I hobbled to my feet and stared as the bird’s beak tore into his face. Something thudded at my feet. A burning scent stung my nostrils, and I nearly vomited again.
Without waiting to find out what was going on, I ran a straight line in no particular direction. The forest had to break eventually. I stumbled twice. On the second fall, I avoided landing on my wrist, but my head smacked into a rock. As I struggled with one arm to get up again, I fought off another wave of nausea. The forest was spinning. Which way had I been running?
I staggered forward. I couldn’t think. Couldn’t stop shaking and crying. Couldn’t breathe.
Light swept between the trees.
Headlights.
I bolted. Footsteps pounded behind me again. So close to where the forest walls broke. I pushed myself harder, but someone grabbed me tight around my arms and stomach. The excruciating pain in my wrist intensified, and I thrashed to break free.
“Shhh. You are safe.” The soft voice was masculine and deep.
An unexpected sense of security swept over me. My desire to escape drifted, replaced by a warming tingle in my mind and a soothing voice like a whisper: Relax.
I couldn’t escape the odd sense of peace that seemed to press into my skin and seep into my mind from the outside. Peace that was not my own.
The man lifted me. “Please do not draw any further attention.”
My breathing slowed. Sleepiness overpowered my senses. I blinked, fighting the drowse, taking in the man whose arms I lay limply across. Smooth, dark skin and kind, dark eyes.
Another figure walked up behind him and placed a hand on his shoulder, face still shrouded by the shadows.
My eyelids drooped. Closed. My mind screamed, but my voice failed. The world tilted as the man laid me down, the persistent rumble of an engine beneath me. I struggled for wakefulness, but soon failed.
Chapter 6
SOMETHING WET on my scalp. A droplet trickling into my ear.
I struggled with the weight of my eyelids. Through the fog, a figure with shoulder-length black hair dipped a rag in a nearby dish of water, then dabbed it near my temple. I blinked until my vision cleared.
“Ivory?” I rasped.
“Yeah, sweetie, it’s me.”
Across the room, an old dresser with shallow incising and grooved panels held a television airing an episode of some crime-investigation saga. As I eased my head to one side, pain pulsed through my body. Black lace curtains framed a bay window beside a red-oak bookshelf, full of familiar books. The Scarlet Letter, Don Quixote, and Oedipus the King.
Ivory’s bedroom? I didn’t remember falling asleep here.
I didn’t remember falling asleep at all.
Outside the window, the dark, cloudless sky and the breeze in the trees made the night air appear thin and cold, but the air in the room was almost too hot.
From the corner of my vision, I saw someone standing in the middle of the road, but when I looked over, they were gone.
Great. I’m hallucinating.
The door creaked open. Charles stepped in, his stone-washed, button-up jeans hugging his thighs and his black short-sleeve shirt tight against his chest. My gaze trailed up, taking in the soft glow of his bronzed skin and the way his toasted-almond hair fell in perfectly careless tousles to obstruct his enchanting teal eyes.
But as his gaze met mine, the events of the previous night rushed back—the attack, my pain. All his fault. Thankfully the pain wasn’t as bad as I would’ve expected for a broken wrist and a crack to the head.
Before I could speak, a man with dark skin and neatly-formed dreadlocks followed him into the room, dressed in black dress pants and a deep red shirt with a plum sheen. His hands clasped tightly in front of him and his suit jacket lay neatly folded over one arm.
He’d saved me.
The unfamiliar man clenched his jaw, hanging back by the door, balling his right hand into a fist and relaxing it over and again. Maybe he was angry with Charles. I wouldn’t blame him.
Pain pulled into my lungs as I breathed. “What happened?”
Ivory helped me sip a glass of water. “You’ve been in and out for a few hours. I hope you aren’t too groggy from the pain killers.”
“I’m sure that hit to my head didn’t help.”
Ivory gave me a worried smile.
I tried to sit up, but pain shot through my arm. I crumpled back to the bed and raised my wrist. It was swollen to twice the normal size and twisted at an odd angle.
I should’ve freaked out, but I’d never been one to panic when I should. Yes, a stubbed toe was like world war three for me, and maybe I was a little scared of the dark, but put me in the center of tragedy and I could be eerily calm.
Or maybe some part of my brain just shuts down when things are too much for me to handle.
“Charles left me,” I whispered.
Ivory nodded. “He went for help.”
A cold sensation pushed on my mind, followed by another warm tingle, and my thoughts returned to the same unnatural stillness I’d felt in the car and at Club Flesh. Something was happening with my curse. Some kind of shift. Whatever it was, I was certain last night was to blame.