No!
I lunge forward, handing out presents to his goons in my spinning mad rage.
A well-placed crunch to the nose with my elbow.
A head butt to the throat.
A backwards kick square in the balls. Shitty people don’t get to enjoy the usual rules about not hitting below the belt.
I’m feeling pretty good when hot lead blows an inch past my head at a couple thousand miles per hour. Nice shot, Bat, but you missed.
And I only need a few more seconds to mess him up royally.
That’s exactly what I’m aiming to do as I charge forward—kick ass and save my woman—when this weird, out-of-place clatter suddenly fills the air.
23
I’ve Goat You (Tory)
Holy crap.
Seeing Quinn fighting off three armed men totally freaks me out and sends adrenaline shrieking through my system. If only I had time to stand around being short-circuited by his noble, insane, and utterly beautiful sacrifice.
It’s now or never!
I twist my hands out of the rope and take a deep breath, hoping against hope my knee can take this.
Well, only one way to find out.
I crouch down, kick, and leap as high as I can, springing up with just the right ninja momentum, breaking the monster’s grip on my hair.
It seems like forever before my feet hit the dock again, missing their shoes.
I’ll celebrate getting free of Bat later. For now, ignoring the pain sparking through my knee, I do a double twirl, nailing the giant in the knee with my foot and whacking him across the face with the rope simultaneously.
“Fu—uck!” He stumbles back, briefly shocked, and while I’m trying to figure out my next move, the night explodes with a sound I must be imagining.
Is that…?
No. It can’t be?
But it keeps coming, closer and louder, like a pack of kids honking toy car horns. Soon, it’s undeniable.
Goats.
A whole chorus bleating their angry little hearts out.
The entire tribe comes flying around the house a second later, heads down, with Owl racing behind them on their heels, barking up a storm.
Front and center, head down, running at a full charge, Hellboy beelines for the dock, while the others break rank and come crashing into the bewildered goons on the ground. It’s a miracle they don’t knock down Quinn, too, who surges through the sudden chaos onto the dock, blazing toward me.
“Get down!” he roars, waving his arms.
It’s the last thing I hear before everything goes eerily silent. Like there’s so much insanity happening, my hearing just fades in this dull hum, and all I can do is stare.
Quinn dodging two more furious shots from Bat Pickett’s gun.
Quinn smashing into him, elbowing the gun out of his arm, and then locking his arms around a literal human titan.
Quinn power wrestling the overpowered freak in his arms, putting Odysseus and David to shame, snarling as he tries to throw the giant on the ground. They fight their way toward the end of the dock, where it tilts into the water at this crooked angle.
For a horrible second, everything stops, and I send up a prayer.
Please. Please let Quinn come out on top.
But when I hear the pounding hooves behind me, I realize he doesn’t need to do the impossible. He just needs to keep Bat Pickett distracted for a few more seconds, turned, fighting for balance, barely a foot or two away from the steep drop into the lake.
Hellboy whirls past in a shadowy blur, heading for them, as I flatten myself against the decayed wood.
I wince before it even happens.
Bat Pickett might be a vicious freak, a criminal, and evil incarnate, but I flinch to imagine how a human body feels when it collides with those horns at that speed.
The instant Quinn sidesteps the giant with a parting shove, Hellboy plows straight into Bat from the side, sending all seven-foot-something of him flying through the air.
I’m sure half of Dallas hears the massive splash echoing through the night.
Then it’s just anticlimactic. Hellboy stops at the edge of the dock, his head up tall.
He unleashes a loud bleat anybody could understand, even if they don’t speak goat.
‘Take that!’
“You okay?” Quinn stands over me, reaching down, lifting me up against him. “Tory, darlin’?”
“I’m…I’m fine now!” I push at his chest so I can lean back far enough to see his face and pat his arms, shoulders, and face, convincing myself he’s real.
He’s okay.
Holy hell. I think we survived.
“What about you?” I ask, rapid-fire. “You were fighting all four of them! And Pickett, Quinn, you—”
“I’m still breathing, Peach, and so are you. That’s a good outcome.” He gives me a quick kiss. “Hang on. I’d better check on Bat.”
In the past few hours, I’ve gone through a litany of strange, whirlwind emotions I’ve never experienced. From believing I was about to die, to finding the grit to kick a bad guy in the knees, to watching Quinn wrestle a flipping monster of a man so our horned guardian angels could finish what he started.