leap out of the darkness at any moment, drag her back home, and… her mind shut down.
Livvie wasn't sure what would happen next, but she knew it would be the worst kind of punishment.
One eye on the street behind her, she gathered pebbles and tossed them against Jackie's window until a dim light showed through the blinds. She saw his shaggy head poke out the window, and a minute later the front door opened. She flew into his arms while he held her until the shakes stopped.
'Shh, shh, Squirt. You're okay now,' he crooned.
Safe, she thought, finally safe. In Jackie Holt's twin bed, she sank into a fitful sleep, curled up against his strong, young body. Safe, for now, but she knew she'd have to go back.
She woke up with her backside pressed against the hard length of muscled body and a band of iron draped protectively over her chest, a hand curved round her cheek. She sighed and wiggled into the firm strength at her back.
'Livvie, wake up,' Jackie whispered at her temple, tickling her ear with his warm breath. 'You have to go before your mom finds out you're missing.'
'No,' she murmured, drugged with sleep and snug in the safe, narrow confines of the bed. 'Can't go home yet.'
Jackie turned her over and brushed the unruly mass of dark hair from her face. 'Come on, Squirt, you can't stay much longer. I'll walk you back and make sure Roger's dead drunk.' He grinned and showed strong, white teeth in a dark face. 'And if he's not, I'll help him along with a little knock to the head.'
She stared up at his suddenly beloved face and felt the seismic shift in her small world. Why hadn't she realized before how beautiful he was? Her face flushed and her heart began an unfamiliar staccato in her chest. She saw the answering emotion in Jackie's eyes and felt a sudden hard thrust against her thigh.
This is what the princess in the fairy tale felt when the prince rescued her, she thought.
Driven by budding confidence and pure instinct, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled his mouth down on hers. His soft, warm lips opened to hers as a fierce jolt jarred her whole body like fire and ice and floods and desert all jumbled together and centered in her lower body. She kissed his lips and face and neck in a fever accompanied by incoherent words she didn't even understand.
And finally, when she pressed against him and urged him so sweetly, Jackie gave in. He was the one person who could understand her convoluted logic. If she was going to lose her virginity anyway, she didn't want Roger with his grabby hands and stinking breath to be the one.
She wanted her best friend to be the first because maybe – just maybe – she was beginning to believe in that fairy tale after all.
Southeast Africa, Present Day
Chapter One
The Zichecola jungle of southeast Africa's coast lay in dank tangles around the man's crouched, naked body. The susurration of insects and the buzzing of tiny living things sounded loud in the humid silence.
A hunter in search of human prey, Jackson Holt moved stealthily through the forest, the air's heavy moisture slick against his bare flesh. Vines and foliage dangled from trees like the crazed scribbling of a madman. Sweat ran off his muscles and bunched under his armpits and beneath his testicles. His body settled into the familiar, dense wilderness like one who'd returned to his primordial self.
The man-turned-hunter lifted his face to the purpled sky and sniffed cautiously. There, upwind of him. Three hundred meters. A faint whiff of man-odor. Man-sweat. Fear, laden with the subtle tremors of panic. The scent of the quarry awaiting the predator.
They'd been expecting him for so long they'd grown inured to the smell of their own fear. Holt barred his teeth and crept steadily forward.
He reached the secret camp just as the mottled sky gave way to the pink tinge of dawn. The rain had ceased, and the muffled humidity blanketed the area of packed dirt where Idi Kanumba pushed back the flaps of his tent and walked to the river's edge.
A giant beast of a man, Kanumba yawned loudly and scratched his bare chest. He stretched in the morning air and glanced toward the two stations where his guards stood at attention. Satisfied, he unzipped his trousers and urinated a steady yellow stream into the water.
Watching, Holt curled his lip.
He reconnoitered from his hiding place, noting with care the number of bodyguards, the weapons they carried, and the level of alertness they showed. Smaller than their leader, the guards looked quick and wiry. Each carried a.45 Auto GLOCK and a hunting knife on his belt. Even with the accuracy of the GLOCKs, Holt figured he could easily take out the first two guards with a single blow.
The third man dangled an Uzi from his right hand and carelessly slung an AR-15 assault rifle over his left shoulder. Though his posture was casual, his eyes had the wary look of a veteran fighter. He'd be the man to watch, the only one who'd put up a decent fight.
The fourth man was Kanumba. The beast who'd assassinated over one hundred thousand of his own people and buried them in mass graves outside Zichecola City. Some of them were healthy, young rebels. Most were women and old men. Many of them were children.
Why had he murdered them?
Holt uncoiled his body and braced the knife blade, his single weapon, between his teeth. First, the Uzi guard. Just as the ebony-faced man snarled and lifted his weapon, Holt buried his dagger hilt-deep in the guard's right eye socket.
He pounced on Kanumba before the leader could react enough to zip up his fly. Slashed his throat in a gnashing of steel against muscle and tendon that nearly severed the head from the body. An arterial spray gushed onto the attacker's face, arms, and torso. By the time he turned to confront the remaining two bodyguards, his body was as slick as an ancient sacrificial offering.
Slippery and wet, he slid on his ass along the grassy marsh at the water's edge, and with a swipe of one leg toppled the two remaining guards. Both men landed with a thud. He stepped behind each, and in a practiced motion, yanked their necks to the right. They crumpled at his feet.
Holt stared at the carnage around him, then retrieved his weapon and wiped it in the tall grass. Already the flies began to hover around the sticky, darkening pools of blood. The man inside the warrior struggled to overcome the wave of nausea that swept through him, but the beast within howled in triumph.
By the time he'd finished digging shallow graves for the bodies, dismantling the tent, and dispersing the supplies, the sun shone high in the eastern sky. The temperature had risen twenty degrees, and the sounds of insects pierced the silence of the forest like angry wasps. He washed in the river, sluicing blood from his arms and face, rinsing his torso. He welcomed the cool relief of the water against his fevered flesh, the return from the dark place.
The miniscule changes that heralded his transformation back to the man he'd been when he set off from Johannesburg yesterday had already started by the time he finished cleaning up. The muscles contracted, the skin color stabilized, the indefatigable strength ebbed. When he sniffed the air, he no longer detected the heavy coppery odor with the fine olfactory senses of the animal.
His nerves prickled as human feeling returned.
At last Jackson Holt dressed in clothes he'd uncovered in the tent and set off toward Zichecola City, twenty miles to the east. The sun dappled in his eyes as he marched. With each step he relived the thrill of the knife blade to the vulnerable flesh, the strength that coursed through his body, the heady adrenaline rush of victory. But, as always, when the warrior's body returned to itself, he felt a terrible reckoning. At the final return of his humanness, he stared at his hands and observed their mortal trembling.
In his mind Holt repeated the mantra that grounded him as he moved silently to the rhythm of the chant. It
