Midnight Enchantment
Page 30
Maybe they were watching her. Maybe they did know what she was. Maybe they did mean her harm. It wasn’t paranoia if they were really after you, right? She wished she knew who they were.
She wished even more she knew what she was. Her whole life she’d felt out of step with everyone else. Only recently had her differences really taken a turn for the bizarre.
How much strangeness could a woman handle before she went insane? She was afraid she might be about to find out the answer.
When she determined Dmitri wasn’t following, she slowed her pace, rounding the corner that brought her to the lot where she’d parked her car.
She approached her black sedan with a sigh of relief. No echo of a man’s measured footsteps had resounded behind her, no gloved hand had come from behind to cover her mouth and draw her back into the shadows. There was her car, she was safe. Yay. She tried to muster some enthusiasm for that happy news and failed. She was exhausted.
Pulling her keys from her other pocket, she unlocked her doors remotely. Just as she touched the door handle, someone cursed loudly. Her head whipped up and she spotted a man with medium-brown hair holding a briefcase on the opposite side of the row of parked cars. He looked harmless, like some accountant or businessman who’d been working late.
In one hand he held a briefcase and he was using the other hand to shade his eyes as he peered into the driver’s side window. He swore again, his voice sounding squeaky and distressed.
She almost ignored the worried man, got into her car and drove away, but she hadn’t been raised that way. “Are you all right, sir?” she called loudly from her safe place beside her car’s driver side door.
The man glanced at her, seeming surprised to find her there. He adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “I locked my keys and my cell phone in the car. Stupid,” he muttered. He turned back to the automobile, staring into the window as though he could reach through the glass and grab his stuff. “It’s late, the building is closed and—”
“No problem,” Jessa called to him with a reassuring smile. “I’ve locked my keys in my car before, too. I’ll call a locksmith for you. I’ll tell them it’s a green Impala on level three of the Handburg parking garage. They should be here soon, okay?”
She opened her car door, intending to sit down and fish out her phone to make the call, but the man walked over to her instead.
No. He didn’t walk, he ran…or something. Damn, the guy could move fast. One minute he was way over there, now he was right beside her.
She backed away from him, alarmed.
“Wait. That will be expensive. Do you mind if I just call my wife? She’s got an extra key.”
He flashed a bland smile at her, a bland smile on a bland face. She looked down and saw the gold wedding band on his left hand wink in the dim light.
“Sure.” She dug into her bag and pulled her cell phone out. “Here you—” The cell phone clattered to the cement as bland suddenly turned brutal. The veneer of nice, harmless man peeled away like an aging patina.
Oh, no.
Jessa stepped backward as the man’s thin lips peeled into a gruesome smile, revealing sharp white teeth and…were those…fangs? How could that be?
“Jessamine Amber Hamilton?” Even the man’s voice had changed. He ripped off the glasses and threw them to the pavement.
She shook her head, unwilling to answer, and took another step back. Her fingers closed around her pepper spray. He was between her and her car. That needed to change. Getting to her car meant she made it out of here alive.
Rage blossomed inside her. She just wanted to go home! Jessa stopped retreating. “Get the hell away from me right now.” Her voice came out a whole lot stronger and more assertive than she felt, but she needed to treat this man like the dog he was—and show him who was alpha. If she didn’t act afraid, maybe he’d back off.
The man tipped his head to the side, looking oddly alien. Then he smiled a waaaay creepy smile and said, “No.”
“Fine. You asked for it, asshole.” She pulled the pepper spray from her pocket, aimed it at the man’s face, and pulled the trigger. The pepper spray hit him straight in the eyes, but he didn’t flinch. All he did was swipe a hand across his face and leer at her. It was like she’d shot him with a water pistol. Then, if the fangs weren’t weird enough, his eyes bled black…completely black. Hellspawn obsidian black.
Okay, that was not normal.
The smell of the pepper spray stung her nose, made her eyes water. It was potent. Any normal human should be writhing in agony on the floor of the parking garage by now. Why wasn’t he?
The man narrowed his creepy black eyes and smiled, revealing—unmistakably this time—two shiny sharp fangs.
It appeared she had her answer; this thing wasn’t human.
A growl issued from the back of his throat that raised the hair along her nape. She dropped her bag, turned, and ran. He tackled her immediately, rolling her over and looming above her. She fought him—punching, biting, scratching, but his strength was as unnatural as his teeth. And his grip was cold, freezing. Where his skin touched her, she went numb.
His mouth, with those shiny fangs, descended toward her face, icy cold saliva dripping from their knife-like points.
She screamed.
HE could feel her.
Her presence burned through every fiber of his body, screaming at him to find her. It had rushed though him the moment that Loki had untwisted the cosmic laws that bound him—unlocked Broder’s ability to be with a woman. His chastity belt. That’s what the Brotherhood of the Damned called it, a darkly comedic term for the magick that kept them from intimate contact with any other person.
You could call Loki many things, but not a liar. At least not this time. It was exactly a thousand years since the day Broder had been taken for the Brotherhood. Just as Loki had promised, he was free—at least for a time—to taste the fruits of which he’d been forbidden.
He could feel her.
From the moment he’d been freed, she pulled him toward her. This was the one woman allowed him in all the world and nothing was going to keep him from her.
He raced his cycle down the rain-slicked streets of Washington, D.C., the reflection of the lights from the intersections he rode through gleaming on the wet pavement and the ends of his long, spelled leather coat flapping behind him.
His blood sang hot with the supernatural scent of her. She wasn’t far, just a few blocks away. His body tightened with need, his heart rushing with adrenaline caused by her nearness. She would be human, that’s always how Loki did it. Not valkyrie, not witch. Human. It complicated things for the Brotherhood and amused Loki, the bastard. He never made things easy.
Of course, a witch, for Broder at least, would have been far more complicated.
One thousand years he’d been in the Brotherhood of the Damned. One thousand years of offing Blight, one by one, hoping to find that single agent from whom the sliver had been taken that pierced his soul. If he could find that one agent, he would be free to die.
Most humans dreamed about immortality, but most in the Brotherhood dreamed of death—of peace, of rest, of change of any kind. Love was just a dream…death, something to strive for.
Immortality for the Brotherhood was hell.
Kill the agent of Blight from whom Loki had extracted the sliver lodged in Broder’s soul and the sliver would die, too. The countdown clock of his physical life would resume.
But this. This was a new goal. This was different from the last thousand years of his life. This woman promised warmth, companionship…pleasure. A respite from the endless cycle of killing and death.
He was close now. He gunned the engine of his cycle, ran a red light. The city was empty, winding down into night. To his left was a parking garage. In it was his woman.
Broder gunned the motorcycle inside, his blood a torpedo headed straight for her.
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