Bring Me to Life（Time Walkers 1）(5)
“Get in the car,” she ordered.
He didn’t quibble about who drove. It was her car, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to drive with how muddled his brain had become in the last five minutes.
“Where are we going?”
Anger sparked. “You’re just going to believe what I’m telling you and let me cart you off to only God knows where?”
She snorted at him as she started the car. “It’s either listen to you or run off to snuggle with a toothy vampire. I’ll take my chances with you, thanks.”
“Why?”
She shrugged as she pulled out of the church parking lot. “They helped me kill Vincent. Why would I trust them?”
He gritted his teeth. The guilt rolling off the woman was stifling. It was difficult to breathe around her. At least she’d suffered as much as he had—though not as long. At this point in her life, she’d aged only ten years, while for him, death had come two hundred years before. What had once been a two-and-a-half-year age gap was now roughly one hundred ninety-three years. That in and of itself was enough to fuck with his head. Time walking had never before given him a headache, but his temples started throbbing.
He settled his large frame in the passenger seat of her car and looked at her. Damn. The woman was a knockout. He’d seen many different women in many different times. None of them had the same effect on him she did. He snarled at her response. “Helped you kill Vincent?”
“Yeah,” her tone went subdued. “But I’m sure you already know the details.” She perched on the seat, sitting at an angle too close to the steering wheel. “Do you really know him? Have you seen him since…h-he d-died?”
His jaw worked as he came up with the answer to give her. He hated Felix. At this moment, he hated that bastard more than dying. There may or may not be some kind of apocalypse needing to be thwarted here. This was probably just some elaborate scheme to get him to face Bryna. Damn the man. This sucked. He hated thinking he made a wrong assessment. Innocent people died when he did that, and it had been more than a century since he’d made those kinds of colossal mistakes. “Yeah. I know him.”
“Is he…” She shook her head. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
“Know what?”
“Where are we going?” she countered.
“I have no idea.” His tone went softer. “I’m just supposed to keep you alive so the apocalypse doesn’t happen.”
She turned after the stop sign. “Maybe I should just take you home.” She gave a half-grin. “That is, if Peggy doesn’t try to attack you with her umbrella. I think you scared her yesterday.” She bit her lip and then let out a long sigh. “You really can’t kill me?”
His brain twitched. “You want to die?”
She drove to the next turn a mile down the road before she responded. “Yes. No. I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem right that I am alive and he isn’t. You know?”
“Yeah.” His tone went even softer.
Her head cocked to look at him when they got to a stop sign. “You sound familiar. Like I should know your voice.”
His face twisted. “You should, or at least, you used to know it.”
She stopped in the middle of a side street and looked at him. “Are you dead?”
“Yes.”
Her back went straight as she started driving again. “Okay. Am I dead?”
“No.”
“You’re not helpful. What the hell is going on?” she snapped at him.
“I’ve already told you—”
“Yeah, yeah, I can’t die or the apocalypse happens. Great. Just want I wanted.” She slumped in her seat and almost missed stopping at the red light. The tires squealed, and she cursed softly under her breath. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
That was so Bryna. It had been adorable then, and now…It made his chest hurt. “Maybe you should pay attention to driving.”
She glared at him and snapped her mouth shut for the remainder of the trip to her home. He’d wondered about that from time to time. Felix hadn’t allowed him to find anything out about her, even when he’d been allowed to find out his mother had also been a time walker. He said it could sabotage the mission, and before, he’d handed Vincent a line of crap about needing to come to terms with his own death. He was beginning to wonder if the terms he’d come to were the right ones.
Bryna was one fucked-up chick. He faced demons and monsters and vampires and all kinds of crazy scary shit, but none of them quite hit the fear factor in the way she was doing right now. Marks were usually easy to protect. They wanted to live and actively helped in their own survival. He wasn’t sure Bryna was going to help him. His stomach lurched, and he had to fight to keep from getting sick. Goddamn it! She’d killed him, and she didn’t even bother denying it. Even the guilty could feel guilt, so why the hell did he feel like a huge bastard for rubbing it in? He clenched his hands into fists at his side.
“Dude!” she snapped at him. “You’re shaking my car.”
He forced his muscles to relax. The power inside a time walker could cause an external physical reaction at times of high emotion. Bryna wanting to die played all kinds of hell on his system. He’d have to watch it, or he’d shake the beat-up old sedan to pieces. “Sorry to inconvenience you with having to live.”
She whipped into the parking lot of a grungy-looking building and parked in the space furthest from the door. She drummed her fingers against the steering wheel for a full minute before she turned and glared at him. “It comes and goes. Today is Vincent’s birthday, and that makes me particularly neurotic. I help people. Did you know that? Do you care?” She got out of the car. “No. I don’t think that you do, and I don’t care that you don’t. Save the world from the apocalypse, but can you please just stop being a jerk? I didn’t do anything to you.”
His brow winged up, and his laugh had a bitter twist. He got out of the car and looked at her over the roof. “If you say so, sunshine.”
For a moment he thought she was going to come over the roof after him. “Don’t call me that.” Her voice went into a scary monotone. “Don’t you ever call me that.”
“Where are we?” He changed the subject because he really didn’t want her finding out who he was. This could get real bad real fast if she did. Damn Felix.
“My apartment building. Isn’t it pretty?” Her grin was so plastic she could have been recycled.
He looked at the run-down building. Twenty years of dirt covered the cracking stone walls, and mortar was missing. The building sign hung on one nail to the side and swayed in the faint breeze. “You live here?” Hell, he’d had a better place when he was on his own at sixteen.
“I don’t hold jobs very well, and I quit my last one last night.” Good thing he was already dead or the venom in her words would have killed him.
“Why?” And then he winced because at this point he really should have known better.
“Um, how about so that when I went missing no one would care?”
“Missing? What the hell are you—”
“Hello? A ghost kidnapping me. Or did you suddenly come back to life and decide you weren’t going to cart me off to save the world?”
He was looking like the ass again, and he didn’t like it at all. He snarled at her. “Let’s get you inside. Vampires aren’t the only thing you need to worry about.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” she bit out as she headed for the door with her backpack. “Demons are some pretty freaky things, aren’t they?”
His blood vessels iced. “You’ve fought demons before?”
She looked over her shoulder and smirked at him. “Yeah. Funny that, huh? Come on. I’m hungry.” She walked right into the building without having to unlock any doors.
“Holy hell, woman, this place is not safe.” He glared at her as they walked down the hall to get to her first-floor apartment.
“It isn’t?” Sarcasm twisted her infinitely kissable mouth. “Jeez, Wraith, I would have never guessed if you hadn’t pointed it out.”
“Don’t be a bitch about it.”
She flipped him off and stopped at her apartment. She peeked behind her at the door across the hall. Then she was frantically trying to get her door open. “Stupid stuck lock,” she growled at the door. “Open.” She turned around and grinned when Peggy’s door swung open and Peggy stepped out, with an umbrella in hand and the tiny menace she called a dog yapping at her feet. Bryna moved in front of him and caught the umbrella before it could hit him in the chest. “Hi, Peggy. You were right. My boyfriend is back, and I’m in trouble. As it turns out, he’s not happy with the guys I’ve been seeing while he’s been away. We were out talking last night for hours.”
Peggy’s face scrunched up with suspicion. She jerked her umbrella out of Bryna’s hold and tried to poke Vincent with it, but he moved. “You better look worse than what you really are,” she warned in her frail voice. “Without Bryna here there are a lot of us who’d—”