Not unless he suddenly sprouted blue tights and a red cape. The hope of escape morphed into despair and resignation and finally reckless pissed-off-ness. No fucking way was he going to die running. He stopped, turned, and faced the truck barreling toward them. The tires ate up the ground at an indecent rate. He clutched Isleen tighter to his chest. For her sake, he wanted it to be a quick death. No more lingering. No more pain.
That thought infuriated him. None of this was right. They shouldn’t be on the verge of death. Again.
The truck kept coming—now twenty-five feet away.
Everything slowed, happening as if through the quicksand of time. A white dandelion floaty meandered on the breeze directly between them and the truck. His heart no longer ran a staccato rhythm. Duh…dum. Pause. Duh…dum. Pause.
His life didn’t flash before his eyes. The future did. Isleen’s future. In an ethereal dream beyond time, her skin was gilded by firelight, her eyes devoid of sadness and fear, her body whole and healthy. She smiled, an expression so full of warmth and tenderness and undiluted joy that it plunked itself down inside his heart and wouldn’t leave.
He ached to create that kind of smile on her face, but their lives were over. It all could’ve gone so differently if he’d only listened to her, believed in her, found her years before now.
The air changed, displaced by the truck only a few feet from them. Heat from the engine blasted his face, smelling of burning oil, gasoline, and a scent reminiscent of popped corn. He locked eyes with the bitch. Her pudgy lips ripped back over her teeth in a snarling scream.
Xander knew anger—his best friends were fury and rage—but the look on the bitch’s face went beyond mere anger all the way to unholy.
The truck imploded.
The sound was supersonic, a resonation that rippled through his skin and muscle to rattle his bones and shake the earth underneath his feet. Metal and glass and fire shot outward, skyward, backward, in a near-perfect arc of destruction. Flaming debris rained around them.
He stood there holding Isleen, watching it happen, not believing the message his eyes sent to his brain.
“What the…?” The last of the truck parts hit the ground. The pieces burned. That’s all that was left—pieces. Nothing touched them, like they resided under an invisible dome of protection.
He glanced down at Isleen for an answer, but she was unconscious, her head lolling so limply on her neck it looked as if he was carrying a corpse.
*
The buzzing and drilling of unrelenting noise—conversations, beeping machines, TV, the rumble of the overworked AC—all threatened to shatter Xander’s two-fisted grip on sanity. He sat in the emergency room waiting area, elbows on knees, hands cupped over his ears to filter out some of the chaos. The only consolation was that no one spoke to him. Tuning in on top of everything else would be a formal invitation for the Bastard to make a guest appearance.
The day had already gone to shit, but Xander didn’t need the lowlight to be the Bastard going on an angry rampage that ended with him either in jail or in a hospital room recovering from bashing his face through a concrete wall. Been there. Done that. Twice. He didn’t want to see what kind of charm the third time would offer.
It’d been four hours since the officer who’d found them had rushed them to the emergency room. Xander had tried listening in only to the conversations about Isleen, but trying to filter out all the noise to follow one thread was exhausting and overwhelming. The only thing he knew for sure—she could just as easily live as die.
His heart twinged at the thought. Isleen and the word die shouldn’t be in the same dictionary. She deserved to live. He needed her to live. To have a life. A good life. One that made up for everything she’d endured. One that made him feel less guilty about drowning her pleas for help with alcohol and denial.
Across from Xander, a haggard mother tried to keep a grip on her writhing, squirming toddler. Twin braids of snot drizzled from the kid’s nose. He sucked in his top lip, slurping up the mucus. The kid looked right at Xander’s scars, then opened his mouth and coughed a wet snapping sound so full of phlegm that Xander cringed. God, he could practically feel the brat’s germs splatting on his skin.
He looked around for another place to sit. A lone man holding a pink plastic bucket sat in the other section of seats. Xander stood to move to that area, but the man burped and belched and then barfed in the bucket. He wasn’t a quiet barfer, and if the stench was any indication, it was coming out of more than one orifice.
Fucking goddamned public places. The man continued to vomit. The toddler started screaming. Xander’s grip on himself slipped. A buzz of electricity sparked underneath his skin. The edges of his vision went white. That shit about seeing red was just that—shit. He saw white. He needed to get out of here. Now. Right now. The Bastard was on the verge of ballistic.
Xander sprinted through the maze of seats for the outside doors.