Her body was still surrounded by flames, her red hair almost vanishing within them. She looked like a phoenix; a goddess. She was so damned beautiful and exotic, that he forgot all about the pain in his arm as he stared at her.
She fell to her knees in front of him, reached out to touch him, and then stopped herself, as if noticing for herself for the first time that she was still on fire. "Shit!"
Cindy yanked her hands back, and Jack watched, fascinated, as the flames around her vanished, as if all the air in the room had been sucked out.
She smiled weakly at him, but he could see that her body was trembling. "Hopefully I didn't melt the key."
"The key?" Jack asked, and hissed again when Cindy leaned over him and unlocked the cuffs around his wrists.
Cindy winced and helped him with his arm. It was a pain in the ass getting it curled around to his front where he could hold onto it.
She'd gone up against a collector. That bothered him too much.
"You fought the collector? You won?" he asked.
Cindy reached out and gently touched his face, her fingers tracing over his quickly swelling eye. "I heard what they were doing to you. I couldn't just leave you down here."
"You should have. Cindy, do you know what happens to paranormals who fight against the collectors? He would've been within his rights to do whatever he wanted to you. He could've killed you." Jack paused for a second, a question quickly forming in his mind. "Where is he? Is he dead?"
"I didn't kill him! He's upstairs!" Cindy said, and the way her voice cracked told him exactly how close she was to crying.
Cindy was definitely not a fighter, in spite of her powers.
"I wasn't accusing you. Wasn't trying to, anyway, but what did you do to them?"
Cindy ran her hands through her hair, which made it look even wilder than before. "The collector's knocked out upstairs, bitch case worker got away, though. We need to get out of here."
Jack tried to think of anything Cindy could do with her power over fire that would allow her to harmlessly render a man, a collector no less, unconscious, and nothing came to mind.
"What did you do to him?"
"Nothing, it wasn't even me," Cindy said.
"It was me."
Jack looked back to the door, and he was shocked to hell at the sight of Jessica, standing there in the doorway, hand on her hip and staring right at Cindy and Jack.
"When did you get here?" Jack asked, and with only a minimal amount of struggling and Cindy pulling on his good arm, he got to his feet.
"You know her?" Cindy asked, staying close to Jack and holding her arms around his waist, as if he needed help standing.
He didn't correct her to stand on his own because he liked the way she held him. He did, however, take one step forward and angle his body so that he was in front of Cindy a little. Jessica was still a hunter, like him, and with her here, things were a little more complicated.
"That's Jessica," Jack said, watching the other woman carefully, noting every twitch of her hand, and the way she shifted her weight from one leg to the other.
She clearly didn't want to be here right now.
Cindy paused, clearly recalling who Jessica was. "But...you never said she was a paranormal!"
Jack frowned. "She's not."
"This really isn't the time to be having this conversation. We need to get out of here, right now," Jessica said.
Jack couldn't look away from her, though. She looked as normal as ever in her black heels and grey skirt. Her long hair was pulled back tightly behind her head in a ponytail. There was nothing paranormal about her. However, he'd once said the same thing about Cindy.
"How did she handle the collector?" Jack asked.
Right about then, the case worker still in the room with them groaned, shifted, and then looked up at them with wide and frightened eyes. Some of the hair on the man's head was burned away, his glasses were missing and his clothing was charred in some places.
The poor guy looked ready to scream. Or start running. This obviously wasn't what he'd signed on for.
Jessica's hand shot out, and a blast of cold blue ice flew from her fingertips, like a snowball, and it struck the guy right in the face with such force that he fell backwards and even skidded across the floor on the trail of ice that had suddenly appeared beneath him. He didn't move, but his chest continued to rise and fall, so he was alive. He was knocked out. He'd likely stay unconscious for a while.
Jack slowly turned his eyes away from the man on the floor to his ex-girlfriend. Her hand was blue and glassy from what she'd just done. A tiny bit of steam even wafted from her ice blue fingers in the warm room. As her hand and fingers moved and flexed as if there was nothing out of the ordinary, the blue slowly vanished, replaced with her regular pink skin.
"You're a paranormal," Jack said, and it wasn't a question. Cindy was right.
"Don't look at me like that, Jack," Jessica said, and she looked away from him, as if embarrassed. Or ashamed. Jack remembered how ashamed Cindy had been when she'd confessed what she was to him, so he wanted to be delicate about this.
"Does Ethan know?"
"He's my brother. Of course he knows. Can we get out of here already?"
Fuck. Jack put his good arm around Cindy's waist and started moving toward the door. The three of them made it up the stairs quickly, and then Jack realized that his right knee was hurting more than he initially thought.
He pushed past it. He wasn't about to let any pain show.
"Wait," Jack said, pulling Cindy back to his room. Jessica followed them.
"What the hell are you doing?" she demanded.
Jack took his phone, but only so he could erase the messages on it before ditching it later on. His computer though...
He looked at Cindy. "Can you overheat it?"
"What do you mean?" Cindy asked.
"I've got pictures of us on the hard drive. Old emails, that sort of thing. You need to burn it. If we're getting out of here then it'll be easier for us to slip by if they think we're traveling separately."
Cindy's eyes widened, but then she looked at his computer, and Jack watched, fascinated as she held out her hand, and her skin brightened, right before the smell of burning metal and plastic hit the air. The machine started to smoke next, but it didn't actually catch fire.
"Don't want to burn the house down around us," Cindy explained, and winced at Jack.
He opened one of his drawers, moved around several articles of clothing, and then yanked out his emergency envelope, and his wallet. He was going to have to leave his truck behind. He didn't want anyone searching for it on the road.
"I know you didn't do it," Jack finally said, the words coming out of his mouth easier than he thought they would.
"My car's parked out back," Jessica said. "I'll drive you out of here. I'll drop you off wherever you want me to, and you're going to be on your own after that."
The way she had trouble meeting Jack's eyes when she said that...fuck, she was really struggling with this.
He wasn't going to accuse her of anything. She didn't even have to be doing this. She didn't owe him a thing, and she was putting herself in danger just by being here, never mind offering him and Cindy a lift in her car.
He wanted to turn down the offer, but because Cindy was with him, he didn't.
"We don't have far to go. There's a storage unit about twenty minutes away. Drop us off there and I'll take care of the rest," he said, and the three of them quickly got out of the house and into the back seat of Jessica's car, just as the sound of sirens in the distance became noticeable. He and Cindy ducked their head low in the back as Jessica drove them out of there.
Chapter Sixteen
"Jesus Christ, Cindy, what happened to you?"
Cindy coughed as she looked up at the door. She must've dozed off somehow, though she wasn't sure how that had happened, considering the pain.
Jamie stood in the doorway, and one second later he was down on his knees helping her up.
She was already pushing against him. She tried to fight him off, but he caught her wrists before she could hit him. "Don't touch me. Don't touch me!" Cindy yelled, crying out her words as the pain in her womb intensified.
Jamie didn't yell at her or shake her. He just continued to hold onto her, restraining her. It didn't hurt, but she couldn't stop herself from panicking.
"Cindy, Cindy, look at me. Breathe and look at me," Jamie said. "I'm not going to hurt you, okay? Fuck, you're bleeding. You need a doctor."
Bleeding? Cindy looked down and she only noticed the thick and wet sensation between her legs just as her eyes landed on the bright patch of blood that soaked her jeans.
Cindy wailed, and she all but collapsed against Jamie's chest.
Jamie held her. Petting her hair and rocking her. "I got you. You're okay now. Cindy, who did this to you?"
She told him. She told him how Stacy and Stephanie had attacked her, and the despair that washed over Jamie's eyes told her well enough that he didn't condone this. She wasn't sure why she thought he'd been apart of it. Her panic had taken over her mind, she supposed.