier who was muttering and cursing to himself as he paced around the bottom of the steps.
“Dorian, open up.” She banged on the door with her fist, although she knew it wouldn’t do any good. Some sort of angry dance music was blaring inside the cabin so loud she couldn’t hear it as much as feel it pounding through her chest. The only way she knew Joshua was still with her was the wall of warmth she felt at her back. “Come on, Dorian. Time to clear out.”
When nothing happened she wrenched open the front door. Smoke and music poured out before she could think to hold her breath. Panic clenched her heart as her lungs filled with smoke and the coughing began. She tried to be calm as she searched for her inhaler, but then Dorian was in her face asking her what in the hell she was doing there and some idiot was screaming about how it was his fucking party because he’d paid for the fucking drugs. She felt like she was in the middle of an exploding circus and all she could do was cough.
As more yelling and cursing filled the air, Ada became aware of a warm pressure at her hip. “Come on,” a soothing male voice said in her ear. “We need to get out of here. The cops are on their way. Let them handle this.”
Unable to speak, Ada nodded and turned around. Joshua was already tugging her back towards the steps. He walked backwards, his steps sure as he watched the bedlam erupting over Ada’s shoulder, which is why he missed the ejected partier coming back up the steps with a gun in his hand.
“Joshua!” Ada gasped, but it was too late. Even though she saw the finger squeeze the trigger, her brain tried to find another cause for the ear-splitting pop. It attempted to make excuses for why Joshua’s eyes had gone big, and red was spreading across the shoulder of his shirt. And then her brain stopped working all together as she was thrown to the ground.
“Stay down.”
Ada blinked up into the face poised above her. Later, when her brain stopped shooting off in a million directions and reality started making sense again, she would wonder what Jase Donovan was doing there, holding her on the ground while pointing a gun towards the cabin, but for now the only thoughts she could entertain were the ones about the likelihood of her getting killed.
“Liam, I’ve got the girl. You take care of Joshua.”
“Joshua!” Ada struggled against the body pinning her to the ground, but it was no use. “He’s been shot! We need to… I have to—” Whatever she had to do was swallowed by the cough that just wouldn’t quit.
“Shhh…,” Jase said in a calming tone normally reserved for screaming babies. “He’s fine.”
“No, he was shot.” There had been blood. So much blood. And it was all her fault. If she had taken him back to his cabin like she should have, he would be shooting terrorists or battling orcs instead of bleeding to death because one of Dorian’s idiot friends shot him. “He can’t die,” she said to Jase. “Don’t let him die.”
“Don’t worry. Joshua will outlive us all. Promise.”
She lay there, gasping for breath, for several long minutes. Her cough died off quicker than she was expecting, but the shock and terror were taking their sweet time about leaving. Without any warning, her rescuer bounced up and offered his hand. As she stared at the fingers stretched toward her, the rest of the world came into focus. She slowly became aware of the breeze blowing off the lake, the smell of beer, and the sound of police sirens.
“Okay, everyone, let’s get up slowly with your hands in the air.”
Ada immediately complied with the authoritative voice. As she rose, she noticed Jase sliding his gun out of sight beneath his shirt.
“Okay, now turn around so I can see your faces,” the cop said once they were both on their feet. With her hands still in the air, Ada turned. The officer’s eyes went big as his jaw unhinged, leaving him standing the in the middle of the post-shooting bedlam like a codfish. It hardly inspired confidence. “Ada Jessup, what are you doing here?”
“Ada Jessup?” Jase jumped back as if her identity was some devastating blow. “Jesus Christ. Will you do me a favor and tell your dad I had nothing to do with this? I was just trying to help. Honest to God.” His words came tumbling out, one on top of the next. “Sorry about all the Jesuses and Gods. I didn’t mean—“
Ada ignored Jase.
“I work here,” she said, her voice in full-on freaked-out vibrato. “I was telling them they had to leave, and then there was this guy with a gun, and… and…” She was going to cry. She could feel all the confusion and panic that had been in her bones seeking release through her eyes. “Is he dead?”
The police officer, who Ada recognized as Colin McLean, repeated his codfish pose. “Is who dead?”
“Joshua.” His name was barely a whisper. She hadn’t really known him at all, but she liked what little she’d discovered before he’d been gunned down in cold blood.
“Someone was shot?” Office McLean grabbed for this gun with one hand and the radio on the shoulder of his uniform with the other.
“No,” Jase answered a little too quickly. “No one was shot.” His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “She heard the gunfire and saw my friend go down, but he was just taking cover. He’s fine.”
Never taking his eyes off Jase, Officer McLean pushed the button on his radio. “Haskell, do we have a gunshot victim?”
“No victim. Only one shot discharged, and it didn’t hit anyone,” Haskell’s disembodied voice replied. “Suspect is in custody. It took four of us to get him in the car. He’s out of his head on something.”
“Are you certain you saw someone get shot?” Officer McLean asked Ada. “I’m sure everything was quite confusing once the gun went off, and it is dark out here.”
“I know what I saw,” she said through clenched teeth, her fear now replaced with annoyance. Why wouldn’t anyone believe her? Even worse, Jase and Officer McLean were looking at her as if she was some poor hysterical girl to be pitied, which pissed her off even more. She ran two miles nearly ever day and took kickboxing classes twice a week, but no one thought of her as that girl. She might as well have “SICK” tattooed in big letters across her forehead since it was the only thing anyone ever saw when they looked at her.
Her determination must have shown on her face because Jase, whose hands were still in the air, nodded to his hip. “May I?” When Officer McLean answered with a quick jerk of his head, Jase pulled his phone out of his pocket and said, “Siri, you sly fox, would you please ask Joshua to send me a selfie?”
“Anything for you,” a voice way too sexy and real to have been manufactured by Silicon Valley replied.
Officer McLean’s eyebrows arched up onto his forehead. “Siri likes you more than she does me.”
Jase chuckled. “I have a friend who is a tech god. He made some adjustments. Speaking of…” He flipped around his phone. Joshua’s face stared back at Ada, a phone in his hand showing the current date and time against a SuperWhoLock background. “Here it is. The text said he was speaking with an Officer Grimes.”
Officer McLean took the phone from Jase. “Is this the guy you thought you saw get shot?” he asked Ada.
“That doesn’t prove anything.”
“So it is him.”
Ada narrowed her eyes. “You’re a cop. Shouldn’t you investigate this beyond looking at a picture on a cell phone?”
Officer McLean licked his lips, but was saved from having to say anything by a commotion at the bottom of the stairs. A round-bellied EMT pushed his way through the throng of party-goers who were being forced to wait as officers took statements and made arrests. No one nearby appeared to be in need of medical attention, but Ada held out hop
e until he stopped directly in front of her.
“Miss Jessup,” he said in greeting. “Do you need a stretcher, or can you walk to the ambulance?”
Was he serious?
“I can walk back to my golf cart and drive back to the main lodge as soon as we’re done here.”
Jase put a hand on her shoulder, and despite everything else, she felt her cheeks blaze just because Jase Donovan touched her. “We’re done here, aren’t we, Colin?” he asked.
Officer McLean nodded. “Yeah, we’re done.” He clasped Jase’s shoulder. “It was good to see you, man, but next time, just call. No need to heroically throw yourself on top of a girl in the middle of Timber’s one and only almost-shooting.”
Jase laughed and Ada fumed. Freaking small towns. Of course Officer McLean would immediately believe Jase and not her. After all, Jase had been Timber’s golden boy just a few years ago. People were still wearing shirts with his jersey number on them despite the fact that he’d graduated over five years ago. Probably just as many people knew Ada, but her fame didn’t earn her a slap on the back and a free pass. Instead, she was rewarded with overweight EMTs and the threat of being carried off on a stretcher.
If she ever figured out who told the ambulance crew she was here, she would kill them.
“I’m sorry, Miss Jessup,” the EMT said, “but you need to come with me to the hospital.”
“But I’m fine.” Confused and still hopped up on adrenaline, but fine.
“You’re panting,” Jase pointed out.
“With everything that has happened, I think it would be for the best,” Officer McLean added.
“I—”
“Your father is already at the hospital waiting for you,” the EMT said, driving the final nail in the proverbial coffin.
“Fine,” Ada said with as much dignity and grace she could muster. She threw back her shoulders and started down the stairs. “But no stretcher. I’m walking.”
Chapter 3
“This is going to hurt.”
Talk about your understatements. Joshua dug his fingers into the pillow beneath his head and locked his jaw.
“Son of a—”
The pillow muffled his scream and caught the tears cascading down his face. Years ago, he might have been ashamed to let his friends see him react so, but he was no longer a self-conscious child. Getting shot hurt, and having a bullet extracted from your shoulder hurt even more. You would have to be a robot to not scream and cry, and Joshua wasn’t a robot. He was an Immortal, which meant no matter how much it hurt or how much damage his body endured, he wouldn’t lose consciousness. He had to stay awake and feel every single ripped muscle and severed nerve being scraped by pliers and the bullet in reverse.
“And it’s out.” Rebecca Donovan dropped the bullet into a little glass bowl sitting next to where Joshua was sprawled out across the dining room table. “Do you want to keep it for sentimental reasons?”
“Throw it away,” he moaned. “This isn’t exactly a night I want to remember.”
During the eighty years he’d lived on this earth, Joshua had suffered his fair share of wounds. If his body scarred, it would be a map of battles fought and won. But the body of an Immortal never reflected the life lived. Joshua looked exactly as he did when he’d accepted the position and took up his sword just weeks after his nineteenth birthday. While other men who had been on this earth the same number of years were hunched-over white-haired geriatrics who shuffled from one place to the next, Joshua still got carded when he went to R-rated movies. No signs of age or the many beatings he’d taken over the years marred his body. Sometimes, he regretted it. He wanted visual proof of where he had been and what he had done. This, however, was not one of those times.
“How does an eternal warrior with the strength of ten Whos plus two get shot by an idiot druggie in the middle of Lake County?” Jase Donovan, Rebecca’s son and Joshua’s best friend, hopped up onto the table, jarring Joshua’s wound and causing a gasp of pain to escape his mouth. In true Jase form, his friend didn’t notice or miss a beat in his monologue. “And what was Ada Jessup doing there? She’s twelve. How does a twelve-year-old end up at a party like that? Who invited her? Who let her in? Do they know who her father is?”
It took a moment for Joshua to respond since Rebecca was furthering his torment by cleaning out the wound.
“I got shot because I wasn’t expecting someone to pull a gun in the middle of Lake County and druggies are, by and large, completely unpredictable,” he finally said through gritted teeth. “And Ada wasn’t at the party. She went there to break it up. She works for the resort.”
He’d been stupid to let her go with him up to the cabin. At least she hadn’t been the one to get shot. He took some comfort in that.
Jase picked up the bowl and started moving it around so the bullet spun in circles. “Ada works here? Isn’t that illegal? Child labor laws are still a thing, right?”
“I don’t think she’s literally twelve,” Joshua said.
“Ada Jessup?” Rebecca ground a piece of gauze over Joshua’s wound. “She has to be seventeen… no, eighteen now.”
Jase had the bowl spinning so fast the bullet was practically skimming the edge and producing a whirring noise that was most likely making the Shifter half of the Alpha Pack think about murderous things.
“Eighteen?” he said as if his mother had just told him the girl was a quadriplegic pole dancer. “No, she’s not. She can’t be.”
Finished with her medical duties, Rebecca moved over to the sink and lathered up her hands with soap. “That’s the problem with getting older, kiddo,” she said to her son. “Everyone else does, too.”
Not growing up in Lake County, and therefore not knowing the entire history of half the population, Joshua had no trouble accepting Ada as an almost-adult. She was what his mother would have called an old soul. You could see it in her multi-colored eyes. She might not have had many years under her belt, but she’d logged lots of miles in a short time.
Plus, she listened to Patsy Cline, and Patsy wasn’t Kidz Bop material.
“You.” Rebecca poked Joshua in the arm, just below his wound. Joshua loved her like the adoptive mother she’d become to him over the past four years, but he had to admit she had a sadistic streak. “I’m putting you on light duty for the next week. No working out. No sparring. And no playing with swords. You’ll reopen your wound.”
“You do realize you can’t make assignments around here, don’t you?” he asked, and then wished he hadn’t when she tried to kill him with her eyes. Jase used the same technique on occasion, but somehow it was scarier when leveled on you by a tiny nurse with grey hair decorating her temples.
“Liam and Scout are the Alphas,” Jase said, his concentration still on the bowl and bullet centrifuge he’d created. “They get to make all the assignments and rules around here.” When a pointed silence followed, he looked up and got the same glare that had just been leveled on Joshua. “Well, they are the Alphas,” he said, trying to defend himself.
“Well, I am the mom,” Rebecca said, swatting Jase on his butt with a gingham print hand towel. “And I’m the nurse you’re making do a doctor’s job, so he’s on light duty for the next week. Got it?”
“Got it.” With a flick of the wrist, Jase sent the bullet flying in the air. In a lightning-fast move only someone with a Shifter’s instincts and reflexes could accomplish, he plucked it out of the air and returned it and the bowl to the table. “He can be on Angel duty this week.”
Joshua jerked his head up so fast it made his shoulder scream. “No. Absolutely not. That is not light duty.”
“It’s a babysitting gig, and she’s twelve,” Jase said. “How on earth could that be strenuous?”
“Neither of us will make it through the week alive.”
“You’re immortal.”
Joshua snorted. “Yeah, well, there is a real chance your little sister is my version of kryptonite. A week with her, and I’ll be begging for death.
”
“Hey, Mr. I-Just-Got-Shot-And-Had-You-Bandage-Me-Up Boy. That’s my baby you’re talking about.” Joshua waited for Rebecca to prove she was still capable of rational thought where her youngest child was concerned. After a moment of pointed silence, she relented with a sigh. “So she’s a little high maintenance. She’s still a good girl. And it’s not all her fault. You provoke her.”
That was a fair point. Joshua really did love antagonizing Angel. Driving her into a rage wasn’t just easy, it was fun.
“Doesn’t matter,” Joshua said. “Scout will never go for it.”
He had no more gotten the words out of his mouth when the back door swung open.
“I won’t go for what?” the Alpha Female called down the hall. If she was a normal human, she would have never heard him, but Scout was the exact opposite of normal. In fact, some might argue she wasn’t even human.
As far as Joshua could tell after doing decades of research, Shifters have always existed. Scout thought they resulted from a mutation in human DNA and had spent the last four years learning genetics at a fancy-smancy private college to prove her theory, but others argued they were a completely different species. One theory even said Scout was the moon personified, her mate Liam, the first wolf to have ever lived, and all the Shifters of the world their offspring. Joshua wasn’t sure which theory was correct. All he knew was that when most of your friends have canine-like hearing, you have to be extra careful what you say.
“Your mother put me on restrictive duty and your brother wants to assign me to Angel watch,” Joshua said just as Scout and Liam came into the kitchen. “I was just about to explain to them why it wouldn’t work.”
Scout jumped up on the counter and grabbed an apple for herself with her right hand while flicking one behind her back with her left. Liam caught the airborne fruit without tearing his gaze from the fridge.
“Yes, you’re all very agile and have amazing super-human reflexes,” Joshua said from his surgery bed/the dining room table. “I get it.”
Liam didn’t even pretend to not know what he was talking about. “We’re just saying, none of us would have gotten ourselves shot by some dime bag loser in the middle of a high-class lake resort.”
Infinite Harmony Page 2
