“It doesn’t matter now.”
“You’re right.” He took at step toward her. “But answer me something.”
“I have to go—”
“If you’d known I wasn’t him, would you have still tried to save me?” When she didn’t reply, he lowered his lids. “Come on, be honest. What do you have to lose?”
“No,” she said after a pause. “I wouldn’t have come back.”
“Good.” As surprise flared in her face, he shrugged. “It proves you have half a brain, and something tells me you’re going to need it, sweetheart.”
The female took a deep breath. “If you call me ‘sweetheart’ one more time, I’m going to mace you.”
Sahvage chuckled a little. “Sounds like fun. I’ll even let you hold me down when you do it. I like the idea of you on top.”
The flush started in her throat and rode up to color her face—and that wasn’t the only heat that flared. The scent of her arousal traveled on the breeze to his nose, and he inhaled slowly, deeply.
“It’s a shame you’re leaving,” he said in a low voice. “I have to take a shower and I could use some help with my back.”
The female shook herself, as if out of a trance. “It goes without saying that I am beyond uninterested. You can keep your soap to yourself.”
On that shutdown, she dematerialized so fast, he was astounded at her mind control. And then, as her absence properly registered . . . for a split second, he did as she had, and reached out into thin air.
Even though there was nothing in front of him.
Dropping his arms, an emptiness washed through his chest and was carried out to his limbs. The feeling of being nothing more than a void that breathed was a familiar one. It was who he’d been for a very long time.
Yet for some reason, that female made him conscious of his barren existence as if the weightlessness was brand-new.
Like anything mattered, though, he told himself as he dematerialized out as well.
Besides, he could reach his own goddamn back.
Always had, always will.
• • •
Down below, at ground level, Mae re-formed in the darkness and studiously ignored the fact that she was panting. And there were all kinds of other things in her body she refused to acknowledge, but she wasn’t going to dwell on them. Not that they existed. Because she was ignoring them.
“Fuck,” she muttered. Even though she rarely swore.
Then again, this night was breaking allllll kinds of records.
Caught in her head, she started walking without bothering to see who was around. Fortunately, the cops were kibitzing on the other side of the parking garage, and all the other humans had already gotten out of Dodge, as the saying went.
Crossing the street, the random flashes of red from the lights on the squad cars strobed around the abandoned buildings, and there was absolutely no traffic on any of the roads in what seemed like a ten-block radius. Likewise, the parking lots that had been SRO for those flashy cars were now empty, nothing but trash and the occasional beater left behind—and overhead, the police helicopter was turning off its searchlight and paddling out of the area.
It was like the last scene in a horror movie, the scares over, the heroine safe, the lessons learned. Cue the credit roll.
Great analogy—metaphor, whatever.
Yeah, except this was always when Jason came back out of the proverbial lake and dragged the counselor down to the bottom with him.
Claiming his last kill, after all.
Her car was where she’d left it, and getting in, she cranked the ignition, put things in reverse, and k-turned around. As she headed off, in a direction that ensured she’d avoid the cops, she gripped the steering wheel, but sat back in the driver’s seat.
God, this was not at all how she’d thought things would work out. And she needed to call Tallah.
Instead of getting her phone from her purse, she just drove out of downtown’s Venn diagram of one-ways, finding an entrance ramp onto the Northway—
Shit, she was headed south, not north.
“Damn it,” she muttered as she looked over her shoulder to merge.
There were no cars, just a couple of semis, and Mae got off at the next exit, tangled with a stoplight, and headed back onto the highway, going in the right direction.
Even as she kept the car in her lane, and stayed at the speed limit, and monitored the ascending numbers of the exits, she was mostly in her head, a slideshow of everything that had just happened flipping through scene by scene. As the start-to-finish came to an end and got ready for a replay, she glanced at the clock on her dash.
Holy crap. Only an hour had passed.
It felt like twelve.
Or maybe an entire week.
Yet for all that had transpired, the essentials remained unchanged, and the crushing reality of her situation made it hard to breathe. Cracking her window, she took some big inhales. Then she turned off the heater.