Chapter 1 #2
Yes I’d been covered in blood—but it was blood that wasn’t my own. By the time I got my clothes off that night and slipped into a borrowed set of pajamas, I discovered I didn’t have a single scratch on me.
I somehow managed to swallow the bitter fear that crawled up my throat.
Letting out a nervous laugh, I flipped my hair over my shoulder.
Guys always reacted better when they thought I was a dumb blonde.
“Sorry. Maybe if you weren’t hiding behind your cowl I could actually see your face, you know?
Hard to jostle the memory with just a broody voice. ”
He hesitated and then shifted so that his cowl moved just enough for me to see the hard ridge of his chin. “I don’t brood,” he growled.
It was almost cute how he immediately retorted the insult. I was about to make it worse, but then he pulled back his hood all the way and hot damn, the guy was smoking.
And, well, his eyes glowed with a metallic orange magic that marked him as a supernatural bounty hunter… but yeah, details.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that a bounty hunter would show up at Cindy’s bar, but he still managed to take me off guard.
While my mind was mush, my body reacted to the deadly flash of silver that was his blade.
The world around me stilled with a magical lock.
I didn’t know if it was something I’d done or if it had been the bar’s defenses.
Taking advantage of the moment, I twisted to put as much distance as possible between me and the hunter.
Except… he tracked my movements with ease, his eyes locked onto mine as I moved.
When I flinched, he flicked the blade and its merciless silver etched across my vision.
I knew it would be sharp enough to cut my head clean off my body, but I realized a half-second too late that he hadn’t been aiming for me.
Jess cried out and clutched at the embedded hilt, crumpling to the floor as time unlocked from its slowed momentum.
“Jess!” I screamed and lurched to her aid, but the hunter had me by the arm with a vice grip.
“You’re welcome,” he growled and tugged me into his chest. “She was about to kill you.”
Flattened against his hard abs, I curled my fingers into the thick layers of his coat and peered up at him, taking in the full brutal force of his hard edges and glowing eyes. Everything about him screamed danger, but the way he held me was protective... almost gentle.
A clatter of metal hit the floor and broke a silence that I realize didn’t make any sense in a crowded bar. No one seemed to notice that Jess had been stabbed, or that a hunter with glowing eyes was holding me.
That was because time was frozen... but not Jess.
Jess... who now had a dagger plunged in her chest.
Even a succubus should have died from a mortal wound like that, but she snarled as if irritated by the blade and launched for me.
The hunter reacted before I did and held out his hand to defend me, which would have been sweet, except the weapon struck clean through flesh and bone, severing his hand and sending it flopping to the floor like a lump of meat.
“Oh dear...” I murmured.
He cursed and wrapped the stumped remains of his hand in his cloak. When Jess cried out and collapsed to her knees, I realized that he hadn’t cursed under his breath, but rather cast a spell.
So, my bounty hunter had some magical mojo.
“You bastard!” Jess screamed. “She’s mine!”
My brain couldn’t process Jess screaming at the hunter, so my gaze wandered throughout the bar that was like a snapshot in time.
A group three tables down held up their beers in celebration and one sloshed his contents into the air, the foam and droplets making a perfect arc over his friend’s head.
Cars outside that should have been speeding down the dark alleyway were now stopped. The one closest to the window featured a woman with her hair fanned out behind her as if she was trapped in a photoshoot.
Then I spotted Cindy watching from the back with the door cracked open.
Even she was trapped in the moment. Whatever had frozen time, only the hunter, Jess, and I were able to move.
It bothered me more that Cindy was just back there.
.. watching... as if waiting for something to happen.
If she knew who the hunter was, why wouldn’t she have stopped me from talking to him?
The hunter shook me with his remaining hand.
He should have been buckled over in pain, but I didn’t know much about bounty hunters.
Maybe he could shut his pain off. “You need to stop daydreaming,” he snapped.
“Look.” He pointed and my gaze obeyed even though my brain didn’t want to process what was going on.
A knife rested on the ground just inches from Jess’s hand, but not the one the hunter had stabbed her with. That one was still lodged in her chest and blood pooled around the wound and seeped into her clothing.
“Jess?” I asked, my voice cracking when I finally realized that she’d been coming at us with a knife. Not just any knife, but a blade etched with runes that glowed red.
I considered Jess my friend, even though I’d only been here a few weeks and was still trying to remember who I was.
Cindy told me that I shouldn’t rush it. Just take as much time as I needed.
Jess had always been supportive in her own way, but this wasn’t the Jess who talked to me about guys or stole a shot with me from behind the bar.
She gripped the hilt of the dagger still embedded in her chest and glared at me.
I’d never seen anyone look at me with such hatred, much less someone I thought was my friend.
“You’re a monster,” she said, almost like it was something she’d kept in for far too long. “You’re supposed to work for us. No one else can have you!” She lurched for the dagger she’d dropped, but cried out in pain and slapped her hand on the floor.
If it hadn’t been for the hunter who still held me with one strong arm, I would have gone ice cold.
I hadn’t been in many situations where I was this stressed, but sometimes when a customer got rowdy or Cindy raised her voice my fingertips would go so cold that they’d feel numb until I grabbed onto someone.
Now the urge to touch devoured me worse than I’d ever felt it and I crawled my hands up the hunter’s clothes until I reached a patch of skin exposed at his neck.
He flinched the moment my icy fingers met his, but he didn’t stop me.
Instead he stroked my hair out of my eyes and gave me a sobering look.
“It’s Lily, right?”
Hearing my name jolted me into awareness and I looked into his eyes that still glowed with that fascinating metallic golden gleam. “Uh, yeah.” How did he know my name?
He surveyed the bar and frowned. “I can’t hold the time lock once we step outside of this bar.
We’re lucky that the monster mother was on the other side of the door when I initiated it.
” He glanced down at the dagger still in Jess’s chest. I noticed one gem on the end of the hilt glowing green, but that light was starting to fade.
“We don’t have much longer. Do you think you can move? ”
The shock of what he was proposing made all the heat I’d gathered into my fingertips surge straight through my whole body. He jerked away from me and cursed.
“You can’t mean that I’d go somewhere with you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he growled, transforming from the kind and patient stranger I’d been clinging to back into the hunter that had come to... what had he come here to do? “If you stay here you’ll be killed... or worse. You have to come with me.”
Sense came back to me as I bristled. No one told me what to do. “I can take care of myself, thank you very much.”
“You better listen to him,” Jess drawled, grinning manically as her eyelids drooped and blood tinted her teeth pink.
It was the most terrifying sight I’d ever seen, especially since one side of her face was starting to droop and one of her eyes was turning black.
“I’m not really a succubus, you know. I’m something else.
.. something even better. I wasn’t ready to show you, but looks like I don’t have a choice.
You lost your memory because you weren’t ready to learn what you are, but I’ve embraced it. ”
“You shut your mouth,” the hunter snapped and produced a second blade. “Lily is nothing like you.”
She gurgled on another laugh. “Oh, protective, are you? Didn’t come to kill her... but to collect her for your little academy? How quaint.”
I dug my fingernails into my palm. The air around us started to tremble as if the whole world was about to fall apart.
I couldn’t leave Jess here, dying, even if she was frightening me.
I didn’t care what she was, I needed to give her a chance to explain.
Maybe if she thought I wouldn’t go with him she’d stop trying to attack me.
She gave me a look of pity. Which was incredulous.
Jess, the one with the knife in her chest and her face falling apart, gave me a look of pity.
“Such a sweet thing. You still want to help me, don’t you?
” She sighed. “Tricky blood you have. Two-thirds of you is perfect for Monster Academy, but there’s that nasty little extra third that shows its ugly head.
I see it right now in your eyes. No proper monster would look at me like that.
” Her face twisted with rage. “Mother will burn it out of you. Then you can join us and Monster Academy will finally have its star pupil.” She chuckled.
“Or failed experiment. Either way, I will be getting some major extra credit for this.”
“Monster Academy?” I shrieked. “Jess, what the hell are you talking about?”
She opened her mouth to answer me, but a loud crack reverberated through the room and time unlocked from its latch.
“Time to go,” the hunter said and took me by the arm again.
Everything happened all at once. The serene silence dropped into a clatter of noise typical of a busy bar. Startled, I ducked as if the bombardment of sounds was an object hurled at my head, and good thing, too. Cindy burst through the door and launched fire—fucking fire!—from her hand.
I’d never seen anything like it. The flames were so hot that they melted straight through a pair of guests and sent their corpses disintegrating to the floorboards. The bar exploded and the scent of fear hit me like a wall.
“Come on!” the hunter shouted and tugged at me, but I was rooted to the spot. He gave me a look of surprise.
That’s right. I was supernatural. No fucking idea what I was, but he wasn’t going to move me unless I agreed to it.
Which, going with him was starting to feel like a good idea. Jess was talking about hooking me up with Monster Academy—no idea what that was but it didn’t sound good—and Cindy was throwing fire around and killing people.
I had a decision to make and not much time to make it.
One quick glance at Jess gave me mixed feelings.
She clearly wasn’t a succubus. Jess’s beauty melted off of her as if the dagger in her chest drained her of her outer skin.
I wasn’t sure if it had been a spell or some elaborate magical sleeve, but whatever this creature was before me now with black eyes and wrinkled skin was the real Jess.
Strangely, I wanted to get to know her. Those black eyes still had Jess inside of them. There was more darkness and pain, but still the friend that I’d come to care for.
Yet, when she went for the cool blade again on the floor, I knew that she would rather kill me than let the hunter have me. Perhaps I was naive, just like she always told me I was.
Closing my eyes with resignation, I let the hunter haul me out of the bar and into the cold night.
Of course, it was fucking raining, and the blood on me wasn’t my own.