Angel Slayer. Michele Hauf
the cab. Eden gripped the driver’s-seat headrest and twisted her body to scan out the side and rear windows. No sign of the punk.
Then the cab turned left—into oncoming traffic—and Eden’s body was thrown from the back of the cab into the front. Her head plunged toward the passenger side floor. Impact thudded her shoulder. Metallic blood trickled across her tongue.
The vehicle’s tires left the tarmac. The cab flipped and landed upside-down, spinning twice before slamming into a street signal pole. Glass shattered. Iron bent.
Eden blacked out.
* * *
Her eyelids fluttered.
The smell of gasoline mixed with the sweet odor of blood. Her chin was shoved down to her chest and her legs felt higher than her shoulders.
Trapped.
Blinking rapidly, Eden grasped for what had happened. The accident. They’d run a stop sign. Because the punk with the eye patch had tracked them across the city—on foot!
She eased herself out through the open door and landed on the street on her knees. Safety glass littered the ground, but she avoided it. Peering into the taxi, she spied the cabbie, his head on the steering wheel. There was no visible blood, and he was groaning.
“Not dead, thank goodness.”
A constant honking car horn effectively cleared her foggy brain. Other vehicles had been involved in the crash—two more, she saw from her kneeling position.
Fore in Eden’s mind remained the strange man. He’d literally been hell-bent on getting to her. Was he still in pursuit? Had he been hit by one of the cars that had collided in the accident?
She slid shaky fingers along her forearm. It itched where he had licked her. She scratched, but a drop of blood on the seat distracted her. Where had that—? She touched her head. A gash across her eyebrow bled. Didn’t feel deep. It didn’t hurt at all, which could be a good thing, or very bad.
A slide of fingers under her skirt and along her thigh verified the small blade still there. She could have been poked with it. She’d been fortunate.
“Have to …” If the punk found her what would he do? Heart racing toward a cliff, she couldn’t think beyond the insanity her pursuer had instilled in her. “Hide.”
Shuffling backward, Eden scrambled along the curb until she stopped at a spinning tire attached to a battered SUV. The radio inside the car blasted a Jimmy Hendrix tune.
Bent over, she crept-walked around the front of the SUV and spied a magazine stand on the sidewalk. She dove to the ground behind the wooden rack, her position hidden from the accident scene.
The sound of a new crash, like rubber-soled boots landing on a trunk, set her rigid. Already her heart beat maniacally. She couldn’t get more alert or tense.
“Here, pretty, pretty.”
It was the punk. Clasping her arms about her legs, she winced when her forearm crushed another cut below her knee. She would not cry. She must not make noise.
What would a man who had followed her through traffic, been thrown off a moving vehicle and was sorting through the scene of a wreckage want with her? No answer was good.
And any answer tested the boundaries of what was real and what could only be supernatural. Eden believed in beings not like herself. She had to, because she believed in angels.
The boots stomped the sidewalk not twenty feet from where Eden hid. She heard a snorting noise, like some kind of animal. He was … sniffing. It was as if he were a wild cat stalking its prey.
She didn’t like thinking that word—prey. Her gut clenched and she tried to stifle the uncontrollable need to sob.
Boot steps slowly approached. They paused and she heard a sniffing sound, as if he were testing the air. Then the boots jumped onto a vehicle and she heard metal crunch beneath them.
In the distance an ambulance siren wailed. Eden realized people from nearby shops had begun to step out and were gathering near the crashed cars.
“Not here,” the punk growled under his breath. “Bitch got away.” He landed on the asphalt. It sounded like he was walking away.
The back of Eden’s head fell against the boards behind her. She could be injured but she didn’t care. It was a relief to know the creep had given up. Finally.
She scratched the itch on her forearm. As if a wasp sting, it burned worse than any of her cuts.
The crowd exhaled a coltective gasp, as if they’d witnessed something strange or horrible.
A pair of heavy leather biker boots landed on the sidewalk right next to Eden.
Chapter 2
The punk leaned over Eden, extending his hand for her to grasp. She fixated on the shiny steel bar pierced through his nose as if a bullring waiting for tether. His smile was wrinkled. It didn’t meet his kaleidoscope eye. Nothing on his face was cohesive.
He did not speak, yet the eye not covered with the patch screamed at her. The promise of something vast and unfamiliar shouted from that eye. It frightened her.
And it compelled her.
She’d almost touched that feeling once. A year ago. Joy.
The crowd again gasped in unison as rubber peeled across the asphalt. Out of the corner of her eye, Eden saw a motorcycle do a one-eighty. The rumbling steel bike approached the accident too quickly. Surely it would crash—
The rear tire stopped two feet from her legs.
The white-haired punk snarled and leaped away from her. It was a physically impossible move, because he soared straight up through the air, flipped in a backward somersault and landed on the other side of the crashed cab.
“My lady, take my hand,” commanded the black-leather-clad motorcyclist. “If you want to be safe.”
Too much happening. So much to register. But Eden heard safe and scrambled to her feet.
Yet she looked to the punk, standing poised to leap upon the hood of a stalled car. Still, his eye beckoned.
I can give you what you seek. If you dare to take it.
“Now, my lady!” the rider insisted.
Shaking from shoulders to legs, wanting to scream, and wondering why she could not physically make a sound, Eden was tugged onto the motorcycle behind the imposing man.
She recorded sensations only. The rough slide of leather under her palms as she groped to wrap her arms about his waist. The burn of the exhaust cylinder when she initially put her shoeless foot right on it.
The intense realization that the man was solid, hard and all muscle. Yes, safe.
The rider gripped her by the ankle and pulled her foot higher to hook behind his booted foot. She sucked in a gasp as his fingers clasped about her bare flesh. At this frantic moment it was too strange to feel desire, yet she did.
The command he projected with the protective move melted her resistance. The world wobbled and skinned her face with brisk air as the motorcycle sped away from the scene of the crash. She clung desperately, crushing her cheek to the supple plane of his leather-clad back.
She didn’t know who this man was, but he’d taken her away from the other man who had looked like a junkie. A man whose hand she had almost taken because the unspoken promise in his gaze had reached inside and touched a part of her she’d thought buried.
Had she heard him say, “I can give you what you seek"?
How could he know what she wanted? Half the time she didn’t know what she wanted.
Safety was fore on that unknown list, and she grasped it, if only for the moment.
“Stop