“Phoenix,” he murmured, his voice deep, the cadence slow and even, as if he had all the time in the world to do anything that he wanted.
He’d always called me by my last name. I’d figured that was to keep a certain distance between us. Understandable, all things considered. However, the way he said it always sounded as if he were whispering secret nothings in front of the world.
Behind me I heard Jimmy scrambling out of the car. I didn’t spare him a glance. He’d brought me here. He’d soon learn why I hadn’t wanted to come.
In a normal world, it would be considered beyond inappropriate to send a fifteen-year-old girl to stay in an isolated cabin with a single man. In a normal world it would probably be grounds for jail time. But, as already established, mine was not a normal world.
Though I’d seen things in his eyes then that had frightened me, things I didn’t understand, things I wasn’t old enough, wise enough, foolish enough to put a name to, Sawyer had never once touched me with anything other than respect. Maybe he’d been afraid of Ruthie.
But Ruthie was gone.
I continued forward. Sawyer waited. The headlights were still on, the car still running. Even without the light I’d have been able to describe the man who’d walked often enough through my dreams.
He wasn’t much taller than me—perhaps five ten—but he’d seemed huge, imposing from his aura alone. His hair was long, though he always tied it back with whatever he found handy—string, ribbon, the dried intestines of his victims. I’m exaggerating. He rarely used anything as mundane as siring.
His face wasn’t handsome. The angles were too sharp for that. But his smooth bronzed skin and his cover-model cheekbones, which only emphasized the ridiculously long and thick eyelashes that surrounded his strangely light gray eyes, were mesmerizing. Those eyes softened the face if you didn’t stare into them too long and realize that behind their gaze was one of the scariest men alive.
He wore nothing but a breechclout, his typical attire. I’d always wanted to ask him why he walked around dressed like an escapee from a historical romance novel, but I’d never had the courage. Instead I’d done a little research and discovered that what he wore was common to the Navajo.
About three centuries ago.
Most breechclouts were worn with leggings and a loose shirt. Sawyer’s wasn’t. I could see every ripple and curve of his incredible body. As a teen I’d known he was hot; I just hadn’t known then what to do with it.
I’d come here when 1 was fifteen. I was now twenty-five. Ten years added to however the hell old he’d been then, yet he hadn’t aged at all. There wasn’t a line on his face; there’d never been so much as a hitch in his step no matter how long we’d trained, no matter how hard we’d worked.
I stopped over an arm’s length away, feeling the pull to go nearer, gritting my teeth against it. I didn’t want him to touch me. I never had.
This close I could see his tattoos. They wound up his arms, down his back, across his chest. Nearly every inch of skin I could see and most likely every inch I could not had been etched with the likeness of an animal.
My gaze shifted to his right bicep where there’d once been a howling black wolf. There still was—along with a mountain lion across his chest; a tarantula crept down his forearm, a hawk took flight from the small of his back. There were others too, all as predatory as the man whose skin they marked.
Frowning, I lifted my gaze from the wolf tattoo to Sawyer’s face. He was watching me.
Jimmy came up behind me, and I turned. I’m not sure what I meant to ask, but as I moved, Sawyer suddenly reached out, his long, strong fingers wrapping around my elbow. I gasped, both at the scalding heat of his skin and at the touch itself. I’d made certain I wasn’t close enough for him to grab. So how had he?
The wind came up from nowhere, its whisper a single word. “Skinwalker.”
Yanking my arm from Sawyer’s took no small amount of effort, but I did it. Unfortunately, I stumbled into Jimmy, got my too big shoes tangled with his, and fell hard on my ass.
“Dammit,” I muttered. “Isn’t anyone human anymore?”
Chapter 17
Jimmy growled, an unearthly sound that made the skin on the back of my neck and all the way down my arms prickle, as he put himself between Sawyer and me. Sawyer just smiled a smile that made the gooseflesh intensify until I was shivering with it.
“I’m okay. Stop. Shit.” I struggled to my feet, trying to shove myself between the two of them, who were circling and snarling like wild dogs. Jimmy shoved me back.
“Hey!” My hands balled into fists. He didn’t even look at me.
“Don’t touch her,” Jimmy said.
Sawyer’s eyes flattened along with his mouth. “I’ll do whatever I have to. As she will.”