Sweet Peril (25 page)

“God, you smell nice,” he whispered. “I’ve missed that smell. I’ve missed everything about you, little Ann.”

My heart neared bursting when he looked straight into me. We were alone. So alone up here. As if gravity weighed all the heavy stuff down and we’d risen above it. Jealousies and insecurities couldn’t exist this high off the ground.

Kaidan moved his head to the side of my face as if to whisper something, but instead his soft lips grazed the sensitive
spot beneath my ear. I stilled. The hand that had been blocking the sun slipped beneath my hair in a caress. His mouth moved down my neck, slow, like a playful whisper. At the base of my throat I felt his warm tongue tasting me. I wove my fingers into his hair. When he raised his face to mine, our quickened breaths mingled. I took in the sweetness of citrusy pheromones, lifted off him by the breeze. Even sitting, it made me dizzy.

I tried to pull him, to close the gap between us, but he resisted.

“Tell me you want it,” he whispered against my mouth, transforming me into a puddle of desire. He groaned, a deep sound of pleasure and need, probably smelling the pheromones my own body expelled.

I closed my eyes and whispered, “I want it.”

“Look at me when you say it.”

My eyes drifted open and his hands gripped me, one at my waist and the other still behind my neck. I looked straight into his ocean eyes. “I want it, Kai.”

Moving closer, with his tongue he ran a warm path across my bottom lip and my whole body tingled. A whimpering sound escaped, revealing my desperation for him to end this teasing torment. I was about to burn up from the anticipation.

How many times had I dreamed of kissing Kaidan again?

A cloud moved in front of the sun, bathing us in a moment of cool shade.

A scratchy voice invaded my mind and Kaidan went rigid.

“Well, well . . .”

It was not a cloud blocking the sun. My clipped scream
pierced the air at the sight of the demon hovering close. Kaidan jumped away from me with surprise and the car rocked. I gripped the bar again, terror ripping through me. This demon was not my father’s ally. It was a jackal-faced whisperer I’d never seen before. I clapped a hand over my mouth as sour nausea surfaced.

“What do we have here, eh? Two little Nephies going at it!”

Bad. Very bad. I’d left the hilt in my bag at Blake’s. Dad would be furious at me for not being on guard.

The demon must have sent its speech into both of our minds because Kaidan was the one to answer, sounding peeved.

“Just needed an opinion on a new technique. You can bugger off now. Shouldn’t you be at the summit?”

I sucked in a shocked breath at the offhand way he spoke to the spirit. Jackal-face laughed, a vile sound. He let his words drag out, cruel and torturous.
“I’m on my way there now. Perhaps we can make a deal, yes? You do me a favor and I won’t tell the Dukies about what I seen today.”

“What sort of deal?” Kaidan asked.

The spirit gave a creepy smile.

“I want to feel the touch that humans live and die for. Let me use your body to have this Nephie girl just once.”
He got closer, leering.
“Just once, and I will keep your secret.”

A live serpent may as well have slithered into my lap and curled up as I processed what he was asking. I’d never been more repulsed by anything in my life.

Kaidan let out a sound of pure disgust. “You can’t be serious.”

My mind was quickly throwing together an idea. “It’s not
a secret,” I told the dark spirit with confidence. “The Dukes know we work together. Pharzuph’s the one who told him to train me in the first place. But what you’re asking to do goes against Lucifer’s orders. So how about this for a deal? You leave us alone, and we won’t tell the
Dukies
that you tried to possess one of us and take a break from working.”

His evil canine features tightened into a scowl before he let out a wraithlike screech and called me a string of nasty names. I held my breath until he swooped away from us, allowing the bright sun to reheat our blood-drained faces. Kaidan and I sat straight, not touching. I stared at the blurry-looking ocean and tried to calm my heart and stomach as the ride clanked to the ground. Kaidan rubbed his face, muffling a curse.

What had we been thinking? This was a public place—of course there was a chance of whisperers being around! But we’d been so caught up in each other that we weren’t on our guard.

We couldn’t get off that thing fast enough. I stumbled from the car when the attendant opened the door. But as we sped away from the Ferris wheel, it clearly wasn’t over yet. There, in the row of game booths, was the same demon whisperer. Watching us.

“Go to the left,” Kaidan whispered to me, barely moving his lips. “I’ll distract him. Go straight back to Blake’s and I’ll meet you there.”

I tensed at the thought of separating, but he was already walking away. I went to the left where several small rides for children were. A horrid feeling of dread passed over me. I whipped my head around but saw only humans. A single
thought weighed me down:
Kaidan is in danger
. Deep in my gut I was sure of it.

I turned back, trying to stay within the crowd. Lingering at the corner, I peered into the game booth alley and saw Kaidan at the very end. He stood beside the last booth talking to the Latina girl with the pink teddy bear. They weren’t alone. The disgusting spirit swished around them, watching from every angle as Kaidan swept her long hair over her shoulder and ran the back of his fingers along her arm. The demon swooped down to whisper into her mind at the same time that Kaidan leaned and whispered something in her ear. Lust flared to life in her color spectrum and Kai caressed her waist. Her hand curled around his bicep.

Dread gathered like a storm swirling around me. I couldn’t look away.

Loud voices rang out from somewhere in the middle of the game row. Two men were arguing at a middle booth. The nosy demon was distracted from Kaidan and left to see what all the commotion was about. I circled back around, running past the children’s rides to the other side of the game alley. Kaidan had led the girl farther back, closer to where the bathrooms were around the side. I pushed my hearing out and watched, partially hidden behind a funnel cake stand.

“—didn’t realize what time it was,” Kaidan was telling her. “I need to be off.”

My vision was blocked by a group of people turning the corner toward them.

“There you are!
Qué pasa? Dónde estabas?
” An older girl gave the girl with the pink teddy bear a hard shove on her
shoulder. She sounded annoyed, asking where the girl had been, then she sized up Kaidan.

“’Scuse me.” Kaidan attempted to move away from the group, but a big hand shot out and pressed against his chest. The guy looked back and forth from Kai to the teddy bear girl.

“Not so fast, gringo.”

My heart rate shot up as I took in his odds. There were five guys, and they looked to be in their early twenties. All with shaved heads and differing facial hair. Each had tattoos up his arms, and two of them had designs tattooed on their scalps. But it wasn’t their appearance that scared me. The thing that frightened me most was that underneath their severely darkened auras, they each wore something red on their bodies.

Gang members. And these guys were hard-core.

Please
, I fervently prayed.
Get him out of this!

“Jugar con mi chica?”
The one with a hand on Kaidan asked if he was messing with his girl. Crap. He appeared to be the leader of this group, the way the others stepped back and let him take control. Hair lined his jaw, except at the scar across his chin, where no hair grew.

Before Kaidan could speak, the girl shook her head, stepping up to her boyfriend and insisting with a shaking voice that Kaidan was just a dumb boy. He was just being nice, that’s all. He had a girlfriend around there somewhere. She asked if they could leave now. The guy backhanded her across the cheek and I covered my mouth. Her pink bear dropped to the ground.

“You think I’m stupid?” he asked her in Spanish. “You think I’m blind?”

Kaidan stood a little taller and his face went hard. His hand slipped into his pocket, and so did the hands of the other five guys. An eerie smile grew across the leader’s scarred face.

This couldn’t go any further. I sprinted through the crowd, dodging people until I got closer. I happened a quick glance down the game alley and didn’t see the whisperer anywhere. Hopefully he was on his way to the summit now. Slowing, I cleared my throat and walked up behind the guys. Kaidan saw me and flicked his free hand in a tight motion, telling me to go away. I gave a defiant shake of my head and approached. His nostrils flared.

I squeezed through the group to stand next to Kai, and the gang guys regarded me with surprise. I didn’t want to swap words with these guys. I liked to give all people the benefit of the doubt, but menace rolled off them like thunderclouds.

Using my strong, willful voice, I said, “Do not take out your weapons. You will not try to harm us. You will let us leave right now.”

Their guardian angels used the opportunity to whisper to them, trying to calm them and make my words sink in.

All five of them stiffened as Kaidan and I stepped back, preparing to run. The scarred leader twitched. He
so
did not want to cooperate with peaceful orders. In what looked to be a great effort, he grunted a command to the guy next to him, who broke from his trance after a moment of hesitation and grasped my shoulder.

Without thought, fifteen months of drilled reactions kicked in. In two swift moves I grabbed the place where his shoulders met his neck, yanked him toward me, and drove my knee straight up into his groin. He crumpled in agony, and I
didn’t stop to admire my handiwork.

I grabbed Kaidan’s arm and tugged. We’d taken two running steps when a clear, metallic click halted our feet. Kaidan squeezed my hand and we slowly turned. Dread crept up the back of my neck and I was breathing as if I’d run a marathon.

The leader had a gun pointed at us, trembling with the effort. “I ain’t takin’ no orders from a little
bruja
.” He glanced down at his writhing friend and said to me, “You gonna pay for that. And you—” He looked at Kai over the barrel. “Nobody touches my girl ’cept me.”

Kai slowly sidestepped to partially block me from him.

The guardian angels exchanged glances and stayed attentive, as if prepared to act, even though they weren’t allowed to do anything more than whisper. Adrenaline flooded my system, but I didn’t know what to do. I was too afraid to say anything else out loud, so I attempted to will a silent order:
“Put the gun down.”

The leader wiped sweat from his forehead with his spare hand, and his forehead crinkled as if in pain, but he didn’t put the gun down. My hand began to sweat in Kaidan’s grip.

“Please,” I whispered.

“Shut your mouth!” the shortest guy shouted, breaking out of the original trance. He bounced his shoulders a little, working himself up. He whipped a switchblade from his pocket and moved toward me, but was stopped by a knife at his own neck, forcing him to look up at Kaidan. It all happened so fast. I never saw Kai pull his knife, and the events that followed went even faster. I had no time to be as terrified as the moment warranted.

“Lay a finger on her, mate, and you’re dead.” Kaidan’s knife
gleamed, large and sharp in comparison to the small, tainted blade in the gang member’s hand. The guy’s eyes glinted with fear, but before he could react, a beam of severely bright light broke through the already sunny sky, shining straight down on the scarred leader, who still pointed his gun at Kai. None of the humans noticed, but I sensed Kaidan’s attention shift.

In a split second the leader’s guardian angel, still bathed in that brilliant light, touched a shimmering finger to the gun barrel just before the leader squeezed the trigger and the deafening sound of a gunshot rang out, followed by cries of pain. Someone shrieked in my ear, which I’d later realize was my own scream paired with those of the two other girls.

A strong hand yanked my arm.

“Come on!” Kaidan’s voice.

My feet obeyed before my mind could comprehend what had happened. Kaidan pulled me until we were both sprinting against hordes of people running to see what was going on. I glanced back to the gang leader on the ground next to his friend, holding his bloody face while the girls crouched above him, screaming. The other guys were gone. And then the scene was swallowed up by mass chaos.

We ran out of the carnival, shoving past people until we came to the exit to the beach. I searched the area, frantic, certain the other guys would be right behind us.

“What happened?” I panted.

“The gun backfired.” Kaidan bent and rested his hands on his knees for a quick breather. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

A high-pitched revving noise sped toward our backs, and I spun, prepared to fight. I reached to my pocket out of habit,
and berated myself for not bringing a knife. The squeal of tires pierced the air as Blake slid sideways to stop mere feet from us on his bike.

“Get on.” His command was directed at me, and Kaidan gave the small of my back a shove. I didn’t want to leave him, but there was no time to argue. I threw a leg over the back of the seat, wrapping my arms around Blake. I shot a glance at the carnival and my heart pounded. The four unharmed gang members were running from a side exit, looking around.

“They’re coming!” I hissed.

“Go!” Kaidan shouted at us before he took off toward the crowded beach.

I pressed the side of my face to Blake’s back and he peeled out, popping an unnecessary wheelie that was met with cheers from all around and a scream from me. Somehow he managed to keep breathing the whole mile back to his house despite the death grip I had around his rib cage.

I closed my eyes, once again, and begged for Kaidan’s safety.