July 2044 - At a rest stop on the edge of the Neutral Zone
Of course,Charlotte didn’t listen. For one thing, she wasn’t about to let Dom fight her battles for her. For another, the idea of sitting in the car, her hands over her eyes and her head between her knees while her kidnappers stood a few feet away made her stomach heave.
She couldn’t just sit. She couldn’t wait and hope that Dom would fix this for her. She needed to see them with her own eyes, to fight if she had to. They stole everything from her once. Charlotte wasn’t about to lay down and let them do it twice.
Shoving her bare feet into her shoes, she scrambled to unlock her door and follow Dom out.
The air was stiflingly hot and humid outside of the truck, but Charlotte barely noticed it. She didn’t register the bite of gravel under the thin soles of her flats, or the way sweat dewed along her spine under the fabric of her hoodie and t-shirt. The sound of shouting — an unfamiliar, hoarse voice mixing with the one she recognized as Millie’s — made her breaths shorten. Her heartbeat drummed in her ears and her hands shook as she threw herself out of the truck and headfirst into the nightmare she had only just escaped.
They won’t put me back in there, she swore to herself.
It didn’t matter that her prison wasn’t that bad. They stole her life. They reduced her to nothing but a battery to be sucked dry — like she was less than a person, less than an intelligent being with hopes and dreams and people that loved her. She couldn’t go back to the isolation of her imprisonment. She wouldn’t.
Charlotte hung on by a thread before Dom rescued her. Being forced back into the crippling loneliness of a life as an m-siphon now? It would break her.
And no matter what Dom said or what she suspected he was capable of, she wasn’t about to let him square off with her kidnappers alone.
Blood rushing with adrenaline and fear and no small amount of rage, Charlotte bared her fangs and ran headlong around the side of the truck just as the unmistakable whine of a bolt gun filled the rest stop.
Charlotte choked on humid air as she slid to a stop in the gravel, one hand snapping out to skim across the hot metal of the hood of Dom’s hulking truck. She stumbled around to the driver’s side. Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead. Don’tbedeaddon’tbedeaddon’t—
Feyrunners were notoriously vicious. They were legendary for shooting down anyone who threatened their extremely profitable business. It didn’t matter that Charlotte suspected she was caught by some two-bit low-life, not any sort of criminal genius or massive enterprise. Even the lowliest, most ill-connected feyrunner would go to any lengths to get their stolen product back.
The idea that Dom, her surly demon who only wanted to see her to safety, might bleed out in the parking lot of a shitty rest stop because of her was so unacceptable, it made her blood actually fizz with fury.
Charlotte charged around the side of the truck, ready to do something, but skidded to a halt at the sight that greeted her.
The SUV was parked haphazardly, its doors flung open. Crouched against it was the unmistakable form of Millie, dressed in her familiar uniform of a long, swishy skirt and her oversized glasses. She cowered against the grill of the vehicle, her lined face slackened with horror and her glasses askew on her nose. Not three feet from her, a still-humming bolt gun lay in the gravel.
It took Charlotte only a moment to figure out what had her one-time jailer so terrified.
Well that’s… She blinked hard several times in quick succession, as if that might make the image of Dom — not the Dom she knew, but unmistakably him — strangling the life out of a man make sense.
No, she thought, gaping at Dom’s back. Not strangling. I don’t have a word for what he’s doing right now.
That was partly because she didn’t have a word for what Dom was just then. The man she looked at was not the man who cupped the back of her neck and drew her in for a toe-curling kiss. He was… something else.
Demons were intimidating on the best of days. She knew they came in a myriad of forms, with many different characteristics based on region and what clan they belonged to. Charlotte thought she understood the breadth of Dom’s differences, more or less, in the day and night they’d spent together.
Sure, he was the size of a house, had funky amber-on-black eyes, and sported a set of antlers, but he was still a man. He had a harsh set of features not helped by his habit of scowling, but when it came down to it, he didn’t look or act any different than the dozens and dozens of sapient beings who roamed Burden’s Earth.
At least, that’s what she thought.
Sometime between his leaving the truck and her following, Dom had transformed into something that made every fine hair and every survival instinct stand at attention. He stood between the vehicles, his back to her and his legs spread in a solid stance. She recognized the washed out black of his t-shirt and his faded working jeans. She recognized his scuffed work boots.
What she didn’t recognize was the rest of him.
“How did you track her?” The voice was rough, the words grated out from somewhere in the mass of shadows and writhing, hungry darkness that made up Dom’s form. She couldn’t see his face from where she stood. She wasn’t even sure he still had a face.
The feyrunner — her feyrunner, she realized with a start — struggled against those twisting tentacles of shadow wrapped around him. They coiled mercilessly around his limbs, his bobbing throat, and wrenched his head back with a grip in his gelled hair. The feyrunner’s face, handsome and familiar through the haze of fear and drugs that distorted her memories, began to turn a terrible shade of puce.
He thrashed against Dom’s hold, his features twisted with malice. The feyrunner didn’t have claws with which to fight, but he raked his nails against the living darkness that held him all the same. “Fuck you, dem—”
“Answer the question.” Dom dragged the feyrunner closer and lifted the smaller man clear off of his feet to bring them nose to nose. “How did you track my mate?”
Charlotte tried to breathe normally, but couldn’t manage it. Oh, gods. They put something in me. Cold terror trickled into her veins. “You chipped me?”
Dom went rigid. The shadows holding the feyrunner clamped hard at the same time that the delicate circlet around her ankle contracted, a pulse of pure power against the delicate bones of her ankle. Her demon swung his head in her direction.