Chapter 20 #3
Sloane stares at me. Then she scoffs and turns her face away, and the hair lifts on my arms.
“I’m not wasting myself on a human.”
“And what does that make you, an extraterrestrial?” But the words make something inside me tense.
“This is exactly why you’ll never have him.” Her smile comes back, pleased with itself. “You don’t even know what he is. People like Marcus and me, we’re evolved.”
“Is that so?” I blink at her. “What, do you use super deluxe toilet paper to wipe your ass?”
Her nostrils flare. “You’ll find out soon enough.” She lifts a glass off the island and holds my gaze. Then she closes her fist. The glass bursts inside her hand, blood running down her wrist, and she doesn’t blink.
I look at her for a second. Then I take a plate off the drainer and smash it on the tiles at her feet. She jumps back a full step.
“If we’re breaking dishes, I’ve got two hands as well.” I brush my palms together. “I don’t like the dishes in this house anyway. Maybe if we break all of them, Marcus will let me choose new ones.”
“Have you lost your mind?” she snarls at me, bewildered.
“I will if you don’t get out of my house.” I give her a pleasant smile.
“This is not your house.”
“Take that up with Marcus.” I waggle my brows at her. “He’ll side with me, since he’s the one begging me not to leave.”
Her upper lip curls back off her teeth. “You shameless little slut.”
“Well, since we’re name-calling…” I inspect my fingernails. “He’s very good in bed.”
She comes at me.
I get the pan up and swing it into the side of her head. The blow rings off the ceiling, and she staggers into the counter, hair coming loose from its pins, blood at her temple.
She doesn’t drop. Through the loose hair she looks up at me, and she snarls. My smile fades.
It’s the hair, and the angle of her jaw with her head down like that. I know her. She’s the woman from the sidewalk outside that bar in Ashford, ten years ago, holding a barely upright man by the arm.
Then she’s on me before I can breathe. I hurl the pan at her, then the fruit stand, and she takes both without slowing. Her fist lands in my ribs. My forearm comes up in front of my face, and her nails rake it open.
“Are you insane?” I gasp, scrambling around the island. “Are you actually trying to kill me?”
“You’d be better off dead.” She follows me around it at a walk. “I only came to frighten you off. Now I think you and that brat of yours would look lovely under ten feet of dirt.”
Anger slams through me with all the force of a freight train. The knife block sits at my hip. She’s coming at me again, and I know she’s here to end this. I have a knife out and buried in her shoulder to the handle, my whole body behind it.
Sloane looks down at it, and my breathing is ragged. “Shit. Oh shit. We have to call an ambulance!”
I actually stabbed her.
Then before I can move, she takes hold of the handle and pulls it out of herself, dropping it on the floor between us.
“This little thing?” Blood sheets down her white sleeve, and she’s smiling at me. “I told you. We evolved.”
She lunges, her hand coming up. Her mouth opens, and her teeth are wrong. They’re lengthening while I watch, the eye teeth curving down into points. My back hits the cabinets, and I have nowhere left to go. My heart is pounding. What the hell is going on? What is she?
Something small hits her from the side and takes her clean off her feet. Sloane sprawls into the broken glass, and my daughter goes down on top of her.
“Mia!” I’m on the floor, scrambling backward. “Mia, no!”
She doesn’t answer me because she isn’t speaking at all. My daughter is crouched over Sloane with her back to me, and the sound coming out of her is a terrifying one.
Sloane shoves herself back against the cabinets and stares up at her. Her mouth falls open. “You’re one of us.” Her voice has gone thin. “You’re a hybrid.”
“What?” I whisper. “What does that mean?”
My daughter springs. Her hand comes up, and I see them this time, coming out of her fingertips, black and curved. She opens Sloane’s cheek from eye to jaw, and Sloane screams.
Feet hammer down the stairs, and Bella arrives at a dead run with a baseball bat up over one shoulder. “Get out of our house!” She swings it into Sloane’s arm with everything she has. “Get out. Get out. I already called Uncle Marcus, so get out!”
Sloane’s arm flies out and catches her across the chest. Bella leaves the floor, and I get under her before her head can meet the tile, taking the impact through my elbow with both arms locked around her.
“I will kill you.” My voice scrapes out of me. “If you touch my children, I will kill you.”
Sloane isn’t looking at me at all. She’s staring past me at Mia, one hand clamped over her face, blood pouring between her fingers. “How is this possible?” she breathes. “You’re human. You’re supposed to be human.”
Mia growls at her. My daughter is circling on all fours across her own kitchen floor, shoulders low, glass crunching under her palms.
“Bella, stay here.” I set her down against the cabinet. “Don’t move.”
I go to my daughter. “Mia.”
She turns her head and looks at me. Her eyes are gold, lit from somewhere inside, and her teeth have come through her lower lip. She lets me get both hands on her shoulders. Her claws prick through my sleeves into my skin, but I don’t take my hands off her.
“Mia, calm down.”
This thing looking back at me, she’s still my daughter.
She growls.
“Mia Vasquez.” I pitch it high and hard enough to strip paint. “You will calm down this instant, or so help me, you’ll be in more trouble than you’ve ever been in.”
She stops. The gold drains out of her eyes between one blink and the next. Her hands close, ordinary hands, shaking, and she looks up at me with her mouth open, then sags forward into my arms.
Behind us, Sloane climbs to her feet. I already have the knife off the floor.
“One more step, and I’ll carve your heart out of your chest, you crazy bitch.” My daughter is behind me, Bella has a fist on my calf, and my hand is steady. “Don’t underestimate me. I don’t care if I go to jail. Get out of my house.”
Sloane retreats a pace. She’s still staring at Mia, and her jaw hangs slack. “This isn’t possible,” she says to nobody at all. “It isn’t possible.”
Then she’s gone, out through the glass door and across the lawn into the trees.
My knees buckle.
I go down on the tiles among the glass and the blood, hauling both girls into my lap.
My own heart drums so loudly in my ears that I can’t hear anything past it.
Mia’s face is buried in my neck. Bella has two fistfuls of my shirt.
There’s a cut over my eye, my ribs won’t let me breathe deep, and my arm is running red into my daughter’s hair.
Footsteps come through the front of the house at a run. Cole rounds the corner into the kitchen and stops dead, taking in the wreckage and the three of us on the floor.
“What the hell happened here?”
I pull the girls in tighter and lift my head.
“Get Marcus,” I whisper hoarsely. “Call Marcus.”