Page 14 of Vicious
I crept my fingers closer, so close an electrical energy tingled up my arm. I brought the ice pick in front of me and held it to my chest, one finger raised as if for a countdown. “I can’t seem to get a handle onit.”
“You’re not even touching it,” Parker said from behindme.
I held up a second finger and hovered my other hand over the lightning until my fingertips went numb. And that was when I realized no one hugging the wall knew what a finger countdownwas.
The albino alien lunged toward the nearest man and pistol whipped him on the back of thehead.
“Don’t, Absidy!” Mase barreled over fallen furniture toward me, but another of Parker’s guys intercepted him and knocked him to the floor with afist.
I shot to my feet and spun, ice pick at the ready. I shoved it into another man’s leg and then plucked it out again for another blow. He howled as loudly as the Saelis ghost had, then fell in a heap on the ground while clutching histhigh.
Parker and I locked gazes over the fallen man as blood from the ice pick dripped down myfist.
“Mase is mine,” Iwarned.
He chuckled, a broken sound that chased a shiver across my back, and turned to Mase, who had pinned the man who’d hit him to the ground. The albino alien ducked a punch from the fourth man, and then buried her knee between his legs. He dropped like a bag of heavy metals. She pointed her gun at Parker and cockedit.
“Mason Ryan, breaker of promises. It seems like karma delivered you to me herself.” He shook his head andtsked, completely ignoring the gun aimed at him. “What abitch.”
Mase climbed off the man he’d rendered unconscious and faced Parker, his whole body quaking with rage. “That was hardly a fucking promise I made to you. I was strung out on both She and He and barelyfunctioning.”
I zipped my gaze toward him, replaying his words so they’d make sense, but they stilldidn’t.
Parker’s cracked eyes narrowed. “Your state of mind when you promise me something isn’t my concern. It’s the carrying through that matters, and youdidn’t.”
“I have a currency card,” I blurted. “I’ll pay you to leave and forget abouthim.”
“Absidy, he called you.” Parker stepped toward me, a dangerous smile frozen to his face. “Is that yourname?”
Mase charged at him with a growl. “Leave her out ofthis.”
Parker whirled to face him, and as he did, the white lightning blocking the door ripped along the ground toward Mase and the albino alien. It zapped the gun from her hands with a loud pop and circled their boots, effectively trapping them with a heat that singed the wood floor black. A thread of it stretched toward Mase’s fingertips as if sensing the level of his need, testing him, taunting him. He fisted his hands, the muscles in his jaw leaping with tension, his haunted gaze aimed at the space between him andParker.
My heart broke for him. I hated seeing him wrestling with the ghosts from his past that were now uncomfortablyreal.
Cold fingertips wrapped around my chin and yanked my gaze away from Mase to Parker. “Now I recognize you. You murdered those two men on Mayvel. Tell me, you plan on murdering all of us,too?”
“No,” I said through gritted teeth. “Justyou.”
He winged up an eyebrow. “Protective. I like that in awhore.”
I couldn’t imagine Mase’s hate for this man who’d ruined his life with drugs, but mine carved into my palm with the force I used to grip my ice pick, still tucked in my bloody fist. Would he still call me a whore after I’d castrated him? Time to findout.
At the slightest movement of my arm to gouge him, Parker doveback.
“She, go home,” heordered.
Mase turned slightly as if to run, but the white lightning still ringed him and the albino alien even as it leaped toward him. It crawled up his back and slowed, pulsing up his spine as if winding around each vertebra. He threw his head back and screamed. The inside of his forearm, scarred with track marks, lit up from within. Lightning crackled across his blue eye, then his clouded half blind one, and zipped a beaming white glow behind the scar down his face in wild pulses, as if the light was sawing his skull open. He screamed again, agonizing, soul-wrenching.
I hurled myself at Parker, my teeth on edge at Mase’s yells. “Stop!”
A loud thud sounded from behind me. And a gunshot. Parker lifted into the air, a blurred corkscrew of white and black energy, and vanished. A rumpled black cloak lay where he’d been momentsbefore.
My ears rang. I turned in slow motion, mentally taking stock of all my pains to see if it had been me who’d been shot. What had justhappened?
The blinding light inside Mase had blinked out. He’d stopped writhing though he’d sunk to the floor, and the white lightning no longer circled him and the albinoalien.
All the air inside me rushed out in one slow, painful punch to the lungs when I saw the blood. I stumbled toward him, my mouth moving over his name even though no sound came out, even though my mind screamed it over the echo of the gun. He’d been shot. My Mase. Blood gushed from a hole in his shoulder. So did a lazy stream of winking light that fizzled out once it hit thefloor.
