Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Her father put his palms up, flashing that phone. “I never told you to do that. I never once told you you had to—”
“Your meaning was always clear.”
“There’s a fucking war going on here! Was he showing off to you? Being the big male, killing a couple of lessers, while he put you in danger—”
“I lured the first slayer in here. Nate was nowhere around. And I was the one who killed it and its backup. But I’m also the reason he—” Her voice cut out. “I’m the reason he’s dead. Are you really this cruel? To fight with me with his body cooling on the pavement between us?”
Her father’s mouth clapped shut, the fit of his teeth making the noise. Then he focused on the front of her parka.
“Yes, that’s lesser blood.” She wiped her mouth and chin, and showed him her palm. “I bit one, too.”
“You did not.” All of the color ran out of his face. “Nalla—”
“It sucks when the facts don’t fit your pattern, right?” She nodded at his phone. “You going to finish that text asking for an ambulance? Even though it’s too late? Or do you want to keep fighting with me because I’m not falling in line like one of your soldiers.”
“You shouldn’t be out here.”
“You trained me yourself.”
“That was for self-defense.”
“Yeah, well, it worked.” She brushed the bloody snow from her jeans. “I’m still here, aren’t I.”
What she wanted was to confess to him that he was right. She had made a mistake luring that lesser into an alley, and it had cost Nate his life.
But the last thing she needed was to feel worse, and somehow, any conversation she had with her father always ended up with anger in her veins and pain in her heart.
“You don’t belong here, Nalla.”
Bingo.
“But Nate does?” she ground out.
“The rules are different for him.”
“Because he’s a male.”
“No, because for him, it’s never too late—”
The gasp that exploded into the charged air between them was so unexpected, Nalla spun around, expecting to see another slayer behind her. Except the enemy hadn’t made the sound.
Down on the asphalt, Nate sat up and took another deep breath as he wiped the blood from his mouth. With his legs out in front of him and his torso so stiff and vertical on his hips, he was like a puppet whose strings had been picked up by his puppeteer.
“Nate…?” she said weakly.
His head swiveled in her direction and then angled so he could look at her. “I told you. Just… gimme a minute.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The stench was terrible.
As Evan hesitated at the entrance to the abandoned office building, he pinched his nose and propped open the boarded-up glass door with the toe of his snow boot. Did he even have the right address? He leaned back out and looked up to confirm the number. Yes, he did. But why would the seminar be here in this run-down location?
God, the stench was like a three-day-old crime scene with someone baking sugar cookies in the back.
No wonder whoever owned the place left the front unlocked. Anyone with a functioning nose would turn around and walk out.
“Hello?” he said into the darkness.
The echo of his voice suggested that the lobby was vast and empty, and instinctively he put his hand to his brow as a sailor would, like the sun was glaring in his eyes and that was why he couldn’t see the sea before him. Of course that didn’t help.
A lack of light was the problem.
Easing back out, he looked around at the other twenty-story-tall buildings rising up from this spin-off from Market Street like the trees of some futuristic world. The road he’d run down seemed like a cattle chute leading to here and here alone, the sidewalk pavers laid solely to deliver him to this door, this entry: Even though none of this made sense… all of it struck him as inevitable. As soon as he’d sent that DM and received this address and nothing more in response, it was like he’d been locked in. Or maybe this had been set in motion with Uncle at the club. Or even earlier with Mickey in the car driving out to that cabin.
Maybe it went all the way back to the moment of his birth, a coward put upon the earth to suffer until he finally grew a set and decided to become a real man.
And yet he hesitated.
You’re such a pussy.
He couldn’t even remember which of his family members had told him that or whether it was specifically from tonight or another time. Perhaps it was finally his own voice in his head, the flagellation caught like the common cold from those around him and brought inward, the tide finally turned, the acceptance made.
And with it had come something he’d never felt before: Anger.