Shadowlight (31 page)

“What else is new?” a voice said from above.

Rowan tilted her head back and saw a man standing in the tree over her bike. “What are you doing up there, you idiot?”

“Maintaining cover, smart-ass.” He jumped, dropping down twelve feet before landing neatly beside her. “Were you followed?”

“Am I six years old?” she countered.

“No.” He looked her over. “Sixteen, maybe.”

“Twenty-one and legal, thank you very much.” She shoved her spare helmet into his hands. “Hop on. We’ve got a lot of road to cover.”

Something whizzed past her cheek and thunked against the tree. Two more things zipped past her nose before Drew knocked her to the ground.

Drew seized the back of her collar. “Keep your head down and crawl,” he said. “Behind the fountain. Move it.”

Rowan crawled, ducking again as more bullets hit the tree where she’d just been standing.

“I wasn’t followed,” she insisted as she got behind the fountain and huddled next to Drew. “They must have been tailing you.”

“If they’d spotted me,” he said, “I’d already be lying on a slab at GenHance.” He looked up as something pinged against the metal sculpture, and grinned. “Oh. We’re okay.”

Rowan stared at him. “We’re being shot at. We’re unarmed. We’re about to be killed or taken, or both. Probably both. We’re
screwed,
is what we are, Andrew.”

“Have faith, baby girl.” He lifted his head and looked toward the source of the shots before ducking down. “Do you have any pennies?”

“A couple thousand in a jar back home,” she snapped. “Tossing one in the fountain and making a wish will not make the bad guys go away. Just FYI.”

Drew shoved his hand into her hip pocket and pulled out a handful of change. He sorted out the silver and dropped it, curling his fingers over the remaining pennies.

“So your bike, is it pretty good on gas?” he asked in a conversational tone. “I’ve been thinking about getting one for years, but with gas prices the way they are, it seems like the right time.”

“You’re crazy. That’s it. I’m going to die with a crazy man.” She folded her arms over her waist. “Well, at least I never slept with you.”

“You’re going to live long and prosper, baby girl. And you never know.” Drew made a V sign with his fingers, winked, and stood. “Hold your fire,” he shouted at the men crossing the park. He held up his arms. “We’re not armed. We surrender.”

Rowan grabbed the leg of his jeans. “Hey. I’m not surrendering, you nitwit.”

“Get up and raise your hands,” he said out of the side of his mouth. “So the nice shooters
think
that you are.”

Rowan realized something, rose, and stood beside him, holding her hands in view. “The fucking fountain is made of copper.”

“Uh-huh.” He lowered the fist holding the pennies and pretended to rub his nose, while the fountain began to shake.

She sniffed. “You could have mentioned it before.”

“And spoil the fun?” Drew glanced at her, his eyes glittering like two new pennies. “I thought you’d be more of a wild biker chick. You sound just like my mother.”

Rowan watched the men advancing on them. “Four of them.”

“Yep.”

“What are you going to do about the guns?”

He opened his palm and the pennies in it began to float around his fingers. “Put a cork in them.”

The fountain stopped shaking and produced an eerie whine as the copper basin began undulating.

The shooters stopped a few feet away from the fountain and aimed for their heads.

“Guys.” Drew smiled. “Put down the guns, turn around, and walk away.”

One of the men laughed. None of them moved.

Drew sighed. “It never works in the movies, either.”

The pennies streaked away from his hand, moving so fast Rowan couldn’t follow them. One man’s gun exploded in his hand, and as the blast knocked him backward the others dropped their guns and shouted, seizing their bloody hands, in which Rowan saw penny-size wounds.

“Shit, Drew, you only hit one out of four.”

“I got their hands, didn’t I?” He scowled at her. “You try ramming a penny down the barrel of a weapon from thirty yards away;
then
you can complain about my aim.”

She chuckled. “Okay, it was pretty cool.”

“And everyone says pennies are worthless.” Drew touched the basin of the fountain and slowly raised his hands like a magician trying to conjure. The copper screamed as it flared up as if molten, shedding flakes of green rust as the water it contained poured out and flooded the ground.

The uneven wall of copper split in two, then four, then eight sections before they lifted into the air and stretched out over the four men. Each of the copper strips wove through the others before the ends drove themselves into the ground. Drew sent more copper from the fountain to reinforce the strips, until he had fashioned a crude but effective cage around the shooters.

Rowan heard a shout, and looked over at a white-faced man who had stopped at the curb and was peering through the open window of his car. “Call nine-one-one,” she yelled to him. “These terrible men have vandalized the park.”

The man gunned his car and sped off.

“No one wants to do the right damn thing anymore.” Rowan walked over to the cage, reached in, and grabbed the uninjured hand of the man closest to her. The image of a voluptuous, Marilyn Monroe-type blonde in a tight sequined dress filled her head, and her body went into shift. A moment later she pouted her red lips and looked into the man’s wide eyes.

“Honeybunch, how could you shoot at me?” she said.

“Rosie, I swear I didn’t see you.” Caught up in the vision of the woman he loved, the shooter smiled. “I thought you were back in LA.”

“I was too lonely for you, sweetie pie.” Rowan leaned close. “How did you find us? Who else is going to try to hurt me?”

The man’s eyes glazed over. “We tracked the bike. Teams all over the city.” He grunted as one of the other men slammed a fist into the side of his head, and he slumped back.

“You can’t get away,” the second man told her. “You’re dead.”

Rowan stood, shifting back into herself as she turned to Drew. “What?”

The side of his mouth curled. “Can you do the blonde again? Maybe for the rest of the day?”

“Shut up.” She walked past him. “And come on. We need to steal a car.”

The truck he’d stolen as a present for Jessa Bellamy handled beautifully, even when he drove it over a hundred miles an hour. And he had to, now that she was moving again. He’d hit the accelerator as soon as he’d felt the connection between them becoming weaker and thinner, and it was growing stronger. He was close enough now to taste the brightness of her fear.

She knew he couldn’t stay away.

Jessa felt a little different now, too. Lawson wasn’t sure if it was because he’d come back from the dead in a different phase of his transformation, or if she had changed from being in his presence. She had given him so much delight with her cringing and pleading in Savannah; he was sure that seeing him now would have her crawling to him to kiss his feet and beg for his forgiveness.

He’d make her kill her boyfriend first, he decided. Then he’d take her back to GenHance and have Genaro transform her into a suitable mate. One he could beat as much as he liked, and who would always heal, just as he did.

The goddess to his god.

A roadblock ahead made him press the air brakes and coast to a stop behind a long line of cars. The unmarked cars and the big men in the dark suits looked like feds, Lawson thought, but they might be working for Genaro. Then he saw the silver BMW at the very front of the line and smiled.

There she is.

Lawson put the truck in reverse, smashing into the car behind him, before he shifted gears and plowed into the one ahead. The force of the truck hitting the station wagon sent it skittering into the next. He crashed through both and turned the wheel, going around the others and hitting two oncoming cars, flipping one and rolling the other into the shoulder.

He saw Jessa and her boyfriend climb out of the car and run, and stopped the truck just before it hit the barricade of unmarked cars. A cloud of black dust wafted from him as he jumped down.

“Sir.” One of the big men came toward him and distracted him. “You’ll have to move—”

Lawson took hold of the man’s left arm, ripped it from his body, and used it to knock the head off his shoulders. He took a bite out of the arm before he dropped it and started after Jessa.

He had missed lunch and breakfast. Maybe he’d have Jessa feed her boyfriend to him instead.

Sam felt Lawson before he climbed out of the tanker truck, and grabbed Lucan’s arm. “That’s him on the other side of the roadblock. The one in the truck.” Her hand shook as she reached for her weapon.

“No, sweetheart,” he told her, tugging her hand away. “This is my work.” He took off his gloves and opened the door before he looked back at her. “If I fail, summon Richard. He will be the only one strong enough to stop him.”

“Wait.” She climbed out after him.

Lucan turned to thrust her back into the car; then they both heard the Kyn warrior cry out. Sam watched in disbelief as Lawson pulled off the Kyn’s arm as if it were an insect wing and used it to decapitate him.

Lucan’s eyes turned to chrome. “Stay here, Samantha.” He strode past a man and a woman fleeing from Lawson.

Sam called to the two mortals to take cover, but a blue sedan screeched to a stop between them and the couple jumped into the backseat. The sedan spun around and sped away from the roadblock.

She turned at the sound of smashing glass and saw the windows of every car Lucan passed explode outward. Lawson, who was covered in some kind of black soot, stopped a few feet away from her lover.

“You’re one of the old ones,” she heard Lawson say. “I’m your new god.”

“There is only one God,” Lucan informed him pleasantly. “You are not Him.”

Lawson lifted one of his hands, and a bolt of electricity shot out, hitting Lucan in the chest and sending him soaring backward to land on top of one of the cars, crushing the hood inward with the impact.

Sam pulled out her weapon and started to run.

“Sarah called Drew. My cell phone’s history.” Rowan turned her attention back to the road, but glanced in her rearview. “Who the hell was the guy shooting lightning out of his hands?”

“Lawson,” Jessa said, her voice bleak. “He’s coming after me again. GenHance did something to him, made him like us, and like the dark Kyn. And something else. Something worse.”

“We passed a truck stop about two miles down the road,” Drew said. “We should change cars there.” He smiled at Jessa. “Nice to meet you at last, Ms. Bellamy. You’re even prettier in person.”

Rowan made a rude sound. “Save it, Andrew. She’s taken.”

“Yes.” Matthias turned to Jessa, who held his hand between hers. “She is.”

Rowan eyed him in the mirror. “Was that GenHance with the roadblock back there?”

“No,” Jessa said before he could reply. “They weren’t GenHance or the police. That woman who got out of the car was wearing a gun in a holster, but she didn’t dress like a cop. And that big man with the fair hair …” She gripped Matthias’s hand. “This is going to sound a little strange, but when I passed him, I smelled flowers.”

“Could be he was a florist,” Drew suggested.

Rowan chuckled. “Or he likes wearing perfume.”

Matthias knew the man and the woman had been dark Kyn, but he didn’t want to frighten his friends or disturb Jessa. There would be time later, when they were safe, to speak of such matters. “Drew, what happened to Lawson to make him as he is now?”

“Evidently he broke into the lab at GenHance and injected himself with the transerum,” the younger man told him. “He’s pumped full of it now, and if it works the way Kirchner predicted, he’ll be next to impossible to kill.”

“He had fangs,” Jessa said. “He also survived being electrocuted.”

“That would mean he’s mutated.” Drew rubbed his eyes. “They haven’t perfected the transerum yet. They were letting Lawson run around to see what effect it had on him.”

“It turned him into a monster,” Jessa said, shuddering. “He doesn’t even look human anymore.”

“What can kill him?” Matthias asked as Rowan pulled off into the truck stop.

“You have to separate the brain from the body to kill both,” Drew said. “My guess is by decapitation, dismemberment, or ripping out his spine. Burning might work, too, but he’d have to be incinerated to ash.”

Jessa stiffened. “He’s getting closer, Gaven,” she said in a low voice. “They weren’t able to stop him.”

Matthias scanned the parking lot. He spotted a welder’s flatbed truck, which was stacked with pipes, and an old fueling station that had been boarded up and appeared unoccupied. He measured the distance from the fueling station to the diner.

“Rowan.” He pointed. “Park the car over there.”