“Get your hands off of him,” I ordered, crouching, preparing, praying I could cross the distance faster than the man could snap Paul’s neck. The slightest muscle flex could end Paul’s life, leaving another dead body in my wake.
“The first of many to come,” the man said, bowing Paul’s neck back. “Say au revoir, mon cherie.”
“No!” I screamed, my eyes wild as I looked into Paul’s, knowing they’d be lifeless in the next instant.
As if my scream had ordered it, a specter rushed down upon them, like an angel being thrown from the heavens. The man holding Paul was smashed to the ground from the force of the man wearing a dark ski-mask. The fallen man didn’t have a chance to move before the masked-man picked him up and tossed him into the side of a tunnel. The wall shattered, crumbling basket-ball sized chunks of concrete on the man, burying him in a heap of rubble.
Three sets of footsteps broke into a run behind me. Assured Paul was safe—for the moment—I turned to the three barreling at me, feeling the stirrings of anger and revenge taking over. I didn’t care that I’d sworn to never take another being’s life—no matter the reason—I only cared about stopping these three men from escaping to carry out their missions of brutalizing those I loved.
I realized that even if these three men were out of the picture, there’d be others—countless others—but I didn’t care. I had to do what I could with what I had right now.
The men were closing in on me and I was welcoming them with outstretched arms, feeling that dark energy sparking across my skin like a live wire, when the masked man leapt in front of me, as noiseless as gravity. His grace of motion was familiar.
He threw a piece of the broken tunnel at the man in the center. It sent him backwards, crashing into a park bench and splintering it.
The masked man glanced back at me, as if ascertaining my position, and moved to put himself directly in front of me as the remaining two descended upon us. The one on the left targeted the masked man, the other coming for me. The masked man drove his palm into the chest of the man barreling into him before spinning to the one coming at me. I was able, and eager, to have a piece of this man sent from John to upend my world, but our nameless ally seemed intent that I wasn’t going to be touched by anyone tonight.
His fist connected with the man’s jaw, delivered with the kind of power and precision that sent the man’s body spinning backwards. He hit the ground face-first, the rest of his body crumbling in an unnatural position over the asphalt. He wasn’t going to be getting up anytime soon—or at least until the sun had risen.
The man who’d taken the palm to the chest was back, coming at the masked man from behind.
I noticed him as he was inches away from wrapping his arms around him. “Behind you!”
At my warning, he glanced over at me, still as a statue. John’s man was inches from smashing into him when he threw his head back, crushing the charging man’s face. It sent him to the ground, where he gripped his skull as if experiencing an aneurism. The masked man turned slowly, purposefully, like he was savoring his next move. He knelt down beside the man and whispered something so quietly into his ear I couldn’t hear. He stood up, looking down at him like he was a bottom feeder.
“You’re next,” the man whispered, his teeth clenching from the pain. He looked at me, his eyes crossed and saliva dripping from his mouth. “She’s last.”
The air stirred as the masked man’s movements blurred. As if he’d been launched from a cannon, John’s man sailed two hundred feet away from us, careening into the ground. He created a school bus-sized crater.
“Wait!” I shouted at the masked man retreating into the shadows. For no reason I could explain, my heart felt like it would break all over again.
His shoulders stiffened before he took another step forward. He stalled mid-step—as if thinking the better of it—before turning to me like the weight of the world was pushing against him.
Despite the distance between us, the eyes that stared into mine glowed in their color—their pale blue color. There were countless Immortals inhabiting the world with the same colored eyes, but the emotion only his could hold had me ringing my arms around myself in attempt to keep from running to him.
“William,” I whispered, letting everything I wanted to say—I needed to say—fill the air.
His eyes dropped, then closed, before he blurred into the park, away from me, leaving me with nothing more than the understanding of what it felt like to be left behind.
“Alright, I’ve got about a million more questions for you,” Paul shouted, brushing off his jeans as he marched towards me.
I stared at the spot William had disappeared, trying to will him back, but the fog swirling through the trees was the only thing that came at me.
“Yoo-hoo,”—he snapped his fingers—“Earth to Bryn.”
I blinked, turning to Paul. “Are you alright?”
“I think so,” he said, patting his body up and down. “How about you?”
I was anything but fine, but knowing he wasn’t referring to my emotional or mental state, I answered, “I’m amazing.”
He put his hand on my shoulder and shook me. “Since you seem to know the man who just tried to kill me,”—he laughed a high-pitched note—“mind telling me who they are and how in the world you know them? And maybe what they wanted, why they were Clark Kent fast and strong,”—his voice and eyebrows elevated—“and who the heck the hero behind the mask was? Is he on our side?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered, remembering how he’d turned his back and left me behind.
A body of one of the fallen men stirred.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I said, grabbing Paul’s arm and pulling him along, wondering if the Council would forgive me for doing my Guardian duty of protecting him if I picked him up and ran at my Immortal pace.
I doubted it—I’d used up my share of warnings ten ago.
Sensing my urgency, Paul burst into a run, but his pace was uneven. I eyed his left leg he was favoring.
He noted my gaze. “It’s nothing an icepack and a few Advil can’t fix.”
I didn’t have time to stop and inspect it, so I took his word. I knew the four men could be recovering and assembling their hunt right now. At this Mortal pace, they could overtake us before we’d made it out of the park.
We broke through the park, spilling onto the quietest road I’d come across in the red light district. Save for a few rats scrounging through the road and a vagrant propped against a building, we were alone.
My eyes found what I needed a block down. “Come on,” I said, leading him towards the motorcycle shining like a beacon beneath the sole working streetlamp on the block—as if it’d been placed there for us to find.
“You’re a biker chic now?” Paul asked, sounding winded behind me.
“Yep,” I answered, hoping Patrick’s instruction on how to hot-wire a motorcycle (he’d demonstrated on a Harley) would crossover to its European brethren, a steel-gray BMW . . . Bavarian Motor Works, my car-enthusiast mind rattled off automatically. Bavaria . . . Germany—I knew where the next dot on the map was for me.
“Since when?”
I kneeled down and pulled a few wires free of the undercarriage, crossing and tying them the way I’d been shown. When I’d asked Patrick why Immortal training consisted of Motorcycle Hotwiring 101, he’d said, “You never know what kind of a pickle you might find yourself in.”
Back then, I couldn’t have imagined a “pickle” big enough it would require this kind of knowledge, but low and behold, here I was sparking the red wire with the black . . . just call me the great pickle finder. “Since now,” I answered, squeezing the gears and my eyes at the same time. Please, please please, I thought Give my bad luck a break.
The engine roared to life, growling like a panther. “Thank you,” I breathed, thrusting the helmet at Paul whose mouth had hit the ground. “Get on.”
“You mind telling me where you learned a thing like
that?” He slid the helmet on while I straddled the seat, eager to put some distance between us and Paris.
“Jail,” I said, knowing he was thinking it. “You have a problem with that?”
“No problem at all.” He climbed on the bike and pressed up against my back. I could feel his heart pummeling through his shirt as he gripped my hips. He slid his mouth just outside my ear. “I happen to have a thing for foxy felons who know how to hotwire a bike.”
I shook my head and muffled my laugh. “Any problem with me driving?”
His laugh of response was low. “I like a woman that takes control, too.”
I eased off on the throttle and gave the bike gas, setting it loose on the streets I knew I’d never see again—I had no problem with that.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GERMANY
Germany was everything and nothing I expected it to be. Everything because of the scenery that seemed transplanted from a fairy-tale, and nothing because the one I’d envisioned sharing the country with wasn’t at my side.
Eight hours, two pit-stops, three shots of espresso apiece, and an endless stream of question from Paul later, we were passing through Munich, heading towards the address of one of the seven residences William had around the world he’d forced me to memorize in case of an emergency. Reclining in his arms as we sat in the center of a wheat field in a downpour, repeating the addresses back to him, I’d known there would be emergencies that would come. I’d just thought he’d be the one fleeing with me.
“Would it be too much to ask how much longer I’m going to be stuck to this thing?” Paul hollered, sounding perturbed. “I’m going to be walking like a cowboy for a week after straddling this thing so long.”
“Not long,” I said, the first answer I’d given to his questions since escaping Paris. Question after question had poured from his mouth, answered with a shake of my head and the acceleration of the bike.
Paul had every right to know what was going on in my eyes, but he didn’t according to the world of Immortals. The past five hundred miles I’d been constructing answers and explanations that would suffice him just enough, without letting him in on the treacheries of the clandestine world I was a part of. I’d bought time by telling him I needed a hot cup of coffee and an even hotter shower, and then he could hold me prisoner until I answered every last question to his satisfaction. He’d asked if holding me prisoner included handcuffs, to which I responded with an elbow to his ribs.
I was hoping he’d forget my promise.
“Hallelujah,” he said, his tone mocking. “The shell of evasiveness is cracking.”
“I wouldn’t press your luck.”
I heard the smile in his voice. “I always do.”
This, I was aware of.
I slowed the bike as we approached the rural road veering to the left, not because I couldn’t read what was carved into the wood plank hanging from a wrought-iron post, but because I didn’t know how to proceed. My heart was telling me to punch the gas and get to whatever home and whoever might have been within it the Hayward Haus sign led to, but my mind was telling me to turn around and not risk what I’d find waiting for me there.
My heart and mind battled, throwing jabs and arguments at each other, until they came to an agreement: we’d follow the road to the house and if it there was so much as a hint that someone was within, we’d turn around and move on to Plan B (although there was no Plan B at this juncture).
“Are we there?” Paul asked as I coaxed the bike up the road, identifying it as a Hayward residence from the potholes lining the road like two lines of lights leading an airplane into landing.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”
“Sweet, the Alps. I had it on my itinerary to hit the Swiss Alps, but the German will work,” he said, sounding as if all the chaos of the past twelve hours had been erased from his mind. “I wonder if there’s enough snow yet to get a little boarding in.”
The road switch-backed several times and the bike groaned over the steep grade. “I’m not sure. This is my first time here.” What a fantasy world I’d been living in when I thought my first trip to Germany—to William’s chalet—would be on our honeymoon.
“So is this someone’s place you know or are you planning on committing a little breaking and entering?” he asked, pinching at my side.
“It’s an acquaintance’s of mine.” Friend was the wrong word, fiancé was a wish forlorn, and boyfriend had never been the right word for all William meant to me, but acquaintance sounded positively cringe-worthy.
“And this acquaintance of yours knows we’ll be borrowing their place?”
I stalled, biting my lip.
He huffed, knowing I was up to more trouble.
“He wouldn’t mind if he knew,” I explained, encouraging the bike around one more switchback that revealed a stretch of road that looked as if it were graded at a ninety-degree angle. If nothing else, the trek up the road would discourage any Mortal, and—judging from the way I was exerting myself—half the Immortals, from going any farther.
“He?” Paul repeated.
Immature boy. Leave it to him to bristle at the fact we were heading towards the place of a man I knew. He could jump to whatever conclusions he wanted, there was no way I was telling him it was William’s.
The road leveled out without warning, causing me to stall the bike. Had it not been for the sudden change in elevation, I would have stalled it anyways because staring back at me was William’s chalet, just as I’d imagined.
Tucked into a hillside at the edge of a cliff, the chalet reminded me of a gingerbread house that had a masculine touch. The intricate scalloping and designs carved out of the shutters could have only been constructed by the hands of a master of his craft—a master who’d had generations to perfect. Whether William was here or not in physical form, some piece of him was carved into every inch of the house.
Paul whistled and heaved off the bike. “Some acquaintance.”
I kicked the stand down before sliding off the bike, not able to take my eyes from the place where, in a different world, I would have visited as Mrs. William Hayward. My heart began to ache in a way I was familiar with—a way I knew, if it progressed, I would soon become useless, so I distracted myself by surveying the area for any signs of life.
No smoke spilling from the stone chimney, no shoes waiting outside the Dutch doors, no shadows ghosting past the beveled windows.
“You have a key?” Paul asked, stretching his arms over his head. “Or will a rock through the window serve as our means of entry?”
I reached for the inside pocket of my weathered leather jacket, searching for the ring that held seven keys that William had hidden there weeks ago. I pulled them out and dangled them in front of Paul’s face before striding towards the front door. “Wait here for a second,” I instructed when I heard Paul’s feet crunching over the gravel. “I need to turn the security system off.”
There was no security system, but I needed to enter it and walk through the rooms and halls alone. I needed my first experience of William’s home to be alone so I could give my emotions free rein to do what they needed so I could put on a mask of composure for Paul.
My hand shook as I turned the lock over and the rest of my body was shaking by the time I stepped foot inside. Nothing but the sound of the coo-coo clock down the hall was present. His scent, faint as it was from however long his absence had been, still permeated the air. I closed my eyes and took in a breath, wondering if I could spend the rest of my life doing this, knowing I’d be content if I could be with him no other way than this.
Reminding myself that Paul was waiting, I opened my eyes and glided down the hall, gazing at the pictures that were decorating the walls as the family’s house in Pacific City had been. His face—somber in some, smiling in most—filled me with happiness, although I’d not expected this emotion. I’d prepared myself for anguish, gut-wrenching pain at the very least, traversing through his home, but neither were present, g
iving me my first break I’d had of them in weeks.
The hall opened into a great room, a wall of windows showcasing the snow-dusted alps as the sun fell into them, painting the sky every shade of pink ranging from magenta to petal. I noticed the landscape for all of a second before my eyes were drawn to a mountain of newspapers sitting in the center of the room, one spread open where an article had been torn from it.
I came closer, my stomach twisting when I saw the name of the paper in the corner: The Santa Cruz Sentinel. The date was a couple years back and the missing article was the one featuring my state conference win in tennis. This is where William had found me—on his living room floor in the German Alps. Shakespeare would have been hard-pressed to create a more romantic notion.
A coffee cup, the liquid evaporated, but the dark rings telling that the liquid had been left in it, and a sesame bagel—no doubt buttered at one time, as was his favorite breakfast—were spread out over the carpet.
I let my imagination carry me back to the day he’d been here last, seeing him roaming from the kitchen to the living room, wearing his scrub bottoms and nothing on top, propping an elbow underneath him on the floor, taking a bite of his breakfast as he thumbed through the first paper on the stack. The image of him was so real I felt my hand reaching out, wanting to touch him, to feel his heart when he saw my picture staring back at him—waiting for him to come and save me from my life.
Only to have me tear his apart.
There was a tap on the door. “Everything alright in there, Bryn?”
The image of William spread on the floor before me hazed away. “Give me another sec,” I called out, rushing to the petrified picnic on the carpet. I grabbed up the dishes, along with the copy of the Sentinel, before racing into the kitchen and tucking them into the first cabinet I opened. Could I have tossed the months old bagel in the garbage? Yeah. Should I have? Absolutely. But there was some crazy part of me that couldn’t throw another piece of him away.