Feisty Heroines Romance Collection of Shorts Page 19

  In that moment, he knew what seized through his heart and refused to let go—dread.

  “Who’s found us?” Dane’s teeth chattered as creatures descended upon them.

  Three bodies made of branches broken from a hanging tree and cloaked in the burial shrouds loomed down the alley. Ice crawled up the tattered hems of their cloaks, shifting the impenetrable black to a filthy white. But within the darkness of their raised hoods lurked nothing. No eyes glowed from within, no lips snarled or teeth snapped.

  They shrieked, but he knew it from the shake of their cloth and not a sound escaping their skeletal mouths. It passed through him how a dog whistle would entrance a werewolf. Dane’s head snapped back, his legs melting to jelly. The ground raced for him when a hand knotted around his vest and held tight.

  “Stay with me,” Morgan ordered. The tip of her finger folded outward and caressed along his sternum. In an instant, the power of those creatures vanished. Dane rose to steady feet behind the woman shifting her sword to a new position.

  “Come on, you bastards,” she taunted. A hand with bones nearly picked clean of all flesh rose from below the formless sleeves. It strained across the gap between them and pointed, not at Dane, but Morgan. She lashed out with her sword, the edge slicing through the arm.

  As it struck, the floating creature hissed smoke. The accusing arm dissolved into acidic foam dripping onto the ground below. A new shriek erupted, this one louder and legible. Dane moved to cover his ears--his head pounding--when Morgan thrust her blade clean through the creature’s hood.

  In an instant, it was silenced.

  But there were still two more coming.

  Morgan swung for the next, but it dodged and five fingers scraped across her bicep. “Gah!” she cried and whipped her arm around. A line of red welled up beneath her shirt, leaving Dane gulping for fear she could fall.

  Hurtling past the pain of whatever venom those things carried, Morgan swung her sword directly through the midsection. The creature sliced in half, both ends bubbling and dissolving away to nothing. Whatever momentum she’d had was used up taking the second down.

  Her sword’s tip collapsed to the ground. Morgan sneered at her wound as if that could heal it, but she cursed when trying to lift her weapon.

  Wait. Where did the third creature go? Dane whipped his head around trying to find the other demon.

  “What are they? Why are they trying to kill us?”

  “Reapers,” Morgan snarled. She shifted the blade to her left hand and tried to move forward, but her shoulder bounded against the wall as blood poured from her arm. “And they aren’t trying to kill us.”

  Her silver eyes burned through him, the entirety of Dane’s body igniting at the look. “What do you…?” he began, when a shriek roared through a dumpster.

  Skeleton hands erupted out of the metal walls. Dane leaped back before they could slice him to ribbons. Without thought, he wrapped a hand around Morgan’s thigh. “What are you—?” she screamed in shock when he unsheathed her small dagger and sliced straight through both of the reaper’s hands.

  They didn’t dissolve as before but shifted against the wind like they were nothing more than a projection. Dane tried again, stabbing across the wrists. Still, they inched closer.

  “That won’t work,” Morgan shouted. Spinning on her heels, she knocked the flat of the blade against the attacking reaper’s arms. It was enough to wipe away the untouchable monster, its lipless face screaming into the void.

  As the final dribbles of its body burbled onto the cement, Morgan’s sword clattered to the ground. Dane scurried to pick up their only form of protection. But with no fight to sustain her, his hero crumpled to the wall. Without a second’s hesitation, he wrapped his arms around her…and his veins lit alive with fire.

  Morgan stared up at him, her wound seemingly forgotten as she brushed a finger along his jaw. Her scarlet hair had fallen around her face in the fight. Dane scooped his palm across her cheek, the bright red locks threading through his fingers, and he reached back to her ear. To the nape of her neck. To hold her in his arms, gaze down at her lips, and…

  “We need to move,” she said, shattering the delusions flitting through his mind. But even as he slipped away from holding her, the tingle vibrating in his blood wouldn’t leave. At that moment, he’d have traveled to the ends of the earth with her.

  “Wait a moment. Move? For what purpose? The creatures, they’re all…” The word ‘dead’ clung to his lips like a sore. Dane gulped at the strange world he found himself stumbling in and the woman that seemed to pull him into it.

  “They’re not dead. I don’t think they can die, only be inconvenienced,” she said, glaring at the gooey remains soaked into the blacktop. “There are more. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. And they’re all tracking you. We need some time to recoup and…” Her shoulder lifted, and she glanced at the wound still seeping through her shirt. Dane’s direction rose to the sky, his eyes narrowing as if he could see this supposed army of reapers flying above.

  The sound of her sheathing the sword caused him to direct his piercing attention to Morgan. She’d tugged back her coat and was reaching for the empty smaller scabbard he pulled the knife from. While he knew she’d placed her flat palm out, wanting the dagger back, his gaze drifted down her inner thigh straining to fit her armory. To run the back of his hand up it, trace the dip and rise of her muscle, round his fingers right against her…

  Right. The knife. Dane laid it in her palm, expecting it to vanish along with the other sharp objects, but Morgan caught his hand. The shiver returned, his toes clenching in his shoes as if they feared he would be electrocuted.

  “I need your blood,” Morgan said, causing his stomach to plummet.

  “What? No. Why? No.” Disgust swam through him, Dane tried to collapse his hand into a safe fist, but she held firm.

  The woman who was—as far as he could remember—a complete stranger moved closer. Her eyes softened to a funeral rain, and he wanted to crumble at her feet. “It’s the only way to throw the reapers off our scent. Trust me?”

  She wanted him to bleed, of course, he shouldn’t trust her. But… his sight glanced across her battered arm. She’d already taken first blood for him. Dane nodded and gritted his teeth.

  Morgan drew the blade across his hand fast, a sharp spike of pain shooting up his arm. Before he could cry out, she slapped his palm to the wall, smearing it in his blood. Dane stared in shock at the crimson splattered across his wounded palm. Some macabre part of his brain kept him plying at the ripped-apart flesh, watching it tear further apart and well more blood to the surface.

  Soft linen landed against his gash, and he looked up into Morgan’s concerned eyes. “This will slow it,” she said, winding the odd bandage twice more before knotting it.

  She moved to slip back when Dane caught her elbow. Those soft lips parted in surprise, or perhaps she felt the same strange rush of electricity with every touch. He couldn’t explain why, but he felt it in his marrow to pull her close, to cup her cheek, and touch her lips with the gratefulness rolling through him.

  A shriek shattered the air, sharper than any they’d heard before. Morgan winced just as he did, both ducking lower as if the reapers were bombers sweeping through the clouds. “Come on,” she said, locking her fingers around his. “We have to move.”

  With his mark of scarlet life left on the wall, the pair ran down the alley and into the streets beyond.

  Chapter 3

  Damnit!

  Morgan slammed open the door of her hotel room and stomped inside. Her movements were methodical, unbuckling each sheath and laying the various daggers and knives upon the dresser. Her mind churned in an endless cycle of anger and regret.

  He saw them. She was so certain she pulled him away before the reapers pulled him from the living world. But if he could see them, then…

  She paused in her usual dismantling, her gaze drifting to the man she’d accidentally damned while trying to save. The sm
all towel she’d swiped from the bathroom dangled off his palm. He kept trying to cinch it back together as if that could fix everything gone wrong. Put him back into the body of a man who couldn’t see reapers, who wasn’t straddling the line between life and death. Who wasn’t doomed to forever run in order to survive.

  “Your sword,” Dane said, shattering the silence that fell when they escaped from the alley.

  Numb, Morgan stared as if she’d never seen it before. Unsheathing the mottled blade, she waited for whatever question he had, but it seemed as if the man ran out of words. He needed something to say and pointing at an obvious and tactile object was better than asking, “Am I dead or not?” As if she had an answer to such a question.

  “It’s pure iron,” Morgan responded. She drew the flat of her palm down the ancient bumps, her lips pulling into a hard frown at the divots and brown patches. That wasn’t good. “Only thing that can stop the reapers, at least for a time.”

  Turning her back on Dane, she fished out a handheld sander and began buffing the sword. “Wasn’t easy to find, most are steel.” The museum wasn’t going to miss one borrowed sword out of their multitude. Morgan gnashed on her lip, her palm feeling the far too thin metal as she scraped away more of the rot.

  Dane peered around the average three-star hotel room. She wasn’t stupid enough to break into one of the penthouses at a luxury hotel. But no reason for her to slum it with cockroaches for pillows either. If she was clinging this hard to life, then some parts of it might as well be worth living.

  “Do you have any other iron swords?” Dane asked, causing her to look up in surprise. “Given the multitude of reapers outside.”

  Not just outside. Hotels were a festering wound for the flies thanks to hundreds of sick and dying passing through the halls every year. But that wasn’t his pressing concern. He’d turned ghostly pale upon spotting the siphon of reapers forever twirling through the skies. Morgan grew so used to the unholy sight, she barely blinked, only shoved him on to the safety of her room.

  “They can’t get in here,” she said and pointed to a line of salt and dirt left by the door. Dane stared in confusion as if he’d never fought the dead before. With a sigh, she paused in her rubbing down her only true offense against the reapers.

  “Sorry, this is all I’ve got, and I may not have it much longer.”

  “Why?”

  “Every time I touch one of those things with this, they rust it. Whatever they are chips away at it, drains the iron until…” Morgan raised the sword now free of the brown and red splotches. Its brittle frame wouldn’t hold much longer, and she hadn’t found a source for a new one. Gritting her teeth, she turned the blade to inspect the edge, when pain shot up her arm.

  Gasping, she doubled over. The sword clattered from her grip, and she clenched her fist as the fire climbed over her bicep. Reaching into her coat, she grimaced at the sticky feel of lukewarm blood smeared over her palm. That wasn’t good.

  “Are you…?” Dane called, dashing closer.

  She stared up at him while shrugging off her coat. Five jagged gashes cut clear through her shirt, blood bubbling up from the holes. “Damn it,” she cursed while rolling her sleeve up. It proved fruitless, only pressing her fingers on the wound and reviving the pain. Without a second thought, she undid the buttons and began to tug her shirt off.

  “Oh.” The man she pulled back to her room gasped in surprise, and he spun on his heels.

  What was he…? She was already half-naked, her shirt dangling across one side of her chest as she inspected her arm, when understanding hit her. A blush churned up her icy cheeks, causing Morgan to clench her toes. She forgot what it was like to have anyone care if she was dressed. Or not.

  Morgan’s gaze drifted from her wound toward the stranger’s back. The vest kept any hint of his musculature hidden, but the pants rounded over an ass firm enough to break boards. Every time he touched her it felt as if her blood was about to sing. What would it be like to…? No. Focus.

  The blood was a bigger problem than the strangely attractive man she pulled into this world. Morgan yanked open the drawer and pulled out a plastic food container.

  “You seem to know a great deal about these reapers,” Dane said.

  “Not really,” Morgan answered while popping open her Tupperware. The sound caused Dane to glance over his shoulder at her miracle cure. “I figured most of it out thanks to trial and error. I don’t even know if they’re called reapers, but it seems to fit.”

  “Indeed,” he whispered, his voice soft as he watched her dig out a handful of her cure. “What is that?”

  Morgan paused before dropping it in place. “Grave dirt.” She watched his jaw drop as she smeared a handful of earth dug from a fresh grave across her wound. “Reapers don’t care about the dead, only the…dying. The in-between part, I guess. This,” she held up a fist crammed full of the old, decaying dirt, “stops ’em cold.”

  A slow cough rolled from Dane and pity swarmed through her. He didn’t ask for this world of reapers, and graves, and iron swords, and death all around. She didn’t mean for him to…join her. It was the kid all over again.

  For a time, Morgan only ran from the reapers. She’d hide whenever they broke from their mother hive to strip the soul from someone. But one day, there was a girl—maybe five or six—being hunted by them, and Morgan couldn’t look away. She tried chasing away the girl’s reapers, shielding the girl, running with her, hiding. None of it mattered.

  They were relentless and always won.

  Here she was, doing it again, hoping this time would be different. And why? Two of whatever they were traveling together would only make them easier to find, easier for the reapers to finish what they started.

  A wince crawled along her face, and she stared at the grave dirt crumbling from her grip onto the carpet. “If I may,” he said while unraveling the bandage she gave him. Before Morgan could argue, Dane wrapped her wound up tight—dirt and all. His movements were gentle and professional, but every now and again, the edge of his thumb would catch against her skin, and she’d shiver clear down to her toes.

  Morgan stood helpless as the stranger tended her. His cheeks and chin looked pristine, as if he’d only shaved an hour earlier. While he worked, his lips both pursed and relaxed in thought. Morgan was unable to escape the soft glisten along them. And a clean, almost oceanic scent wafted from his chest which nearly glanced against hers.

  “Why…?” she whispered, her brain unable to understand what was happening.

  Ice blue eyes burned in hers, and she felt a foolish smile tug at her mouth.

  “You suffered this wound protecting me. It seems the least I could do.” He returned her smile tenfold and, as he finished tying a much better knot in the bandage, his fingers drifted through the air. Would they land on her shoulder? Curl against her cheek? Tug off the last of her shirt as he pulled her to him for a kiss?

  Dane slid back a step and rustled an aimless hand through his hair. “I suppose we’re here for the long haul, then?”

  “Afraid so,” she answered, darting her gaze away.

  “It could certainly be worse,” he chuckled. “Trapped in a hotel room with a beautiful woman. However will I survive?”

  Morgan wanted to laugh with him, to push harder on the beautiful thought, but guilt swam through her. She had to tell him the truth. He didn’t survive, neither of them did. “Do you…do you remember anything yet? About your life before…?” You sort-of died.

  The laugh faded, his lips flattening as he shook his head. “It’s fuzzy and empty. Static crackling in the back of my head.”

  That sounded familiar. “Took me weeks. Even then I had to…” She pieced it together from the purse left by her bedside and googling her own driver’s license info. Gaps remained, but—as the years of her un-life stretched--the concern over them faded to nothing.

  She faded to almost nothing. A shadow at the bar, a voice down the hall, a hand closing a door. She wasn’t a person and hadn�
��t been one in years. “I’m sorry,” Morgan whispered, guilt chewing through her aloof visage. Only the edge of her eyes could flit to Dane as if she feared her mere gaze would doom him.

  “For what?”

  That stubborn breath clinging to her shell of a body rattled from her nose. “I thought, hoped that…I tried to save you.”

  Dane snickered, his hand falling to his chest as if to measure his heartbeat. “But you did.”

  Shutting her eyes tight, Morgan whispered, “I tried. I wanted to, but you’re…”

  A spark lit between her darkened vision, the energy cascading straight down her arm. She turned in surprise to find Dane’s fingers trailing from her inner forearm down to her palm. Her body hummed with inescapable electricity, causing Morgan’s lips to part and a sigh of satisfaction to escape. How long had it been since anyone touched her? Looked at her beyond a cursory glance, and with eyes burning brighter than the stars of winter?

  “You’re trapped between the living and the dead,” she sputtered. “Just…just like me.”

  To her shock, Dane didn’t collapse in frustration or stomp away in denial. No, instead his fingernails danced up her arm like figure skaters. Each hop sent a burst through her, Morgan waiting and pleading for another touch.

  “This life,” she kept confessing, “it’s not a life. It’s scrabbling to survive. It’s existing for the sake of not dying. It’s…”

  A palm, warm as the summer sun, cupped her cheek. She leaned into it, craving him to the depths of her soul. Her eyelashes fluttered, and through a clog in her throat, she confessed, “It’s lonely.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” Dane whispered. With his thumb curled under her jaw, he pulled her to him. Lips soft as silk caressed hers, the breath of life warmed across her mouth, and Morgan’s entire body lit white-hot.

  She wrapped her arms around Dane, tugging him to her. His lithe, taut body flexed below her palms. Heat entwined with his taste filling her mouth. Masculine and strong, Dane lapped his tongue across her lip and Morgan happily invited him in.