“Stay there and I’ll get you some clothes,” Christian says.
He lopes off, moving long-limbed and easy, not gliding in the weird way the princes do. Down the other end of the long room he rummages through an armoire, and comes back with a pair of flannel pj bottoms with a drawstring waist and a huge cream fisherman’s sweater.
I suit up under the covers, tying off my waist tight and rolling up the legs and arms about a hundred times. When he tosses me a pair of balled-up socks as he heads off to the kitchen, I’m distracted, still thinking about Jayne, and miss them. They go sailing past me, hit the wall and fall down in the crack. I roll over and reach down, rooting around for them.
It takes me a second to figure out what I close my hand on.
Hair. Attached to a head. There’s a head in the narrow space between the bed and the wall. I freeze, totally horrified and massively grossed out.
I jerk my hand back and just sit there, swallowing the creeped-out sound trying to claw its way out of my throat, then look over my shoulder at him. He’s humming a weird song under his breath that sounds a lot like the music they play at Chester’s and disappearing into a pantry off the kitchen.
I force myself to reach back down and pat around, never taking my eyes off the pantry door. “I’m hungry, Christian,” I call. When he answers, I can make a good guess at how deep the pantry is, how far in it he’s gone. How much time I have to figure out what the feck is going on here.
The head has a neck attached to it, and sure enough there’s a body, too. It’s naked and female and human. She’s stiff with rigor mortis and ice cold.
I barely let myself breathe. I hear boxes being moved around on shelves.
“Sorry, lass, I’ll have more for you in a second. I thought I had some Snickers in here but so far I’m only finding Almond Joy.”
I yank my hand out of the crack and scoot back to the middle of the bed, and when I answer him I sound relaxed, playful. “Aw, dude, keep looking. You know how I love my Snickers.”
The boxes stop moving. “Something wrong, lass?”
There’s a dead woman wedged between Christian’s bed and the wall. Normally I’d say that’s a whole lot of wrong and I’d get real vocal about it, but I’m in the killer’s apartment, wearing his pjs with no shoes and I got no fecking sword that kills Fae because that fecker Jayne took it, so I’m in no hurry to do that right now.
There’s no way I tipped him off. My delivery was perfect. “No, nothing. Just starving out here!” Another flawless lie. I may not do it often but I shine at it like I do most things.
He steps out of the pantry and looks at me. The Highlander is gone. He’s full Unseelie prince, iridescent eyes tinged with crimson. “Och, lass, Mac never told you, did she?”
“Told me what?”
“I’m a walking lie detector, Dani, my darling.”
“Nobody is.”
“It’s inherited, like your sidhe-seer gifts.”
“Which I’m going to use to kick your ass from here to next week.”
“And that was one big fat fuck of a lie. You found her, didn’t you? I knew I should have put her away. But you were here, and bleeding so much, and I needed her off the bed. Saving you was all that mattered.”
“So you shoved her off the side of the bed and thought I wouldn’t notice? You stuffed her in a crack!” My hands are fists. The ignominy of it. Dead and disposed of like a used condom. If I hadn’t missed the socks, I’d never have known. I’d have left thinking Christian was wicked cool for saving me and not been one ounce the wiser that I’d been in bed next to a dead woman, eaten and dressed without even seeing her two feet away. “Dude, you are one sick feck.”
“Och, Dani, my love,” he says, gliding toward the bed, “you’ve really no idea.”
Nineteen
I kick up into freeze-frame without even thinking. I don’t lock one thing down on my mental grid. I hope I do a lot of damage, break everything I hit and just don’t knock myself out, because I have a feeling if I do, I’ll wake up strapped down to a rack with an insane ex-Highlander about to do seriously fecked-up things to me.
If he can sift, I’m dead meat.
I make it to the door but he’s there in front of me, arms spread, crouched low, looking like he’s about to bum-rush me and take me off my feet. His face is contorted with anger, kaleidoscopic tattoos rush beneath his skin. His eyes are full black. Only thing that’s missing to complete the Unseelie prince picture is a radioactive torque and huge black wings spreading, getting ready to crush me in a deadly embrace. I backpedal frantically and he lunges.
Then I’m on the floor and he’s on top of me, and I know the second he hits me that Christian is so much stronger than me that I don’t stand a chance of taking him. I can’t believe the strength I feel in his body! The Unseelie part of him has kicked in with a vengeance. It’s not just power oozing off him. He’s turning into pure sex just like the rest of them. I shake my head, trying to keep it clear. I think about horrible things like the dead woman stuffed into the space between his bed and the wall, and how I don’t want to end up like her.
I’m flat on my back and he’s got my wrists and he’s stretching my hands above my head. I curse and struggle and kick but it’s like fighting a concrete wall. Nothing, and dude, I do mean nothing, seems to have any impact on him. I head-butt him. He laughs and drops his face into my shoulder, and sniffs me!
I bite his ear, try to tear it off his head. Blood fills my mouth, gagging me, and I let go.
“Dani, Dani, Dani,” he says like he doesn’t even feel it. “Don’t fight me. You don’t need to fight me. I’ll never hurt you. Not you. You’re my brightest shining star.”
I ain’t nobody’s bright shiny nothing! He’s a certifiable lunatic! “Get off me!” Up close the death-by-sex Fae part of him is doing wicked bad things to me. Things I don’t like feeling. My mouth is dry and I’m seeing those graphic images plastered inside my skull. Christian. Naked. Doing the things I seen Ryodan doing. And I want to watch and I don’t want to watch and I have to get the feck out of here now! “Can you even feel? Or are you as dead inside as that woman? Why did you even bother saving me? So you could kill me slower?”
“It’s not like that. Would you hold still and listen to me for a second?”
“There’s nothing you can say that matters!”
“It’s hard to talk to you when I’m touching you.”
“Dude, quit sniffing me! That’s just rude. Get off me!”
“I can’t. You’ll run.”
“If you really didn’t kill her, you’ll let me go. You’ll trust me to come around. Give me room to breathe.”
“If I let you go, will you sit down and hear me out, lass?”
He’s relaxed since we’re kind of negotiating but he’s a lie detector and I know I can’t answer that last question, so I take my best shot and knee him in the balls with everything I’ve got. There’s no such thing as a dirty fight when you’re fighting to win.
He roars so loud my head just about blows apart. Then he’s off me and curled in a ball, howling. I’ve kneed a few dudes before. Got to out there on the streets sometimes. Never seen one react so bad. I wonder if it’s because he was hard as a rock when I hit him, so I had to twist really hard to get to his balls and I came up on them from underneath and probably mashed his … uh, yeah, Mega, now’s a good time to run.
I blow out the door so hard I blast it off the hinges.
This morning when I left Chester’s after almost dying and coming back to life — I think it was this morning, I spend so much time unconscious lately that I’m never sure if I’ve been out for a few hours or a couple of days — I was trying to decide what to do with the rarity of a whole day of free time. But then I nearly got killed again, this time by exploding frozen people, then Jayne took my sword, then I passed out from blood loss, got cleaned up by an Unseelie prince and drank his blood, found a dead woman practically in bed with me, and now I’m out on the streets again and feck if it’s not time for me to report to work again!