The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance

lying with her face inches from the pavement; her keys were clasped in her hand. “Get out of here. The car - it’s—” Her eyes widened.
    Mord spun, faced the car. He could see the driver again — a man, small with a hat pulled low over his brow. The human grasped the car’s wheel, his knuckles white. There was fear in his eyes. He knew he was going to die.
    There was no time to stop the inevitable. Mord stood strong, let the man-made mass smash into him. The front of the car bowed inwards. Tyres squealed, metal screamed. White balloons of cloth billowed into the windows, muffling whatever noise the man emitted.
    Mord thrust his fist through what remained of the car’s windshield and grabbed the human by the front of his shirt. He hung there, limp.
    “Is he ... ?” Kami whispered from beneath her car. Her voice shook, but Mord could hear her scrambling beneath the vehicle, scooting her way to the other side. Within seconds she stood beside him.
    He pulled the man who would have killed her close, stared into his blank face. “I don’t know him,” he muttered. He’d thought the man might be someone from his past.
    “It’s the Mason,” Kami murmured. She stepped over mangled pieces of metal, didn’t stop until she stood right next to Morel. She lay her hand on his arm. “Put him down. Is he—” she swallowed “—dead?”
    “I—” Mord started to answer, but other voices cut him off.
    “What’s happening out there?”
    “Dear God. Call 911.”
    Kami gripped his arm tighter. “The police, they’ll be coming.”
    Sirens sounded in the distance. On the horizon the first pink strip of the coming sun appeared.
    Mord glanced back at the man in his grasp. Blood stained his face, and his breathing was shallow - but it was there. He was alive.
    Kami saw it too. “Put him down.” Her touch was warm and insistent.
    There were only minutes until Mord would turn to rock. If he didn’t leave, take his place back on the building, he’d be found here. Then what? He didn’t want to leave the man alive, but he also wanted to question him, find out what he knew about the gargoyles and their enemies, why he was hunting Kami.
    Kami pressed her fingers into Mord’s skin, nodded towards the ground. “Put him down. I’ll be OK. I know now, and he’s in rough shape. He may not make it, and if he does it will be a long time before he can try again.”
    She was right, but setting the human down, not crunching her would-be killer’s throat under his foot was one of the hardest things Mord had ever had to do.
    And he had to do it because Kami asked it of him. She’d brought him back to life - he owed her, but it was more than that. He wanted to do it because to do otherwise would cause her pain.
    He never wanted anything to cause her pain again.
    He set the man down.
    Relief washed over Kami’s face, and she smiled. “It’s right. I couldn’t . . . thanks.” And she smiled again at him.
    Then she leaned forwards and pressed a kiss to his lips. “Go back to my apartment. I’ll talk to the police, then later ...” She squeezed his arm again, her eyes glowing. “We’ll talk.” She ran a finger along his chin. Mord’s hands rose. He had to fight to keep himself from gathering her to him. He could already feel his skin beginning to harden, his blood to slow. Her magic wasn’t working, or had run out. With the sun, he would return to stone.
    Would he wake again? Or was this it? His one chance outside the sorcerer’s curse? He should be happy that he’d had this night with Kami. He could feel the sadness that leaving her was causing him.
    Up on the building, perched on the ledge, he stared down at her as he began to lose feeling in his feet. All he could think of was how much it hurt to leave her, to know he might never see her again.
    Kami had awakened him more deeply than he’d thought, changed not just his frozen state, but his heart - his soul.
    Impossible as it seemed, he loved her.
    And the next time he woke might be one hundred years in the future. Or perhaps, he’d never wake again.
    Kami spent hours at the accident scene, telling her story over and over, or the one she’d made up. The bowed hood of her attacker’s car was hard to explain, as was the passenger door that Mord had torn off her vehicle. By the time an officer discovered the footprints broken through the asphalt, they quit asking, just shook their heads and snapped photos.
    It was almost ten the next morning when she was