Demon Moon

open the door on the opposite side. “Wait, don’t eat it!”
    Colin stood near the trunk, watching the hellhound. “A little late, sweet.”
    “Oh. Dammit. We might have been able to use traces of soil from its feet to determine where it came from.”
    “Its head is here.” He nudged a lump on the ground with his foot, then glanced down at his shoe and grimaced. “Perhaps it ate a few things on the way, and you can pick bits of them from its teeth.”
    She tried to cover her disgust with a smile; she could smell the odor of its blood now—rotten, sulphuric. “I can scour the missing pet notices. ‘Your cat, Fluffy, is missing? Yes, we’ve found his collar caught in a wyrmwolf’s jaws. Do you have a portal to the Chaos realm in your basement?’”
    Her smile failed as his jaw hardened, and he turned his face farther away from her. Stop, Savi. Don’t mention Chaos again .
    His sleeve was torn from the attack in the car, and a stain spread over his abdomen near the top of the inverted V formed by the unbuttoned bottom half of his jacket. She’d have gone to him to examine it more closely and would have tried to bandage it if not for the forbidding expression on his face.
    “You were bitten.”
    “And I’m not likely to forget it.” He tossed his swords through the shattered back window, and they clanged together as they landed on the seat. “You’re still bleeding.”
    She tucked her hand beneath her opposite arm. Blood soaked the denim over her knee—cold and wet, sticking to her skin. “Sir Pup will protect me.”
    “And who will protect me from Sir Pup?” There was no amusement in his tone. “You shouldn’t have come out.”
    Her stomach twisted painfully. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think.” She’d just trusted that all was well after she’d seen him laugh, that he’d regained control. And acted impulsively, to stop Sir Pup from devouring evidence.
    “Ah, yes.” A sardonic smile thinned his lips. “ You didn’t think . I thought I taught you well; yet despite your playing the wronged little girl for eight months, and your insistence that you know better now, you haven’t learned a bloody thing.”
    The color drained from her face, left her features stiff. Her wide smile almost cracked her cheeks. “Excuse me.”
    The car door was open; she only had to reach in and slip her cell phone from her bag. She couldn’t look at Colin, and perhaps it was foolish to turn her back on him, but she did. She dialed the number for the taxi service from memory and walked to the front of the car as it rang.
    Her legs shook with the need to run, but she forced herself to sit down on the concrete parking stop. She leaned her shoulder against the bumper, and began counting the tiny, pentagonal holes in the radiator grill.
    She was at fifteen when the disinterested voice of the dispatcher answered. For a moment Savi couldn’t recall her location, but it only took a second for it to pop into her head.
    Sixty-five holes when she hung up. Fifteen minutes until the taxi would arrive. She could make it to two thousand holes by then.
    Colin’s cold laughter floated over the night air. “I must confess I’m shocked you didn’t ring Castleford. Your knight in armor, come to defend your honor and save you from the evil vampire. Would he have been pleased he didn’t have to pry you away from me this time? Or disappointed he didn’t have a reason to exile me for another month? Or, God forbid, a reason to remove my head from my shoulders?”
    That was why Colin had left for England? Because he’d been a danger to her?
    One hundred and seventy. Don’t think, Savi .
    But it was impossible. She knew what he was doing; perhaps she should have been glad of it. He’d coated truth with cruelty at Polidori’s, too—as his fucked-up method of protecting her from himself, and of putting distance between them.
    But it didn’t make sense. What kind of bastard protected someone by hurting them?
    “Perhaps I should give him a reason,” Colin rasped into her ear. His knees rose alongside her waist, his chest hard against her back. He must be sitting on his heels directly behind her, like a hawk over its prey. Her teeth dug into her lip as his hands slid around to cup her breasts. “Why deny myself? You run now, when you should have run a week ago. You claimed you’d learned and yet you agreed to try friendship, then denied our mutual satisfaction like a tease. Did you think to hold off until I panted after