neck.
My heart dropped to my knees.
Scott was speaking, tapping the pool stick against my forehead, but the words went right past. I fought to recapture my breath and focused on the blur of concrete straight ahead to ground my complete shock and sense of betrayal. So this was what he meant when he said things with Marcie were strictly business? Because it sure didn’t look that way to me! And what was she doing here after having just been knifed at Bo’s? Did she feel safe because she was with Patch? On a split-second thought, I wondered if he was doing this to make me jealous. But if that were the case, he would have to have known I’d be at the Z tonight. Which he couldn’t have, unless he’d been spying on me. Had he been around more the past twenty-four hours than I’d originally believed?
I dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands, struggling to focus on the pain there, and not the choked, humiliated feeling rising inside me. I stood that way, numb and holding in the threat of tears, before my attention was pulled to the doorway leading into the corridor. A guy in a red muscle tee leaned on the frame. Something was wrong with a patch of skin at the base of his throat—it almost looked deformed. Before I could take a closer look, I was paralyzed by a flash of déjà vu. Something about him was startlingly familiar, even though I knew we’d never met. I had a strong urge to run, but at the same time was overwhelmed by the need to place him.
He picked up the white cue ball from the table closest to him and tossed it lazily a few times in the air.
“Come on,” Scott said, waving the pool stick back and forth across my line of vision. The other guys surrounding the table laughed. “Do it, Nora,” Scott said. “Just a little peck. For luck.”
He slipped the pool stick under the hem of my shirt and lifted it.
I slapped the pool stick away. “Knock it off.”
I saw movement from the guy in the red muscle tee. It happened so fast it took two beats of my heart to realize what was about to happen. He cranked his arm and hurled the cue ball across the room. An instant later, the mirror hanging on the far wall shattered, shards of glass raining to the floor.
The room fell silent except for the classic rock playing through the speakers.
“You,” the guy in the red muscle tee said. He aimed a handgun at the man in the sweater vest. “Give me the money.” He motioned him closer with a flick of the gun. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
Beside me, Scott pushed forward to the front of the crowd. “No way, man. That’s our money.” A few shouts of agreement rose up from the room.
The guy in the red tee kept the gun trained on the man in the sweater vest, but his eyes roved sideways to Scott. He grinned, baring teeth. “Not anymore.”
“If you take that money, I’ll kill you.” There was a calm fury to Scott’s voice. He sounded like he meant it. I stood frozen in place, barely breathing, terrified of what might happen next, because not one part of me doubted that the gun was loaded.
The gunman’s smile grew. “That so?”
“Nobody in here is going to let you leave with our money,” Scott said. “Do yourself a favor and put the gun down.”
Another murmur of agreement circled the room.
Despite the fact that the temperature in the room seemed to be rising, the guy in the red muscle tee lazily scratched his neck with the barrel of the gun. He didn’t appear the least bit worried. “No.” Switching the gun to aim at Scott, he ordered, “Get on the table.”
“Get lost.”
The guy in the red tee was two-handing the gun, aiming at Scott’s chest. Very slowly, Scott raised his hands level with his shoulders and scooted backward onto the pool table. “You won’t leave alive. You’re outnumbered thirty to one.”
The guy in the red tee crossed to Scott in three strides. He stood directly in front of Scott for a moment, his finger poised on the trigger. A bead of sweat trickled down the side of Scott’s face. I couldn’t believe he didn’t wrench the gun away. Didn’t he know he couldn’t die? Didn’t he know he was Nephilim? But Patch had said he belonged to a Nephilim blood society—how could he not know?
“You’re making a big mistake,” Scott said, his voice still cool, but spilling the first drop of panic.
I wondered why nobody made a move to help him. As Scott had pointed out, the crowd had the guy in the red tee outnumbered by a landslide. But there was something vicious and frighteningly powerful about him. Something … otherworldly. I wondered if they were just as spooked by him as I was.
I also wondered if the queasy and uncomfortably familiar feeling inside me meant he was a fallen angel. Or Nephilim.
Out of all the faces in the crowd, I suddenly found myself locking eyes with Marcie. She stood across the crowd, with something I could only describe as bewildered fascination written all over her expression. I knew, right then, that she had no idea what was about to happen. She didn’t realize Scott was Nephilim and had more strength in one of his hands than a human had in his whole body. She hadn’t seen Chauncey, the first Nephil I’d ever met, mangle my cell phone in the palm of his hand. She hadn’t been there the night he’d chased me through the halls of the high school. And the guy in the red muscle tee? Whether Nephilim or fallen angel, he was likely just as powerful. Whatever was about to happen, it wasn’t a mere fistfight.
She should have learned her lesson at Bo’s and stayed home. And so should have I.
The guy in the red tee shoved Scott with the gun, and he flew back on the tabletop. Out of surprise or fear, Scott fumbled his pool stick, and the guy in the red tee snatched it up. Without pausing, he leaped onto the table and held the pool stick pointed down at Scott’s face. He drilled the stick into the table an inch from Scott’s ear. The pool stick went down with such force, it smashed through the felt surface. Twelve inches of it were visible beneath the table.
I swallowed a scream.
Scott’s Adam’s apple quivered. “You’re crazy, man,” he said.
Suddenly a bar stool flew through the air, knocking the guy in the red tee sideways. He caught his balance but had to jump off the table to keep it.
“Get him!” someone in the crowd shouted.
Something like a war cry went up, and more people grabbed for bar stools. I went down on my hands and knees and looked through the forest of legs for the nearest exit. A few bodies away there was a guy with a gun holstered in an ankle strap. He reached for it, and a moment later the splintering sound of shots rang out. What followed was not silence, but more mayhem: swearing, shouting, and fists hammering into flesh. I got to my feet and ran in a crouch toward the back door.
I’d just slipped through the exit when someone hooked the waistband of my jeans and hauled me upright. Patch.
“Take the Jeep,” he ordered, shoving his car keys into my hand. A hasty pause. “What are you waiting for?”
My eyes teared up, but I angrily blinked them away. “Quit acting like I’m a huge inconvenience! I never asked for your help!”
“I told you not to come tonight. You wouldn’t be an inconvenience if you’d listened. This isn’t your world—it’s mine. You’re so bent on proving you can handle it that you’re going to do something stupid and get yourself killed.”
I resented that, and opened my mouth to say so.
“The guy in the red shirt is Nephilim,” Patch said, cutting me out of the conversation. “The branding mark means he’s in deep with the blood society I told you about earlier. He’s sworn allegiance to them.”
“Branding mark?”
“Near his collarbone.”
The deformity was from a
A loud noise seemed to rupture my eardrums, and Patch yanked me to the ground. Fragments of glass
