The once-a-man still screamed and flailed. She picked up the lost knife, kneeled, pinned him down, and began to carve…
And the lights flickered and blurred. Sounds deadened.
He grabbed at her. She stabbed.
There was blood. Much blood. She kept stabbing, appalled yet fascinated by the thick red as it slipped over his skin and by the feel of the metal cutting deep into flesh and cartilage.
A stinker barreled forward. In one slick move, she stood, plucking out the broom and hurling it straight through the stinker, sending it sliding and tumbling backward. Wait… What was she doing here?
She needed to be elsewhere.
She found herself staring down the darkening tunnel, her feet following the tracks, her arms glistening and wet all the way to the elbows.
Her last thought before the thoughts stopped:The Lure.
17
Though she’d ventureda fair distance into the tunnel, Rutger had caught up to her. He checked the surroundings as he closed in. This seemed a dead end. Ahead was a parked train carriage, left here since the invasion.
A service door off to the side might be where Cyn planned to go?
Assuming her brain could plan when the Lure had her? Maybe people just backed up and tried a new path if their first choice failed to lead upward?
She didn’t seem to register him following behind her. Watching her for a few more seconds wasn’t a crime. It soothed him to know she was okay and gave him time to calm down, after what had happened at the camp. Too much death. Way too much.
Killing ghoul guards, who were really only possessed people, it bothered him. He remembered the people he’d once known in every damn face, even when they weren’t there.
With Vargr disappearing to chase after the last ghoul guard, he’d made finding Cyn a priority. Why had the beaster decidedto do that alone? He might get swamped by stinkers or find himself in the middle of the tail-end of this attacking force.
Vargr might never return.
He would be sorry if that happened. The beaster had a foul mouth, but most did. He also possessed a woman Rutger was attracted to in the way the north pole of a magnet wants to fuck around with the south end. It was a painfully intense attraction. The things he’d been imagining doing to her…
Her dark hair was black enough to dive into. And the slink of her curves when she sauntered from point A to point B was criminally sexy. Rutger huffed out a sigh. His dick had been getting more exercise recently than it had for the previous five years.
There was nothing he could do about the fool, Vargr, but he could look after her, this not-quite-human woman. When Maura relapsed, he’d figured out she and Cyn had been separated. They had Maura tied down and safe. Cyn had wandered away down this branch of the train tunnel, bloodied, and probably Lure-affected.
“Got you,” he said, wrapping his hand around her arm. He expected this to be easy, as in pick her up, carry her back, then tie her down until Vargr returned. When she wrenched her arm free of his grip, Rutger gaped.
The force in that yank had been stronger than should be possible with puny human muscle. If he’d not opened his hand, her arm bone would’ve snapped, her flesh might’ve torn. Nanites were in this one, for sure.
In spite of her twisting to get loose, he grabbed her long black hair and restrained her.
She latched an arm around a handle on the train and would not let go. With great patience he lifted each finger away from the steel, curled those fingers into her palm, then pried heroff the train. Cyn promptly, with the flexibility of a monkey, grabbed another bit of train.
“Damn,” he muttered.
Frustrated, he debated tying those hands, realized it couldn’t be something thin or she’d hurt herself, so he pinned her face down and ripped off his shirt. He used it as mummy wrapping all the way down her arms, fastening them at her back, then he picked up the squirming female.
Toting her the whole way back to camp was a little painful—she kicked him several times—but he managed. Proud of his accomplishment, he set her on her feet near the extinguished campfire and turned her to face him.
Those pretty irises with the red sprinkles lacked any recognition of her surroundings.
“The Lure?” Tom, a wing-soldier with a startling head of fair hair—he even looked like an angel—arrived and grounded his rifle.
“Yes.” Gently, Rutger turned her head this way then that, using a finger and thumb grip on her chin. She licked her blood-spattered lips, and for a second he swore he saw life in there. More awake than some Lure-affected he’d seen up close.
Blood had spilled down her front, soaking the breast area of her shirt. The buttons at the top were no longer a pearl-gray, they were scarlet. Her arms were too.
