Mortal Sins Read Online Free PDF Page B

won’t see him unless he wants you to.”
    “Shit. You didn’t bring that weer here, did you? He’s here in my town?”
    Just beyond the lance of her light, a shadow shifted. And growled.
    Lily’s right hand slid beneath her jacket. Her left hand raised the flashlight higher, searching. “Hold it,” she snapped when Deacon didn’t stop.
    “You have to draw on your lover to make him behave?” he drawled.
    She had her weapon out and aimed. “That’s not—”
    Two large dogs exploded from the underbrush—teeth bared, ears flat, moving fast. Lily didn’t think. She fired. Fired again.
    The first dog fell. The second faltered, but kept coming on three legs—a Rottweiler with a foaming muzzle and mad eyes. She fired again just as two gunshots, packed together, smacked her eardrums.
    The second dog fell, blood spraying from its head. So did one she hadn’t seen, a Doberman that had attacked from the right. Deacon’s bullets had caught it in midleap.
    Lily was breathing hard, as if she’d been running. Her hands shook—aftermath of the adrenaline that had wanted her to run. She swallowed bile.
    Dogs. She’d shot dogs. “Good shooting,” she managed.
    “Shit.” Deacon’s voice shook slightly. “Did you see the way that one kept coming, even after you hit it? Sumbitches must’ve been rabid.”
    Rabid. Yeah, that might explain why they’d ventured here, where they must have been able to smell Rule, but . . . Rule. Where was Rule?
    Deacon was shining his flashlight all over the place, wary now. “You reckon there’s any more? Dogs don’t attack that way. Not like that. These were rabid. I’ll have to—hey!”
    She’d taken off running.
    Lily jumped a small log, skidded, then looped around a pair of scruffy pines. Rule was alive. She knew that as clearly as she knew the way the hot air felt as she sucked it in. If he’d been killed, the mate bond would have snapped.
    But he hadn’t come. He should have heard the dogs, the gunshots, and he hadn’t come.
    He wasn’t far. That was the main reason her pell-mell race through the woods didn’t put her on her butt, twist an ankle, or send her tumbling. She didn’t have far to run before jerking to a stop, her stomach roiling at the smell. She fell to her knees, her fingers clenched tight on the flashlight.
    Rule lay in a leaf and loam bed, curled up like Hansel lost in the woods. Ten feet away, an open grave poisoned the air, but she saw no signs of a fight or trauma on Rule—no blood, ripped clothing, scuffed ground. His breathing was even; his face, peaceful. The dark hair falling back from his face wasn’t mussed.
    She reached for his throat to reassure herself of a pulse. And jolted.
    Magic. Thin and clammy, it coated his skin like pond scum . . . pond scum mixed with ground glass, for it held an abrasive wrongness she recognized. Even as her own heartbeat went crazy, her fingers found the steady beat in his carotid. And the ugly magic was fading. Evaporating like sweat on a hot, dry day.
    His eyes opened slowly. He blinked. “Why am I lying on the ground?”
    “I was hoping you could tell me. What’s the last thing you remember?” She stroked his skin everywhere it showed—his cheek, his throat, his hand—reassuring herself. The scum of magic was gone.
    “Waiting. An owl hooting, the crickets . . .” He frowned. “There’s something else, but I can’t . . . It’s gone.”
    He started to sit up. Lily tried to push him back down—which made him smile gently and move her hands. “I’m fine, nadia.”
    “You were out cold a second ago.”
    “Whatever caused it doesn’t seem to have left any aftereffects.”
    “We don’t know that.”
    “Lying on the ground won’t help us find out.” He stood, so Lily did, too. “Who’s thrashing through the underbrush?”
    “Sheriff Deacon, I suspect.” Not that she could hear . . . No, wait, now that Rule had drawn her attention to it, she did hear movement, very faintly. “I think I lost