Instead, she had a perturbed expression on her face, as if she expected to see the shadowman if she looked hard enough. Good luck with that. She’d have to look pretty damn hard to see into another plane of existence.
“Maybe we should talk.” Why the hell had I said that? I needed to get out of here. Away from this woman who seemed designed to be a pain in my ass.
I expected her to blanch. To threaten to call the cops. To run away. But she didn’t.
She just rubbed her arms and turned her striking eyes on me. “You think?”
…
Sheesh. Sitting in an SUV with tinted windows in a parking lot half a block away from my work with a man I didn’t trust had to be the stupidest thing I’d done in a very long time. But he had stepped in when that…that man-thing came after me. He could have let the other guy hurt me. I wasn’t sure I should entirely trust Tough Guy—Karson—but he had saved me. I did feel like I could trust him at least to not murder me and muss up his leather seats.
“I’m Ava, by the way.” I could totally do this. Get through this conversation as if I hadn’t just watched a man disappear into thin air.
“I know.”
Wow. Talkative. I tried again. “This is the part where you introduce yourself.”
He tapped his chest once, eyes still locked on the dashboard. “Karson.”
“Yeah, I got that the other day. And?”
He finally turned to look at me, and his dark brown eyes sent a shiver over my skin. “And I like long walks on the beach. Sunsets. Strip clubs filled with—”
“Jesus H—what the heck was that back there?”
“You need to stay away from Thomas—and that includes looking him up on the damn Internet. Do you know how easy that is to trace?”
“That…really didn’t answer my question.” It suddenly felt ten degrees below zero in the car. I reached out to adjust the vent, then pulled my hand back when I saw how badly it was shaking. Crap. Maybe I wasn’t as calm as I felt. Shock? Was this what shock felt like?
He reached out and shut the vent for me, then turned the AC down a couple of clicks. “Look. I know it’s hard to believe that there are forces outside of our understanding in the world, but they exist. That thing that attacked you—it was one of those forces.”
“He wasn’t normal? No way,” I said, coating my tone with as much sarcasm as I could. “I totally didn’t pick up on that when he disappeared into thin air right in front me.”
He shrugged.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I continued. “Give me some freaking details.”
“Forget you know Thomas’s name. You searched for a set of terms that triggered them sending that thing after you. I was there to save your ass this time, but that doesn’t mean someone won’t come after you again. Lay low for a couple of weeks—take a leave of absence from work. Those are the only details you need.”
Karson didn’t look like the kind of man who could be reasoned with. Definitely not bullied. I’d seen the scar on his face right away at the hospital, but now that he was closer I noticed multiple jagged scars running down both sides of his neck. His nose was slightly off center, like it had been broken and reset improperly. Or not reset at all. His full mouth formed a hard line, and his eyes were narrow slits. Everything about him said dangerous, from the way he looked to the way he carried himself.
What would it feel like to trace that scar with my fingertips?
No. I had to get away from that line of thought. Sure the man was sexy as hell, and he may have just saved my life. Nothing made a man sexier than saving your butt. But touching his scars—or his anything else—wasn’t in the cards for me. Skin-on-skin contact came with the risk of visions.
I was painfully curious. About Karson and Thomas. About the freaking man-thing who’d attacked me. About the word “Venator,” and how it might relate to my visions. A smart person would accept what he’d said, get out of the car, and pray to never see him or Thomas again.
But I couldn’t just let this go.
“Drive me home,” I said. I’d get him to my place, then grill him. He’d damned well better have some answers then.
He raised an eyebrow at me, but started the car.
I gave him directions to my apartment, a tiny part of my brain screaming that I was stupid for doing so. But he’d had plenty of chances to murder me, so I figured I was safe enough.
His expression turned darker the closer we got to my place. At first I thought he was irritated with me, but the sweat touching his brow and the tension rising in his shoulders looked more like pain.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” But his voice was low, a growl.
“You don’t look fine.”
His grip on the steering wheel tightened. “It scratched my back.”
The way he kept referring to the man who attacked me as it was seriously creepy. But how else could I describe it? Especially since the man had seemed almost inhuman to me, too. The way he had moved. The way he had spoken. His weird eyes.
And the fact that humans—far as I knew—didn’t disappear the second they hit fresh air.
“The guy scratched you?”
“Yes,” he said. “And for the last time, that wasn’t a guy.”
“Whatever.” I pointed at the parking lot in front of my building just ahead of us. “There. You can come up. I usually work with cats and dogs, but I’m sure I can handle dressing a non–fur covered wound, too. At least until you can get to a doctor.”
“I’m fine.”
I forced a shrug. It wasn’t my problem if he refused to seek medical attention. Karson didn’t strike me as a man who liked to let people know he was hurt. And the thing’s—uh, the man’s—fingernails had looked a little odd. Long. I almost wished I’d gotten a better look. Almost.
He stopped the SUV in a no-parking zone, right by the front door.
“You can’t park here.”
“I’m not parking. I’m dropping you off.”
I couldn’t let him go. Not until I got some answers. But the man was stubborn, and he wouldn’t come up just because I asked nicely or demanded he follow me. I only had one bargaining chip, and the idea of using it pushed panic into my throat. But I didn’t have a choice.
“You want to know what I saw at the hospital? How I know your friend is going to die horribly in a fire?”
His face hardened, and he opened his mouth to speak. I beat him to it.
“Then you’ll come up.” I opened the door and hopped out of the SUV before he could argue.
Chapter Four
Get a grip, Ava, I told myself. My hands had finally stopped shaking somewhere between the car and the short walk up the stairs to my apartment. Being on my own turf helped, even with the large, imposing man following me like an angry shadow.
Once we were in my apartment, I pointed to the living room and said, “Stay.” Karson stayed while I went into the kitchen, ostensibly to get us drinks.
Instead, I immediately called Eileen and reassured her I was okay. I had to lie and tell her that the big guy with the tattoos was a former boyfriend who’d heard I was searching for him on Facebook and thought I wanted him back. I lied again and told her I did, and that I’d taken off from work without checking back in with her because I’d been…well, I hinted that I’d been overcome with passion and had gone off for a quickie—not that I’d said such. Fortunately, Eileen bought my story. Just showed how little she knew about me. And how little she wanted to think about what had happened, because really, my story barely made sense.
I put my cell phone down on the kitchen counter and poured the Cherry Coke into the glass I held in my now-stable hand. I took a deep breath, gathering what little reserves I had left, and muttered to myself, “You can do this, Ava. Just talk to the man.”
Carrying the glass of cola in one hand and my can in the other, I stepped back out to the living room from my small galley kitchen.
Karson was on my couch.
Th
e surreal quality of it was almost enough to send me back into a panicked state. But the uncomfortable way he sat on the edge of the cushion, as if afraid he’d get it dirty or like he was ready to bolt from my apartment at any moment, made it impossible for me to be too afraid of him.
But I was still pretty damn scared of that man-thing at the clinic. He’d moved wrong. Sounded wrong. Screeched like a banshee and then disappeared into nothing. Absolutely nothing. No ash or dirt like I’d seen on television when inhuman things were killed. Simply gone, leaving no trace behind. And this definitely wasn’t TV.
This was so messed up.
I handed him the glass, then took a long drink from my can. I wanted answers from him, but I needed a minute first. To process. To get my mind around what I’d already seen. He watched me as I paced, then I finally came to stand in front of him.
I sucked in a deep breath, then said, “I know you said you didn’t want medical attention, but you really should let me look at your back. And doctor up any other wounds you got fighting that thing. I’ll grab my first-aid kit.”
He looked like he wanted to argue, but I didn’t wait around long enough to see if he would. Instead, I slipped out of the room and walked down the short hallway to the lone bathroom in my apartment before he could open his mouth. I grabbed the kit from under the sink, and then leaned against the counter and took a moment to suck in a few deep breaths. A fiery death. A sexy scary dude with tattoos. A man who melted into nothing. This was so far removed from the almost-ordinary world I’d known the day before.
Karson had a sour expression on his face when I returned.
“Is this Cherry Pepsi?”
“Coke. Don’t insult me. Pepsi is gross.”
“This is gross.”
“Take your shirt off.” My face immediately flushed with heat. Had I ever ordered a man to take his shirt off before? Pretty sure that was a negative.
I dropped the first-aid kit and it thudded against the coffee table. I went and grabbed a set of latex gloves from the box I kept under the sink. Last thing I needed was for a vision to hit while I was trying to treat the man’s wounds. I think I’d just give up at that point.
Even though the idea of touching him, feeling my skin sliding against his, was definitely appealing.
Karson had pulled off his jacket by the time I emerged from the kitchen, and the sight of him stopped me in my tracks. He’d turned so his back was to me, and I could see exactly why he wore a long jacket in early June.
Beneath his jacket, he’d hidden a shoulder holster. Against his hip was a long knife, still sheathed. He wore a black T-shirt, ripped and bloody. Clawed. The rips went from his belt line and halted at his leather gun holster.
He pulled off his knife and gun, then set them on the couch on top of his jacket. The shoulder holster was next. He pulled off his T-shirt, and I gasped.
Tattoos covered his shoulders and upper back. They were like, everywhere. I looked closer. No two symbols appeared to be exactly the same and with their complex arrangement, they were surprisingly beautiful. I’d seen small ones trailing down his arms, but had mistaken them for wanna-be tribal designs. These were different, and I could see now that the ones on his arms were different, too. Symbols rather than pictures, and all etched in black ink.
He peeked at me over his shoulder, eyebrow quirked as if asking me silently if I liked what I saw.
I licked my lips.
“Any day now.”
The low growl in his tone roused me from the half trance that staring at the designs covering his back had put me in. I turned my attention to the scratch marks.
“Scared I have cooties?” he asked after I pulled the gloves on.
The teasing in his tone almost made me drop the peroxide bottle. Who knew the man could tease?
“Scared you have another arsenal hidden in your pants.” Oh, damn. That wasn’t what I meant. “I’m just not big on touching.”
He hesitated, as if processing what I’d said. “I’m tempted to make a joke about you touching the arsenal in my pants, but it seems too easy.”
I snickered, then slid the cotton ball over his wounds. Like the “Tough Guy” I’d dubbed him, he didn’t even flinch. I leaned in closer to the scratches and blinked. They looked old. Not weeks old, but older than a few hours. Still, they were nasty cuts, not to the muscle, but close.
“You should really see a doctor. Some of these are pretty deep.” Now that I was closer, I could see a scratch down the inside of his right forearm, too. And I could see a tattoo around his neck that his jacket and shirt had mostly hidden before.
Peroxide in hand and antibiotic ointment next to him on the couch, I carefully pulled his arm onto my lap. Again, the wounds appeared older than they should have. Lucky for him, they weren’t as deep.
I massaged antibiotic ointment onto the scratches and suddenly felt the weight of his stare. When I looked up, his eyes were fixed on mine.
There was an intensity in his gaze that made me want to run away. Or move closer. Slip off my gloves and slide my hands down his sculpted chest. Over his flat stomach.
Need gathered in my stomach. Lower. A flash of hunger crossed his face, and I scooted back, face burning.
“You should heal up okay now,” I said, words coming out too fast. “But again, a hospital would be a good—”
“I think we both know I don’t need a hospital, Ava.”
I refused to look at him, and instead I pulled off my gloves and tossed them onto the coffee table.
“Okay. You do seem to be healing nicely. But—”
“Cut the crap.” He sighed and put his elbows on his knees. The man didn’t do relaxing very well.
He pulled his shirt on, and with most of his tattoos hidden under the cloth, he looked relatively normal. His hair was still disheveled, but in a way that was sexy, like he’d just rolled out of bed. Black lace-up boots covered his feet, completing his bad guy image.
Down, girl.
“So tell me.” The questions tumbled out of me, one after another. Like if I didn’t get them out there now, I never would. “What was that guy—thing, whatever? What does he have to do with Thomas? What’s a Venator? Why did a freaking Internet search bring a monster to my work?”
“That’s a lot of questions.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “You sure you really want to know?”
“Karson, I just saw a guy flipping disappear into thin air. I need to know what the hell is happening. We had a deal.”
“Did we?”
“You followed me up here, didn’t you?”
“Maybe that was to take advantage of you.”
If only. I stifled the thought and glared at him.
He took a long drink of his Coke, then grimaced. “They’re not human. Thomas Winston, I mean—and those like him. The shadowmen, like the one you saw, are things that Thomas’s kind are able to summon from another plane of existence. Shadowmen aren’t super smart, but they’re nasty creatures. And if they can get you immobilized for more than a few seconds, they can drag you into the shadows with them. Transport you to their master.”
I couldn’t help but gape for a beat, and any sort of follow-up question to that kind of freakishly scary idea evaded me for a moment.
Then an even more frightening thought pushed through.
“That’s what it would have done to me. If you hadn’t stopped it,” I said dully.
“Yep.” He took another drink, ice rattling in the glass.
“But Thomas is different? Not like those…things?” Thomas hadn’t seemed anything like the strange man who’d disappeared in front of me. He’d had human eyes, for one. And he’d seemed to move in a normal way. As far as I’d noticed.
“No. He’s something much worse. That thing was a servant of his.”
“If Thomas isn’t a…” I struggled with the words. “A shadowman, what is he?”
“You first. How did you know about the fire?”
A wave of nausea hit me. “Is Thomas—”
>
“Thomas is fine. For the time being.” He was nothing if not direct.
I swallowed hard, suddenly not sure if I could get the words out.
“Gotta give a little to get a little,” he added.
Would he laugh at me? Of course he would. No one believed me except Miriam. Well, Miriam and my mother. My mom had believed me enough to move halfway across the country to get away from me and my curse. Which had felt awesome for an eighteen-year-old.
But Karson wouldn’t tell me anything until I told him my secret. Lying wasn’t an option; he would see through it. He seemed to be able to read me like a book, and I was a terrible liar in the best of circumstances.
“You remember the day we met at the hospital?” My voice came out soft, tentative. God, I hated that. Might as well announce that I was a wimp and that all this crap scared me.
He nodded. His gaze never faltered from my face.
“I saw Thomas’s death. I felt him burn. Smelled his flesh…” I took a deep breath. Even if Thomas wasn’t human, or even if he was at the very least a bad man, it didn’t make the vision any less horrible.
“Has this happened before?”
“Yes. Since I was a kid. Though I haven’t ever seen anything that terrifying.”
He frowned at my arms. “It happens through touch? That’s why you always wear long sleeves?”
“Yes,” I said, tugging at my sleeve. “Not every time I touch someone. Not even most times. But I don’t like to take chances.”
“I’ve heard rumors. I’ve never met a real psychic.”
“I’m not a psychic,” I said, voice rising. “I just see stuff, sometimes. It’s not like I can read your future on your palm or tea leaves or whatever.”
“Maybe not.” He leaned forward, his expression hard and unyielding. “But you have psychic powers. Real ones. And it’s going to get you worse than killed if you don’t keep your head down.”
For a moment, I was stunned. He believed me, even if it felt like he’d compared me to a carnival attraction. The questions I’d expected to fly from his mouth, the accusations, the derision and disbelief, hadn’t come. His automatic acceptance should have made me suspicious, but it didn’t. He was a man who’d seen things way stranger than little ol’ me.
Temptation by Fire Page 4