Red didn’t weigh the options. She didn’t consider the angles or calculate the odds. There wasn’t a need. In her ripped, shredded and torn heart, she’d known what was going to happen next the minute she’d spotted the flash of hot pink outside her window.
“I’m going.” She picked up the sword. Its weight threw her off balance and she stumbled forward a few paces before righting herself. “If anyone gets to collar that wolf, it’ll be me.”
“Here, you’ll need this if you’re going to take on the king.” Granny held out a red cape. Unlike the ones downstairs in the pub, this one was enchanted and had saved Red’s life more than once when she was a young girl trying to make it out of The Woods alive. “It’ll save both of you this time.”
She sure as hell hoped so. Red wrapped it around her shoulders and jumped out into the pre-dawn sky.
Chapter Nine
Shouts and gunfire echoed outside the Royal Flush Toilet Emporium warehouse. Blood dripped from where a bullet had grazed Liam’s upper arm and his thighs burned from maintaining a crouched position for the past ten minutes. He wanted nothing more in the world than to bust out of here and find Red, but that wasn’t going to happen until he found a way to get past the two redwood-sized armed guards standing on the other side of the crate where he’d sought cover.
Liam had been in worse pinches in his life. There was the time he and Max got caught six miles under water right outside of Atlantis’s protective bubble and their oxygen tanks had malfunctioned; or the quick escape from a six-story window with a grown-up Goldilocks, who’d failed to mention the apartment wasn’t hers. But this was different. Without Red by his side, invisible jackhammers were drilling a hole into his skull, making it hard to think or move with his usual finesse.
He’d like to blame the love spell for the bone-marrow-deep ache in his chest too and the way Red stayed on the edge of his thoughts, but he couldn’t. The pain tying his lungs in knots was the result of his own stupidity as was the love-sick obsession. Now he was stuck with his back literally against the outside wall of a wholesale toilet warehouse and his entire life was about to go down the shitter unless he got the fuck out of here and found Red.
He had to persuade her to give him a second chance. Somewhere in the past few days, he’d gone from wanting her to needing her in a way that had nothing to do with the love spell. If he couldn’t make things right with Red, reversing the MacTíre family curse didn’t really matter so much anymore.
The Redwood twins were restless. They’d been ordered to stand post by the warehouse’s back door, but being away from the action had made them fidgety. All the tell-tale signs were there. The near-constant trigger checks. The barely restrained steps forward anytime a shot sounded. The lack of cocky shit-talking natural to every soldier of fortune ever hired to pull a trigger. They were on edge and prime for the picking.
Liam redistributed his weight onto the balls of his feet and rolled his shoulders. The king had warded the emporium against magic, making most of his arsenal unusable, but unlucky for the Redwood twins, he’d always enjoyed a little bare-knuckle brawling. He withdrew a dagger from its ankle sheath and stood. The magic promising the serrated edge would land true wouldn’t work here, but Liam hadn’t trained long and hard with various knives just so he could depend on magic.
“What’s that?” The Redwood twin on the left pointed at the pre-dawn sky just starting to turn pink.
Liam looked up. The air had turned wavy directly above them, like the horizon on a steamy hot day. Harold. It had to be. But instead of a hot-pink dragon, a rope appeared. It uncoiled in its fall and hit the concrete with a solid thwap a few feet from the twins.
In the next heartbeat, a figure in a red cape slid down the rope. The cape’s material billowed around her, protecting her from view, but Liam didn’t have to make visual contact to know who it was.
She landed without even the smallest of sounds and flicked back her hood. Red winked at the guards. “Hey fellas, wanna have some fun?”
Liam rushed around the side of the crate, dagger in hand. There was no way he’d let her battle these two on his behalf. “Can I join in?”
Red slid on a nasty pair of brass knuckles, their gold color gleaming in the dawn’s first light. “Only if you can keep up.”
She didn’t wait for the nearest guard to make a move. Her fist plowed into his gut with enough force to make him bend in half a fraction of a second before her knee came up, crashing into the guard’s nose. Blood spurted everywhere.
Liam’s inner wolf approved, scratching at the surface in hopes of getting some action. He wasn’t about to disappoint.
He landed a solid elbow hit to the other guard’s ear, making him reel back as he clutched the side of his head. Holding tight to the dagger’s hilt, Liam slashed the guard, drawing blood that soaked through the now torn edges of his T-shirt.
The guard roared and charged Liam, hitting him with bone-cracking power and taking them both down to the pavement. The dagger flew from his grasp. The guard landed a trio of vicious hits to Liam’s side. He retaliated with a head butt hard enough to make the other man’s eyes cross. Taking advantage of the moment, he flipped the guard over and let loose with a right hook to the jaw that knocked the man out cold.
Sucking in a deep breath, Liam jumped to his feet and ran toward Red in time to see her do a spinning kick move that knocked the second guard’s feet out from under him. He landed hard and his thick skull bounced against the concrete. The guard’s chest rose and fell, but his eyes were shut tight. The Redwood twins were down for the count.
Gut twisted with worry, Liam rushed to Red. The guard had been twice her size. Sure, she’d knocked him on his ass, but the guy had to have gotten in a few good licks. He reached for her, wanting nothing more than tactile confirmation she was okay, but she held him off with a don’t-even-think-about-it glare. There wasn’t a mark on her. “How?”
“Unless it’s about us getting out of here, don’t even talk to me.” She put some distance between them before pressing a button on the nearly undetectable communication unit in her ear. “Anytime you’re ready.”
He hobbled over, a bit more wobbly than his usual strut, but then again, getting tackled by one of the Redwood twins would do that to a guy. “Still pissed, huh?”
“What gave you a clue?” She withdrew a wide ribbon from one of the cape’s many inner pockets and tied the satin material around his arm where a bullet had grazed him, staunching the bleeding.
He covered her hand with his. “I’m sorry.” It wasn’t the first time he’d ever said the words in his cursed but otherwise privileged life, but it was close.
“Yep, you sure are.” She pulled her hand away. The vein in her temple pulsed an erratic beat, but she kept her big-eyed gaze away from his face.
His thumb grazed her cheek before stopping at the edge of her chin and lifting it up. The guarded look in her eyes undid him. This was his fault. He’d done this to her, but she was still here. That had to mean something. “So why’d you come after me?”
She sucked in a deep breath as her gaze flicked to the left. “That damn dragon threatened to burn down the pub.”