Captive Spirit Read Online Free PDF Page B

Cole?
    You asked me to stay. Here I am .
    A thunderstorm broke across Duncan’s awareness. Lots of crashing and raining and blue-white flares of hurt and misery. He shoved his good hand against the side of his head and managed to roll away from John’s corpse.
    Sounds and voices rose from every direction.
    Duncan couldn’t tell what was happening inside his body and what was happening in the world. The world that had gone completely insane.
    He rolled into something solid and lost the little bit of air he had left.
    Legs.
    Legs clad in leather.
    “Did we kill any of them?”
    “I don’t think so, but we cut the hell out of one of them.”
    “Good.”
    As Duncan once more collapsed on his back, a woman said, “Damn, Bela, he’s got head and neck wounds and a broken arm—and look at how those cuts are swelling on his neck—they go all the way to his chest!”
    Okay, that sounded halfway normal. When Duncan heard the woman who’d just spoken talking on her phone or radio or whatever, he had no doubt she was an officer. The inflection, the jargon, the way she reported their position—definitely law enforcement.
    He turned his head to his left even though his neck nearly cracked from the effort.
    An officer in a black leather bodysuit complete with face mask, talking on a pink cell phone and carrying some kind of dart gun?
    The woman standing next to the cop, the one with the big honking scimitar sword, had her face mask off, and she was on fire. Like, everywhere. And the long-haired blonde beside her was holding a bunch of evil-looking three-clawed throwing knives and had wind-devils coming out of her head.
    I’ve got a helluva concussion. I’m hallucinating hot women with kick-ass weapons. I even thought my dead best friend was talking to me. At least the tiger-things are gone .
    Fingers pressed against his neck, gentle and warm.
    Duncan’s attention turned to the woman touching him.
    In the ever-brightening moonlight, he saw long dark hair falling in loose waves, a shade that reminded him of night itself, like her black, black eyes.
    “Pulse is stable,” she said in a voice so sexy it made him blink. “We need to get him back to the brownstone.”
    Need’a get’im back to thah brownstone .
    Oh, yeah. Now that was an accent. He was good at accents, and this one was something interesting—like a mix of Bronx and European, getting more Bronx as she got worked up. Very exotic. Like the tilt of her eyes and her perfect, regal features.
    A Slavic goddess, tall and athletic, sword belted at her waist, breasts pushing against her tightly zipped leather bodysuit.
    Now, this was one hallucination he could get behind. Duncan let the image of the beautiful woman chase back his grief, his aches and pains, and the strangeness of everything in the warehouse. He let her fill his eyes, his senses.
    Somehow through all the blood and singed hair, he caught an earthy, comforting almond scent. He wanted to lift his hand and touch her face just to see if she was real, but one of his arms was broken, and the arm that sort of worked was pinned under his side.
    The woman’s graceful fingers drifted to the burning wounds on his neck, shoulder, and chest, and she stared at him so intently he thought she might bend down and brush her lips against his face.
    Duncan’s entire body tensed with anticipation. Those lips would be cool and wet. He thought he might crumble to dust from the pain if he moved to kiss her back, though it might be worth it to taste her, to feel this woman against him a single time.
    The goddess vision lowered her face closer, closer, until her soft, sweet breath played off his skin. She stared at him so deeply, so completely, that he had to believe she was seeing everything about him, understanding all that could be understood.
    Her beautiful lips parted, and that sexy voice said, “He’s infected. We’ll have to call the Mothers.”
    Damn, Duncan , said the voice of dead John Cole, directly in the center of