Alarms coming to life.
The sprinkler system is hard at work trying to do its job, but I doubt there’s anything that can go up against this woman’s flames.
They’re as unnatural as she is, as abnormal as the priestess I sold my soul to.
As unnatural as I now am.
Letting loose a short growl, she takes off after me, but it quickly becomes apparent that although she might be supernaturally more powerful than I am, physically I’ve got her beat.
I’m much faster.
Probably much, much stronger.
I could take down that little fire demon by simply squeezing her between my jaws.
Problem? I don’t want to. No part of me does, even the one driving me to run and survive her intent. She’s the fantasy I spent my life chasing after that night with the priestess, the ghost I could never escape.
The reason I kept filling the hole in me with money, even after I’d made enough to secure a good life.
That woman doesn’t know it, but she ruined my chances of fucking other women like a normal man. She’s the reason I always had to close my eyes and block out each partner I’ve been with, imagining her in their place.
Logically, I know she wants to kill me, that she’s disgusted by what I am, but even as she’s trying to end my life, I can’t shake the visual of her beneath me, taking the pounding I’ve lived ten years dying to give her.
Clearly, I’m a sick man.
If I’m even still a man.
We crash through another set of double doors, her fires following me the whole way. We’ve entered one of the many bedrooms and within seconds, the walls and furniture are caught in the blaze.
“You can keep running but I never fail, werewolf! You die here, tonight.”
No, I don’t, although as I run toward the massive bed and the room seems to catch fire inches behind me, I have no idea how I’m hanging onto that certainty.
She flings five more blasts, four of them missing me by no more than an inch.
The fifth one almost hits home, and what a fucking time to realize I now have a freaking tail.
I yelp at the close call—yelp—and hearing that sound sends a primal reaction through me. Not sure if it’s disgust, fear, a combination of both, but just as I jump over the bed, the unexpected happens.
In the blink of an eye, I switch back to human form.
I land on the bed, hands held up in surrender.
My beautiful killer storms toward me, highlighted in that blaze, and the confusion on her face isn’t lost on me.
She’s starting to realize this isn’t playing out the way she thought it would.
At least, I hope so.
“Listen to me, please,” I implore, keeping my hands up.
“You aren’t the first to beg for your life. Vile. All of you.”
Vile? Then why are her eyes traveling my naked form like that?
And why the fuck is my dick twitching, threatening to get hard for her, when I’m supposed to be convincing her to spare me?
“I didn’t really know I was doing it, okay? I was high. I didn’t mean to sell my soul.” Even to my own ears, the excuse sounds feeble and pathetic.
Her pretty lips part on a scoff. “Yet you profited from it and continued defending the worst of humanity, didn’t you?”
She’s got me there and I can’t even deny it. I was just gloating and celebrating my success at getting another criminal off earlier.
A sardonic smile curves her lips, and fuck me, but they couldn’t have sent a more attractive assassin after me. If their goal was to strike me stupid and near incapable of defending myself, they hit it right on the head with this one. “Okay. There’s no excuse. But you all . . . you turned me into . . .” I wave a hand back toward the living room, even as the heat of the fires in the room grow dangerously closer. “I tore them apart . . . killed them . . .”
“They all deserved it. Leeches, just like you.” Her hand rises once more, and they’ll be no escaping that next blast.
As her words ring out in my head—“Leeches, just like you.”—I start to suspect that I might not deserve to get out of this alive—
Her fires are overcome by a sudden swarm of darkness, a rotten force that extinguishes the flames, snakes through the walls, and eats away at everything in its path.
Like acid destroying matter.
There’s a stretching in my eyes, a feeling that freaks me out, and my vision is once again enhanced along with it, as it was when I was a wolf. My ears twitch as I pick up on a light ticking sound.
It’s the sound of tiny legs rushing along the surfaces of the room.
That black swarm is a hoard of spiders—no, not spiders. Fucking centipedes. Millions of them, or perhaps even more, flooding the room and destroying everything they touch.
It’s an attack that takes her by surprise as well, if her expression is anything to go by. She stumbles backward, the fires around her form the only remaining light, and she’s too focused on the ceiling falling apart above her head.
Completely oblivious to the floor beginning to give way under her feet.
She’s my murderer.
She’s my fantasy.
Letting her die might give me a chance to live.
Letting her die means I’ll never find a way to taste every inch of her.
What a fucking choice.
An impossible one because there’s no force on this Earth that’s going to stop me from saving her.
The urge to do so is too loud within my mind.
Yours! Help her!
I do.
Without conscious effort, I jump to her, moving as quickly as I did while I was a wolf, and wrap my arms around her.
Her gasp is lost in the roar of her flames.
The flames now surrounding us both.
The flames I feel, their heat unbearable . . . and the same flames that aren’t causing me any harm.
Not a single burn.
Her pupils shrink with what can only be terror at the fact and it isn’t hard to imagine that this hasn’t happened before.
She’s never met anyone immune to her fire.
We’ll have to worry about that later.
Squeezing her tighter, I use my newly gifted preternatural speed to rush us through the suite, past the disintegrating walls, gore covered floor, ashes left in her wake, and straight out the doors she first walked through.
Out in the hall, the swarm is only worse, reality crashing around us like the hotel is about to do.
It won’t survive this onslaught. There’s no way. If this is happening on every floor, the Ritz-Carlton is going down.
Hugging the silent, flaming woman in my arms against my naked chest, I rush through the collapsing hallway toward one of the windows.
Our only hope.
Just gotta pray whoever is sending that force after us doesn’t catch us once we’re outside.
One thing’s for certain: someone doesn’t just want me dead.
They want my assassin to die alongside me, as well.
Ignoring the unwarranted rage that thought brings forth, I barrel straight for that window, close my eyes, and jump through.
Doesn’t even occur to me I might not survive the fall until we’re in the air, spiraling nearly twelve stories toward the ground.
CHAPTER 4
Present Day
- Ritz Carlton, French Quarter, New Orleans, LA (USA)