"Any mark?"
"Any mark."
"Like this?" I asked and lifted my arm.
The look of utter disbelief on his face when I showed him what I'd scratched into my skin made me burst out laughing. His mouth did a fish thing when he read, Ian was here, and I doubled over.
Seriously, this day just got better and better.
He grabbed a handful of my hair, twisted his fingers into it, then – in an act I felt was a bit much – slammed my face against the rim of the tub. My head bounced back, and a blindingly sharp pain shot through me. He did the face-slam thing a few more times. Eventually it stopped hurting, so there was that.
"Not laughing anymore, are you, bitch?" he said into my ear. He wrenched my head back, and the irony of it all – that there would be a soulless man in a trench coat and fedora standing behind my captor and attempted murderer – struck me as hilarious.
My shoulders shook, and I thought Ian was going to come unglued.
He wrenched me closer until we were nose to blood-red nose and asked, "What?"
I looked past him and tried to raise an index finger to show him, but before Ian could turn around, the man placed his hands on both sides of Ian's head and twisted. Ian's neck snapped with a loud crack. Then he went completely limp and fell to the side.
The man grabbed a towel off my counter, tore it into strips, and wrapped them around my hemorrhaging wrists. "Can't lose all of this," he said with a flirty wink. "We're going to need at least a couple of drops." He frowned down at Ian. "I have to say, he was the easiest human to manipulate I've every encountered."
"He was a douche," I said, trying not to giggle.
"I agree."
He lifted me out of the tub and carried me to the place where he would kill me.
No, really this time.
22
Every girl wants to be swept off her feet.
It's when you put her in the trunk that she starts to freak out.
-INTERNET MEME
"Thankfully, it takes a lot to kill you now," he said to me as his driver took us through the streets of Sleepy Hollow in a black Rolls-Royce. "That Jeffries kid could have beaten you for days. Would not have made the slightest difference."
I was worried about getting blood on his seats, since it was gushing out of my nose and from a gash over my left eye, but he didn't seem to mind at all.
"You're the nicest man who's tried to kill me all day," I told him.
"Thank you." He turned toward me. "I appreciate that. So many people, mostly humans, don't understand what goes into preparing something like a political assassination or a mass suicide or a ritual sacrifice. It's exhausting."
"I hear that."
"And then take somebody like you," he said, waving a dismissive hand, "a god, no less. Talk about prep work. One word: years. That's all I'm saying."
I gave him a horrified expression. That was dedication.
"Oh, and I won't even go into how horrible the record keeping was back in the 1400s."
"Dude, they didn't even have computers." I rolled my eyes. "I don't know how they got anything done."
"Amen."
I was busy trying to spit hair out of my mouth when he started humming the Blue Öyster Cult song "Don't Fear the Reaper." I socked him in the arm. "Oh my God," I said, floored. "You're James."
He tipped an invisible hat, as he'd taken off the aforementioned fedora. "If you want to get technical, this human's name was Earl James Walker. He was your husband's … well, I don't know what. He raised him, if you want to call what he did raising. That guy was a crude piece of work. Anyway, just thought it would be a nice twist."
"I'm married?"
"Oh, sweetheart, you really don't remember, do you?"
I shook my head, causing another rush of blood to ribbon over my eye.
"Well, you won't have to worry about that much longer."
That made me feel better. I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep. But I'd barely managed a few nonproductive Z's when my eyes fluttered open again. I was tied to a rather comfy chair in the middle of a gigantic warehouse with a fire blazing behind me in a stove.
My face had stopped bleeding, and James was wiping it with a warm towel.
"I just want you to know this isn't personal."
"Thanks, James."
There were several men working on this or that, all dressed casually in an array of light jackets and jeans, and a handful of departed stood sprinkled about, probably acting as lookouts.