Nightwing (17 page)

If she survived this, she’d tell Lucy there really were bobcats in Stonebridge. She took a deep breath and a sideways, backward step toward the table. The lynx snarled and she froze, her breath seizing at the gleam of its fangs.

Oh, God, it was big. Forty, maybe fifty pounds of spotted, muscled cat. It turned its head toward the table, the flames in its eyes shrinking. Willie had a heartbeat’s glimpse of a wary intelligence keen enough to register the lighter as a threat.

When the flames in its eyes leapt again, so did Willie. So did the lynx, like lightning, swiping a paw at her as she grabbed the umbrella pole and pulled herself onto the table. She felt her jeans rip and pain shoot up her left calf, fire and ice so intense it paralyzed her.

The table rocked beneath her on the flagstones, splashing rainwater out of the watering can, rolling the lighter out of her reach. For a second she could only cling to the pole and watch it wobble toward the edge. Until she saw the wavery image of the lynx through the glass top, gathering itself to spring after her.

She threw herself across the table at the lighter, her right knee slipping in spilled water. She hit her chin, hard, and her shoulder, too, as she flung out her arm and her hand. Too late to stop the lighter, but just in time to see Johnny’s opaque hand snake out of nowhere and catch it.

Relief shot through Willie, and another stab of pain, as she pushed up on one elbow and watched him, grim faced, wad one of her best yellow bath towels and strike the lighter. She heard gas hiss and held her breath as Johnny set fire to the towel and threw it at the lynx.

The cat snarled and cuffed the fireball aside, bouncing it onto the lawn where it lay smoldering in the wet grass. Willie’s heart sank, and her only hope with it, until she heard gravel crunch, lifted her gaze and saw the red Corvette rocket over the crest of the driveway.

The lynx saw it, too, and wheeled, screaming. Its eerie cry raised the hair on the back of Willie’s neck. So did Raven’s answering snarl as he swerved the Vette around the Jeep, slammed on the brakes and vaulted out of the car. The damp grass at his feet burst into smoky flames, and so did his eyes as he turned on the cat.

Willie wanted to scream but couldn’t. Horror held her captive; she couldn’t look away from the claws sprouting from Raven’s fingers. The lynx leapt at him, its fangs bared at his throat. Raven spun on one foot, raking his raised right hand at the cat as it hurtled toward him. It fell with a thump, its throat torn open and bleeding, its paws twitching.

Willie’s throat clenched with terror at the silvery shimmer rising from the body. It shifted and wavered into the shape of a man, tall and broad shouldered with long braided hair. His skin glowed bronze; the gold kilt slung low around his hips gleamed in the flames leaping around him.

“Nekhat,” Willie breathed.

He spun toward her, bands of color streaming like tracer bullets from the beads woven into his braided wig. His burning gaze raked over her, almost stopping her heart.

She saw a flash of bared fangs, the wink of gold in the amulet around his neck, the hole gaping in its center like a dead, empty eye. Then Nekhat whirled and swung a powerful arm at Raven.

Willie screamed, but his claws, thick and shiny as steel spikes, passed harmlessly through Raven’s body. Nekhat threw back his head. The muscles in his arms and throat bunched. He bellowed like a storm tide crashing on the beach—and vanished in a swirl of iridescent sparks glittering on the wind billowing the fire toward the house.

Raven swept his right arm over the flames, snuffing them as abruptly as a pinched candle flame. Red flames still flickered in his eyes and there was nothing at all sexy about his mouth pulling back into shape over his receding incisors, nothing gentle about his fingers straightening out of gnarled hooks.

Oh, God. Retractable fangs and claws. Willie felt her gorge rise, her head spin and a slow, icy numbness seep up her leg. She let her head fall on her outstretched arm long enough to draw a shaky breath, inhaling the acrid, burned-toast smell of scorched grass and the rusty stench of blood.

She snapped her head up in time to see Johnny duck out of the house with a dish- towel in his hands. He tore it in two and flipped half over his shoulder.

Willie glanced at her shredded pant leg and swallowed hard at the sight of blood pooling on the tabletop. Dizziness washed through her and she shut her eyes, until Johnny wrapped half of the towel around her leg and wrenched it tight just below her knee. She gasped then rolled over and leaned back on her hands.

Johnny was glaring at Raven. Willie had flipped through the dictionary enough to recognize the swift, curt sign he made, right fist on his left palm as he raised both hands— “Help me.”

Raven wanted to help, all right, help himself to the blood pulsing out of Willow Evans’s leg. The scent of it, hot and pungent as raw chocolate, sent his senses screaming.

He was ravenous, his system stuck in overdrive from the day spent in avian form. It was easy to gorge, so he’d fed lightly. He hadn’t anticipated this, or the brush with Nekhat. Even in essence he was staggeringly powerful. Raven felt weak and shaky, his hunger a raw, gutting pain.

He forced his hunger back, and his fangs into their sheaths, and then he approached the table, slowly, where his Shade hovered protectively over Willow Evans.

It didn’t shrink away, yet Raven wished it would. It was agony to see his face after so long a time, to taste the emotions radiating from his Shade: cold tart fear, hazy brown confusion, hot red anger. The feelings tugged on his senses, yet repelled him. He felt sick and wanted to gag.

Willow Evans nearly did when he cupped her badly clawed calf in his hand. The shiver of revulsion that ran through her made his fangs slide forward reflexively. They pricked his lips and filled his mouth with saliva.

“So, are you going to sew me up?” she asked breathlessly. “Or am I dinner?”

Chapter 17

Her voice was as thin as the pulse Raven could feel skipping erratically behind her knee. Her brown eyes were glassy, the irises huge, her pupils dilated. Sure signs of hysteria and the beginning of shock from blood loss.

Even in the smoky dark he could see the torn gastrocnemius muscle and shredded anterior tibial vein. There was still some seepage from the three-inch slash crawling with staph bacteria from the cat’s claws. He was the only doctor on the planet who could see the bacteria without a microscope— and the only physician with a screaming need to drink his patient’s blood.

He closed his eyes and his nostrils until the heady scent of blood faded. He felt his Shade edge closer, wary and warning, felt the cool clamminess of Willow Evans’s skin through her ripped jeans.

It would be flaming by the time he got her to Stonebridge General. There were antibiotics there, plasma to replace the blood she’d lost, and questions he couldn’t avoid.

And there was Nekhat. Long before the first Norseman sailed into Stonebridge harbor, Nekhat had learned how to master the elements. Already the wind had shifted, gusting out of the south. Nekhat would be here within hours to reclaim the moonstone and wreak vengeance for its theft.

“I can’t sew you up here,” Raven said. “You need surgery to repair the vein and physical therapy to rebuild the muscle. Neither of which we have time for.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that. How long before Nekhat comes for the moonstone?”

“Soon.” Sooner than she could imagine, but there was no point frightening her. “If we aren’t here, most likely will bypass Stonebridge in favor of pursuing the moonstone.”

“How likely?”

He rubbed a hand over his mouth, but it didn’t help. His fangs still throbbed. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

Willie blinked, surprised. She’d expected lies and false assurances. “I can’t go anyplace with this leg. You’re the doctor. Short of surgery, what do you suggest?”

He was a vampire, too. A very hungry one. Willie saw it in the faint red gleam in his eyes and the tremble she’d noticed in the hand he’d wiped across his face.

“A vampire rarely kills its victims,” he told her. “A corpse drained of blood with punctures in the neck points rather obviously at the cause of death. My saliva actually contains an ingenious coagulant and several fearsome antibodies. I can close your wound within minutes and kill any infection.”

“And have dinner on me while you’re at it?”

“By morning you won’t even have a scar.”

“You could make a killing in plastic surgery.”

Willie knew she sounded as goofy and giddy as she felt. She knew, too, that something had to be done about her light-headedness. And fast.

“You needn’t be aware,” Raven said. “I can make you think of something else.”

“Like what will happen if we don’t leave before Nekhat comes back? No, thanks. I prefer to keep an eye on you.”

She had no choice. Raven felt her horror at the realization, and the terror and the fury blazing from his Shade. He swung his head away as his Shade flew around the table signing frantically to Willow Evans.

“If you don’t like it, then
you
sew me up,” Willie snapped. “You’re a doctor, too!”

Johnny’s hands flashed pale and opaque in the darkness. She recognized the sign he made, the brush of his right index finger across his left for “I can’t,” figured the cupped palm he held up to his face and rotated from the wrist signified mirror
.
He meant he couldn’t do it without the mirrors, which Willie had already surmised.

“You said you had no choice but to trust Raven,” she reminded him. “Clearly, I don’t, either.”

It wasn’t exactly what he’d said, but it was close enough. So was Raven, so close that Willie could see dark spatters of blood on his white shirt. Her head spun sickeningly; Raven’s fingers pressed the pulse point in her right wrist.

“Your blood pressure is dropping. It’s now or never.”

Some choice. But life was slipping away from her. She could feel it in the dull ring in her ears, the spots swirling at the corners of her vision.

“Tell me first where we’re going,” Willie said, sliding weakly down on her elbows.

“To Italy.” Raven felt her pressure drop another notch, tightened his grip on her wrist and gave it a boost. “To collect the last item I need for the Ritual.”

Tending to her took strength he didn’t have and sent his hunger soaring. He dosed his eyes until it eased, opened them and saw his Shade offering him the spare towel. Raven glanced at his blood-smeared hands. He wanted to lick them dean but resisted the urge, taking the towel, dipping it in the watering can and wiping them, instead.

“Obviously Johnny has to go with you, but why do I?”

“Because now you are known to Nekhat.”

He didn’t say that made her number one on his hit list, but he didn’t have to. Willie figured as much.

“If we go with you, if the three of us aren’t here when Nekhat comes back, he’ll leave Stonebridge alone, right?”

Raven didn’t answer. Willie pushed up on her hands, but her arms were too weak to hold her. Johnny leapt to catch her as her elbows buckled, but he couldn’t, for there were no mirrors. There was only Raven to slide his arm beneath Willie and ease her back down on the table.

Raven’s arm, too, should have passed through him like smoke, but it didn’t. His wrist bumped Johnny’s elbow as he did so, hard enough to shoot pins and needles all the way up to Johnny’s shoulder. It was impossible. He had no body, no nerves, yet he felt it. Physical sensation, for the first time outside of a mirror in 117 years.

Raven felt it, too. Johnny saw it in the startled leap of his gaze, felt the same jolt that laced up his arm shoot through Raven. He felt his yearning and his loathing at the touch of human flesh—and he felt his hunger. It roared through Johnny, white-hot and ravening, a surge of raw power that sent his senses reeling. He wanted to sink his teeth into Willie’s throat, throw back his head and howl at the moon.

Johnny gripped Raven’s wrist, felt his own flesh, cold and lifeless as the grave. Awareness washed through him, and recognition. It flickered in Raven’s dark eyes beneath the flame of his hunger—for only a moment, hardly more than a heartbeat before he dropped his gaze—along with a gleam of remorse so deep and wrenching it nearly staggered Johnny.

So did the realization that he was no different than Raven. He was a thing neither dead nor alive; a horror trapped in between, an abomination never meant to have existence. He knew it as surely as he knew that if the Ritual didn’t work he would die, and so would Raven. As they should have, as perhaps they were meant to, in Egypt over a century ago.

The certainty of it clutched him, as icy and inexorable as the void waiting to reclaim him on the full moon. He felt only sadness, a deep, grinding sorrow that he’d evaded Raven for so long, so very long, when he was and always had been his only hope of salvation.

The cloying stench of pity rolling off his Shade almost gagged Raven. It singed his senses and burned his nostrils. He beat back the hunger clawing at him. If his Shade hadn’t tightened its grip on his wrist, hadn’t forced his gaze from the pulse throbbing in Willow Evans’s throat, he would have taken her.

For the first time since he lay dying on the floor of Nekhat’s tomb. Raven looked directly into his own eyes. They were dark as midnight. No pupil, no iris. He remembered they’d once been gray, like his father’s. He grasped the memory and clung to it, twisted his grip and grasped his Shade’s wrist. His hunger screamed, recoiled from the contact and curled into a tight, whimpering ball.

His Shade felt it. Raven saw it in the shudder that rippled through him, the tears that welled in his eyes. He felt the ducts swell and overflow, saw his dark fringe of lashes shimmer like the stars winking behind the racing clouds.

A single tear slid from his Shade’s left eye and splashed the back of Raven’s left hand. He felt his skin sizzle, and pain— real, nerve-generated pain—flash up his arm. He jerked his hand free and almost fell, but caught himself on the table, palms spread on either side of Willow Evans.

There was a burn on the back of his hand, about the size of a glowing cigarette tip. It throbbed a raw, angry red, the edges boiling as if he’d spilled add on his hand. Only a second passed—barely more than a flutter of Willow Evans’s pulse—before the surrounding tissue reacted.