“Jerk,” she hissed at him and crossed her arms across her chest.
“You need to quit,” Benjamin advised, turning to her as he brought the BMW to a halt at a red traffic light.
“Don't tell me what to do,” Taylor whined. Her nose twitched and her lips curled in under her perfect white teeth.
His sparkling blue eyes could not ignore that she looked like she was about to cry. Lifting his hand to her shoulder from the gearshift, Benjamin nudged her chin like a big brother and grinned. “Sorry, Taylor,” he cooed. “Mom would kill me if she smelled smoke in here.”
“At least you have a mom,” Taylor said bitterly, choking back her tears. Dabbing at her cheek with the back of her hand, she checked her waterproof mascara in the visor mirror. Gaining her composure, she sat up straight in the plush leather seat and threw back her shoulders.
“This light is never going to change,” Benjamin droned under his breath, his head aching from a lack of sleep and an overdose of Taylor.
As the traffic light turned green, Taylor suddenly hit the unlock button on her door handle. A horn blared behind the BMW as the tall blonde maneuvered the heavy white cast encasing her fractured left leg from the seat and to the sidewalk.
A wad of sticky pink chewing gum planted itself on her cast. She yelled through the open passenger side door, “Hand me my crutches.”
“You're crazy, Taylor, absolutely crazy. Now get back in the car.” Benjamin's face turned the same shade of red as Taylor's lipstick because a chorus of car horns shrieked at him to move.
Slamming the door shut nearly on his face, Taylor hobbled back from the curb just as a row of cars sped around the idling BMW. Shoving the gearshift into park, Benjamin switched on the emergency flashers. Propelling his six-foot-plus frame over the center console, he pulled himself out of the passenger door and to the sidewalk.
“Get in,” he said calmly. But Taylor only stumbled backward away from him. His blue eyes bore angrily into her skull. Taylor gasped when she realized that the sun-kissed, golden-blond sweetheart was not going to play along with her.
Scooping her into his arms, Benjamin threw the pouting girl over his broad shoulders. The hood of the BMW stung Taylor's thighs when he plopped her down on the smooth metal and looked her straight in the eyes.
“She's crazy, Ben,” Taylor wailed. The girl collapsed against his shoulder in heaving sobs.
“I didn't know you could cry,” he said gently, lifting her quivering chin with his finger.
“I can't go home. You don't understand.” Taylor grabbed at his chest and clutched a handful of his t-shirt in her fist. “She wants to hurt me, Ben.”
“Let's go pick up some of your clothes, okay?” Benjamin asked as he loosened his shirt from her iron grip. “We'll figure something out.”
Helping her back inside the leather passenger seat, Benjamin eased around the hood of the car and opened the driver's door as the traffic light flashed red again. He figured that Alex would know what to do. He smiled to himself, a bit guilty that Taylor's distress meant that day he might get to see Alexâthe shy, auburn-haired beauty.
In the passenger seat, Taylor wrapped her arms around her chest.
“Are you cold?” Benjamin asked, turning off the air conditioner.
“No,” Taylor said, shrugging her shoulders. “Actually, I'm fired up.” Her body tensed and hunched forward as Benjamin hit the gas pedal.
The sleek BMW shot through the yellow traffic light dangling above the intersection. Abruptly, Taylor pointed a sharp, pink fingernail past his head.
As Benjamin stared past the tip of Taylor's finger, he spotted a pile of brown and beige river stones stacked in the shape of a neighborhood entrance sign. “Sawyer's Mill,” read Benjamin as he slipped past the entrance. The name of the neighborhood was conveniently etched in bronze and securely centered in the middle of the stones.
Sawyer's Mill sat on only three acres, but the real-estate developer responsible for its existence had packed ten overpriced McMansions uncomfortably into every last square inch. The profit had allowed to him to retire to Bermuda when all the units had been sold. Jim had bought the last one, doing so under duress from his breathtakingly lovely young wife, Krystal. “I can be a queen here,” she had purred in his ear as he had signed the contract and prayed silently for the continued shallow vanity of his rich patients.
Benjamin pulled his mother's BMW into the driveway of Fifty Sawyer Lane. The young man hoped that Krystal would not be home. A breeze rustled his sandy bangs, and as he brushed the bangs from his blue eyes, the scent of smoke floating past in the damp morning air told him that his prayer would probably not be answered.
Holding the passenger door open for Taylor, he held his breath. She grabbed her crutches and hauled herself slowly from the deep seats of the BMW.
“What's that smell?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.
Benjamin shrugged his shoulders, his strong jaw clenched for the fury to come.
“Get out of my way,” Taylor said, quickly hoisting herself up the stone steps of the house.
The door had been left unlocked, the alarm unarmed, as if Krystal considered herself immortal. Close on Taylor's quickened heels, Benjamin followed her to the marble foyer. A grand staircase rose above his head, suggesting that they could look upstairs. But the smell of smoke pulled the two teens straight ahead to the kitchen. The French doors to the patio stood wide open as smoke billowed into the house.
Shrieking, Taylor stumbled clumsily toward the pool, which faced the BBQ pit. Passed out on the cement patio, Krystal lay half naked and snoring on the ground, a flimsy bathrobe covering her assets and her hand dangling in the blue water.
“I'll call 911,” Benjamin stammered as he retreated back into the house for a phone. A cordless handset rested by a Chinese take-out menu on the granite kitchen counter, and Benjamin grabbed it, hitting the keys in a panic.
Around the cement patio, the perfectly manicured Bermuda lawn was ablaze in fiery, random patches. Taylor nudged her stepmother with her crutch for signs of breathing; when she ascertained the woman was still alive, Taylor turned her blonde head to the grill and realized that the dresses had been ruined.
A ball of fury rose inside the girl's gut. “I'll kill you!” she screamed and threw aside her crutches. Kneeling to the ground, she pushed with all her strength against the unconscious body of her stepmother until the woman slid head first into the pool.
“I already told you!” Benjamin was saying frantically to the dispatcher. “We're at Fifty Sawyer Lane.” He rushed outside through the smoke. “I don't know the zip code. It's my friend's house. Hurry. Please.” His eyes bulged from his head when he suddenly recognized Krystal's body flailing underneath a ripple of waves in the sky-blue pool.
“Taylor!” he shouted. “Help her.”
Taylor kicked her toe against an empty vodka bottle and smiled smugly. “No, she needs to sober up.”
Groggy and confused, Krystal grasped for Benjamin's hand, which he had extended to her from the edge of the pool. Gasping for air, she spat and coughed furiously as he pulled her from the water.
“You stupid witch!” Taylor screeched as her stepmother shrank behind Benjamin's shoulder. A fire engine siren blared in the near distance. “Why did you burn my mother's clothes?” Taylor lunged at the dripping woman and knocked her to the ground.
“Get away from me,” Krystal cried, black mascara dripping down her cheeks. “I'll call the cops.”
Grabbing Taylor by the arms, Benjamin held her hands behind her back. “Stop,” he hissed in her ear.
Three firefighters rushed through the open French doors to the patio, a massive yellow hose tight under their arms. Water rained on the grass, soaking Taylor and Benjamin to their skin before they could escape the blast.
In seconds, the firefighters had controlled the burning lawn, but the flames of hate between the women still smoldered. A balding, brown-mustached police officer burst onto the patio from inside the smoke-filled mansion.
Wet and trembling, Taylor noticed the smirk spread across her stepmother's face as the police officer approached from behind. Benjamin nudged Taylor's shoulder, but Taylor narrowed her intense blue eyes on Krystal's silicone-filled chest.
“Jimmy is going to be so mad,” Krystal purred. “Good thing he loves me more than you.”
Taylor focused on viewing the puffy, pouting lips of her stepmother as they receded around her sharp, bleached teeth. A roar gurgled up from Taylor's throat. Pushing off with her one good ankle, she flew at her stepmother. Krystal rocked back on her heels as Taylor clenched her right fist tight, as hard as a rock, and jabbed at the woman's nose.
Blood dripped down Krystal's skimpy robe as tears of pain and anger welled in her eyes. “You're going to pay for that,” she threatened as the policeman jumped between the two women.
Coincidentally, at that moment, in an icy hotel conference room in Miami Beach, Jim Woodward thought of calling home to check in on his girls. He decided not to, reasoning that they couldn't have gotten into much trouble. He tapped his ballpoint pen on the laminate table top. Then again, he considered, maybe he should call at the next break. Twisting restlessly in the hard, plastic chair, Jim felt a sweat break out underneath his collar.
At Fifty Sawyer Lane, Taylor squished her long legs into the back of a black Atlanta police car as Benjamin handed a pair of crutches to the mustached police officer. “Call Alexandra!” Taylor shouted at him as the officer shut the door on her face.
Krystal sneered at her stepdaughter from behind the glass window of the oak front door.
“That's what you get for messing with the Onion Queen,” she hissed.
A shy grin tugged at the corners of Alexandra's puckered mouth. At first she thought she and Kraven were lucky to be alive, but then she decided that luck had nothing to do with it.
We saved each other
, she mused.
The beautiful stranger at her side held his arm around her lean hips while she matched him, stride for stride, to the city park across the street from her apartment building. Her bulldog, Jack, raced ahead of the pair, down the cement pathway, his stubby legs pounding furiously to get at a squawking pigeon picking bread crumbs by a trash can.
Stalking his territory, a brown-and-black mutt with the slim build and sharp teeth of a wild fox growled at the passing couple as they followed Jack toward a playground. The stray dog wanted them to know the trash can belonged to him and he snapped at the approach of the intruders.
Kraven kept his eyes on the dog, but Alexandra did not see the low, snarling beast until he growled. Jack's head snapped away from the pigeon as the bird soared into the air. With his head down, he started to charge the mutt, as if a mighty ram to the stomach would teach the dog not to mess with his lady.
Pulling Alexandra's hips close, Kraven shielded her behind his body. His blue eyes met the black eyes of the growling mutt. Whimpering, the frightened animal retreated swiftly from the girl and her bodyguard toward a grove of trees a hundred yards down the pathway.
Alexandra's heart raced. The shapeshifter locked in Callahan's attic was wounded, possibly mortally. She breathed in and out deeply.
I am safe,
she thought to herself,
for now. The old man cannot turn into a wolf while he is injured. That's what Callahan promised. And even if he does heal, I'll be more than happy to remind him that the only reason he is alive is because he's more useful to me alive than dead. I've got questionsâlots of questionsâand it is time I got some answers.
Alexandra tucked her long brown bangs behind her ears and whispered to Kraven. “Sit with me,” she said softly and nudged him toward a soft spot of grass beside the playground. She glanced at the metal swing set and yellow plastic slide looming over the ground.
I'm not too old
, she thought. A small boy with shaggy, pumpkin-colored hair giggled as he swung toward the blue sky. Sitting on a bench nearby, his mother clapped and beamed.
What once was lost now is found.
The weight of secrecy dropped Alexandra to the ground, her body reclining backward in the grass. Staring up to the cloudless sky, she felt a ticklish tingle in her toes as a wet tongue lapped her feet.
“Stop it, Jack,” she said, sitting up as her bulldog rolled on his back in the grass beside her.
A shadow loomed overhead, blocking out the sun. It was Kraven. “Please sit,” she pleaded to Kraven and patted the ground with her hand.
Too young to die
, the raven-haired immortal thought, kneeling to the grass.
Too old to live.
“Relax,” Alexandra said, biting her thumbnail as she blushed. Kraven copied the casual crisscrossing of Alexandra's legs and sat beside her, their knees touching lightly. He kept his blue eyes locked on her pink, freckled cheeks.
Jack rose from his back to sniff around the nearby trash can. “Hello, doggie-woggie,” a child's voice sang in the air. The pumpkin-haired boy jumped out of the swing and rushed to Jack.
“No,” his mother shouted. But the boy had already grabbed Jack by the tail. The dog whimpered and licked the boy's hand.
“Come here, Jack,” Alexandra called and waved the bulldog to her.
“He might lick you,” she advised the toddler as he followed the dog to Alexandra's lap.
His panicked mother, with her hand on his shoulder, guided the boy back to the swing set. “Sorry,” she mumbled, with a confused look on her face. “We didn't mean to disturb you,” she said, backing away from the couple in the grass.
Alexandra frowned. “No problem,” she said softly and turned to Kraven. His adoring eyes had never left her face.
Raising his palm to her chin, he stared into her green eyes. His touch stung, his fingertips pricking her skin like a burn from the tip of a match.