None of that stopped her from pushing off the ground and scrambling to her feet.
A weight landed on top of her back, pinning her to the sidewalk. Buffered by her backpack filled with her sneakers, a spare set of clothes, and her wallet, the details of the weight pinning her were unclear.
But it was heavy.
It, not he or she, but IT.
Then it was gone. Eden pushed up onto her knees when something hooked her backpack and she went flying over a fence to land on her back halfway on a merry-go-round, halfway on the rubber mat in a playground.
The sickening crunch and snap on impact, followed by the blinding pain, put a punctuation at the end of her sentence. She couldn’t move. Could barely inhale a breath. Something important was broken, something important was impaled, something important hemorrhaged.
She’d heard your life flashes before your eyes when you die. All the things you did. All the people you loved. But none of that happened.
Eden was stuck on what the hell had done this to her. What had killed her? She couldn’t tell anyone. The knowledge would go to her grave, but she wanted to know. Needed it like the air she couldn’t get into her lungs and the legs she couldn’t force to move.
Her head still worked. Though fog crept to the edge of her vision, she used the little she had left to lift her head and focus.
What she saw, what her oxygen starved brain computed, was wrong. So, fucking wrong. And stunningly beautiful as it hovered over her, one hand reared back to deliver the final blow.
“Why?” Her voice was as broken as her body. “Why?”
It paused from taking her head and ending her life as if the sound of her voice caused the action. Her blood clung to its hand. That’s all she could see. Not its face or body. Maybe it was the blood loss or whatever power this demon had enabled it to hide its features. Blurry, she couldn’t focus, or he wouldn’t let her.
He? Did she just pull that out of her ass, or was it a he?
None of it mattered when dead is dead and knowing her killer’s face meant nothing to the deceased.
In slow motion, his head cranked around to look at his hand and the blood dripping from his claws. A tongue, long and thick, snaked out of his mouth to lick his hand clean. A shudder ran through his entire glowing body. And eyes, burning embers in a face so beautiful, landed on her, igniting a fire in her soul.
“It’s you!” His harsh, raspy voice growled. “It can’t be.”
Chapter 3
Somehow, though she leaked like a sieve, she found the strength to climb to her feet. They worked! She wasn’t paralyzed, though she expected him to knock her back down and finish the job. Instead, he gave her room, retreating like she had the plague.
“It is you,” he repeated. Face still shrouded; incredulity seeped into his snarl.
“Yeah. It’s me.” Whatever that meant, she hadn’t the strength to find out. Her only goal was to make it to the emergency room.
Knees buckling, she stumbled away. Claws, white-tipped and dripped with her blood, reached for her to finish the job. Weak, she shuffled backward, and kept shuffling out of the playground, on to the cracked sidewalk, her gaze on the claw just out of reach from digging into her flesh and ripping her apart.
Tripping, she slipped off the sidewalk and into oncoming traffic. Tires screeched. The headlights of a car blinded her. Death by a Sentra or death by a demon. What a fucking choice.
“No!”
That wasn’t her screaming. She was too busy staring at the car bearing down on her. Eden looked back at it, him, one last time in triumph. He came to kill her, but she’d die on her own terms with her eyes wide open, facing the headlights and the end of her too short life.
Her body jolted. Not from the impact of the car, but from the impact of his body colliding with hers. Weak as she was, Eden punched, kicked, fought for her freedom, and didn’t stop until her back kissed a softer surface than the sidewalk she expected to bleed upon.
A stretcher, she realized. Only then did the fluorescent lights, beeping machines, and the shouts of nurses and doctors register. She was in the ER with a man leaning over her. Anger and concern warred in his eyes.
Then he was gone in the blink of an eye, replaced by a lab coat taking her vitals and shouting orders.
Eden followed, welcoming the darkness quickly blanketing her.
???
The world came to Eden in painful dribs and drabs. Human voices, human hands, a poke to her elbow, a prod to her scalp, ribs, abdomen, and then nothing.