Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet

“For now.” He frowned and looked past the building down the alley. “Until they figure out a better way to get at you.”

We were still at an impasse with the picture. And I still had to wonder if he had been cleared of murder charges only to become an arsonist. Why would he burn down that building? Any of them? He’d lived there, but why burn them down?

I had to remember what he came from. I’d been tortured by Earl Walker once and only once, and I had been changed mentally, physically, and emotionally. I became a different animal. What would years of that do to a person? Decades of living and breathing fear, day in and day out? Of being used and abused, beaten and starved, with no haven, no safe place to hide? The thought cinched my ribs around my lungs.

He watched me from underneath his lashes, his expression knowing. “You aren’t feeling sorry for me, are you? I would hate to have to remedy that.”

Yep, he was still mad. “And just how would you accomplish such a thing?”

The resignation on his face stole my breath. “Believe me when I say you don’t want to know.”

Before I could manage a reply, a thunderous crack exploded in the air behind him. He turned toward the sound and I looked past him, sensing danger instantly. The world thickened and slowed, but not fast enough. Reyes stepped in front of me as a bullet that had been rocketing toward my head tore through his chest instead. It exited out his back and continued its journey, the metal fragmented, but whole enough to finish what it had started.

Then, in a feat that stunned me to my core, Reyes turned, too fast for me to see, and caught it in midair.

I stumbled back and looked on as Reyes opened his palm to examine the bullet. But he was corporeal. When the bullet hit, he hadn’t had time to separate. To try to stop it with his incorporeal self. Blood spread across his T-shirt so fast, I grew light-headed at the sight of it. He coughed, and blood bubbled out of his mouth.

His gaze met mine as he fell to his knees and whispered, “Run.”

I rushed forward to catch him and caught a glimpse of the culprit cowering on top of a building down the street. I expected another demon. Perhaps one who’d wised up and decided to bring weapons of mass destruction to the party. But it was the blond biker from the bank robbery. The one who had been kicked out of the military, who hadn’t finished his sniper training. I stood there, beyond flabbergasted. Apparently, he really didn’t want any witnesses.

Anger surged inside me faster than the splitting of an atom. Like a volcano bursting through the top of a mountain, fury erupted out of me in one blinding flash. Windows shattered and shards of glass hung like a menagerie of shimmering color as I walked toward Blondie, determination locking my teeth together. He was reloading the rifle, his movements slow in the adjustment of time, sluggish. He brought the butt to his shoulder, leaned his head over until the image from the scope came into view. Just as his finger started to squeeze the trigger, I reached into his chest and crushed his heart. It beat once, twice more, then stopped altogether. And satisfaction coursed through me like cool water dousing a wildfire.

Blondie grabbed his chest, his mouth dropping open, fighting for air seconds before he fell face-first to the ground.

Reyes appeared beside me. He examined me, the blond, then turned back to where we had been. Where we still were. When I looked back, I saw myself kneeling on the ground, looking back at me, into my own eyes. Reyes’s body lay next to me. Before I could make sense of any of it, I awakened to my previous surroundings with a startled gasp, like I had never been outside my own body, like I had not just seen it from a great distance. I looked down at Reyes.

He curled into himself, his breaths hard and shallow.

“Reyes!” I shouted, scrambling toward him and trying to find the wound to put pressure on it. A bullet had ripped through his chest. Even the son of Satan wouldn’t walk away after an injury like that.

We heard sirens in the distance, and he struggled to his knees.

“Get me … into the shadows.” He nodded toward a trash bin. “Behind that Dumpster.”

“You need an ambulance.”

“No.” Anger hit me like a wall of fire. He grabbed my shirt with a bloodied hand and jerked me forward. “I’m not going back, and you’re not sending me there.” He pushed and fell onto his hands, trying to catch his breath. It reminded me so much of the very first time I saw him, when I was in high school and he was fighting for air beside a Dumpster after being beaten. I’d let him down then. I did nothing to save him, and his life took a definite turn for the worse. I would not let that happen again.

I touched his shoulder, forgetting that he was more wolf than canine, more panther than cat. There was nothing domestic about Reyes Farrow. He could turn in a heartbeat, had proved it a dozen times. But when he did turn on me, when he rocketed from prey to predator, my shock was complete.

He struck so fast, his movements were nothing more than a dark blur. I was vertical one moment and horizontal the next. And he was on top of me, his body rock hard, unbending, unyielding. He leaned into me until his mouth—his sensual mouth that had only recently sent shivers of passion thundering through me—hovered at my ear. The warmth of his blood spread over my chest and shoulders and pooled in the divot at the base of my throat, and I wondered how much longer he’d live. Surely no one could survive that much blood loss. Not even a supernatural being. He sent a thigh between my legs, parting them for a better fit.

“I told you,” he said, his voice like a low growl, rippling through me in white-hot waves. “Don’t—” One hand wrapped around my neck as his mouth nuzzled my ear. “—ever—” The other slid up my shirt, the pleasure of his touch leaving heat trails in its wake. “—pity—” His h*ps pushed my legs farther apart; my hands cupped them in reflex. “—me.” His mouth crushed mine, the kiss raw and needy. I wrapped my arms around his waist, then sent one over his steel bu**ocks, pulling him into me, wanting him inside. Despite our situation. Despite our circumstances.