“I didn’t see you pay,” I continued to whisper, even though there was no longer a need to.
“I had the waiter charge the bill to my account.”
No credit cards, just charging things to your account. It struck me as hilariously funny for some reason. I started laughing as I almost ran to keep up with Roberto’s brisk pace, his hand tightly clasped around mine.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, glancing back.
“You are. This whole situation—bodyguards, just signing instead of paying a bill, running from a bird.” And unsaid, our skin glowing with moonlight, and learning that there were other people like us who Roberto had killed and who had tried to kill him. And discovering that people like us could shift into animal form!
Our car quickly pulled out in front, and we slid inside into the dark, tinted interior. The two guards squeezed in front with the driver, and off we went, blending swiftly into traffic. There were fifteen minutes of alert tension but nothing happened, and I began to think that we had lost whoever, whatever, had been flying toward us. A bird. A freaking bird, I thought with disbelief. Had I not felt that frisson of awareness, I would have wondered whether Roberto was paranoid or deluded.
Shifting into an animal . . . Roberto had claimed he could as well. Never in my wildest dream had I imagined being able to do something like that. But as we pulled off the main highway and threaded our way onto less crowded residential roads, I felt it again, that sharp frisson of awareness.
“He’s here,” I said a second before something big struck the roof. The car jolted with the impact, and taloned claws—alarmingly big, almost the size of a man’s hand—punched through the metal above us with a screeching, tearing sound. Gravity tilted as the car was jerked abruptly onto its side, my scream lost among the blistering sound of metal scraping along asphalt and the loud, explosive din of guns being fired at close range.
The taloned claws disappeared, and the car careened to a stop. We were amazingly uninjured, I saw, as I climbed out of the upended car. I looked wildly around for a large eagle and felt him close by but had only a fraction of a second to glimpse a naked, bleeding man sprawled on the road before my senses were awash with another onslaught. Not just one but many, I had time to think, and then three men were suddenly attacking us.
Our two bodyguards had crawled out of the car and were shooting in a wild burst of fire but seemed unable to hit any of our attackers. Roberto came closer to hitting his target with the gun he had pulled out and was firing. Close but no cigar. His bullets struck and deflected off the thick, metal bracelets his attacker wore on his forearms, using them like an ancient warrior of old to block the shots—a wild-looking man with long, dark hair and a thick, unruly beard. It was a scary and impressive skill he had. Even more impressive were the three-inch-long claws curving out of his fingertips!
I blinked my eyes to make sure what I was seeing was real. Holy crap, it was.
He was a seasoned fighter, much better than Roberto, it became quickly obvious as the two neared each other. Blood scented the air, pungent and coppery thick, as he sliced across Roberto’s chest and, spinning nimbly, cut deep bleeding furrows down his back. Before I had time to think, I was in motion, as with cold, eerie calmness he executed another neat rotation, raising his right hand—his right claw—for a beheading stroke.
“No!” I threw myself in front of Roberto, coming face-to-face with eyes so pale a blue that they looked like ice. I saw my death in those eyes and had no time to brace myself for the oncoming blow that would end my life.
Emotion flashed in those arctic eyes, something like confusion, maybe even surprise, as he twisted himself violently away. I felt his claws whistle pass my neck, felt the brush of passing wind whip across my skin, and braced for pain, but none came. No blood, no wet splatter. He’d missed . . . he’d deliberately missed.
“Mona Lisa,” he rasped hoarsely, words that jolted me. As I stared into those odd, pale eyes, his body jerked as a gun fired behind him, blasting my eardrums with the close shock of the loud noise. My eyes dropped down to those deadly claws, so long and lethal and inhuman, and watched with awful fascination as they shrank down in a fluid wave of transformation to become normal nails on normal hands.
“Silver bullets,” the pale-eyed attacker said, looking down at his unblemished chest. No exit wound. The bullet was still inside him, buried in his flesh.
As he dropped to his knees, Roberto came into view, his dark eyes shining with satisfaction as he shot the man a second time. The bandit jerked again and collapsed on the ground.
One moment I was alone with the fallen attacker, shielded behind Roberto and the two bodyguards; the next instant a hand grabbed me out of nowhere, an invisible hand I could not see, matched by an invisible voice that said, “Let’s go, milady, quickly.”
“No!” Frightened and bewildered, I instinctively resisted the invisible hand gripping me. “Let me go!”
Roberto aimed to my left and fired. More bullets whined.
I heard, even felt, some of them passing by. Heard two of them hit their invisible target as I twisted and fought against my unseen captor. My wrist was abruptly released, and I sensed whoever had been holding me move away. He made it only a few yards away before the first drops of red blood spilled out at stomach height, as if from the very air itself. Then abruptly, as if a veil had been yanked away, a man suddenly appeared, tall, wiry thin, with short, curly brown hair. He looked like a young graduate student instead of a road bandit; certainly not someone capable of playing the invisible man and inspiring the choking amount of terror he had in me.
All guns trained at him and fired. If I had wondered before if we were capable of moving faster than a speeding bullet, the answer is yes, sort of.
Roberto and I were the only ones who saw the other attacker move, the biggest one, tall and strongly muscled, with a beard like the other man but shorter and more neatly clipped—the only one left uninjured among our group of attackers. He moved as I moved when I ran free, out of sight of prying eyes: inhumanly fast. He snatched up Mr. Invisible (who had now turned visible) and darted out of the way of fire before the bullets reached where the other man had been standing.
Roberto was the only one fast enough to fire a second round. The big guy deflected two of the bullets with metal wrist guards similar to what the arctic-eyed bandit wore. Even as he ran, fast, so fast that it was nothing but a blurring streak to human eyes, I saw him turn back and look at us . . . no, not us. At the other man who had fought like him and been shot down, fallen near me, blocked from rescue behind Roberto and the bodyguards.
“Go! Leave me,” I heard the injured man say as he tried to crawl away from us, making pitiful progress. The words should have been lost beneath the gunfire but I heard him and so did the big man.
The large bandit raced to the naked eagle guy and swung him over his shoulder. Unhindered by their weight . . . indeed, acting as if they weighed nothing more than a feather each, he sprang into the air, one impressive bounding leap that took him to the end of the block where he veered around the corner, disappearing from sight.
I was still reeling from what I had seen, not the world-record-breaking leap—that I could do myself, though maybe not with two other men hanging over my shoulders—but rather from what I had glimpsed when he had swung the naked man onto his shoulder: the neat Vandyke beard and mustache adorning the bird-man’s face.
Looking just like a character out of England’s Victorian age.