“Where is it?” Osum demanded, sudden hope warring with suspicion. “You have to have it. There is no other reason for you to be out here.”
“Where’s what?” Damon temporized, calculating the distance to Rory and the odds of taking on fifteen men by himself. He had ammo to spare, if he didn’t waste his shots. Another plus for his side was the fact that most of the fifteen weren’t facing his direction; like good little soldiers, they were trying to cover all the approaches, in case of an ambush. Too bad he was it. On the minus side, his wet shirt would hamper his draw. Too, a .45 was no match for an Uzi in most cases, and he couldn’t assume his enemies wouldn’t react quickly to his attack.
Osum’s black eyes narrowed to furious slits, making the gang lord look even more like a mean-tempered wild boar than he normally did. “Do not play stupid. You know precisely what I mean.” He drew a large pistol from his belt, handling it with unthinking competence. “The bomb. It is why you came here, yes? Do not take me for a fool, Abdou. I know all about you.”
So his cover had held. The knowledge was little comfort to Damon. It didn’t look like Osum feared retaliation by the PKU. Why would he when the only witnesses around were his own thugs?
Still, perhaps the fiction would give him and Rory a chance. It was better than nothing.
Damon twisted his lips in a sneer of condescension. “You really think I’d keep it with me?”
Uncertainty flickered in the gang lord like the lightning above them. If he knew so much about Jamil Abdou, he’d also know that Abdou had been seen in Ahmad’s company. Damon could have handed off the nuke to Ahmad.
Osum made a dismissive gesture, desperation smothering his doubts. “If I return with the bomb, Alexei Karadzic will know I am still to be trusted.”
“More like he’ll believe you stole it in the first place.” Damon snorted deliberately to fan the gang lord’s uncertainty. He edged toward Rory; the thugs might hesitate to fire if he were in the middle of the pack, for fear of hitting another of their number. “I heard you had plans.”
“I am loyal to Alexei,” Osum blustered; then he stiffened, his small eyes rounding in a flash of comprehension. “All this is your doing!” The gang lord brandished his pistol at Damon, his finger on the trigger. “I ought to kill you right now.”
Fuck.
He hadn’t said anything that wasn’t common talk. How had the Kosovar made the connection?
Fear slammed into Damon like a sledgehammer. Rory’s. Until then she hadn’t reacted much to the threats. But now fear exploded, bright to his mental sense and just as warming. If he didn’t do something soon, she might. He could feel her steeling herself to act.
Osum swore at length. He descended into dialect, his guttural delivery making Damon glad he understood only a word in five. But by the admiring looks the thugs threw their leader, the gang lord was either bad-mouthing Damon’s ancestry or making bloodcurdling threats.
Damon ignored the rant, more interested in the positions of Osum’s thugs. The way they were drifting closer still, drawn by the gang lord’s posturing, was good—clumped together they’d make easier targets.
Eventually, the Kosovar ran down, panting from his excesses. “Where is the bomb? If you do not tell ...” The pistol came up— aimed at Rory—murderous rage backing its threat.
And Damon was still too far away to block the shot.
Not her!
“NO!”
He threw himself in front of his thief, reaching for his hidden .45. But he was moving too slowly. Oh so slowly.
Osum flinched at Damon’s shout, then corrected his aim.
Prak!
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The gunshot cut through the sounds of Nature’s fury. The howling wind, the drumming rain, the boom of thunder were nothing to the explosion reverberating in Rory’s ears. Damon flinched, a grunt of pain escaping him as he lunged at the leader, the look on his face set and fey.
More shots rang out in quick succession, louder and deeper than the first. Her captors jerked at the sounds, their grips loosening, but she paid little heed to their reaction. What absorbed her attention and chilled her heart was the Fed’s reckless, headlong attack. Then he crashed into the thugs, bowling them off their feet.
“DAMON!”
Rage exploded in her heart. Fanned by horror and fear for Damon, it flooded her veins with dreadful power. Fangs sprouted in her mouth as she Changed into the worst nightmare she could imagine. Breaking the hold of her captors, she slashed at the nearest throat with long, razor-sharp talons. Hot blood spurted into her face, blinding her for a moment.
She screamed wordlessly, the taste of copper filling her mouth, mingling with cold rain. Skin and muscle parted under her claws to shrieks of terror. She lashed out at everyone within reach, instinct demanding she protect her lover. They’d
shot
him! She couldn’t forgive that.
Damon struggled in the mud, wrestling, punching, and kicking, as more thugs piled in. Still alive, but for how much longer?
She fought to get to him, to even the odds. To save him, somehow.
Gunshots rang out anew, the cracks and booms driving her fury to greater heights.
“Rory, run!” Damon shouted, his voice nearly lost in the rolling thunder. “Get away!”
Never!
She refused to abandon him.
Lunging into the melee, Rory drove her claws through bulletproof vests and heavy jackets, ripping and rending with impartiality. The effort to cut deeper and harder to greater effect felt like she was tearing her nails out, her fingers throbbing in complaint. Borne on a wave of exaltation by her killing rage, the meaty impact jarring her shoulders barely registered.
She ignored the buffeting wind and the blows of her enemy, more interested in results.
“Damon!” Screaming her lover’s name, she laid backs open, snagged an arm between her fangs, and gnashed down.
With a screech of pain, her enemy jerked away, clutching his stump, and caromed into others.
They whipped around to face her as lightning lit up the skies. The nearest yelled in terror and fled into the storm. The ones that remained didn’t seem to realize Damon wasn’t the danger.
She pounced on their backs, shrieking her rage and bloodlust.
“Kill it!” Someone out of arm’s reach fired, emptying his gun at her.
The body in her grasp jerked and jittered. Shocked out of her killing frenzy, Rory crouched behind her makeshift shield. Then more shots filled the air, going off so rapidly they sounded like strings of fireworks.
She froze where she knelt, waiting for pain to register. Surely so many bullets couldn’t all miss. When nothing came, triumph filled her with a heady bravado. Baring her teeth in a snarl, she screamed defiance at the enemy, daring them to do their worst. She would kill them all!
The nerves of the remaining few broke. Gibbering in panic, they abandoned their truck and dead associates for the night.
“Rory . . .” Damon’s breathless bass was so weak she nearly didn’t hear him in the heavy downpour.
Panting, she turned in his direction, the gunfire echoing in her ears urging her to slash and destroy.
He was nowhere to be found.
“Down here.”
When she looked down, still snarling, her lover blinked, then raised a brow at her, an incongruously mild expression on his face, sprawled as he was beneath several motionless bodies. “Remind me never to make you angry.”
Rory gaped, wondering at his lighthearted quip. Something wet flowed down the corner of her mouth. She licked it off and caught a taste of blood. Spitting in disgust, she reached up to swipe her lips clean and felt hard claws against her cheek. Only then did she realize she still wore the demon shape she’d Changed into. Shivering as adrenaline faded, she shifted to something more human.
And remembered what had set her off.
“Are you alright?” Rory stumbled toward Damon, her knees threatening to fold, the gunshot and his flinch playing back in her mind’s eye. He’d been hit, damn it.
Mud made getting to him difficult, her shaky legs nearly sliding from under her. Then she had to dig him out from under the pile of corpses, several of which had bullet holes in them. Damon’s handiwork?
She almost lost what little she had in her stomach rolling off the last one. Its head flopped in a different direction from the rest of its body, a prolonged flash of lightning showing its neck almost completely blown away. Decapitation by gunfire. It was the leader, the one built like an ox who’d pointed the gun at Damon. She retched blood and acid at the sight, the noxious combination amplifying her nausea, but fear gave her the strength to finish clearing the pile to get at her Adonis.
Thunder crashed as she knelt by his side, vaguely grateful that the rain washed the air clean of the smells of death.
“You idiot. What did you think you were doing, jumping in front of a gun like that?” She searched Damon’s body frantically for his injuries, worried even further by the way he just lay there with only his gun hand raised while she ran her hands over him. “The mission isn’t over yet. What if you’d been killed?”
“You’d’ve been okay, so you’d see it through.”
The quiet statement of confidence shook Rory to the core and took the wind from out of her sails. Of course she would have seen it through, but he still would have been dead! “Idiot,” she repeated with less heat. “I’d prefer not to finish without you.”
He gave a pained laugh. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Bastard.”
“Careful, I might think you care.”
She bit her lower lip against a snarl. The way her heart jittered in her chest, as though afflicted with Saint Vitus’s dance, he might be right, too.
There was only one hole—an obscene blind eye high on his chest—so the bullet was still inside him. She sucked in a breath at the sight, then scrambled for a scrap of fabric that wasn’t muddy from the fight. Nothing presented itself.
Damon waved her off. “Never mind that. Get the truck before they come back for it.” He collected something from the wet ground beside him—empty magazines for the cartridges he’d expended protecting her, she realized.
“Shut up. You’re hurt.”
Tucking the magazines away, he staggered to his feet, still holding his pistol at the ready. “It’s just a scratch.” He fumbled in his pockets, then extracted a clean handkerchief and pressed it on the wound. “Get the truck.”
Knowing she couldn’t sway his determination, Rory was forced to accept his assurances. It would be faster to carry out his instructions than argue with him. She ran to the truck, wondering if she’d have to hot-wire it; she wasn’t sure she remembered how, though she suspected Damon did. Luckily, the driver had left the keys in the ignition.
Wrestling with the unfamiliar controls, she drove it to Damon and leaned over to open the passenger-side door. He slung the muddy suitcase inside, followed by their packs, then got in himself. Her beloved idiot hadn’t waited for her to retrieve the nuke.
"Go!”
Stifling useless reproach, Rory put the truck in gear and drove off.
At first, the effort of driving a strange vehicle and finding and following the unmarked dirt road took most of her concentration, especially when her muscles started to shake as adrenaline left her system. But after an hour to recover with only grunted directions from Damon, scenes from the fight began to flicker in her mind’s eye. The darkness and hypnotic drumming of the rain on the truck’s roof left little else to occupy her.
She’d killed!
Rory waited for horror to rise, but nothing came. The memory of gore was what stayed with her, that and the feel of skin and muscle parting under her claws. Nothing more. She didn’t remember much of the actual fight, just an all-consuming fury that blotted out everything else.
She was glad she’d killed them. They’d deserved it. At that moment, they’d come to represent all the vileness she’d seen in the past weeks. She didn’t regret their deaths. Maybe she would later, but she suspected not. Right then, she felt as though she could do it again, if she had to.
Her reaction—rather, the lack of it—surprised her. So her condemnation of Damon’s hits was all intellectual?
“Are you okay?”
The darkness that cocooned them in a world of their own made it easier to share her thoughts. “I killed them.”
“Yeah, you did. Some.” He patted her thigh. Injured though he was, he still tried to comfort her. “Welcome to the club.”
Rory confessed the important part in a whisper. “But I don’t regret it.”
He didn’t react to her statement. Of course, he probably sensed her lack of remorse.
She shook her head at the emotional energy she’d wasted. “I’ve been an idiot. I’m sorry.” She risked a glance at him. “Forgive me?”
Damon gave her a ghost of his usual smile, almost invisible behind his weeks-old beard. “There’s nothing to forgive. I just wish your killing them hadn’t been necessary.”
Rory choked up at the lack of rancor in his answer, her heart flipping over. “That’s it? Anyone else would be crowing, ‘I told you so.’ ”
His breathless laugh was cut short by a groan. “Don’t worry. I’ll make you pay for it once the mission’s over.”
“Pay how?” Ingrained suspicion pierced the breathless anxiety that stirred at his sound of pain.
“Oh, maybe another blow job or two would do it.”
If Damon could joke about that, maybe he wasn’t as badly hurt as she thought. Forcing herself to match his levity, she quipped: “That’s cheap. One-twenty euros?”
“Okay, make it daily blow jobs for a month,” he countered immediately. “And two on Sundays.”
Rory snickered at his nonsense, warmed by the thought of more time with her Adonis after the job was done. “You’re on.”
Though the winds were abating, the rain came down stronger, obscuring the lousy excuse of a road and forcing her to concentrate once more on driving. Damon had rejected calling for pickup since they had transportation, saying they’d make better time by heading straight for Skopje.