He paused, confused. “So can’t you just get rid of the ‘r’?”
“I tried that, but I made a big mess of the gel lettering.” He opened his mouth again, but I held up a finger. “And before you ask, yes, I left without checking the spelling. Sue me.”
I disappeared into the back, before he could ask about candles. Somehow I’d forgotten those too. I was sure I couldscrounge some up; if I went through enough drawers. At the moment though, I had a garbage bag in each hand.
“DID YOU GET CANDLES?” Carter called back to me.
I headed for the back door, pretending not to hear. For a moment I wondered if it wasn’t somewhat nice, not being able to hear everyone all of the time. I could always fake being hard of hearing. Try it out for a little while, or—
The shriek of the wind reached my ears through the open back door. As I approached, I heard it again.
This time it sounded more like a scream than a shriek.
FUCK!
The bags fell from my outstretched fingers as I rushed outside. Cold blasted over me, and darkness swallowed my vision. Somehow though, even squinting into the freezing rain, I could make out the form of two figures struggling.
One, I could see, was small. And one was very,verybig.
“HEY!”
Fuckface was back, and he was even bigger than I remembered him. But that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was her.
I dove for him, committing fully. Cole whipped his head around at the sound of my voice, just in time to find me throwing myself bodily in his direction. It enabled him to twist at the last moment, causing me to miss spectacularly. In retrospect, I probably should’ve kept quiet.
“SAWYER!”
I found Hayden on the ground, rolling in the dirt and mud. I couldn’t tell if she was hurt, but she was holding her head in her hands.
Forgetting everything else, I ran over to her.
“Hayden! Hayden, I—”
Something connected with my side, and that something was a size sixteen boot. The wind was forced from my lungs, leaving me gasping for breath on my hands and knees. But there was no oxygen to be had. Long seconds ticked by, and inhaling did absolutely nothing. Panic set in, as the edges of my vision began going gray.
“Sawyer!”
Hayden’s warning came too late; not that I could do much about it. My body had somehow left the ground, and my whole world was spinning…
~ 54 ~
CARTER
I’d flown over the bar at the sound of Sawyer’s scream. It was faint and distant, but it was also frantic, and it told me something was very, very wrong.
Bursting through the back door, I was just in time to see Cole holding Sawyer’s limp body high over his head. He slammed him to the ground with a sickening thud, and I saw my friend’s head roll back as his eyes fixated on something far, far away
And then I saw Hayden, sprawled helplessly in the mud and dirt…. and my blood boiled.
MotherFUCKER!
I tackled him from behind, just as he was heading for Hayden. It was like wrapping my arms around a garbage truck. Cole fell forward, not expecting the full weight of me to come crashing down unexpectedly upon him. But as a trained fighter, he also knew exactly how to fall.
FUCK.
He twisted in such a way that I ended up beneath him, which meant the bulk of his fall was broken by me. I felt an unnatural crunching sound, somewhere inside me. It registered way before the pain actually reached my brain, giving me justenough time to scramble from underneath him and kick him square in the face.
Cole’s expression remained unchanged for a moment, but a moment was all I had. Teeth bared, lips curled back, he went absolutely berserk, swinging haymaker punches that were all brawler, no brain. They looked nothing like the controlled movements of a trained boxer, and I was able to dodge them easily. My back was giving out, though. The pain that was insidiously creeping up my spine was white-hot and all-consuming, and I knew it was only a matter of time before—
