Fated in Stone, page 7
The moment he’d jumped in front of her, taken the bullet meant for her, played out in her mind.
She shook away the thought and, reluctantly, eased away from him. He’d lifted her, one arm under her thighs, the other behind her back, cradling her to his chest. Which, she knew was still injured and bleeding. But he still held her securely, and he wasn’t shaking, despite her weight. Like she didn’t weigh that much at all.
Well, he was the size of a grizzly bear and could become a stone statue. Maybe she didn’t feel heavy to him.
The instant she gave his shoulders a slight push, he let her slide back to her feet, holding her only long enough to ensure she got her balance and then letting her go and taking a step away.
“Sorry I didn’t warn you about that,” he murmured. “But a monster had gotten out and was heading your way.”
Shit. “Did you…”
“I… Well, I don’t know if killed is the right word since I’m pretty sure I didn’t find its ‘head.’ But I sliced through enough of it to slow it down.”
She let out a slow breath through her mouth. And finally remembered he’d had a sword on him. He’d held it in the hand that had been around her back. He’d run at that speed, holding her, with a sword in one hand that hadn’t cut either one of them in the escape, all with a chest wound.
Who was he?
“And I wasn’t sure how long it would take for the generator to blow,” he added with an almost embarrassed shrug.
She glanced back, wondering that too…
Just as the generator exploded in an ear-shattering, blinding flash of fire.
CHAPTER EIGHT
They were deep enough in the woods, far enough away from the house, that when the generator blew, they were in no danger. Still, Elle ducked her head and crouched low, an instinctive reaction to watching the explosion flare and spread, breaking through the house, throwing wood and metal into the air in a fireball of heat she felt even this far away.
Secondary explosions happened within the house. Smaller but cumulative. Sending more debris flying through the clearing around the house and into the woods.
She winced at that, really hoping they didn’t start a forest fire.
It took her several seconds of watching the explosions before two things occurred to her. One, that there must have been more explosive material in the lab part of the house, or else the monsters themselves, that black goo whatever it was, were flammable.
And two, that Ben was standing in front of her, blocking her physically from the explosion. Even though it was too far away for any of the debris to reach them.
His chest was still bleeding from a gunshot wound. A wound he’d gotten by jumping between her and a bullet. And now he stood between her and an explosion. As if he’d take that for her, too.
She wasn’t sure whether to be appalled or enamored. The soft, melty feeling in her chest seemed to indicate she was feeling more enamored.
Of a man who had a wolf living inside him that jumped out of his human body and left the human body stone.
Okay, good reminder. Well timed bucket of cold water. No getting romantic notions about heroes and that sort of bullshit. He wasn’t her hero. He was a stranger.
Who’d taken a bullet for her and stood between her and an explosion.
“You okay?” he murmured.
“Fine. Looks like my impromptu bomb worked.”
“Very well,” he said dryly. “But that should take care of…whatever was in there.” He sighed as he stared at the fire now burning bright in the distance, a huge bonfire of destruction. “Unfortunately, probably destroyed any evidence, too.”
He said this quietly, almost to himself.
“Evidence?”
He shook his head. With his back still to her, she couldn’t read his expression. “Doesn’t matter. Had to be done.”
“Evidence of hinky genetics experiments? Because…there was definitely some of that going on in there.”
“There was. More than anywhere else we’ve seen so far.”
We? He’d said “we” before. “Anywhere else?”
He finally turned to face her. “Long story.”
She flicked a look down to his chest. The seeping blood had mostly clotted. Barely anything came from the wound anymore. But there was still blood across his chest and that made her painfully aware he’d nearly died and could still yet die. And she was also very aware that there was still a bullet in him. That he’d been doing all this while a bullet was lodged somewhere in his chest—near his lungs? His heart? That bullet could be doing all kinds of damage, even if they couldn’t see it on the outside yet.
But he’d said his body would push the bullet out or something when he did the thing where he turned to a statue. He needed to do that again. Soon.
“You need to…do that turning to stone thing,” she said, gesturing to his chest.
“I will. I want to make sure none of the monsters escape the fire first.” A furrow formed between his brows as he stared at her.
For some reason, that look made her heart pound. She wasn’t sure why.
But after a moment of that look, he turned his attention back to the burning house.
The debris that had scattered had started small fires, but so far none of it seemed to be spreading very far. The recent rain and damp ground were actually helping. But Elle still nervously watched those small fires, her gaze jumping between them and the house.
If this was a horror movie, something would come lurching out of the building any moment. Either when they had their backs turned, so they’d miss it, or as they watched and they’d know the monsters were still after them. She hadn’t watched horror movies growing up. She’d lived through real-life human monsters and found the fake monsters in a horror too…well, boring. She couldn’t enjoy the movies because they seemed ridiculous to her and not in a fun, good way. Some people she knew who’d faced horrible things loved watching horror movies because they were so obviously fictional. She wasn’t one of those people.
But as she stood there waiting for real-life monsters that weren’t humans but were actual monsters that might appear in those horror movies, she started to regret not watching more. Be helpful to have a playbook for this kind of thing. What was it called…? Jump-scares? She was waiting for the jump-scare. And that waiting had her anxiety high and her nerves pulled tight.
She hadn’t thought she’d made a sound, a move, a gesture, but just as her anxiety was climbing so high it was clogging her throat, she felt a large hand wrap around hers, squeeze gently. She squeezed back, comforted much more by that gesture from a virtual stranger than she should have been.
When nothing lurched from the house after a few minutes, she took a deep breath and reluctantly released Ben’s hand. But neither of them moved. They just stood there, watching the house burn, watching the small fires that had started.
And as they watched, the realization that she’d lost Professor Arron sank in once more. She’d have to start tracking him again as soon as she could. First get Ben taken care of. Then she’d have to leave to follow the professor.
Although. She glanced at Ben from the corner of her eye. He was going after the people holding the professor, wasn’t he? That’s why he was here. Maybe they could…work together?
She didn’t usually work closely with other people because she didn’t want them to realize her tracking skills weren’t entirely normal. But this man occasionally turned to stone. A little thing like psychic hunting skills probably wouldn’t faze him. Right?
But she didn’t actually know him or what he’d intended here. Not really. He knew all about monsters, and he’d been trying to find out what was happening inside. She presumed he’d intended to stop it. He wouldn’t have burned the place to the ground if he wanted to…use the monsters or study them or anything.
And he’d gotten shot saving her life. He’d risked his life to get her past the monsters. And he’d trusted her to blow the generator.
She wouldn’t call this feeling trust. She trusted no one—a lesson from her father she’d never shaken, even when she’d tried—but maybe acceptance of a possible ally?
Lot of hedging in that thought.
She considered how to bring up their mutual goal of finding the professor and the monster again, when his barely audible curse made her look back at the house.
Some of the smaller fires were growing. And the conflagration of the house was throwing huge plumes of black smoke into the night sky. The stench had finally reached them. Not a nice campfire smell. The smell of things already grotesquely stomach-churning without heat applied got infinitely worse when set on fire. Enough to make her gag. She put a hand over her nose in a vain attempt to block the stench. But still. Gross. Whichever poor first responder got here to put that out was going to throw up if they took their masks off.
But the smell wasn’t the scary part. The scary part was the fact that the fire seemed to be spreading now. A tree behind the house had caught and was burning fast. That was going to spread to the other trees soon.
Shit. Exactly what they didn’t want to happen.
“Now what?” she asked around her hand since she wasn’t prepared to move it from pinching her nose closed.
Ben scowled.
But before he could answer, the sound of thunder rolled through the woods. And the next thing she knew, a torrential downpouring of rain soaked them. Sheets of rain so thick she couldn’t see more than a blur of orange and yellow where the house was. She was so suddenly and completely wet, she might as well have stepped into a shower. Only this was worse. She’d have had time to adjust to a shower. And it would be warm. And she wouldn’t—probably—be fully dressed. Soaking wet cargo pants were not very comfortable. Though they were better than jeans. That was something, she supposed. But since she wasn’t wearing a jacket, the cold rain left her shivering.
The downpour seemed to contain the fire, though. The orange and yellow blur looked to be shrinking. Their surroundings got progressively darker, until the size of remaining glow looked like little more than a campfire in the distance.
Ben glared up at the sky as Elle said, “That was…fortuitous. Weird. But lucky.”
“Maybe,” Ben said.
“Didn’t think we were due rain today,” she both said and asked as she shaded her eyes and glanced up toward the sky. There hadn’t been any clouds earlier. And she hadn’t noticed any rolling in since they left the house. But she’d had bigger things on her mind since then—like monsters that shouldn’t really exist. Clouds could have crept in while she wasn’t paying attention.
The rain was freezing, though, so while it might have been a handy way to put the fire out, she had to wrap her arms around herself in an attempt to stop her shivering. No handy raincoat in her pockets either. She had one in the trunk of her car, along with all sorts of backup and emergency gear. But her car was a few miles away.
Walking through this icy rain back to the car was going to be miserable.
“We need to go,” Ben said, still looking up at the rain suspiciously.
“My car is a couple miles away. Where’s yours?”
“We’ll go to yours. Mine’s…farther.”
Farther? He must have come in on foot from a long way away.
Well, given how fast he moved, maybe he just ran here from the closest town. Did he need cars and things like that?
“You still have a bullet in you,” she pointed out.
“Let’s get out of the rain first, worry about that then.”
The wound on his chest was fully clotted and closed now. The blood on his chest washing off in the rain. His bare chest. In freezing rain. After he’d nearly died less than an hour ago.
She took his hand. “This way.”
Taking him to her car had to rank up there with one of her least paranoid actions. And the paranoia instilled by her father rose to warn her this was a bad idea. She didn’t know him. He could be the enemy.
Blah blah blah.
He’d gotten shot saving her, and so far, he hadn’t done anything but help her. From things she didn’t even have a name for. The paranoia had a place in this world—which was an irony she hated—but in this case, she ignored it. Ben, whatever he might be, wasn’t her immediate enemy. He was an ally. And he was an ally that was injured and caught out without even a t-shirt in the soaking, freezing rain.
An instinct to take care of him, to ensure he was okay, overrode the distrust and fears she carried through most other interactions with strangers, especially strange men. And wasn’t that something she’d have to analyze soon. Once she was out of the rain.
Ben turned away from the banked fire reluctantly, but another glance at the sky had him picking up speed as they hiked through the trees. The way he kept glancing back in the direction of the house, then up at the sky, had Elle’s instincts humming. She held her questions, though. Her fingers were so cold she could barely feel them, and she was going to start trembling uncontrollably soon. Everything but getting out of this icy rain and to the pseudo safety of her car took a backseat.
They weren’t very far away from the house before the darkness got so thorough, Elle could no longer see where she was going. Shit. She stopped long enough to take a penlight out of her boot. The light didn’t illuminate much at all, a tiny circle of visibility a foot in front of her, but it was enough to keep her from panicking or twisting an ankle.
“I can see,” Ben said, as if he’d sensed her panic. “What direction are we going? I’ll make sure we get to your car.”
Why was that such a relief and not scary? “West and a little north. I pulled off a dirt road without a name, but it was only about a couple of miles from the closest paved road.”
She moved in the direction unerringly. She could feel the car with that ability to track things that mostly she used to track people. She hadn’t consciously tried to use that skill to find her car, but when she was looking for something, anything at all, the skill kicked in. She needed to find the car in the middle of the woods, her tracking skills turned on, and she could sense where she had to go.
So she pointed that direction, using her little penlight in its waterproofed casing to keep from tripping, and relied on Ben’s eyes to ensure she didn’t walk off a cliff or into a tree.
The hike back to the car felt a lot longer, and a lot more precarious, than the hike to the house had felt. By the time they reached her used Corolla, the rain had stopped, leaving muddy puddles to squish up around her boots. This far from the fire, the stink of burning things no longer filled her nose or coated her tongue, and the soft scent of rain-soaked pines and earth would have been a pleasant reprieve if she wasn’t nearly numb from being so cold.
Her hands shook as she took her keys out to open the door, and she dropped the fob into the mud despite her best efforts. She cursed and swept the keys up, her fingers clumsy and awkward as she pressed the button to open the doors and then opened the trunk.
“You’re probably freezing,” she said to Ben, because if she was cold, he had to be. “Get in. I’m just getting out some blankets.” She had a few thick wool blankets in the trunk and a sleeping bag that would help warm him up.
He didn’t get into the car, though. He stayed at her side, scanning the surroundings, his shoulders stiff, the sword still in hand. He wasn’t shivering, which she took as a good sign. He also didn’t drop his vigilance.
She handed him a wool blanket, which he took without looking and absently wrapped around his shoulders one-handed, which was a neat trick.
He glanced at her briefly and said, “Wrap up too. You’re shivering.”
Who was taking care of who here?
She hid an irrational smile as she pulled out the sleeping bag and one more wool blanket. She had some emergency mylar blankets she added to the pile, but she found those less useful than they were supposed to be. Especially when she was wet.
When she’d gotten everything she needed to keep them warm, she walked around the car and dumped everything into the passenger seat. Then she pulled out some bottles of water from the trunk and put those into the car’s cupholders. Satisfied, she closed the trunk and motioned Ben into the backseat.
“If you’re going to do that stone thing, you’ll need to lay down in the back. I presume you don’t want casual observers on the highway to see you.”
He grunted. She took that as a yes.
They were both inside the car, the doors closed and locked, when she heard Ben take a long, slow breath, letting it out in a whoosh that sounded like relief.
“Worried about more monsters coming for us?” she asked.
“Something like that.” He shoved the sleeping bag she pushed at him back to her. “You use that. I won’t be cold in a minute. My wolf won’t be wet.”
“Okay.” That was going to take some getting used to. And sparked a lot of questions. Which, very soon, he wouldn’t be able to answer. And also, why did she think she’d have to get used to this since they were separating soon? “Where am I taking you? Back to your car or…?”
He frowned, but the expression didn’t look so much worried as…awkward. Charmingly awkward. How strange. She wouldn’t have thought of him as awkward about anything.
It was too dark inside her car to see him clearly. She realized she hadn’t really looked at him closely since this all started. A little, while he’d been wounded. Enough to know generally what he looked like. But…at the same time she didn’t. She wanted to study him closer, to really see him. In the light. When they weren’t bedraggled from rain, or nursing a chest wound, or racing from monsters.
The desire to get a really good look at him in good light without scary stuff happening was pretty overpowering. And yet, she was about to say goodbye to him.
Maybe.
She remembered her earlier thought, that they had a mutual goal and could maybe work together. How did she bring that up?
And why was she so reluctant to say goodbye?
