Free Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) by A.J. Aalto Page A

me.” Part of my brain told me to smarten up, stop being a victim, calm down and tell her how to find me. But it was too incredible. What I wanted to shout was: That snot-gobbling fuckpuddle Danika Sherlock stabbed me. But what came out was a bawling, “Please, please send help!” My innards quivered nonstop. My vision started to blur. That's never good. The operator was asking me something. I didn't understand any of it. “Ten Springs Motor Inn…” My clammy hand reached for and found the knife she'd used. I rubbed my other glove off against my hip, and gripped the knife in my left hand, hard.
    A blast of imagery slammed my head back into the copper-soaked carpet. I wrenched my eyes shut, as if that could protect a Groper from what she was seeing: that crazy nutjob had watched my cabin, had been inside, inside! Plotting it out. She had been told explicitly, repeatedly like a drill, how to break the DaySitter Bond through death or refusal to feed, mine or his. Sherlock had been waiting for her chance to strike like an injured king cobra in the shade of a Jeep. This day had been earmarked. On a calendar. In smudgy blue ink. For some reason, that struck me as insult atop injury.
    If she thought she could just waltz up to Harry and say: “Marnie's dead, so you're with me now” she was streaming headlong toward a bad death. What a low opinion of me she must have, to think my companion would be so easily lured away. Harry would put her through a wall, repeatedly, and when the authorities found out, they'd swear out a warrant to have him staked. Kill-Notch Batten would eagerly volunteer for the job. This was the end of everything. If I lived, I wouldn't want to.
    The door swung open to the dusky outside and I froze, holding the phone half-leaning upright against one elbow. The jig was up. She'd put the blade across my jugular this time. I clutched the knife so tightly that my knuckles flared with pain, laying my thumb along the hilt like Harry had shown me long ago. I waved it at the figure in swift, warning arcs.
    The legs that straddled the threshold were wide, sturdy and undeniably masculine. And dressed, I noted deliriously, for a winter night's ride. A double-breasted chesterfield overcoat I recognized flapped around his thighs, above salt-flecked biker boots that were otherwise perfectly polished. Only one man I knew was that persnickety. A cry of relief leaked from my throat.
    Harry moved swiftly across the room in his dizzying blink-step, pale lips curled back in a silent snarl. He kicked the ruined TV out of his way; it tumbled through the air casting shards of glass and metal in a shower. Sweeping down beside the bed on one knee, whispering in furious French as he always did when angry, his tongue worked the words like a spell, his mouth caressing the sounds with a voice slightly sibilant around a hint of fang. The scent of blood in the air had him trembling badly. The old ones may play poker-face better than any human, but in times of bloodshed or in the face of arterial spray, even they inevitably lost their cool and had to work hard at controlling near-ejaculatory enthusiasm.
    “Who's a brave soldier, then?” he said as he assessed and surveyed the damage with quick hands that scanned and catalogued too fast to follow, unzipping my jacket, clutching my shirt front to yank it out of his way. With a sharp jerk he shred its remains up the front.
    “This…” Apparently there was no word for it in any of his languages. He diagnosed the wounds rapidly with bleak ash-grey eyes that had seen centuries of triage and casualty, much of the latter caused by him. “Right, then. Do not fight me, love, there is no other way.”
    His hand snaked behind my head and pulled my face into his left elbow. I hadn't seen him break his skin there, but a small wound was pressed to my lips. Dizzily, I closed my eyes and calculated theodds that he knew better than me what was best. Something leaky-sweet passed my lips and hit my