Chapter Five
Present: Topside, 4:37 a.m.
“Oh, God, notmore.” Icy sweat broke out over Marissa’s flesh as the rusted-out, one-eyed Honda Civic and the green Ford Taurus careened onto the road behind the Impala. Three cars total, lots of bad guys in each.
“Shitfuckpiss!” Dev cursed. “Stay back!” he ordered the three women.
Marissa pressed her aching spine against the van’s metal siding, hiding as best she could behind the one closed door. Tears welled into her eyes. This night sucked so bad.
The Impala gunned closer, almost ramming their bumper. Red-haired Tollar chin-upped himself out of the passenger-side window and jumped onto the hood of the car, riding it like a surfboard. He cocked his arm back, preparing to throw something.
“B?taie Blade!” Bull Tattoo Gábor shouted in warning.
Dev slammed his shoulder up against his side of the van to get out of the way as, whoosh, a knife sliced inside and embedded in the back of the Dodge’s passenger-side seat. A second later, whomp, the seat exploded.
“Jay-sus!” Sedge the driver batted at the cloud of yellow foam balls and vinyl pieces floating around him. It looked like Winnie the Pooh had just stepped on a land mine.
Tink-plink-tink-tink.
Someone inside the Impala was peppering the van with bullets. Marissa ducked further into the shadows, not that there was anywhere to go, and squinted her eyes at the driver of the Impala. It was the neo-Nazi Bat Man Dev had thrown a knife at over by—
Tink. “Aargh!” Dev’s rifle flew out of his hands, hit the van floor, and smoked from its bullet wound. Dev shook his hand. “Fuck.”
“That’s what you get”—Gábor grabbed the interior metal frame as the van swerved hard to the right—“for stabbing Krolan.”
Marissa pitched over into Hadley. Did these guys know each other? This was so bizarre. She scrambled upright as whizzzz—plink. A bullet hole materialized in the front windshield.
“Shit on a stick!” Sedge glared over his shoulder at the men in back. “Do you think maybe you assholes could shoot those dickheads already!?”
They all lurched as the Impala rammed their bumper.
“It’s called a gas pedal,” Thomal yelled back. “Do you think maybe you could use it some time soon?!”
“This thing drives like a fucking cow, dammit, and that Impala has a V8.”
Marissa screamed, not caring who had what. Tollar had just leapt from the hood of the Impala into the Dodge and socked Dev hard in the gut.
Grunting, Dev ducked the next blow, then kicked Tollar out of the van with a booted foot rammed in his gut.
The Impala veered sharply to avoid his somersaulting body.
The half-blind Civic shot forward to take its place.
Tollar staggered to his feet and sprinted for the Impala.
Marissa exhaled roughly. My God, were these bad guys made out of an indestructible alloy?
With a neat flick of his wrist, Dev threw a knife at the escaping Tollar. It flipped end over end through the night, the glint of streetlights racing along its length, then buried hilt-deep in Tollar’s butt.
Tollar hollered and arched.
“Oh, ho,” Dev laughed, “the quarterback is toast. That’ll show you, Tollar, you dildo.” He kept laughing. “Won’t be sitting for a week.”
Marissa stared at Dev, watching him laugh in the middle of this tornado. He had one of those Bruce Willis laughs, the kind that’s filled with a delight over life’s ironies, even when the world was falling apart around him. “You didn’t kill him,” she observed.
“What?” Dev glanced at her. “Tollar?” He shrugged. “Just returning the favor, I guess. He hasn’t killed me a time or two when—”
Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. The distinct report of an automatic weapon sent them all diving for the floor. It was coming from her kidnapper, Murk, seated on the edge of the winking Civic’s passenger-side window.
“Shiiiiit!” Dev yelled as the hailstorm of bullets riddled the van with holes.
Marissa flung her arms over her head, cringing against the battering metallic sound of a thousand Budweiser cans being crushed against a giant’s forehead. Steely fragments rained down like ticker-tape confetti. “Jesus God!” She peered out from under her arms through the dust and debris at Dev. “Please tell me you have more men coming to help.”
“Now, what fun would that be?”
“Dammit to fuck!” Gábor snarled. He was glaring down at the smoking toe of his right boot. “My favorite pair.” He moved to kneel in the middle of the van, weapon raised in perfect plastic army man formation. “Buncha cheese weasels!” He started shooting like a lunatic.
One, two, three small geysers of blood spurted up from Murk’s shoulder—white again?—sending him tipping precariously to one side.
The one-eyed Civic’s windshield split from clear glass into crackled, then the car screeched sideways into a skid, running off the road. Blam! Gábor switched aim and shot out the green Taurus’s front tires. The Taurus pitched nose-first into a handstand, spun an almost graceful pirouette on one corner of its bumper, then not-so-gracefully smashed onto its back in a shock of thunder, windows blowing out. Two hubcaps wobbled off down the road on their merry way.
“I need another clip!” Gábor bawled at Thomal.
“Get the hell out of here!” Dev yelled at Sedge.
Sedge cranked on the steering wheel. Tires squealed.
With a grunt, Gábor rocked over onto his shoulder, while Dev was sent flying across the van. He landed smack on top of Marissa, tumbling her to the floor, his hips planting right between her legs in an explicit parody of missionary-position sex.
“Oh, my God,” she gasped out.
Dev groaned deep in his chest, his face coming to rest against her throat.
It sounded like he was in pain. “Are you all right? Did you get hurt?”
He moaned again. “You smell…so good.”
Huh?
His mouth brushed her throat as he drew a large, chest-expanding breath. He shuddered.
Her lips parted, a shiver coiling up her spine. It was…the strangest way she’d ever been smelled, never before so completely, so deeply, as if this man could crawl inside her and smell the most intimate parts of her. And, even in the middle of this tornado, it was sexy as hell.
“I can’t get around this car!” Sedge warned as their vehicle slowed. “Watch out for—!”
The sound of multiple pairs of boots hitting the metal floor of the van echoed out. The other women shrieked, and Gábor and Thomal shouted. Suddenly, there was a shadowy tangle of men fighting in the middle of the van.
Marissa flapped her hands at Dev’s back. “You need to get off!”
More of his weight settled on top of her. Was he…snuggling? “Don’t want to,” he murmured.
She angled her face to give him a confounded look, but could only catch sight of the masculine curl of his ear. Another bad guy leapt into the van. She drew a loud breath, every muscle in her body tensing. Him!
The other women’s cries grew more hysterical. That got Dev’s attention.
He hopped off Marissa, rounding on Videon just as that hideous man cranked back a steely arm and punched Dev brutally in the face. The blow hurled Dev from the back of the van all the way into what was left of the passenger-side seat. The forceful momentum of Dev’s heavy body snapped the seat in two, then smashed him into the front windshield, the glass splintering into a dozen spider web arms against his back.
“Jesus!” Sedge yelled. “Dev!”
The windshield broke apart and dumped a pile of chunky glass on top of Dev and into Sedge’s lap.
Eyes flashing red, Videon turned on Marissa, grabbing her by the ankle and hauling her toward him. She screamed, her pulse hammering against her veins. “No!” God, not him! She kicked wildly at him.
Dev jumped on Videon’s back, and she tumbled free. “That really fucking hurt, you anal load.” Teeth gritted, Dev wrapped his hands around Videon’s head and twisted, his awesome arm muscles standing out against the sleeves of his trench coat. Videon’s head moved from front-to-back with a vertebrae-breaking jerk.
Marissa scrambled back against the van wall, bile rushing into her throat, and her lips trembled. Dear God in heaven. She’d just witnessed one man kill another with his bare hands.
With a savage bellow, Dev heaved Videon outside the van.
The body flopped along the street for several yards, then… Videon rolled to his feet and surged upright, standing with his head tweaked into a backward position. Like no more than cracking his knuckles, Videon snapped his head back into place.
Marissa’s jaw dropped to her chest, the blood washing from her face. What in the world?!
Dev slid his eyes sideways toward her. “Um…” His expression turned sheepish. “Videon’s triple-jointed.” He paused, waiting for her reaction.
She didn’t have one to give—except to stare gawp-eyed at him.
Dev turned his attention back to the roadway, one hand clutched around the hilt of another sheathed knife, his profile tense. His hair whipped against the sculpted rise of his cheekbones, and she caught the glint of a gold-hoop earring in his left lobe. Blades of silvery moonlight arrowed through the myriad bullet holes around them, crisscrossing the interior of the van like a matrix security system that only the Human Blob could’ve gotten through. The rushing wind was the only sound.
In the sudden quiet, adrenaline abandoned Marissa’s body, leaving her slightly dizzy. She felt as if someone had just chucked the earth down a bowling alley. This whole night was fifty different ingredients of nutso, put into a blender and then set for frappé. Men who couldn’t be killed, other men who appeared dead but actually weren’t, white-colored blood, flashing red eyes, knives that exploded, and then, of course, the all-consuming why me? Maybe she was still asleep back at her apartment.
“They outta here?” Gábor asked, crouched with his rifle butt braced against one thick thigh.
“Seems like it,” Dev murmured, the tension in his body visibly easing. “I think we’re clear. Nice shooting, Pavenic.”
“So what now?” Sedge called back to the men.
“Hightail it out of here and head for one of our entrances.” Dev turned to the women, his expression softening to concern. “Are you all okay? Is anyone hurt?”
They stared back mutely, shivering in shock, reeling with horror and confusion…and awkwardly silent. All three of them were hurt in some way, bruises, scrapes, sore jaws from those fricking ball gags, but one of their group was worse off than the rest. By far.
Marissa’s co-passenger, Hadley, finally spoke. “Kendra was…” She wrapped an arm around the woman seated next to her and hugged the dainty figure. “One of those disgusting men, uh…raped her in the… She was…anally raped.”
A beat of shocked, almost disbelieving silence passed. Then Dev’s head slumped forward on his shoulders. “Ah, Jesus,” he breathed, covering his eyes with one hand. “Why do they do shit like that?”
Thomal’s face was a mask of tight rage, and Gábor was glaring at the roof of the van as if imagining a hundred different pain-filled ways to make the bad guys pay.
Dev looked up at Kendra. “Do you think you could describe the guy for me?”
Hadley answered. “He was… God, he’s the meanest one.”
“You broke his neck,” Marissa said softly.
Dev swung his stare over to her.
“I think he’s called Videon.”
“Fucking figures.” Dev’s face hardened. “Sedge, pull over.”
Sedge braked to the side of the road. “Tell me this is something good,” he said grimly.
“Yeah, I’m going after the scuzzbag. Thomal, give me your M16, my weapon’s shot to shit.” Dev hopped to the ground and caught the tossed weapon one-handed. “Gábor, you’re with me.”
“Hoo-rah.” Gábor jumped off the rear end of the van.
Sedge turned around, one arm hooked over the back of his seat. “Hell, let me go. I can already taste that guy in my teeth.”
“I need someone who can see in the dark for this, Sedge, and, um”—Dev’s eyes darted toward Marissa—“and your NVGs are busted. You and Thomal just make sure the women get back to ??ran? safely.”
“No sweat.”
“You only have a little over an hour till sunrise,” Thomal said, strangely enough.
“I got it.”
Marissa watched Dev turn to go, and her chest clenched. She grasped his forearm. “Don’t leave,” she whispered around quivering lips, her stomach filling with a sudden, weird desperation. It might be just the slightest exaggeration to say that Dev Nichita was the only person in the world she’d ever felt wholly safe around. “Please, I-I don’t want you to.”
“Hey,” he said in a gentle voice. “Don’t you worry about a thing, all right? My men are taking you someplace safe, and I’ll be there real soon.”
“Y-you’re coming back? For sure?”
His goatee parted in a gleaming smile. “I always do, sweetheart.” And then he was gone, he and Gábor disappearing into the darkness as easily as if they were made of the night.
Thomal carefully stepped off the back bumper. “There still a first aid kit in the glove, St?nescu?”
“Yeah, come on up. Not that there’s anywhere to sit.” Sedge was still craned around, looking at them. “Sorry, ladies, but we have to go no-vis now. The entrance into our compound is classified.” He flipped a switch and a thick screen descended from the roof just behind the front seat.
Thomal closed the rear doors and locked them.
Screen met floor, entombing them in the Dodge’s dark metal belly, then the screen’s motor shut off in an abrupt, unearthly quiet.
Marissa crammed herself into a corner of the van and hugged her knees to her chest. Compound…? An extra special security unit…? Bad men called Murk, Teer, Videon, Tollar, Krolan…? More questions than answers never felt good.
The Dodge moved back onto the road, the steady drub-drub of rubber tires over asphalt the only noise. Taking them someplace safe…called ??ran?…