Chapter Twelve

Lydia

I was hit broadside by something heavy and was sent sprawling.

Said something crushed my foot on its way past and I yelped in pain. My arms went out to my sides, windmilling wildly as though that might save my head from cracking open like a rotted pumpkin on the concrete. I tipped backward, still flailing, and would have smacked hard against the pavement, if large hands hadn't caged my waist. They didn't arrest my momentum, but did transform it. When I hit the ground, my body met flesh instead of stone. Angelo held me cradled against his chest. He took the brunt for me, grunting in discomfort when he hit the asphalt head-on. We rolled twice before hitting the curb on the opposite end of the ambulance parking lot. He recovered more quickly than I did and propped me up against the curb.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

I blinked a few times, trying to reorient myself. When I could finally bring things back into focus, I realized Angelo hadn't come through unscathed. Blood ran in a thin line down one of his temples. The skin was scraped raw, red beading on his forehead. It reminded me of the times I'd skinned my knees as a kid. He'd sacrificed layers of skin to save me from hitting the ground.

His eyes narrowed and he snapped his fingers in front of my face. "Lydia, are you alright?"

"I'm fine," I answered, reaching up a shaking hand to touch his forehead. "But you're not. You're hurt."

"I'll heal."

"But..."

"If you want to help, you could kiss it better."

I expected to find him smirking at me, but there was no hint of teasing in his expression. He meant it. A kiss was probably as good as a bandage for a superficial injury when you were treating an incubus. Before I could talk myself out of it, I pressed my lips to the center of his forehead. It wasn't much, just a brush of my mouth across his skin, but my body reacted like he'd groped me. Nervous excitement zinged up my spine and I let out a shuddering breath as he drew my lifeforce out through that brief contact. When I blinked again, his forehead was still bloody, but it no longer had a source.

Angelo reached up and smudged a little blood from the corner of my lip. "The vampire look is interesting on you, but I can do without the blood play." He flashed me an unapologetic smile.

"Cute," I grumbled.

Angelo brushed his fingers over his forehead as if he could still feel the ghostly imprint of my lips on his skin. His eyes closed, as if he was recalling the memory with a small shudder. It was almost obscenely intimate to know he knew how I tasted before even touching me sexually.

I sighed and pain shot up my foot when I tried to stand. Angelo had to catch me once more, steadying me with a hand on my waist. I ended up in his lap, tucked in close to him.

"What the hell happened?" I grumbled.

"Kids," Angelo muttered darkly, nodding toward the other end of the lot. I turned in time to see a pair of bicycles round a corner and onto the sidewalk of the next road. A cop car was giving chase.

"But I heard a scream?"

He nodded. "They were the ones screaming. They probably got spooked when the cop showed up. They must have thought the incline leading toward the ER entrance looked like fun on a bike. Too young to know better."

A little of the tension eased out of me. When I'd heard the screams, I'd been sure we were about to witness some poor sap disappearing down the gullet of something big and slimy. It was both annoying and a bit of a relief to realize it was something as trivial as kids playing where they weren't supposed to. The bike hadn't landed on me and had only clipped my foot. I was pretty sure I could put weight on it. It didn't feel as bad as it had a minute ago.

Angelo helped me to my feet, and I scanned the parking lot, hoping to catch a glimpse of a familiar face or the flash of dark hair that would give me a hint to where Essie and her weird boyfriend had gone. If Angelo hadn't seen her too, I would have thought she'd just been a figment of my imagination. Something strange and possibly magical was going on here.

There's no ‘possibly' about it, Indigo piped up. There's magic in the air. Can't you sense it?

I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be sensing. The cold was so pervasive that it froze my thoughts, making them as slippery and hard to find traction on as black ice.

The cold, you mean? I asked. I thought you said that was Taliyah's doing.

No, the incubus said that. It's possible she's responsible for the snowfall, but the energy I sense is different. It's not fae. It's… hostile. Something is or was here, I just can't put my finger on what that something is.

That made the skin at the back of my neck prickle. I might not have known much about Indie's background, but I'd witnessed enough to realize she'd lived a full life before meeting her end in my former shop. She'd seen and done a lot. If a source of dark energy confounded her, it was definitely cause for concern.

I took another wary look around, searching for the source. Now that I was paying attention, I could feel something odd, but it was just a nebulous sensation, nothing I could really grasp. It felt like those uncertain moments in the theater before the monster jumps out and slaughters the girl on screen. You know the creature is out there, but not what direction it will come from. And that curl of dread in your chest from not knowing was worse than facing the thing when it inevitably revealed itself.

Of course, I could have been wrong about that. I was still new to the world of monsters. There were probably plenty of things out there that were a lot worse than dread. I just hadn't met them yet. If all went well, I'd keep avoiding that meeting.

"We need to go," I said softly, pitching my voice as low as I could. If there really was something with large teeth and sharp claws lurking nearby, I wanted away from it. Almost in response, I spied Angelo's BMW where he'd parked it in the emergency room parking lot.

Angelo gave me a quizzical look. "I thought you wanted to look for Indigo's nieces? Why the rush to leave now?"

I shook my head. I wasn't sure how to explain this to him without sounding like a crazy person. I couldn't reveal Indie's continued existence without pissing her off. But what else could I say? I didn't imagine that ‘I just have a bad feeling' would go over well.

"Please?" I asked, a note of desperation leaking into my voice. I hated it, but it made him soften. I didn't like being Angelo's damsel again, but if it got me away from the unsettling feeling I was experiencing, I'd allow myself to be less of a feminist, just this once.

Angelo nodded and wrapped an arm around my waist and helped me hobble along. I leaned on him gratefully and scanned the parking lot around us, expecting something to lunge out from behind a Toyota and sink four-inch fangs into my calf. It didn't happen. Nothing dropped down on us from above or let out a primal shriek designed to stop my heart. It was just the still, ominous cold that made my chest ache, even in the warm air inside the cab of the car. It felt like someone had pressed a block of dry ice against my breastbone. I kept expecting frostbite to bloom like a black rose under my skin.

"You seem scared," he said and opened the car door for me, then helped settle me into the passenger seat.

"The kids really spooked me," I answered.

"Well, everything is okay now," he said as he started the engine and cranked up the heat. Even though I could feel it blaring at me, I still couldn't seem to shake the bone-gripping cold. It was like it had settled inside me and nothing was going to shake it.

Angelo pulled out of the parking lot and when I looked to my right, I could have sworn I saw a pair of eyes peering at us from over the bed of a nearby pickup truck. Then Angelo whipped around the corner, and it was lost from sight, leaving me wondering if my eyes were playing tricks on me or if there really had been a creature crouching in the Chevy.