Immortal Coil (2 page)

Sudden, sharp pain bit into her shoulder. She gasped and froze. Samaritan’s eyes
hardened,
his mouth a tight line. Behind him stood a blond woman whose smile sent a shiver down
Anaea’s
spine.
A blade protruded from the man’s chest. The weapon had gone right through him and cut into
Anaea’s
arm. The blade had—

Oh God! That woman had stabbed him. Right here on the bridge.
Anaea
couldn’t make her mind work beyond that. She had no idea where this new stranger had come from. She hadn’t noticed the woman’s approach, but then she hadn’t been paying attention to the road, only to her thwarted desire to jump off the bridge.

The woman leaned against the man, pinning him to the railing. “Give me the medallion.”

Samaritan shook his head. His eyes were fierce, dark.

“You’re so predictable.” The woman jerked the blade from his body.

Samaritan coughed a mist of blood into
Anaea’s
face, making her eyes sting. Through her tears, like a slow-motion scene in a horror movie, she watched the woman raise her sword to swing at the man’s head.
A sword.
An actual, honest-to-goodness, medieval weapon.
What kind of trouble was this man in?

He tensed and his grip on her sweater tightened. Something flickered through his dark eyes, a decision, but she couldn’t fathom what. With a ragged breath, his face contorted in pain and he threw himself over the metal barrier, his weight slamming into her. The railing tore from her grip and they tumbled off the bridge.

For a heartbeat,
Anaea
was weightless, her mind unable to focus on anything but the woman standing on the bridge. Her expression was stunned, eyes wide, mouth hanging open. The headlights from the man’s car glinted off the sword blade and blood ran down its length onto her hand.
The man’s blood.
Anaea’s
blood.
And now they were falling.

Falling!

Her heart pounded hard; the world leapt back into real time. She drew breath to scream and they hit the water. The air burst from
Anaea’s
lungs. Water whooshed around her, cold and stinging. She couldn’t see, couldn’t feel,
couldn’t
breathe. Her brain screamed at her to surface, but if she let go, relaxed, everything would be over. Wasn’t this what she’d wanted?
To end her struggle and finally beat the cancer?

Her Good Samaritan appeared inches from her face, water billowing his coat around him, his eyes peering into hers. Good God, he was still alive.

He clutched at her arm and pressed something hard and round into her palm, his expression pleading, desperate. Then his demeanor changed, hardened. He jerked her toward him and smashed his lips against hers.

What the hell was he doing? She struggled against him, but he grabbed the back of her head and thrust his tongue into her mouth, forcing it open. A ferocious heat raced down her throat, pouring across her chest and deep into her gut.

The heat grew, melting away the bite of the freezing water until fire radiated from every pore. An inferno rushed through her veins, raced into every organ, muscle, and bone. Expanding, burning, until she felt she’d burst or burn up or both.

She threw her head back and screamed. Water flooded her mouth and white light shot out.

Water surged around
Anaea
and the man. The light vanished, leaving her numb, confused. She had no idea what had just happened.
A hallucination from the cold?
But it had felt so real.

The man’s kiss had certainly been real.

She turned her attention to the stranger. His gaze was unfocused and his face slack. His hands were limp between them. He was dead.

Letting him go, she kicked at the water, pushing herself up toward the surface. His body drifted down, sucked into the murky depths, and disappeared. She hadn’t even known his name. It wasn’t fair that she, who sought death, should live when a stranger trying to do the right thing had died.

She
scissored
her legs against the water again and again, her lungs burning, her limbs numb from the cold, her arm aching from the sword cut.

Breaking the surface, she spat out the water that had filled her mouth when he’d kissed her. She gulped in air, dipped back beneath the surface, and forced herself back up.

The bank
lay
only a few feet away, snowy ground and trees rushing past as the current swept her farther and farther from the bridge. She struggled to the edge and clambered onto icy rocks, half in the water and half out, stopping to catch her breath. A gust of wind whipped through the naked branches of a tree beside her, but she was too numb to feel its sting.

If she didn’t get out of the cold and change into dry clothes, hypothermia would take her. Why hadn’t she just stayed in the water and died, like she’d planned? The shock of seeing the stranger die must have broken her concentration, causing her survival instinct to kick in.
That, along with the strange light and his kiss.

She shivered, not wanting to think about the sizzling lip-lock, and the fact that moments afterward he had died.

She dragged her attention to the object in her hand: a brass medallion the size of her palm, with a square hole in the center, similar to some Asian coins. Intricate symbols were carved around it on both sides and a thick, masculine chain looped through the hole, long enough that she didn’t need to open the clasp to pull it over her head. She slipped it inside her soaked sweater and hauled herself the rest of the way out of the water.

Her vision blurred and darkened, and she felt as though the world was spinning even though she knew she was on her hands and knees, hunched over in the snow. She blinked her vision clear, determined to get her bearings. Trees and scrubby bushes surrounded her. Thick yellow stalks of dead grass and weeds poked through the snow, and far off to her left the city lights twinkled. Before her lay a rusted chain-link fence and beyond, the shadowy mounds of ruined cars.

The Allegheny had swept her into an industrial area. She doubted she’d find a payphone in the vicinity, and she’d left her cell in her car. Her best bet was to follow the shoreline back to the bridge. Of course her car keys had been in her coat pocket and now they were at the bottom of the river.

And then there was that woman. She’d stabbed the man right in front of
Anaea
. It was possible the woman was still on the bridge, or searching the bank for the man’s body... for
Anaea’s
body.

This wasn’t what she wanted at all.
A death of her choosing, not someone else’s, and definitely not a violent one.
That made her stomach churn and she forced the thoughts from her head. No, she needed to think of something else, anything else.

She had to go to the police and tell them what had happened.

It seemed a silly thought all things considered, but she clung to the idea, determined to focus only on it. The right thing to do was go to the police, tell them what she’d seen. The thought made her snort, which made her vision blur and darken again.
While I was attempting to commit suicide, officer…

Maybe she should leave that part out.

She grabbed a low-hanging tree branch and hauled herself to her feet. Her head felt stuffed with wool and everything about her was heavy and slow. Her waterlogged clothes weighed her down, but the heaviness was more than that. It had to be hypothermia. She couldn’t feel the cold, and she knew she should.

Blackness washed over her. She sucked in air and put one foot in front of the other. The police needed to know about the man’s murder.

Another wave of darkness crept over her vision and the frozen ground hurtled up to meet her. She put her hands out to stop it, realizing too late that it wasn’t the ground moving, but her.

* * *

Trapped in the woman’s body, Hunter fought to suppress her spirit. It had been close to two thousand years since he’d shared a body with its human soul and the sensation was disorienting. Regardless, he needed control now, before whoever had attacked
him
came looking for him. If the assailant was a dragon like himself, she—and from the timbre of her voice it had definitely been a woman who’d stabbed him—would have seen the transfer.

Heck, from the power and light that had poured from the woman’s mouth, half of the town had seen the transfer.

He struggled to concentrate, but the woman’s soul fought against him, not knowing it was him making her numb and drowsy. She thought it was hypothermia. That at least helped. It made her weaker and easier for him to take over. But it didn’t solve the root of the problem.

Which was the complete loss of all his common sense.

It was the only explanation for whatever had compelled him to choose saving her instead of fighting his assailant. He couldn’t have done both. But when he’d transferred into the woman he’d been met with so much more than he’d anticipated.

The cut in her shoulder was insignificant to the cancer consuming her. And above it all, her strength of will threatened to subdue him. It took everything he had to divert a small portion of his soul magic from healing this new body to overpowering her consciousness.

Concentrating on the snow stinging his hands, he used the pain to anchor himself within her. He mentally boxed her up until she was contained and asleep, whispering to her that what she’d seen and experienced was all a dream. He could hold that for a few hours. After that, she’d wake to discover herself a prisoner in her own body and what she’d thought were dreams, were in fact reality. But he wouldn’t allow it to come to that.

He pushed up to his hands and knees... her hands and knees, and studied his surroundings. He stood on an unkempt riverbank on the edge of a fenced-in industrial yard. It was the likeliest place to find a car, since he wasn’t going to risk returning to the bridge.

Marching through the snow, he slipped through a break in the fence and stepped into a storage yard filled with long rows of rusting cargo crates piled two and three high. Shadows filled the pathways, giving ample coverage for him as well as anyone who wished him ill.

And there was definitely someone out there who wished him ill. It was only a matter of time before his assailant discovered where he’d emerged from the river, and that made haste essential.

He jogged down the closest path to what he hoped was the front of the property, scanning for trouble and a working vehicle. But after a minute, his breath burned in his chest and he had to slow down. He wasn’t healing fast enough, and his soaked clothes weren’t helping. His usually rapid ability had diminished to a level that barely sustained him.

The woman had been right when she’d told him she didn’t have to justify her suicide to him. Regardless of whether she’d killed herself tonight or not, she would die soon.
Unless, of course, he remained inside her.

If he did, his soul magic would cure her cancer within four or five hours... along with the possibility that she’d go crazy and he’d become soul sick. It wasn’t likely; usually it took days or months, but to have it happen within hours wasn’t impossible.

At the end of the row lay an open, well-lit area. Hesitating in the shadows, he glanced around. The fence was taller here, with a gate wide enough for a transport truck. It was open, and beyond
lay
a road, void of any traffic. Beside the entrance sat a small security station, no more than a shack with a window. Light flickered within and noise from a television blared deafeningly through the thin walls. A few feet from the shack
was
a beat-up white hatchback.

There was no sign of anyone else around. Hunter stepped into the open area, sauntered to the hatchback, and tested the latch on the driver’s side door.

Unlocked.

How convenient.

He loved the human fallacy that if it was old no one would steal it.

Getting in, he hotwired the engine and drove out of the yard. The closest point of contact for a member of the Royal Coterie was almost four hours away in
Newgate
. The woman he possessed didn’t have that kind of time. Well, she did if he intended to kill her afterward, which would possibly be a blessing to her.

It wouldn’t be for him. He might be the Prince’s Assassin, but he’d lost the taste for killing humans centuries ago, particularly innocents who became involved in dragon business because of his mistakes.

Which meant Memorial General for a new, uninhabited body, preferably male, and while there were funeral homes closer to this end of town, he couldn’t guarantee they’d have a John Doe lying around. Of course, there was no guarantee the hospital would have a John Doe in its morgue either, but the odds were better.

This was such a disaster. Hunter didn’t even know who’d attacked him.
Although if he had to guess it was probably one of Nero’s or
Zenobia’s
flunkies.
The woman he possessed might have seen whoever it was—

No, he
wasn’t possessing
just some woman. Even if he was only with her for the next twenty minutes he could in the very least learn her identity. He drew her name from her consciousness.
A-nay-ah.