“This is my night,” Gabe added, punctuating the fact by spitting at his feet. “I’m ending it on my terms.”
“Wait a minute,” the guy in the gray hoodie interrupted, sounding stupefied. His eyes swiveled in both directions down the alley. “Gabe! Your Nephil. He’s gone!”
We all turned toward the spot where B.J. had lain inert only moments ago. An oily stain on the gravel was the only sign he’d been there.
“He couldn’t have gone far,” Gabe snapped. “Dominic, go that way,” he ordered the guy in the gray hoodie, pointing down the alley. “Jeremiah, check the store.” The other guy, the one in a white graphic T-shirt, took off jogging around the corner.
“What about her?” Jev asked Gabe, nodding at me.
“Why don’t you make yourself useful and go bring me back my Nephil?” Gabe shot back.
Jev raised his hands level with his shoulders. “Have it your way.”
I felt my stomach tumble to my knees as I realized that this was it. Jev was leaving. He was friends with, or at least an acquaintance of, Gabe, and that alone was enough to make me nervous of him, but at the same time, he was my only shot at getting out of here. Up until this point, he’d appeared to take my side. If he left, I was on my own. Gabe had made it clear he was the alpha male, and I wasn’t going to pretend I thought his remaining two friends would stand up to him.
“You’re going to walk away, just like that!” I yelled after Jev. But Gabe rammed his shoe into the back of my leg, forcing me to collapse to my knees, and before I could say more, my breath was knocked out of me.
“It’ll be easier if you don’t watch,” Gabe told me. “One solid hit, and it’ll be the last thing you feel.”
I lunged forward to escape, but Gabe grabbed a fistful of my hair, jerking me back. “You can’t do this!” I screamed. “You can’t just kill me.”
“Hold still,” he growled.
“Don’t let him do this, Jev!” I yelled, unable to see Jev, but certain he could still hear me, since I hadn’t heard the SUV start up yet. I was rolling in the gravel, trying to turn around so I could see the tire iron and try to dodge it. I wrapped my fist around a scoop of rocks, twisted violently just long enough to spot Gabe, and flung them.
His big hand came down, grinding my forehead into the ground. My nose was bent at a painful angle, rocks biting into my chin and cheeks. There was a sickening crunch, and Gabe collapsed on top of me. Through a haze of panic, I wondered if he was trying to smother me. Killing me quickly wasn’t enough, was it? Had to draw out the pain as long as possible? Gasping for breath, I clawed my way out from under him.
I scrambled to my feet and flipped around. I braced myself in a defensive position, expecting to find Gabe prepping to take a second shot at me. My gaze dropped. He was facedown on the ground, the tire iron jutting out of his back. He’d been stabbed with it.
Jev wiped his sleeve across his face, which glistened with sweat. At his feet, Gabe twitched and shuddered, swearing violently and incoherently. I couldn’t believe he was still alive. The tire iron had to be straight through his spine.
“You—stabbed him,” I blurted, horror-struck.
“And he’s not going to be happy about it, so I’d suggest you get out of here,” Jev said, twisting the tire iron deeper. He glanced over at me and did an eyebrow raise. “Sooner rather than later.”
I backed away. “What about you?”
He watched me for an absurdly long moment, considering the circumstances. A brief expression of regret flicked across his features. Once again, I felt a powerful tug to my memory that threatened to mend the bridge holding everything out of reach. I opened my mouth, but the conduit between my mind and my words had been destroyed. I was at a loss as to how to connect the two. I had something to say to him, but I couldn’t nail down what.
“You can sit tight, but I’m guessing B.J. already put a call in to the cops,” Jev said, screwing the tire iron deeper, causing Gabe’s body to spring taut at one moment, and fall limp the next.
As if on cue, the distant wail of sirens shrilled across the night.
Jev grabbed Gabe under his arms, dragging him into the weeds on the far side of the alley. “On the back roads, at the right speed, you can put a couple miles between you and this place in no time.”
“I don’t have a car.”
His eyes sliced into mine.
“I walked here,” I explained. “I’m on foot.”
“Angel,” he said in a way that sounded like he sincerely hoped I was joking.
A few moments together hardly qualified us for pet names, but nonetheless, my heartbeat went a little erratic at the endearment. Angel. How could he possibly know that name had haunted me for days now? How could I possibly explain the eerie flashes of black that intensified the closer he came?
Most unnerving of all, if I connected the dots …
Patch, a voice whispered from my subconscious, a quiet syllable that dashed itself against a cage deep within. The last time you felt this way was when Marcie mentioned Patch.
The single syllable of his name opened me up to a swarm of black, maddening, consuming black that flooded from every direction. I concentrated through it, eyes intent on Jev, trying to make sense of a feeling I couldn’t put words to. He knew something I didn’t. Maybe about the mysterious Patch, maybe about me. Definitely about me. His presence cut me with emotions too deep to be a coincidence.
But how were Patch, Marcie, Jev, and I connected?
“Do I—know you?” I asked him, unable to come up with any other explanation.
He gazed at me, unflinching. “No car?” he confirmed, ignoring my question.
“No car,” I repeated, my voice considerably thinner.
He arched his neck back, as though to ask the moon, Why me? Then he jerked his thumb at the white SUV he’d pulled up in. “Get in.”
I shut my eyes, trying to think. “Wait. We have to stay and testify. If we run, we might as well be confessing our guilt. I’ll tell the police you killed Gabe to save my life.” Further inspiration struck me. “We’ll find B.J. and get him to testify too.”
Jev opened the driver’s-side door of the SUV. “All of the above would be true if the police could be relied on.”
“What are you talking about? They’re the police. It’s their job to catch criminals. We’re not in the wrong here. Gabe would have killed me if you hadn’t stepped in.”
“That part I don’t doubt.”
“Then what?”
“This isn’t the kind of case local law enforcement is set up to handle.”
“I’m pretty sure murder falls under the jurisdiction of the law!” I argued.
“Two things,” he said patiently. “First, I didn’t kill Gabe. I stunned him. Second, believe me when I say Jeremiah and Dominic will not go into custody willingly and without a lot of bloodshed.”
I opened my mouth to argue when, from the corner of my eye, I saw Gabe twitch again. Miraculously, he wasn’t dead. I remembered the way he’d manipulated my sight with what I could only guess was a powerful form of hypnotism or a magician’s sleight of hand. Was he using another trick to somehow evade death? I had the eerie sensation that something bigger than I understood was going on. But—
What, exactly?
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Jev said quietly.
I hesitated, but there wasn’t time for it. If Jev knew Gabe as well as I suspected, he had to know about his … abilities. “I saw Gabe do—a trick. A magic trick.” When Jev’s grim expression confirmed that he wasn’t surprised, I added, “He made me see something that wasn’t real. He turned himself into a bear.”
“That’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what he’s capable of.”
I swallowed against the sticky film lining my mouth. “How did he do it? Is he a magician?”
“Something like that.”
“He used magic?” I’d never given two moments’ thought that such convincing magic might actually exist. Until now.
“Close enough. Listen, time’s running a little thin.”
My gaze traveled to the weeds partially concealing Gabe’s body. Magicians could create illusions, but they could not defy death. There was no logical way he could have survived.
The sirens blared closer, and Jev ushered me toward the SUV. “Time’s up.”
I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I had a moral responsibility to stay—
Jev said, “If you hang around to talk to the police, you’ll be dead before the week is over. And so will every cop involved. Gabe will stop the investigation before it starts.”
I took another two seconds to think it through. I didn’t have to trust Jev. But in the end, for reasons too complicated to untangle on the spot, I did.
I strapped myself in beside him, my heart thundering behind my rib cage. He put what I could now see was a Tahoe in gear. With one arm braced behind my seat, he craned his neck to see out the back window.
Jev reversed down the alley, backed onto the street, then gunned forward toward the intersection ahead. There was a stop sign on the corner, but the Tahoe wasn’t slowing. I was just wondering if Jev would at least yield for the stop sign, as I clutched the granny handle above my door with both hands and hoped he would, when a dark silhouette staggered into our lane. The tire iron projecting out of Gabe’s back was wrenched at a gruesome angle, and in the hazy light, it resembled a broken appendage. A battered wing.
Jev stepped on the gas and threw the SUV into higher gear. It pitched forward, increasing in speed. Gabe was too far away to read his expression, but he showed no sign of moving. He crouched, tucking his legs beneath him, his hands up in front of him as though he thought he could block us.
I gripped the seat-belt strap. “You’re going to hit him!”
“He’ll move.”
My foot stomped an imaginary brake pedal. The distance between Gabe and the Tahoe rapidly narrowed. “Jev—stop—right—now!”
“This won’t kill him either.”
He forced the Tahoe into another burst of speed. And then it all happened too quickly.
Gabe lunged, hurtling through the air toward us. He struck the windshield, the glass cracking into a latticelike web. An instant later he flew out of sight. A scream filled the car, and I realized it was mine.
“He’s on top of the car,” Jev said. He floored it over the curb, plowing through a sidewalk bench and driving under a low-hanging tree. Jerking the steering wheel a hard left, he steered back onto the street.
“Did he fall off? Where is he? Is he still up there?” I pressed my face to my window, trying to see above me.
“Hang on.”
“To what?” I shouted, grasping for the granny handle again.
I never felt the brake. But Jev must have stepped on it, because the Tahoe spun a full rotation before squealing to a stop. My shoulder was slammed up against the door frame. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a dark mass fly through the air and land with catlike grace on the ground. Gabe stayed there a moment, crouching, his back to us.
Jev threw the Tahoe into first gear.
Gabe looked back over his shoulder. His hair clung to the sides of his face, a sheen of sweat holding it in place. His eyes locked with mine. His mouth tipped up diabolically. He said something just as the Tahoe lunged into motion, and even though I couldn’t decipher a single word from the movement of his lips, the message was clear. This isn’t over.
I pressed back in my seat, swallowing gulps of air as Jev peeled away in a manner I was sure left tire treads tattooed on the street.
CHAPTER
10
JEV DROVE ONLY FIVE BLOCKS. IT DAWNED ON ME A little late that I should have asked him to take me to Cooper-smith’s, but he’d opted for the obscurity of the back roads. He steered the Tahoe to the shoulder of a peaceful country road, lined by acres of trees and cornfields.
“Can you find your way home from here?” he asked.
“You’re just going to dump me here?” But the real question framed in my mind was this: Why had Jev, presumably one of them, alienated himself to save me?
“If you’re worried about Gabe, trust me, he’s got more on his mind right now than tracking you down. He won’t be doing much of anything until he gets the tire iron out. I’m surprised he had the strength to chase us as far as he did. Even after he gets it out, he’ll have what I can only describe as a killer hangover. He’s not going to be in the mood to do much other than sleep for the next several hours. If you’re waiting for the perfect moment to make a break for it, you aren’t going to get a better one.”
When I didn’t budge, he jerked his thumb back the way we’d come. “I need to make sure Dominic and Jeremiah clear out.”
I knew he wanted me to take a hint, but I wasn’t convinced. “Why are you really protecting them?” Maybe Jev was right, and Dominic and Jeremiah would fight the police. Maybe it would end in a bloodbath. But wasn’t the risk better than letting them walk free?
Jev’s eyes were fixed on the darkness beyond the windshield. “Because I’m one of them.”
I immediately shook my head. “You’re not like them. They would have killed me. You came back for me. You stopped Gabe.”
Instead of answering, he angled out of the Tahoe and came around to my side. He yanked my door open and pointed into the night. “Head that way to town. If your cell phone doesn’t work, keep walking until the trees clear. Sooner or later you’ll get reception.”
“I don’t have my cell.”
He paused only a beat. “Then when you get to Whitetail Lodge, ask the front desk for their phone. You can call home from there.”
I slid out. “Thanks for saving me from Gabe. And thanks for the ride,” I said civilly. “But for future reference, I don’t appreciate being lied to. I know there’s a lot you aren’t telling me. Maybe you think I don’t deserve to know. Maybe you think you hardly know me, and I’m not worth the trouble. But given what I just went through, I think I’ve earned the right to the truth.”
To my surprise, he nodded. Not eagerly; a reluctant inclination of his head that said, Fair enough. “I’m protecting them because I have to. If the police see them in action, it will blow our cover. This town isn’t ready for Dominic, Jeremiah, or any of us.” He watched me, his razor-sharp eyes softening to a velvety black. There was something so consuming about the way his eyes took me in, I almost felt his gaze like a real touch. “And I’m not ready to leave town yet,” he murmured, his eyes still holding mine.
He stepped closer, and I felt my breath come a little faster. His skin was darker than mine, more rugged. He wasn’t beautiful enough to be handsome. He was all hard, prominent angles. And he was telling me that he was different. Not because he was unlike any other guy I’d ever known, but because he was something else entirely. I clung to the one strange new word that had stayed with me all night. “Are you Nephilim?”
Almost as if he’d been shocked, he jerked back. The whole moment snapped apart. “Go home and get on with your life,” he said. “Do that, and you’ll be safe.”
With his blunt brush-off, I felt tears spring to my eyes. He saw them and shook his head in apology. “Look, Nora,” he tried again, resting his hands on my shoulders.
I stiffened in his embrace. “How do you know my name?”
The moon broke briefly through the clouds, allowing me a glimpse of his eyes. The soft velvet was gone, replaced by a hard and hooded black. His were the kind of eyes that held secrets. The kind that lied without flinching. The kind that once you looked into them, it was hard to break away.
We were both damp from the exertion of our earlier escape, and what I assumed was the lingering scent of his shower gel hung between us. It held the slightest trace of mint and black pepper, and the memory of it rushed through me so fast I was left dizzy. I had no way to trace it, but I knew the scent. Even more unsettling, I knew I knew Jev. Somehow, whether it was in a trivial way, or something much larger and therefore much more disconcerting, Jev had been a part of my life.
There was no other way to explain the searing flashbacks that came from being near him.
It crossed my mind that maybe he was my kidnapper, but the idea didn’t have a lot of conviction behind it. I didn’t believe it. Maybe because I didn’t want to.
“We knew each other, didn’t we?” I said, my extremities tingling. “Tonight isn’t the first time we’ve met.”
When Jev stayed quiet, I was pretty sure I had my answer. “Do you know about my amnesia? Do you know I can’t remember the last five months? Is that why you thought you could get away with pretending not to know me?”
“Yes,” he said wearily.
My heart beat faster. “Why?”
“I didn’t want to pin a target on your back. If Gabe thought we had a connection, he could use you to hurt me.”
Fine. He’d answered that question. But I didn’t want to talk about Gabe. “How did we know each other? And after we left Gabe behind, why did you still pretend not to know me? What are you keeping from me?” I waited restlessly. “Are you going to fill in the gaps?”
“No.”
“No?”
He merely looked at me.
“Then you’re a selfish jerk.” The accusation flew out before I could stop it. But I wasn’t going to take it back. He may have saved my life, but if he knew something about those missing five months, and refused to tell me, anything he’d done to redeem himself was lost in my eyes.
“If I had anything good to tell you, trust me, I’d start talking.”
“I can handle bad news,” I said curtly.
He shook his head and sidestepped me, heading back to the driver’s side. I grabbed his arm. His eyes dropped to my hand, but he didn’t pull free.
“Tell me what you know,” I said. “What happened to me? Who did this to me? Why can’t I remember those five months? What was so bad that I’m choosing to forget?”
His face was a mask, all emotion compartmentalized away. The only sign that he heard me was a muscle flexing in his jaw. “I’m going to give you some advice, and for once, I want you to take it. Go back to your life and move on. Start over if you have to. Do whatever it takes to leave this all behind. This will end badly if you keep looking back.”
The Complete Hush, Hush Saga Page 68