Brett had ruined any progress they’d made with his cock and his coke.
He had to pay.
And I was the happy debt collector.
The car was closer now, almost level with where Wrath and I stood veiled by the night dark and massive oaks. They were going fast leading up to the stop sign, passing in a streak of orange-like paint smeared against the nightscape.
Too fast, really, to see the interior of the dim vehicle.
But I was a human predator.
A clinical psychopath.
I blinked half as much as the rest and had instincts keener than a room full of psychologists.
So I spotted something bright and glinting like moonlight caught in a jar on the passenger seat of the rigged Camaro.
I opened my mouth as my hand snapped out to still Wrath’s fingers on the phone.
But that bastard, he knew death, and he didn’t just embrace it.
He ran toward it.
His thumb was on the trigger before I could slap it from his fist, and a second later, my shout was drowned out by the muffled boom and sharp tear of the car exploding.
For the first time in a long time, I felt my heart in my chest, beating too fast, too hard against its confines like a rioting prisoner.
Something was wrong.
Sound was distorted in my ears as I shoved Wrath and stalked toward the car. There was the hiss of gas leaking, the scattered pop of hot metal peeling off the frame and the tinkle of glass falling to the pavement.
But no human noises.
I prayed to a deity I hadn’t believe in since I was nine that my eyes had deceived me.
That my mind, broken and warped as it was, had only transplanted her at the scene. I thought of her often, at strange intervals, in odd places like a ghost haunting my thoughts.
That was it, I told myself even as I prowled toward the steaming metal wreck and rounded the front of the car.
It wasn’t her.
It couldn’t have been.
Beatrice Lafayette would never be seen with a motherfucking loser like Brett.
But there was no denying what lay before my eyes as I faced the car head-on.
The safety glass of the windshield was webbed with fractures, a gaping hole blown straight through the middle by the body of a woman. Her blonde curls caught in the wind, waving like a white flag over her prostrate form. Bizarrely, she was wearing wings, giant feathered white things affixed to her back that wilted brokenly over her spine, the left one crumpled and tangled in the glass hole.
My eyes burned, and my heart, it throbbed.
Thump, thump. Thump, thump.
I felt painfully alive the way I figured most people did the moment before they died.
It was her.
Bea.
My Little Shadow, the woman who noticed me and studied me too much. The sunshiny girl who followed me around like a second shadow.
There she lay.
Broken and folded into the wrecked car like a savagely opened present.
I sucked in a deep breath that tasted of ash and rain, then decided my course of action.
The car was going to blow.
I’d rigged it that way.
And there was no way in fucking hell or heaven, any conceivable destiny on earth that I’d let this broken angel die like a criminal in the street.
My boots landed with a clamour on the hood of the car as I jumped up to extract her, almost drowning out a faint whimper.
Thank fuck, she was alive.
“Priest,” she said, her voice so light, so sweet it unraveled like torn silk.
My heart punched against my ribs, but I kept my calm.
She was going to be okay.
I ignored her as she muttered nonsensically while I carefully cut the left wing off her back so I could gently pull her from the windshield. She was boneless in my arms, head lolling, pupils blown wide open with an obvious concussion, but she was breathing.
I listened to her breath stutter wetly through her bloody lips as I slid off the hood and made my way quickly away from the car, my arms immovable so I wouldn’t jostle her battered body. When I gauged we were far enough from the wreck, I dropped to my knees and curled my torso over her prone form seconds before the Camaro burped one last, rattling gasp and then tore into pieces from the force of the explosion.
I could feel the heat of it break like a wave against my leather-clad back.
“You saved me,” Bea whispered, one hand reaching for my face, the bones in her index finger broken and spliced through the skin.
“No,” I protested, giving myself one pristine moment to listen to her breath, to feel her in my arms in a way I never would again. “I did this to you.”
A moment later, she was out like a light. I shifted her body onto the grass, then looked up just as Wrath stalked toward me, gun out and face fierce with a grimace.