Iron (The Warding Book 1) (3 page)

“That’s a killer mask by the way. Super realistic.” It had to be a mask, my piss-scared mind reasoned. He was just a day early, that’s all. Must be a real Halloween lover. A pasty, stinky, seven foot tall Halloween lover. All of that was thought in the most hysterical tone an internal monologue can muster, I’m sure. And, of course, I didn’t believe a word of it. It seemed to take forever before I felt the reassuring solidity of the door against my palms. I yanked it hard and kept that smile plastered on my face. “Happy, uh, pre-Halloween. Sorry again for, you know, running in to you and all. Have a nice night!”

I backed out on to the sidewalk and yanked the door shut as quick as I could. My hands remained clenched on the handle, like I was somehow going to hold the damn thing shut against a hulking Goliath like that. My head whipped about, frantically searching for the cab, a cop, a passerby—anything. My former tipsiness was good and gone but my legs were shaking like they would give out at any moment. My fortitude was so not improved by the utterly fucking vacant state of the street. Just me, a handful of empty, parked cars and two street lamps for as far as the eye could see.

Shit, shit, shit.

The door was pulled open and I let go to avoid being sucked in with it. I stumbled back, forgetting my already precarious balance, and tripped over my own feet in a pathetic attempt to keep myself upright. I went down on my ass, yelping from both from the pain and the cold wetness of the puddle I had landed in as it instantly seeped through my jeans. Goliath stood over me and I got a real good look at his Herman Munster sized shit-kickers. He glared down at me with those black, beady eyes. Huge, jagged teeth were revealed as it barked something at me. His voice sounded like marbles being crushed in a steel vice. I wanted to throw up. I couldn’t make out a damn word but I was pretty sure he wasn’t speaking English.

I scooted myself back inch by inch toward the street, pain forgotten, trying to put distance between myself and the demonic pyscho. If my eyes had widened any more, my eyeballs would have fallen out of my skull. I was pretty sure if I showed fear in the face of this thing, it would be just as bad as showing it to a wild animal, but I failed to keep the shrill note of hysteria out of my voice. “Look, I’m really sorry but I can’t understand you. I don’t speak… whatever the hell it is you’re speaking!”

Panic, apparently, did not do a damn thing to temper my smart-ass gene.

He let out a deep Rottweiler-like growl and took another step forward. He straddled me with ease and this time there was obvious rage in his tone, though his fast, guttural words were no clearer. I shook my head in small, quick jerks, afraid to take my eyes off him for too long. The remaining foot and a half to the street seemed miles long. Where the fuck was that cab? “I said I can’t understand you, buddy. Please, just let me go. Whoever you are, I don’t want any trouble. I can forget I ever saw you, trust me!”

With another low, angry sounding growl, he reached down for me. A hand the size of a dinner-plate grabbed me by the front of my jacket and hauled me up into the air like I weighed nothing at all. I screamed long and loud, hoping someone—any-freaking-one—would hear me and come to my rescue. I clenched my hands in the lapels of my jacket and yanked on them, struggling to keep it from tightening around my throat. My legs dangled in the air and I kicked at him with all my strength, but it was like kicking a brick wall. I was pretty sure I hurt my foot more than I hurt him.

The creature held me up, his face only inches from mine, and I gagged at the rotten meat stench of his breath. Those large, canine-like teeth appeared again as his fleshy lips spread into what I can only describe as a grin. A horrible, predatory, movie monster grin. The world was spinning. I closed my eyes and held my breath, trying to work up another scream.

“Put her down.”

Goliath turned his head, his ragged, matted mane of coarse black hair blocking my view of whatever brave soul had come out of the shadows. A dark, ugly rumbling rose from inside the beast and it took me a moment to realize that he was laughing. I squirmed with renewed vigor, trying to free myself from my coat while it was distracted, but it was no use. I had the upper body strength of an inchworm and he had me held tight. It was getting hard to breathe. I gasped out, “Please, get help! Call the police!”

Goliath said something again in that broken glass voice, and this time I could have sworn it sounded like he was mocking my unseen knight in shining armor.

The out-of-view stranger was not deterred. “I said, put her down. Now.”

Oh brave, stupid soul. I had the sinking feeling we’d both meet our ends soon, smeared across the sidewalk by this crazy freak of nature. As if some part of my thoughts were heard—and not the good part, either—the meaty paw that held me up in the air opened and let me go. I fell to the concrete in a heap and felt a burst of agony blaze as my head bounced off the ground.

Then everything went dark.

Chapter Three

Waking up from taking a knock to the head wasn’t anything like I expected it would be. In the movies, our plucky hero (or the swooning damsel; take your pick) comes to slowly; blinking groggily, with everything before their eyes all bright and fuzzy. Maybe they moan a bit from the pain in their head, maybe not; depends on the flick. Then, as they blink faster, the colors deepen and the details around them start to come into focus. Someone appears from downstage to cluck and coo, telling them to remain still because they’ve just taken a nasty spill. Of course that person either is a doctor or someone will shortly leave to get our hero the doctor…

Yeah—so not how it happened.

There was no gauzy curtain that had to be cleared from my lens; not even a sad, pathetic whimper to alert my awaiting friend/lover/doctor to my awakening. Instead, my eyes sprang open and I found myself staring up at a white ceiling. A section just a few inches to the right of me was peeling in a familiar diamond-shaped pattern. It made sense that it was familiar, as it was the ceiling above my bed in the crappy little apartment I had lived in for the past six years. I tilted my head slowly to the side. Ever so slightly, mind you—the teeny-est, tiny-est movement—and waited for that runaway train impact of pain in the back of my skull.

Only, none came. I raised a hand and tucked it under my head. I felt around with gentle fingers, expecting a lump or some icky, sticky blood or something but… Nope. Nothing but regular, old sleep-tangled hair. I scrunched my nose up in confusion and muttered, “What the…?”

I was in my own bed, without any evidence of having gotten the crack to the head I clearly remembered getting. I laid there for a good minute and recounted the events of the night. No one in Gilroy’s had shown any interest in the ugly brute as he came through the door. Even the people closest to me had just given me a weird look, like I was that crazy girl at the bar making a scene. I wondered if, perhaps, I had been. Maybe I had hallucinated the whole thing. Jenni’s hand had been the only one to touch my drinks other than my own, which ruled out someone having slipped me something, but there was that sudden, explosive migraine that had nearly knocked me off my barstool. It, like my earlier buzz, was also gone (of course) but I remembered
that
pretty clearly. Had I suffered a bursting aneurysm or something? Did those even cause hallucinations? At one in the morning, after the night I had just had (or maybe only thought I had just had) the possibility of a solid medical reason for my bizarre night seemed strangely comforting.

I pushed myself up on my elbows and looked around. I was still fully dressed, the rumpled sheets beneath me just as I had left them that morning. My purse and Jenni’s God-awful stilettos were on the floor by the nightstand, as if carelessly tossed. Granted, that was not as neat as I normally would have been with my expensive bag and borrowed goods, but it was not out of the realm of possibility given the combination of liquor and brain bleed. (The likelihood of having suffered some sort of hemorrhage was all but certain to me at that moment.) The room around me was mostly dark—a sidelong glance saw the deep of night outside the window—but the lamp on my dresser was casting a dull circle of light across the foot of the bed. A faint glow reached down the hallway outside my wide-open bedroom door and I recognized it as the familiar blush of my living room lamp left on. The faint murmur of voices told me that I had left the TV on as well.

I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat up, scowling. I had a lot of unanswered questions. How the hell had I gotten home? Had I passed out on the street like a drunk? Had someone peeled me up off the sidewalk and poured me into the cab? Or had I somehow stumbled into it on my own, barely coherent? Had the cabbie had to endure some freaky ranting about a terrible super-goon the whole way home? I scrubbed my face with my hands. I couldn’t even face the worst question of them all: how bad would Jenni rip into me after she heard about this?

I couldn’t make sense of it all. The harder I tried to wrap my brain around it, the less I cared. I was alive. I was home. And while it was probably a good idea to call my doctor in the morning for the next available appointment to get my noggin looked at, the danger I had thought I had been in appeared to have been all in my head. (Because as much as I kind of sort of wanted to believe my brain had gone all loopy on me, my gut told me I’d be feeling a hell of a lot worse if I were in that sort of mortal peril.) I was exhausted. The mere thought of the alarm going off in just a few hours made me want to weep big, fat baby tears. Whatever had happened, it was likely to result in embarrassment of monumental proportions, and I wasn’t up to the amount of self-loathing such antics deserved at the moment. I could chastise myself over my morning combo of coffee and cereal.

I briefly considered a shower—I felt gross—but the will to follow through did not manifest. I resigned myself to an extra-large helping of self-reproach over breakfast and shrugged out of my jacket. A hanger seemed too difficult to unearth; the doorknob would have to do for one night. As I watched its weight settle against the door, I pulled out my earrings and tossed them on the dresser. The rest of my jewelry quickly followed, forming a small heap. My sweater was tossed in the corner that doubled as a hamper, leaving me in a tank top and leggings; close enough to pajamas for me. Getting to the bra was too much work though. I was going to hate myself for all sorts of things come morning—what was another smidgen for pulling an all-nighter going to matter? The living room light beckoned, though the TV had gone quiet. Maybe I had had the forethought to set the sleep timer. That would be just like me; too messed up to take off my damn coat but remembering to preserve the sanctity of my cherished 42” flat-screen.

I turned right and checked the front door first, shocked to find I had had the wherewithal to throw both locks on the door. Mentally patting myself on the back, I padded back down the hall, past the bedroom and darkened kitchen doorway, making a pit stop in the closet-sized bathroom. A look in the mirror only brought more bewilderment to the party. Though I had expected raccoon eyes and a smudge or two of sidewalk grime, my face was clean. Apparently I had also had the presence of mind to wash up before passing out fully clothed. That pretty much clinched the Leaking Blood Vessel In My Cranium hypothesis. Never on a stumble-drunk night had I ever remembered to take off my mascara before falling into bed. Come to think of it… I looked down at my hands. Yup; they were clean as a whistle too. This was getting weirder and weirder. Maybe I hadn’t passed out on the street after all. Hell, maybe I had never made it to the street. Oh good God, what if I had passed out
in
the bar? I could forget a few years of mockery. Jenni would be regaling my grandchildren with the Tale of Granny Cat’s Wild 30th B-day Meltdown.

I could hardly blame her. I had been ribbing her mercilessly about her own antics for months and months. I knew it was wrong but I couldn’t help myself. She was just so much damn better than me at everything that I kind of had to latch on to the one moment of fail I could tease her with. She was my bestie and I wasn’t supposed to feel so bitter about how much more pulled together her life was when compared to mine, but I couldn’t help it. While not glamorous by any means, she had a decent thing going at Gilroy’s. It paid the bills and gave her the time she needed to follow her real dream—singing. I had known since we were teenagers that she would be something big one day. She had a glow about her that attracted people in droves, including Anthony, the handsome and devoted marine whom I had a hunch would be presenting her with a ring when he returned from overseas. And why not? She was all around awesome. Friendly. Loyal. Easy-going. Fun. Not to mention a natural blond with gorgeously tanned skin and a rack I would kill for. Maybe if I had known what a talented knock-out that gangly teen with braces would grow up to be, I would have reconsidered my choice of a best friend in high school.

That’s a load of crap, of course, but I’d be lying if I said that evil little thought hadn’t crossed my mind once or twice over the years, usually while staring morosely in the mirror. After all, I came in at a whopping 5’3” with the complexion of our ghostly friend Casper and was almost embarrassed to let the ladies at Victoria’s Secret see the lack of cup sizes I was buying. I glared at my reflection. My face was just a little too long, my nose a touch too thin. Mousy would be an accurate word to describe me, and it certainly felt fitting.

Sure, some called my pale blue eyes, with their thick, dark lashes and my equally black hair striking, but I had always thought it was a combination more suited to those creepy porcelain dolls than a living, breathing person. That unintentional goth-girl look was the source of the “black sheep of the family” jokes my dad had been telling for longer than I cared to remember. (Was goth even a thing anymore? Was I aging myself even more by saying that?) Those darling quips had fallen flat years ago—probably right around the time I became an awkward teen who realized there was no growth spurt in sight and I that I was getting no curves to speak of—but it was hard to deny, however bad the pun. Aside from having inherited his fair Irish complexion and the inherent inability to tan, I looked nothing like him. Or my mom. Or my curvy, spitting image of mom and dad could-do-no-wrong little sister, Emma.