She tried elbowing him in the shoulder. “Yes.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Allie. You’re not going anywhere. How the hell do I know if your sanity is even intact?”
“I’m perfectly fine.” She pushed against him, grunting as she fought to break his hold.
But no matter how powerful her Fae powers were, she would never match him in the strength department. Their difference in size alone was enough to give him an unfailing advantage.
Loosening his hold, he quickly rotated her to face him. She weighed so little, even less than she used to.
“Let me go.” She kicked hard and caught him straight in the shin. Holy shit, that stung. He bit his lower lip and fought back a curse. Allsún had never had much in upper body strength, but, man, did she have loads of power in her legs. Holding her out in front of him, he walked over to the wall, then pinned his body against hers, holding her in place with his weight so she couldn’t kick him.
But now he had other problems. Shit, if the feel of her body against his wasn’t enough to undo him completely. His cock stiffened as her hips pressed against him. He wanted to kiss her hard and deep, slide his hands down to truly remember the feeling of her body.
No. He couldn’t do that. She didn’t want him like that, not anymore.
“Let me go,” she said again.
He held on to her tight. It didn’t take much for him to subdue her, and frankly, he wanted to keep her pressed against him forever. “I’m not letting you go until you agree not to run off.”
She continued to shove against him. “I won’t make any promises.”
When he didn’t release her, her sweet face twisted into a scowl, and he knew what she was gearing up to do—what she always did when she was beyond pissed at him. Use his full name.
She inhaled a sharp breath, and as she spoke she punctuated each of her words with pure irritation. “David Jonathan Matthew Aronowitz, you let me down this instant or I swear I’ll—”
“Allsún, you need to listen to me. This is really important,” he interrupted her.
Refusing to listen, she continued to scowl at him, and he knew her stubborn side had set in. If he didn’t cave, at least a little, she would keep going for hours, and if he got her pissed off enough, boy, would he regret it. Allsún might be only half-Fae, but that half was of pixie heritage, and while pixies were sweet little things most of the time, you really didn’t want to piss them off. Allsún held true to that rule.
Slowly he loosened his hold, allowing her body to slide down the wall until her feet touched the floor. But he didn’t release her completely, just enough to placate her temper.
The scowl faded slightly. “I can’t stay here, David. I came to help that family, and you know I’m all for saving live victims, but the dead ones are your thing, so since you have this covered, I really need to go and get out of this hospital gown.”
No way was he letting her go when there were demons out there who knew what she really was. “Allie, listen to me. We need to talk.”
Turning her head away, she refused to look at him. “There’s nothing for us to talk about.”
He scoffed. “Really? Nothing? How about the fact that you’ve been in a coma the last month, and now you’re suddenly awake and at a crime scene? How the hell did you get here? How did you get out of the hospital? Jace was heading to the hospital to watch over you as soon as I left.”
Finally she met his gaze again. “No one was there but me when I woke up, so I just left, okay? All of a sudden I woke up. I was lying in a hospital bed, connected to an IV, and when I woke up I didn’t want to be there anymore, so I took the IV out and I left.”
David stared at her for a long moment. She wasn’t serious, was she? “So you woke up, pulled out your IV, decided ‘I don’t really need to be here,’ and then walked out in a hospital gown into the freezing cold Rochester night and decided to follow me to a crime scene? Why wouldn’t you wait for clearance from a doctor to make sure you were okay?”
She ignored his last question. “Followed you? I didn’t have any idea you would be here, okay? I woke up, and I had one of my feelings. I knew that somebody in the area was in trouble, that they were having problems with demons. I listened to my senses. I flagged down a cab, and I got a ride here. I didn’t expect you to be here, that’s for certain. If I had, I wouldn’t have come.”
“I’m the only demon hunter in the city, and you didn’t expect me to be here?”
She flashed him a look that said don’t-be-an-asshole.
David’s eyes widened, and he stared at her in disbelief. Clearly she hadn’t thought a single bit of this through. All the more reason she needed to stay with him. She needed time for her head to clear. “Last I knew, you weren’t hunting demons. What happened to that?”
She frowned. “I haven’t been hunting demons, okay? I haven’t been hunting anything in the past five years, but when I woke up, this feeling of someone being in danger overcame me and I couldn’t ignore it. I’ve never felt a pull so strong. I knew I had to track it to the source, and my senses led me here.”
“What exactly were you expecting to do when you got here? Single-handedly take down a demon with no weapons and protected by nothing but a hospital gown?” he asked.
He loosened his hold enough for her to wiggle free. As soon as she left his arms, he missed the feel of her body pressed against him. He grabbed her hand to keep her from leaving, but she wrenched away from him.
“I hadn’t thought that far through it, okay? Get off my case. What does it matter to you, anyway?”
David’s jaw dropped. “What does it matter to me? I’m the one who’s been stationed at your bedside nearly 24/7 since you were hospitalized. I’m the one who carried you out of that awful warehouse where Robert tortured you. You do remember that, right?”
She met his stare. “There’s no way I could forget that, even though I want to.”
A lull fell between them. There were so many things he wanted to say, but he wasn’t even certain where to begin.
Allsún broke the silence first. “Once the drugs wore off, it all came back to me pretty fast.”
David couldn’t believe what he was hearing. She’d simply snapped out of her coma? That was it? On the very night he’d found out that her life was in danger?
No. It was too coincidental. Her senses were clearly trying to tell her something.
Allsún dropped her hands to her sides in exasperation. “Look, I get that it was dumb, okay? And I can clearly see that I’m not needed here. The carnage that’s down there—” her eyes flicked to the staircase leading down to the basement “—well, you can take care of that. Now that you have the Execution Underground on your side with all their fancy equipment, I’m sure that sort of thing is no problem for you.”
He could hear the slight contempt in her voice at the mention of the Execution Underground. Did it really still piss her off after all these years? She’d left him after he joined the Execution Underground. She hadn’t approved of him signing on. Not that he could really blame her. Hell, he should’ve considered her feelings more back then. He knew that now. He’d been young, naïve and so ready to save the world that he’d failed her in the process. For the first year, every day without her had been worse than the last. He tried to tell himself that things had improved since then, that he wasn’t constantly longing for her to be by his side, and that he was really okay, but who was he kidding? Even being with her like this now was killing him. He shoved the feelings inside, boxing them away where they wouldn’t be so painful. He couldn’t allow himself to go down that road.
She wrenched her eyes away from the stairs and spoke again. “Anyway, I’m out of here,” she said. She moved toward the door.
David stepped in front of her. “I can’t let you do that.”
She crossed her arms over her c
hest. “Why not?”
“Because I need to watch over you.”
She scoffed. “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself. In case you hadn’t noticed, I wasn’t kidnapped by a psychotic killer until you and Jace barged into Frankie’s pack. Before that I was fine.”
He winced. He knew it was his fault. He knew that before he and Jace had shown up at K9’s, the club run by Frankie Amato, Rochester werewolf packmaster and Jace’s girlfriend, Allsún had just been hanging out with the werewolves. He had brought Robert into her life. She didn’t need to point that out to him. “Yeah, I know it was my fault, but that’s all the more reason I need to keep you protected now. I know you’ve always been capable, but give yourself at least a few days to recover from what you’ve been through, Allsún. Allow me to watch over you.”
She tried to move around him, but whatever way she turned, he blocked her path. “I don’t need you to watch over me. Robert’s dead, right? If I remember correctly, Jace killed him.”
David nodded. “Yeah, Jace killed him.”
The tense muscles in her shoulders relaxed. “Good. Then, as far as I’m concerned, I’m perfectly safe.”
Without warning, she ducked underneath his arm and started to walk out of his life yet again.
“A few days ago a demon possessed your psychiatrist.”
Allsún froze. She lingered in the doorway for a moment as if she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to leave or not. Finally she turned around. “You have my attention now,” she said.
Relief washed over David. Maybe he could actually convince her to stay. “I went after that demon tonight.”
Allsún wrapped her arms around her body as if she was trying to hold herself together while she listened to him speak. “And?”
His face hardened at the thought of that demonic piece of shit threatening Allsún. “And I killed him.”
“Good,” she said. She turned to leave again.
“But it knew about you, Allie. It knew you’re the last Fae outside the Isle of Apples.”
Allsún turned back toward him. He could see in her eyes that she realized the ramifications of the news he’d just told her. If that demon had told even one other demon about her—and according to the doctor, it had told far more than one—the word would spread amongst them.
As the natural enemy of the demons, the Fae had been engaged in a constant war with them for centuries. But not long before David and Allsún separated, there had been a mass movement of Fae back to the Isle of Apples, an alternate dimension inhabited exclusively by the Fae, a completely different world. Since then David had done plenty of searching, and as far as he could tell, all the full-blooded Fae were gone, and Allsún was the only remaining half-breed outside the Isle. When she stopped hunting, she had gone undetected by the demons. Now that the demons knew she was still here, they would all be gunning for her.
A slight note of panic crept into her voice. “B-but I’m only a half-breed. He must have realized that I—”
“Allie,” he said, cutting her off before she could get herself worked into a tizzy, “you know that doesn’t make a difference to demons. You’re a faerie all the same. You’re still their enemy. Plus, you don’t think it’s strange that on all the nights you could have woken up, this was the one? I don’t know about you, but that’s a little too coincidental for my tastes.”
“Shite.” Allsún swore under her breath. The slightest bit of her mother’s Irish accent crept into her voice. That always happened when she was upset. “What do I do now?”
He stepped forward again. He was barely a foot away from her. He towered over her small frame and scanned the length of her body. She was hardly covered in the hospital gown, and being this close to her still electrified him. His desire for her came rushing back, though he was certain it had never truly left. God, how he’d missed her.
“Stay with me. Allow me to protect you.” He said the words as if the situation were only temporary, only until they could find a way to get her off the demons’ radar again, but deep down he wanted so much more. Being so near her when he knew she didn’t want him anymore was the sweetest form of torture—painful and divine all at once.
She shook her head. “You know I can’t do that, David.”
“Why not?”
She glanced at the floor, refusing to meet his gaze. “Because forgive me if I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t want to spend time with my ex-fiancé.”
Damn. That stung. His face remained calm on the surface, but inside he wanted to scream in agony. He was tormented by so many emotions he couldn’t let out. He wanted to say that he didn’t have to be an ex-fiancé, that nothing in the world would make him happier than getting back together with her again, but instead he settled for, “You know it’s necessary, at least for a few days until you’re back to normal again and can fight off demons on your own.”
“Fine,” she said. “But I want to make it clear that this is not a chance to mend things between us.”
A sharp pain hit him straight in the heart, but he held on to his poker face.
When he didn’t respond, she continued. “I assume that’s not what you’re going for here, but let’s both be adult enough to agree beforehand that dredging up our past is only going to make both of us miserable. So, if I stay with you for the next few days, just until I’m on my feet again and we’ve figured this situation out, we’ll agree to be just friends and nothing more, okay?”
She stuck out her hand to shake on it. He stared at her and couldn’t help but wonder how they’d gotten to this point. How had their relationship gone so wrong? They’d grown up together, been friends since they were young.
It was the summer in between David’s junior and senior years in high school that changed everything. Allsún had been away all summer in Ireland with her mother, while David had spent his free time acting like an idiot and getting into trouble with Jace, who was home for a brief summer break from training with the Execution Underground. Once Jace had shipped off again, the rest of David’s summer was spent watching too many bad cartoons. With Allsún not scheduled to return until the day before school began, David had anticipated the first day of class like a starving man staring at a juicy hamburger. He had never been a bookworm, much less enjoyed school, but Allsún had gotten him into reading, which was the extent of his interest in learning. His excitement for that first day of classes had been solely because of the chance to see Allsún again. He had counted down the days all summer long until he could tell her his thoughts on the books she had left him to read.
But all of that had been blown to hell as soon as he saw her.
The once gangly Allsún who wore glasses a little too large for her face and a retainer, and possessed an unruly amount of curly, slightly frizzy hair, had blossomed into the gorgeous girl who every guy in high school wanted. Over the summer she had filled out in all the right places. Her hips had widened, and her formerly nonexistent breasts had developed and then some. She’d ditched her retainer, giving her the perfect smile, and her mother had finally caved and bought her contacts. Even her once-crazy curls had now fallen in smooth, perfect ringlets without a hair out of place.
Whatever was in the water in Ireland, David was a major fan.
Really, he hadn’t been sure if he was seeing correctly at first. Hell, he’d always thought Allsún was beautiful, even despite all her geeky attributes, but she’d been transformed overnight from his best friend to the girl he couldn’t stop thinking about.
Sure, even to this day he still felt a bit shallow that he wasn’t interested in Allsún romantically until her inside and outside matched in beauty, but he had been a teenage boy then, and he knew now, as a full-grown man, that even in her nerdlike state he would have fallen in love with her.
When she’d walked into the hallway of Brighton High School after that summer,
he’d dropped the three textbooks he was carrying, just like a total idiot.
A smile had blossomed across her face at the sight of him, and she’d thrown her backpack to the ground and run down the hallway to launch herself into his arms. “Hey, jerk. I’ve missed you.”
It had taken him a minute to respond. He’d still been trying to process the fact that his best friend, someone he’d never been nervous around, was suddenly the one girl in school he wished he could take advantage of. Shit, that was so not good.
They’d danced back and forth in an overly flirtatious tango throughout the year. They would go from being comfortable with one another one minute to avoiding each other for days the next, because in some way the thought of wanting to kiss and touch the girl he had once considered to be like a sister made him sick to his stomach with anxiety. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her, and he hadn’t wanted a romance between them to mess up the friendship they’d shared for so long. But that friendship had already changed as soon as his attraction to her had made itself evident. He’d been certain Allsún had noticed the different way he looked at her.
He wished he could say that he’d swept her off her feet on prom night or something equally cheesy, like Sixteen Candles or all those other ’80’s movies that she loved to watch. But he hadn’t shown up with a birthday cake at her house to declare his love, he hadn’t ridden a lawnmower across her front lawn, held a blaring boom box outside her window, or any of the other ridiculous things that Allsún fawned over in those films.
One night, when she was at his grandmother’s house for dinner and his grandmother had gone to bed, leaving the two of them alone, he’d just done it. Mid-sentence. Without any warning signs.
Allsún had been talking about how his grandmother had offered to teach her to cook, and before he knew what was happening, his hand had been on the back of her neck. He’d pulled her into his lap and was kissing her with so much force the world seemed to spin. She’d kissed him back, and that sealed the deal.
Immortal Hunter Page 4
