Sin dropped the shotgun she still held and sprinted down the alley, following the footfalls clapping so fast she wondered if she had a chance to overtake him. “One’s heading south down the alley,” she barked into her mike. “Chappa’s got the other cuffed. Need backup.”
Glad she’d been working out, running miles to rebuild her strength, Sin trailed the man, just keeping him in sight. She concentrated on her breathing, listened to the steady but rapid beat of her heart. While her body shoved past her endurance, her mind calmed. Jake was okay. She had an unarmed man to take down, or at least to track. She could handle this. Maybe she really was ready to be back.
More sirens whined in the distance. When the robbery suspect turned onto another street, she kept on his tail. “He turned north on Brooklyn.” She felt strong, not even winded yet. Maybe she was ready for this after all.
The sirens drew closer. “Where ya gonna go, bastard,” she said more to herself than the man sprinting up the block ahead of her. At the corner of an intersection, he paused to check traffic, glancing back at her.
Her heart thudded heavily in her chest.
Caught in the light from a streetlamp, half his face blurred away—same as the homeless guy at the bus stop. Golden eyes glowed.
“No. Goddamn it, not now,” she whispered.
She didn’t let her steps falter or slow, forced herself to ignore the warning clambering in her mind. She kept on his ass, ignoring the blare of horns as he ran into the traffic. She darted right behind him, keeping her gaze on him, not the cars blasting their horns or squealing their tires.
She wasn’t gonna lose him because she’d lost her mind.
When he ducked into a space between two buildings, she almost smiled. She had him cornered. The end of the narrow space was the back of another building. No exit. All she had to do was wait him out. She relayed her location. Another officer was only a minute away.
She ducked into the channel, too narrow to drive into, but wide enough for two men to walk through shoulder to shoulder. Still running, she shouted ahead, “You can’t make it out of here. It’s a dead end.”
His steps didn’t slow.
So, he didn’t believe her, and she wanted to see his face again, wanted to look closely and erase the blurred image she held in her mind. She kept running. Gaining on him, she reached out for the back of his shirt, grabbing a wad of cotton and jerked. The building at the end was just ahead. All she had to do was swing him around, and she’d take him down.
Only he was strong. He kept moving forward, dragging her behind him. She tried to dig in her heels to slow them down, but he wouldn’t let her. At the last moment before they slammed into the wall, she raised her other arm to brace for the sudden stop, knowing it would hurt like hell.
The man growled again, the low, grating hum sounding like a big cat’s squall, and leapt the last few feet, jerking her off her feet and through a hole that glimmered at the edges before it flickered out.
Chapter 2
Sin fell through the opening, rolling over the back of the man, her hand still clutching his shirt. Only when she landed, her hand wasn’t balled around fabric.
A tuft of warm fur pulled away from a mountain lion’s back. It snarled, turned and swiped at her chest, scraping the top of her uniform clean through to her Kevlar jacket. As soon as she rolled free, it loped away.
“What the hell?” she whispered, kneeling on hard ground, her stomach lurching again. This time, she did throw up, heaving her guts onto rocky soil.
Still on her knees, she straightened, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth and looked around her. Gone was the narrow space between the buildings. So were the buildings. She sat in a wide-open area, a hilltop, with the moon shining down unimpeded.
She stood on shaky legs, wondering if she’d finally lost it for good, when she heard something that sounded like a whip cracking in the air above her head. Ducking, she crouched low, looked toward the sky, and saw the outline of a huge pair of wings, the body of a man suspended between them. Before she had the time to even form a question in her mind, it swooped toward her.
“Hell, no!” she said, and darted up from her crouch, running away from the cracking sounds behind her—the beat of wings against the air.
She zigzagged on the uneven earth, heading for a deep, jagged shadow in the ground. An arroyo, maybe? She didn’t have time to check it out. She leapt for it, hoping like hell she wasn’t jumping from one bad situation into something far worse.
As she sank into darkness, she couldn’t help the scream that ripped from her throat, because she didn’t hit the bottom, didn’t get a sense of there even being one. She fell, tumbling head over heels, until something snagged her boot and lifted her, flying toward the sliver of gleaming moonlight at the mouth of the deep chasm she’d leapt inside.
Straining to see above her, she heard the beating of wings. The creature had caught her, but what choices did she have left? Shoot the bird-man with the gun still clutched tightly in her hand and fall? Or see whether he intended to eat her?
As soon as that thought formed, she relaxed. She must have hit the wall and passed out. This was just a bad dream. No way could this really be happening.
But it was one hell of a wild ride.
The creature flew straight up, his wings skimming the edges of the rough walls of the chasm, until it lifted beyond it and headed back in the direction she’d run—back to the top of the hill.
Sin closed her eyes as the ground blurred beneath her eyes, and then grunted when the firm hand clutching her foot released her, and she slammed to the ground.
She coughed and spat out dirt then scrambled to her feet to face him. Close enough now she could make out his features, she thought his face seemed somehow familiar. Like they’d met before a long time ago.