Talbot was right. That knot in my stomach had become a flaming rage. Daniel would tell me to push it away. Find balance. But as the large masked thug reached for me, I let that rage wash over me, and my fists went flying. I socked him in the gut, and he went sailing back several feet. I’d had no idea I was capable of hitting that hard.
He hit the brick wall of the adjacent building, but it didn’t seem to faze him. He caught himself and charged in my direction. I countered out of his way, but then he swung around and snatched at my shirt. One of his fists had tattoos of the letters S and K between his knuckles. This guy reeked, and the smell—like two-month-old milk—only aggravated me more. I grabbed his hands and twisted them away from me, then pulled his body down closer as I kneed him in the groin. He grunted with pain. His tongue lolled out of his mouth. I pushed him, and he stumbled back. I kicked him in the left kneecap while he was unstable, and he buckled under his own weight and fell to the ground. I glared down at him, my hands up in fists.
“Hey!” the gunman shouted. “You’ll pay for that.”
Watch out! I heard inside my head, and I looked up just in time to stare down the barrel of a gun.
“No!” Talbot shouted, and in a lightning-quick move, he wrenched himself out of the guy’s hold and then had the man’s gun-wielding hand in his.
Talbot slammed the guy’s arm down and against his knee. I swear I heard the cracking of bones.
The guy dropped the gun and pulled his arm in against his chest, moaning. He took a wild swing at Talbot with his uninjured arm. Talbot blocked the blow and smashed the palm of his hand into the guy’s ski mask, presumably where his nose would be. The guy sputtered and coughed.
“What the hell, man?” He gasped and pulled at his ski mask, but before he could even yank it off, Talbot took a running leap, bounced off the cement wall like it was a springboard, and sent a flying kick right into the guy’s chest.
The gunman crumpled to the ground. Talbot landed in a crouching position next to him. There was just enough light left in the dim alley to glint off his green eyes, making them look like dazzling emeralds.
I gasped. “You’re a … You’re a …”
“An Urbat.” Talbot straightened up. He crossed the alley between us, then placed his warm, callused hand against my arm. “Just like you.”
BACK AT THE VAN
The thug I’d knocked down got away during the skirmish, and Talbot wanted to make sure the other one didn’t escape when he regained full consciousness. I couldn’t help watching the large muscles in Talbot’s forearms ripple as he used his belt to hog-tie the gunman next to the
Dumpster. He did it with such ease I pictured him roping a calf on whatever farm he presumably came from. Talbot then emptied the gun of its bullets and tucked them into the front pocket of his flannel shirt. Then he wiped the gun clean with his shirttail and tossed it next to the semiconscious guy’s head. “For evidence,” he said.
“Should I call the police now?” I pulled out my phone.
“Let me do it,” Talbot said. “My phone’s a prepaid, so they won’t be able to trace it.”
“You mean we’re not sticking around?”
“What would we tell them? Besides, I gotta get you back to that bus before they think I’ve run off with you. I can’t afford to lose this job.” He pulled out his phone and motioned for me to follow him out of the alley.
“We’re just leaving him here like that?” I looked back at the guy, lying on his side, groaning with pain. “It seems a little inhumane.”
“That guy tried to kill you, Grace.” He flipped open his phone. “Besides, he isn’t human. That there is what you call a demon.”
At first I thought he was being metaphorical, but then his meaning clicked. “A demon? A living, breathing, bona fide demon?”
“What? Don’t tell me you haven’t seen one before.”
I shrugged. “Well, not really. I met one at a party once. She did this little mind-control trick with her eyes.”
“Ah, an Akh. They’re a terrible sort.” He clucked his tongue. “This one here is a Gelal. They prey on young women. That girl would have gone through all sorts of hell if we hadn’t shown up.”
“How can you tell?” I asked. The guy still seemed like a person to me. I was itching to go over and take off his mask to see what he really looked liked underneath.
“The smell.” Talbot crinkled his nose. “You really are a rookie, aren’t you? I bet you haven’t even figured out how to track someone yet.”
I looked down at the ground. The masked demon let out a loud, angry groan.
“We better go,” Talbot said. “I’m just hoping the police get here before he comes to enough to break free.”
Talbot hit a button on his phone and put it to his ear.
“You have 911 on speed dial?”
“I told you I make a lot of deliveries.”
I followed him out of the alley. “Wait, you mean you do this a lot?”
But Talbot didn’t respond. He was too busy telling the operator on the other end of the line that a young woman had been attacked near Tidwell
Library and that they’d find the perpetrator behind a Dumpster near Tidwell and Vine. He hung up before they could ask him any questions.
“You still got the keys?”
“Um, yeah, I hope.” I patted down my pockets and found the keys.
Talbot unlocked the passenger’s-side door and held it open for me. Sometime between Talbot’s shutting my door and his climbing in through the driver’s side, the shock of everything that had happened finally hit me. My hands shook so hard I could barely fasten my seat belt.
“Are you okay?” Talbot asked. “You did awesome back there. Just like I knew you would.”
“But how … how did you know that I could even do anything? How did you know what I am?” I’d already asked how he’d known I was an Urbat earlier, but he’d insisted on taking care of the gunman before we talked about it. But now I wanted answers.
“Your necklace.” Talbot reached over and touched the cracked moonstone pendant that hung from my neck. “Kind of a dead giveaway, if you think about it.” He brushed one of my curls against my neck with his fingers as he pulled his hand away. “And I saw you fight back at The Depot.
Most girls can’t pull off a roundhouse kick like that on a guy that big unless she’s packing some serious paranormal heat.” He crinkled his nose again. “Plus, you kinda smell, too.”
“What?” I sniffed both my arms. I smelled perfectly normal to me—okay, kind of sweaty from fighting, but not at all like those guys in that alley.
Talbot laughed, his cheeks dimpling with his smile.
“You jerk!” I punched him playfully in the arm.
He grabbed my hand. “Hey, watch it, kid. You’ve got a mean right hook.”
Talbot’s hand, wrapped around my fist, seemed huge by comparison. I could see the veins stretching along his tendons. He squeezed my fingers, and a pulse of tingling energy ran up my arm and down my spine. It felt like the connection that had passed between Daniel and me when we first held hands in the Garden of Angels. The tingling sensation turned to a shudder. I tugged my hand out of Talbot’s grasp. It wasn’t right to feel that kind of energy with anyone other than Daniel.
I crossed my arms in front of my chest. Talbot shifted his gaze away from my face. He coughed slightly and started the van. We pulled away from the library. After a moment, I asked the question that had been nagging at the back of my mind.
“If those guys were really demons, then why did they need a gun?”
Talbot shrugged. “I don’t know, Grace, but it worries me. Gelals don’t even usually come out until well after midnight. They’re completely nocturnal, you know? And the fact that they were even here in the city is a mystery. That’s the third pair of them I’ve come across in the last two months, but before that I hadn’t even encountered one since I was last on the West Coast.” He shook his head. “There’s something going down around here.