Of Eternal Life (13 page)

“That’s not a possibility.”

“I was certain that would be your response.” Major Taylor’s voice returned to its light tone, but his face remained resolute. “Abilene, dear, I apologize ahead of time for what I’m about to do.” With no further indication that he was about to act, Major Taylor raised his gun, leveling it at Abilene.

The only thought Eli was capable of was
he’s pointing a gun at Abilene
. He barreled toward Major Taylor in that same second.

The sound of the gun firing reverberated through Eli’s chest and bounced across the asphalt of the freeway.

Eli didn’t even slow down.

He missed. He actually missed
.

Disbelief in his luck strengthened his speed. In the next moment, Eli had his hand wrapped around the Tormentor’s wrist. With a simple movement, Eli forced the Tormentor’s arm to bend mid-forearm, the resulting snap of bone accompanied by a masculine scream.

“You don’t
ever
,” Eli glared into the pain-glazed eyes of Major Taylor, “point a gun at my woman.”

Eli punctuated his words with a merciless twist of the arm still clutched in his hand. Major Taylor moaned in abject pain and fell to his knees at Eli’s feet.

The headiness of having the Tormentor at his mercy filled Eli’s head with orgasmic-like pleasure. Eli’s eyes roved Taylor’s writhing form, looking for the next point of attack. The next place to inflict pain.

“
Eli!
”

He froze. His brain was so taken with his current task that he couldn’t place the anguished cry, but it stopped him in his tracks, the primal part of him responding to the pain he heard. The pain that was not coming from the pathetic man at his feet.

He turned, his feet sluggish.

What he saw took years off his immortal life.

Abilene stood on swaying feet where he’d left her. Her eyes were shocked wide open. Her nostrils flared in panic. Her fists were clenched together in a white knuckled grip below her breasts.

She was covered in blood.

The source of the blood seemed to be centralized beneath her fisted hands, but it splattered across her chest and dribbled down her abdomen to her thighs. Specs of red dotted her cheeks, clung to her eyelashes, wet her hair.

“Eli,” her lips ghosted without air.

“
No
.” Eli was at her side in a moment.

He heard the sounds of Major Taylor scrambling to his car on his knees, the cranking of an engine, and the fading sound of a car fleeing the scene, but he paid it no mind. His world was focused on the current realization of his worst nightmare.

“No,” he repeated, giving her a slight shake. “Where are you hit?” He didn’t wait for her to answer, but pulled her hands from the large spread of blood covering her front.

He stepped back in confusion.

He had expected to find a singed entry hole marring the front of Abilene’s shirt. He felt disconnected from his body as he brushed shaking fingers over blood-soaked, but otherwise unmarred, material.

He brought his eyes to her face once again.

“Where are you hit?” he repeated, enunciating each word.

Her lips moved without sound a few times before she was able to stutter, “Y-you.”

Dizziness was preventing Eli from understanding what she was saying. Eli shook his head in an attempt to clear the cobwebs.

“It’s you,” Abilene clarified, her voice infused now with strength. “You’re the one who’s hit.”

Eli’s hands fell from Abilene’s arms, their weight far too much for his muscles to handle.

He followed her riveted stare down to his own chest and noticed that a clean entry wound lay between his own pecks; an almost dainty trickle of blood trailed down to the hem of his shirt.

“Oh.”

The pain rushed in as though it had been waiting for Eli to acknowledge its source before attacking. Eli grunted; his knees locked, and he swayed forward. Abilene tried to catch him, but even more surprisingly, she managed it. Her petite hands grasped him at his shoulders, and he scrambled to relocate his center of gravity so he wouldn’t fall and crush her.

His brain scrambled to make sense of what had happened, of the blood covering Abilene from head to toe.

She had been standing right behind him when he had bolted toward Taylor. The blood covering her must be from his exit wound. God, if she looked like this …his back must be …
gone
.

It was a fatal wound. Ask him how he knew.

Okay, time was of the essence here. The last time he’d taken a gunshot wound to the chest, he’d expired within minutes. A similar wound made by the same gun would guarantee similar results.

Major Taylor could grow a pair and come back at any moment. Abilene would soon be unprotected. Eli had to do everything in his power to ensure that she would be safe when he was gone.

“Truck,” he rasped through dry lips. “Please,” he added as an afterthought once he saw the dinner-plate size of her eyes.

Abilene’s head nodded twice, and she maneuvered herself under his left armpit. She then stalled out, not sure of where to put her arm since his back was a mess.

Eli took over for her. He leaned as much weight as he dared on her shoulders and began to move forward, shuffling to the truck. There was no way he would make it around the hood to the passenger’s side, so he just headed to the driver’s side.

His forward motion seemed to jar Abilene from her shock; she hooked a thumb through the middle belt loop of his jeans and did her best to keep him from crumpling to the ground.

He half expected to die before reaching the truck: his vision was tunneling, and the telltale coldness of death was emanating from the central location of his heart. But they made it, and Abilene somehow got him into the truck, followed him inside, and got him to lay flat across the seat with his head in her lap.

Somewhere in the dim recesses of his fading consciousness, he recognized that she was touching him again. Apparently, all it took to get her forgiveness was a horrific death. He’d have to remember that for the future.

“Drive …into the trees,” he directed in a fading voice.

“Eli, we have to get you to the hospital!” she countered. “This is bad. I won’t be able to stop the bleeding. You need surgery — ”. He forced his eyes to focus on her face and saw the devastation that covered her features. Tears flooded her eyes, but she refused to let them spill.

He was confused.
Why is she upset?
For Eli, death was not the end. She knew that.

He shook his head at her. “Drive, please. Get off …road.”

She seemed to remember that moments ago, they were face-to-face with a willing-to-commit-murder psychopath. “Okay, that’s a good idea.” She cranked the truck, and he could tell from the sounds of the tires that she was moving the truck off-road to the continuous line of trees that lined the Arkansas freeway.

He closed his eyes for a moment and woke several moments later to painful shaking.

“Eli!” Abilene was screeching in his ear. He pried his eyes open to find that he was out of the truck. He was flat on his back beneath the canopy of trees. “Don’t you
dare
close your eyes again,” she commanded in a panic.

He couldn’t promise her that. He’d gotten her as safe as was possible, given the circumstances, and the familiar pull of death was lurking in the wings. He’d done the best he could, and it wasn’t nearly good enough.

He tried to raise his hand to touch her, but it fell to his side. Abilene read his intent, picked up his hand, and cradled it against her cheek. With devastation, he realized he couldn’t feel the smooth skin beneath his palm. It would have been so great to just
feel
her once more.

“I-I’m sorry,” he whispered.
For so much
. He was sorry for kidnapping her, for exposing her to danger, for getting himself killed and leaving her vulnerable. But most of all, he was sorry for not telling her how he felt about her in the way she deserved.

He closed his eyes once more, the heavy weight tugging on his body too much to ignore any longer.

“Eli, no,” Abilene pleaded. “
Please
, fight it.”

Eli reveled in the feeling of having her near. This death was different — not as hopeless — because she was here. He wasn’t alone.

He wished he had the energy to say he was sorry one more time, but it was over. He heard Abilene begin to sob and wondered once more why she was so distraught. He’d told her —

But she didn’t believe you
.

Death pulled him under.

• • •

Major Taylor cradled his destroyed arm against his chest and used his knees to steer. He was swerving all over the road, but in the back roads of Arkansas, no one would see him. He was off the map.

He kept reliving the firing of the gun. How had he missed at point-blank range?

He had failed to secure the female. And now he had to contact his associate and admit that he was coming in alone. And injured.

He moved his knees to steer the car to the shoulder. When he had to remove the brace of his good arm to retrieve his cell phone, his mangled arm flopped with a
thwap
against the steering wheel.

Major Taylor cried out in the cab of the car. The horror of watching his arm flap around from a joint that had not existed an hour ago was almost enough to have him blacking out. It was only the gravity of having to report that kept him lucid.

He groaned as he lifted his hips just enough to reach the cell phone in his back pocket, and gritted his teeth from more than the pain as he listened to the dial tone hum in his ear.

His assistant answered after one ring. “That was quick. When can I expect you?”

The phone call was already as hard as Major Taylor had anticipated it would be. He fought to keep the fear and pain from his voice as he said, “There’s been a complication.”

He could hear the hesitation crackling over the line. “A complication,” his assistant said as though trying to find meaning to words that were in a different language.

Major Taylor sighed. “I don’t have them.” His head fell back against the seat rest.

More silence. Finally, “You don’t have them.”

The throbbing agony radiating out from his arm mixed with his frustration and had his head snapping back up. “Repeating everything I say does us no good!” he snapped, craning the phone around so his lips brushed the receiver as he spoke.

“Well, honestly, sir, it isn’t as though we could be doing any worse.”

Major Taylor growled into the phone. “You
will
watch your tone. I am your superior officer.”

He must have put a significant amount of threat behind his tone, because his assistant responded with an immediate, “Yes, sir.”

It was not without a wave of relief that Major Taylor allowed himself a steadying breath. He didn’t deserve the deference of his assistant, but by some stroke of luck he’d gotten it.

“You can continue to expect me around the same time,” Major Taylor continued after a moment. “And I will still need the operating room.” Shame made his pause before revealing his current predicament. “I require surgery for an injury,” he said as quietly as possible.

“I’m sorry,” his assistant said. “What was that?”

Major Taylor gathered strength beneath his diaphragm, hoping to infuse his voice with power. “My arm is — ” he glanced at the green and blue bruising already mottling his forearm. “I’m injured,” he finished simply. Best to save the extent of his injury until he could see his assistant face-to-face.

If he was expecting his condition to garner sympathy, he was bound for disappointment. “Yes, sir,” his assistant said, sarcasm and a tone of disrespect weaving back into the voice ringing in Major Taylor’s ear.

Major Taylor didn’t dare tempt fate a second time by reminding his assistant to respect him; he ended the phone call.

As he stared through the windshield with bleary eyes at the road leading to Georgia, his body begged him for sleep. For a reprieve.

But there was no time. He needed medical attention, but perhaps more importantly, he needed a plan. This situation may be beyond salvageable, but that didn’t mean that Major Taylor wasn’t going to give it a try.

She couldn’t stop running her fingers through his hair. Eli’s skin had long ago lost the warmth and vitality of life, and yet she couldn’t quit touching him.

Abilene had fought with the meager tools she had to revive Eli. But there was only so much CPR could do, and reconstructing massive wounds and restoring blood loss were not on the list.

How was it possible that she was hunched over Eli’s body for the second time in three days?

This time, though, he really was dead.

She’d had an up-close-and-personal look at what that bullet had done to Eli’s body. The evidence was still splattered on her clothes.

And she couldn’t ignore the irrefutable proof of watching him take his last breath. That image was still emblazoned on her corneas. She feared she would never see anything else.

But the feel of his hair running through her fingers was still the same, and so she would stay here, looking into his face — the only part of him that didn’t portray a horrific death — for as long as she wanted.

She suspected that would be forever.

She hadn’t cried yet. The sorrow was too severe for tears. What she had done was re-examine her every cruel action since Eli’s bombshell revelation of the night before.

So he’d botched it. Badly. He hadn’t said anything she herself hadn’t been feeling. Falling for someone after three days? Asinine. She knew that, and he was smart enough to know it, too.

But. He’d had the courage to tell her what he felt — doubts and all. She’d only had the courage to realize that she cared for him the moment his eyes had glazed over in death.

When he’d died, she’d managed to tear his shirt down the middle, using the rip from the bullet hole as a starting point, to examine his chest for any telltale sign of respiration.

There had been none.

Since then, she had ignored the freakishly neat hole marring the perfection of Eli’s body. Now she couldn’t prevent a quick flick of her eyes. She braced herself for the physical blow of seeing his wound again. As soon as her eyes touched the wound, she moved them to his face again.