Читать книгу What She Wants - Lucinda Betts - Страница 11

Ann considered her options as Daniel Hallock lay in the sand, gasping for breath like a netted fish. If she could’ve questioned him, she would have. Who had a bounty on her and why did he think—no, know—she could heal? God, she’d love to ask what he knew about the predators.

She’d have to find some other way. Right now she needed to neutralize the threat he presented—and she didn’t mean that in an FBI way. The bastard needed a head injury. Not something life threatening, tempting as that was, but something no one could ignore. Something that would make listeners doubt every word that came from his mouth from this day forward.

When he started talking about shape changing, she wanted people to ask him about fairies and dragons. And aliens. And yetis.

“Ann.” His voice came out like a frog’s croak as he lay on the ground and stared blindly into the sky. With audible effort, he inhaled. “I love you.” He gasped again. “I love…everything about you.”

She snorted through equine nostrils. She couldn’t believe she’d let this bastard go down on her just an hour ago. What had she been thinking?

“You can…” He inhaled with a disgusting, snotty noise. “Trust me.”

Bullshit. His wife thought she could trust him too, no doubt, and look what that got her. Anger roiled through Ann’s veins, pounding more heavily than the Pacific surf on the beach sand.

“Ann.” He held his hands above his head, and she saw his breath was coming easier now. She didn’t have much time. “I knew you were magic the first time I saw you. I…knew it.”

She snorted again and pawed the sand.

“Don’t hurt me.” He lifted his head to plead with her. “Please. You can trust me. Together we can knock science on its ass. You’re real! We’ll get our names—both our names—in Science and Nature. We can rewrite all the rules of biology and evolution.”

Ann had a different kind of history she wanted to rewrite. Slowly she walked toward him, her ears pinned flat against her head. She concentrated her fury into her legs and neck, into her chest. She didn’t need magic for this.

“Don’t hurt me,” he said again. His features wrinkled as he tried to gather his arms behind him and sit. “Please, don’t hurt me.” His hand crept toward the pistol at his side. He was going to shoot at her again.

She stepped back and snapped her forefoot. Her hoof hit his skull with a disgusting thud, and he passed out cold. Blood poured into the sand from the gash.

Killing him would be so easy. Another lash of her forefoot, a slam of her back feet. She could grab his neck between her teeth and crush his trachea. She could shake him, break his neck. Or hell, she could drag him to the water and let him drown.

Still, death wasn’t hers to give. Her ears flicked toward him, and she listened to his heart pounding solidly in his chest. The breeze whipped through the tall palm trees.

She had a choice at this point: she could heal Daniel’s wife, or she could find Daniel’s phone and call 911. This woman—who’d done nothing but confront her husband’s lies—lay smashed at her feet. Under the care of the best American doctors, she would endure years of reconstructive surgery, and she’d still be scarred from that smashed cheekbone.

No real choice existed.

Ann turned toward the woman, and her hooves churned the damp sand. Swiveling her ears in all directions, she listened for intruders. Nothing.

Standing on the beach where the sea pounded the sand, Ann noticed something she’d only registered in the back of her mind earlier: the earth’s power in this spot was stronger here than in most places where she had worked her magic. More power coursed through her veins here than in the Sierra Nevadas. Perhaps the energy released as the water slammed against the beach gave her something additional to harness?

She didn’t have time to care. Taking a deep breath, she focused on the earth’s strength, letting it connect to her hooves and pour into her veins. She locked that air in her lungs for several heartbeats, letting the earth’s might infuse each and every one of her cells, into each mitochondria and into each ribosome.

Another huge wave crashed on the shore, and her magic coiled around her heart, through her veins. She controlled the lust that accumulated as she’d changed shape now. She would stay in control of it until she slipped back into human form—unless the predator tracked her out to this empty beach. Then control was a less certain thing.

She released just a touch of lust and shunted it to the coalescing magic. Desire licked through her veins.

She was ready.

Ann dipped her head toward the prone woman and positioned her horn just above the smashed cheekbone. The tendrils that had wrapped around her heart flowed like water to her forehead, and then ethereal wisps spiraled around her horn, slowly at first and then with increasing speed. Power raced through her veins toward her horn and concentrated there.

Finally, the magic coalesced, becoming nearly solid. The tendrils dripped down toward the woman’s cheek. The green evidence of Ann’s magic pooled on the woman’s face. The deepest puddles formed over the injuries, flooding the left side of the wound in a saturated, moss-green plasma.

Within seconds, Ann sensed the healing, her horn registering every microscopic movement in the woman’s injury. Shattered bone fragments found mates and knitted together, stronger than before; broken blood vessels wormed back into their natural positions and reattached themselves, rejoining torn neighbors. Newly grown cells shunted blood from the injuries back toward the woman’s kidneys, and the bruised flesh healed.

Within minutes, Ann’s magic had restored the woman’s health.

“Where—” the woman started to say. “What happened to—”

Sleep, Ann commanded the woman’s body. You’re safe here. Sleep. And the patient obeyed.

As Ann surveyed the woman, her dark hair fanned out around her; guilt snaked through her guts and suffocated her heart. She had caused the woman’s heartache and pain and demoralization.

If she were in this woman’s shoes, she’d be questioning her very being, her femininity and attractiveness. She’d look in the mirror and see the normal changes wrought by time and stress—the crow’s-feet and laugh lines, the gray hair. She’d look at a forty-year-old woman and see a sixty-year-old crone. And she’d blame herself for her husband’s infidelity.

Ann could help this anguish.

She absolutely shouldn’t—but she could. The last time this type of healing had been used, her mother had broken all the rules and done it. Why? Because Ann lost control.

Still, if ever there’d been a time in her life to break a rule, this was it. She owed this woman.

Ann took a deep breath. Aging wasn’t an illness, but it was biological. She would repair the cellular damage. The woman wouldn’t need to doubt her femininity, and Ann could free herself of at least some guilt.

She dipped her horn again and let her healing suffuse the woman again, lengthening the telomeres in the woman’s cells and washing away all but the necessary free radicals. She repaired all the random mutations in the woman’s DNA, washing the cells in antioxidants.

The effects wrought by years and stress evaporated. The veins in her hands shrank; the flesh of her face tightened and lines vanished. Her hair softened and regained a richer hue. The strands became thicker. The curves of her hips, the flatness of her stomach returned, mirroring the beauty the woman had had at the peak of her loveliness.

Ann walked slowly back to the blanket, hooves dragging in the sand. Cold starlight caught the diamond of her supposed engagement ring, and it sparkled on the checkered beach blanket. It’d been such a beautiful thing. It would’ve looked gorgeous on her finger. She would have cherished it and the man who’d given it to her.

If she’d belonged to the human race. If she’d been normal.

As she changed back to human form, her heart bleak, the memory of her happiness hit her in the chest like a truck. When she’d seen Daniel smuggle the ring into his pocket back at the hotel, no woman alive had ever been happier.

What had she done?

Her hooves gave way to human feet, still warm and dry in her boots. She caught her breath as her breasts became human—and filled with lust. Her bra felt too tight, too constraining, and her core ached with desire. She stumbled with her need—and then pushed it aside. She had no time for this.

She leaned over Daniel’s prone form and fished into his pocket, trying not to cringe at the proximity of her body to his. She took out his cell phone and pulled Kai Atlanta’s business card from her purse.

“Hello.” His deep voice rushed through her, lighting up the neurons kindled by her shape-changing. Lust had a physical taste, she realized, a palpable flavor. Her mouth watered for the salt of his skin.

“Kai.” Her voice was too husky, but she couldn’t help it. “This is Dr. Ann Fallon. We met at the hotel—”

“I know exactly where we met.” The deliberate way he spoke, his deep tone, these made her catch her breath. “Your face isn’t something I’d forget.”

His words might’ve stoked her innate lust under normal conditions, but now…so close to her change…she’d be tempted to fuck him silly if he were here.

“I, um—” She paused, wishing she’d thought this out a little better. “There’s a man lying at my feet—”

“Lucky bastard.”

Again, that unwanted lust twined between her thighs. All doubt was gone. If Kai were here, she knew she’d fuck him. Forget that squeaky-clean appearance, she’d teach him to play dirty. “Seriously, Detective Atlanta.” Her voice sounded steadier than she thought it should. “He’s bleeding.”

“I apologize. I’ll call an ambulance.”

“That’s a good idea, but…”

“But what?”

She concocted a plausible story on the spot. “But I was walking on the beach, and I saw him attacking a woman.”

“Where is she?”

“Also lying at my feet.”

“Bloody?”

“Umm,” she hedged. The woman had been bloody, but now…“It’s too dark.” This implied she couldn’t see but didn’t actually say it.

“So…” He apparently searched for the right words. “You’re surrounded by two bloody bodies?”

“Bodies?” She laughed, but it was a nervous sound. A guilty sound. “No. They’re alive.”

“How do you know?”

“I took their pulses.”

“So if he attacked her, why is he unconscious?”

Ann had had enough of this. If he kept giving her rope, she’d hang herself. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I just know that when he wakes up, the woman here might not be safe.”

“And you know this how?”

“Maybe he has a gun?”

“What makes you think that?”

No way she’d answer that one. “This seems like something for the cops, doesn’t it?”

“It does. Where are you?”

“The victims are at…” She looked at the road, making out the mile-marker signs with an ease a human would have found impossible. “They’re at mile-marker 5 on Silver Strand Boulevard.” She turned and her eye caught the rough-hewn wood building in the distance. Gigantic palms waved by its darkened doors. “South of the Silver Strand State Beach.”

“You called them victims?”

“Well, the woman isn’t moving and something attacked the man, for sure.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.” She gave a low chuckle. “I’m not a detective.”

He didn’t laugh. “Was it you?”

“Me?” She didn’t fake her surprise. How’d he suss out the truth so quickly? “This man’s twice my size.”

“I’ll be right there with an ambulance. Wait for me.”

“I won’t be here. I’m leaving.”

“You can’t leave a crime scene.”

“I’m reporting it, which is all I’m required to do. You have my cell and you know where I’m staying.” Except it occurred to her to wonder where she’d be staying, exactly. Not in Daniel’s room, that’s for sure. If he’d been hunting her, and if the predators had been hunting her…Jesus, what was she going to do? “Just call if you need me.”

“If you’re not guilty, why’re you running?”

Ann knew goading when she heard it. “Why would I stay alone on a dark beach in the middle of the night where people have just been attacked?” She clicked off the phone before he could answer.

Her pleasure at having such an unassailable final word lasted a nanosecond. A person who belonged to the human race would sit in the car. An innocent person would wait. She couldn’t though. Not in Daniel’s car. Not for the cops. Not even for Kai Atlanta.

She had to find the vials.

In that moment, she realized her future was ruined.

Her fiancé had been hunting her for bounty and was essentially already married—and she had missed all the classic signs of his betrayal. The secrecy? She’d bought it, hook, line, and sinker. His utter refusal to let anyone know about their relationship? She’d fallen for that too.

Why had he done this to her?

No, she thought. Why had she let herself be fooled? She hadn’t missed classic signs; she’d ignored them.

It was time to start putting her family first—really first. She needed to find the vials and destroy them, and then she needed to help her mother destroy the lab.

She stepped away from the beach blanket, face to the wind. The salt air rolled over her tongue and filled her lungs. Ann knew why she’d done it, why she’d pulled the wool over her own goddamned eyes. She’d wanted the dream too much. Tired of running and hiding and scheming, she’d wanted a so-called normal life so badly that she’d spurned her heritage and embraced what this man had to offer.

Which was lies.

A gust of wind rolled over the water and hit her in the face, chilling her. Fuck this, she thought to herself. Just fuck this. She planted her feet deep into the sand and ripped power from the earth, giving herself no quarter. Her equine form took hold fast, too fast. Muscles tore and ligaments shredded themselves as her human form gave way—but she didn’t care. She deserved the pain. She craved the pain, but it couldn’t last. Her biology healed damaged tissue as quickly as it ruptured.

So she ran.

She ran like a hurricane roaring over the ocean. Sand flew from under her hooves as she thundered over the turf, waves licking her ankles. She put her head down and let the strength of her legs dominate her spirit. Soon she heard nothing but the pounding of her heart and the wind in her ears.

She ran for ten miles, then twenty. Then she quit counting. The naval base had a huge fence, and she cleared it without trying. She sped past a homeless guy, then a couple walking on the shore. They didn’t notice her. She burst past a virgin, a young woman just shy of maturity. The girl woman saw her, saw her horn, but even her sweet perfume of innocence failed to stop Ann. She’d run until—

The fragrance washed through her like a deluge, the kind that rushes through Southwestern arroyos and leaves them barren.

She knew what she had to do right now—before her job talk in the morning, before she found a safe place to spend the night.

Ignoring the wind rippling through the tall palms, Ann looked up the beach and saw the bright lights curving along Glorietta Bay. A shell crunched beneath her boot as she began to walk toward the hazy crescent of the Coronado Bay Bridge.

Where was he? Her mouth watered for him. Her thighs craved him. She’d do now what she should have done earlier.

The predator had become prey.