Instantly incapacitated, he let go of the woman and went bull rider, sinking into his knees around an invisible saddle—and thankfully, the grip was released. While Lucan blinked his eyes clear and tried to stand up straight, the woman shoved herself off of him, backing away—
Right into the path of the screeching muscle car with its pixelated safety glass, probably dead driver, and copilot who was apparently remaining under the dash while he or she steered an escape.
“No!” Lucan yelled.
The image of the woman wheeling around to face the car and getting spotlit by yellow running lights was going to stay with him forever: Her eyes popping open, her short dark hair a helmet that would do nothing to protect her skull, her reflexes not enough to save her.
She was hit fair and square, right in the legs, her body tumbling up onto the hood, her somersaults taking her in a roundabout over the busted windshield and across the roof and down the trunk: Hands, boots, hands, boots, her dark head the fulcrum around which the momentum carried her torso and spun her limbs.
The geometry was pretty damn clear. She was going to end up hitting the pavement on a headfirst landing—
Lucan sprang forward, putting all his strength into the surge, and just as he got in range, gravity won out over her forward motion, and her tender flesh started to fall with her skull leading the way—
He went airborne, throwing his body parallel to the pavement because it was his only chance to get there in time. With the wind in his ears, the stink of car exhaust and burnt rubber in his nose, and a pounding in his chest, he flew . . . flew . . . flew . . .
Like he was a bird instead of a wolven.
He grabbed whatever he could of the woman, locking his arms around her and rolling in midair so that his back and not her brains took the impact of their combined weights. As they began their joined descent, he tightened his left arm, and leveled the gun in his right to the shadows just beyond the fire escape.
The shooter there was still focused on the Charger, pumping bullets into the car, pings! and bursts of Roman candle sparks turning the thing into a deadly disco party.
Lucan got as many bullets off as he could before he landed so hard, the breath knocked out of him and his vision went on the fritz. He told himself that the distant shout of pain was the shooter going down, but he had no proof of it. He might have made the sound.
Now . . . no more shots. Just a soft moaning.
His? The human female’s? Not the shooter, too far away.
Meanwhile, the Charger was no more. The engine roar was dimming . . . and now disappearing.
Breathing. His. Hers.
Then he felt the pressure on his chest ease up and that on his hips increase. He opened eyes he hadn’t known were closed.
The woman was sitting up with her back to him. Right on his pelvis. Talk about bull riders.
As his thoughts went to places where they were naked, she was yee-hawing all over him, and things were on the hot and sweaty side of hi-how’re-ya—she cursed and put her hand up to her head. Then she looked around. Twisted around. Met his eyes with ones of her own that went wide as paper plates for a second time.
“Oh, Jesus—” she barked.
The woman pushed herself off the cradle of every bright idea he’d ever had—and it was pretty clear she meant to leap to her feet. That was a no-go. She slumped to the side and grabbed for one of her legs.
“Are you okay?” he said. Or at least, that was what he meant to say. He wasn’t sure what kind of fruit salad’s worth of syllables came out of his mouth.
“It’s not broken.” She hissed as she rubbed her calf. “It’s not broken, dammit.”
Sitting himself up onto his elbows, he thought about pointing out that if a cast was required, that pep talk wasn’t going to do shit for the situation. But really, why waste breath on the obvious—
Boom!
They both jumped at the explosion. Putting his arm out to shield her even though he didn’t know what or where the threat was coming from, he looked down at the far end of the alley. Flames. A bonfire’s worth of them. About six blocks away under one of the city’s twin bridges by the river.
The orange strobe-lighting was impressive, and courtesy of the flickering show, he could see that the black muscle car was at the center of the bomb burst. And as street people ran away, he knew that soon there would be flashing blue and red lights, and all kinds of humans with badges, and spectators with camera phones.
“We gotta get out of here,” he said as he stood up—and put a palm to the small of his back with a curse.
When she just looked at him, he extended the hand that didn’t have a gun in it toward her.
“Do you need a doctor?” he asked.
“No.”
As she left his palm out there in the breeze, he’d really had it with the way things had been going tonight.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he muttered. “I saved your life, twice. And if we keep hanging out in the middle of this fucking street, you and I might have to go for a threesome.”
There was an awkward pause and then Lucan shook his head.
“Wait, that came out wrong.”
Or did it, he wondered to himself.
Vishous re-formed on the roof of a walk-up apartment building that had trap house written all over it. As his full weight of nearly three hundred pounds solidified in his boots—hey, he’d been working out hard, and all that iron humping was paying off—there was a creaking that suggested he needed to step carefully. Easing forward, he checked out the raw tar paper, the pockets of leaf debris that were ossifying into topsoil, and some twists that looked like clothes caught up in a crime scene.
’Cuz human flesh would be unlikely. Not a lot of Buffalo Bills in Caldie at the moment. That anybody knew about, that was.
The rooftop was long and thin because the five stories’ worth of crappy flats was a shotgun, the building sandwiched between two others of equal merit and distinction. On a lowbrow domicile such as this, it went without saying there was no HVAC venting of any size, not that he felt like rolling his mortal dice on a ghosting trip down an unknown system of ductwork. But there also wasn’t a set of stairs or even a hatch, and this left him with having to find a way into the top-floor apartment. Not a big deal, though. Plenty of broken windows he could dematerialize through—
Whoop!
There it is.
Without even a snap, crackle, or pop of warning, V went into a free fall, his shitkickers breaking through the mushy roof, his body sucking through the hole they’d created, the drop so lightning fast that he barely had time to put his hands up so that his arms didn’t snap off at the pits.
The weightlessness lasted one blink and a single inhale of powdered urban rot long—and just as he was wondering if he was going to keep busting through until he hit the basement, his soles hit something solid, his knees went into a bend—
And his butt bounced. Twice.
As a cloud of dust blurred the air, his forearms flopped onto padded rolls.
“Fuck me!” Rhage hollered from the far side of the debris bloom.
V glanced down at himself. Well, what do you know. An armchair.
“You want to give me a heart attack?” Hollywood demanded. “Scaring me like that?”
Across a fetid war field of stained mattresses, empty liquor bottles, and drug paraphernalia, the brother was clutching his chest like a little old lady in church who’d just learned premarital sex was a thing.