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only that it could be done. If you have the strength and the stomach for it.”
“If you have the bal s,” Max said. He looked at Lara. “You could stil change your mind, sweetheart. Come with us.”
“Fuck you,” Iestyn said. He looked down at her, his eyes molten gold. “We’re leaving. Now. Together.”
She blinked at his sudden about-face. She almost didn’t recognize this hot-eyed, cold-voiced stranger. But she trusted him. “Fine.”
Taking her hand, he towed her to the Jeep. If the vehicle had had a door, she thought, he would have slammed it.
The engine choked to life.
Iestyn backed out of the parking space, narrowly avoiding the three flyers behind the truck. His face set in grim lines as the Jeep lurched onto the road, picking up speed.
Lara twisted in her seat, pushing her hair from her eyes.
The sky was crossed with phone and utility lines, but between them she could see black specks like flies in a spider’s web.
Misgiving snaked down her spine. “They’re fol owing us.”
“Not for long.”
“I meant the birds.”
He flashed her a look. “So did I.”
The Jeep tore up the old coast road, changing lanes, weaving in and out of traffic. Motels, restaurants, outlet stores streaked by. The wind whipped Lara’s face and rattled the bags in back. She bit her lip, one eye on the quivering needle of the speedometer. The last thing they needed was to be picked up for speeding in a stolen Jeep.
The buildings thinned.
“Hang on,” Iestyn said.
He veered hard onto a wooded side road past split rail fences and straggling stone wal s, rutted driveways and rusting mailboxes.
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Another sharp turn. Lara clutched the rol bar as Iestyn drove the Jeep over a ditch and under the trees, crashing, bumping, bouncing through the brush, light and shadow dancing crazily overhead. Her knuckles turned white.
The Jeep lurched and jolted to a stop deep under the cover of a broad, black pine. He turned off the engine. In the sudden silence she could hear the rasp of his breathing and the beating of her own heart.
The scent of spruce wrapped around them.
Iestyn turned his head. In the tree’s shadow, his eyes gleamed like the eyes of an animal, unreadable and intent.
“Come here.”
Tension thickened the air like the smel of broken bracken.
Lara licked her lips. His gaze dropped to her mouth.
“What about the birds?”
“They’l fol ow the road.”
“And the demons?”
“What about them?”
She blinked. “They could be . . .”
“Miles away,” he finished for her.
“Miles away,” he finished for her.
The sun slanted through the branches of the pine, sculpting his body in sunlight and deep blue shadow. He stretched one arm along the back of his seat, sinewy, graceful.
Denim pul ed taut over his hard thighs and his hard . . .
Wel .
Her cheeks flushed. Her heart pounded.
The bruises on his face, the hint of beard roughening his jaw, made him look disreputable. Dangerous. But it wasn’t terror that scrambled her pulse.
Cupping the back of her head, he pul ed her slowly toward him. His breath seared her lips. His mouth hovered, just out of reach. She made a smal , impatient sound deep in her F
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throat, and he kissed her. Not roughly, with none of the suppressed violence that had quivered in him since the parking lot. But slowly, thoroughly, taking possession of her mouth, using his tongue and his teeth. Blinded, she closed her eyes.
His left hand covered her breast. “Your heart is racing,”
he whispered against her lips.
He fil ed her head like a day at the beach, hot, salty, golden.
“Adrenaline,” she managed to say.
He twined his fingers in her hair. “Fight? Or flight?”
The tug on her scalp, the pul on her senses, rippled along her nerves. She didn’t want to fight him. “Are you giving me a choice?” she asked, half-seriously.
“You always have the choice.”
She attempted a smile. “Not if you’re holding my hair.”
He twined it around his fist. “Maybe I’m afraid you’l run away.”
Was he kidding? She’d just dismissed her last, best chance to go home. Every mile, every decision, separated her more irrevocably from everything and everyone she knew at Rockhaven.
“I’m not the one who’s leaving,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
But of course she didn’t. “You’re the one on your way to World’s End.”
“That was your idea.”
“Because you need to find your people.”
“I’m not like you. I don’t need others of my kind to survive.”
“It’s more than a matter of survival.” She struggled to explain the precepts she had lived with for the past thirteen years. The nephilim spent their entire earthly existence aspiring to the perfection that had been theirs before the 2
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Fal . “Only your own kind can see you as you real y are.
Without their vision, how can you become your best self?
The self the Creator intends you to be.”
