Iced, стр. 42

“Don’t use that tone with me.”

“What tone?”

“The one that thinks I’m some kind of freak predator that molests children. I’m not a freak and you’re not a child. I undressed you, lass. I cleaned you up. I healed you. I will never hurt you.”

“How did you heal me?”

“Fed you my blood.”

My gag reflex is instant and uncontrollable. I retch dry and noisy. Unlike a lot of other folks I know, drinking blood doesn’t sound cool to me at all. It grosses me out. Same with eating Unseelie flesh; I’ve never done it and never will. I’m staying an Unseelie-flesh virgin all my life. I’m not even tempted by the possibility that it could make me stronger and faster than I already am. Dude, you got to draw your lines in the sand somewhere and hold them. It’s especially important when the sand keeps shifting beneath your feet.

“It’s potent. Works better than Unseelie flesh. A few drops in your mouth and …” He turns around and smiles at me. I think. Tattoos rush beneath the skin of his face, shadowing the planes and valleys, making it hard to decide just what that twist of his lips means. “There’s really only one question: would you rather have died?”

That’s an easy one for me. I’d never rather that. Not under any circumstances. I’ll take survival at any price. Always. “No. Thanks for the blood, dude. Means a lot.” I hate admitting this next part but I’m pretty sure it’s true. “You saved my life. I won’t forget it.” I smile back at him, then I just sit there trying not to gape at his reaction. He totally changes and I see the Highlander he was. His eyes go brown and playful and he looks college-guy hunky again; the tattoos recede from his face. Even his muscles change, smooth, and suddenly his body is more human.

He tosses me a candy bar. I catch it, rip it open and munch it, and begin making plans to get my sword back. I know Jayne. He knows if I survive I’ll come after it, so he’ll take it somewhere he thinks I can’t get to it. He won’t want to waste too many of his men guarding it because he wants them out on the street, fighting. I waste a couple secs trying to figure out where he’d take it, then realize I don’t have to. All I have to do is spy on him and follow him back to wherever he takes the Fae he catches to be slaughtered. I can’t believe he’s so stupid he really thinks he’ll be able to keep it!

“Stay there and I’ll get you some clothes,” Christian says.

He lopes off, moving long-limbed and easy, not gliding in the weird way the princes do. Down the other end of the long room he rummages through an armoire, and comes back with a pair of flannel pj bottoms with a drawstring waist and a huge cream fisherman’s sweater.

I suit up under the covers, tying off my waist tight and rolling up the legs and arms about a hundred times. When he tosses me a pair of balled-up socks as he heads off to the kitchen, I’m distracted, still thinking about Jayne, and miss them. They go sailing past me, hit the wall and fall down in the crack. I roll over and reach down, rooting around for them.

It takes me a second to figure out what I close my hand on.

Hair. Attached to a head. There’s a head in the narrow space between the bed and the wall. I freeze, totally horrified and massively grossed out.

I jerk my hand back and just sit there, swallowing the creeped-out sound trying to claw its way out of my throat, then look over my shoulder at him. He’s humming a weird song under his breath that sounds a lot like the music they play at Chester’s and disappearing into a pantry off the kitchen.

I force myself to reach back down and pat around, never taking my eyes off the pantry door. “I’m hungry, Christian,” I call. When he answers, I can make a good guess at how deep the pantry is, how far in it he’s gone. How much time I have to figure out what the feck is going on here.

The head has a neck attached to it, and sure enough there’s a body, too. It’s naked and female and human. She’s stiff with rigor mortis and ice cold.

I barely let myself breathe. I hear boxes being moved around on shelves.

“Sorry, lass, I’ll have more for you in a second. I thought I had some Snickers in here but so far I’m only finding Almond Joy.”

I yank my hand out of the crack and scoot back to the middle of the bed, and when I answer him I sound relaxed, playful. “Aw, dude, keep looking. You know how I love my Snickers.”

The boxes stop moving. “Something wrong, lass?”

There’s a dead woman wedged between Christian’s bed and the wall. Normally I’d say that’s a whole lot of wrong and I’d get real vocal about it, but I’m in the killer’s apartment, wearing his pjs with no shoes and I got no fecking sword that kills Fae because that fecker Jayne took it, so I’m in no hurry to do that right now.

There’s no way I tipped him off. My delivery was perfect. “No, nothing. Just starving out here!” Another flawless lie. I may not do it often but I shine at it like I do most things.

He steps out of the pantry and looks at me. The Highlander is gone. He’s full Unseelie prince, iridescent eyes tinged with crimson. “Och, lass, Mac never told you, did she?”

“Told me what?”

“I’m a walking lie detector, Dani, my darling.”

“Nobody is.”

“It’s inherited, like your sidhe-seer gifts.”

“Which I’m going to use to kick your ass from here to next week.”

“And that was one big fat fuck of a lie. You found her, didn’t you? I knew I should have put her away. But you were here, and bleeding so much, and I needed her off the bed. Saving you was all that mattered.”

“So you shoved her off the side of the bed and thought I wouldn’t notice? You stuffed her in a crack!” My hands are fists. The ignominy of it. Dead and disposed of like a used condom. If I hadn’t missed the socks, I’d never have known. I’d have left thinking Christian was wicked cool for saving me and not been one ounce the wiser that I’d been in bed next to a dead woman, eaten and dressed without even seeing her two feet away. “Dude, you are one sick feck.”

“Och, Dani, my love,” he says, gliding toward the bed, “you’ve really no idea.”

Nineteen

I kick up into freeze-frame without even thinking. I don’t lock one thing down on my mental grid. I hope I do a lot of damage, break everything I hit and just don’t knock myself out, because I have a feeling if I do, I’ll wake up strapped down to a rack with an insane ex-Highlander about to do seriously fecked-up things to me.

If he can sift, I’m dead meat.

I make it to the door but he’s there in front of me, arms spread, crouched low, looking like he’s about to bum-rush me and take me off my feet. His face is contorted with anger, kaleidoscopic tattoos rush beneath his skin. His eyes are full black. Only thing that’s missing to complete the Unseelie prince picture is a radioactive torque and huge black wings spreading, getting ready to crush me in a deadly embrace. I backpedal frantically and he lunges.

Then I’m on the floor and he’s on top of me, and I know the second he hits me that Christian is so much stronger than me that I don’t stand a chance of taking him. I can’t believe the strength I feel in his body! The Unseelie part of him has kicked in with a vengeance. It’s not just power oozing off him. He’s turning into pure sex just like the rest of them. I shake my head, trying to keep it clear. I think about horrible things like the dead woman stuffed into the space between his bed and the wall, and how I don’t want to end up like her.

I’m flat on my back and he’s got my wrists and he’s stretching my hands above my head. I curse and struggle and kick but it’s like fighting a concrete wall. Nothing, and dude, I do mean nothing, seems to have any impact on him. I head-butt him. He laughs and drops his face into my shoulder, and sniffs me!