She felt it through her own nerves as if she’d taken the blow herself.
Noah grunted at the impact, dropping to one knee, hands clamped over his eyes. He let out another roar that rattled her bones. Caro scrambled away from him.
Everything was overbright, disjointed. The world through a shattered mirror.
The keys to the Porsche. She snatched them, stumbling and weaving through a smear of colors out the door. Something broke behind her. He was still bellowing.
She was crying so hard she could barely breathe. She dropped the key fob, had to fish for it in the wet grass. Once she was in the car, her legs couldn’t reach the pedals, and she lost precious seconds groping for the button that slid the seat forward, terrified that Noah would descend upon her in an avenging fury.
She hesitated before putting the car into drive, and groped in her pocket for the phone she’d kept for calls from Gareth. She turned it on. She couldn’t leave Noah like that, after hitting him on the head.
She got the information across to a methodical 911 operator, then turned the phone off and shoved it back into her secret pocket, the one she’d sewed way down in the seam. She’d toss it the next chance she got.
The paramedics would come to his rescue—while she sped away in the luxury car that she’d stolen from him. It was so fucked up. Tragic and twisted. But it wasn’t like she could go back and minister to him. He might actually feel justified in killing her after what she’d done to him.
At least the Porsche wasn’t a stick shift. She’d be doomed.
Still crying, she blundered through unfamiliar streets, constantly expecting sirens, strobe lights. When she finally made it home she left the car in a tow zone. Noah must have a GPS tag on it. She’d leave the keys in her apartment for him to find, along with a note of apology.
When she put the Porsche keys into her pocket, she felt the carved wooden wolf between her fingers. All she needed right now. A reminder of the one moment when he’d seemed real. She fished around in her big overstuffed pockets for the key to her apartment and found it as she ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
She unlocked her door, and went in, reaching for the light—
A hand clamped her throat, stopping her breath. A damp cloth reeking of chemicals pressed down hard over her nose and mouth. Someone else caught her wrists, crushing them.
She fought, frantically. The huge hand holding her wrists tightened, until the small bones and tendons ground together, crushed tight, and oh God, that hurt . . .
Two shadows, in the gloom. One spoke, in a mocking tone, but she could hardly hear him over the roaring in her ears, her thumping heart.
“. . . Olund wants her, he can have her.”
Her lungs demanded air, forcing her to inhale the nasty stuff on the smothering cloth.
It plunged her right down into the dark.
Chapter 21
Noah couldn’t stop bellowing. He crashed against the wall, lurched away and thudded to his knees again. He blinked away streaming tears, his body’s desperate effort to wash the chemicals out of the blistered whites of his eyes.
No longer human. Not even close. Not in this red haze, combat program raging, so far from his right mind he didn’t even know where he’d left it. He could feel it back there, struggling, but it couldn’t reach the control panel.
Arrogant shithead, thinking he was so on top of himself.
He put his fist through the top of the glass coffee table.
He hunched beside it, head dangling, panting. Hannah’s sandwiches were scattered on the glass shards below the metal frame. Fat red drops of blood plopped down from his fingertips. He stared around the room, dripping, panting. Seeking with his burning, swimming eyes. Finding nothing else to break.
Blood trickled down his shins from his lacerated knees. The smell maddened him with ugly associations. His friends at Midlands, the ones that didn’t make it. Sprawling in an ocean of blood. So many of them.
He staggered in the direction of the kitchen. The sink. Yes. That was what a normal human would do. Wash the wound, stanch the blood. Logical. Sequential.
But as soon as he made it into the kitchen, some random association made AVP rage sweep over him again. He forgot the sink, the blood, the logical sequential plan, and swept his arm over the kitchen counter. A big glass blender sailed high into the air in a slow, lazy arc . . .
It hit the brick wall. Chunks of glass rained down over the kitchen. He was peppered with small, stinging darts.
He hardly noticed. His eyes stung, burned. Fucking hurt . . .
He flung containers, flour, pasta, sugar, garlic, contents scattering across the floor, the counter. He was possessed by a demon, programmed to someone else’s specs, and he had to play their game or pay an unspeakable price.