The demon could win.
Keane let himself think about that for a moment as Hendrick landed several additional punches to various parts of his body. If he died tonight, the curse would be no more. He’d be free. He’d be with Eliah.
He wouldn’t be with Holly.
Shielding from Hendrick’s next assault, Keane rolled out of the way. Something weird was happening. That much he knew. It had something to do with Holly, and dammit, he wanted to investigate that more. He didn’t want this to be his last night on the planet. Not after so many things had been recently awakened in him.
He rammed the heel of his palm into Hendrick’s nose, sending the demon reeling backward. Hendrick landed with a thud a few feet away, and garbage cans tipped on either side of him. Keane readied for Hendrick’s next move, and the supernatural slug didn’t disappoint. Hendrick picked up one of the garbage cans and tossed it at Keane.
Ducking, he managed to get out of the direct path of the garbage can, but it hit his right shoulder and ripped a howl from his throat. As he fought to stay on his feet through the resonating pain, he barely noticed Hendrick pull a blade from the inside pocket of his long trench coat.
Get your dagger, man
. Keane’s movements were in slow motion. He could hardly move his right arm, so he slid his left hand into the back pocket of his jeans and attempted to extract his weapon. A weapon with the blood of so many supernaturals smearing its blade, it should have been thirsting to cut into Hendrick’s host flesh.
Instead, Keane could barely hold the dagger in his left hand, and he sank to his knees. The fingers of his right hand didn’t seem to be working. His entire hand had gone numb. The blade fell to the ground, and he braced for Hendrick’s final blows.
Blue and red lights strobed into the dark alley, and Hendrick took one look to the street before climbing the fence. Keane lay on the damp asphalt watching the sideways approach of boots. Lots of them. Black and stopping in a circle around him.
“Sir, are you all right? What happened here?” a voice from above one set of boots asked.
“Hendrick.” Keane managed to point toward the fence.
“Ritcher, Marrin, and Lodge, follow Hendrick,” Boots said. “Amondy, get an ambulance over here, right now.”
Ambulance?
That word rang between Keane’s ears. No ambulance. No hospital. No doctors. They couldn’t help him.
“No.” He spit out a mouthful of his blood.
Boots kneeled so a face came into view beside Keane’s. “Sir, you need medical attention.”
“No.” He forced himself to a kneeling position beside Boots. “I need to get home. Help me up.”
Boots did as Keane asked, and the alley swirled around him in a flash of blue and red. He wanted to vomit, but his stomach was too empty for that. Clinging to Boots for a moment, Keane forced his body to steady itself.
“Sir, you should wait for the ambulance. You may have serious injuries.” Boots backed him up against the building wall behind him, and Keane released his hold on the officer. “What is your name?”
“Keane Malson.” He didn’t have the energy to lie. Suddenly, a bright flashlight beam burned his eyes, and he held his left arm up to shield from it.
“Let me see your injuries, Mr. Malson.” Boots pulled Keane’s arm away from his face. “Your nose and mouth are bleeding. Nose could be broken.” The flashlight moved to illuminate his shoulder and arm. “What did Hendrick do to your arm?”
“Threw a garbage can.” He pushed himself off the wall and stumbled toward his bike. If he could sit down on it, take a couple of breaths without this officer crowding around, he’d be all right. He’d drive home to Holly’s. Crash in his bedroom. Be okay in the morning.
“Mr. Malson, you can’t ride a motorcycle in your condition. You need to wait for the ambulance.”
Keane shook his head. “I pointed you in the right direction for Hendrick. Catch him this time.” He managed to haul his leg over the bike and sink onto the seat. He wasn’t convinced that he could make it to Holly’s driving one-handed and in so much pain, but he had to try. A hospital visit would only result in questions for which he couldn’t supply answers. Any blood work done on him would puzzle the doctors, and he didn’t trouble himself with things like health insurance. It had never been necessary.
“I don’t want to arrest you, Mr. Malson, but I will if you try to leave.” Boots clamped a hand onto Keane’s left shoulder. “It would be irresponsible for me to let you go when you’re obviously hurt.”
“I’m not going far, and I’ve given you all the help I can give you. Get Hendrick off the streets and out of this town.”
Keane started the motorcycle, and luckily, the Harley’s engine drowned out his pained cry. Clenching his teeth against the all-over ache of his body, he shot forward out of the alley. He narrowly missed crashing into the rear fender of a police car on his way onto the street. The bike swerved dangerously as he fought to control it.
He only had two wishes as he pushed onward. One was that the police would catch Hendrick.
The other was that he wouldn’t die before he got to see Holly again.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Keane?” Holly shut the front door behind her. She turned on one of the lights in the living room and went to the hallway. She walked down to his bedroom. Empty. She checked the back porch, but he wasn’t there either. “Damn.”
On the drive home, she had prepared her apology to Keane. It sounded brilliant and now no one would hear it. She’d have to hold onto her eloquence until the morning and hope the delivery produced the desired effects. Something along the lines of Keane forgiving her for grilling him in the bar’s parking lot followed by a fantastic round of making out and a promise for more when she came home from school tomorrow.
Her grandmother’s clock on the fireplace mantel chimed once. 1:00 a.m.
On a school night.
She shook her head and trudged to her bathroom. This had been a long, strange day. Two brushes with a pedophile. Some self-defense training, erotic taste testing, and fighting with Keane. A concert and a lonely night in her bedroom to top it all off. What the hell would tomorrow bring?
In her pajama shorts and T-shirt now, Holly padded into the kitchen to get a drink of water. The red light on her answering machine blinked in the darkness. As she made her way to the cupboard for a glass, she pressed the message button. Her mother’s voice filled the kitchen, and Holly stopped at the sink to listen.
“Holly Berry, are you there?” Mona’s tone was up in that concerned mother range. “She’s not answering, Charlie. We need to go there. Make sure she’s all right.”
Oh, shit.
Holly gripped the edge of the counter.
“Calm down, Mona,” Charlie’s voice said in the background.
“I’ll be calm when I know some lunatic has hasn’t killed our baby! Holly, where are you? We saw the story about the pedophile in your area on the national news this evening. They had a clip with you in it, for heaven’s sake.”
“Mona,” Charlie said. “Call her cell phone.”
“End of messages,” the digital answering machine voice reported.
Holly stared at the blinking light then went into the living room to fish her cell phone out of her bag. Sure enough, three text messages waited in her inbox. Two from Mona, one from Luke. Sweet Mary, had her parents gotten him involved in their frantic search for her?
Standing in front of the picture window in the living room, she dialed the first three digits of her parents’ phone number. She stopped when a light cut into the darkness in the front yard. The roar of a motorcycle engine let her know Keane was home. The loud crash of the bike into her fence and its awkward progress across the lawn let her know something was wrong. Terribly wrong.
She snapped her cell phone closed and dropped it on the couch. She ripped open the front door and ran out to the motorcycle now on its side.
“Keane!”
His body was flat out in the grass a few feet from the bike. She kneeled beside him and turned his head so she could see his face. Her hand came away from his chin with something warm and wet all over her fingers. She angled her hand toward the porch lights and gasped at the blood.
“Keane, can you hear me?” She wasn’t sure if she should check for a pulse. Did he have one normally?
His eyes opened, the left one showing broken blood vessels in the corner, and Keane groaned as he touched his nose.
“Holly.” His voice was nothing but a raspy whisper.
“What happened?”
“Hendrick.”
“You fought with him?” She darted a frantic glance into the darkness surrounding her property.
“Yeah, and the demon beat the shit out of me.” He ran his left hand over his right shoulder and grimaced.
“You need a hospital, Keane.” She touched his right arm in several spots until she got to his shoulder and he cried out. “Something’s wrong with your shoulder.”
“Definitely.”
“Let me go inside and call for an ambulance.” She rose to her knees, but he caught her hand.
“No ambulance. I can’t go to the hospital, Holly. I’m not a regular human anymore. Doctors won’t know what to do with me.”
“You’re bleeding like a human. Bleeding a lot. What do you want me to do?” Holly had never seen Keane look so…terrible.
“Help me inside.”
She slid into position by his left side and struggled to get him to his feet. He was heavier than the night she’d found him on the floor in the hallway. His steps were labored as if every movement caused him immense pain.
They somehow made it up the front steps and into the house. She pulled his leather jacket off and let it drop to the floor. She then eased him onto the couch. In the light of the living room, his injuries looked worse. Dried blood stained his chin while fresh blood still glistened from a slice on his left cheek. His bottom lip was split in two spots, but what most concerned Holly was the odd angle at which he positioned his right shoulder as he rested on the couch.
She dug around his body until her fingers closed around the cell phone she’d dropped between the cushions. She flipped it open and started to dial.
“I said no hospital, Holly.” He raised his left hand and grasped her wrist with a strength she wouldn’t have thought he had. “Who are you calling?”
“My father.”
Keane shook his head and let out a moan as he ran a finger along his cheek. He inspected the blood on his fingers as if he’d never seen such a sight.
“No, Holly.”
“I don’t want to do it, Keane, but you need medical attention. You’re hurt worse than I can help you. My father is a doctor. He’ll know what to do.”
She stepped out of his reach and finished dialing. While she waited for one of her parents to answer, she watched Keane try to move his right arm. His teeth ground together, and if she wasn’t mistaken, sweat dotted his brow. She was about to tell him to stay still, but her father picked up the phone.
“Holly? Where are you? Are you all right?” Charlie’s usual operating room calm sounded as if it had been torn to shreds.
“I’m fine, Dad,” she said. “I need you to calm down and come to my house.”
“Your mother and I are about ten minutes away. When you didn’t call us back, we started thinking the worst and decided to drive over.”
“Okay, good.” Ten minutes. Keane could last another ten minutes.
Couldn’t he?
“You sure you’re okay?” Charlie asked.
“I am, yes, but Keane isn’t. Hurry, Dad.”
“You got it.”
Holly was so glad her father had answered the phone. His ability to not assault her with a million questions was a blessing right now. Her mother would have demanded to know if Keane was at her house, and if so, why? She would have asked what was wrong with him. How had it happened? Where would he stay to recover once Charlie fixed him up? So not what Holly needed right now.
“They’ll be here in ten minutes.” She stepped back to the couch within Keane’s reach.
“You shouldn’t have called them.”
He was shivering now, and Holly pulled the quilt hanging on the back of the couch over him.
“Maybe not, but I’m not about to let you die on my couch. I love this couch.”
A whisper of a smile tugged up the corners of his mouth, and he winced at the splits in his lip. “Don’t make me laugh. I think you bruised my ribs in the bar.”
“You should have let me continue beating you up. I can assure you I wouldn’t have done this much damage.”
She went to her bathroom and grabbed a facecloth and towel. She moistened the facecloth and brought it out to the living room. Sitting on the edge of the couch by his hips, she dabbed at the dried blood around his nose and mouth. As she cleaned him, she noticed the slight flush on his cheeks—a color she’d never seen on his flesh before.
“What happened, Keane?” She pushed his hair back from his face, and he closed his eyes for a moment.
“Hendrick was too quick for me.” He shifted on the couch and swallowed an agonized cry as he held his right arm to his side.
“How is that possible? I thought you were beyond human. Super-indestructible.” She dried his face with the towel, and aside from the blown blood vessels in his eye, he looked much better. That beautiful face would probably be covered in bruises in the morning, but for now he looked more like Keane was supposed to look.
“I don’t know what’s happening, Holly. Something. Something big. In that alley with Hendrick, I was slow. Slower than when I was totally human. Hendrick is no stronger than me, but he tossed me around as if I wasn’t half a foot taller than him. I’ve killed demons bigger than him without getting so much as a scratch on me. Why was tonight different?”
She didn’t have an answer to that, but she read the worried confusion in Keane’s eyes loud and clear.
“What were you thinking about while Hendrick was kicking your ass?”
“Lots of shit,” he said, “but mostly…” He closed his eyes and put his left hand over them.
“But mostly what?” She pulled his hand away and rested it in her lap.
“Mostly, I was thinking about you.” He narrowed his eyes at her and opened his mouth to say something more, but the doorbell rang.