She was halfway across the clearing, huddled on the ground, watching me in dawning disbelief and horror. Too late I realized my lips were drawn back in a silent scream, and she could see my elongated fangs.
“What in God’s name are you?” Her voice was little more than a choked gasp of horror.
I ignored her question—I had more important things to deal with. I had to gather my self-control or I was doomed. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to save myself at this point, and I couldn’t save her either, not that I particularly cared. She had gotten me into this mess in the first place.
She was going to have to help get me out of it, whether she wanted to or not. I shuddered, forcing the agony back down my throat. In a few minutes I wouldn’t be able to do even that much; a few minutes longer and I would be unconscious. By morning I would probably be dead.
Did I care? I wasn’t sure it mattered one way or the other. But I didn’t want to leave her behind, where the Nephilim could get her. I’d rather finish her myself before they tore her body into pieces while she screamed for help that would never come.
I sucked in a deep bite of air, steeling myself. “Need . . . to make a . . . fire,” I managed, feeling the dizziness pressing against my brain, feeling the darkness closing in. I could hear the monsters out in the night forest, the low, guttural growling of the Nephilim. They would rip her apart in front of me, and I would be paralyzed, unable to do anything but listen to her screams as they ate her alive.
Things were beginning to fade, and the nothingness called to me, a siren song so tempting that I wanted to let go, to drift into that lovely place, the warm, sweet place where the pain stopped. I managed to look over at her—she was curled in on herself, unmoving. Probably whimpering, I thought dizzily.
Useless human, who probably belonged in hell anyway.
And then she lifted her head, staring at me, and I could read her thoughts easily. She was going to make a run for it, and I couldn’t blame her. She wouldn’t last five minutes out there in the darkness, but with luck I’d be unconscious by the time they began ripping her flesh from her bones. I didn’t want to hear the sounds of her screams as she died.
One more try, and then I’d let go. I tried to rise, to pull the last ounce of strength from my poisoned body, struggling to warn her. “Do not . . .” I said. “You need a fire . . . to scare them away.”
She rose, first to her knees, then to her bare feet, and I sank back. There was nothing else I could do. She was frightened, and she would run—
“And how am I supposed to start a fire?” she said, her voice caustic. “I don’t have any matches and I’m not exactly the camping type.”
I could just manage to choke out the words. “Leaves,” I gasped. “Twigs. Branches.”
To my glazed surprise, she began gathering the fuel from nearby, and within a few minutes she had a neat little pile, with branches and logs on the side.
The last of the twilight was slowly fading, and I could hear them beyond the clearing, the odd, shuffling noise they made, the terrible reek of decaying flesh and old blood.
She was looking at me, expectant, impatient. “Fire?” she prompted.
“My . . . arm,” I barely choked out. The last ounce of energy faded, and blessed darkness rushed in. And my last thought was now it was up to her. I had done everything I could.
And the night closed down around us.
CHAPTER THREE
HE’D PASSED OUT. I STARED down at him, torn. I should leave him, I thought. I didn’t owe him anything, and if I had any sense at all I’d get the hell out of there and leave him to fend for himself.
But I could hear those noises out in the darkness, and they made my blood run cold. They sounded like some kind of wild animal, and in truth I’d never been Outdoors Girl. My idea of roughing it was going without makeup. If those creatures out there liked to eat meat, then they had dinner stretched out on the ground, waiting for them. It even smelled as if he were already slightly charbroiled. I didn’t owe him anything. So what if he’d pulled me back from the jaws of hell . . . or whatever it was? He was the one who’d pushed me there in the first place. Besides, he’d only gotten slightly singed, and he was acting like it was third-degree burns over most of his body. He was a drama queen, and after my mother and my last boyfriend, I’d had enough of those to last me a lifetime.
Hell, who was I kidding? Whether he deserved it or not, I wasn’t going to leave him as food for wolves or whatever they were. I couldn’t do that to a fellow human being—if that was what he was. Though I still didn’t have the faintest idea how I was going to start the damned fire.
I edged closer, looking down at him. He was unconscious, and in the stillness the unearthly beauty of his face was almost as disturbing as the unmistakable evidence of fangs his grimace of pain had exposed. Was he a vampire? An angel? A fiend from hell or a creature of God?
“Shit,” I muttered, kneeling beside him to get a closer look at the burn on his arm. The skin was smooth, glowing slightly, but there were no blisters, no burned flesh. He was nothing more than a big baby. I reached out to shake him, then yanked my arm back with another “Shit,” as I realized that beneath the smooth skin fire burned.
That was impossible. It looked as if coals were glowing deep under the skin, and the eerie glow was putting out impressive amounts of heat.
There was a shuffling noise in the underbrush, and I froze. My comatose abductor/savior wasn’t the highest priority. The danger in the darkness beyond was worse. Whatever was out there was evil, ancient, and soulless, something foul and indescribable. I could feel it in the pit of my stomach, a nameless dread like something out of a Stephen King novel.
This was just wrong. I wrote cozy mysteries, not horror novels. What was I doing in the equivalent of a Japanese horror movie? Not that there’d been any blood as yet. But I could smell it on the night air, and it sickened me.
I glanced back at the small pile of twigs and grasses that I’d assembled. My fingertips were scorched, and on impulse I scooped up some dried leaves and touched them against his arm.
They burst into flames, and I dropped them, startled; they fell onto the makeshift pyre, igniting it.
The fire was bright, flames shooting upward into the sky. But darkness had closed in around us, and the monsters were still waiting.
I put more leaves on top of the fire, adding twigs and branches, listening to the reassuring crackle as they caught. It was only common sense, using fire to scare away the carnivorous predators in the darkness. Even cavemen had done it. Of course, cavemen hadn’t started fires from the scorched skin of a fanged creature, but I was handling things the best I could. Hell, maybe saber-toothed tigers had had fire beneath their pelts as well. Anything was possible.
I rose, turning back to my own personal saber- toothed tiger. We were too close to the fire, close enough that my companion would go up in flames if we stayed there. If I could pull him back against the rock face, we might be safe, and it would be easier to defend only one side of the clearing. I reached under his arms and tugged at his shoulders.
“Come on, Dracula,” I muttered. “You’re too big for me to move on my own. I gotta have some help here.”
He didn’t stir. I looked down at him, frustrated. He wasn’t huge, more long-limbed and elegant than bulky; and while I didn’t waste my limited time and money chasing after the perfect body in one of the many fitness clubs in Manhattan, I was strong enough. I should have been able to drag him a short distance away from the fire. Nothing was making any sense, and all the possible explanations put him in a fairly nasty light. Even so, I couldn’t just let him die.
I couldn’t get a good enough grip on his body, so I caught hold of his jacket and yanked. He was unexpectedly heavy, though it shouldn’t have surprised me—the man had towered over my meager five foot three, and I’d felt the crushing strength in his hand as he’d propelled me toward the . . .
I couldn’t remember. Five minutes later, and I couldn’t remember a damned thing. I didn’t know how he’d managed to get burned, or what he’d been trying to do. It was a blank. Everything was a blank. The last thing I remembered was stepping off the curb outside the office building on my way to meet with my editors.
They were going to be pissed as hell that I’d stood them up again.
How much time had passed since then? Days, weeks, months? The short, sassy hairstyle I’d spent a fortune on was now an unruly mane hanging down to my shoulders, and I could see that it was its original mousy brown instead of the tawny, streaked blond I’d gone for. That certainly couldn’t have happened in a matter of hours. How long had I been gone?
His heavy body finally began to budge, and I dragged him as far as I could until he let out a piercing cry of pain. I let him be, squatting beside him, staring at his burned flesh. It was the weirdest thing—it seemed like he had flames beneath his skin, as if his bones were made of burning coals.
His entire body was radiating heat, but apart from his arm he wasn’t painful to touch. The night had grown sharply colder, and the shapeless thing I was wearing wasn’t made for late autumn nights. My patient shivered as I put more wood on the fire. Thank God I’d grabbed an armload. The nighttime marauders seemed to have gone, but there was no guarantee they wouldn’t return if I were fool enough to let the fire go out. Wolves didn’t actually attack people, did they? But who said they were wolves?
It was going to be a long night.
I sat back on my heels, studying him. Who was he, and what the hell had he done to me? There had to be a reasonable explanation for what had appeared to be fangs. There were crazies out there who filed their teeth to points so they could resemble vampires—I’d seen it on one of the rotting corpse television shows like
