“If it’s Walker you’re worried about, don’t be. I’ll take care of him,” Jeremy said, watching her tongue trace her bottom lip. He reached out and caught her wrists.
Keira wrenched her arms against his grip, but he didn’t let go.
“Get OFF ME!”
He bent his head, bringing his lips to her neck like he hadn’t heard her. The body spray and deodorant smell of him filled her nose and she gagged on the idea of kissing him. She twisted away, lifting her foot to kick him in the groin, but she couldn’t get a decent shot at the bulge in his pants. Instead, she kicked his knee as hard as she could. She felt the joint shift sideways beneath her heel and her stomach lurched.
Jeremy screamed and dropped her wrists. All at once, Keira was pulling backward against nothing. She landed hard in the grass with Jeremy looming over her like a storm cloud.
“What the FUCK?!” He raised his arm above his head, flattening his hand like he was going to slap her. Keira barely managed to throw an arm up to shield herself before she realized he hadn’t swung.
Another hand was wrapped around Jeremy’s wrist.
Walker’s hand.
Jeremy yelped and whirled around, howling as Walker maintained his grip, twisting Jeremy’s shoulder in its socket.
Walker looked down at him. “Touch her, ever again, and I will break you.” He twisted harder and Keira could see the unnatural bulge of Jeremy’s shoulder joint beneath his shirt.
“You can have her,” Jeremy spat between his panting breaths. “She’s nothing but a tease any—” His scream cut off his words before he could finish.
Walker let go of him and Jeremy dropped to the ground, moaning and cradling his shoulder.
Keira got unsteadily to her feet. Walker was by her side in an instant.
“Thanks,” she said. “I don’t love being the damsel in distress, but I wasn’t exactly expecting that.” Her voice cracked and failed. Keira shook her head.
“It was the least I could do, after disgracing myself by getting knocked out by a shrub.”
“You can both go screw yourselves,” Jeremy spat, staggering to his feet and lurching toward the house. The door slammed behind him.
Walker whistled. “He’s a shining example for losers everywhere, isn’t he?” Residual anger colored his words.
Keira laughed in spite of her trembling. “Should we look for Smith? Do you know where he might have gone?”
“I think the best thing to do is to let him cool off; get himself together. He needs that sometimes. When he’s ready, he’ll come back. Chasing him makes it worse. I suppose I should have thought of that before I went tearing off after him and landed in a bush.”
“If you’re sure . . . ” Keira stared into the darkness. She hated to think of Smith out there, hurting and alone.
“Let’s go find the car, okay?” Walker wrapped an arm around her and started for the gate. “Where do you want to go?”
She wanted to go home, but she was sitting smack in the middle of a spiderwebbed lie and she had to untangle the deception, first. “I’d better call Susan. I’m supposed to be at her house—maybe she’ll let me wait there and I can have my mom come pick me up.” Her voice hitched on the last word.
They walked down the sidewalk, heading toward Jonquil and Walker’s car. It wasn’t until they’d turned the corner and found the Mercedes waiting beneath the yellowed glow of the streetlamp that she trusted her voice enough to speak again.
“That sucked,” she said.
“I’m really sorry about Jeremy,” Walker said. “Not all guys are like that. Most guys aren’t like that. In fact, most guys think guys like that deserve an ass-kicking.”
“It’s not just Jeremy,” she said, climbing into the unlocked car. “And it’s not just Smith. But that’s all part of it—I mean, I don’t want to sound ungrateful. I know I could be dead right now, but what I told your cousin, about not wanting to run from the Reformers because I didn’t want to give up the life I had planned . . . ” She looked over at Walker. “It was true. And everything’s different now. I don’t like different. I don’t like uncertain.”
The sad-edged gleam in Walker’s eyes was a thousand years old, the look of someone who had seen too much and known too much and had a pretty good idea of what lay ahead. He reached over and cupped her face in his hand, his thumb gently tracing the hollow beneath her eye.
“I’m not going to pretend everything’s going to go back to normal,” he said. “But we’re alive and we’re together and your music—it’s the center of everything, now. That’s a start, right?”
Keira leaned into his palm. “It is. And I know things change—that life doesn’t always go exactly the way you think it will. I just never guessed that it would be so . . . ” She paused, searching for the right word.