The Missing

pressing his fingers to the strong, steady beat of her pulse didn’t reassure him much. There was a little bit of blood trickling from her left nostril, and she had a thin layer of grit obscuring her features. He gently brushed away as much of the dust as he could. Under his fingers, her skin felt soft as silk and warm.

    She had a pretty mouth. Very pretty. The kind of mouth that would make a guy’s brain empty of all blood as it flowed south. The bastard who had been on top of her had fisted his hand in her hair, and now most of it had fallen free from the braid she’d confined it in.

    A soft, weak moan fell from her lips, and the sound of it sent a fresh wave of fury hurtling through him. He shot a vicious look at the punk who was still lying on the ground, moaning and clutching his right leg. The drunk asshole had sobbed like a baby when Cullen took his knee out. The other guy had taken off running, and a few minutes later, Cullen heard an engine roar. As he picked the girl up, he glanced at the sobbing guy on the ground and said, “If you don’t want me to do the left one, you’ll shut the hell up.”

    Cullen was pretty sure that if Master Bruhns knew what he’d done and why, the man would understand. He’d been taking karate since he was eight. He’d competed in competitions at the national level, but this was the first real fight he’d ever been in.

    First time out, and he’d taken somebody’s knee out. Cullen hoped to hell he didn’t ever have to do that again. The bone had made a sickening, wet crunching sound that even the boy’s pitiful scream couldn’t quite mask. If he wasn’t so hot with fury, he thought it might have made him sick.

    But he’d seen what those two were going to do, and if he needed to, he would have done a lot more than bust a kneecap. The stink of booze had clung to both of them, and it reinforced what Cullen had figured out on his own, without all the assemblies at school and without the awkward, well-meaning talks from his parents. Alcohol screwed up the brain, especially if the brain’s owner wasn’t all that impressive to begin with. Give a couple of dumb jocks who thought they were God’s gift some booze, and you could have a problem.

    She moaned again, and the sound was louder. Gently, he tapped her cheek and said, “Hey. It’s okay. You’re safe.”

    The girl went from unconscious to wide awake in the space of one heartbeat. Her lashes lifted, and he found himself staring into the wide, misty depths of her eyes. Her pupils flared, and she tensed. If she could have retreated into the hard dirt at her back, she would have. Cullen eased back. “It’s okay.” He shifted to the side so she could see the kid lying on his back. He still clutched as his knee, and he wouldn’t look at Cullen or the girl.

    “He’s not going to touch you,” Cullen promised. He shot the bastard a dirty look and raised his voice so that he knew the kid heard him. “He touches you again, I’m going to rip his balls off.”

    Her voice was clear and steady when she responded, “Oh, I’m not going to wait to do that. I’m going to do it right now.”

    She rolled to her feet, moving with a liquid grace that reminded Cullen of the way she’d looked when she cut through the water earlier, saving that boy’s life. Still a mermaid, he thought whimsically.

    Cullen was perilously close to being a serious geek, and he knew it. He played basketball, took karate, and had even spent a couple years on the swim team at school, but still, he pushed real close to the line of geekdom. He loved to read. He loved to write. Since he was twelve years old, he’d been writing his own stories and, to the delight of his parents and his own self-conscious pride, he had even written two different short stories that had been published by a fantasy magazine.

    His room had its share of typical teenaged kid stuff—video games, a computer, a ball that he’d caught when he went a game with his dad at Yankee Stadium—and bookshelves. Tons of books, most of them either fantasy, science fiction, or books on Greek and Roman mythology.

    Mermaids hadn’t ever been his favorite figures from mythology; he was more into the Amazons or Herculean myths. But this girl could definitely change his mind. She still reminded him of a mermaid, although she wasn’t the kind who would lie around on a bed of rock while she combed her hair and used her voice to lure men to their deaths.

    She’d be a fighter.