Moonshadow (Moonshadow #1)(20)

As she told the dog all the reasons why she couldn’t keep him, she reached the ground floor. The pub had several public rooms, and the staircase let out into the game room toward the back, where a dwarf and a human male were smoking, drinking pints, and throwing darts.

She raised her eyebrows at the smoke, pretty sure the two were breaking the law from the articles she had read about the UK in preparation for her trip, while the two males watched her with unbridled curiosity.

Giving them a nod, she strode to the front room. She was starving again, and a classic pub supper of fish and chips or shepherd’s pie sounded heavenly. It probably wasn’t the healthiest thing to feed the dog, but any calories right now had to be good calories for him. A diet of proper dog food could start tomorrow.

As she stepped across the threshold into the front room, the dog started making noise, a cross between a growl and a high whine. Staring down at it in puzzlement, at first she didn’t take in the details of who populated the room.

Then she felt a male presence so heavy with Power it felt like a thunderclap.

Lifting her head, she found the male sitting by the large picture window near the front door. He wore biker’s leathers and was as big as she remembered, this saber-toothed tiger of a man, only now his face wasn’t obscured by the blank, featureless helmet.

She took in the sharp eyes that were at odds with his relaxed demeanor, and the strong features that carried a rough sort of handsomeness. While she was usually good at spotting and identifying those of the Elder Races, she couldn’t place his heritage. But whatever he was, he wasn’t human.

He was looking right at her or, more accurately, at the dog under her arm. He recognized the dog, and clearly, the dog recognized him.

Leisurely the male came to his feet.

A heavy dose of adrenaline dumped into her veins. Bitching under her breath for letting herself get caught unawares—like the magic fucking rope didn’t give you enough of a massive fucking clue to make sure you had your shit together, Sophie—she backed out of the doorway, turned and strode rapidly toward the back.

Her limbs shook. There was too much fight or flight going on for her system to absorb.

Just as it had been when she’d watched the gun swing toward her, and she looked down the wrong end of the barrel as the shooter had taken aim.

She’d reached for the shadows to pull them around her, but she’d been too late for that trick to work. He had already laid eyes on her… and she’d heard a flat tat-tat-tat and felt the individual blows to her body, but by then Rodrigo had dived into the room, his own gun firing.

As her body went into a slow spiral downward, she watched red dots explode across the shooter’s forehead, arm, and chest, and they both fell together….

A part of her still lived in that space, always falling. She was in no shape for a possible confrontation, either mentally or physically. It was too soon. She was still healing. And she didn’t have her Glock or any offensive spells prepared.

But she had the dog, and she’d made it a promise that she would make everything okay. She wasn’t going to give it up to more abuse, not without a fight. Sometimes confrontations came whether you were goddamn ready or not, so somehow she was going to have to suck it up and make something good come out of this.

Her mind sped like a race car hurtling down an open highway. The shadow trick wouldn’t work, not indoors. Not now that he knew she and the dog were here. The best defense she had was the other people in the pub… hopefully… and the best offensive spell she had on the fly, if it came to it, was a raw, inelegant curse she’d learned in the backwoods of Kentucky that would knock her down as much as it would flatten the other guy.

Not an optimal choice.

But hopefully it wouldn’t come to that if she could only get outside first, and under the trees, then she was confident she could pull enough shadows around them to hide them from the most intensive scrutiny, if only the damn dog would stop that high, wacky sort of growly-whiny thing it was doing.

She hissed at it. “Shush!”

Ahead of her, the door to the kitchen opened, and a bolt of lightning came toward her.

Lightning, she saw as she blinked rapidly to clear her overloaded vision, which was just barely contained in a lethal male form that moved toward her like Death shadowing a dying woman…

His face. His face.

She knew his face.

The planes and angles so sharp they appeared as if they had been cut from an immortal blade. The indomitable will in those dark, chilling eyes and the ferocity.

The killer’s grace that was purely inhuman, sleek muscles sliding underneath his skin like a python swimming underwater, and oh my gods, he carried so much Power, even more Power than the other male did. He wore all black, the uncompromising clothes outlining every lethal line of his lean body. Once, Sophie had helped the LAPD catch an infamous gang leader who had always worn black, the better to hide all the blood.

The male newcomer recognized her too. She saw the moment it happened.

His eyes narrowed, and that incredible face of his sharpened—really, she wouldn’t have thought he could have looked any sharper or harder, but he did, he did—and he reached up and behind his head, and she knew what he was doing then too.

He was pulling his sword. The one that had dripped crimson with blood in her vision.

Everything crescendoed inside, the terror and the shakes and the sense of doom connected to the realization that she was trapped, with Lightning headed straight at her and Thunder coming up behind, and all that nightmarish PTSD she had bottled up inside her, and the damn dog hadn’t shut up at all. Now it was yodeling.