Air closed around me like a big fist. I reached for my sword, which had fallen to the ground two feet from me, but couldn’t get it before I was lifted into the sky.
The cold force within me throbbed harder, almost painful. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes, trying to connect with it. Trying to figure out a way to lift a rock and beam that danged mage in the side of the head.
A scream rent the night. I fell, landing awkwardly and crumpling to the sidewalk. Disorientated, I dazedlygrabbed my sword and climbed to my feet. Someone gasped as I shook off the pain and started forward yet again.
Darius stood in human form in the street, naked, holding the now-limp mage by the back of his shirt. Before I got there, the shirt ripped at the neck and shoulder, making the mage drop a little lower in the air. The girls from the car that had nearly mowed him down gasped again.
“Tell me you merely knocked him out,” I said to Darius, limping as I worked around the hood of the car. My ankle was a little out of sorts from my haphazard landing. “Tell me he’ll wake up and give us information.”
“I do not like to lie to you, Reagan. I lost control when he had you in the air. I need to feed. I told you that.”
“There is no way it’s my fault you lost control, so don’t even try to pin it on me.”
“I am simply reminding you of what happens when you hold me off.”
“Do you also want to be a dead body? Is that what you’re after? Keep it up and I’ll add you to the pile.” I braced two fingers to the mage’s neck.
“Is he okay?” one of the girls asked with a quivering lip. The other was already crying. Their distress was evident from their lack of questions regarding the factthat a naked man was holding a potentially injured man in the air by his shirt. With one hand. And no visible strain.
No, they weren’t based in reality just now.
I deflated. “Nope. Damn it!” I turned around, seeing a row of lights and people emerging from their houses. “Well, this all went horribly wrong. Drop him and get us out of here. Fast. We don’t need anyone to take pictures of our faces. Send some vampires out here tomorrow to make those ladies forget their own names, let alone the fact that they saw a monster kill a guy.”
“I will not appear in photos.”
“You are really hard to get along with right now, do you know that? Let’s hit his house really quickly before we leave. Hurry, before the cops—” A siren wailed in the distance.
Without warning, he scooped me into his arms and raced up the street, faster than thought. We were breaking so many magical rules it wasn’t funny, not to mention that we’d killed a mage whom the Mages’ Guild, his circle, and—most recently—a demon might employ and/or like. My second night in Seattle and already my enemies were stacking up. I had a gift.
Chapter Twenty
“Are you sure this is your chosen course of action?” Darius asked me as we pulled up near the mage bar to meet Callie and Dizzy.
Instead of going in himself, Darius had given me ten minutes to run into the mage’s house and get the stuff I couldn’t live without. Eleven minutes later, he’d dragged me out. After that, we’d stopped by the hotel so he could get some clothes on, and now here we were, ready for a beer and hopefully some good news.
The beer was the only sure thing.
“Yes. Callie isn’t great at making friends, and Dizzy is weird at the best of times. He might make friends, but he doesn’t inspire the kind of intimacy that will get someone to spill their secrets. Hopefully I can be the go-between.”
Darius shook his head as he exited the car. I pushed the door open and gingerly stepped on my ankle.
“Would you like me to carry you?” he asked, walking around the car to me.
I snickered. “Funny.”
His expression was serious.
“The reason I let you carry me the last time was because we had to flee the scene of a crime. That was about speed, not a tweaked ankle. Give me a break.”
“Do you heal at a faster rate than humans?” he asked, shutting the door for me. He adjusted his satchel around his shoulder.
“You keep forgetting that I am human.”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” I said grudgingly.
“Why do you detest the side of you that isn’t human?”
