away from twisting her neck and snapping it like a twig.
Alex held his breath against the strain of monumental effort.
His gun had already cleared the holster.
He drove his fist past Jax’s head and rammed the end of the barrel into the man’s left eye socket.
Without an instant’s hesitation, before the man could react, before he could jerk back away from the gun, before he could snap her neck, Alex pressed the trigger.
The hot glare of the muzzle flash lit the inside of the truck. The sound of the gun going off was deafening. In the darkness Alex could also see the flash of the muzzle blast coming out the back of the man’s head, lighting a cloud of blood, bone, and brain as the hollow-point round blew through. The recoil snapped Alex’s hand back.
Most of the debris went out the open door, but some of it splattered against the inside of the windshield and side window in the back seat. The ejected brass shell casing ricocheted off the headliner, then pinged off the passenger window.
The instant the bullet tore through his brain, the hulk of a man went as limp as mud. He wasn’t thrown back like in the movies; he simply dropped dead in place. The man, who an instant before had been a blur of ferocity, was suddenly stone still.
Jax gripped the bottom of the steering wheel for leverage and with a growl of effort arched her back. Alex helped push her up. The dead man slid off her back and down into a heap at the side of the driveway. One arm splayed over his head, as if trying to hide the ghastly wound.
Alex at last drew a needed breath. His ears rang from the sound of the gunshot. The gun had been right beside Jax’s head when it had gone off. He hoped it hadn’t deafened her.
He hoped, too, that the gunshot hadn’t roused the neighborhood. On any regular, quiet night it would have awakened everyone within a couple of blocks, but with the thunder booming enough to shake the ground, a single gunshot was lost in nature’s mayhem.
It had all happened so fast. The night was suddenly back to normal. The rain droned on. In a blink the killing was over and done with, a man’s life ended.
Jax rubbed her neck with both hands as she twisted her head around experimentally. Blood dripped from sodden strands of her blond hair.
“Are you all right?” he asked, checking the darkness. “I was afraid that he might have broken your neck.”
“He would have,” she said, still catching her breath. “I guess that answers the question of whether or not I can count on you. Your Glock technology works pretty good.”
“That’s a Glock for you. Pull trigger go boom.”
“Thank you, Alexander. That was quick thinking.”
He nodded. “Just returning the favor.”
He holstered his gun as Jax bent down to the dead man and swiftly began cutting symbols that Alex recognized as the same design she had cut into Bethany. Ordinarily a gory sight like the aftermath of such a shooting might have made him sick, but he was too angry to be anything but angry.
Jax stood as soon as she had finished. She was getting faster at it. It had taken mere moments this time. He supposed that practice at magic that invoked travel to another world was just like any other practice that helped make one faster, like drawing a gun and firing at a threat.
Somewhere between the sporadic flashes of lightning the man wasn’t there anymore. It still seemed impossible the way he simply vanished. Alex glanced into the truck. The blood that had been splattered all over and running down the side of the dashboard was gone as well. It looked as if it had never been there, as if nothing had happened.
“Alex, we need to go. Men like that usually travel in pairs. The second will be here any—”
There was a soft thud to the air that Alex felt as a thump deep in his chest. For an instant it seemed like there was a dark smudge swirling in the air right beside Jax. As soon as he saw it, the indistinct, dark stain in the night changed into a vortex of vapor in the humid air.
The vapor almost instantly condensed into a shape.
Alex was already starting to draw the gun even as he could still feel the thump deep in his chest. The shape came into being before his weapon had cleared the holster. Jax was already spinning toward the threat.
There was no question in Alex’s mind; he had just seen a man step out of another world and hit the ground running, charging at them out of the downpour. The vapor rising from his beefy arms evaporated into the rain as he came at them.
Before Alex could get the gun up and on target to fire, Jax spun, slashing open the man’s abdomen.
As the man stumbled to a stop to stare down in shock at his insides erupting out of the long gash just as he had appeared in a new world, Jax rammed her knife up through his eye. The blade went in hilt-deep. It was as effective as the hollow-point round had been.
The man went down before he’d known what happened.
In the quiet whisper of rain, Jax looked up at Alex. “Like I said, usually in pairs.”
Ben had always said that in close-quarters combat, a knife was often faster than a gun. Alex was a believer.
As she hurriedly squatted down to repeat her task of activating the man’s lifeline, Alex holstered his Glock. “Let’s get away from here before we find out they travel in quads.”
Jax glanced up, giving him the oddest look. She then gestured. “You said that you had to push the, the. . what did you call that thing?”
“Truck. I have to push it down the drive to get it to start,” he said as he ducked in and released the parking brake. He leaned his weight into the windshield pillar to get the truck rolling. “Hurry with him while I get the truck started. When I do, jump in.”
The truck rolled down the drive, picking up speed. Alex ran beside it, pushing, then when it was going at a good clip he hopped in and put it in gear. As he turned to the right out into the street, in the downhill direction, he lifted his foot off the clutch. The engine caught. He pumped the gas a few times to make sure it wouldn’t stall, then put it in reverse, spinning the wheels on the wet pavement as he backed to the drive. Jax ran down the driveway to meet him. The second man was gone.
Alex rolled his hand, urging her to hurry.
Jax pressed up against the door. She slapped the palms of her hands against the passenger window as the truck started rolling forward.
“Alex! Wait! How do I get in?”
Rather than try to explain where the handle was and how to push the button, he leaned across and popped open the door. The woman had opened a doorway between dimensions or worlds or something, and yet she couldn’t open a truck door.
Jax jumped in. “Sometime you will have to teach me how to do that on my own.”
As he shifted into second, leaving his house in the distance behind, he noticed that she had a death grip on the console and the door’s armrest.
“Do we have to go so fast?” she asked in a breathless voice.
Alex glanced down at the speedometer. “We’re only doing thirty.”
“Can you make it go slower, please?”
For someone who had just gutted a man three times her size and given him a lobotomy for good measure, she suddenly seemed pretty squeamish. He guessed that he was starting to feel pretty squeamish himself. He slowed down a little to let her get used to the sensation.
With her blond hair plastered against her head she looked half drowned. He noticed, too, that her hair was no longer stained with blood. Her wet dress was a shambles from the brief battle. Seeing her alive, though, he doubted that she could have looked any better to him. At least she also looked like she was starting to relax, if only a little.
“I’m sorry, Alex.”
“About what?”
She waited until he looked over at her. “That you had to kill that man.”
“I’m just thankful that he wasn’t able to hurt you.”
As they raced away slowly down the street, he noticed her hands fisted in her lap. She looked like she
